said, looking suddenly relieved, showing an anxiety of her own she’d been covering till now. Her right hand stayed in the coat pocket while her left dipped into the other pocket and came out with the cell phone. Her thumb clipped into the second ring and she said, “Keenan. Sure it’s me, it’s Roy’s business phone. What have you got?”
Parker watched McWhitney. Was the man tensing? Had he given the bounty hunter the truth?
Suddenly Sandra beamed, the last of the tension gone, and her right hand came empty out of the pocket. “That’s great. I thought my source was reliable, but you can never be sure. I’ll come into the New York office tomorrow for the check? Fine, Wednesday. Oh, Roy’s around here somewhere.”
McWhitney looked very alert, but then relaxed again as Sandra said into the phone, “My best to Linda. Thanks, she’s fine. Talk to you later.” She broke the connection, pocketed the phone, and said to McWhitney, “It worked out. He’s who he is, he’s where you said.”
“Like I said.” Now that it was over, McWhitney suddenly looked tired. “Let me throw you people out of here now.”
As they walked down the bar toward the door, Sandra said, “You got any more goods like that stashed around, you know what I mean, goods with some value on them, give me a call.”
“What I should have done,” McWhitney said, as he unlocked the door to let them out, “I should have held out for a finder’s fee.”
Sandra laughed and walked away toward her car, and McWhitney shut the door. They could hear the click of the lock.
5
Claire’s place was on a lake in north-central New Jersey, surrounded mostly by seasonal houses, only a fifth or so occupied year-round. In several of these houses were hollow walls, crawl spaces, unused attic stubs, where Parker kept his stashes.
Two days after the overnight trip to Long Island, he finally stashed the duffel bag he’d brought from upstate New York, then drove to put gas in Claire’s Toyota, paying with cash from the duffel, money on which nobody had a record of the numbers. Heading back, he was about to turn in at Claire’s driveway when he saw through the trees another car parked down in there, black or dark gray. Instead, then, he went on to the next driveway and steered in there, stopping at a house boarded up for the winter.
He probably knew this house better than the owners did, including the whereabouts of the key that most of the seasonal people hid near their front doors where workmen or anybody else could find them. He didn’t need the key this time. He walked around the side of the house opposite Claire’s place and on the lake side came to a wide porch that in summer was screened. Now the screens were stored in the space beneath the porch.
Parker moved past the porch and across a cleared lane between the buildings kept open for utility workers and on to the blindest corner of Claire’s house. Moving along the lake side, not stepping up on the porch, he could see across and through a window at the interior. Claire was seated on the sofa in there, talking with two men seated in chairs angled toward her. He couldn’t see the men clearly, but there was no tension in the room. Claire was speaking casually, gesturing, smiling.
Parker turned away and went back to the next-door house, where he stepped up onto the porch, took a seat in a wooden Adirondack armchair there, and waited.
Five minutes. Two men in dark topcoats and snap-brim hats came out of Claire’s front door, and Claire stood in the doorway to speak to them. The men moved together, as though from habit rather than intention. With the hats, they looked like FBI agents from fifties movies, except that in the fifties movies one of them would not have been black.
The two men each touched a finger to the brim of his hat. Claire said something else, easy and unconcerned, and shut the door as the men got into their anonymous pool car, the white driving, and went away.
Parker went back around this house to the Toyota, drove to Claire’s place, and thumbed the visor control that opened the garage. When he stepped from the garage to the kitchen Claire was in there, making coffee. “Want some?”
“Yes. FBI?”
“Yes. I told them my blacktop story, and said I’d try to remember who gave me Mr. Dalesia’s name, but it had been a while.”
He sat at the kitchen table. “They bought it?”
“They bought the house, the lake, the attractive woman, the sunlight.”
“They gave you their card, and that was it?”
“Probably,” she said. “They said they might call me if they thought of anything else to ask, and I said I thought I might be going on an early-winter vacation soon, I wasn’t sure.” Bringing Parker’s coffee to the table, she said, “Should I?”
“Yes. We’ll go together.”
Surprised, she sat across from him and said, “You have a place in mind?”
“When I was in Massachusetts last week,” he said, “they were talking about something called leaf peeping.”
Even more surprised, she said, “Leaf peeping? Oh, that’s because the fall colors change on the trees.”
“That’s it.”
“People go to New England just to see the colors on the trees.” She considered. “They call them leaf peepers?”
“That’s what I heard.”
She looked out the kitchen window toward the lake. Most of the trees around here were evergreens, but there were some that changed color in the fall; down here, that wouldn’t be for another month, and not as showy as New England. “It makes them sound silly,” she said. “Leaf peepers. You make a whole trip to look at leaves. I guess it is silly, really.”
“We wouldn’t be the only ones there.”
She looked at him. “What you really want to do,” she said, “is be near the money.”
“I want to know what’s happening there. You have to drive and pay for the place we stay, because I don’t have ID. And if I’m a leaf peeper, I’m not a bank robber.”
“You’re a leaf peeper if you’re with me.”
“That’s right.”
“On your own, nobody would buy you for a leaf peeper,” she said, and smiled, and then stopped smiling.
Sensing a dark memory rising up inside her, he said, “Everything’s all finished up there. It’s done. Nothing’s going to happen except we look at leaves and we look at a church.”
“A church,” she echoed.
Rising, he said, “Let me get a map, I’ll show you the area we want. Then you can find a place up there —”
“A bed-and-breakfast.”
“Right. We’ll stay for a week.” Nodding at the phone on the wall, he said, “Then you can make your answering machine message be that you’re on vacation for a week, and you can give the place you’re gonna be.”
“Because,” she said, “what’s going to happen up there already happened.”
“That’s right,” he said.
