Nobody Runs Forever

Three. They needed one more man.

Dalesia paid his check and left the place, thinking about people he knew, wondering if Parker might know somebody who’d be available almost any minute now. He walked around the side of the diner, and at first he didn’t recognize the guy seated on the passenger side in his car, just thought, somebody’s in my car. Why?

Then he saw it was McWhitney, one of the guys from Al Stratton’s meeting, the one who’d carried Harbin away, and he grinned as he walked over and opened the driver’s door to say, “You’re just the guy I’m looking for.”

McWhitney showed him the automatic in his right hand and said, “I don’t think I am, Nick. Get in.”

Something’s wrong, Dalesia thought, and he thought, something’s wrong with me. I didn’t expect him, I didn’t know why he was all of a sudden in my car, and I just walked up to him grinning like an idiot, as though nobody’d ever been dangerous to anybody in the whole history of the world.

I’m still alive, anyway, Dalesia thought, as he got behind the wheel. Maybe this is only bad, not worse than bad.

Since he had the stupid smile on his face anyway, he left it there and said, “What’s wrong? Nelson, isn’t it?” I don’t even know this guy, he told himself, and I walked right up to him. I deserve whatever I get.

McWhitney said, “I just have one question, Nick.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Why’d you wise off?”

“I’m sorry?” Thinking, this son of a bitch is gonna kill me for a mistake, an error, he said, “Wise off to who? About what?”

“Oh, you been talking to a lot of people?”

“I haven’t been talking to anybody,” Dalesia said. “Except Parker. You don’t mean Parker.”

McWhitney looked uncertain, and then certain again. “I don’t give a shit about you and Parker,” he said. “I mean you and Roy Keenan.”

“Never heard of him,” Dalesia said, because he never had.

Now McWhitney was angry. “Never heard of him? You talked to the guy about Mike Harbin and you never heard of him?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Dalesia said, “you mean the bounty hunter.”

“Oh, you do know him.”

“No, and I don’t want to. Parker told me about him. He found Parker, but Parker brushed him off. He says the guy doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t even think he ever heard the tape Harbin made.”

McWhitney frowned mightily. “Keenan never talked to you.”

“Never.”

“He did talk to Parker.”

“He’s looking for all of us,” Dalesia said. “He’s looking for you, too, because there’s some kind of reward money on Harbin. But he doesn’t know anything.”

“He found me,” McWhitney said.

Dalesia looked at the automatic, now resting in McWhitney’s lap. “Is that why the hardnose?”

McWhitney sighed and slipped the automatic out of sight under his jacket. “I’ll tell you what happened,” he said. “I fell for an old one.”

“Yeah?”

“This guy Keenan, he comes to me, he says you told him he should ask me where to find Harbin.”

Dalesia laughed. “Why would I do that?”

“That was my question. What were you up to. But it wasn’t you up to something, it was Keenan. That’s the old dodge, he tells me you told him this thing or that thing, then I’m supposed to figure it’s okay to tell him more.”

“He had no idea what was going on.”

“None,” McWhitney agreed.

“So that was a big mistake he made.”

“Yeah, it was.”

Dalesia grinned. “I bet he learned a lesson from it.”

“Yeah.” McWhitney nodded. “He learned the harp.”

THREE

1

I like retirement,” Briggs said. “Turns out, I was nervous all those years.”

“You looked nervous,” Parker said.

And it was true; Briggs looked calmer than the last time Parker had seen him, after a broken heist where Dalesia had been the driver, Parker and Tom Hurley and a guy called Michaelson had been the doers, and Briggs the explosives man, fussy and petulant but very methodical behind his thick spectacles. When an alarm had gone off that hadn’t been in the plan they’d been sold, Michaelson wound up dead, Hurley went off for revenge, but the guy who’d sold them the plan had disappeared forever, and Briggs decided he’d had enough. “I’m running a streak,” he’d said. “A very bad streak. I believe I’ll just retire for a while, and wait for it to go away.”

He’d already had this house in Florida, not on either coast but inland, on a lake near Winter Garden. He had a