“Stay right there,” he said, and showed Hopwood the Ranger. “I don’t wing.”
“What is—what’s—” She was still more bewildered than anything else, but then she saw the Ranger in Parker’s hand and her eyes widened and she cried, “You!
THREE
1
Of the three men who’d pulled the bank job in Massachusetts, Nelson McWhitney was the only one who’d left the place carrying his own legitimate identification and driving his own properly registered pickup truck. The cops at the various roadblocks where he’d been stopped and the pickup searched had warned him against driving south toward the Mass Pike, because the heavy police activity had backed up traffic in all directions, so, even though his goal was Long Island, McWhitney drove steadily westward for hours, into the same areas where Parker found himself bogged down and Nick Dalesia found himself arrested.
He heard the news of the arrest on the truck radio and gave the radio an ironic nod and salute in response, saying, “Well, so long, Nick.” A couple of miles farther on, having thought about it some more, he nodded and told the radio, “And so long money, too.” That would be Nick’s only bargaining chip, wouldn’t it?
After Syracuse, McWhitney turned south, keeping to smaller roads because they were less backed up, but still making slow progress. He finally gave up and found a motel outside Binghamton, then early Sunday morning got up into a still-police-infested world and made his way southeast toward Long Island, where his home was and where the small bar he owned was and where he had an appointment coming up with a woman named Sharon.
On even a normal day, he would have known better than to drive through New York City to get to Long Island, and this was far from a normal day. It was amazing how much fuss three guys with a simple bank plan could create. And, of course, having grabbed Nick Dalesia, the law was now hungrier than ever to gobble up the other two.
Driving down across New York State, he found himself wondering, was he himself maybe a bargaining chip for Nick? He thought back, and he didn’t believe he and Nick had shared that much private detail, not enough so that Nick could pinpoint McWhitney on Long Island. He hoped not.
What he’d do, when he finally got to the neighborhood, was case it first. If Nick did know enough about him to turn him up, the surveillance on his home and bar would be far too large for him not to notice. Just go there and see.
He stopped for lunch at a diner in Westchester, then headed south to the Throgs Neck Bridge to take him across to Long Island. The roadblock inspection at the bridge was the most thorough and intense yet, but then, once he got on the Island, life suddenly became much calmer. There were only a limited number of routes on and off the Island, so clearly the authorities believed they hadn’t so far let any of the bank robbers through.
His neighborhood was quiet, like any Sunday afternoon. His bar, where he’d left a guy he knew in charge while he took his little “vacation,” was also very quiet, almost empty-looking, which was also standard for a Sunday afternoon.
McWhitney parked the truck in the alley behind his building, went into his empty and stuffy-smelling apartment, opened a few windows, opened a beer, and switched on CNN. No further news on the bank-robbing front.
He wondered how Parker was doing among the straights.
2
Brian Hopwood, asprawl on his back on his dirty office floor, grinding pain in his left side where his rib cage had smacked into the sharp corner of his desk, useless little toy automatic still clutched in his fist, stared up past Suzanne Gilbert’s thick mass of wavy auburn hair at the hardcase he’d been stupid enough to try to get the drop on, and he thought, Well, I’m not dead, so that’s good.
Yes, it was good. If this hardcase here, this bank robber, had just wanted to clear these two pests out of his path, he’d have shot them without a word, without a warning like, “I don’t wing.” So in fact, he didn’t want to shoot them, not unless they made it necessary.
Brian Hopwood had lived this long a time partly by never making it necessary for anybody to shoot him, and he was prepared to go on that way the rest of his life. Which meant shutting up Suzanne here. Heavier than she looked, now draped across him like a deer carcass lashed to a fender, half-twisted around with her elbow propping her torso up by bearing down into Hopwood’s stomach, she glared in discovery and outrage at the hardcase who had their lives in his hands, yelling at him, “You!
Jack Riley? It would have to be Jack Riley, but what the hell would Jack Riley want with a gun? Fighting that off, fighting his mind’s habit of digression—that’s what made him the first-rate loner mechanic he was, in a job that let his mind wander wherever it would while his hands and some other parts of his brain dealt with the particular problems of this particular automobile of the moment—Brian yelled, or tried to yell in a raspy hoarse croak that was all he seemed to have right now, “Suzanne, shut up and get off me! Mister, I’m putting the gun down, see? On the floor here, I can give it a push if you— Suzanne, get
She managed it, finally, rolling rightward off him, rolling over completely in a flurry of legs and tossing hair. She was dressed in black slacks and a gray wool sweater, so she didn’t flash any parts of herself, but Brian’s digression-ready brain did notice there was something very nicely womanly about that body in motion.
The hardcase hadn’t moved, but now he pointed a finger of his left hand at Suzanne while holding the revolver still trained on Brian, and said to Suzanne, “Right there’s good.”
Suzanne had wound up in a splay-legged seated position, and did move some more, folding her legs in close into something like a loose lotus position while she glared up at him, but at least she didn’t say anything else.
Then, as though Suzanne had been by that order effectively locked into a cage and put out of play, the hardcase looked at Brian again and said, “Tell me about her.”
Tell me about her? She’s right here; why doesn’t he ask her himself?
