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?
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
Parker 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.
Nobody Runs Forever Page 17
