Parker said, ‘You worked on the refit.’
‘That’s just right,’ Marcantoni said. ‘And I found the secret entrance.’
That got the blank looks he’d anticipated. He said, ‘I looked it up afterward, that’s what they used to do. Like they’re getting ready for a siege, they put in a little back entrance nobody knows about.’
Flat, Williams said, ‘A secret entrance.’
‘No, it’s true,’ Marcantoni told him. ‘I had free time on the job there, I liked to poke around, see what was what, and there was this locked metal door in the basement, no knob, just a keyhole. I wondered, what’s back there? Maybe government gold, everybody forgot about it. So I managed a look at the blueprints in the site office, and there was no door there. It wasn’t on the plans.’
Williams said, ‘Did you get it open?’
‘Sure. I took a bar down, and popped two bricks next to the door so I could pull it open, and I put my flashlight in there, and it was a tunnel, brick all around, like five feet wide, maybe six feet high, going straight out.’
Williams said, ‘To where?’
‘A pile of trash, blocking it,’ Marcantoni told him. ‘Part of the thing fell in some time, who knows when. So I put the door back, put the bricks back, and later I figured out where it had to go, if it was a straight line, and it had to go to the library across Indiana Avenue. That was the first public library here, federal money, built around the same time as the armory.’
Parker said, ‘You looked over there.’
‘I had to break into the library,’ Marcantoni said. ‘But libraries are not tough to break into. I went in three nights, and I finally found it, with storage shelves built up in front of it. They didn’t know anything about it either. I got through that door, and went along the tunnel as far as where it was broken in, and I don’t think there can be more than five or ten feet where it’s blocked. You know, they pulled up the trolley tracks along there maybe fifty years ago, it could be they screwed up the tunnel then, never knew they did it.’
Parker said, ‘Your idea is, we go in there, clear it, have all night in the wholesaler’s.’
Marcantoni grinned, he was so pleased with the whole thing. He said, ‘I told myself, wait at least five years, so nobody’s thinking about the crews did the makeover.’
Williams said, ‘How do you know, when you’re pulling that rubble out of the way, there won’t be some more come down? I don’t like the idea of tunnels that already fell in once.’
‘It’s only that one short part,’ Marcantoni assured him. ‘My idea is, we’ll take two or three of those long tables from the reading room in the library, they’re not far away. We clear stuff, shove the tables ahead of us, we go on all fours under them, just that one part of the route. Anything else falls down, they’re sturdy tables, they’ll keep it clear.’
Williams said, ‘Guns. Alarms.’
‘I can tell you about that,’ Phil Kolaski said. ‘I was looking into it before Tom tripped. Because the building’s so solid, the only way into the jewelry place’
‘The only way they think,’Marcantoni corrected.
‘Sure,’ Kolaski agreed. ‘But that is what they think. The front door on the street, that’s all they worry about. There’s three separate entrances, for the jewelry operation, the dance studio, the apartments upstairs. They’re right next to each other, and there’s a doorman around the clock for the apartments. The dance studio just has a couple regular locks, you could go in that way except for the doorman. The jewelry operation has an alarmed front door plusa barred gate plusan articulated steel door comes down over the whole thing.’
Williams said, ‘No motion sensors inside.’
‘They really don’t expect anybody inside,’ Kolaski said. ‘Except through that front door. It lookssolid.’
There was a little pause and then Williams said, ‘What are the hours, in this library?’
Marcantoni answered that one: ‘Sunday they close at five P.M.’
Angioni said, ‘And Sunday, the jeweler isn’t open at all.’
Williams said, ‘You want to do it this Sunday, or a week and a half from now?’
‘This Sunday,’ Marcantoni said. ‘Who wants to hang around?’
‘Nobody,’ Parker said.
3
When he heard the first news on his police scanner, Goody popped a call to Maryenne, cellphone to cellphone. ‘You home?’
‘No, I’m at the family center.’
All the mamas read to their babies at the family center. ‘Read to him tomorrow,’ Goody said. ‘I’ll meet you your place. I got news for you.’
‘What news?’
‘Tell ya when I see ya, lovey,’ Goody said, and broke the connection, because this wasn’t the kind of news you’d talk about, chat away, back and forth, on a cellphone,where any fool in the world can be listening in.
Goody shut off the scanner, started the Mercury, and drove away from the post where he’d been sitting the last hour and a half, one of the few cars moving in this miserable slum neighborhood. Three blocks later he made a left on to a one-way street and stopped next to the Land Rover parked at the left curb, where Buck sat in the backseat with his two bodyguards up front. The bodyguards eyeballed him, but they knew Goody, and looked down the street again instead.
Goody lowered his window and Buck did the same thing on the other side, saying, ‘You leavin early? Somethin wrong back there?’
‘No, I got a family emergency,’ Goody told him. He picked up the shopping bag from between his feet, with the merchandise and the money in it, and passed it over to Buck. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow, same as ever.’
‘I didn’t hear nothin on the scanners,’ Buck said. He frowned like he was trying to work out what he should be suspicious about.
‘No, I got it on my cell,’ Goody told him, and raised the phone from the seat to show it. ‘Family business,’ he said. ‘See you tomorrow.’
Buck wouldn’t recognize that name, Brandon Williams, one of the three hardcases that had just bust out of Stoneveldt outside town, leaving behind them one dead inmate and a lot of aching heads. Buck wouldn’t know it, what had all those police dispatchers talking so fast, ordering this car that way, that car this way, but Goody would. And where else would old Brandon go now, when he had to lay as low as a footprint, except to his sister Maryenne? And where else would Goody go, to see the boy?
Maryenne lived in a third floor back with her grandmother and her sister and her sister’s boyfriend and her baby Vernon and her sister’s two babies. Maryenne didn’t have a boyfriend right now that Goody knew of, so he thought he might move in for a while, see how that would play, make life easy while he waited for old Brandon.
When he got there and knocked on the door the street door downstairs wasn’t locked because the push-buttons in the apartments hadn’t worked for thirty years it was opened by a short heavy girl with a baby on her hip. ‘I’m Goody,’ he told her. ‘Maryenne’s expecting me.’
She gave him the look she probably gave every man since she got the baby I know your type, keep your distance and said, ‘If she’s expecting you, come on in.’
He went on in, and the living room was full of them, young mamas and their babies. It looked as though Maryenne had brought her whole reading group from the family center, and maybe that was supposed to be a hint to Goody that she wasn’t of a mood for romance, but that was okay. He could be the friend of the family, work just as well, be there in moments of need, like when old Brandon showed his face.
It wasn’t only that Maryenne had her whole reading group here, they’d all brought their books, too, and there they were, all over the room, on the couch and the chairs and the floor, babies in their laps, books in their hands, reading out loud. They were all quiet about it, but there sure were a lot of them, and it reminded him of the sound of the pigeons on the roof, in a big cage room that had been on top of one of the buildings where he’d lived when he was a kid, ten or eleven years ago. The guy that owne
d the pigeons was a bus driver, and he didn’t mind if Goody or some of the other kids came up there with him sometimes, hang out with the pigeons. He and his wife didn’t have any kids of their own, Goody remembered.
Huh; maybe that was why he had the pigeons.
Maryenne was in a chair by the switched-off TV set, Vernon in her lap. Vernon was about a year old now, and Goody couldn’t for the life of him see what the point was in mamas reading to babies that little that they didn’t know anything yet, but it was supposed to do some kind of good or another and everybody believed in it, so maybe so. Vernon was going to need all the help he could get anyway; his papa was Eldon, who’d got himself killed in that bank he was in with old Brandon. The one thing Goody definitely didn’t ever want Maryenne to know was that he’d been Eldon’s dealer, including on that final day.
‘Say there,’ Goody said, and walked around a lot of mamas and babies to grin at Maryenne up close. She was a nice girl, a lot younger than old Brandon, he being their mama’s first and Maryenne being her last.
She was nice, and she was young, but she also had that same look on her face as the one that had opened the door to him. ‘You got some kind of news, Goody?’ she asked him.
The news was going to be known by everybody in this room, and in this city, soon enough, but Goody wanted it to start off a special secret just between the two of them; the beginning of that closeness he’d need until old Brandon showed up. So he said, ‘Come on in the kitchen, Maryenne, let me tell you just you.’
‘There’s nothing you can’t tell me here,’ she said. She still held the book up thin, bright colors, called The Very Red Butterfly like she wanted Goody done and gone so she could get back to reading, like she was in a hurry to know how the story would come out.
He put a solemn face on and said, ‘I think you’d want me to tell this to just you, Maryenne.’
So then she treated him a little more seriously, becoming worried, saying, ‘Is it something bad?’
‘You tell me. Come on, girl.’
Fretful, she got to her feet, dropping the book on her chair, moving Vernon over on to her hip. He would have preferred to talk with her without Vernon, but he realized it would be pushing his luck to try for that, so he just led the way through the cooing mamas out the door, down the hall, and on down to the kitchen doorway, where he stopped, because the grandmother was in there, seated at the kitchen table, reading an astrology magazine.
Goody turned back. ‘We’ll talk here,’ he said, keeping his voice low, and moving so he’d be out of the grandmother’s sight, away from the doorway.
Maryenne was burning with curiosity and worry: ‘What is it, Goody? Come on.’
‘Brandon,’ he said. ‘Him and two other guys, they just bust outa the jail.’
She stared at him. She didn’t seem to know how to react, except to stare at his face, as though to memorize it. Even Vernon stopped his usual gnawing on his fist to look at Goody, his expression thoughtful and a little skeptical.
‘Maryenne? You hear what I said?’
‘It was that man,’ she said. She sounded awed.
He frowned at her. ‘What man?’
‘Chili Greebs brought him around,’ she said. Chili Greebs owned a bar not far from here, was in and out of different kinds of businesses. She said, ‘A white man. Chili said he was all right, and I was supposed to pass on a message to Brandon when I visited, that there was a white man in there with him named Kasper that he could trust.’
‘Huh,’ Goody said.
‘But I thought it was just to help each other in there,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know they meant this.’
Goody said, ‘You know what it means, don’t you?’
‘They’re gonna kill him.’ she whispered.
‘Waddaya mean, kill him?’ Goody demanded. ‘That’s not what’s gonna happen.’
‘They’re gonna hunt him down,’ she whispered, ‘and they’re gonna kill him.’ Her eyes were filling.
‘No, but that’s why I come here,’ Goody told her. ‘Cause we can help. You and me, with you and me on the case, they’re never gonna find him.’
Finally he had her attention. Frowning, she said, ‘What do you mean, you and me?’
‘Where’s he gonna come?’ Goody asked her. ‘He’s gonna need help now, lie low, get out of this state, probly get outa the whole country, get to Mexico, South America, somewhere. He can’t do that on his own, and who’s he gonna turn to? His favorite sister, that’s who. There’s no place else he’s gonna turn.’
She thought about it. ‘He’ll call,’ she decided. ‘He won’t come here, because they’d catch him, but he’ll call.’
‘And that’s when,’ Goody said, ‘you send him to me.’
‘To you? Why to you?’
‘Don’t you think the cops’re gonna be keepin an eye on you? Don’t you think they know who you are, where you are? But you’re right, Brandon’s gonna call, and when he does, you send him to me, cause the cops don’t know about me,and we can work it out together.’
She was frowning again. She said, ‘Why you wanna do that?’
‘ ‘Cause I always liked old Brandon,’ he told her. ‘And I always liked you. And I was playing with my police scanners, and I heard the first report, so I know I’m ahead of the news here, and you and me can plot and plan before anybody else even knowsanything.’
She nodded, thinking about it. Then she said, ‘It’s for sure, now. He broke out.’
‘It’ll be on the news,’ he told her, ‘the first anybody else knows about it. It’ll be on the news. What time is it? Half an hour, it’ll be on the news.’
‘Poor Brandon,’ she said.
‘He’ll call you, you know he will.’
Slowly she nodded. ‘Yes, he will.’
‘And you send him to me. Maryenne? You send him to me.’
‘All right,’ she said.
‘Good.’
‘Thank you, Goody,’ she said.
‘Oh, I knew I had to do it,’ he assured her. ‘Soon as I heard that police report, I knew I had to be on hand, I had to help old Brandon somehow.’
Yes, and by then, for certain sure, there would be a very nice reward out on good old Brandon’s head.
4
The class was called Low Impact Rhythm and was theoretically a preliminary for classes in ballroom dancing, but was actually merely an exercise class with slower music. In addition to Brenda, there were eleven other students here this evening, nine women and two men, and of them all, if she did say so herself, she was the youngest, the fittest, and the cutest. She didn’t needto take some flab off her ass, like that one over there, or learn not to move like an elephant on downers, like that one over there. Watching herself in the side-wall mirror, echoing herself echoing the instructor, a whippet-thin black man in black leotards, she knew she was already at what this class was supposed to move you toward.
The mirror was twenty feet long and eight feet high in this long room, with barres on the end walls, a piano (ignored) at one side, and soundproofing in the ceiling to keep the reverb down. Brenda was interested in the mirror not only for what she saw in it, her own cute ass, firm body, rhythmic movements, but also for what she couldn’t see beyond it.
This hardwood floor she and the group were step-step-stepping on was part of the parade field from the building’s military days. The field, she knew, continued on under the mirrored wall. Over there, imaginable in her mind’s eye, was the jewelry wholesaler, like something out of the Arabian Nights. Another reason to smile at the mirror.
When she traveled with Ed Mackey, Brenda called herself Brenda Fawcett. Since she seemed to travel With Ed all the time, she might as well beBrenda Fawcett, so a while ago, for a birthday present, Ed had given her various kinds of ID driver’s licenses from different states, credit cards she shouldn’t try to use all in that name. What made it a real present was, all the IDs made her a year younger.
She’d called herself Brenda Fawcett here at the Johnson-Ross
Studio of the Dance out of habit. She wouldn’t be flashing ID here because she was paying for her lessons this was the third in cash, explaining to the receptionist at the initial interview, showing a smile that was both confidential and sheepish, ‘I don’t want my husband to know. Not yet.’
The girl smiled, charmed by her. ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said. ‘You’re not the first like that. It’s such a sweet surprise, I think.’
‘Me, too,’ Brenda said.
One of the nice things about this low-impact routine, you could have a quiet conversation under the music because, if you were in any shape at all, what you were doing didn’t use up all your breath. The first session, Brenda had taken a position next to a petite blonde in a pink leotard, who turned out to be named June and to be just as gabby as she looked. In two hours and counting, Brenda had learned a lot about June’s love life, which tended toward the high impact, but also about this city, this dance studio, and this building.
Which was the point. What Ed did was always illegal and sometimes dangerous, especially when he was teamed with Parker. More than most people, he needed somebody to watch his back. That’s what Brenda did, and she’d come in useful more than once. To know the territory was, she believed, part of the job.
And June was happy to talk about the territory. ‘There wasn’t anything like this here before,’ she explained. ‘You’d have to go to LA to see a facility like this. Or maybe Vegas.’
‘Then we’re lucky it showed up,’ Brenda agreed.
‘It’s all Mrs Johnson-Ross,’ June assured her. ‘She’s a local girl, she went away to New York, she had a careerthere, and when this opportunity came along, all this space, she came back and snapped it up.’
‘Good for her. And good for us.’
That conversation had been during lesson number two. Now, in lesson number three, they were both being quiet, following the leader’s sinuous movements, Brenda feeling the stretch in those long side muscles it’s so hard to tone, and then, in the mirror, she saw the door centered in the wall behind them open and a woman walk in.
Not for a second did Brenda doubt this was Mrs Johnson-Ross. Tall, too blonde, she carried her just-a-little excess weight as though it were a fashion accessory she was pleased to own. She dressed in verticals, a long dark jacket open over a darker pantsuit with deep lapels, in turn over a blouse in two shades of vertical light blue stripes. The effect was to make the body fade away and emphasize the blonde-framed face, slightly puffy but still very good looking.
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