‘Have they gone?’
‘Shit,’ Mackey said.
Parker said, fast, into Henry’s ear, ‘I’m alone, come home.’
‘I’m all alone here, Darlene,’ Henry said. ‘Everything’s fine. Why don’t you come home? We don’t want to discuss this on the phone.’
‘Just so they’re gone, that’s all I ask.’
It was hopeless. Parker said, ‘End it, Henry.’
‘I have to hang up now,’ Henry said. ‘Hurry home, Darlene.’ And he hung up. Turning away from the phone, he said, ‘I did my best.’
‘We know,’ Parker said.
12
Mackey said, ‘Henry, wherever she made that call from, somebody was listening.’
Henry shook his head. He was ready to apologize for her: ‘She’s not used to this’
‘No time, Henry,’ Mackey told him. ‘Cops are on their way now.We don’t want to talk to them, and neither do you. Go out that front door, walk do not run to the nearest store, call a cab, go home. Goodbye, Henry.’
Henry blinked at them both. Parker said, ‘Now, Henry.’
They followed him through the house to the front door. Henry opened it, paused, and Mackey said, ‘No goodbyes. Go.’
Henry left. They watched through the front window as he strode briskly to the sidewalk and turned left. Their problem was, they couldn’t leave until he was away from here because they didn’t want him to know what they were driving. In case he didn’t evade the law himself, he shouldn’t know that.
Watching Henry’s arms swing as he marched away, Mackey said, ‘The simplest thing, of course, is a bullet in the head. But you know, it’s hard to go with the bullet in the head once a guy’s made you lunch.’
‘We can go,’ Parker said.
They left the house, pulling the breached door shut behind them, and crossed the porch, headed for the garage. ‘They become real,’ Mackey explained.
Williams had turned the Saab around before he put it away, backing it into the garage, so they could leave fast if they needed to. They needed to. As Mackey slid behind the wheel, Parker got into the small backseat and curled down sideways to be out of sight, so nobody would have two males in a car with out-of-state plates to think about.
Three blocks later, that turned out to have been a good idea, because four police cars, two of them from Rosetown and two from the city, went tearing by, toward Darlene’s house, Tootsie Roll lights flashing on their roofs. As he watched them recede in the rearview mirror, Mackey said, ‘They’re not using their sirens.’
Parker sat up and looked out the back window. ‘Sneaking up on us,’ he said.
13
The only sensible way to drive from the Park Regal, the hotel Brenda was checking out of, to the airport was to cut across downtown to a highway called the Harrick Freeway. It was more complicated to get to the Harrick from Rosetown, but Parker, in the backseat, gave directions from Darlene’s map, and a little after two Mackey took an on-ramp and joined the traffic headed west. Twenty minutes later they saw the exit sign for McCaughey International and took it, Mackey saying, ‘What we need now is a place we can wait.’
That turned out not to be a problem. The four blocks of city street between the freeway and the airport entrance were lined with motels. Mackey pulled in at one in the second block, where the parking area for the attached restaurant was in front, just off the street. Parked to face the traffic, he said, ‘Now we wait.’
‘I should do the driving, this part,’ Parker told him. ‘When we get there, you follow Brenda in, I stay with the car. The cops here would make me right away.’
‘Fine,’ Mackey said. ‘Circle the airport and come back for me. Either I’ll shake her loose, or I’ll see what plane she takes.’
They switched places, Parker at the wheel and Mackey beside him, and watched the traffic, which seemed to be about half cabs. They waited a quarter of an hour, and then Mackey said, ‘There she is,’ and they watched Brenda go by in the backseat of a taxi, sitting forward, looking in a hurry to be somewhere else.
‘There’s her tail,’ Parker said.
‘And there’s her other one. They put two on her.’
The unmarked police car is unmarked, but it’s still a police car, still with police equipment, built to government specifications. They’re always large American sedans, heavy, four-door, in the lower price range, Plymouths or Chevrolets. They’re usually painted some drab color that civilians would never choose but that’s supposed to make them less noticeable, and they have the same tires municipalities buy for all their official vehicles, making them the only apparently civilian cars on the road without a white stripe on the tires.
Now, when Parker pulled out from the motel parking lot to follow the followers, both cars were Plymouths, one a dull green, the other a dull tan. Two bulky men rode in the front seat of each. He couldn’t see Brenda’s cab, but that was all right; the cops could.
They all drove to the airport entrance and in, taking the loop past the terminal buildings. Ahead, first one unmarked car and then the other flashed right-turn signals, so Brenda was going to the terminal for Great Lakes Air, a regional carrier. Parker also pulled over, behind everybody else, stopping just long enough for Mackey to hop out, then angling back into the traffic. One cop was getting out of each car to follow Brenda, the other staying at the wheel. Mackey trailed them all.
This road would eventually circle back to the entrance, where he could swing back to go past Great Lakes Air again. If Mackey was there, he’d stop.
