Pointing farther back behind the church, McWhitney said, “There’s some trees back there.”
Parker steered that way, saw the pickup nosed in among some scrubby trees, and put the Dodge in the same area, though he doubted those trees would hide much in the daytime. Then he walked back to McWhitney, who said, “You see Nick?”
“Yeah, he was getting out of the way. He’ll be along.”
“I don’t like how fast they’re being,” McWhitney said.
3
Dalesia drove the truck in around the side of the church ten minutes later. With hand gestures, Parker and McWhitney guided him to maneuver the truck in deeply under the lean-to until its right side was an inch from the rear wall of the church. Then Dalesia climbed down from the cab and said, “We made a stir.”
“Don’t need it,” McWhitney said.
“No, we don’t,” Dalesia agreed. “But we got it. Let’s get the tarp over this thing.”
Earlier, they had stashed in here, hidden beneath crèche figures, a gray canvas tarp that would not reflect the light. Now, with Parker holding a flashlight to guide them, Dalesia and McWhitney draped it over the top and hood and left side of the truck. Then Parker switched off the light, and McWhitney said, “Now we go in the church, right? Wait it out.”
Dalesia said, “Where’d you put your cars?”
“Back in the trees,” McWhitney told him.
“There’s too many choppers out,” Dalesia said. “Why not put them across the road, beside the house there?”
“It’s empty,” McWhitney objected. “The locals are gonna know they don’t belong.”
Parker said, “Nick’s right. From the helicopter, our cars look as though we’re trying to hide. Next to a house, they’re normal. Tomorrow, we’ll get them out of here.”
“Not in the morning, though,” Dalesia said. “This heat isn’t gonna go away for a while.”
McWhitney said, “I tell you what. I’ll put my pickup in front of the church, and Parker puts his car next to the house across the street. That way, during the day tomorrow, I’m a guy doing maintenance and he’s the real estate broker.”
Dalesia laughed. “I like your story lines,” he said. “Parker?”
“Sure.”
They stepped out from under the lean-to, but then, from far off to their right, they heard the flap-flap again, and moved back inside. The helicopter never came close, but the noise of it ricocheted from the ground for about three minutes, while that thin vertical light moved over there like a pendulum made of a fluorescent tube.
At last the helicopter moved on, out of sight and out of sound, and then they moved the cars, Parker leaving the Dodge in front of the separate garage at the end of the driveway on the left side of the house.
He was about to turn back when he saw headlights approaching from the right, the same direction they’d come from. He dropped to the ground beside the Dodge and watched a car with a bubble light on top, unlit, hurry by; SHERIFF could be faintly read on the door.
After the sheriff’s department car left, Parker stood and went back across the road, where Dalesia had the church front door open and called to him, “Come in over here.”
It was very dark inside the church. There were too many large windows down both sides to permit them to use a light. Parker shut the door behind himself and spoke into the dark: “That was a sheriff’s car.”
“Well, they’re out and about,” Dalesia said. “You got that flashlight?”
“For what?”
“There’s got to be a basement in here,” Dalesia told him. “For Boy Scout meetings, ladies’ auxiliary, AA.”
McWhitney said, “Maybe the coffeemaker’s still there.”
Parker held his fingers over the flashlight lens, switched it on, separated the first two fingers slightly, and by that faint light they moved around the church, which had wide straight lines of dark wood pews and a central aisle, a railing across the front, and beyond it a bare plaster wall. Whatever altar and decorations had once been there were gone.
A door to the left of the entrance opened on stairs up to a pocket choir loft and down to a U-turn a half flight below. “That’s what we want,” Dalesia said.
It was. They went down, past the U-turn in the stairs, and below the church was a long, low-ceilinged rectangular room with cream walls and a pale, worn linoleum floor. Shelves and counters filled the wall along the back, amid spaces where stove, refrigerator, and dishwasher had been. The double sink was still there, but when they twisted the faucets, nothing happened.
The most interesting part was the windows, narrow horizontal ones down both sides of the room, high up near the ceiling, that cranked out and up. To each window had been added two narrow wooden strips, attached to the wall above and below the window, with a sliding cream-painted sheet of thin plywood between that could be moved either to block the window or to clear it. The system looked crude and homemade, but effective.
Looking at the windows, Dalesia said, “They showed movies down here. Close them, we’re gonna be fine.”
They slid all the plywood panels shut, and McWhitney said, “Shine your flash on a couple windows on that side, I’ll go up and see does anything show through.”
He was gone, up into the darkness, for about three minutes, while Parker shone the light at two of the plywood panels, and when he came back down, he said, “Dark as hell up there. Nothing showed.”
“Good,” Dalesia said.
“Also,” McWhitney said, “another chopper went by.”
“Not good.”
“You know it. I just got back inside before the light went right over this place.”
Dalesia said, “It did? We didn’t see a thing.”
“So that’s good, then,” McWhitney said, and looked around, saying, “Do you suppose the power still comes in here?”
“The panel’s back there, where the refrigerator used to be,” Dalesia said, and they went back to take a look. When they opened the circuit breaker box, the main switch at the bottom had been moved to Off, and all the circuit switches were also set at Off. A paper chart pasted to the inside of the metal door showed which breaker ran which circuit.
Dalesia studied the list. After a minute he said, “Rec. That would be rec room, right? Suppose there’s any law going by out there?”
McWhitney said, “I’ll go up. When I get there, you throw the switch. If I holler, switch it off again.”
“Good.”
Parker said, “Let’s make sure something’s on,” and he walked back to the stairs with McWhitney, where a set of four light switches was mounted on the wall. He flipped one of them up and said, “We’ll see what happens.”
“Give me a minute,” McWhitney said, and went away upstairs. Parker stayed by the light switches, and Dalesia, with Parker’s flashlight, stayed by the circuit breaker box.
McWhitney called down, “Try it now.”
Parker said to Dalesia, “He says, now.”
Dalesia moved first the main switch and then the circuit breaker switch marked “rec,” and fluorescents in the dropped ceiling, down at his end, began to sputter into life. Parker called up to McWhitney, “It’s on. Anything up there?”
“Nothing.” McWhitney came back down and said, “I had to close the door at the top of the stairs, some light comes up there. But now we’ll be fine.” Looking out at the rec room, he said, “Snug. We’re gonna be snug.”
Parker flipped on one more switch, so now they had pockets of light at both ends of the room. Dalesia came over to give Parker back his flashlight and to say, “No coffeemaker, though. In fact, no water.”