Richard Stark
Dirty Money
This is for Dr. Quirke,
and his creator—
two lovely gents
One
1
When the silver Toyota Avalon bumped down the dirt road out of the woods and across the railroad tracks, Parker put the Infiniti into low and stepped out onto the gravel. The Infiniti jerked forward toward the river as the Toyota slewed around behind it to a stop. Parker picked up the full duffel bag from where he’d tossed it on the ground, and behind him, the Infiniti rolled down the slope into the river, all its windows open; it slid into the gray dawn water like a bear into a trout stream.
Parker carried the duffel in his arms and Claire got out of the Toyota to open its rear door and say, “Do you want to drive?”
“No. I’ve been driving.” He heaved the duffel onto the backseat, then got around to take the passenger side in front.
Before getting behind the wheel, she stood looking toward the river, a tall slender ash-blonde in black slacks and a bulky dark red sweater against the October chill. “It’s gone,” she said.
“Good.”
She slid into the Toyota then and kissed him and held his face in her slim hands. “It’s been a while.”
“It didn’t come out the way it was supposed to.”
“But you got back,” she said, and steered the Toyota across the tracks and up the dirt road through scrub woods. “Was one of the men with you named Dalesia?”
“Nick. They nabbed him.”
“He escaped,” she said, paused at the blacktop state road and turned right, southward.
“Nick escaped?”
“I had the news on, driving up. It happened a couple of hours ago, in Boston. They were transferring him from the state police to the federal, going to take him somewhere south to question him. He killed a marshal, escaped with the gun.”
Parker looked at her profile. They were almost alone on the road, not yet seven AM, she driving fast. He said, “They grabbed him yesterday. They didn’t question him yet?”
“That’s what they said.” She shrugged, eyes on the road. “They didn’t say so, but it sounded to me like a turf war, the local police and the FBI. The FBI won, but then they lost him.”
Parker looked out at this hilly country road, heading south. Soon they’d be coming into New Jersey. “If nobody questioned Nick yet, then they don’t know where the money is.”
With a head gesture toward the duffel bag behind them, she said, “That isn’t it?”
“No, that’s something else.”
She laughed, mostly in surprise. “You don’t have that money, so you picked up some other money on the way back?”
“There was too much heat around the robbery,” he told her. “We could stash it, but we couldn’t carry it. We each took a little, and Nick tried to spend some of his, but they had the serial numbers.”
“Oh. That’s why they caught him. Do you have some?”
“Not any more.”
“Good.”
They rode in silence for a while, he stretching his legs, rolling his shoulders, a big ropy man who looked squeezed into the Toyota. He’d driven through the night, called Claire an hour ago from a diner to make the meet and get rid of the Infiniti, which was too hot and too speckled with fingerprints. Now they passed a slow-moving oil delivery truck and he said, “I need some sleep, but after that I’ll want you to drive me to Long Island. All my identification got wasted in the mess in Massachusetts. I’d better not drive until I get new papers.”
“You’re just going to talk to somebody?”
“That’s all.”
“Then I can drive you.”
“Good.”
She watched the road; no traffic now. She said, “This is still something about the robbery?”
“The third guy with us,” he said. “He’ll know what it means, too, that Nick’s on the loose.”
“That the police don’t know where the money is.”
“But Nick knows where we are, or could point in a direction. Are we all still partners?” He shook his head. “You kill a lawman,” he said, “you’re in another zone. McWhitney and I are gonna have to work this out.”
“But not on the phone.”
Parker yawned. “Nothing on the phone ever,” he said. “Except pizza.”
2
Once or twice, Claire had gotten too close to Parker’s other world, or that world had gotten too close to her, and she hadn’t liked it, so he did his best to keep her separate from that kind of thing. But this business was all right; everything had already happened, this was just a little tidying up.
She drove them eastward across New Jersey late that afternoon, and he told her the situation: “There was a meeting that didn’t pan out. A guy there named Harbin was a problem a lot of different ways. He was wearing a wire—”
“A police wire?”
“Which got him killed. Then it turned out there was federal reward money out on him, and it attracted a bounty hunter named Keenan.”
She said, “This didn’t have anything to do with you in Massachusetts.”
“Nothing. This was just an annoyance, Keenan trying to find everybody at the meeting, so somebody could lead him to Harbin, which nobody was going to do. He got hold of some phone records, Nick Dalesia made two calls to our place here, that brought him around.”
She glanced at him, then looked out at Interstate 80, pretty heavy traffic in both directions, a lot of big trucks, the kind of traffic where you didn’t change lanes a lot. “You mean,” she said, “the law might come around now, using those same records.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Keenan was looking for connections. The law’s looking for Nick, and they’ll know he’s too smart to go hole up with somebody he knows. They won’t be spending time looking at phone bills.”
“Well, where are we going now?”
Parker was rested, most of the day asleep, but this car still felt too small. Maybe it was because he wasn’t at the wheel. He stretched in place and said, “Keenan’s partner, a woman named Sandra Loscalzo, caught up with us in Massachusetts just before the job. McWhitney convinced her to go away, and when he got back to Long Island he’d lead her to Harbin.”
“Who’s already dead.”
“Yes.”
“And McWhitney lives on Long Island?”
“He’s got a bar there, and lives behind it.”
“And that’s where we’re going.”
“And when we get there, the next part is up to you.”
She frowned out at the traffic and the eastern sky darkening ahead of them. “Is this something I won’t like?”
“I don’t think so. When we get there, I can go in and talk to McWhitney and you can wait in the car, or you come in, we have a drink, it’s a social occasion.”
“There isn’t going to be any trouble.”
“None. We’ve got to decide what to do about Loscalzo, and we’ve got to decide what to do about the money. There’s too much heat up in that area right now—”
“Because of what you people did.”
“They’re looking close at strangers,” Parker said, and shrugged. “So we’ll have to leave the cash where it is for a while, but if we leave it too long either they find Nick again and he trades the money for a better sentence, or he gets to it himself and cleans it out because he’s desperate. Being on the run the way he is uses up a lot of cash.”
“You said they have the serial numbers,” she said, “so he can’t use it, can he?”
“He’ll leave a wide backtrail, but he won’t care.”
“But you won’t be able to use it.”