13
Parker drove the first half of the trip back, because his ID wasn’t likely to be an issue before they got to the search zone. They stopped for dinner midway, at a chain restaurant along the road, where no locals would look at them and remember them. While they waited for their food, Parker said, “This whole thing is the wrong side of the street for you.”
Sandra grimaced. “I don’t think of it like that,” she said. “What I think, there’s no sides to the street because there is no street.”
“What is there?”
She studied him, trying to decide how much to tell him, moving her fork back and forth on the table with her left hand. Then she shrugged, and left the fork alone, and said, “I figured it out when I was a little girl, what my idea of the world is.”
“What’s that?”
“A frozen lake,” she said. “Bigger than you can see the end of. Every day, I get up, I gotta move a little more along the lake. I gotta be very careful and very wary, because I don’t know where the ice is too thin. I gotta listen and watch.”
“I’ve seen you do it.”
She grinned and nodded, as though more pleased with him than with herself. “Yeah, you have.”
They were both silent a minute, and then their food came. The waitress went away and Sandra picked up her fork, but then she paused to say, “You go see a war movie, the guy gets hurt, he yells ‘Medic!’, they come take him away, fix him up. Out here, you get hurt, you yell ‘Medic!’, you know what happens?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“There’s no sides,” she said. “No street. We just do what we’ve got to do to get across the lake.”
14
They got back to Bosky Rounds a little before nine that night. As Sandra pulled into a parking space beside the building, Claire came down off the porch, shaking her hand at them not to get out of the car. They waited, saying nothing, and she came over to slide into the backseat and say, “We have to leave.”
He twisted half around in the seat to look at her, shadowed back there, far from the light on the porch. “Why?”
“That woman detective was here again,” Claire said. “I heard her talking to Mrs. Bartlett. Because they haven’t found Nick Dalesia, they’re convinced all three of the robbers came back here, to get their money.”
Parker said, “Why would they have an idea like that?”
“Because,” Claire said, “they don’t believe Nick could hide this long without help, and who else would there be to help him?”
Sandra said, “I’d figure it that way, too.”
“Nick’s running a string of luck,” Parker said. “For him. Not good for the rest of us.”
“She brought wanted posters,” Claire said. “Pictures of Nick, but drawings of the other two.”
“I’ve seen them,” Parker said. “They’re not close enough.”
“Not if you’re just walking by,” Claire told him. “But if you’re sitting in that place having breakfast, and out in the office on the wall there’s a drawing of you, people will make the connection.”
Parker said, “She put posters on the wall?”
“They’re papering the whole area, every public space.” Claire leaned forward to put her elbow on the seatback and say, “I packed all of our things. Everything’s in the car. I’ve just been waiting here for you to get back and then we can leave.”
“No,” he said.
“You can’t stay,” she insisted.
“But not that way,” Parker said. “They’ve got your name, they’ve got your address, they’ve got your credit cards. You stay here tonight, tomorrow morning you check out. If you leave here tonight, you’re just pointing an arrow at yourself.”
Claire didn’t like that. “What are
“McWhitney’s coming up tomorrow with a truck, we’re gonna take that cash out of there. You’ve got my stuff in the car?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll move it over to this car. You go back to the room until tomorrow. I’ll show Sandra where the church is and I’ll stay there tonight.” To Sandra he said, “When McWhitney gets here, you can lead him to the church.”
Sandra said, “That probably won’t be until tomorrow afternoon.”
“When you come to the church,” Parker told her, “bring me a coffee and Danish.”
Claire said, “Then how will you get home?”
“I’ll find a way,” he said.
15
There won’t be any twenty-four-hour delis around here,” Sandra said.
“That’s all right,” Parker said. “I won’t starve to death between now and tomorrow afternoon. Take the right at that yellow blinker up there.”
“The right,” she said, with some sort of edge, and looked sidelong at him. “That’s where you lost me last night.”
“Thought I lost you.”
Now she laughed and made the right, and said, “McWhitney’s sore because McWhitney’s a sorehead. You know better.”
“We’ll see how it plays out.”
“Don’t fool around,” she said. “We’ve got a deal.”
“I know that.”
“It’s better for you. It’s better for you and McWhitney both.”
“You mean,” Parker said, “we get our own pieces, and part of Nick.”
“You get more than you were going to get,” she said, “and now you’re partners with somebody who can help you get it.”
“Don’t sell me any more,” Parker said. “I get the idea.”
“Sorry,” she said.
He said, “I know, you were used to Keenan.”
“I’m getting over it.”
Till now there’d been no other traffic along this road, but a wavering oncoming light turned out to be a pickup truck, moving slowly and unsteadily, tacking rather than driving, with a driver fighting sleep. Sandra pulled far to the
