“That’s right.”
“We’ll take a run out there. You mind if I make myself some breakfast first?”
Parker shrugged. “We’re in no hurry. I want to know some things first anyway.”
“Name it.”
“How long have you been stationed here?”
“Eleven months.”
“Finance office the whole time?”
“Right.”
“You RA or US?”
Devers frowned. “What’s that?”
“Maybe they changed things,” Parker said. “It used to be, RA on your serial number meant you enlisted, US meant you were drafted.”
“Oh. That’s Army. There’s no draftees in the Air Force.”
Fusco said, “You enlisted?” He couldn’t believe it.
Devers grinned at him. “I’m no place getting shot at, am I?”
“What’s your term?” Parker asked him. “Four years.”
“How much to go?”
“Seven months. I did a year in the Aleutians before I came here.”
Parker said, “You want to hold this job up till you get out?”
“That’d be smart. I leave the office, then they get held up. They’d come looking for me.”
Parker nodded. He knew that was true, but he hadn’t known whether Devers would understand it or not. He said, “What about the way it is now? Only seven months to go.”
”There’s two short-timers in the office,” Devers said. “One’s getting out in three weeks, the other one in two months “
“So the law will look at them before they look at you.”
“That’s what I figure.”
Parker said, “But they will look at you.”
Devers nodded. “I figured that, too.”
“How long’ve you been working your dodge in the office?”
“What dodge?”
“The dodge you bought the Pontiac with.”
Devers grinned and shook his head. “I saved my money while I was in the Aleutians.”
“You got bank records to prove it?”
“Do I need them?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t keep it in the bank.”
“Where did you keep it?”
Devers was getting irritated despite himself, the smile was slipping slowly from his face. “What’s the point?” he said. “We’re talking about robbery, not embezzlement.”
“The law,” Parker told him. “They’ll check out everybody in your office. They’ll say, ‘There’s a kid with charge accounts in New York, expensive clothes, expensive car. How’d he do all that on Air Force pay?’ Then they look very closely at you, just to see what happens.”
Devers bit a knuckle, frowning, thinking. Finally he said, more as though it were a question than a statement, “I had my grandmother hold it?”
“Your grandmother? Why?”
“I always got along with her best,” Devers said. “My mother and father split up, I wouldn’t trust my mother with the prize from a Cracker Jack box. So I gave my money to my grandmother, and when I got back to the ZI she gave it back to me.”
Fusco said, “Back to the what?”
“The States,” Devers told him. “ZI. Zone of Interior.”
“Christ,” said Fusco.
Parker said, “Your grandmother’s going to cover for you?”
Devers grinned. “Guaranteed. She died in April.”
Parker said, “What if they check with your mother?”
“What my mother says is her business. She’d say something different from me just out of spite.”
“Would she?”
Devers hesitated. “Who am I talking to now? Parker or the law?”
“Does it matter?”
“No. No, you’re right. I’ve told you the straight story.”
Parker said, “You got a checking account?”
“Sure.”
“Let me see the checkbook.”
“Oh.” Devers nodded. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
Fusco said, “What’s the problem?”
“My deposits,” Devers said. “Like, I put in a hundred thirty last week, so where did it come from?”
Parker said, “Where did it come from?”
“Give me a minute,” Devers said.
Parker waited, but when Devers kept on concentrating he said, “You’re a sitting duck, Devers. You aren’t covered at all. They could land on you any time.”
“They’ve never had any reason to look me over.”
Parker said, “What if somebody else in the office tries something, and he’s clumsy? So they find out there’s something wrong, they start looking around, and you stick out like the Empire State Building.”
“God damn it.” Devers gnawed his cheek. “There’s got to be some way to cover.”
“Not the old lucky at cards routine,” Parker told him. “That way, you’ve got to get half a dozen other people to say yeah, they played cards with you, they lost to you. That’s too many people.”
“I know. I wouldn’t try that one anyway. Let me think about it while I make some breakfast.”
Parker finished his coffee. “All right, we’ll be back at twelve.”
“Fine.”
Parker got to his feet, and Fusco bounced up after him. They went out to the sunlight and got into Devers’ Pontiac. Fusco said, “Which way?”
“Gas station. We want gas and a roadmap.”
“Right.”
As they drove, Fusco said, “You were right about him. I mean, hitting the company.”
“The question is,” said Parker, “can he work out a cover.”
“He’s a smart boy, Parker.”
“Maybe.”
They came to a gas station and Fusco pulled to a stop beside the pumps. While the attendant pumped gas, Fusco went into the office and got a map. He brought it out and handed it to Parker, already folded to the area around Monequois.
They were in an out-of-the-way northern corner of New York State, close to the Canadian border, about fifteen miles west of Malone, north of Route 11. The nearest city of any size was called Massena, farther west, large enough to have a commercial airport. The border was about twelve miles to the north. Dannemora, the New York State penitentiary, was about forty miles to the east.
Fusco paid for the gas while Parker looked at the map. They drove out of the station and Parker said, “Let’s go north, toward the border.”
Fusco looked at him in surprise. “We won’t want to go crossing any borders, Parker.”
“I know that. But they’ll figure us to try, so let’s see what the road looks like.”
Fusco shrugged and went back to driving.
Monequois was a small town, overbalanced by the Air Force base just outside the town limits. There were more people on the base than in the town, so the influence showed up everywhere, in the names of bars and diners and motels, in the heavy preponderance of blue uniforms on the downtown streets, in the number of bars and movie houses. If the majority of people at the base had been permanent rather than transient, the effect on the town would have been even greater, but as it was the place was unmistakably a camp town.
They had to go through town and out past the air base to Route 95. It was scrub country out here, hilly but not mountainous, heavily forested. Very little of the base could be seen from the road, only a few drab slant-roofed buildings glimpsed through the trees and then the sudden complex busy structure of the main gate, like a stage set in the sunlight, with a dark blue billboard on one side giving, in gold letters, the names of the military organizations here, all done in incomprehensible abbreviations.
Fusco turned north on 95, went up to Bombay and took the unnumbered road up to Fort Covington. This was a smaller and less traveled road than to continue on to Massena or to take the bridge across the St Lawrence from Rooseveltown to Cornwall on the Canadian side.
They went through Fort Covington, but stopped on the other side before reaching the border. Parker said, “All right, let’s go back.”
It didn’t look good. No place had shown itself readily as a hideout. The forest was thick between the little towns, but it wasn’t empty. Most of the woods were posted against hunters, and the rest would be full of them. It didn’t look likely for them to come up here after the job and cool out somewhere short of the border.