Parker said, “It’s the way the guards come to work, a hall there next to the library, goes back to the offices. I think the way it works, the volunteer lawyer in the library, back in the stacks there where we’re not allowed to go—”
“That’s right,” Williams said. “You tell the lawyer what you’re looking for, he goes back and gets it, and you sign out for it.”
“Back there,” Parker said, “I think he’s got a door to the guards’ hall, a side door. He doesn’t come around to the main corridor when he comes to work.”
Marcantoni, sounding surprised that he remembered this detail, said, “He doesn’t come outa there at all. When the library closes, he locks the door from the inside, stays in there.”
“Goes out the back,” Williams said.
Parker said, “We should all talk to our friends on the outside, get what floor plans we can’t see for ourselves.”
“And a car and driver waiting when we come out,” Marcantoni said. “I don’t wanna be calling a cab.”
“When we get a route,” Parker said, “we’ll get a car.”
“Good,” Marcantoni said. “There’s one thing more. I was working on a better thing when I was nabbed on this thing. Half my crew came in with me, they’re lost to me now. The rest will help us get out. But I’m gonna need cash, so I’ve gotta do this other thing, right away. I want you two in with me.”
“Replacements,” Williams said.
Parker didn’t like where this was going. He said, “Is this something near here?”
“In the city, yeah.”
“It’s not smart,” Parker told him, “to break out of here, then hang around the neighborhood, pull a job.”
“It goes down easy,” Marcantoni promised. “And I can keep you both out of sight, for just a few days. Then you’re off wherever you go, with cash in your pocket.”
Parker considered. He couldn’t expect Marcantoni to describe the job to him, inside here, but it wasn’t good to make a jump into the unknown. Still, he needed Marcantoni. So he’d go along with it, and if it looked bad, he could make adjustments.
Marcantoni said, “I’m trusting you in here. I’m asking you to trust me out there.”
Parker nodded. “I’m in,” he said.
“Me, too,” Williams said. “Why not?”
Marcantoni said, “Good. You’re gonna like it.” He grinned at Williams. “You’re okay for a Baptist,” he said.
11
Ed Mackey said, “Marcantoni’s friend was in on the armored car with him. Every day Marcantoni keeps his mouth shut, his friend owes him his life.”
Parker said, “Does that make him grateful, or scared?”
“Grateful,” Mackey said. “They did some things together, like you and me, they trust each other, he’d like his pal outside, be a help here and there.”
“Sometimes,” Parker said, “a guy wants to help somebody get to the outside, it turns out, he just wanted a clear shot on him.”
“Not Marcantoni.”
“Meaning what about Williams?”
Mackey shrugged and shook his head. “There it’s family,” he said. “So that’s a little different, harder to read. Who I’m talking to is a neighbor of Williams’ sister, a guy in a different line of business entirely.”
“What line of business?”
“Import-export,” Mackey said, and touched the tip of his nose. “You know what I mean.”
“Mostly import?”
“I’d say so, yeah.”
“Trade?”
“No, he sells to the trade.” Mackey grinned. “You seen those signs on the stores. ’To the trade only.’ Wholesalers. He’s like that.”
“But Williams isn’t part of it.”
“No, Williams is strictly a heavy, like you or me. He doesn’t deal in anything and he doesn’t taste anything.”
“And his sister?”
“A simple girl, I think an innocent. Loves her brother.”
“I hate not being able to see these people,” Parker said. “Is there any way she can shop me and not shop her brother?”
“Not that I can see,” Mackey said, and offered a slow smile. “And at this point,” he said, “she and the neighbor are a little afraid of me.”
Parker looked at him. “Just a little?”
“So far,” Mackey said.
That was the twelfth day. The thirteenth, Mackey gave him a verbal map. “From what I hear,” he said, “that doorway you use, when you come in here, that’s a corridor straight down from the cells, mess hall on the right, the other side of that wall there with the kids’ pictures of trees and airplanes and shit.”
“I visit the lawyers across the same corridor,” Parker told him, “beyond that wall with the long table and the drinking fountain.”
“Right,” Mackey said. “And from what I understand, the library’s beyond that, the hallway you want beyond that.”
“Right.”
“Okay, tilt it all on its side,” Mackey told him, because they wouldn’t be able to write any of this down or make any drawings. “You know those metal change things the conductors carry on the front of their belt, where they can give you coins out of?”
“Right.”
“Okay. Then if this whole thing is on its side with that corridor out there on the bottom, then where we are is the row of half dollars, and the lawyers’ room next to it is the row of quarters, and the library is the row of dimes, and the hallway you want to know about is the row of nickels. Okay?”
“Right,” Parker said.
“Near the top of the dimes, the library,” Mackey said, “back where the law books are kept, there’s a side door to the hallway, the row of nickels.”
“That’s what I hoped.”
“It’s kept locked, and the lawyer doesn’t have the key. In fact, there is no key. When he wants out, he phones, and the guard at the far end of the hallway, top of the nickels, buzzes him out. Same going in, buzzes him in.”
“What’s beyond the guard at the far end of the hallway?”
“Above the nickels and the dimes is a couple offices and the guards’ locker room, where they change for work. And a side door to the guards’ separate parking lot.”
“Good. What else?”
“Above the lawyers, and you see the corner of this room where the door is that I come in, above all that is the hall down from the front entrance at the very top of the building. The rest up there is offices and johns.”
“So the best route out,” Parker said, “looks as though it’s into the library, into that side hallway, in the guards’ locker room, into the guards’ parking area. Is the parking area kept guarded and locked?”
“You know it is.”
“So I need,” Parker said, “people coming in while I’m coming out.”
“I can talk to Marcantoni’s pal,” Mackey said.
“And Williams’ sister, and her friend?”
“I don’t think I’ll mention many details to them,” Mackey said.
12
Walter Jelinek was a man, but he looked like a car, the kind of old junker car that had been in some bad accidents so that now the frame is bent, the wheels don’t line up any more, the whole vehicle sags to one side and pulls to that side, and the brakes are oatmeal. Half the original body is gone, the paint job is some amateur brushwork, and there’s duct tape over the tail-lights. That was Walter Jelinek, who Mackey had told Parker not to talk to, since he had a reputation for carrying tales to teacher, but now Jelinek on his own wanted to talk to Parker.
It was the fourteenth day, two weeks in this hard world, progress but slow, and Parker was on his way to join Marcantoni and Williams over by the weights in the exercise yard when all at once Jelinek was beside him, gimping along with him, trying to keep in step. His left shoulder was low, his left knee had a ding in it that made it click outward when he walked, and his jaw hadn’t been rewired very well, so that he always showed some spaces and some teeth. His hands were big but bunchy, and whe
n he talked he sounded as though something was knotted too tight around his neck. He said, “Kasper, you and me, we never talk somehow.”
Parker stopped, to look at him. Guards always kept their eyes on Jelinek, because he was like a garden to them, something always ripening. Aware that guards now watched him talk to Jelinek, Parker said, “We never talk because we got nothing to say to one another.”
“Couple old lags like us?” Jelinek’s left eye closed when he tried for a smile. “Long-term guys, gonna be in a long time? Why, you and me, we could spend the first ten years just gettin caught up on the old days.”
“The past doesn’t interest me,” Parker said, and moved on.
Jelinek hopped along with him. “I bet the present interests you,” he said. “I bet the future’s what you talk about with Marcantoni and the schvug all the time.”
Parker stopped. He looked at Jelinek. “What do you think you know?”
“I think I know you stopped,” Jelinek told him. “That’s one thing I think I know.”
“Tell me another thing.”
“They want you in Cal,” Jelinek said. “Es-cap-ing. Killing a guard.” He grinned, and the eye shut. “They hate it when you kill a guard.”
“They don’t mind when we kill each other,” Parker told him.
“Oh, some of us, they do,” Jelinek said. He was pleased with himself. “Some of us,” he said, “they like to see alive, moving here and there.”
Parker said, “Is there a point to this?”
“You and those boys,” Jelinek said, “have travel plans.” He waited for Parker to comment, but Parker merely looked at him, giving him nothing, so Jelinek shrugged and said, “You got plans, and why not? All three of you are looking at heavy time. I don’t have to know what the plans are, I just have to know you got em.”
“Think what you want to think.”
“I do.” Jelinek looked around, then pretended he was being confidential. “Me, I wanna travel, too,” he said. “I been livin this life too long, I wanna settle down. You believe I got a daughter?”
“If you say so,” Parker said.
“Well, I do. She’s forty-one years of age, runs a nursing home in Montana. My own daughter. Would I be happy there?”
“Probably so,” Parker said.
“Need help getting there, that’s the thing,” Jelinek explained. “Hitch a ride on a bus with somebody.”
Parker waited. Jelinek squinted at him. “You boys got a bus,” he said. “I don’t have to know what it is, when it is, where it is, all I got to know is, you boys got a bus. And here’s what I think. When you fire up that bus, I’m on it. I’m riding along with you.”
Again, Jelinek waited, and again Parker simply stood and looked at him. Jelinek didn’t like the lack of feedback. “Not gonna argue with me?” he demanded. “Not gonna go all innocent, you don’t have any bus, you and them other two? Not gonna go all tough guy, warn me keep my mouth shut or you’re gonna do all kindsa shit, and how’d I like that?”
“You’ve heard all that before,” Parker said.
“Yes, I have,” Jelinek agreed. “There isn’t a goddam thing I haven’t heard before, Ronnie Kasper. When that bus of yours is ready to roll, be sure to give me the word, because some word is going somewhere. Either I’m on that bus, or that bus doesn’t roll.”
13
We have to kill him,” Marcantoni said. He was lifting the hand weights again, but bunching his arms more, because he was mad.
“Not now,” Parker said. He stood by Williams’ head, where Williams lay on his back on the bench, lifting and lowering the weighted bar, resting it between times on the vertical metal posts.
“The longer he’s alive,” Marcantoni said, “the more sure it is he’ll rat us out.”
“He doesn’t know anything yet,” Parker said. “And the guards saw him talk to me today. If he dies now, it draws attention right at us.”
Williams rested the bar on the posts. “But Tom’s right,” he said. “He saw us together. That’s what he does, he prowls around like that, looks for something he can deal in. He might not wait until he’s got everything in a package.”
Parker said, “What does he give them? At this point, what’s he got to sell?”
“You listened to him,” Marcantoni said. “That means you got something to protect.”
Parker nodded. “He made the same point. But if I duck away from him, that’s even worse, because then I don’t know how much he’s got. The reason he braced me is because he’s already got his eye on us. That doesn’t change. But what does he know? He knows we’re long-termers and we’re together, and it isn’t natural for us to be together.”
“Damn it,” Williams said.
“So,” Parker said, “he asks me questions, and I give him nothing. He’ll keep watching us, try to see what we do, where we go, try to figure out what our idea is. While he’s doing that, he won’t talk to the guards because he doesn’t have anything to give them yet.”
Williams said, “You think there’s any chance he really does want to come along?”
“None,” Parker said.
“Jelinek doesn’t want life on the run,” Marcantoni said. “All he wants is to build up some merit badges, make his time on the inside easier.”
Parker said, “That’s right. He doesn’t want to be on the outside. He’s got everything he wants right in here.”
“Or the place he gets sent, after his trial,” Marcantoni said. “And he’s angling for that place to be a nice retirement village.”
“On our backs,” Williams said.
“You got it.”
Williams hefted the weight again, put it back. “But what we do now is nothing.”
Parker said, “And watch him watching us.”
“But the last thing I do before I leave this place,” Marcantoni said, “I put him down.”
14
When the loudspeaker said, “Kasper,” next morning, the fifteenth day here, it was too early for visitors. Parker and Williams exchanged a glance, and then Parker dropped down from his bunk and walked down to the end of the line of cages, where a second guard waited. “I’m Kasper,” Parker said.
No conversation. The first guard buzzed the gate open, and the second one led the way, down the clanging stairs, through the locked door into the corridor with the white line painted down the center of the floor, through the next locked door into the main building, and there the guard said, “Wait.”
Parker waited. The guard turned to his left, to that first door, the one nobody ever noticed, the one that was supposed to lead to a hall down past the library and the volunteer lawyer’s exit. The guard pressed a button on the wall, then spoke into a grid beside the door, and the door buzzed open. The guard gestured for Parker to go first.
This was the route. This was what he’d been wanting to see, and now that he was looking at it he realized he’d already seen it once before, from the other direction, when they’d first brought him in. At that time, he’d been concentrating too much on too many other things, hadn’t paid attention to the route coming into this place because he hadn’t expected he’d ever go out the same way.
But this was the way. The locked and guarded parking area was just outside this wall to the left, not only for the guards’ personal cars but also for delivering fresh fish. The hall was a little narrower than the other one, with no windows, nothing on the left but a yellow-painted concrete block wall, and the same wall on the right with a gray-blue metal door in it, down toward the far end. The volunteer lawyer’s door; had to be.
Parker was now completely alert, not to where he was going, but to where he was. This was the route he’d been trying to dope out, and now they were handing it to him, giving him a guided tour. He didn’t know yet why, but he would remember every bit of it.
At the far end was another barred door, which another guard buzzed them through once he’d eye-balled them, and past that door was a square foyer with a jumble of exits. The metal door to the left
would lead out to the parking area. Beyond the barred door to the right stretched a normal office hallway. And straight ahead, the open doorway on the left showed the guards’ locker room while the shut gray metal door on the right was marked, in black block letters, CONFERENCE.
That last was the door Parker’s escorting guard knocked on. Another buzz sounded, and the guard pulled open the door with one hand while he gestured Parker inside with the other.
Inspector Turley. Same office, same man, a small bulky red-haired middleweight. He sat at the same desk and the same steno sat at the same small table in the corner.
Turley looked at Parker without expression. He said, “Come in, Kasper. Sit down.”
Parker entered, the guard following, shutting the door, leaning against it. Parker sat in the same chair as before. Turley looked at him, waiting, and then said, “You do remember me, don’t you?”
“Two weeks ago,” Parker said. “In here.”
“I told you your friend Armiston would talk if you didn’t,” Turley said. “Remember that?”
“Game theory,” Parker said.
Turley started to smile, proud of his student, then frowned instead, realizing the student wasn’t a student. He said, “Armiston’s coming around, I have to tell you that.”
Parker nodded.
“Nothing to say?”
“Not yet.”
“All right,” Turley said. “I’ll tell you what the situation is, so you don’t think I’m trying to play off one fella against another fella.” He cocked his head, bright-eyed. “All right?”
“Fine,” Parker said, because some sort of statement was required.
“So here’s the situation,” Turley said. “Armiston’s beginning to make noises like he’d maybe come around, but so far, it’s just negotiation, you know what I mean? Jerking off, in other words.”
Parker didn’t really care what Armiston did, because it wouldn’t affect what he himself was going to do. It would be better for Armiston, maybe, to make a deal with these people, tell them whatever he knew about the guys with the plane, the customer, and then the customer’s customer; though Parker doubted Armiston knew enough to be really useful.
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