Dirty Money

smoked, but then he got under control and the Tahoe hurried away from there.

Parker carried the Glock and the towel back into the bar. The bulky guy was still in position in the rear booth. Parker called to him, “Come here,” and the guy, sullen-faced, came down along the bar to stand in front of him, look at the Glock, and say, “Yeah?”

“I hope you got your own car here.”

The guy frowned at the front door. “Where are they?”

“Gone. Except for Oscar. He’s dead out there. He was shot with this gun of yours.” Putting it on the bar, Parker said, “Hold on to it, Nels.”

“Will do.”

Parker looked at the guy. “Did somebody hear me fire one shot? I don’t know. Did somebody call the cops? I don’t know. Will Oscar be there when they get here? That’s up to you.”

“Jesus Christ,” the guy said, and it was equal parts curse and prayer. He hurried out the door and Parker said to McWhitney, “Let me use your phone.”

“Sure.”

Parker called Claire’s cell phone. “Are you still on the Island?”

“Yes. Are you finished already?”

“Come back, we’ll get dinner around here somewhere together—”

“I’ll tell you where,” McWhitney said.

“— and spend the night down here, and then you go home tomorrow and I’ll come back to Nels.”

“What happened?” she said.

“I’m not angry any more,” he said.

7

The sign in the window of the door at McW read closed at nine-thirty the next morning, and the green shade was pulled down over the glass, but the door was unlocked. Parker went in and McWhitney was seated at the first booth on the left, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the Daily News. He looked up when Parker walked in and said, “Claire get off?”

Parker sat on a stool with his back against the wood of the bar. “Yes.”

McWhitney nodded at the wall above the backbar, where a television set on a shelf was switched on with the sound turned off. “There’s news on the news.”

“For us?”

“They found Nick’s body.”

Parker shrugged. “Well, that’s all right.”

“You want coffee, by the way?”

“No, Claire and I ate.”

“Well, maybe the Nick thing is all right and maybe it isn’t.” McWhitney waggled his palm over the newspaper, to indicate the question.

Parker said, “Why wouldn’t it be all right? We’re done up there.”

“The hymnbooks,” McWhitney said. “I was gonna drop them off at a church around here. Just to get rid of them, but now I don’t know. Can they be traced back to the church up there? I don’t want anything anywhere around me that hooks to anything in Massachusetts.”

“We’ll dump them somewhere else,” Parker said.

McWhitney shook his head, “I never thought I’d sit around,” he said, “and try to figure out what to do to get rid of a load of hot hymnbooks.”

“The money’s mostly what we have to deal with,” Parker said. “Make the load lighter. Hefty bags are good for that.”

“Maybe three of them. It’s a lot of cash.”

“Where’s the truck?”

“In an open parking lot a couple blocks from here. I figured,” McWhitney said, “a piece of crap like that little truck, if we give it a lotta security, it’ll look like something might be inside there.”

“Hymnbooks.”

“Right.” McWhitney yawned and pushed the News away from himself, “I talked on the phone with Sandra this morning,” he said. “She checked the ferry on the Web. The one we want’s at one o’clock. Takes an hour and twenty minutes, we come back on the three.”

“Fine,” Parker said. “But now I’m thinking about another complication from Nick.”

McWhitney laughed. “That Nick,” he said. “He’s one complication after another, isn’t he? What now?”

“The troopers that stopped by when we were unloading the boxes out of the church,” Parker said.

“Sure. The woman went to that church when she was a little kid.”

“And now they found Nick,” Parker said. “Do they start to wonder about that truck?”

“Well, shit,” McWhitney said.

“They didn’t write anything down,” Parker said. “They looked at your license but they didn’t do anything about it.”

“No, that’s right.”

“But they’re going to remember those words on the door. Holy Redeemer Choir.”

“And they’ll look here, and they’ll look there, and they won’t find any Holy Redeemer Choir.”

“At least, not the same one.”

McWhitney looked bleak. “And we’re gonna take that same truck on a ferry to New England.”

“That place where you had the name painted on,” Parker said, “is he around here?”

“Yeah, walking distance. In fact, I walked it.”

“Could he paint the name out again?”

Getting up from the booth, McWhitney said, “Let me call him, I mean, why not?”

“We should have just time before we have to go get the ferry. And if not, we’ll get the next ferry.”

Walking around the end of the bar to the phone, McWhitney said, “When this is over, I’m gonna be nothing but a bartender for a long long time to come.”

8

On the phone the car painter told McWhitney he could do a quick spray job of the body color over the names on the doors in five minutes, so he and Parker walked to the parking lot where McWhitney had left the truck. Along the way, Parker said, “The only thing we’ve got to do today is the money switch, get that stuff out of our hands. The hymnbooks is something for later.”

“I don’t like it,” McWhitney said, “but I know you’re right.”

“Where’s your pickup?”