Nobody Runs Forever (10 page)

9

N
elson McWhitney was a bartender to begin with, but the bar he bought from his former boss never did make much of a living. A few of the regulars in the place, though, were connected to another line of work that was certainly more profitable but also chancier. Still, when these guys began to invite Nels along, he was happy to go. At first, he was just brought in for the heavy lifting, or the muscle if muscle were needed, but after a while he got to know some things, like how to open certain safes, how to bypass certain alarm systems, and his value to his partners only increased.

Unfortunately, mistakes by a couple of those partners had led to two brief stints inside, where he’d picked up a wider acquaintance, so he could pick his future partners with better care.

One of the first things he’d learned, way back, was never to trust those partners for a second. A thief is a thief. If he’s stealing anyway, he might as well steal from his partners, if he gets the chance.

It had been a long while since Nels had given anybody that kind of chance. With his mistrust of his partners had come a certain pragmatic wariness and a habit of protecting himself in certain ways. For instance, if he was going to be working with this fellow or that fellow, he liked to know where the fellow could be found later on, just in case.

Whatever the dental gold job with Al Stratton might have turned out to be, it had aborted before Nels could do that kind of homework on the rest of the group, including Nick Dalesia, but Al Stratton he could find, and Stratton would know how to put Nels together with Dalesia.

He hadn’t expected such stupidity from Dalesia. A man had died at that meeting. You don’t make jokes about it. You don’t hint to strangers—and a bounty hunter, no less!—that Nels McWhitney could tell you where to find Mike Harbin. That’s just stupid.

What was it for? Revenge maybe, because Nels had brought Harbin to the meeting? Whatever Dalesia’s reason, it was stupid, and Nels was looking forward to asking the question in person.

Which meant going to visit Al Stratton, who in his straight life was a furniture refinisher in a small town outside Binghamton, New York. Stratton had taken what had originally been a dairy farm, sold off the grazing land, lived in the farmhouse, and converted one of the barns to a workplace where he had room enough for any piece of furniture a customer might want dealt with.

Like most people who live some distance from town, Stratton kept a couple of dogs on the place that would let you live once their master said you were okay. McWhitney drove in from the county road, and as he circled the old wood-shingled house, both dogs came tearing out of the barn, yelping and throwing themselves around, snapping at the moving tires as McWhitney crunched along the gravel to stop at the barn’s open door.

He kept the car windows closed, and one of the dogs lifted his forepaws onto the driver’s door, onto the ledge just under the window, and dared McWhitney with a snarl. The other dog, still on the ground, ranged back and forth, barking.

Until Stratton came out and yelled at them. Then they immediately turned away from McWhitney and went trotting over to Stratton, who came a pace closer to peer through the windshield. When he recognized McWhitney, he nodded, waved, and said something more to the dogs as he pointed at the barn. Obediently they went inside, not bothering to look back, and Stratton came over to the side of the car as McWhitney rolled his window down.

Stratton said, “You surprised me.”

“I don’t like to talk on the phone.”

“No, I understand that.”

Stratton could be seen trying to figure this out. He and McWhitney didn’t hang out together, had only a work relationship and not much of that.

“I need to find Nick Dalesia,” McWhitney explained. “I figured you know where he is.”

“Well, I
did,
” Stratton said. His eyes were watchful.

“The thing is,” McWhitney said, “there’s a fella has maybe a job, and if he does have it there’s maybe a spot in it for me. But he doesn’t know me, and he does know Nick, though not where he is. But I need Nick to tell this guy I’m okay, and also maybe see if he wants a piece in it.”

Stratton nodded. “Any more pieces around?”

“It’s not my pie, Al. Sorry.”

“I understand. I think I got a phone number for Nick.”

“The way I’ve been told, Nick never answers his phone.”

“I think he lives over in Connecticut or Massachusetts,” Stratton said. “I may have an address. You wanna come inside?”

“I don’t know,” McWhitney said. “Do I?”

Stratton grinned. “Oh, don’t worry about the dogs. Once I tell them you’re all right, you’re all right. Unless you start beating on me.”

“I’ll remember not to,” McWhitney said, and got out of the car.

He followed Stratton into the barn, which looked mostly like a stage set for some upscale family drama. It was all clean, but not particularly neat. A couple of old-fashioned sofas stood around among armoires, dining tables and chairs, some smaller tables, and a dry sink. Some of the items looked very good; others were in several pieces. Toward the rear of the place, the dogs were lying on old, scuffed blankets. They watched McWhitney, but didn’t move.

Stratton led the way to an old rolltop desk against a side wall. “Customer never paid me for this,” he said as he rolled the top up out of the way and sat down. “So it’s mine now.”

“It’s a beauty.”

The desk’s pigeonholes were full of notepads of various sizes, thick envelopes, some folders. Stratton reached into the jumble, pulled out a smallish address book with a dark red cover, and said, “I only do first names in here, so that’s how they’re alphabetized. Here we are. Nick.” Pointing to a corner of the desk, he said, “Take a scrap of paper there, and a pencil.”

“Sure.”

“Box twenty-three, County Route forty, Greengough, Massachusetts.” Stratton spelled the name of the town. “Box numbers are hard to find sometimes.”

“Oh, I’ll find it,” McWhitney said, pocketing the address. “I’m motivated.”

10

N
ick Dalesia drove the roads between Deer Hill and Rutherford, with side trips to and past West Ruudskill, where they would take the armored car. Because the countryside was hilly and had been settled for a long time, there were multiple routes between any two points. Some roads dead-ended where an early settlement hadn’t lasted, leaving nothing but a family name: Granthornville. Some roads went out of their way to loop past a water source that hadn’t been needed in two hundred years. It was terrain a heister could make good use of, but first he’d have to learn it.

The way Dalesia figured it, the people doing the move would not be the regular bankers but professionals, hired because this kind of move is what they do. They would try to keep the move secret, but they would know that leaks are just part of the human condition, and that at least some unauthorized people out there would know, by the time of the move, that the move was going to happen. Among those unauthorized people there might be some who would fantasize about getting their hands on all that money and all those securities, but would there be a few who might decide to take an actual run at it? Such robberies had happened before.

Yes, they had, and Nick knew they had, just as much as the bankers did. It had happened in America, it had happened in France, and it had happened in Germany that he knew about, and probably other places, too. And the MO was always the same: A gang, ten or twenty strong, would lie in wait along the route, pop out, kill or otherwise get rid of the drivers and guards, and drive away to some field or parking lot where the getaway cars were stashed. The fast ones didn’t get nabbed while making the transfer; the slow ones did.

The job Dalesia and Parker were putting together was different. No gang, only the two of them. And they only needed to pluck out one armored car from a caravan of four.

So it was very important to find the right place to do it. They needed an intersection, small and tight, that they could dam with the disabled armored cars they’d leave behind. They needed that intersection to give them a good, easy run toward the abandoned mill in West Ruudskill where they’d make the switch, without it being obvious from where they pulled the job exactly where they had to be going.

So Dalesia these days was putting a lot of mileage on the car. His job was the terrain, Parker’s the materiel. They would need guns, and they would need other things as well. Parker was off promoting the gear they wanted, while Dalesia traveled the county roads, looking for just the right intersection.

And he believed he’d found it. It was not part of any town, but it had a little commercial buildup around it; a cafe open only for breakfast and lunch, a gas station that shut at dark, a used-car lot with cars behind a chain-link fence and with a small shed out front with a handwritten sign on the door:
PHONE FOR APPT
.

The area was occupied, but not at night. The roads heading north and east met other turnoff roads almost immediately, making an escaper’s route very hard to guess. At the intersection itself, the two roads coming up from the south and east met at dogleg angles, no straight lines. And the diner, the used-car shack, and the layout of the gas station made for a somewhat constricted area around the intersection. The armored cars would have to come through very slowly.

For breakfast and lunch, the diner’s parking lot at the front and left side was full of pickup trucks. This was where the labor force in this part of the world ate everything but dinner. They were all regulars, talking to one another about their jobs and their bosses and their favorite sports teams. They paid no attention to Dalesia when he sat among them and spent some time over coffee at a window table at the front, looking out at the intersection, pleased with his choice.

The point was to be here before the armored cars arrived, to set themselves in useful positions. They had a rough idea how to pull it off, and how to lead the target car away, but where should they place themselves to begin with? The armored cars would come up that road over there, to cross the intersection northbound. Parker and Dalesia would want their special one to go out the road on that side, they would want the other three armored cars to block the intersection there and there, and the more Dalesia looked at the place, the more it seemed to him they needed two guys on the ground and one to bird-dog the target.

Three. They needed one more man.

Dalesia paid his check and left the place, thinking about people he knew, wondering if Parker might know somebody who’d be available almost any minute now. He walked around the side of the diner, and at first he didn’t recognize the guy seated on the passenger side in his car, just thought, somebody’s in my car. Why?

Then he saw it was McWhitney, one of the guys from Al Stratton’s meeting, the one who’d carried Harbin away, and he grinned as he walked over and opened the driver’s door to say, “You’re just the guy I’m looking for.”

McWhitney showed him the automatic in his right hand and said, “I don’t think I am, Nick. Get in.”

Something’s wrong, Dalesia thought, and he thought, something’s wrong with
me.
I didn’t expect him, I didn’t know why he was all of a sudden in my car, and I just walked up to him grinning like an idiot, as though nobody’d ever been dangerous to anybody in the whole history of the world.

I’m still alive, anyway, Dalesia thought, as he got behind the wheel. Maybe this is only bad, not worse than bad.

Since he had the stupid smile on his face anyway, he left it there and said, “What’s wrong? Nelson, isn’t it?” I don’t even know this guy, he told himself, and I walked right up to him. I deserve whatever I get.

McWhitney said, “I just have one question, Nick.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Why’d you wise off?”

“I’m sorry?” Thinking, this son of a bitch is gonna kill me for a mistake, an error, he said, “Wise off to who? About what?”

“Oh, you been talking to a lot of people?”

“I haven’t been talking to anybody,” Dalesia said. “Except Parker. You don’t mean Parker.”

McWhitney looked uncertain, and then certain again. “I don’t give a shit about you and Parker,” he said. “I mean you and Roy Keenan.”

“Never heard of him,” Dalesia said, because he never had.

Now McWhitney was angry. “Never heard of him? You talked to the guy about Mike Harbin and you never
heard
of him?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Dalesia said, “you mean the bounty hunter.”

“Oh, you do know him.”

“No, and I don’t want to. Parker told me about him. He found Parker, but Parker brushed him off. He says the guy doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t even think he ever heard the tape Harbin made.”

McWhitney frowned mightily. “Keenan never talked to you.”

“Never.”

“He did talk to Parker.”

“He’s looking for all of us,” Dalesia said. “He’s looking for you, too, because there’s some kind of reward money on Harbin. But he doesn’t know anything.”

“He found me,” McWhitney said.

Dalesia looked at the automatic, now resting in McWhitney’s lap. “Is that why the hardnose?”

McWhitney sighed and slipped the automatic out of sight under his jacket. “I’ll tell you what happened,” he said. “I fell for an old one.”

“Yeah?”

“This guy Keenan, he comes to me, he says you told him he should ask me where to find Harbin.”

Dalesia laughed. “Why would I do that?”

“That was my question. What were you up to. But it wasn’t you up to something, it was Keenan. That’s the old dodge, he tells me you told him this thing or that thing, then I’m supposed to figure it’s okay to tell him more.”

“He had no idea what was going on.”

“None,” McWhitney agreed.

“So that was a big mistake he made.”

“Yeah, it was.”

Dalesia grinned. “I bet he learned a lesson from it.”

“Yeah.” McWhitney nodded. “He learned the harp.”

THREE

1

I
like retirement,” Briggs said. “Turns out, I was nervous all those years.”

“You looked nervous,” Parker said.

And it was true; Briggs looked calmer than the last time Parker had seen him, after a broken heist where Dalesia had been the driver, Parker and Tom Hurley and a guy called Michaelson had been the doers, and Briggs the explosives man, fussy and petulant but very methodical behind his thick spectacles. When an alarm had gone off that hadn’t been in the plan they’d been sold, Michaelson wound up dead, Hurley went off for revenge, but the guy who’d sold them the plan had disappeared forever, and Briggs decided he’d had enough. “I’m running a streak,” he’d said. “A very bad streak. I believe I’ll just retire for a while, and wait for it to go away.”

He’d already had this house in Florida, not on either coast but inland, on a lake near Winter Garden. He had a wife, too, but she wouldn’t be coming out to see their visitor, and Parker wouldn’t be going inside the house. He and Briggs sat on a patio in front of one corner of the low, broad house, facing the lake glittering like a diamond pin out there, where motorboats snarled and white sailboats slid silently among them at a slant.

Watching the movement on the lake, Parker said, “You like things calm. No commotion.”

“We get commotion sometimes,” Briggs said. He’d put on a few pounds but was still basically a thin unathletic man who looked as though he belonged behind a desk. Nodding at the lake, he said, “A few years ago, a tornado came across from the Gulf, bounced down onto the lake, looked as though it was coming straight here, lifted up just before it hit the shore, we watched the tail twist as it went right over the house, watched it out that picture window there. That was enough commotion for a while.”

Parker said, “You watched it out a picture window?”

Briggs either shrugged or shivered; it was hard to tell which. “Afterwards, we said to each other, that was really stupid.”

“So you want to stay retired,” Parker said.

“The last time we met,” Briggs said, “we were crawling through a tunnel with alarms going off. Michaelson got shot. I don’t want any more of that.”

“Let me tell you what I’ve got,” Parker said. “I don’t need you there, when it goes down. I need materiel.”

Briggs looked doubtful. “You want me to sell stuff to you?”

“I want you to provide it,” Parker told him, “for a piece of the pie. Come along and show how it works, but then be somewhere else when it’s going down.”

“What materiel do you need?”

“I need to stop three armored cars, and open one more.”

“That’s a lot of armored cars.”

Parker told him the setup, and Briggs said, “Using them as roadblocks, that’s nice.”

“You’re the one knows what would work.”

“Well, a lot of things would work,” Briggs said. “I’ll tell you something I can get my hands on. You know the Carl-Gustaf?”

“Sounds like a king.”

“It’s an antitank gun, made by the Swedes, ever since the Second World War. It’s heavy, but you won’t be carrying it except in cars.”

“How heavy?”

“Thirty-six pounds, a little over four feet long. It’s eighty-four millimeter, shoots different kinds of rounds, including antitank. The antitank shell is almost six pounds all by itself.”

“It sounds old,” Parker said.

“But it’s still in use,” Briggs assured him. “The NATO countries used it a lot. Singapore’s got two hundred of them right now, Uganda uses them. There’s a place in India makes the ammunition.”

Parker said, “And you can get hold of some of these Carl-Gustafs.”

Grinning, Briggs said, “I’m retired, but not that much. The difficult part, these days, you start dealing in arms, the feds figure you’re probably hooked up with terrorists. Makes it hard for a private guy to get along. But the good thing is, I know people who have materiel they’re afraid to move, because anybody they talk to could turn out to be undercover. And one of these people I know has Carl-Gustafs.”

“Could you get them to New England by October fourth?”

Briggs considered. “Five days from now? I’ll drive them up in my van.”

“Good. One of the people with us manages a motel, we can put you there without paper, so you never left home.”

Briggs nodded, smiling at his lake. “That’s the goal, all right,” he said. “Never leave home. What else do you need?”

“To get into the last armored car without setting fire to anything.”

“They’ll have a radio in there,” Briggs pointed out. “And a global positioning device.”

“I know that,” Parker said. “So it all has to be fast.”

“You’ll want an Uzi or a Valmet or something like that, to shoot out the tires and the door locks. Do you worry about the guards?”

“If they’re sensible,” Parker said, “it’s better to leave them alive. Doesn’t get the law as agitated.”

“I agree. So the three Carl-Gustafs and two assault rifles. Do you want tear gas?”

“Then we’d need masks,” Parker said, “so we could go into the car to get the goods, and everything slows down. No, it’s up to the guards. They get out of the way or they don’t.”

“I suppose so.” Briggs frowned out at the lake. The noise of the motorboats, an irritation at first, after a while seemed to become a part of the day, like the droning of insects. Briggs said, “In my years on the heist, I never liked it when somebody died. I still think about Michaelson from time to time.”

“That wasn’t us,” Parker said. “He was shot by a guard.”

“He was dead.”

Parker said, “I don’t want these armored car people dead, but I’m not going to have a lot of time to spend on them.”

“No, that’s true.”

“We’re giving them the choice, that’s all.”

Briggs looked troubled, but then he said, “Let me tell you something I learned about retirement, I mean, besides it’s boring.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s expensive. Where in New England am I meeting you?”