Parker looked out. No traffic. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ he said.
5
Parker hated going back, but there was no choice. Turn around, go up the stairs, the other way along that hall, toward the rental office. Instead of getting out of the maze, turn around and go back into the maze. And less time than ever.
The rental office door was locked, but not seriously. They went through it, and found a suite of offices illuminated by a few pale narrow strips of light. The tall thin windows continued up here, though not in the apartments farther up, and these windows were just above the level of the streetlights outside. It was their glow, coming through the deep-set narrow windows, that made the stripes of light across ceiling and desks and walls.
Mackey sat at the nearest desk, just outside a band of light, and opened drawers until he found the local phone book, then called the place where Brenda was staying. He spoke with the clerk there, then hung up, shook his head, and said, ‘She’s got a no-disturb until her wake-up call at eight.’
‘We need a car,’ Parker said. ‘We need somebody with a car.’
‘Shit,’ Williams said.
They looked at him. Mackey said, ‘You got something?’
‘I hate to think I do,’ Williams said. ‘I called my sister, you know, I went’
‘No,’ Parker said. ‘We didn’t know.’
‘It wasn’t dangerous,’ Williams promised him. ‘I left that beer company place where we were staying, late at night, I walked maybe five blocks, found a phone booth, called from there, came back. Nobody saw me, no sweat.’
Parker said, ‘The law is listening to your sister’s phone.’
‘I know that,’ Williams said. ‘I was just calling to say goodbye, because I gotta get away from here.’ He looked around at the rental office. Disgusted, he said, ‘If I ever get away from here,I mean, then I gotta get away from this town.’
Mackey said, ‘You can’t call your sister again. She would definitelybring the cops down on us. Not meaning to; they’d just come along.’
‘No, I wouldn’t do that,’ Williams told him. ‘I wouldn’t do a thing to mess up her life. But the thing is, when I called her, she told me, there’s this guy we both know, his name is Goody, or everybody calls him Goody, he already been in touch with her, soon as he heard I busted out, said to her she couldn’t help me because of the cops but he could, give me money, whatever, I should call him, he’d help out.’
Mackey said, ‘This is a good guy? Friend of yours?’
Williams shook his head. ‘This is a scumbag,’ he said. ‘He’s a dealer, street dealer, works for some big-deal drug guy.’
Parker said, ‘So he told your sister, have Brandon get in touch with me, I wanna help him, but what he means is, he’ll turn you in.’
‘Sure,’ Williams said. ‘I knew that from the first second. I wasn’t gonna call Goody at all. But now, maybe so.’
Mackey said, ‘If you call this guy, tell him where we are, he just calls the cops, tells themwhere we are, goes back to bed, goes downtown tomorrow to collect the reward.’
Williams said, ‘Well, I’m the only local guy in this room, and he’s all I got.’
Parker said, ‘Then we’ll work with him.’
Williams looked at him. ‘How?’
‘You’ll tell him a story.’
‘What story?’ Williams spread his hands. ‘Soon as I tell him to come here, he knows I’m here.’
‘You don’t tell him to come here,’ Parker said.
Mackey said, ‘Then what good is he?’
‘Just wait,’ Parker told him. To Williams, he said, ‘When we were looking out that back way, across the street, there were stores. There was one of them, second or third in from the corner, a camera shop, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Williams said. ‘Yeah, I been seeing that all my life, it’s, uh, Nelson’s Lens Shop, that’s what it’s called.’
‘Okay.’ Parker went over to one of the other desks, saying, ‘Come on over. Let’s write this down.’
Williams sat at the desk, found a pen and a sheet of letterhead stationery, and Parker said, ‘You call this Goody. You tell him you’re hiding out in Nelson’s Lens Shop, but you’ve gotta get out of there, you’ve gotta be out in How fast could he get here, if you woke him up at home?’
‘Half an hour.’
‘Okay, good. You tell him it’s almost three-thirty now you tell him you’ve gotta be out of there by four. You just can’t stay after that, one way or another you’ve gotta get out of there, even if it means just walking down the street. You’ve got two thousand dollars for him, cash money, if he’ll come right now,pick you up, drive you to What’s a place he’ll believe you want to go to, hide out?’
Williams thought. ‘There’s a little town,’ he said, ‘Stanton, about ten miles down the river, it’s all black, dying town, just some old people still living there. I got a couple relations living down there, he’d believe me if I said I was gonna go hide out with them awhile.’
Parker said, ‘And he’ll believe you think you can buy him off with two grand.’
