Dirty Money

Cursing the stiffness, Parker turned the other way and grabbed the automatic off the floor. Then he used the wall to help him to his feet, and hobbled to the gaping window.

Nick was out of sight. He’d landed on weedy lawn back here, twelve feet down, with the woods half a dozen fast paces away.

Fresh blood hadn’t yet darkened on the zigzag edges of glass. Nick was hurt out there. How badly?

A sound on the stairs, behind him. Had Nick come in? Without his gun?

Parker moved to the corner farthest from the doorway and waited. He heard the heavy steps coming up the stairs, and then silence. He waited.

“Parker?”

Parker leaned against the wall behind him. “Nelson,” he said.

McWhitney appeared in the doorway, his own gun loosely in his hand, but reacted when he saw what Parker was carrying: “Whoa! What’s this?”

“Nick’s gun,” Parker pointed at the slashed window. “That was Nick.”

“He was here?”

“In and out.”

“We heard the crash. Sandra went around back.” Crossing to the wrecked window, he said, “How come he didn’t do you?”

“He wanted to know where my car was.”

McWhitney laughed, first surprised and then amused. “The greedy bastard. Where’s he been keeping himself the last week?”

“He didn’t say.”

McWhitney leaned forward to look out the window and down, and call, “What do you see?”

“Broken glass,” Sandra called back. “Broken wood. What happened up there?”

“Nick went out the window.”

“Nick?”

“We’ll come down,” McWhitney told her.

They went downstairs and around to the back, to find Sandra standing where Nick must have landed, frowning away to the woods behind and to the right of the house. Turning to them, she said, “What happened here?”

“I was asleep,” Parker said, “and then Nick came in. He wanted a car.”

“You don’t have a car,” Sandra told him.

Parker shrugged. “We discussed it. Then I got his gun, and he went out the window.”

“You didn’t push him out.”

“I didn’t want him out. I wanted him in there.”

McWhitney said, “We gotta find him now, Parker.”

“I know.”

“Wait a second,” Sandra said. “We’re here, we’ve got the van. Let’s pick up the money and get out of here.”

“Sandra,” McWhitney said, “Nick has run out his string. Wherever he was holed up, he isn’t there any more. He’s on foot, he’s cut up from that window, he’s a dead duck. If the cops get their hands on him, he puts me right out of business. The bar, everything. I’m on the run the rest of my life.” To Parker he said, “You, too.”

“Not so much.”

“Enough. Enough to give your friend Claire some nervous moments.”

“That’s true.”

Sandra said, “What are you gonna do, run around in the woods? You’re not gonna find him in there. Maybe he’s bleeding to death.”

“We can’t take the chance,” McWhitney said.

Sandra thought about it, and realized she had to bend on this. “Five minutes.”

Parker said, “Sandra, we’ll give it what it takes.”

“I’ll be with the cars,” she told them. She was disgusted.

“With your piece in your lap,” McWhitney advised.

“Now you’re insulting me.”

She headed off around the house and Parker walked over to where dry fallen leaves had been recently scuffed, showing streaks of wetter leaves beneath. The streaks pointed at an angle away from the right rear corner of the house.

Parker and McWhitney, both with guns in their hands, followed the streak line’s direction, away from the house. They kept parallel to each other, but a few paces apart. Away from the house, the narrow tall scrubby second- growth trees were like an army of lancers, all upright, with daylight in vertical strips between. The ground was rocky and uneven, but trended upward, with clusters of thorny shrubs intermixed with nearly bare areas of grass and weed.

They walked along the scrub ground for two or three minutes, watching in every direction, and then McWhitney stopped and said, “I’m not seeing anything.”

“Neither am I.”

Parker looked back and the house was almost completely hidden back there, just a few hints of white. “We don’t have him,” he said.

Complaining, McWhitney said, “I’m not a tracker, I’m a bartender. This isn’t where I do my best work.”

They turned around, headed back to the house, and Parker said, “When you get home, just in case, you gotta start building an alibi.”

“Oh, I know. What’s that?”

Ahead and to their left, a piece of dark gray cloth flapped, its corner stuck to the thorny lower branch of a wide- spread multiflora rose. They went over to look at it, and Parker said, “That’s the pants he was wearing.”

“The road’s right over there.”

“I know it. There’s blood on these thorns here.”

“The son of a bitch is hurt,” McWhitney said, “but he won’t stop. Can we get to the road this way?”

“If we want to bleed like Nick. Easier back around by the house.”

They retraced their steps to the house, and when they came around the side of it Sandra got out of her Honda and said, “Give me some good news for once.”

“We’re alive,” McWhitney told her.

“Try again.”

Parker looked at the van with holy redeemer choir on the doors. “Looks good.”

Sandra said, “So why don’t we use it?”

Parker told her, “You drive your car and the van over to the church, we’ll take one look along the road for Nick.”

She heaved a sigh, to show how patient she was. “Done,” she said.

They walked along the road while she shuttled the vehicles behind them. A red pickup went by, with two guys in hunting caps in it, neither of them Nick; everybody waved.

In a ditch there was a space of tangled smears where somebody or something had slid down out of the roadside scrub, maybe fallen here, then moved on. Impossible to say which direction he had taken.