“We got bottled water and candy and stuff stashed out back,” McWhitney said. “And now we got light and a roof down here. Come on, we’ll get the stuff and bring it down, and then we’ll just wait it out till morning, see what we got then.”
They started for the stairs, Parker flicking on the flashlight, and Dalesia paused to say, “You know what we got here? It’s not just light and a roof. We’re in a church, Nels. What we got, we got sanctuary.”
4
Parker woke first. The original idea had been, they would come here and divvy the boxes from the truck right away, Dalesia taking Jake’s piece with him, Parker taking Briggs’s. They might sleep a while in the vehicles, but then they would leave early in the morning. McWhitney would drive the rental truck, because his name was on the paperwork, while Dalesia would take McWhitney’s pickup with his and McWhitney’s shares in it. Parker, finished, would head home, while McWhitney dropped off the truck at a nearby office of the rental company and then drove Dalesia to the municipal parking lot in Rutherford where the Audi had been left.
Except it wasn’t going to work like that. Law enforcement in recent years had come to expect an attack from somewhere outside the United States, that could hit anywhere at any time and strike any kind of target, and they’d geared up for it. Because of that, the few hours Parker and the other two had been counting on weren’t there.
They couldn’t leave this place, not yet, not with the money from the bank on them, but they couldn’t stay here either. Having electricity all by itself wasn’t enough. They needed food, they needed water, and they needed a better place to sleep than a wooden pew in the church, which was at least a little less hard and cold than the linoleum floor downstairs.
When Parker opened his eyes, lying on his back on the pew, pale early morning light gleamed in through the windows on the left side of the church, and darkness seemed to be drawn out through the windows on the right. His body stiff, he sat up and saw that Dalesia and McWhitney still slept on nearby pews. He got to his feet, stretched, bent, and then went to the front door. He opened it, made sure no traffic was going by, then went out, moved around to the rear of the church, relieved himself, and washed face and hands with bottled water. Far away, he heard the flap-flap, but then it faded.
Back inside the church, he went up to take a look at the choir loft, and saw that it had a round window at the back, above the front door. As he looked out through it, a state police car drove by. He watched it, then stepped back and looked at the space.
It was very cluttered. As wide as the church below, it was a narrow area with a railed opening at the front, above the main church. At one time, it had been lined with rows of wooden folding chairs. These, along with a lot of cardboard boxes of the same sort as the ones they’d taken from the bank, were now stacked up almost everywhere. Parker opened one of the boxes, and it was full of hymnals, heavy books with thick shiny paper and speckled dark red covers.
Was there anything to do with these boxes? They weren’t exactly like the ones from the bank, though very similar. It was a style of box with a separate cardboard top and fairly long sides that was sold to be used as storage. A dull white, they had handholds cut into the two narrow ends. When television showed U.S. marshals carrying evidence into federal courtrooms, they used these boxes.
How could Parker and the others make use of these things? Put a top layer of hymnals over the cash underneath? But at a roadblock, any cop was likely to lift at least one book.
Parker heard movement downstairs, looked over the front railing, and saw the other two starting to rouse. Dalesia looked up, saw him, and said, “Anything interesting up there?”
“I don’t think so.”
Parker went downstairs, and McWhitney said, “After I go out and take a leak, I’ll drive somewhere and find us something to eat. Then we gotta figure out what we’re gonna do around here.”
“How we’re gonna get away from here,” Dalesia said.
McWhitney shook his head. “With the profits? I don’t think so. I’ll be back.”
“I’ll walk you out,” Dalesia said.
They left the building, and Parker went back downstairs, switching on the lights. There were closets and cabinets down here, and a storeroom and a room with the furnace and water heater. Parker searched everywhere and found nothing of use. Anything that could be removed without structural damage had been taken out of here.
He went back upstairs, and Dalesia was in the choir loft. He called down, “You see these boxes?”
“Yeah.”
“Like ours.”
“Doesn’t help.”
“Yeah, I know. Only it’s like a coincidence.”
Except it wasn’t; those were the boxes you got when you needed boxes and when, like a bank or a church, you didn’t get your boxes from your neighborhood liquor store.
Dalesia came downstairs. Inside the chipper manner, he looked worried. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” he said.
“I know.”
“We were supposed to get out right away.”
“We couldn’t.”
“But the longer we stick around, the worse it gets. What if it’s a week before they call off the search?” With a gesture at the open, empty church, he said, “We can’t stay here that long.”
“I know it.”
“We don’t have a base, Parker,” Dalesia said. “We need a base.”
“We need to get out of here,” Parker said.
McWhitney brought coffee and pastries and news: “I heard it on the radio in the pickup; they got Jake.”
The three were sitting on pews at the front of the church to eat their breakfasts. Dalesia said, “What do you mean, they got Jake? He’s in the hospital.”
“He went outa there last night,” McWhitney said. “Don’t ask me why. The cops found him this morning, wandering around in his hospital pj’s. They said he was disoriented.”
“Sounds it,” Dalesia said.
“But then,” McWhitney said, “they said he was cooperating.”
“Oh?” Dalesia frowned. “Disoriented and cooperating?”
“His sister’s with the cops,” McWhitney said. “She’s the one they quoted on the radio. Her brother’s cooperating.”
Parker said, “She’s cooperating.”
“Sure,” Dalesia said. “Trying to help her brother, soften the blow.”
“Well, what do they know, those two?” McWhitney asked. “They don’t know me at all. They could describe you guys.”
Dalesia said, “Jake could make a little trouble for me. Not for Parker. But I’ll have to move around some.”
Parker said, “They’ll sink the wife.”
“Christ, they will,” Dalesia said. “And the doctor, you think?”
Parker shook his head. “The doctor didn’t do anything. He thought he was gonna do something, but then he didn’t have to. If he just keeps his mouth shut now, he’s fine.”
McWhitney finished his coffee and threw the plastic cup at the wall where the altar used to be. “He’s fine,” he said. “What about us? Parker, every move we make outside this building is full of risk. The cops are everywhere. It said on the radio, they’re bringing in cops from out of state. It said, if they don’t find us in three days, maybe they’ll bring in the National Guard. The weapons we used, and the fact it’s a bank, the feds are part of it.”
Dalesia said, “We’ve got to get out of this part of the country. We’ve just got to.”
“You haven’t been out there,” McWhitney told him. “I was just a few minutes each way, stayed on little nothing roads, I was stopped twice, show ID, search the car, thank you very much. One of the cops, I said I’m headed back to Long Island, he gave me a friendly advice, stay away from the MassPike, it’s a horror scene down there, roadblocks every exit, traffic backed up to Boston.” He laughed, without much humor. “There’s a lot of drivers out there this morning, Nick,” he said, “don’t like us guys at all.”