Nobody Runs Forever

“Do your drugstore run again.”

“Fine.”

They left the motel, and McWhitney took his time on the local roads, constantly checking his rearview mirror. “I don’t know where the hell she is,” he said.

“She’ll show up.”

McWhitney stopped at a stop sign, took his time, looked all over the place, started through the intersection, then looked down to his left and said, “Son of a bitch, there she is! Parked down there, see? Here she comes.”

Parker looked past McWhitney’s jutting jaw and saw the car down there pulling away from the shoulder, saw the blonde at the wheel. “I see her,” he said.

“So?” McWhitney’s belligerence was increasing, now that she was actually there, hanging discreetly back in his mirror. “What do you think now?”

“Head back to the motel,” Parker said. “I think you and Nick and I have to talk.”

McWhitney gave him a quick look. “Why? Something wrong? What is it? Isn’t that your cop?”

“No.”

“I give up,” McWhitney said. “Do you know her? Who is she?”

“I’ve seen her,” Parker said. “Her name is Sandra. She was a friend of Roy Keenan.”

8

We don’t need this,” Dalesia said.

“Well, we got it,” McWhitney growled. Now that he’d found out the one he should be mad at was himself, he sat hunkered, beetle-browed, as though waiting for a chance to counterattack.

The three sat in Dalesia’s room, the door closed against the evening view of the MassPike. There were two chairs, flanking the round fake-wood table, and Dalesia and McWhitney sat there, each with an elbow on the table, while Parker stood, sometimes paced, sometimes stopped to watch one or the other face.

“That’s a few hundred miles,” Dalesia complained. “From Long Island to here. But you never saw her before today.”

“I think I did,” McWhitney said, and beat the side of his fist gently on the table. “I think I probably saw her, maybe a few times. What do you think to yourself when you see that? ‘There’s a good-looking blonde.’ Not, ‘There’s the good-looking blonde I saw yesterday.’ You aren’t looking in that kind of way.”

Dalesia, as though grudgingly, said, “That’s true, I guess. Good looks can make a woman anonymous.” He grinned at McWhitney, apparently deciding to make nice. “Anybody looks at an ugly beak like you two days in a row,” he said, “they’re gonna notice.”

Parker said, “What does she want, that’s the question.”

“Good,” McWhitney said, rather than have to answer Dalesia. “You tell us. What does she want? She can’t still be waiting for her partner to show up.”

Dalesia said to Parker, “You saw her before, when Keenan braced you, but you didn’t talk to her.”

“No, Keenan used her as a decoy to get me in position where he could suddenly show up. Then she left. He said her job was to be somewhere around, out of sight with a three fifty-seven Magnum.”

“Christ on a crutch,” McWhitney said.

Dalesia said, “So that’s what happened. Keenan went into Nels’s bar, and this Sandra woman stayed outside as backup. Didn’t help him much, but there she is.”

As though reluctant to say it, or to say much of anything, McWhitney told them, “He had a walkie-talkie in his pocket.”

Parker said, “But he didn’t use it.”

“He didn’t get the chance.”

Dalesia said, “That was at night. What, around eleven?”

“A little earlier. That bar doesn’t get a late-night bunch, not even on weekends.”

Dalesia said, “All right. Whatever happened between you and Keenan happened that night. Then what? In the morning, you came out to look for me?”

“Yeah, I went to Stratton first, and got you from him. Told him I wanted to bring you in on a job.”

Dalesia laughed. “You sure did.”

Parker said, “When you leave there, does anybody else live in the building?”

“No, I’ve just got this guy comes in to open and close the bar, run the place. He’s got a home to go to.”

“So when you left,” Parker said, “this woman followed you until you landed somewhere, until she could leave you for a while, and then she went back and tossed your place. What did she find?”

“Nothing!” McWhitney looked as though he might get insulted.

Parker shook his head. “Come on, Nelson,” he said. “This woman’s a pro, she’s at least as much a professional as Keenan was. She went into your place when it was empty. She didn’t have a lot of time because she had to get back in position behind you, but she spent a little time, and what did she find?”

McWhitney furrowed his brow, thinking. He wasn’t thinking about what the woman had found; he was thinking about what he would say. “All right,” he said. “She found some patted-down dirt in the cellar. And she found some empty acid bottles. That’s all.”