Parker said, “Li’s right, the big problem is the dance studio woman.”
“Yeah, she is,” Mackey said. “But Li’s also right that we can’t touch her. It would make things worse for Brenda because, first of all, it would prove we’re connected to her. If Ms. Johnson-Ross gets a cold sore tonight, Brenda’s behind bars the rest of her life.”
Parker said, “Well, we’ve only got two choices, unless we just walk away, and I know you don’t want to do that.”
“No, I don’t,” Mackey said, almost as though he wanted an argument.
Parker nodded at Williams’ drawings. “We can either go into this Fifth Street station tonight and bring Brenda out, and she lives the way you say, the way you and I live, the way Williams lives, or we go see this dance studio woman, see what kind of handle we can put on her back.”
Williams said, “What if you can’t put any handle at all?”
“Then we remove her,” Parker said, “and go pull Brenda out anyway. She won’t be clean, but she’ll be out.”
“If that’s what we gotta do,” Mackey said, “then that’s what we gotta do.”
Parker shrugged. “Nothing’s gonna happen right away. If we take it easy now, find out where this woman lives—”
“She’ll be in the phone book,” Mackey said. “Everybody’s in the phone book.”
Williams grinned and said, “Probably Brenda is, somewhere, under some name.”
“That’s what I’m trying to keep,” Mackey told him.
Parker said, “We get up at three, three-thirty, go to this woman’s place, see what we can do. Get her maybe to phone the cops in the morning, say she changed her mind, doesn’t want to make any complaints, isn’t even sure that was Brenda in the car.”
Williams said, “They’ll send somebody over to argue with her.”
Mackey said, “I just thought. What if she lives above the shop? What if her place is one of the apartments in the Armory building?”
Williams laughed. “Well, we do know that place,” he said.
Mackey said, “Parker? We go in there again?”
“That isn’t where she lives,” Parker said. “She had a little apartment in the studio, remember? For when she wants to stay over. Not her full-time place, not used much. So her full-time place is not in the same building.”
“I hope not,” Williams said.
“We’ll see how it plays,” Parker said, “and if it isn’t gonna play, we’ll go over to Fifth Street, still early in the morning, and pull Brenda out of there.” He looked at Mackey. “Okay?”
Mackey nodded. “First we try it easy,” he said.
Parker said, “Then we don’t.”
4
There was only one Johnson-Ross in the phone book: JOHNSON-ROSS D B 127 Further R’town
“She’s doing good for herself,” Williams commented.
It was twenty to four in the morning, and they were seated again at the conference table. The phone book left behind by the beer distributor was three years out of date, but this was surely Johnson-Ross’s current address. Parker said, “You know this place?”
“Rosetown,” Williams told him. “North of the city. Pretty rich up there. Until a few years ago, if I was to drive through Rosetown, I’d get stopped sure. DWB.”
Sounding interested, Mackey said, “Not any more?”
Williams shrugged. “Now it would depend on the car,” he said.
Parker said, “So it isn’t city police, it’s a local force.”
“Yeah, but they’re rich,” Williams said. “Those are people spend money on law enforcement.”
“Which means the Honda’s no good to us,” Parker said. “We need a car that’ll make their cops comfortable.”
“Well, I guess that’s me,” Mackey said.
They looked at him, and he said, “Brenda and me, we almost always go by car, but as much as we can, we leave the car out of it. Like we came here, we took it to the airport, left it in long-term, took a rental back.”
Williams said, “What do you do that for?”
“If something happens to one of us,” Mackey told him, “it doesn’t happen to the car, so we’re that far ahead. Like now; they got Brenda, but they didn’t get a car. And a car would have another whole set of ID for the cops to play with.”
Parker said, “What is this car?”
“Two-year-old Saab, the little one, red.”
Williams laughed. “You’ll look like a college boy coming home on vacation.”
“Sounds right for that neighborhood,” Mackey said, “doesn’t it?”
Parker said, “So what we have to do, take the Honda to the airport, get this Saab.”
“And once again,” Williams said, “I’m on the floor in back.”
There were two kinds of long-term parking; inside a brick-and-concrete building or, the cheaper way, in an outside lot. Mackey drove to the outside lot, picked up a check, and found the Saab in its place, small and sleek, gleaming in the high floodlights. Leaving the Honda, he crouched beside the Saab, and from underneath drew a small metal box with a magnet on one side. Opening it, he took out the Saab’s key and used it to unlock the car.
Once the metal box was in the glove compartment, the parking check was out of the glove compartment, the Honda was in the Saab’s old space, and Williams was again on the floor in the narrow rear-passenger area, Mackey steered toward the electric exit sign, saying, “One thing. If we have to go on from the dance woman to the Fifth Street station, we don’t use this. We go back to the Honda.”
“It’s your car and it’s your woman,” Parker pointed out.
From the floor in back, Williams said, “When you’re out of the airport, take the left on Tunney Road, I’ll direct you from there.”
One-twenty-seven Further Lane was a bungalow, a one-story mansarded stucco house with porch, on a winding block of mostly larger and newer houses. Darlene Johnson-Ross had spent for the best neighborhood she could afford, not the best house.
The Saab drove by, slowly, seeing no lights, not in that house or any other house nearby. The dashboard clock read 5:27, and this wasn’t a suburb that rose early to deliver the milk. They’d seen one patrolling police car, half a mile or so back, but no other moving vehicles, no pedestrians.
Most of the houses here had attached garages. The bungalow had a garage beside it, in the same style as the house, but not attached. Blacktop led up to it, then a concrete walk crossed in front of the modest plantings to the porch stoop. A black Infiniti stood on the blacktop, nose against the garage door.
As they went by, Parker said, “Go around the block, cut the lights when you’re coming back down here, turn in, stop next to the other car.”
“And then straight in?”
“Straight in.”
They made the circuit without seeing any people, traffic, or house lights. Mackey slid the Saab up next to the Infiniti, half on blacktop and half on lawn, then the three moved fast out of the car and over to the front door, which Parker kicked in with one flat stomp from the bottom of his foot, the heel hitting next to the knob, the wood of the inside jamb splintering as the lock mechanism tore through.
They didn’t have to search for Johnson-Ross; their entrance had been heard. As they came in, Williams paused to push the door as closed as it would go, and a light switched on toward the rear of the house, showing that they’d entered a living room, with a hall leading back from it. Light spilled from the right side of the hall, most of the way back.