“If you’re there,” Parker told him, “you’re in jail the next day, you and your lady friend both, in different jails, for the next twenty years.”
“If you’re not there,” Dalesia said, “if you’re already in jail then for some other reason, that’s it, you’re never behind bars again, you’ve got your stake, you wait out your parole, the world is yours.”
Parker said, “Do you want the score, or do you want to make a point? Tell the world off, and go down in flames.”
“Jesus.” Beckham didn’t sit on the examination table again, but he leaned backward against it, brow furrowed like corduroy as he stared at the floor, trying to work out this new situation. “You’re asking me . . .,” he decided, and trailed off.
Dalesia picked up on that. “What, to trust us? You’d never find Parker, Jake, but I couldn’t hide from you. We go back a long way. You never wondered about me before. We’ve been in tents by trout streams up above Quebec, Jake, and we both slept like babies.”
“I know that,” Beckham said, and roused himself. “Jesus, I don’t mistrust you, Nick, and if you say you don’t worry about Parker, I won’t worry about Parker. But this was my baby, it’s been my baby from the beginning. It’s not like I go off with Elaine at the end of it, what I get is the cash, but it’s my cash, my score.”
Dalesia said, “It just happens, Jake, in your score this time, you put the two of us on the send, we come back with the winnings. Meantime, you cover your ass.”
Beckham sighed. “I gotta get used to this,” he said. “All right, if this is what has to happen, what do you want from me?”
Dalesia turned to Parker, who said, “What does Elaine drive?”
“A white Infiniti.”
Dalesia laughed: “So the marriage isn’t all downside.”
Beckham showed him a sour face. “The car’s leased by the bank,” he said. “It’s all scam. She doesn’t get to choose it, and she doesn’t get to keep it.”
Parker said, “Do you have a place to stash the money car, once you’ve got it?”
“Yeah, a good one.” The idea made Beckham smile. “It’s one of those old nineteenth-century factory buildings, old brick, concrete floors, the jobs moved to the South seventy years ago, abandoned ever since, take it a thousand years to rot away.”
“All right.” Parker turned to Dalesia. “You got anything to do between now and tomorrow?”
“Only this.”
To Beckham, Parker said, “Tomorrow morning at ten, she drives the Infiniti to the service area on the MassPike west of Huntington. Eastbound side. She parks there, and we’ll find her.”
Dalesia said, “You better tell her what we look like.”
“I don’t know,” Beckham said. “You’re bringing her in?”
“She brought herself in,” Parker said, “and you brought her in. She meets with us, she has a map of the money route, she tells us what she knows about which armored car we want, and we give her a phone number to call when she’s got the date it’s going down. Then she leaves again. The only thing left for her to do, when the move is scheduled, she calls that number. Then maybe she should go shopping in New York for a few days.”
“She does those to Boston,” Beckham said, “on account of I can’t leave the state.”
Dalesia laughed. “Funny thing is,” he said, “on the day the job goes down, you really won’t be able to leave the state.”
7
The old empty factory Beckham had described was in a remnant of a town ten miles south of Rutherford, on a narrow, hilly road that was itself a branch off a secondary road. Down below them to their left, through pine trees, was a fast, twisty stream that the road followed.
As they drove, Dalesia said, “Jake’s problem is, he’s still part amateur himself.”
“He is,” Parker said.
“I like him, don’t get me wrong, but he didn’t start out to be one of us. He started out to be a soldier boy, obey orders, get drunk, chase girls. He got turned and turned, and he’s with us now because he’s got no place else to be.”
“He brings us a job,” Parker said, without emphasis, “he got from the woman he’s in bed with.”
“I know. It’s worse than a soap opera. Do you think you got him to back out of this?”
“Maybe. If not,” Parker said, “you’re the one he can finger.”
Dalesia laughed, but then he said, “No. I put one in his head before that.”
“Then her head, too.”
Dalesia, considering, said, “You think so?”
“Never trust pillow talk.”
Dalesia thought about that for a while, then said, “We could just keep driving.”
“We could.”
“I got nothing else.”
“Neither of us has anything else.”
Dalesia nodded. “For Jake’s sake,” he said, “I hope he can keep himself under control.”
After a while, the road they were on descended to a flatter, more open area at stream level, and that was where they found the town, or what was left of it: a few old wooden houses with junked cars around them and clothes drying on lines extended back toward the encroaching pines. There were no stores or other commercial establishments.
Then the road made a left turn over a small concrete bridge, with just beyond it the hulk of the factory building on the right and an abandoned old wooden hotel and bar on the left; even the For Sale sign on the hotel had an antique look.
Dalesia turned right onto the weedy gravel on the far side of the factory and stopped at a sagging, rusty chain-link fence. They sat in the Audi a minute, looking out at the brick hulk, and Dalesia said, “To get here, you gotta go past those houses back there. On this road, at night, you don’t do that without lights.”
“Those people don’t call the law,” Parker said.
Dalesia thought that over, then nodded and said, “You’re right. Also, we can see where this road goes next. You want a look at the place?”
It was seven in the evening now, twilight just setting in, but still bright enough to see. Parker considered the dark hulk of the factory building, then shook his head. “I take Beckham’s word for it.”
“Me, too.”
They drove on, and after another four and a half miles they came to a numbered county road. There had been no more occupied buildings since the town.
“So what we do,” Dalesia said as they turned south, “we bring the armored car in from the other way, because that’s where their route is between the banks, but the vehicles to take things out again come this way.”
“Stashed ahead of time,” Parker said. “Right. It’s just the one trip that night.”
They drove south a while in silence, toward the general area of the MassPike, and then Dalesia said, “If it’s just you and me and the armored cars and the state cops and the private security, we’ll be fine.”
“That’s right,” Parker said.
8
They chose a motel that was not the one where Beckham worked these days, and in the morning they checked out and went back to where Parker had left his car. Dalesia put the Audi near it and went on into the restaurant to find a booth, while Parker leaned against the driver’s door of his Lexus to wait for Elaine Langen.
At ten in the morning, the parking area was nearly empty—too late for breakfast and too early for lunch; everybody was on the road. Except for the truckers, who had their own parking area around to the side of the building. As Parker waited, a thin but steady trickle of semis arrived and departed, snorting in and groaning out.
She was a few minutes late, which was to be expected, but when she arrived, the white Infiniti would have stood out even if the lot had been full. Watching her roll tentatively down the lane, looking at him but not yet sure he was the right one, Parker nodded first at her, then at the restaurant, then turned to walk indoors.
The interior was cafeteria style, with a mix of freestanding tables and booths along the windowed walls. Truckers and a few civilians
ate at widely scattered tables. Dalesia had taken a booth near the back, beyond the windows. Parker walked toward him and saw Dalesia’s expression change, meaning she’d followed him in.
Dalesia was on the side of the booth that faced the front and the entrance, so that whoever sat on the other side would be invisible from most parts of the restaurant. Parker slid in next to him and only then looked toward Elaine Langen.
Well. The first impression was of a slender, stylish, well-put-together woman in her forties, but almost instantly the impression changed. She wasn’t slender; she was bone thin, and inside the stylish clothes she walked with a graceless jitteriness, like someone whose medicine had been cut off too soon. Beneath the neat cowl of well-groomed ash-blond hair, her face was too thin, too sharp-featured, too deeply lined. This could have made her look haggard; instead, it made her look mean. From the evidence, what would have attracted her husband most would have been her father’s bank.
She walked directly to the table, looked at them both, and said, “Say a name.”
“Jake Beckham,” Parker said. “Elaine Langen.”
“That’s me.”
“Sit down.”
She looked at the booth, looked at the privacy they’d arranged for her, and said, “Thank you.” She slid in and said, “Jake had to talk me into this, you know.”
Dalesia said, “Into this, or into the whole thing?”
Her laugh was brief and harsh. “Into this,” she said. “I had to talk him into the whole thing. But I guess you two must agree with me.”
Parker said, “About what?”
“There was an old movie,” she said, “called, Nice Little Bank That Should Be Robbed.”
Dalesia laughed and said, “That’s what we’ve got here, huh? In the movie, did they get away with it?”
“I never saw the movie,” she said. “I just noticed the title, in a TV listing. It struck me.”
“Probably,” Dalesia said, “being a movie, they didn’t get away with it. Movies are very unrealistic that way.”
She seemed amused by him. “Oh? Do bank robbers usually get away with it?”
“They always get away with it,” Dalesia told her. “What orders do the bosses give the tellers in your bank? ‘If they show the note, give them the money. If you can slip them a dye pack, good, but if not, just give them the money.’ Less hassle for everybody, right?”
“That’s right,” she said. “But still, they do get caught sometimes.”
“The really stupid ones,” he agreed. “Also, if you do it a hundred twenty-two times, the hundred twenty-third they’re gonna grab you. Everybody’s gotta show a little restraint.”
She considered him. “What number are you up to?”
“One.”
Parker said, “You’ve got a map for us.”
A little surprised, she gave Parker an appraising look, then looked again at Dalesia. “Well, it isn’t exactly good cop, bad cop,” she said, “but it works the same. Yes,” she told Parker, and reached into the shoulder bag she’d put on the seat beside her.
Parker said, “You got a gun in there, too?”
Surprised again, she said, “As a matter of fact, yes. I don’t intend to show it.”
“Then don’t carry it.”
She had taken from her bag a sheet of typing paper folded in half, but now she paused to say, “I’ve taken courses. I know how to fire a weapon, and I know how to hit what I aim at. And I also know never to show it unless I intend to use it. I carry it because I live in an uncertain world.”
“That’s true,” Parker said.
She extended the paper toward him. He took it, unfolded it, and it was a Xerox copy of a page from a Massachusetts atlas, in black-and-white, showing one small section of the state in close detail. On it a route had been indicated by a few short lines in red ink. Deer Hill was at the southern end of the red line, Rutherford at the north. West Ruudskill, the town with Beckham’s factory in it, was a dot off the middle of the route, to the right.
Parker folded the map twice and put it in his shirt pocket. She watched him, then said, “Jake says you’re doing it without him, but you’ll still share and share alike.” She sounded as though she didn’t entirely believe it.
Parker said, “Did he tell you why he’s staying away?”
Dalesia corrected that: “Why it’s better for him that he stays away.”
Her mouth, thin to begin with, twisted a little. “You’ve got him convinced Jack knows about us.”
“Knew the first round,” Dalesia said, “knows this round.”
She held a hand up to stop him. “Don’t give me the arguments, please,” she said. “They’re just arguments. You’ve convinced Jake, that’s all that matters, and he’s going to do whatever it is you told him to do, but it so happens I know my husband. Jack could not fool me, not for a minute.”
Parker said, “Beckham didn’t tell you what we thought he should do?”
“No.” She shook her head, remembering. “To tell the truth, he seemed a little embarrassed about it.”
“He is,” Parker said. “We told him he should violate parole.”
She stared. “You what?”
“That means he’s inside,” Dalesia explained, “from before anybody knows the date of the move. After the job, he comes back out.”
“My God,” she said. “I know how Jake feels about prison. You really sold him a bill of goods.”
“We showed him what’s out there,” Parker said.
She shrugged. “Well, that’s up to him. You’re supposed to give me a phone number or something?”
This was Dalesia’s part. “It’s a fax number,” he said. “I think we can be pretty sure the move won’t happen until October, that’s less than two weeks from now.”
“I think so, too,” she said.
“So when you know the date,” he told her, “you write just that, the day, seven or fifteen or whatever—”
“I get the idea.”
“You write just that on a piece of paper,” he said, “and fax it to this number. It’s somebody I know that’s not gonna ask me what it’s about. All I want you to do, get rid of the fax number afterwards.”
“I assume,” she said, “it’s a long-distance call. It will be on my bill.”
Parker said, “There are fax machines in your bank branches.”
Surprised, she said, “That’s true. All right, I can do it.”
Dalesia already had the number on a small slip of paper in his pocket. He handed it to her and said, “Don’t copy it anywhere.”
“Don’t insult me any more,” she said, and put the paper in her bag.
“Sorry,” Dalesia said.
Parker said, “You were gonna tell us about the armored cars.”
“Four of them. They’ll be coming that day from Boston,” she said. “There’ll be rooms for the drivers at the Green Man Motel outside Deer Hill for that night. They’ll get some sleep, then get up and get to the bank at one-thirty to start the move. We’ll have people from a moving company to do the heavy lifting. One decision that’s been made for sure is that the car with the cash will not be the first or the fourth, so it’ll be one of the two in the middle.”
Parker said, “When do you know which?”
“When they start to load.”
Parker shook his head. “That’s no good. The idea was, we’d know which armored car of the four, not which two of the four.”
Sounding dubious, she said, “I could fax that number, I suppose, that night, a two or a three.”
“Too late,” Dalesia said.
Parker said, “Are you going to be there, to watch the move?”
“For a while, at the start,” she said. “It’s interesting, it’s kind of fascinating, to make a move like that. But I don’t intend to stay up all night.”
Parker said, “You’ll leave before they finish loading.”
“That’s what I plan to do, yes.”
He took out of his pocket the map she’d g
iven him, unfolded it onto the table. “Which way do you drive, to go home?”
“The same route, really, most of the way. I turn west before Rutherford, on Route Twenty-seven. It’s a little county road.”
“I see it,” Parker said, tracing the road with his finger. “Where do you meet a stop sign on that road?”
Again she made her bitter, unamused laugh. “Everywhere. I hit four of them on the way home.”
“How about Route Thirty-two here?”
“That’s one of them.”
“What time do you want to get there? One-thirty? Two?”
“No later than two. But you know, they’ll still be loading, back at the bank. I might not know whether it’s going to be the second or the third when they leave.”
“Those armored cars,” Parker told her, “are part of a fleet. They’ll have their own numbers on them. By the time you leave, you’ll know which one is getting the cash. You write the fleet number of that car on a piece of paper, you get to that intersection at two o’clock, and when you stop there a car will come the other way, with one of us in it. We stop, you hand the paper over, you drive home. Will your husband still be at the bank?”
“Until the bitter end, absolutely.”
“Then, when you get home, you phone him. He knows what time you left, he knows what time you got home, he knows you didn’t have time to stop and talk to anybody.”
Frowning, she said, “You really believe it, don’t you? That Jack will suspect me.”
“Whether he does or not,” Parker said, “do you like to take risks?”
“To wind up in jail, you mean?” Her mouth twisted again. “Prison orange is not my color.”
“You’ll stop at the stop sign at two, you’ll call your husband when you get home.”
Dalesia said, “Just call us worrywarts.”
She looked at him, and could be seen to relax, just a bit. “Good cop, bad cop,” she said, and looked at Parker again. “Is there anything else?”
“No. We won’t see you again, except at the stop sign. Now, you want to leave here before we do; we’ll give you a few minutes.”
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