The crates had been pretty heavy to start with, being made of steel, and now that they were full of money they were a full two-man job each. Parker and Fusco took one, Kengle and Stockton took the other, and they moved out of the office and down through the blackness to the first floor.
Parker lit a match in the doorway, and when Devers saw it he stopped and shifted his carbine to port arms. He stood there, his back to the building as he watched in both directions, and Parker and the others carried the two crates out, hurried along the front of the building with them and around the corner into the deeper darkness between the buildings. Here they put them down to rest for a minute, and out front Devers went back to his marching.
From the side of the building to the bus was fast and easy, in solid darkness. Webb opened the door for them and they piled the cases aboard, then carried the two APs out and put them under some bushes at the side of a building across the street, where it was unlikely they’d be found before morning.
When they got back to the bus Webb had put the rear banner on again. They quickly put the side banners on and climbed aboard. Webb had discarded his fatigue jacket and cap and switched to his gold tunic. Now, as the bus started forward, the others got out of their hoods and black sweaters and put their own tunics back on.
Webb turned the corner, stopped for a second, and Devers swung on, grinning from ear to ear, “Beautiful,” he said.
“Get changed,” Fusco told him. It wasn’t over yet.
Devers quit grinning. He shucked out of the borrowed uniform, put his tunic on, and rolled the uniform and carbine and helmet and Webb’s fatigue cap and jacket into a ball. Webb stopped on one dark street and Devers went out to stow these things in a litter basket. Then they drove on.
By the time they reached the South Gate the money crates were stowed way in back, hidden by the musical instruments. The machine guns were back there, too, but the four revolvers were still in pockets, close to hand, when Webb pulled to a stop beside the AP shack.
The guard who came out was young and heavy-lidded. Webb handed the pass to him and the guard looked at it with sleepy suspicion. “You guys are leaving awful late,” he said.
“We were a smash, pal,” Webb told him. “They wouldn’t let us go.”
“Sure.” He waved them through, saying, “Okay, go ahead.”
“Right, pal.”
Out on Hilker Road they turned left and accelerated. There was no traffic anywhere. The speedometer touched ninety, and in under three minutes Webb slowed for the dirt road. This time he went up as fast as the road and bus would take it, not caring how much he jounced the contents or the passengers. Parker and the others clung to seat backs and got bounced around.
At the top, Webb stopped in front of the garages. Stockton ducked out to open one of the doors and Parker and Fusco and Devers and Kengle carried the two crates out and put them in the garage. While they were doing that, Webb turned the bus around and Stockton opened the other garage doors.
Devers said, “See you next week.” The plan was that he was to meet Fusco in New York in ten days to get his piece of the pie.
“See you, Stan,” Fusco said.
Devers got into his Pontiac while Parker slid behind the wheel of Webb’s station wagon. Webb had already started back down the slope.
Parker went second down the dirt road in the Buick, with Devers behind him. At the bottom, Devers blinked his lights in farewell and headed south while Parker turned north after the disappearing taillights of the bus.
They took it up to within two miles of the border, where Webb ran it deep off the road into a stand of trees where it couldn’t be seen from the road. But the tracks would be seen. The law would find the bus early tomorrow, probably within an hour of the alert going out. They would believe the bandits had gone over the border into Canada.
Parker turned the wagon round and slid over to the passenger side. Webb opened the door, got in behind the wheel, and headed them south again. “Worked out nice,” he said.
“It did,” Parker said.
Neither of them was much of a talker, so they were quiet after that. Parker liked that about Webb, his close-mouthedness. They’d worked together a couple of times several years ago, and all Parker knew about Webb was that he was a good hard driver, that he had a passion for playing with cars, and that he was solid in a pinch. It was all he needed to know.
After they made the turn now they stopped and, in the red glow of the taillights, smeared away the tracks their tires had made. They didn’t want anybody coming up here for any reason in the next few days. For the same reason, they stopped again partway up, spent a while brushing away more tracks, and dragged a heavy branch back across the road where it had been before Parker and Fusco had removed it the other day. Then they drove the rest of the way up.
The darkness at the top was complete, broken only by their headlights. All the garage doors were shut.
Webb and Parker got out and opened a set of garage doors and there wasn’t anybody there. Kengle and Stockton and Fusco, all gone. And the money gone too.
Part Four
1
Parker found them both in the bedroom. Up until one second ago they’d been having sex, and when Parker hit the light switch Devers came up off the bed, looking as foolish as a naked man can look. Ellen blinked in terror at the light.
Parker looked at Ellen and said, “She still here.”
Devers said, “Parker?” He was still too shocked to be able to think. “What’s going on?”
Parker ignored him. He went over to the foot of the bed and said to Ellen, “Didn’t you think I’d tip?”
“What—what—”
“Parker,” Devers said. “For Christ’s sake—”
“It’s gone,” Parker told him. “Webb and I ditched the bus, went back to the lodge, and the cash was gone.”
Webb, still in the doorway, said quietly, “Three dead, pal.”
Devers just blinked. “Dead?”
“Fusco,” Parker said. “And Stockton. And Kengle.”
Webb said, “We found them over by the work-shed. They’d been lined up and shot down.”
Devers and Ellen were both beginning to unscramble their brains now. Ellen reached for a blanket to cover herself, and Devers said, “We were hijacked? It’s gone?”
“Somebody hit us for the bundle,” Parker said. “They had to be waiting up there for us.”
“In the work-shed,” Webb said.
“Wherever it was,” Parker said, not caring. “They waited for us to show up, they waited for you to go and me and Webb to go. They waited till the one time when there’d be only three men on the stash.”
Webb said, “You know what that means, buddy?”
“They had to know,” Devers said. His face was bloodless there was no strength in his voice. “They had to know the whole caper,”
Webb said. “In advance,” Parker said.
“Right,” Webb said. “They had to know not only we were scoring tonight, they had to know where the hideout was and when we were due to get there and how we were going to split up then, with Parker and me off to get rid of the bus and you coming back here.”
Devers said, “It had to be somebody on the inside.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, dropping there as though his legs wouldn’t hold him any more. “You think it’s me,” he said. He looked hopeless, as though it didn’t seem to him there was any way to keep them from thinking it was him and acting on that assumption.
Parker said, “I don’t think you’re that stupid, Devers. You don’t want to be hunted, not by the cops and not by us. If you work a cross on us, you can’t hang around, you’ve got to clear out. If you clear out, you’re a deserter from the Air Force. If you desert the day after the heist, they know you were in on it. That isn’t what you want.”