Nobody Runs Forever (16 page)

“See you there,” McWhitney said, and got out of the Audi.

They waited until he’d entered, stepped inside to disarm the alarm, and stepped back out to wave that everything was okay, and then Dalesia drove them away from there, southeast. Along the way, he said, “The situation with this police car, this is the wrong season for it. It’s in a very dinky little town, this time of year they don’t have a police force at all. I broke into their town hall to check them out, and they’ve got two retired cops come in the beginning of December and play police department until the middle of March. It’s because they’re right next to the base of a ski area, so all of a sudden the joint’s jumping. The rest of the year, the police car’s kept in a separate little garage out behind the town hall.”

“But it looks like a police car,” Parker said. As they drove, he was changing into the hat, shirt, and jacket of a police uniform.

“It
is
a police car, Tootsie Roll on top, the whole thing. You’ll see.”

It was a twenty-minute drive to the garaged police car, during which time, at Deer Hill Bank, the last of the invited guests finally trailed away, leaving Jack Langen and the hired security guy, Bart Hosfeld, and the other people in charge of tonight’s big move. “Time to start bringing everything upstairs,” Bart said, and the moving company people, who’d been waiting outside for nearly half an hour, came in to start the move. Every piece of paper from the downstairs vaults had been boxed and labeled, and now the boxes would be brought up to bank level and stacked near the front door, to make the transition as rapid as possible once the armored cars arrived.

At the hospital, the pill they’d given Jake had taken effect, but it had to fight a very troubled mind. Jake was groggily asleep, harried by bad dreams, never sinking all the way down into real rest. He argued with his dreams, fretfully, inconclusively, and some of the argument surfaced in muttering, low, distressed phrases that nearly made words.

The police car, which looked exactly like a police car, was twelve years old and had only forty-three thousand miles on it. It was a little stiff at first, but then smoothed down. Parker turned on the police radio to listen to the night as he drove toward the intersection where the job would go down.

In her room at the Green Man, Sandra Loscalzo also listened to the night, and it seemed to her that something unusual was going on out there. Every once in a while, there’d be a directive or a report that didn’t appear to contain a subject, and she was beginning to believe they were all on the same subject:

“I’ve finished running Route Eleven. Everything clear.”

“Be sure you’re in position to control the traffic light in Hurley when the time comes.”

Things like that kept snagging her attention—the glimmerings of some sort of movement in the night, like a whale too far below your ship to see. Something was starting up out there. Was it connected to her three guys?

There was one more vehicle for Dalesia to pick up tonight, the truck they’d transfer the goods to. This truck couldn’t be stolen, because they’d have to use it more than once after the robbery, so Dalesia and McWhitney two days ago had taken the MassPike west to Albany, New York, and rented a truck, McWhitney using his legitimate business credit card from his bar. It had been stashed since then in the municipal parking lot in Rutherford. Now, after delivering Parker to the police car, Dalesia drove to Rutherford, left the Audi in the truck’s place, and drove the truck to the factory.

McWhitney was already there with the Chevy Celebrity, a car about as old as Parker’s police car but which had gone through a much more strenuous life. It was dinged and scratched and dented all over, and the muffler sounded like a bad case of asthma, but it ran.

McWhitney had all four of the Celebrity’s doors open, so its interior lights illuminated to some extent the area around the car. Too much light might attract attention, which they didn’t want.

When Dalesia got out of the truck and joined him, McWhitney was studying the Carl-Gustafs and their rockets in this soft light. Looking up, he said, “I never loaded one of these things before.”

“If they were that easy to do wrong,” Dalesia said, “they wouldn’t sell them to so many third-world countries.”

“That sounds good. I’ll watch.”

“Sure,” Dalesia said, and armed the weapons with self-confident speed.

Watching him, McWhitney said, “Parker in place?”

“Just waiting,” Dalesia said.

“Like all of us.”

And like the armored car crews, all of whom were ready by one, when a police escort came to lead them to the Deer Hill Bank.

The five engines made enough noise pulling out of the parking area that Sandra went to the window and looked out. A whole lot of armored cars? Going where? Too late to get out to her own car and follow them. She went back to her scanners.

At one-thirty, when the moving men were just starting to load the four armored cars, under the direction of Jack Langen and other bank officials, separating files from commercial paper from cash, Dalesia used McWhitney’s pickup truck to leave the factory and go meet Elaine Langen and get the number of the armored car that they would want. And an hour later, Dalesia drove fast into the parking lot of the diner at the intersection where the robbery was to take place, and where Parker was waiting in the police car, because anybody who saw a police car behind a diner late at night would just assume the cops were cooping.

Parker saw the pickup drive in, and was out of the police car before Dalesia had stopped. Dalesia called out his open window, “Didn’t show! The damn party at the bank’s
over,
Parker.”

Parker got into the pickup. “I’ll direct you to her house,” he said, and removed the police hat and jacket along the way.

When they reached the Langen house, it was completely dark. There was a door at the end of the multi-car garage, with a window in it. They smashed the window, unlocked the door, stepped in, and the white Infiniti was there. They moved fast through the dark house, up to the second floor, found her room, switched on the light, and she lay on her back on the bed, asleep, dressed except for shoes.

“Wha?” she said, blinking, lifting her arms to protect her eyes. “Wha?”

“Up,” Parker told her. “Fast!”

“Oh, my God!” She sat up, horrified. “I forgot!”

“You got drunk. On your feet. Now!”

“I will, I will, oh, I can’t believe I—”

Wailing, she hurried away into the bathroom, and seven minutes later she was moving fast down the stairs with them, saying, “The maid sleeps way in the back, she won’t hear a thing.”

“You just go there and out,” Parker said.

“I can’t go back there for just one minute.”

They all went through the house to the garage, Parker saying, “Make it three minutes.”

“Five tops,” Dalesia said.

“Oh, God. I never thought I’d do a— It was the stress, it was my father’s— Oh, never mind.” Distracted, she triggered open the garage door. “I don’t know why I’m explaining myself.”

“We’ll follow you.”

Driving back toward the bank, seeing those headlights well back but constantly there in her rearview mirror, Elaine cursed herself for a fool. Everything she did was wrong. Shooting Jake, for God’s sake! Getting drunk and forgetting what she was supposed to do tonight, and for
those
people.

With a wince every time her eyes saw those headlights, small, sharp, accusing, she thought, what if they didn’t come after me until it was too late? It isn’t too late now, I can make up for it, but what would they have done if I’d spoiled the whole thing? They would not have let me live, she assured herself. They would not have let me live.

I want to get away from here. But not that way.

But she had another chance; she could still do it right. She’d go to the bank; she’d tell Jack she’d gone home for a nap but really wanted to see at least part of the big move, so here she was, back. She’d make chitchat for a few minutes, find out which armored car would contain the cash, and then plead tiredness, say she’d seen enough to get the general idea, and leave. Pausing next to that pickup truck.

She had just made out the lights and activity spilling out of the bank, far ahead, when the headlights behind her clicked off. She drove on, more and more slowly, and saw that the scene in front of the bank was of constant ordered activity, brightly illuminated. In order not to disturb the neighbors more than necessary, the lights had been set to shine toward the area in front of the bank but nowhere else, so it was a white cone of busy movement up there, surrounded by the blackness of this moonless overcast night, as though it were a scene on stage.

The parking spaces near the bank were all taken, by the armored cars and state and local police cars and vehicles belonging to the bank executives and the moving people and the private security firm. Elaine drove slowly by, seeing the blue-coveralled moving men coming out, pushing dollies on which the cardboard boxes rode. Bank employees with clipboards directed each dolly to the appropriate armored car. The back doors of the armored cars stood wide open, and all four cars, it seemed to Elaine, were already at least half full. So she hadn’t had much extra time to make up for her stupidity.

Slowly she rolled on by, and saw a dolly with a gray canvas bag on top of two boxes as a mover brought it to a stop behind the second armored car. More canvas bags were visible inside there.

Canvas bags were used for coins. This was the money car.

Elaine drove on by. On the driver’s door, as she passed it, were black, squared-off digits: 10268.

“One-oh-two-six-eight,” she whispered, and drove on, speeding up slightly. At the corner she turned right, and then at the next corner and the next, and then left, mouthing the five numbers over and over the whole time. A minute later, she angled into the left lane on the empty street to stop next to the pickup truck. “One-oh-two-six-eight.”

In the hospital, the pill Jake had been given had begun to weaken, but his turbulent brain had not. Closer and closer he came to real consciousness, though he didn’t want it. He wanted to be unconscious forever, but his brain wouldn’t let it happen.

Sandra Loscalzo listened to her scanners and studied her maps of Massachusetts. Unfortunately she didn’t have a detailed atlas of the state, and the road maps she did have wouldn’t show every minor road, but from what she was hearing out of the night, the
thing,
whatever it was, that was happening or going to happen, existed along a line that ran north and south, roughly from a town called Rutherford in the north to a town called Deer Hill in the south.

Neither of these towns meant anything to her. She had come to this part of the world in search of Michael Maurice Harbin, and this was clearly something else entirely. But something interesting.

Carrying one police scanner in its vinyl bag, plus her own leather shoulder bag with the .357 automatic in it and the best of her roadmaps, she left her room at three in the morning and went out to see what there might be to see. Rutherford seemed the largest town in the area. She’d start there.

Dalesia dropped Parker off at the police car, then drove back to the factory, where McWhitney had the weaponry already placed in the Celebrity, some in front and some in back. Dalesia drove the Celebrity; McWhitney sat in back, one palm resting on a Carl-Gustaf.

Sandra saw the police car behind the diner as she drove by, but thought it was empty. The next police car she saw contained two uniforms and was parked at an intersection with a traffic light in a very small town called Hurley.

I got to get out of here, Jake told himself, and when he realized he must be awake, he found he was sitting up, moaning slightly and moving his torso slowly left and right. It wasn’t bright in here, but he squinted as though it were. His whole head ached horribly, as though a clamp were being tightened around his skull. And he knew he had to get out of here; he had to get away; that was the only thing he knew.

He had not been on his feet since the shooting, but now he pushed himself off the bed and stood, tottering, bent forward, trying to find his body’s balance through the screaming ache in his head.

He shouldn’t have been able to walk. But the medicines he’d been given worked to combine now with the intense level of anxiety in his brain to short-circuit the pain signals his wounded leg tried desperately to send him, those lightning strokes of pain blurring and muddying before they could capture his attention.

He had too little strength in that leg now to accomplish a lot, but at least he could force himself to move. And did.

A door, in the right corner of the room. Would that be a closet? Would his clothes be in there? He wore only a two-piece blue-and-gray vertically striped pair of pajamas. He was barefoot.

Thinking hard about his balance, he moved away from the bed and toward that closed door. The knob was very hard to turn, the door much heavier than he’d expected, but yes, it was a closet. That was his zippered windbreaker hanging in there, and those were his shoes on the floor. No pants, which must have been messed up in the shooting.

He didn’t care. Holding on with both hands to the bar in the closet, concentrating, he stepped first his left foot and then his right foot into the shoes. Then he took the windbreaker off its hanger.

No. That was impossible. He had to clomp back over to the bed, the shoes feeling like alien weights on his feet, and sit on the bed again before he could put the windbreaker on and zip it up. Then, standing again, he crossed the room to the partly open hall door, looked outside at an empty hall, and went out.

It was really very late at night. There were no people moving around in the halls. Two nurses sat at their station near the elevators. He moved in their direction, trying to think how he could get past them and down the elevator without being seen, and on his left he passed a door marked
STAIRWAY B
. He went just beyond it, then stopped.

He couldn’t take an elevator. They’d see him here, and they’d see him on the ground floor. Could he go down the stairs? He was very weak and shaky; his balance was still unreliable. But how else was he going to get out of here?