Dirty Money

“Absolutely.”

Nodding, with a little smile at Claire, Sandra said, “One car or two?”

“We’ll follow you,” Parker said.

As they turned toward the front door, Sandra looked around and said, “Where’s Mrs. Muskrat?”

Claire said, “I think we’re on our own till morning.”

“It’s the kind of place,” Sandra said, “I feel I oughta check in with the proctor before I do anything.”

Her car, in the gravel lot beside the building, was a small black Honda Accord that would have been anonymous if it weren’t for the two whip antennas arcing high over its top, making it look like some outsized tropical insect in the wrong weather zone. Sandra got behind the wheel with a wave, and Claire started the Toyota to follow.

Driving down the dark road with that humped black insect in front of her, Claire said, “Tell me about Sandra. Does she have a guy?”

“She isn’t straight,” Parker said. “She lives with a woman on Cape Cod, and the woman has a child. Sandra supports the child. She thought she was the brains behind Roy Keenan and maybe she was. We got linked to her because she wanted the Harbin reward money and we led her to it. What she wants now I don’t know.”

“The bank money?”

“Maybe.” Parker shook his head, not liking it. “It’s not in her line,” he said. “I’d think she’d be out looking for another Roy Keenan now. I don’t know what she’s doing.”

“Was Roy Keenan straight?”

“Oh, yeah. That was just a business arrangement. She’d be out of sight with the handgun while Keenan asked the questions.”

Claire said, “I don’t mean to be a matchmaker, but why wouldn’t McWhitney be a good new Roy?”

“Because he’s too hotheaded and she’s too hard,” Parker said. “One of them would kill the other in a month, I don’t know which. This looks like the place.”

It was. The Honda, antennae waving, turned in at an old-fashioned sprawling roadhouse with a fairly full parking lot to one side. The main building, two stories high, was flanked by wide enclosed porches, brightly lit, while the second floor was completely dark. A large floodlit sign out by the road, at right angles to the parking lot, told drivers from both directions WAYWARD INN.

They parked the cars next to one another and met on the gravel. “I didn’t go inside the place before,” Sandra said. “It seemed to me, big enough for some privacy, dining rooms on both sides, bar in the middle.”

“Bar,” Claire said.

“You’re my kind of girl,” Sandra told her, and led the way as Claire lifted an eyebrow at Parker.

The entrance was a wide doorway centered in the front of the building, at the end of a slate path from the parking area. Sandra pushed in first, the others following, and inside was a wide dark-carpeted hall with a maitre d’s lectern prominent. To left and right, wide doorways showed the bright dining rooms in the enclosed porches, the customers now thinning out toward the end of the day. Behind the lectern a broad dark staircase led upward, and next to that a dimly lit hall extended back to what could be seen was a low-lit bar. Atop the lectern a cardboard sign read PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF.

“That’s us,” Sandra said, and led the way past the lectern and down the hall to the bar, which was more full at this hour than the dining rooms, but also quieter, with lower lighting. The room was broad, with the bar along the rear, high-backed booths on both sides, and black Formica-top tables filling the center.

Sandra pointed toward a booth on the left: “That looks pretty alone.”

“Good,” Parker said.

They went over there, Sandra sitting to face the front entrance, Claire opposite her, Parker beside Claire. From where he sat, the bar’s mirrored back wall gave him a good view of the hall down toward the entrance.

A young waitress in black appeared almost immediately, hugging tall black menus to her breast. “Supper menu?”

“We ate,” Claire said. “Just drinks.”

“I might as well look at it,” Sandra said.

Claire and Parker both ordered scotch on the rocks while Sandra decided on the popcorn shrimp and a glass of red wine. When the waitress went away, Sandra explained, “I didn’t really have dinner, I just drove up.”

“You were in a hurry,” Parker told her.

Sandra gave him a frank look. “I wasn’t out to make trouble for you boys last time,” she said, “and I’m not now. But now the situation is different than it was.”

“Keenan’s dead,” Parker suggested.

“And my government,” Sandra said, “is jerking me around.”

Parker said, “They want your source?”

“Absolutely not. That isn’t the way it works.” To Claire she said, “Sometimes the government needs information. The deal is, if you’ve got that information and you’re a legitimate licensed investigator, and you give them that information, or you sell it to them, they don’t turn around and use it against you. It’s kind of immunity plus a paycheck.”

“Not bad,” Claire said.

Parker said, “So what went wrong?”

“Harbin was too popular,” Sandra said, and the waitress arrived with their orders. “I gotta eat just a minute,” Sandra said.

She was hungry. She scarfed down a couple large mouthfuls of popcorn shrimp, with a swig of red wine as though it were beer, and Parker looked at the other customers in this room.

Tourists. Nobody that looked like a local, only visitors not ready for this day to end. Conversations were low and easy, but here and there punctuated by a yawn. Nobody looked like law.

Sandra waved at the waitress, then called to her, “Same again,” and said to Parker, “Three different agencies had money out on Harbin, and a fourth had a leash on him, and none of them knew anything about any of the others. So right now they gotta sort that out so they can decide, when they pay me, which agency budget does it come out of. Right now, they’re fighting about it.”

“They’re fighting about which of them has to pay you.”

“That’s about it.” Sandra shrugged, and now she sipped a little wine. “In the meantime, you know I’ve got expenses.”

“I know,” Parker said.

“Roy took too long on the Harbin thing,” Sandra said. “That’s why he got careless at the end there. He figured, no penny-ante punk could really just disappear like that. So we were pretty much running on empty when I finally got my answer to the question, and the bitch of it is, I’m still running on empty until they get their official heads out of their official asses.”

“That’s too bad,” Parker said.

“Meaning,” Sandra said, “why should you give a shit. The only other two places for cash money I know of right now, to tide me over, is your bank score and Mr. Nicholas Dalesia.”

Parker said, “Dalesia?”

“You don’t think there’s reward money out on him, right now?” Sandra asked. “And only one agency, no waiting.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Parker said. “I told you that.”

“You did, and I believe you, and I believe if you found out where he was he wouldn’t live long because he’s a lot