Nobody Runs Forever

“But she won’t lead them to us,” Dalesia said, “because she doesn’t know us. Who she knows is a guy used to work security for the bank, like head of all the guards or something—he skimmed a little too often, did time. That bent him over to our side, he’s been in a few things, I got to know him, Jake Beckham. Mean anything?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Good, so you’re even further away. The wife went to Beckham, offered him the job for a piece, he came to me, and I made the exact same face you’re making right now. But Stratton’s gold mine isn’t gonna happen, so I’m thinking I’ll call Beckham, see if it’s all still the same. Will you want to hear what he says?”

“I can listen,” Parker said.

3

Parker drove the MassPike east out of New York State and pulled off at the service area just west of Huntington, getting there a little before three in the afternoon. It was mid-September, the air crisp, the sunlight sharp, like a clean blade. He put his Lexus in among the tourists’ cars and got out to stretch. He was a few minutes early, but after driving up from New Jersey, he was ready to stand.

Over there to his right, the MassPike roared, heavy traffic in both directions. That was the easternmost leg of Interstate 90, beginning on the Atlantic coast at Boston and ending three thousand miles to the west in Seattle. This part of the road was always busy, the big rigs and the tourists and the commuters streaming along together, everybody at eighty, holding inside their own bubble of space in the flow or there’d be hell to pay.

He was there five minutes when a green Audi eased down the lane between the rows of parked cars and came to a stop. Parker nodded at Dalesia at the wheel and walked around the car to get in on the passenger side. Dalesia put the Audi in gear and said, “Well, even if it turns out to be nothing, we’ve got good weather for it.”

There was nothing to say to that, so Parker watched as Dalesia put them back up on the Pike, eastbound, then said, “Where we headed?”

“Exit’s about fifteen miles farther on, near Westfield. Then we turn north. Was that your car back there, or just something you picked up?”

“Mine.”

“Then we’ll come back for it.”

Once they got off the MassPike, Dalesia took them on increasingly narrow winding roads as they headed northwest. “All the real roads around here,” he explained as they stopped at and then crossed another larger road, “want to take you east, over to the towns along the Connecticut River. What we want is north, up near Vermont.”

They rode a few minutes in silence, and then Dalesia said, “I heard a little more about what happened after we left.”

Parker said, “Stratton and his dental gold?”

“Yeah.”

“Stratton was the one brought you in, wasn’t he?”

“Oh, yeah, it was his party. I called him a few days later.”

“On this thing we’re going to?” Parker wouldn’t like that.

Dalesia shook his head. “No,” he said, leaning on it. “If you make a meet, and one guy shows up wired, anybody could be the hot one, starting with the host.”

“And including you or me.”

“Well, not so much,” Dalesia said. “You didn’t know anybody there but me, and I didn’t know anybody but you and Stratton. So what I wanted to know was, were they looking at me now, just in case Stratton had been their first target. According to him, the very next day after we decided not to play poker after all, some state cops scooped up McWhitney.”

“He’s the one brought Harbin.”

“That’s right. Apparently, these cops were a little pissed. Their boy Harbin wasn’t anywhere to be found, and McWhitney must have been their target, since he’s who they went after right away. But they didn’t have anything. If he’d wanted to negotiate, McWhitney had a name or two on us, mostly wrong, but mostly all he had to do was tell them he didn’t know anything about anything. They had no probable cause, no specific crime, not even a discussion. Just a wire left behind in an empty room. So he’s out.”

“With a leash on him,” Parker said.

“Oh, sure.” Dalesia shrugged and said, “I figure Stratton’s got a leash, too, these days, since he’s the one called McWhitney for the meet.”

“If they think there’s something to be found,” Parker said, “they’ll look behind Stratton. They’ll want to know who else was in that room.”

“Here’s the funny thing,” Dalesia said. “They can’t get to you except through me, because Stratton didn’t know you from a bag of Bugler, and they can’t get to me except through Stratton, because the rest of them were new to me. But that doesn’t help them either, because I don’t know Stratton’s first name, and he doesn’t know my last.” Grinning, he said, “I mean, he really doesn’t know it. You remember, in the room, he introduced me as Nick.”

“I remember.”

Dalesia negotiated a steep climbing curve, moving up into the Hoosac hills, trending northwest toward the Berkshires. Then he said, “You’d be surprised how many people there are named Nick.”

4

The town was called Rutherford, built into a lower south-facing fold of the Berkshires. Vermont was another ten or fifteen miles farther north, New York State a little farther to the west. The town apparently had some seasonal tourist business because of ski slopes nearby, judging from the few specialty shops along the main street, but this wasn’t the season yet, and the place had a siesta look to it.

Driving slowly along toward the town’s only traffic light, the time now about four-thirty in the afternoon, Dalesia said, “We’re looking for a doctor, on the right, a big white shingle— There it is. Myron Madchen, MD.”

Parker looked and saw another two-story building, like most of them along here, with a store downstairs and either offices or residences above. This one had a florist below, venetian blinds over the windows upstairs, and that rectangular white sign with black lettering suspended out over the door beyond the florist’s window. He said, “We’re