They watched him. Nobody said anything.
Lloyd said, "I looked, and there's one Blazer left in the garage here. About an hour ago, they brought the paintings up, in the crates, stacked them in the front hall. Obviously, they're waiting for transportation."
Wiss said, "Larry, they're not gonna believe the Blazer is their transportation."
"That's not my idea," Lloyd said. He was very earnest, as though he were describing a new Internet application. "When we see their truck go up, when we see them start loading, I follow, in the Blazer, I say, 'Hi,
I'm Dave Rappleyea, need any help here?' We don't need every last painting, you know. Whatever's in it when I get there, I grab the truck and drive down."
Wiss said, "Larry, you'll never get away with that."
"Listen to me," Lloyd insisted. "You'll be able to watch me on the screens, and the minute I take off in the truck, you shut off their electricity and their phone, I can show you how."
Elkins said, "Larry, they can still radio."
Lloyd pointed to the junk in the cardboard carton. "I made a jammer," he said. "You douse their phone and electric, come in here, you see the two dangling wires? You twist them together, no radios on this mountain."
Parker said, "Police cars go faster than trucks."
"I can get this far," Lloyd told him. "We'll have the ambulance beside the road, just up at the next curve, there's oxygen canisters in there, we can turn the ambulance into a bomb. You put the ambulance in the middle of the road right after I go by, get into the truck with me, the ambulance blows, they can't follow us or see us or radio anybody or do anything, and we're long gone."
"Larry," Wiss said, "none of that is gonna work. They'll have you in cuffs the minute you're out of the Blazer."
"Why would they? They know what the security people here look like, and what the Blazer is."
Elkins said, "Larry, I never knew you had yourself confused with James Bond."
Lloyd offered a shaky grin. "Are you kidding? The last few weeks, I've been scaling cliffs, shooting people, getting rid of bodies, stealing ambulances, I am James Bond." Earnest again, he turned back to Wiss. "Ralph, it's my only shot at those paintings, and without those paintings I'm dead, even if Mr. Parker here doesn't kill me."
Wiss blinked. He and Elkins looked at Parker, who looked at Lloyd, whose expression was now that of a kid in the principal's office, insisting they got the wrong guy.
Parker said, 'Take your shot."
13
Barker, watching the Blazer appear on the downhill monitors, said, "I'm sorry I had to leave the Remington."
Wiss was out positioning the ambulance, while Elkins and Parker watched the monitors. Elkins looked away from the screens to study Parker's profile. "Why?"
Parker nodded at the Blazer just as it ran beyond the range of the downhill monitors. "If they grab him, and they might, what does he say about you and me? He has a history, he talks with prosecutors. If I had the Remington, I'd drop him when they drive him down past here. Whatever Ralph thinks."
The Blazer appeared on the exterior house monitors, coming up. Uniformed cops, four of them, carried one crate at a time out of the lodge and up the ramp and into the back of the tall slat-sided canvas-covered truck with the state police logo on both doors. The driver, smoking a cigarette, wandered around the front of the building, curious, looking the place over. Inside, in various rooms, uniformed and plainclothes cops conducted a detailed search, a fishing expedition they could play at because the place was already a crime scene.
Elkins said, "Ralph won't argue. We all know Larry; he's okay, but he gets too emotional."
Moxon had established himself in the office near the front door. Parker watched him look out the window, see the Blazer coming, and get to his feet. He walked out of the lodge as the four cops were coming in for another crate.
Moxon stepped down off the porch, and Lloyd got smiling out of the Blazer, walking forward to meet Moxon, hand held out, mouth already moving. Moxon seemed a little confused, but not suspicious, and accepted the handshake.
Elkins said, "He's making it work."
Moxon and Lloyd stood together, near the left side of the truck, talking, Lloyd making gestures down the hill, explaining himself.
'The reason he can do a civilian so good," Elkins said, "is because he is a civilian."
On the screens, Moxon made a right-arm gesture that clearly invited Lloyd into the lodge, come on in, sit in the office, let's figure out who you are and what you're doing here. Lloyd, smiling, eager, did his own gesture: you first. Moxon turned toward the house, and Lloyd jumped into the truck as the four cops were coming out again, toting another crate.
"God damn!" Elkins said.
Moxon turned, yelling, jumping toward the truck, but Lloyd already had it rolling. It faced downhill, so all he had to do was put it in neutral to get it to move.
They watched Moxon run beside the truck, shouting, almost reaching the door handle, but then the truck jerked forward as Lloyd got the engine started, and a second later it leaped away, leaving Moxon behind.
"Son of a bitch did it," Elkins said.
Moxon turned to yell toward the house. The four cops had dropped the crate and were running for the nearby parked police cars. The truck ran away downhill from the house and its monitors, disappearing as the cops, in two police cars, raced after it.
Parker hit the switches Lloyd had marked to cut the lodge's power and phone. "Jam it," he said, and Elkins hurried out of the room toward the jammer Lloyd had made.
Parker watched the truck, not fast, appear in the downhill monitors. Already the two police cars were closing with it. He left the security room, found Elkins coming in the hall outside, and said, "Come on. It's going bad."
They trotted from the house, Elkins saying, "What's up?"
"The truck's too slow, there won't be a gap where we could block the road."
Wiss was in the ambulance, motor running. They had it sideways on the road, blocking the uphill lane, its rear in the middle of the road. The passenger side faced downhill, two tall green oxygen canisters angled out the open passenger window.
Parker shouted to Wiss, "Come out! Leave the engine on!"
Wiss clambered out of the ambulance and met Parker and Elkins in front of it, saying, "What's wrong?"
'Truck too slow," Parker told him, "cops right on his tail. You two get down to the next curve, flag Lloyd down, I'll get there."
He went around to get into the ambulance, as the other two trotted away. He was positioned at the downhill end of a tight curve, flanked by thick evergreens. The truck would be almost on him before anybody saw anybody.
He heard sirens, getting louder. Why did they bother with sirens? But it told him they were close. He shifted into reverse.
The truck swerved around the curve, rocking from side to side, motor loudly straining, going as fast as it could, which wasn't fast enough. Lloyd, a pale shape behind the windshield, bounced like a puppet inside there, twisting the wheel back and forth. The police cars, in a row, streamed right behind him.
The truck roared by the ambulance and Parker stamped hard on the accelerator. The ambulance surged backward, ramming the first police car just behind its left front wheel, bouncing it off the road. The second police car, swerving away from the ambulance that now blocked the entire road, ran into a tree on the other side.
Parker shifted into drive, and the ambulance jounced forward, accelerating around the next curve, finding the truck stopped there, just off the road. He pounded the brake pedal, skewed to a sideways stop, reaching to spin both oxygen canister valves open, then jumped out of the ambulance and ran for the truck.
They were already firing at the oxygen when he got there. It took half a dozen shots before a ricochet caused the spark they needed. Then the explosion pinned them against the side of the truck, threw heat at them and then wind, and then cold.
The ambulance was a mass of debris now, spread across the road. Trees to both sides
had caught fire.
14
The state road was just ahead, their motel a dozen miles to the right. "Turn left," Parker said.
Lloyd, at the wheel, didn't argue. The four of them were crammed shoulder to shoulder on the bench seat of the truck, Parker next to the right door, ducking his head from time to time to look in the outside mirror. But there was no pursuit, and nothing to block them at the intersection up ahead. The cops up at the lodge couldn't get out, and they couldn't ask for help. Parker and the others had an hour, maybe more.
Lloyd took the left, a little too fast, and Wiss, next to him, said, 'Take it easy, Larry. Nobody's chasing us now."
"Okay. Okay."
Parker said, "If we go slow, nobody looks at us. Ralph, if we drop you at the next town, can you get yourself a car?"
"Sure," Wiss said. "You want me to go back to the motel? Will do. I get Frank's car and our stuff, and where'll you people be?"
"After the town," Parker said, "we'll take the first dead end on the left. We'll be up in there some place."
'There's a town coming up," Lloyd said. He was trying to be calm, but his voice jittered as though he were being shaken, and his fingers kept flexing on the wheel.
It was a small one-traffic-light town. The light turned green in front of them, so Lloyd rolled through the intersection and pulled to the curb on the far side. He said, "Maybe somebody else can drive."
"I will," Elkins said.
"Good."
Lloyd opened his door and climbed down out of the truck, followed by Wiss, who shut the door. Lloyd, still in his brown security uniform, trotted around the front of the truck as Elkins and Parker both moved along the seat to their left. Wiss strolled away, hands in his pockets, and Lloyd got up onto the seat next to Parker. His grin flickered, like a lightbulb about to blow. Shutting his door, he said, "I'm beginning to feel the aftereffects." His teeth were chattering.
'That's okay," Parker told him, as Elkins put the truck in gear. "Shake it out."
Lloyd did. Next to Parker, he twitched as though electric currents were running through him. "I was okay while it was going on," he said, "but now?" He held his shaking hand up and looked at it. "I don't think I could write my name."
"You don't have to," Elkins told him, "so don't worry about it."
The first road on the left with a sign reading dead end was a narrow two lanes, dirt. A low wooden prefab house at the corner had swings and toys all around it, but a quarter mile up the road the evergreens started. When they got up that far, in among the trees, Parker said, "Stop here."
Deep drainage ditches ran on both sides of the road, dry now, for the spring thaws. Elkins stopped pretty much in the middle of the road, and all three got out to walk around back to see what they had.
Four crates. "Not many," Lloyd said.
Elkins said, "Larry, that fella Marino had a very good eye. It doesn't matter which four these are, they'll buy you a dozen new faces."
"One will do me."
No two crates were the same size, but all were very heavy. They wrestled them out of the truck one at a time, then slid them down into the right-hand drainage ditch, hauled them up the other side, and shoved them flat as far as possible under low evergreen branches. Then Parker said to Elkins, "Drive it on up a couple miles, somewhere you can get it off the road. We'll wait here."
"Fine."
Elkins turned, about to jump across the ditch, but then paused to look back at Parker and said, "Larry did good."
"He did fine," Parker agreed.
Elkins met his eyes for a minute, then shrugged and said, 'That's okay, then," and jumped the ditch.
As Elkins drove the truck farther up the road, Parker sat on a protruding corner of crate. "Now we wait," he said.
"I'm not even cold," Lloyd said.
"Uh-huh."
Parker sat looking at the road, listening to the faint rustle of the woods. It would be an hour, maybe more, before Wiss got here. They could drop Parker at the airport in Bismarck, North Dakota, on their way home to Chicago, he'd take a plane east, call Claire.
Lloyd said, "I'm too jumpy to sit." He walked back and forth, back and forth, looking at the road, looking with wonder at his own hands. Finally, he stopped to face Parker and say, "So you aren't going to do it."
"No need," Parker said.
"Good." Lloyd gazed around at the woods, calmer now, smiling at the day. "Smell the trees," he said. "That's a great smell."
END
Firebreak Page 19
