Nobody Runs Forever (17 page)

The door to stairway B was one of the heaviest things Jake had ever in his life tried to move. It opened inward toward the stairs, so he could lean his weight on it and at last get it open enough so that he could slide through.

And here was a metal stairwell, and metal stairs going down. Jake looked at them, and a wave of dizziness made him drop back, leaning against the closed door behind him.

Only one thing to do. He sat on the floor and inched himself forward until his feet were over onto the first step down. Then he used hands and feet to move his torso down onto that step. And then the next step, and the next.

It turned out, he’d been on the third floor. It took a long time to get down all those steps, but after a while he found a rhythm in it, and he could just blank his mind and keep moving.

To the bottom, where he made it to his feet again and found another impossibly heavy door. Once again he forced his way through, and came out to one side of the main waiting room. Two of its walls, to his left and ahead, were glass in the upper half, on his left showing the admissions desk, straight ahead a side view of the front entrance. There were people in their own glass-sided room beyond the admissions desk, but none looked over here.

Jake kept to the wall and moved slowly around the room till he reached the next heavy door, this one mostly glass. He pushed through it and moved to the entrance, which was a revolving door, and even that was heavier than it should have been.

But he made it, around and out, and slowly but steadily walked away into the cool night air. No stars, no cars, no people. Just Jake, getting away. Everything would be all right now.

As the armored car crews climbed into their vehicles, shutting the rear doors, Jack Langen stood beaming in self-satisfaction on the sidewalk. What a night, what a beautiful night. As he stood there, Bart Hosfeld from the security company came over with his own broad smile and said, “So far, it goes down like cream.”

Nodding at the last of the armored cars, Jack said, “That’s the only one I’m really worried about. All that commercial paper, bonds. What a nightmare to lose that.”

Bart said, “Really? Not the cash?”

“Well, the cash, too,” Jack agreed, “but not as much. From the minute we knew this move would take place, we’ve been cutting back the cash at this location, not adding to it. It’s still a lot, but not as much as it was.”

“Well, it’s all going fine,” Bart said. Looking around, he said, “I wanted to say good night to your good wife.”

“Elaine? She left hours ago. Before dinner ended.”

“Really? I could have sworn I saw her car, not an hour back.”

“She’s long since asleep,” Jack said, and smiled. He preferred to think of Elaine asleep.

As the line of armored cars moved away from the bank, preceded by one private security car and followed by another, Dalesia and McWhitney arrived in the Celebrity at the intersection. They saw the police car but went on by, started out the road to the right, stopped, and reversed around in a half turn on the shoulder of the road. The right side of the car now faced the intersection.

Sandra had noticed several police cars stopped along the route she’d taken north, but she’d reached Rutherford without seeing anything actually happen. She’d decided to retrace her steps south when she heard, from the scanner on the seat beside her, “They’re on their way.”

Oh, really? Sandra made a U-turn and headed fast toward Deer Hill.

Jack Langen and Bart Hosfeld and a few of the others who would have work to do tonight at the Rutherford end of the operation left in a short caravan of vehicles, taking a different route from the armored cars, faster in some ways and more direct, but through built-up areas that were too chancy for the transport of the bank’s assets. Driving along, listening to a Frank Sinatra CD, at moments even singing along, Jack thought to himself that today, tonight, he had at last completed the first step in separating himself from what he now liked to think of as the first Mrs. Jack Langen.

The first one bought me, he thought. The second one I’ll buy. “It was a very good year.”

As she waited for the red light to change at Hurley, Sandra saw one of the uniforms get out of the police car stopped there and go over to the pole containing the control panel for the traffic light. It switched to green before he got there, but he unlocked and opened the door anyway, as Sandra drove on.

It was happening now. Whatever it was, it was happening. She remembered the various police cars she’d seen along the way, and then she remembered the first one she’d seen, silent and dark behind a diner, and this time it struck her as strange. That would be just ahead now, wouldn’t it? All the other police cars tonight were out and obviously waiting for something. That one had been . . . hiding?

Ahead of her was the very intersection, and vehicles were just coming into it from the other direction. Sandra slowed when she saw what they were. First a white car with yellow and red words and symbols on its doors and hood and a warning light unlit on its roof. Then a large, square red box of an armored car, with a black hood. And another one behind it. And another.

This is it. She knew it; this was what was happening tonight. And was this what those three friends of Mike Harbin were involved with?

Sandra slowed almost to a stop. The first car passed through the intersection and continued, coming this way. The first armored car followed it across the intersection. Two more were behind it, in the intersection, and now a fourth was visible, behind the third.

Sandra was trying to see if there was a fifth armored car, and wondering what all these armored cars would be used for, when all at once flashes and explosions erupted from the darkness on the left, and then more explosions happened at the armored cars themselves. The whole engine compartment of the first one exploded into the air, raining chunks of black metal, and at the same time the same thing happened to the fourth in line, throwing the whole intersection into a sudden garish glare.

Sandra slammed on the brakes. She stared, amazed, as the lead car slued around, trying to get back, and men tumbled out of the lead armored car and, simultaneously, another flash and explosion on the left met an explosion onto the third armored car as lights suddenly flashed behind the diner, white lights and red lights, and, siren screaming, the police car came tearing out from behind the diner to slide to a stop next to the only armored car that hadn’t been hit.

An amplified voice from a loudspeaker in the police car ordered, “FOLLOW ME. DON’T STOP; FOLLOW ME.” And the police car veered away, the driver’s uniformed left arm out his window, urgently gesturing at the armored car to follow. Which it did, lurching rightward, then hurrying off after the cop and away from its maimed companions, while Sandra thought, that’s not right. There’s something wrong about that.

The lead escort car had given up trying to get around and past the burning wreckage of the first armored car, and now brown-uniformed men came crowding out of it, guns in their hands. The armored car crews, having escaped from their destroyed vehicles, wandered in a daze or sat on the asphalt in the middle of the intersection, holding their heads. Sandra watched it all, glaring and distorted by the light of the three flaming trucks, and suddenly thought, it’s a fake. “It’s a phony,” she said out loud. “The police car’s a phony!”

She had to tell them; she had to let them know. The story isn’t
here,
with these blocked roads and burning trucks and dazed people. The story just went away with the only armored car that wasn’t hit. Get after that phony cop. She actually had her hand on the door handle, shifting her weight to get out of the car, when she thought again. Wait a second. Whose side am I on here? If those
are
my three guys—and who else could they be?—I don’t want them arrested, I don’t want them in jail. That way I’d
never
get the proof I need on Mike Harbin.

Keep going, fellas, she thought, as she put the car in reverse and U-turned backward away from there. Keep going, and I’ll see you in a couple days.

Quickly the fires shrank and then disappeared from her mirror.

2

P
arker spun the wheel hard right, pounded the brake, and the police car skewed around to a juddering stop, crossways on the road. He jumped out to the asphalt, looked over the car’s roof at the oncoming armored car, and put both arms up over his head, waving them back and forth to tell the driver to stop. He could see the driver plain in his dashboard lights, hunched so far forward over the wheel, his nose nearly touched the flat glass pane of the divided windshield. Beside him, the guard was shouting into a microphone with a spiral black cord.

The driver hit his brakes, pushing himself back from the window with one hand, then waved his own arms, asking Parker in dumb show what he was supposed to do next. Parker pointed at him and then at the roadside, telling him to get out of there, but the guy firmly shook his head. He knew he was supposed to stay with his vehicle.

But then he twisted around, staring backward, and so did the other guard, so the one in back must have seen Dalesia and McWhitney coming. Yes, now Parker did, too: the two running forward from where they’d left the Celebrity behind the armored car, Dalesia on the driver’s side, McWhitney on the other. Both now wore white hooded sweatshirts with the hood up over their heads and forward beside their faces, and both had on deeply black sunglasses with very large lenses. Both ran with the Colt Commandos held in front of their chests at port arms.

The driver put his engine in gear, and the armored car lurched forward as he labored the wheel around, hoping to drive around the police car in his way, but Dalesia stopped beside his door and fired twice from the hip directly into the doorlock. On the other side, McWhitney showed his weapon to the guard but didn’t fire it.

The armored car stopped. Dalesia tugged on the door he’d hit, and it eased open, and Dalesia went nuts, screaming,
“Out of there!”
Like a maniac, like someone barely under any kind of control, he screamed again before the men in the truck could react to the first order,
“You wanna die? You wanna die? I’ll blow your fucking heads off!”
Then he made a high keening sound, like a banshee, and aimed the Commando at the driver’s face.

“I’m coming! I’m coming! Here I come, take it easy, honest to God—”

As the driver and then the guard climbed out, both on the driver’s side, McWhitney ran back to deal with the third guard.

“Over there! Over there!”

Dalesia, jumping around as though he couldn’t control his legs, pointed at the dirt road that angled off from here, and the two guards moved toward it. Parker came around the back of the police car, carrying the handcuffs, as Dalesia made the two lie facedown on the road and McWhitney brought up the third, who’d come out of his compartment without trouble.

The three were handcuffed, and then Parker ran back to the police car, Dalesia to the armored car, and McWhitney to the Celebrity. In that order they drove away from there, only Parker showing headlights, the other two staying close, guided by his lights.

It was fifteen minutes to the factory, where the rented truck waited for them. Parker and McWhitney wiped down the cars they’d been driving, while Dalesia backed the armored car around to the open back of the truck. Then they looked to see what they had.

The interior of the armored car was less than two-thirds full, and a quarter of that was canvas bags, which would be coins. They didn’t want the coins. Dalesia, climbing up into the armored car as McWhitney shone a flashlight into it, lifted the lid off one of the boxes, and they all saw the neat stacks of green.

Dalesia laughed. “My favorite color,” he said, and put the lid back down on the box, and they started the transfer.

Dalesia, staying in the armored car, moved each box to the rear door, Parker lifted it over the space to the truck, and in the truck McWhitney stacked them all.

The whole operation took less than ten minutes. Then Dalesia got behind the wheel of the truck and said, “I’ll see you there.” He drove out, and that left only the illumination from the interior light of the rental Dodge, with the driver’s door open.

“We’ll give him a couple minutes,” Parker said.

They leaned against the side of the pickup, and McWhitney said, “I like that Carl-Gustaf. You point it at something, the thing stops.”

“Briggs earned his cut,” Parker said. “We can go now.”

But as they turned away, they heard a distant flapping sound, high and repetitive. They looked at each other, and Parker said, “Helicopter.”

“That was fast.”

“Everybody’s on alert,” Parker said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be two cars traveling together.”

McWhitney nodded. “You want me to go first?”

“You remember the way?”

“I’ll find it.”

McWhitney climbed into the pickup and drove out of the building. As he left, the flapping sound got louder, though never directly overhead, and then it got softer again, and then it faded out. When it was gone, Parker got into the Dodge and drove out to the black night, switching on his headlights once he was on the road.

He hadn’t gone far when the flapping sound came back, and this time he saw them: two long, narrow floodlight beams angled down from beneath two helicopters, one behind him near the scene of the robbery, the other up to his left, in case they’d continued northward.

The one from behind was coming this way. Parker drove steadily, and the finger of light illuminated trees and houses in his rearview mirror, closer and closer. He kept going, and the light approached him, then angled away to his right, hovering beside him a minute, so the people up there could study his car without blinding him. Then it swung on out to the front and moved ahead.

A few minutes later, as the two floodlights still walked like laser stilts across the night, Parker passed Dalesia in the truck, stopped and lightless beside a closed gas station. He was waiting for the helicopters to leave, knowing they’d be too interested in any truck-sized vehicle moving around in this area right now.

The light to the left disappeared first, and then the one straight ahead veered rightward and also disappeared. When Parker reached the church and drove around behind it, McWhitney paced back and forth just outside the lean-to, looking irritated. Parker opened his window and said, “What did you do with your pickup?”

Pointing farther back behind the church, McWhitney said, “There’s some trees back there.”

Parker steered that way, saw the pickup nosed in among some scrubby trees, and put the Dodge in the same area, though he doubted those trees would hide much in the daytime. Then he walked back to McWhitney, who said, “You see Nick?”

“Yeah, he was getting out of the way. He’ll be along.”

“I don’t like how fast they’re being,” McWhitney said.