He said, “You want to talk out here, or in the room?”
“Out here,” she said.
“Because . . .”
“Because I’m here to tell you, the deal’s off.”
He frowned at her. “What deal’s off?”
“The robbery,” she said. “The armored car with all the cash from the bank. The bank, God help us, that Jake used to work for. You aren’t going to rob it. You aren’t going to take it.”
He said, “Why not?”
“Because you’re all staying here, at Jake’s motel.” She was really very angry. “He’s still the same irresponsible clown he always was,” she told him. “You people will go, you’ll get away with it or you’ll be killed by the guards in the armored car, but whatever happens to you people, he’s in trouble again.”
“I don’t see that,” Parker said. “We aren’t registered here, under any names at all.”
“Don’t you think the maids will talk?” she demanded. “Don’t you think the people that work here already know there’s something funny going on? Three guys staying here without management knowing about it, three guys disappear, all of a sudden three guys rob an armored car. No, they won’t catch up with you, but how long will it take them to get here?”
“Doesn’t mean anything,” Parker said. “They might even think Jake had something to do with it, because he’s an ex-con, but every ex-con in this part of the state will be under suspicion and so what? Jake’s in the hospital, legitimately in the hospital. He doesn’t know anything about anything. They can suspect whatever they want, but how are they gonna prove anything?”
“You’re here, in his motel.”
“He doesn’t know a thing about it. Somebody pulled a fast one while he was away in the hospital. Besides, it isn’t his motel, he’s on staff here, he’s an assistant manager.”
She shook her head. “The minute the police start leaning on people here,” she said, “the truth will come out, and Jake will go back to jail, and the worst thing is, you know that.”
No, the fact was, Parker didn’t care. Jake would find his own way out of the jam, or not. He said, “It’s too late to stop it. It’s going to happen, so you better tell Jake it’s time to start practicing his poker face.”
“I’ll stop you,” she said. She was wide-eyed, body clenched with determination.
He studied her. “How do you figure to do that?”
“I’ll go to the police! I’ll tell them everything, I’ll tell them what you plan to do.”
Parker shook his head. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said. “You’re dumber than your brother.”
She was offended, but also involved. “What do you mean?”
“There’s one guy in this group,” Parker told her, “that doesn’t spend a lot of his time thinking things through. I could walk you down there to his room, knock on the door, have you tell him what you just told me, and he’d kill you right then. Wouldn’t even think about it, just drop you.”
She blinked, but remained defiant. “Well, I’m not telling him,” she said, taking a step backward, away from him and toward her car. “I’m telling you, you’re the one I know, and you’re the only one I have to tell.”
Parker said, “The reason it’s better to tell me than this other guy is, I take a minute to think about it. I take a minute and I think, what is she gonna tell the cops? Does she know when or where or how we’re gonna do it? No. Does she know who we are when we’re at home? No. The only thing she can do is blow the whistle on her brother, so instead of maybe he’s in trouble definitely he’s in trouble, and you did it.”
He waited, watching her eyes, as she went from defiant to frightened to something like desperate. Then he said, “You want to talk to the cops, go ahead. Don’t worry about us. I gotta pack now. Goodbye.”
FOUR
1
Dalesia left the Trails End first, followed a few minutes later by McWhitney, and a few minutes after that by Parker, who drove out past the covered swimming pool just around the time Wendy Beckham sat down in the hospital room with her brother to try to figure out how to keep him out of trouble, now that Jake’s bad companions had announced they were not going to cancel their robbery.
“I’m sorry I told you,” Jake said. He was sulky, and getting bored in the hospital bed.
“Unless I can think of something to get you out of this,” Wendy told him, “so am I.”
And they sat together in grim silence. This was the first day Jake’s leg was out of the sling and he could sit up normally, but he wasn’t even allowed to enjoy that.
When Parker got to the old mill in West Ruudskill, Dalesia and McWhitney had already driven their cars across the old, littered concrete floor, lumpy and powdering beneath their tires as they circled around rusted pieces of machinery, rolls of wire, moldering stacks of cartons, until they’d reached as deep into the building as they could drive. From the broad open entrance at the other end of the place, long since stripped of its huge metal sliding doors, they were invisible back here.
Now they had nothing to do until Dalesia would drive off to meet Briggs at the motel at six. The inside of the old brick building was colder than the outside air, so they went out a squeaking side door to the remains of an old iron bench on a concrete platform over the stream. There they sat or paced, and saw that the white sky was not going to clear today. Heavy cloud cover or even rain could only be an advantage to them tonight.
Across the way they could occasionally, not often, hear a passing vehicle approach and cross the bridge, but where they were, the bushes and trees screened them from the road, and they could neither see nor be seen.
This was a dead time, nothing to do. Even McWhitney didn’t feel like talking, though at one point he did say, “What do we do if your friend Briggs doesn’t show up?”
“We go home,” Parker said.
McWhitney looked at him. He’d clearly been expecting some endorsement of Briggs. Not getting it, he realized he hadn’t needed it. So he nodded, and looked out at the quick stream, and said nothing else.
While they were out there, in the last of the day’s thin warmth, one hundred sixty miles to the east, in Chelsea, just north of Boston, behind an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence, four armored cars were finishing their prep. The company was Harbor Coin Services, and the cars had all been bought used and were then refurbished. They were all the International Navistar Armored Truck model 4700, more or less the standard of the industry. They had been manufactured in America in the late eighties or early nineties and were as good as ever. The reinforced metal box that was their reason for being did not weaken or grow old. The parts that did, the engines and transmissions and brakes and the rest of it, could be repaired or rebuilt or replaced, but the metal box remained solid.
Each car held a crew of three: a driver and a guard riding shotgun in the front compartment, and a guard with his own fold-down seat in the sealed-away rear compartment. A shatterproof glass panel between the two compartments could be slid open for communication, but otherwise the wall between front and rear sections was as thick and tough as the outer walls.
The four trucks, their bodies painted red and hoods black, went through the company car wash as the final step in their preparation for the night’s work, and then lined up behind the chain-link fence, awaiting departure time. The twelve men of their crews had an early dinner, without beer or wine, and got to Harbor Coin Services at six-thirty, ready to roll.