more dangerous to you than I am or anybody else.”
“Maybe.”
The waitress brought Sandra’s seconds and she ate a while more, then said, “You know Dalesia isn’t ten miles from here right this minute.”
“Probably.”
“He’s got no money, no ID, no transportation. Does he have anybody around here he can go to?”
“Not that I know of.”
Sandra considered. “Maybe a shut-in, take over a house for a few days.”
Parker said, “Even shut-ins get visitors, phone calls. Medicine delivered.”
“Well, he’s a bad penny, he’ll show up.” Sandra used the paper napkin on her lips and said, “The point is, you see where I am.”
“In my face,” Parker said.
“Sorry about that,” Sandra said. “I need cash, and this is where it is, or where it’s gonna be. You know I’ve got dossiers on you and your partners.”
“That your lady friend is holding, out there on Cape Cod.”
“Well, she’s gone visiting,” Sandra said.
Parker nodded. “Is that right.”
“Maybe with family, maybe with friends. Maybe here, maybe there. She’s hoping she’ll hear from me pretty soon.”
Claire said, “Sandra, you seem like a smart person.”
“Thank you,” Sandra said, and gave Claire a cool look with not much question in it.
“Which means,” Claire said, “you already know what you want out of this talk here.”
“Sure,” Sandra said, and shrugged. “A partnership.” She switched the cool look to Parker. “Think of me as the successor firm to Nick Dalesia,” she said.
Parker said, “You want his share?”
“I don’t deserve his share,” Sandra said, “because I wasn’t around for the first part. But I deserve half of his share, and you and McWhitney split the other half.” Waving toward the waitress again, giving her the check-signing signal, she said, “We’re just doing a little business here, so I’ll pick up the tab. You don’t have to agree or say anything. I’m in, that’s all. It’s not your fault, and it’s not mine, and we’ll learn to live with it. And you’ll find I have my uses. In the meantime, we’ll all be cosy together, over at— What do they call that place?”
“The waiting room,” Claire said.
10
Following Sandra out the front door of Wayward Inn, Parker said quietly, “Let her go first.”
“All right.”
They said good night, said they’d see one another tomorrow, and got into the cars. It took Claire a while to decide the best place to put her handbag, and by then Sandra had backed out, spun around, and headed for the exit.
As they followed, Parker said, “Hang back. She won’t let you disappear out of her mirrors, but she’ll let you hang back.”
“You aren’t going to do anything to her, are you?”
“I can’t. When she and her partner Keenan were first looking for Harbin, they made dossiers of what they could find out about the people at that meeting where he disappeared. Nelson’s bar, Nick phoning you. If something happens to Sandra, her friend on Cape Cod gives that stuff to the law.”
“They already know my phone number.”
“Getting it again, from a second direction, means they’ll take a closer look. You don’t want that.”
Claire shook her head, eyes on the taillights out in front of her. “If I have to give up my house, I will,” she said. “Be Claire somebody else, I will. But I won’t want to.”
“We’re trying to make it not happen,” Parker said. “Right now, Sandra’s on guard, something could kick her off. Her friend I don’t know anything about. But so far, we can deal with it. The worst would be if McWhitney found out she was here.”
“Why?”
“He’d kill her, right away, first, worry about dossiers later. Then everybody has to move.”
Claire brooded about that. “Do you think he’ll come up?”
“Not now, not over the weekend, he’s still got that bar to run. Early next week, he might. Up ahead there, at the intersection, you’re gonna turn left. There’s a deli on the right, parking lot beyond it. Make the turn, go in there, shut everything down.”
Claire nodded and said, “I thought maybe we weren’t going straight back.”
The intersection ahead was topped by a yellow blinker signal. Sandra’s Honda drove under it and through. Claire, without a signal, made the left, made a right U-turn into the deli’s parking lot, tucked the Toyota in next to a Dumpster back there, and switched everything off. They waited, and then a black car went by out there, from left to right, accelerating.
Parker said, “Give her a minute, then go back out and go straight through the intersection.”
“All right,” she said. “Where are we going?”
“To visit the money,” Parker said. “Start now,” and she did. As they jounced out onto the road, he said, “We don’t wanna do all this dance and the money’s long gone.”
* * *
“Stop at the road up there on the right. Then just drive around a while. Give me half an hour.”
“All right,” she said, and when she stopped at the corner, the two visible houses both dark for the night, she said, “Will you bring some out?”
“No,” he said. “We don’t want samples. We just want to know it’s there. And alone.”
He got out of the Toyota and walked down the dark side road. There was partial cloud cover above, but some starlight got through, enough to see the difference between the blacktop and the shoulder.
It was not quite midnight now, a Thursday in October, nothing happening on this secondary road at all, no lights in the occasional dwelling he walked past. Soon, ahead of him on the right, he could make out the white hulk of the church. It was a small white clapboard structure with a wooden steeple. Across the road, difficult to see at night, was a narrow two-story white clapboard house that must have been connected to the church. Both buildings had been empty a long time.
Parker started with the house first. If there were a law presence here, watching the place, this would be the most comfortable spot to wait in.
But the house was empty, and when he crossed the road, so was the church. There was no sign that anybody had been in it since he and Dalesia and McWhitney had quit it a week ago.
Finally, he went up to the choir loft to check on the money. The bank had been transporting its cash in standard white rectangular packing boxes, and the church had stored its missals and hymnals up in the choir loft in the same way; not identical boxes, but similar. Parker and McWhitney and Dalesia had mixed the bank’s boxes in with the church’s boxes and left them there, arranging them so that, if anybody came upstairs and started looking in these
