“What happened to Oscar?”
“I popped a tire, left him in a ditch.”
“Alive?”
“I don’t kill people, Parker,” she said. “All I shot was his tire. He maybe got a concussion from the windshield, but that’s all.”
“So he’s out of the picture. Fine.”
Sandra said, “How long do we go east?”
“You can talk to Nels, can’t you?”
“On our cells, sure.”
“Tell him, we’ll be coming to a bigger road soon. He should turn right and look for a diner or someplace where we can stop and talk.”
* * *
It was a bar, a sprawling old wooden place with mostly pickup trucks out front, a pretty good Saturday afternoon crowd at the bar, and an active bumper pool table in the open area to the bar’s left. On the other side were some booths. Pointing to them, McWhitney said, “Grab a place. I’ll buy.”
Parker and Sandra picked a booth, and she said, “You want to drive the whole way tonight?”
“Away from here, anyway. Let’s see what Nels thinks.”
“The thing is,” Sandra said, “my stuff is still in my room at Mrs. Chipmunk’s. But if I go there, that leaves you being two men in a truck again.”
McWhitney came back, his big hands enclosing three beer glasses. Putting them on the table, he bent low and said, “Drink up and we’ll get outa here.” Then he sat, next to Parker.
Parker said, “Something?”
“You see behind the bar,” McWhitney said, “those posters. It’s you and me and Nick again.”
“They’ve been around all week.”
“They got a new one of you over there,” McWhitney said. “I hate to tell you this, but it’s a lot closer.”
Sandra said, “How’d they do that? It better not be Mrs. Chipmunk. I don’t want to walk into a lot of questions about who do I associate with.”
“You’ll talk your way out of that,” Parker told her. “But we’ve got to decide.” To McWhitney he said, “Sandra has to go back to the place where she’s staying, her stuff is there.”
“So you and me travel together, you mean.” McWhitney shook his head. “Back to matching the profile.”
“If that new picture’s that good,” Parker said, “I can’t chance a traffic stop. Sandra, you’ve got to drive me some more. Once we’re south of the Mass Pike, we’re out of the search area, we’ll be okay. Drive me down there, then come back up. I’ll go on with Nels, and you’ll catch up with us at his place later.”
“Another two hours in the car,” she said. “That’s just great.”
5
They were still north of the Mass Pike, in hilly forested country with darkness beginning to spread, when a northbound state police car did a kind of stutter as it passed them, and Parker said, “He’s coming back.”
Sandra looked in her mirror. “Yep. His Christmas tree went on. I guess I should do the talking.”
“No,” Parker said. “He doesn’t want us, he wants the van. Don’t volunteer. If we stop, he’ll throw a light on me.”
Sandra eased to the shoulder to let the cop go by, saying, “I don’t like to leave McWhitney alone.”
“With the money, you mean. But that’s okay. He won’t run out on us, he’s too tied to that bar of his.”
“Then what was he gonna do with Oscar?”
Up ahead, McWhitney pulled off the road, the cop sliding in behind him. Parker said, “He was gonna kill us with Oscar, if he could. Or else just let it play out and see what happens. If it falls that way, he can suddenly say, ‘Oh, here’s a guy can help.’ ”
“You have nice friends,” Sandra said.
“He’s not my friend.”
Sandra drove over the hilltop and down the other side, and far ahead of them, downslope, the Mass Pike made a pale band of footlights between the darkening ground and the still-bright southern sky.
“I’m gonna stop there,” Sandra said, and nodded ahead toward an old grange hall converted to an antiques shop. An OPEN flag in red, white, and blue hung from a short pole slanting upward above the entrance. Two cars were parked in the small gravel lot at the side. She drove in, parked closer to the road than to the other cars, and watched the rearview mirror. After five minutes she said, “It shouldn’t take this long.”
“Maybe Nels doesn’t look right for the part.”
“I’m going back.”
She U-turned out of the lot and drove back over the hill.
There had been two troopers in the patrol car, both now out. One stood beside McWhitney’s open window, holding his license and registration, talking to him. The other had the rear doors of the van open. Two of the hymnal boxes were on the ground behind the van, their tops at a tilt. The trooper was leaning forward into the van, moving boxes, trying to see if there was anything else inside there. McWhitney’s face, when they drove by, was bunched like a fist with his effort to stay calm and impassive.
“They didn’t like his looks,” Parker said.
“All that trooper has to do,” Sandra said, “is see there’s two kinds of boxes in there.”
Parker looked ahead along the road, but in this direction there were no antiques shops, no buildings at all, just the bright-leaved trees on both sides, reflecting the last of the daylight. “Just pull off on the shoulder,” he said, “If it looks like they’re calling for backup, we’re getting out of here.”
“You know it.”
She angled them onto the shoulder and stopped, lights off and engine running, then watched the scene behind them in her mirror, while Parker adjusted the outside mirror on his side so he could also see what was going on.
There wasn’t a lot of traffic at the moment on this two-lane road, and the few cars that did pass in either direction just went on by the stopped van and patrol car with its flashing lights. They were used to seeing troopers stop other drivers.
Finally the troopers decided to give up. The one handed McWhitney his papers, while the other stood and waited at the rear of the van, hands on his hips. Then the two walked back to their patrol car, with the lights still flashing on its roof. They left the two boxes of hymnals on the ground behind the open rear doors of the van.
“They’re not neat,” Sandra said.
“They’re punishing him for making them not like him,” Parker said, “and then for not giving them a reason to pull him in.”
The troopers got into their car, its flashing lights went off, and they steered out past the van and away. Once they were out of sight, McWhitney, furious, came thumping out of the van to put the boxes back.
