“Yeah.”
He broke the connection, and he did ask for a pill, and they gave him one. Then he lay on his back in the dim room and stared at the ceiling.
Before this, he’d been worried. Now he was terrified.
Briggs spent half an hour in Dalesia’s former room at Trails End, but felt restless and couldn’t sit still. He kept walking around the room, opening the door to look out at the traffic rolling on the MassPike, going into the bathroom to critically inspect his face and conclude, yet again, that he didn’t need to shave at the moment, and in general behaving like something caged in the zoo.
It was the job those three were on; that’s what had agitated him. He’d been away from that business a long time, and he’d forgotten the rush it involved, the sense that, for just a little while, you were living your life in italics. You weren’t really aware of it when it was happening to you, but Briggs had seen it in Parker and Dalesia and the other one, and he’d found himself envying, not the danger or the risk or even the profit, but that feeling of heightened experience. A drug without drugs.
Half an hour was all he could stand, and then he said the hell with it; he didn’t have to stay here; he could do whatever he wanted. He wasn’t even checked in, so he wouldn’t have to check out.
He packed the stuff he’d unpacked thirty minutes earlier, wiped the room down just in case, left the card key on the bedside table, and went out to the van. His one bag went in where all the weaponry had been transported, and he got behind the wheel and headed south, taking an underpass beneath the MassPike. Forty-five minutes later he was on Interstate 95, which would run him down the entire U.S. Atlantic coast to Florida. He figured, when he grew tired, he’d find a motel. Maybe in Maryland.
Not long after leaving Trails End, Briggs had passed an upscale restaurant out in the country, where Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, her tour done for the day, was having dinner with her friend. These days, Gwen was dating a lawyer. Well, it beat dating a cop. Somehow, in your off-duty hours, you needed to be with somebody you could talk to who would understand your language, your references, your assumptions. That was why actors dated actors, doctors dated doctors, mathematicians dated mathematicians.
Gwen had dated a couple of cops, but male cops just couldn’t seem to get up to speed when it came to independent women. They would open the door for you, if they had to break your leg to get to it. They would protect you; they would make your decisions for you; they would explain for you how the world worked; and it would never occur to them they were patronizing, condescending bastards who should count themselves lucky Gwen kept a lock on her carry sidearm when off duty. They would condescend even when talking about the job, as though a person of either gender could make it to detective second grade without knowing the first thing about the work she was doing.
So a lawyer was better than that. Barry Ridgely, criminal defense attorney, attractive, good dresser, forty-one, divorced, two kids in private school, no real bad habits. Gwen had, naturally, checked him out when they’d first started seeing each other, and he was fine. He liked good restaurants, and so did she. He liked shoptalk, and so did she. It was just fine.
Tonight, Gwen’s shoptalk was all about the man whose name, she was pretty sure, was not John B. Allen. “He just didn’t look right,” she said, not for the first time. “You know how people look right in their jobs, or they don’t look right?”
“I know what you mean,” Barry said. The restaurant was half full but quiet, dim-lit, comfortable. He said, “I got a guy right now, veterinarian, strangled his wife. He looks like a veterinarian, you know? Caring, easygoing, patient.”
“But he strangled his wife.”
“She wasn’t a pet. I tell you, Gwen, if I could bring a puppy into that courtroom, I’d get my guy off in a New York minute.”
Gwen laughed and said, “Let me tell you about my landscape designer.”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.” Which was one of the many nice things about him.
“That’s okay,” she told him, because it was. “I love the image of the puppy in court. But my guy, in the Lexus, is no landscape designer. You look at him, he could be a prison guard, he could be a mine worker. He isn’t outdoors, he isn’t saying, ‘Put the petunias over there.’ He just isn’t.”
Barry nodded. “Then why’d he say he was?” he asked, and put some monkfish in his mouth so he wouldn’t interrupt her any more.
“He was at Elaine Langen’s house when I interviewed her,” Gwen told him. “Not in the house, outside it. I didn’t see him then, but that’s when I saw his car, the Lexus. She’s the one said he was a landscape designer.” She stopped, considering that. “That’s right, she’s the one lied first, then he told the same lie when I stopped him, later on. And since then he’s disappeared, I asked some people on the force, unofficially, you know, keep an eye out for the Lexus, it hasn’t been seen since.”
“You said it was Jersey plates,” Barry pointed out, and poured them both some more chardonnay. “Maybe he went home.”
“Or maybe he’s lying low,” she said. “If he isn’t a landscape designer, and I know damn well he isn’t, then what’s he doing here, what’s he doing with Elaine Langen, and why are they both lying about it?”
“Hanky-panky?”
“No,” she said, sure of that. “She would, with anything in pants, but not him. He’s a cold guy. With me, when I stopped him, he wore this affability like a coat, it wasn’t him.”
“The cloak of invisibility,” Barry suggested.
“Exactly. Who knows who he is, down in there?”
“Well, if he’s still around,” Barry said, “and if he still has something to do with Mrs. Langen, you’ll find him.”
“Is he connected to my gunshot victim? I wonder,” Gwen said. “You know, the guy I told you about in the hospital.”
“A farmer boyfriend of Mrs. Langen.”
“Who may have shot him, I don’t know yet. But she and this Allen guy.” Gwen shook her head. “I just have the feeling, whatever those two are up to, and it isn’t hanky-panky, it would be very interesting to find out.”
“You’ll find out,” he told her. “I know you, you’re a bulldog.”
“Thanks, Barry,” she said, grinning comfortably at him. “Tell me about this veterinarian of yours. Why’d he strangle his wife?”
A little north of where they sat, in the restaurant that was only a restaurant for tonight, Elaine Langen, having not eaten her dinner and not drunk her coffee, but definitely having drunk her scotch and her wine, saw that the speeches were about to begin, and murmured to her husband, Jack, at her left hand, “Liddle girls’ room.” She stood carefully, so as not to stagger, and walked in more or less a straight line out of the room, out of the building, and into her car.
As Elaine was slipping shakily into the white Infiniti, Parker and Dalesia and McWhitney were getting into Dalesia’s Audi and driving, at first with parking lights only, slowly out of the factory building and away along the road in the opposite direction from where they would meet the armored cars later tonight. Their goal was a diner down near the MassPike, where they could have their dinner in guaranteed anonymity. They reached the diner, and as they drove into its parking area, the four armored cars from Boston rolled by unseen up on the Pike, slowing for their exit just ahead.
A few minutes later, when the armored cars turned in at the entrance to the Green Man Motel, their headlights cut short the goodbye kiss of Dr. Madchen and his Isabelle, who whispered hurried endearments, got into their separate cars, away from the headlights of all those trucks, and drove away to their for-the-moment homes.