With the knife she was holding, Cara sliced through the rope binding Martin’s feet and he dropped down behind a table. Runyer realized this was how she’d cut the ropes tying his arms — reaching around his back to hug him. She now cut Jude’s hands free, too, pulled a second pistol from her waistband, and passed it to the older woman.
Fast as snakes, Gare popped up behind the couch and fired. Three, four times. But they were panicked shots and all of them missed. Gare emptied Runyer’s pistol and snagged Earl’s from his bloody, twitching hand. While Gare peppered the wall with bullets Martin took his time and squeezed off rounds carefully, forcing the captor back into the corner behind a cedar chest.
“Go right,” Martin called. Jude rolled toward the kitchen, an elegant maneuver, and made her way around Gare’s flank.
“Think you’re hot shit?” Gare screamed, scared as a baby.
Martin ignored him, jumped over the low table, and ducked as the spray of bullets from Gare’s gun slapped the walls. He rolled behind the large armoire.
“Position,” he called to Jude.
“You son of a bitch,” Gare snarled. “You’re dead! You’re both dead.”
“Position,” Jude called.
Martin sized up the room and said, “All right, son. It’s over.”
“Like hell.” Three more shots. A window broke, raining glass onto Cara and Runyer.
“Shoot?” Jude asked.
“Wait.” Then he called, “We’ve got you in a cross-fire, Gare. And we have more ammo than you do. You can’t win. But you can save your life. If you want to.”
They heard hard breathing. Gare coughed once and spat.
“Shit. I’m bleeding. My shoulder!”
“You don’t want us to come get you, son.”
Slowly Gare stood.
“Gun down,” Jude barked. “Now. I won’t tell you a second time.”
The pistol hit the couch. Cara snagged it before it bounced twice and had it unloaded in an instant. She pulled some plastic hogties from her shearling coat pocket and handed them to Martin, who bound Gare’s hands.
“How did...”
“Just lie down there.” Martin and Cara helped him down on his belly. They tied his ankles.
“You’re going to kill me,” he blubbered. “Just do it! Get it over with! I dissed you, I said all those things. And now you’re going to kill me.”
Runyer was gazing at the gun in Martin’s hand. It was a big pistol, a Colt Python with an eight-inch barrel. With a telescopic sight mounted on the top vents.
Martin went through Gare’s pockets, pulled out a box cutter, some papers, a wad of bills. He tossed them on a table. Then he nodded at Jude, and together the couple dragged him into the bedroom. They rested him facedown on the floor, where he cried and moaned.
They returned to the living room and sat down in front of the sheriff. Martin pulled on gloves and began wiping the big Colt.
“You were good,” Runyer said to him. “Really good.” Deciding that it was a lot harder for a brave man to act like a coward than the other way around. Since they so rarely need to.
“Had to get their guard down,” Martin said, meticulous as he removed the fingerprints.
“Had me fooled, too,” Runyer admitted.
“Wished we could’ve kept you fooled, too. But... well, didn’t work out that way.”
“No. I guess not. She’s not your daughter, is she? Cara?”
“Nope,” Martin answered, distracted by his task. “She’s our partner. Backup mostly.”
“How?” Runyer asked her. “How’d you know?”
“Oh, we have codes,” Jude said as if it was obvious.
Martin continued, “When we meet at a safehouse after a job, if there’s anyone in the place who shouldn’t be there, we leave a sign. Tonight if both the bathroom and kitchen lights were on at the time Cara’d know something was wrong. She was supposed to pretend she was our daughter. Buy us some time and maybe get a weapon to us. I staged that fight to pull the shade down so she could look in and get an idea about what was going on.”
Taking a breath a little deeper than he should’ve, Runyer gasped at the pain.
Cara said, “I got here ten minutes ago. I saw those two. I could’ve taken them out then but I didn’t know if there was anybody upstairs or in the basement.”
“But you’re a nurse,” Runyer said to Jude. Trying to disprove these facts encircling him.
“I just know some first aid. Helpful in this line of work.”
“But your birthday...?” Runyer began, looking at Martin.
“Oh,” he answered, “that’s true. It’s today. And I am fifty.”
“You picked a funny way to celebrate.”
The man shrugged. “Big cash delivery at a low-security bank. Didn’t have much choice. We go where the work is.”
The friendliest-seeming folk often aren’t...
Jude looked over Martin with a cryptic gaze, then said to Cara, “Let’s get the car packed up.”
The women vanished.
... and you’ve got to be most cautious of the ones leaning hard to be on your side.
When they were alone Martin said, “What you were going to do... with the ten-gauge... appreciate it. But it wouldn’t’ve worked. They’d’ve killed us on the spot.”
Runyer nodded at Earl’s body. “Stealing the Lexus... that’s what they meant by the job tonight. Not the bank.”
“I guess so.” Martin turned toward the sheriff, who was gazing at the pistol in his hand. Man, it looked big. Bigger than any weapon Runyer’d ever seen. “So,” he said.
“So,” Runyer echoed. “Say, one thing I noticed.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ve been pretty free telling me who you are and what you did and all. Just wondering, d’l just jump outa a frying pan?”
“That depends,” said Martin.
Jack Applebee, president of Minuteman Savings, had wanted to give the hero a nice watch, bestowed at an official ceremony. Juice and cake and Ritz crackers. Paper streamers. Folks in Andover just love their official get-togethers.
But Runyer wasn’t in the mood. Besides, Sheriff’s Department regulations won’t let officers accept rewards. So Applebee settled for a handshake at Runyer’s hospital bedside, surrounded by Lisa Lee, Pete, a half dozen friends and family, and a Pequot County Democrat reporter.
The banker talked about gratitude and courage, and also managed to work in a few words about the new Minuteman branch at Elm and Seventeenth and, naturally, the grand opening home-equity loan special. The old guy was in a great mood, and why not? Of the $687,000 stolen, nearly half was recovered. More than he’d ever expected to see again. Gare and Earl’s partner made off with the rest of it. The federal agents and Vermont troopers couldn’t figure out how he slipped through the roadblocks — they were plentiful and well manned. But clearly the robbers were pros and would’ve had escape routes worked out ahead of time.
Defendant Garrett Allen Penbothe adamantly denied that they’d even stuck up the bank in the first place, and so he wasn’t about to offer any information about the elusive third partner. He and Earl, he claimed, had bused up to Andover that afternoon to steal a car, which they’d done a half dozen other times over the past month. And he came up with a version of the robbery so far-fetched that even the Democrat, which’ll print anything shy of alien visitations, decided not to include it in their articles about the trial.
The prosecution witnesses — a businessman and his family whose rental cabin Gare and Earl tried to hide in — confirmed Runyer’s story about the shootout and offered generous words about the sheriff’s courage, and marksmanship, in a tense situation.