Nobody Runs Forever

get straight with the law.”

“They’ll lock me up,” Beckham said.

“Yes, they will,” Parker said. “By the time they check you out, do a hearing there, bring you back, give you a hearing here, decide what to do with you, it’s three weeks. If the bank move has gone down by then, you get a lawyer, you talk about your good record inside and since, you work your ass off to get time served. If it didn’t go down yet, you’re sullen, you don’t want anybody’s help, you’ll get another thirty days tacked on.”

“Thanks a lot,” Beckham said.

Dalesia said, “Jake, don’t you get it? You couldn’t have had anything to do with the bank job because you were in jail, you were in a cell, the law had you.”

“You were already in a cell,” Parker pointed out, “before you could have known anything about the details of the bank move.”

“But I gotta be there to do it,” Beckham said. “What good is that, I’m in some jail cell? I’m in some jail cell, the job doesn’t happen.”

“We do it,” Dalesia said.

Beckham frowned at Dalesia. The idea had never occurred to him. He said, “You do it without me?”

“You’re still part of it,” Parker assured him. “You brought it to us, so you’re still in it, you get your share. But the law isn’t looking at you.”

“Jake,” Dalesia said, “what Parker’s doing, he’s getting all the emotion out of it, including you. So it’s just us, and anybody else we have to bring in.”

“But—” Beckham couldn’t get his mind around this idea. “I have to be there,” he said. “When it happens, it’s my— I have to be there.”

“If you’re there,” Parker told him, “you’re in jail the next day, you and your lady friend both, in different jails, for the next twenty years.”

“If you’re not there,” Dalesia said, “if you’re already in jail then for some other reason, that’s it, you’re never behind bars again, you’ve got your stake, you wait out your parole, the world is yours.”

Parker said, “Do you want the score, or do you want to make a point? Tell the world off, and go down in flames.”

“Jesus.” Beckham didn’t sit on the examination table again, but he leaned backward against it, brow furrowed like corduroy as he stared at the floor, trying to work out this new situation. “You’re asking me . . .,” he decided, and trailed off.

Dalesia picked up on that. “What, to trust us? You’d never find Parker, Jake, but I couldn’t hide from you. We go back a long way. You never wondered about me before. We’ve been in tents by trout streams up above Quebec, Jake, and we both slept like babies.”

“I know that,” Beckham said, and roused himself. “Jesus, I don’t mistrust you, Nick, and if you say you don’t worry about Parker, I won’t worry about Parker. But this was my baby, it’s been my baby from the beginning. It’s not like I go off with Elaine at the end of it, what I get is the cash, but it’s my cash, my score.”

Dalesia said, “It just happens, Jake, in your score this time, you put the two of us on the send, we come back with the winnings. Meantime, you cover your ass.”

Beckham sighed. “I gotta get used to this,” he said. “All right, if this is what has to happen, what do you want from me?”

Dalesia turned to Parker, who said, “What does Elaine drive?”

“A white Infiniti.”

Dalesia laughed: “So the marriage isn’t all downside.”

Beckham showed him a sour face. “The car’s leased by the bank,” he said. “It’s all scam. She doesn’t get to choose it, and she doesn’t get to keep it.”

Parker said, “Do you have a place to stash the money car, once you’ve got it?”

“Yeah, a good one.” The idea made Beckham smile. “It’s one of those old nineteenth-century factory buildings, old brick, concrete floors, the jobs moved to the South seventy years ago, abandoned ever since, take it a thousand years to rot away.”

“All right.” Parker turned to Dalesia. “You got anything to do between now and tomorrow?”

“Only this.”

To Beckham, Parker said, “Tomorrow morning at ten, she drives the Infiniti to the service area on the MassPike west of Huntington. Eastbound side. She parks there, and we’ll find her.”

Dalesia said, “You better tell her what we look like.”

“I don’t know,” Beckham said. “You’re bringing her in?”

“She brought herself in,” Parker said, “and you brought her in. She meets with us, she has a map of the money route, she tells us what she knows about which armored car we want, and we give her a phone number to call when she’s got the date it’s going down. Then she leaves again. The only thing left for her to do, when the move is scheduled, she calls that number. Then maybe she should go shopping in New York for a few days.”

“She does those to Boston,” Beckham said, “on account of I can’t leave the state.”

Dalesia laughed. “Funny thing is,” he said, “on the day the job goes down, you really won’t be able to leave the state.”

7

The old empty factory Beckham had described was in a remnant of a town ten miles south of Rutherford, on a narrow, hilly road that was itself a branch off a secondary