‘The other side of the state line,’ Williams told him, ‘I’ll sleep like a baby.’
‘Then go for it,’ Mackey said.
Mackey opened the overhead door again, and Williams backed the Honda out into early dawn. He waved at them through the windshield, and Mackey slid the door shut.
Upstairs, in the former offices, is where they’d set up temporary housing for themselves, with cots, each of the six of them with his own room. Parker and Mackey went up there now, and Parker took off only his shoes before he lay down, Terrier under pillow, and went immediately to sleep. He woke reaching for the Terrier, but it was Mackey who’d come into the room, saying, ‘They arrested Brenda.’
FOUR
1
‘Give me a minute,’ Parker said.
The functioning men’s room was upstairs. Parker washed face and hands, then looked at his watch. Not quite nine-thirty; he’d been asleep less than three hours.
When he went downstairs, Williams was back, and so was the Honda. Williams and Mackey sat at the conference table with containers of coffee and a bag of doughnuts; Parker sat with them. ‘I thought you were gone,’ he said to Williams.
‘I thought so, too,’ Williams said.
‘He heard it on the radio,’ Mackey explained. ‘So he turned around and came back.’
Williams’ smile was weak. ‘I was almost to the state line,’ he said.
Parker looked at him. ‘Why didn’t you keep going?’
‘If it wasn’t for you people,’ Williams said, ‘I’d still be in Stoneveldt, and then someplace worse after that, the rest of my life. That’s one. You said, “Take the Honda, we don’t need it,” that’s two. You two make no difference between me and each other, that’s three.’
‘Three’s all we need,’ Mackey told him. ‘Tell Parker what you heard on the radio.’
‘I had it tuned in to a news station,’ Williams said, ‘to help me know what to watch for. They described everything in the Armory they had our route pretty good and they said they were pretty sure it was you and me, escaped from prison, that was part of the gang, because Tom Marcantoni was one of the guys they found dead.’
‘All three dead,’ Mackey said. ‘Like we thought.’
‘Then they came on,’ Williams said, ‘they said they had an arrest, I thought it was gonna be you two, but then they said it was a woman. Then I thought, it’s Maryenne, it’s my sister they’re after because I called her that one time, but it isn’t. They describe a white woman, and say the only name they have is an alias, Brenda Fawcett.’
Parker shook his head. ‘What are they doing with Brenda? She was asleep in her hotel with a do not disturb.’
‘That’s the bitch of it,’ Mackey said. ‘She wasn’t. She pulled that trick again, that thing she does, where she hangs around near me in case I need help.’
Parker said, ‘She was outthere?’
‘Most of the night,’ Mackey said. ‘Maybe a block away. If we could have reached her, she could have come right over in a minute.’
‘You told her,’ Parker said, ‘she was gonna make trouble for herself doing that one of these days.’
‘And when she went back to the hotel,’ Mackey said, ‘after we busted out and set off that siren, somebody saw her go in. But that isn’t what did it.’
Williams said, ‘Somebody else turned her in. The woman that runs the dance studio.’
‘I’m sorry now,’ Mackey said, ‘we didn’t bust her goddam mirror.’
Parker said, ‘The woman in the dance studio? What’s shegot to do with anything? And what’ve they got on Brenda that they’re gonna pull her in?’
Williams said, ‘What they said on the radio, Brenda went to this dance studio a few times, took lessons, paid cash, gave a phony name, used phony ID.’
‘Now they’re saying,’ Mackey said, ‘she was casing the joint. For us.’
Williams said, ‘So this woman runs the dance studio, Darlene Something, one of those two-name things, she followedBrenda one time, see where she really lives, so when the cops call her this morning, tell her the dance studio’s all messed up, or where we come through, she says, “It’s Brenda Fawcett, she’s part of it.” And they go pick her up.’
‘And find,’ Mackey said, ‘a lot of fake ID I gave her a while back, just like to goof with.’
‘So now she’s the brains of the gang,’ Williams said, ‘and they want her to tell them where the rest of us are.’
‘Parker,’ Mackey said, ‘I gotta get her out of there.’
‘I know that,’ Parker said.
‘The radio says,’ Williams told them, ‘they’re holding her at the Fifth Street station, until they find out who she really is and what she knows about the rest of us.’
Mackey asked him, ‘Do you know this Fifth Street station?’
Williams grinned. ‘I put up there a couple times,’ he said. ‘It isn’t the city jail, it’s more of a holding tank kind of place. Connected to a precinct. You’re there, and then they move you on to some place real, once they decide where you should go.’
