Kengle made a face and nodded. “That sounds like Marty,” he said. “You should of seen him in stir. Polite to the screws.”
Webb, his hand on the doorknob, said, “We’ll see you out there, Parker.” “Right.”
The three went out, Webb leading the way and the other two carrying the cartons. They were put in the back of the station wagon and a minute later the wagon pulled away.
Parker stood by the open door, waiting. It was three or four minutes before Fusco came out, holding the tunics up by their hangers, a worried expression on his face. “Boy, Parker,” he said. “She’s really nervous. I guess me taking a fall really shook her up.”
“She’ll survive,” Parker said. “You want to put those things in a bag or something. Somebody’ll see us going out with those things.”
“Nobody pays any attention in a neighborhood like this,” Fusco said. “Nobody’s looked at either of us any time we came in or out here.”
“That’s because they can figure us, even if they’re wrong. Ellen’s a divorcee, we’re men. But those are crazy gold pajama tops, and people’ll remember them. We don’t want the law around here tomorrow, asking Ellen where’d the guys go with the gold pajama tops.”
“And the gold. Okay, you’re right. Just a minute.”
Fusco got a brown paper bag from the kitchen, took the tunics off their hangers, rolled them one at a time and stuffed them into the bag. When he was done, he and Parker went out to the Pontiac. Parker’s suitcase and sweater and sport jacket were still on the back seat, and Fusco now added the bag of tunics to them. Parker got behind the wheel.
They drove east out of Monequois, past the air base, and left up Hiker Road. They went past the South Gate and continued on northward another four miles, until they came to a dirt road leading uphill away to the left. They took this and Parker shifted into low. The road climbed steeply, with sharp curves. Never anything more than a track beaten into and scraped out of the mountainside by a bulldozer, it had now been out of use for three years and showed it. Deep meandering grooves showed where the runoff from mountain rains was making paths for itself toward the valley. Here and there tree branches hung low, scraping the roof of the car, and in two spots thick fallen branches lay beside the road where Parker and Devers and Fusco had shoved them out of the way the first time they’d driven up here.
It was three miles, almost all uphill, all on minimal road, until at last they came to the burned-out lodge. It had been a large building, two storeys high, of stone and log, and it had been almost entirely gutted by fire. A garage behind it, originally large enough for a dozen cars, had been partially burned away, with now only one end of it still intact, enough for three cars. Another out-building, a large work-shed, hadn’t been touched at all.
Of the original building only the stone walls were left, extending from three to seven feet up at different spots around the perimeter. Inside these walls was a jumble of black lines, the charred remains of beams and walls, made anonymous and smooth by three summers and winters. Grass was growing here and there inside, little areas of green.
Half a dozen “No Trespassing” signs had been fixed to trees or the remaining stone walls, but there was no sign anyone had been around recently to see if the signs were being obeyed. The garage and work-shed were both stripped and bare, and it was obvious no one was in any hurry to rebuild Andrews’ Lodge. It looked, in fact, suspiciously like the result of somebody’s having burned his business down for the insurance, which doesn’t happen when the business is showing a steady profit. Andrews’ Lodge had probably been losing a lot of its business to Canadian hunting areas, which hadn’t been as extensively hunted, so that game was still plentiful.
The station wagon was nowhere in sight, but when Parker drove the Pontiac around the corner of the lodge shell Stockton was standing beside an open garage door in the unburned end of the garage, motioning at them to come on. In this setting he looked like a modern-day Ichabod Crane, tall and skinny and stoop-shouldered.
Parker drove the car into the garage and cut the engine as Stockton shut the two doors. He and Fusco got out of the Pontiac, and Parker got his sport jacket and sweater from the back seat.
There were no interior walls separating the garage stalls. The Pontiac was the nearest to the burned portion, and next to it on the other side was the Buick station wagon. At the far end was the bus.
It was a small bus, shorter than usual, the kind of thing frequently used by small private schools to transport their children. It had been that yellow color when Parker had first seen it at the junkyard in Baltimore, but a lot had been done to it since then. It had a different color now, a rich royal blue that looked dark inside the garage here but would look as bright as a swimming pool out in the sunlight. It also had a different engine, much hotter than the original plant it had had under its hood. The false set of Maryland plates that had brought it up here were in the process of being changed now by Webb to New York plates which were equally false but for which they had faked-up registration. Kengle was in the process of attaching to the near side one of the two cloth banners they’d made, in red letters on white, reading:
ERNIE SEVEN AND THE FOUR SCORE
This was where most of Norman Berridge’s money had gone, into this bus and the musical instruments showing conspicuously through the rear windows.
Parker walked around the Buick and stood looking at the banner for a minute. Kengle grinned at him, saying, “Looks good, don’t it?”
“Just so it looks real,” Parker said.
“Then that’s what it looks,” Kengle said. “It looks real.”
Parker agreed with him. A bus that made itself as conspicuous as this had to lull suspicions.
Parker carried his sweater and sport jacket into the bus and dropped them on a seat toward the rear. Fusco had followed him aboard, and when he turned round he saw Fusco getting the gold tunics out of the brown paper bag, shaking them out one at a time, smoothing out the wrinkles, and draping each across the back of a bus seat.
Parker edged by Fusco and stepped down out of the bus again. Kengle was now around on the other side, putting the second banner there. A third, smaller but just as bright was being put on the back by Stockton. Webb, having replaced both license plates, was putting his tools away in the kit in the back of his station wagon.
They were ready to go at ten to five. They all got aboard the bus except Stockton, who opened the garage doors. The doors had been padlocked shut, but Parker and Fusco had sawn through the padlocks so they could be removed and then replaced to look as though they were still secure.
Those in the bus slipped on their tunics and settled in seats, all toward the front. Webb got behind the wheel, started the engine, which sounded deceptively ordinary, and backed the bus out into tree-dappled sunlight. Stockton shut the garage doors and replaced the padlock while Webb turned the bus around, then came over and climbed aboard, but didn’t put his tunic on yet.
The trip down the dirt road was painfully slow, Webb being careful not to rattle the goods inside the bus too much. The toy cartons were now on the floor unobtrusively near the back seat, surrounded and hidden by the musical instruments: snare drums, electric guitar and amplifier, tenor saxophone, three or four others.
Near the exit to Hilker Road, Webb stopped the bus and Stockton got out and continued down on foot. He was just barely in sight when he stopped, and they waited for the arm signal from him that would mean no traffic in sight in either direction.
It was a couple of minutes before it came, and then Webb slid the truck down the last several yards, slewed out onto the paved roadway without touching the brakes, and Stockton swung up through the open door as the bus rolled by him. Webb tapped the accelerator and they surged forward, running south.