Mackey said, ‘Any place else would be tougher.’
‘Fifth Street isn’t easy,’Williams assured him.
‘But you know the place,’ Mackey said. ‘You can give us the layout.’ Turning to Parker, he said, ‘We gotta get her out of there today.She isn’t gonna like that place.’
Parker didn’t say anything. Mackey was about to turn back to Williams, but then he frowned at Parker. ‘Are you saying you aren’t in this?’
Parker didn’t want to be in it, he wanted to get away from this place, get back east, spend some time with Claire, decide what to do next. He’d been nailed to the floor here too long. He didn’t have that feeling of obligation that had sent Mackey to give him a hand when he needed to get out of Stoneveldt, or that had made Williams turn around at the state line and come back into the pit he’d spent all this time crawling out of.
Parker didn’t live by debts accumulated and paid off; but there were times when you had to do things you didn’t want, be places you didn’t want. He could stand up now and walk out of here and head east, and there’d be no problem, not now. Neither of these people would shoot him in the back as he got to the door. But somewhere down the line, Mackey would think about him again, and he’d have a different kind of IOU in his mind. Parker didn’t collect the IOUs, neither the good ones nor the bad ones, but he knew he had to live among people with those tote boards in their minds.
‘I didn’t say anything at all yet,’ he answered Mackey. ‘I was thinking, we got to get hold of that lawyer Claire found me.’
Mackey beamed. ‘You’re right! Jonathan Li. He’s the guy.’
‘I’ve still got his card, up with my stuff,’ Parker said, and got to his feet. ‘But we need to get us inside there, too. I don’t know how yet.’
He went upstairs to his room. In the few days they’d been out, they’d accumulated a small amount of possessions; some clothing, toilet articles. Parker’s things were in the drawers of an abandoned wooden desk. He found the card and looked at it again, the many partner names in fine blue letters against ivory, the name Jonathan Li in gold at the bottom right. He carried the card downstairs, put it on the table, and said, ‘The problem is, none of us can go to him.’
‘I can phone him,’ Mackey said. ‘I’m not an escaped felon, where he might have to tell the law about me, I’m just somebody the cops want to talk to about people who areescaped felons.’
‘There’s a payphone’ Williams started to say.
‘No, I don’t need that,’ Mackey told him. ‘Tom had a cellphone, it should be upstairs with his stuff. I’ll be right back.’
He left, and Williams looked at Parker, considering him. ‘You don’t like this,’ he said.
‘None of us likes it.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Williams nodded. ‘But Mackey feels like he owes Brenda, and I feel like I owe you and Mackey, but you don’t feel like you owe anybody anything. Tell you the truth, I wish I could be like that.’
‘If you were like that,’ Parker told him, ‘you wouldn’t have phoned your sister.’
‘Meaning,’ Williams said, ‘one of these days I’m gonna do something like that, because I feel like I owe somebody something, and I’m gonna put my head right in the noose.’
‘Maybe not,’ Parker said, and Mackey came back downstairs with the cellphone.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, hefting the phone. ‘Is he in the office yet? I can’t leave a callback number.’
‘Try,’ Williams said.
So Mackey sat at the table and punched out the number, then listened, the cellphone a small black beetle against the side of his blunt head.
‘Jonathan Li, please. Would you tell him it’s a guy, he’s so happy about how Mr Li dealt with the Ronald Kasper problem, now he wants to hire Mr Li on the Brenda Fawcett problem. Sure.’
Mackey put his other hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘He isn’t in the office, but they can patch in to him. In his car, I guess, or wherever.’
Then he bent to the phone again. ‘Mr Li? Yes, this is Ed, you remember me.’ Shrugging, he said to the others in the room, ‘He’s laughing.’ Then, into the phone: ‘Yeah, you’re probably right. Yeah, that’s what they said on the radio, Fifth Street station.’
Raising his eyebrows at Parker, he said into the phone, ‘Sure, I think you can get a retainer from Claire again, same as last time. Probably easiest.’
Parker nodded. Mackey said into the phone, ‘She wired it to your account last time, didn’t she? So she’ll do it again. You just tell me how much. Fine, tell me then. That’s terrific. Nice to do business with you again, Mr Li.’
Mackey broke the connection, put the phone on the table, and said, ‘After he laughed, he told me he wasn’t surprised there’d be a link between a friend of Ronald Kasper and a friend of Brenda Fawcett. He says he knows it’s urgent, he’ll go over to the Fifth Street station right now, let Brenda know he’s her legal, he understands I’m probably somewhere he can’t phone me so I should phone him in three hours. By then he’ll know the situation, he’ll tell us how much is the retainer.’
‘In three hours,’ Williams said. ‘Good.’
Parker said, ‘We still have to get usinto this Fifth Street station.’ Standing, he said, ‘I’m gonna spend the three hours asleep.’
2
‘He wants to meet,’ Mackey said. He held the phone to his chest while he talked to Parker. The three of them were again at the downstairs conference table.
Parker said, ‘You’re the one he wants to meet.’
