He kept the car windows closed, and one of the dogs lifted his forepaws onto the driver’s door, onto the ledge just under the window, and dared McWhitney with a snarl. The other dog, still on the ground, ranged back and forth, barking.
Until Stratton came out and yelled at them. Then they immediately turned away from McWhitney and went trotting over to Stratton, who came a pace closer to peer through the windshield. When he recognized McWhitney, he nodded, waved, and said something more to the dogs as he pointed at the barn. Obediently they went inside, not bothering to look back, and Stratton came over to the side of the car as McWhitney rolled his window down.
Stratton said, “You surprised me.”
“I don’t like to talk on the phone.”
“No, I understand that.”
Stratton could be seen trying to figure this out. He and McWhitney didn’t hang out together, had only a work relationship and not much of that.
“I need to find Nick Dalesia,” McWhitney explained. “I figured you know where he is.”
“Well, I did,” Stratton said. His eyes were watchful.
“The thing is,” McWhitney said, “there’s a fella has maybe a job, and if he does have it there’s maybe a spot in it for me. But he doesn’t know me, and he does know Nick, though not where he is. But I need Nick to tell this guy I’m okay, and also maybe see if he wants a piece in it.”
Stratton nodded. “Any more pieces around?”
“It’s not my pie, Al. Sorry.”
“I understand. I think I got a phone number for Nick.”
“The way I’ve been told, Nick never answers his phone.”
“I think he lives over in Connecticut or Massachusetts,” Stratton said. “I may have an address. You wanna come inside?”
“I don’t know,” McWhitney said. “Do I?”
Stratton grinned. “Oh, don’t worry about the dogs. Once I tell them you’re all right, you’re all right. Unless you start beating on me.”
“I’ll remember not to,” McWhitney said, and got out of the car.
He followed Stratton into the barn, which looked mostly like a stage set for some upscale family drama. It was all clean, but not particularly neat. A couple of old-fashioned sofas stood around among armoires, dining tables and chairs, some smaller tables, and a dry sink. Some of the items looked very good; others were in several pieces. Toward the rear of the place, the dogs were lying on old, scuffed blankets. They watched McWhitney, but didn’t move.
Stratton led the way to an old rolltop desk against a side wall. “Customer never paid me for this,” he said as he rolled the top up out of the way and sat down. “So it’s mine now.”
“It’s a beauty.”
The desk’s pigeonholes were full of notepads of various sizes, thick envelopes, some folders. Stratton reached into the jumble, pulled out a smallish address book with a dark red cover, and said, “I only do first names in here, so that’s how they’re alphabetized. Here we are. Nick.” Pointing to a corner of the desk, he said, “Take a scrap of paper there, and a pencil.”
“Sure.”
“Box twenty-three, County Route forty, Greengough, Massachusetts.” Stratton spelled the name of the town. “Box numbers are hard to find sometimes.”
“Oh, I’ll find it,” McWhitney said, pocketing the address. “I’m motivated.”
10
Nick Dalesia drove the roads between Deer Hill and Rutherford, with side trips to and past West Ruudskill, where they would take the armored car. Because the countryside was hilly and had been settled for a long time, there were multiple routes between any two points. Some roads dead-ended where an early settlement hadn’t lasted, leaving nothing but a family name: Granthornville. Some roads went out of their way to loop past a water source that hadn’t been needed in two hundred years. It was terrain a heister could make good use of, but first he’d have to learn it.
The way Dalesia figured it, the people doing the move would not be the regular bankers but professionals, hired because this kind of move is what they do. They would try to keep the move secret, but they would know that leaks are just part of the human condition, and that at least some unauthorized people out there would know, by the time of the move, that the move was going to happen. Among those unauthorized people there might be some who would fantasize about getting their hands on all that money and all those securities, but would there be a few who might decide to take an actual run at it? Such robberies had happened before.
Yes, they had, and Nick knew they had, just as much as the bankers did. It had happened in America, it had happened in France, and it had happened in Germany that he knew about, and probably other places, too. And the MO was always the same: A gang, ten or twenty strong, would lie in wait along the route, pop out, kill or otherwise get rid of the drivers and guards, and drive away to some field or parking lot where the getaway cars were stashed. The fast ones didn’t get nabbed while making the transfer; the slow ones did.
The job Dalesia and Parker were putting together was different. No gang, only the two of them. And they only needed to pluck out one armored car from a caravan of four.
So it was very important to find the right place to do it. They needed an intersection, small and tight, that they could dam with the disabled armored cars they’d leave behind. They needed that intersection to give them a good, easy run toward the abandoned mill in West Ruudskill where they’d make the switch, without it being obvious from where they pulled the job exactly where they had to be going.
So Dalesia these days was putting a lot of mileage on the car. His job was the terrain, Parker’s the materiel. They would need guns, and they would need other things as well. Parker was off promoting the gear they wanted, while Dalesia traveled the county roads, looking for just the right intersection.
And he believed he’d found it. It was not part of any town, but it had a little commercial buildup around it; a cafe open only for breakfast and lunch, a gas station that shut at dark, a used-car lot with cars behind a chain-link fence and with a small shed out front with a handwritten sign on the door: PHONE FOR APPT.
The area was occupied, but not at night. The roads heading north and east met other turnoff roads almost immediately, making an escaper’s route very hard to guess. At the intersection itself, the two roads coming up from the south and east met at dogleg angles, no straight lines. And the diner, the used-car shack, and the layout of the gas station made for a somewhat constricted area around the intersection. The armored cars would have to come through very slowly.
For breakfast and lunch, the diner’s parking lot at the front and left side was full of pickup trucks. This was where the labor force in this part of the world ate everything but dinner. They were all regulars, talking to one another about their jobs and their bosses and their favorite sports teams. They paid no attention to Dalesia when he sat among them and spent some time over coffee at a window table at the front, looking out at the intersection, pleased with his choice.
The point was to be here before the armored cars arrived, to set themselves in useful positions. They had a rough idea how to pull it off, and how to lead the target car away, but where should they place themselves to begin with? The armored cars would come up that road over there, to cross the intersection northbound. Parker and Dalesia would want their special one to go out the road on that side, they would want the other three armored cars to block the intersection there and there, and the more Dalesia looked at the place, the more it seemed to him they needed two guys on the ground and one to bird-dog the target.
Three. They needed one more man.
Dalesia paid his check and left the place, thinking about people he knew, wondering if Parker might know somebody who’d be available almost any minute now. He walked around the side of the diner, and at first he didn’t recognize the guy seated on the passenger side in his car, just thought, somebody’s in my car. Why?