It wasn’t the TV news reporters’ questions he was thinking about now, it was the questions the police would ask. He’d be able to give full descriptions of the robbers, and he’d be able to describe just about everything they did and said.
And now there was the question of what the robbers didn’t want them to see. All he had left now was his ears, and he listened as hard as he could. He heard shuffling noises, and then he heard a click of some kind, and wondered what that was. There was something familiar about that click, and yet there wasn’t. Inside the canvas sack, George frowned deeply, breathing automatically, not even thinking about his breath now, and tried to think what that click could be, what it reminded him of, where he’d heard it before.
He almost got it, he was seconds from understanding, when another sound distracted him. A whoosh and a foamy rush, and a sudden sense of cool damp air, a breeze wafting over him.
They’d opened the outer door. Thatmust be what they didn’t want him and the others to see; what sort of transportation awaited them outside.
George strained to hear, leaning forward, staring at the canvas a half inch from his eyes. He heard murmuring, vague movement, and then not even that. And then a slam, as the outer door was shut again.
They’ve gone, he thought, and never did remember that click any more, and so didn’t come to the memory that would have told him that the click was the sound of the inner door closing. And so he never did get to tell the police the one thing they would have been interested to hear: that before the robbers left, one of them went upstairs.
Greg Hanzen trailed the big gleaming ship for several miles, and at every second he wanted to veer off, run for his life. But he was afraid to leave them stranded there, afraid they’d escape anyway somehow and come after him. They would surely come after him.
They might anyway.
The door in the side of the ship, up ahead of him, opened inward, showing a vertical oval of light. Immediately, not permitting himself to think, Hanzen drove forward, in close to the ship’s flank, up along the side of that open doorway, where Parker stood in the light, empty-handed.
Hanzen tossed him the line, and Parker handed it on to a much bigger man, who stood grinning down at Hanzen as he held Hanzen’s little boat firm against the Spirit of the Hudsonwhile Parker and a third man jumped in. Then the big man grabbed the outer handle of the door and jumped across into the boat, slamming the door behind him. That would be, Hanzen guessed, so that there wouldn’t be an unexpected light in the hull of the boat for the next hour, to maybe draw attention from shore.
“Okay,” Parker said.
But something was wrong. Hanzen looked at the three of them. “Where’s the money?”
Parker said, “That’s going a different way.”
Oh, Christ. Oh, what a fuckup. Hanzen had an instant of even worse despair than usual, and then, afraid Parker might see something on his face, he turned away to the wheel and said, “Well, let’s get us out of here.”
He put on speed and veered away from the ship into the darkness, as they opened the duffel bag Parker had given him earlier to bring along on the boat. Here were the clothes they would change into, to become fishermen out at night, while the suits and ties and white shirts, into the duffel bag with a rock, would soon be resting on the river bottom.
Hanzen gritted his teeth and chewed his lower lip. Had he given himself away? He snuck a look at Parker, and the man was frowning at him, thinking it over.
Oh, Jesus, I did! He saw it! He knows already. Oh, Christ, everybody’sgot a reason to be down on poor Greg Hanzen, and I never wanted anyof it. Low man on the totem pole again. Whydidn’t I cut and run when I could?
Whoever survives this night, Hanzen told himself, if anybody does, it won’t be me.
9
One-fifteen. It wasn’t necessary for Noelle to pitch her faint for another fifteen or twenty minutes, but she was ready to do it now. She really did feel queasy as hell, and it wasn’t because she was on a ship; the motion of the Spirit of the Hudsonas it coursed upstream was barely noticeable.
No, and it wasn’t the money under her that had her queasy, either. She understood about that, and agreed with the thinking behind it, and had no trouble with it. She’d been the girl distraction more than once in her life, either carrying the dangerous stuff herself or fronting for the one who did, though she’d never done it as an invalid before. But the idea here was a good one; she was an established presence on the ship. The robbers would have left through the door in the hull, and why wouldn’t they have taken the money with them?
Of course, the reason they hadn’t taken the money with them was because they would be half an hour or more in that small boat on the river before they reached the safety of the cabin. Nobody knew how soon the alarm would be raised, but when it was, there would be police boats out. They might be suspicious of four night fishermen, but on that boat they wouldn’t find any guns, any dress clothes, and most importantly, no money.
Would the police have any reason to think the money was still on the ship? None. Why would they believe that three men would go through such an elaborate con job and robbery and then not take the money with them?
So Noelle wasn’t worried about being caught sitting on several hundred thousand dollars. What had her shaky and nauseous was something much simpler; she was dehydrated. Having to sit for over six hours every night in this damn wheelchair or the other wheelchair, actually, up till tonight without any opportunity to leave it for any reason at all, meant she’d been avoiding liquids as much as possible the last eight days.
Six hours without a bathroom isn’t easy, if you stay with a normal intake of liquids, so Noelle had been cutting back, and finding it a little chancy anyway, and by tonight the drying-out had begun to affect her. She knew it already in the van driving up to Albany, but she didn’t dare do anything about it then, with the whole night in front of her, so she’d been hanging in there, feeling sicker and sicker, until by now what she was most afraid of was dry heaves; and dry they’d be.
Apart from the physical discomfort, though, she was having no trouble with this job. Since she and Tommy had split up, it had been harder to find strings to attach to, so money had often been a problem, which tonight should go a long way to solve.
And another good thing about this crowd was, none of them felt he had to hit on her. Parker had his woman Claire, and the other three all seemed to understand that she was simply another member of the crew, and it would screw things up entirely if they got out of line. Also, they probably knew she could be difficult if annoyed; they might even have heard about the guy she’d kneecapped in St. Louis.
It would probably be better all around if she found some other guy on the bend to hook up with, but she’d gotten along before Tommy and she’d get along now, and if another guy appeared, fine. It would certainly be easier, though, if Uncle Ray were still alive.
It was her father’s older brother, Ray Braselle, a heister from way back, who’d brought her into the game, over her pharmacist father’s objections. Ray Braselle had been around for so long that once, in describing the first bank job he was ever on, he’d said, “And I stood on the running board,” and then he’d had to explain what a running board was.
Uncle Ray was all right, though old as the goddam hills. But the people he ran with were more like Parker; tough, but not just smash-and-grab, always with a plan, a contingency, ways in and ways out. For guys like that, a good-looking girl could frequently be part of the plan, and if she was a pro herself, steady and reliable, not a hooker and not a junkie, who knew how to handle a gun, an alarm system or a cop, so much the better.