Nobody Runs Forever (2 page)

4

T
he town was called Rutherford, built into a lower south-facing fold of the Berkshires. Vermont was another ten or fifteen miles farther north, New York State a little farther to the west. The town apparently had some seasonal tourist business because of ski slopes nearby, judging from the few specialty shops along the main street, but this wasn’t the season yet, and the place had a siesta look to it.

Driving slowly along toward the town’s only traffic light, the time now about four-thirty in the afternoon, Dalesia said, “We’re looking for a doctor, on the right, a big white shingle— There it is. Myron Madchen, MD.”

Parker looked and saw another two-story building, like most of them along here, with a store downstairs and either offices or residences above. This one had a florist below, venetian blinds over the windows upstairs, and that rectangular white sign with black lettering suspended out over the door beyond the florist’s window. He said, “We’re meeting at a doctor’s office?”

“Beckham’s idea,” Dalesia said, pulling into a parking place a few doors farther on. “I like it.”

They got out of the Audi, and as they walked back along the empty sidewalk, Dalesia said, “I heard of guys doing this with lawyers before, meet at his office because the law can’t bug a lawyer’s office because of lawyer-client privilege, but it works just as good with a doctor. Patient confidentiality. It could be even better, because lawyers worry about the law all the time, but what doctors worry about is money.”

Dalesia opened the door beneath the doctor’s sign, which had another, more discreet sign in its curtained window, and Parker followed him up a steep carpeted staircase with oak railings on both sides. At the top were two dark-stained wooden doors, both with brass plaques screwed to them. The one straight ahead read
PRIVATE
and the one to the right read
ENTER
.

Dalesia pushed open
ENTER
and they stepped into a large square waiting room with shabby armchairs and worn carpet. Three people who looked like the room were waiting there; all looked up from their magazines, then down again.

Across the way was a glassless window in the opposite wall, and beyond that a smaller office with a woman seated at a desk, behind her a row of white filing cabinets. Dalesia crossed to the window, Parker following, and said to the woman, “Turner, I got an appointment.”

“William Turner? Yes, here you are. Has the doctor seen you before?”

“Oh, sure, I’m in your files.” Jabbing a thumb at Parker, he said, “This is Dr. Harris, my diagnostician.”

This didn’t seem to surprise the woman at all. Making a note, she said, “Just have a seat, the doctor will see you shortly.”

“Thanks.”

They found adjoining chairs in front of the venetian-blinded windows, and leafed through fairly elderly newsmagazines. After about three minutes, the woman behind the window said, “Mrs. Hancock,” and one of the waiting patients got up and went through the interior door.

Parker said, “Lawyers are quicker.”

Dalesia thought that was funny. “Yeah, they are.”

Two or three minutes later, a man who must be the doctor himself came out the door that Mrs. Hancock had gone in. He was a heavyset, polished-looking man of about fifty, with lush iron-gray hair combed straight back over a high forehead, and large, pale eyeglasses that bounced the light. He carried a manila folder, and his eyes swept casually over Parker and Dalesia as he walked to the open window, bent there, and spoke briefly with the woman. He gave her the manila folder, turned away, scanned Parker and Dalesia again, and went back into his office.

Now it was less than a minute before the woman said, “Mr. Turner.”

Dalesia got to his feet. “Yeah?”

“Go right in.”

Dalesia and Parker stepped through the interior door to a narrow fluorescent-lit hallway with closed doors along both aides. A shy girl dressed as a nurse smiled at them and opened a door on the right, saying, “Just in here. Dr. Madchen will be right with you.”

“Thanks,” Dalesia said.

They went through, and she closed the door after them. This was an examination room, with a long examining table and two chrome-and-green vinyl chairs. The walls were covered with glass-fronted cabinets of medical supplies, and posters about various diseases.

Seated on the examining table, reading a
People
magazine while his feet dangled above the floor, was a stocky fiftyish man in an open gray zippered windbreaker and shapeless cotton chinos. He looked like a carny roustabout who didn’t realize he was too old to run away with the circus.

When Parker and Dalesia came in, he tossed the magazine onto the table, hopped to his feet, and stuck his hand out in Dalesia’s direction, saying, “Whadaya say, Nick?”

“Nice place you got here,” Dalesia said, shaking hands.

The man laughed and put his hand out toward Parker, saying, “You’d be Parker, I guess. I’m Jake Beckham.”

Taking the hand, finding it strong but not insistent, Parker said, “This is an examining room.”

“That’s what it is, all right,” Beckham said. He was proud of his meeting place.

Parker said, “So why don’t we all look at our chests?”

Surprised, Beckham laughed and said, “By God, you’re right! Nick, this guy is good.”

They all stripped to the waist, showing that none of them carried a recorder or transmitter. Dressing again, Beckham said to Parker, “Nick told you the idea, I guess.”

“Two banks merge, move the goods from one to the other. You’ve got an inside woman to tell you which truck the cash is in.”

“And some inside woman she is,” Beckham said, grinning to let them know he’d slept with her. “Sit down, guys, let me tell you the situation.”

While the other two took the vinyl chairs, Beckham hopped back up on the examination table. He was a bulky guy, but he moved as though he thought he was a skinny kid. Settled, he said, “Small banks are getting eat up, all around the country. If they don’t bulk up by merging with one another, they get swallowed by some international monster out of London or Hong Kong. The bank in this town—you might’ve noticed it, coming in: very old-fashioned, brick, with a clock tower—it’s called Rutherford Combined Savings, and the ‘Combined’ means it already ate a couple even smaller banks, outfits with three offices in three towns ten miles apart. So now Rutherford’s got maybe twenty branches all around the western half of the state, and a little farther south you’ve got Deer Hill Bank, four branches. Deer Hill’s who I used to work for before they caught me with my hand in the till.”

Parker said, “Nick says you did time.”

“Seven to ten, served three. Well, two years, eleven months, four days.” With the boyish grin that seemed strange on that heavy face, he said, “You know yourself, there’s some things you don’t round off.”

“No.”

“My history is simple,” Beckham said, “but I guess you oughta know it. Into the army at eighteen, they made me an MP, based in Germany for a while, saw how an MP could supplement his income. But I didn’t really like the army, so after a couple close calls—I never did get caught at anything, but I got suspected a lot—after a couple of those, end of my second enlistment, I quit. Seemed to make sense to go into policing, so I did. Not big towns—I don’t want to spend my life doing shootouts with drug dealers—small cities like this. But I think my army years made me a little too rough-and-ready for those civilians, so after a while I didn’t have any more police jobs, and that’s when I went to work doing security for Deer Hill. The president was a hard-drinking old guy named Lefcourt, Harvey Lefcourt, and him and me got along just fine. Harvey’s daughter Elaine was married to a smarmy piece of shit named Jack Langen, and Harvey was bringing him into the business, vice president and all, because on his own Jack Langen would starve to death in a supermarket and take Elaine down with him. So I was in charge of security, I hired and fired the guards, hired the companies that maintained the vaults and the deposit boxes, did all of that, found some ways to dip in here and there, but I’m afraid I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.”

Beckham grinned and shook his head. He seemed mostly amused at himself, as though he were observing his own raffish kid brother and not himself. He said, “An audit found my footprints, followed them to me. Harvey didn’t want to prosecute, he’d of just let me go without a recommendation, but Jack Langen pressed it all the way. I don’t think he knew I was putting it to his wife, I think it was just the natural evil of a useless piece of shit handed a little authority. So in I went, and two years, eleven months, four days later out I got, and called Elaine, and we went back to seeing each other from time to time while I took a crap assistant manager job at a motel down by the MassPike. Harvey had died while I was inside and pissant Jack Langen was the president now, and when Rutherford Combined come along he was more than happy to sell out to them for lowball dollar and a make-work place on their board. Deer Hill doesn’t even get to keep its name, it just becomes part of the Combined.”

Parker said, “This doesn’t sit well with the wife.”

“With the
daughter,
” Beckham said. “She’s more Harvey’s daughter than she is Jack Langen’s wife. I think she’d have left him long ago except he had the bank, and the bank, as far as she was concerned, was Harvey. So she stuck around to watch out for the company the way Harvey would, and if he was alive Harvey would rather get swallowed up by some Chink from Hong Kong than the tight-asses of Rutherford Combined, that’s how Elaine sees it, and I think she’s right. So once Deer Hill is gone, she’ll be gone, too. Not with me, she’s got more sense than that, but gone somewhere she can do some good for herself. And for that, she’ll need money. She wouldn’t wind up very far ahead just divorcing Jack Langen, she knows what he’s like, so what the hell. She called me, we did some pillow talk, and the idea was, I put a string together and take Deer Hill’s cash and give her a third. That way, she screws Jack Langen
and
Rutherford Combined, and she can still divorce the weasel and get on with her life. And two-thirds of Deer Hill’s bank money would be a very comfortable amount for us boys.”

Beckham looked around at them, bright-eyed, pleased with himself. “Well, Mr. Parker,” he said. “What do you think?”

5

I
don’t like it,” Parker said.

Surprised, Beckham said, “You don’t? What’s wrong with it?”

“Most things,” Parker told him. “The hinge of the thing is an amateur. Even a calm amateur is usually trouble, and this one is all emotion. It isn’t about money, it’s about revenge and anger and family pride. I can’t use any of those things.”

“No, you’re right,” Beckham said. He had nodded all the way through Parker’s statement, and now he nodded another minute more, as though mulling over in his mind the rightness of what Parker had said. Finished nodding, he said, “It may be I’m kidding myself, I hope not. It may be you can talk me out of a big mistake that’d put me right back inside, where I do not want to be. Because you’re right about the whole thing, Elaine is one pissed-off lady, and if I’m just some pussy-whipped clown she’s using to get revenge on her husband then I oughta be told about it by somebody before I do myself an injury.” He shook his head and turned to Dalesia to say, “The reason I went up last time, I wasn’t careful enough, didn’t take everything into consideration. Am I doing that again? I sure hope not.”

“Well, Jake,” Dalesia said, “so far, it sounds to me as though maybe that’s what’s happening.”

“Shit,” said Beckham. “Mr. Parker, let me try something here. Let me walk you through it the way I see it, how the details go down, and you tell me if there’s any more sense in it once you know what I have in mind. If you still say it’s no good, I’m gonna have to rethink here, and I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t have a plan B.”

Parker said, “How long can we stay in this room?”

“This won’t take long. Honest.”

Parker shrugged. “Go ahead, then.”

“The first thing you have to know,” Beckham told him, “is that Elaine isn’t any part of it. Not what
we’re
doing. The bank is gonna make this move, close down the Deer Hill office, no sooner than two weeks from now and no later than the first of November, because they don’t want to get all mixed up with weather and skiers. It all depends on weather, and when the armored cars and the private security are available. They won’t know for sure until about five days before they make the move. As soon as Elaine finds out through her husband when that will be, and which car the cash will be in, she’ll get word to me, and that’s the last she has to do with anything. I already know the route, so that’s taken care of. The night comes, we make our move, we disappear.”

“Well,
you
don’t disappear,” Parker told him. “You’re on parole, aren’t you?”

“And I’m being a very good boy, believe me. And Dr. Madchen is gonna see to it I’m in the hospital that night, I’m gonna come down with something not too serious. He’ll put me in a private room, so I can sneak out of there to do the job and then back, and that’s my alibi.”

Parker and Dalesia looked at each other, expressionless. Then Parker said, “Beckham, what’s this Dr. Madchen to you?”

“There’s a cousin of his,” Beckham said, “got into drugs, wound up in the same can as me. I knew the doctor from before, you know, just as a patient, and he wrote to me, asked me to help with his cousin, he was afraid the cousin wasn’t up to taking care of himself on the inside, and let me tell you, was he ever right. So I did help, and took care of the guy, and now the good doctor feels he owes me one, and this is it.” Beckham grinned again, in that boyish way that seemed so at odds with who he was. “So there you are,” he said. “There’s my alibi. I’m in the hospital when it happens, I couldn’t be involved.”

Parker shook his head. “No,” he said.

Now Beckham looked more frustrated than worried. “Still no? Why? I’ve got the emotional one out of it, I’ve got my own alibi, you guys are big boys and can take care of yourselves, work out your own cover. The job is
good,
Mr. Parker, I know it is, that target is good, that armored car full of cash.”

“Yes, it is,” Parker agreed. “That part is all right, that’s what got me here. If it was just that, we could do it and no problem.”

“You still see problems,” Beckham said.

“Two, to start with,” Parker said. “In the first place, it’ll take the cops about twenty minutes to work out the link between you and the doctor.”

Beckham looked bewildered. “Why are they gonna look?”

“Because you’re the one they’re going to want for the job, from the start,” Parker told him. “The minute it happens, they’re going to be looking for you, and there you are in a hospital. Hospital? Who put you in this hospital? What’s the connection between you and this doctor? If another doctor looks you over, because the police want to know what the story is here, what’s he gonna find?”

Beckham shook his head, a man bedeviled by gnats. “But why are they gonna just think about
me
?”

Dalesia said, “Let me tell him that part.”

“Go ahead,” Parker said.

Dalesia said to Beckham, “Parker’s right, the job’s all clouded up because of emotions. Including yours, Jake.”

Beckham reared back on the examination table, his feet floating above the floor. Clutching at his chest, he said, “Mine?”

Dalesia said, “The husband— What’s his name?”

“Jack Langen, the little prick.”

“There you go,” Dalesia said. “You just said it yourself.”

Beckham spread his hands. “Said what?”

“Jack Langen isn’t the little prick,” Dalesia told him. “He’s the angry husband. He knew you were putting it to his wife from the very first.”

“He doesn’t know his ass—”

“
That’s
why he pressed charges on you the first time,” Dalesia told him. “Overrode his father-in-law, put it to you because he knew you were putting it to the missus. And the minute you got out, he knew when it started up again. Part of this bank merger deal is to get back at the wife and not be the young nobody brought into the family business any more.”

Parker said, “And the second this job goes down, he’ll know it’s you, with her help. He’ll right away start saying your name to the cops, and telling them why it has to be you, and why his own wife has to be the insider. You’re all they’ll look at, and that’s why they’ll see through the doctor alibi in a heartbeat.”

Dalesia said, “Jake, all you wanted was to feel contempt for the husband, like he didn’t matter, like you were that much smarter than him. That’s called underestimating your enemy, Jake.”

“Shit,” Beckham said. “You mean, it still can’t be done?” Turning to Parker, he said, “You said yourself, without the emotions in it the job is good. I really want to do this, Mr. Parker, I need the stake, I need to get my life together. Do you see any way at all we could still pull it off?”

“One way,” Parker said. “I was thinking about it while Nick was telling you things. There’s one way you
might
get the cops to stop looking at you.”

“I’ll do it,” Beckham said.

“We’ll see.”

“Why?” Beckham looked a little alarmed. “What do you want me to do?”

“Violate parole,” Parker said.