She seemed amused by him. “Oh? Do bank robbers usually get away with it?”
“They always get away with it,” Dalesia told her. “What orders do the bosses give the tellers in your bank? ‘If they show the note, give them the money. If you can slip them a dye pack, good, but if not, just give them the money.’ Less hassle for everybody, right?”
“That’s right,” she said. “But still, they do get caught sometimes.”
“The really stupid ones,” he agreed. “Also, if you do it a hundred twenty-two times, the hundred twenty-third they’re gonna grab you. Everybody’s gotta show a little restraint.”
She considered him. “What number are you up to?”
“One.”
Parker said, “You’ve got a map for us.”
A little surprised, she gave Parker an appraising look, then looked again at Dalesia. “Well, it isn’t exactly good cop, bad cop,” she said, “but it works the same. Yes,” she told Parker, and reached into the shoulder bag she’d put on the seat beside her.
Parker said, “You got a gun in there, too?”
Surprised again, she said, “As a matter of fact, yes. I don’t intend to show it.”
“Then don’t carry it.”
She had taken from her bag a sheet of typing paper folded in half, but now she paused to say, “I’ve taken courses. I know how to fire a weapon, and I know how to hit what I aim at. And I also know never to show it unless I intend to use it. I carry it because I live in an uncertain world.”
“That’s true,” Parker said.
She extended the paper toward him. He took it, unfolded it, and it was a Xerox copy of a page from a Massachusetts atlas, in black-and-white, showing one small section of the state in close detail. On it a route had been indicated by a few short lines in red ink. Deer Hill was at the southern end of the red line, Rutherford at the north. West Ruudskill, the town with Beckham’s factory in it, was a dot off the middle of the route, to the right.
Parker folded the map twice and put it in his shirt pocket. She watched him, then said, “Jake says you’re doing it without him, but you’ll still share and share alike.” She sounded as though she didn’t entirely believe it.
Parker said, “Did he tell you why he’s staying away?”
Dalesia corrected that: “Why it’s better for him that he stays away.”
Her mouth, thin to begin with, twisted a little. “You’ve got him convinced Jack knows about us.”
“Knew the first round,” Dalesia said, “knows this round.”
She held a hand up to stop him. “Don’t give me the arguments, please,” she said. “They’re just arguments. You’ve convinced Jake, that’s all that matters, and he’s going to do whatever it is you told him to do, but it so happens I know my husband. Jack could not fool me, not for a minute.”
Parker said, “Beckham didn’t tell you what we thought he should do?”
“No.” She shook her head, remembering. “To tell the truth, he seemed a little embarrassed about it.”
“He is,” Parker said. “We told him he should violate parole.”
She stared. “You what?”
“That means he’s inside,” Dalesia explained, “from before anybody knows the date of the move. After the job, he comes back out.”
“My God,” she said. “I know how Jake feels about prison. You really sold him a bill of goods.”
“We showed him what’s out there,” Parker said.
She shrugged. “Well, that’s up to him. You’re supposed to give me a phone number or something?”
This was Dalesia’s part. “It’s a fax number,” he said. “I think we can be pretty sure the move won’t happen until October, that’s less than two weeks from now.”
“I think so, too,” she said.
“So when you know the date,” he told her, “you write just that, the day, seven or fifteen or whatever—”
“I get the idea.”
“You write just that on a piece of paper,” he said, “and fax it to this number. It’s somebody I know that’s not gonna ask me what it’s about. All I want you to do, get rid of the fax number afterwards.”
“I assume,” she said, “it’s a long-distance call. It will be on my bill.”
Parker said, “There are fax machines in your bank branches.”
Surprised, she said, “That’s true. All right, I can do it.”
Dalesia already had the number on a small slip of paper in his pocket. He handed it to her and said, “Don’t copy it anywhere.”
“Don’t insult me any more,” she said, and put the paper in her bag.
“Sorry,” Dalesia said.
Parker said, “You were gonna tell us about the armored cars.”
“Four of them. They’ll be coming that day from Boston,” she said. “There’ll be rooms for the drivers at the Green Man Motel outside Deer Hill for that night. They’ll get some sleep, then get up and get to the bank at one-thirty to start the move. We’ll have people from a moving company to do the heavy lifting. One decision that’s been made for sure is that the car with the cash will not be the first or the fourth, so it’ll be one of the two in the middle.”
Parker said, “When do you know which?”
“When they start to load.”
Parker shook his head. “That’s no good. The idea was, we’d know which armored car of the four, not which two of the four.”
Sounding dubious, she said, “I could fax that number, I suppose, that night, a two or a three.”
“Too late,” Dalesia said.
Parker said, “Are you going to be there, to watch the move?”
“For a while, at the start,” she said. “It’s interesting, it’s kind of fascinating, to make a move like that. But I don’t intend to stay up all night.”
Parker said, “You’ll leave before they finish loading.”
“That’s what I plan to do, yes.”
He took out of his pocket the map she’d given him, unfolded it onto the table. “Which way do you drive, to go home?”
“The same route, really, most of the way. I turn west before Rutherford, on Route Twenty-seven. It’s a little county road.”
“I see it,” Parker said, tracing the road with his finger. “Where do you meet a stop sign on that road?”
Again she made her bitter, unamused laugh. “Everywhere. I hit four of them on the way home.”
“How about Route Thirty-two here?”
“That’s one of them.”
“What time do you want to get there? One-thirty? Two?”
“No later than two. But you know, they’ll still be loading, back at the bank. I might not know whether it’s going to be the second or the third when they leave.”
“Those armored cars,” Parker told her, “are part of a fleet. They’ll have their own numbers on them. By the time you leave, you’ll know which one is getting the cash. You write the fleet number of that car on a piece of paper, you get to that intersection at two o’clock, and when you stop there a car will come the other way, with one of us in it. We stop, you hand the paper over, you drive home. Will your husband still be at the bank?”
“Until the bitter end, absolutely.”
“Then, when you get home, you phone him. He knows what time you left, he knows what time you got home, he knows you didn’t have time to stop and talk to anybody.”
Frowning, she said, “You really believe it, don’t you? That Jack will suspect me.”
“Whether he does or not,” Parker said, “do you like to take risks?”
“To wind up in jail, you mean?” Her mouth twisted again. “Prison orange is not my color.”
“You’ll stop at the stop sign at two, you’ll call your husband when you get home.”
Dalesia said, “Just call us worrywarts.”
She looked at him, and could be seen to relax, just a bit. “Good cop, bad cop,” she said, and looked at Parker again. “Is there anything else?”
“No. We won’t see you again, except at the stop sign. Now, you want to leave here before we do; we’ll give you a few minutes.”