“Roadwork,” he answered.
“It certainly is about time!” She straightened again and drove off.
A little while after the Packard had disappeared at the far curve, Parker saw the Dodge coming. He knew it was the Dodge the second he saw it, and he motioned at Handy. Handy grinned, and let go of the wheel. He could relax now. The Dodge came closer, and Parker could see that Alma was alone in it, so he’d been right all the way down the line.
The Dodge was coming fast, too fast for someone who couldn’t afford to be stopped by the law, and Parker stepped out into the passing lane, and waved the red flag at her, while motioning with his other hand that she should turn right. The car sagged when she hit the brakes, and then she made the turn.
At the last minute, she must have recognized Parker or seen the Ford across the road, because she slammed on the brakes again and tried to get back to the highway, but she was already in too far and her left front fender crumpled into a tree. The Ford came across and turned, blocking the turnoff, and Handy ran over to the Dodge. He had the .38 in his hand, but when he got there the job was finished and Parker was putting the Sauer away again under his shirt. Alma had run only three steps from the car.
They opened the rear door, and Skimm was lying on the money with a paring knife in his chest, which was why she’d taken longer than they’d expected. They pulled him out and got to the money. They stayed behind the Dodge, and the Ford was on the other side of that, so the occasional cars going by didn’t bother them.
There were four metal boxes of bills and five bags of coins. Handy took care of the locks on the boxes, and they started to count. The bills were all bound in stacks of a hundred, so the counting didn’t take long. There was just over fifty-four thousand dollars in bills.
Parker took out six thousand, for the bankrolling, and they split the rest in half. Parker stowed his share in the suitcase he’d put in the back of the Ford; Handy put his back in two of the metal boxes and stashed them in the trunk of the Dodge. Then Parker picked up a bag of coins in each hand and walked deeper into the woods. The ground was mushy, and when he came to a stream he stopped and dropped the two bags on the ground. On the way back, he passed Handy carrying two more bags in.
Parker went back and got the fifth, and when he got to the stream again Handy had already slashed one of the bags open and was dumping rolls of quarters out onto the ground, scattering them around. Parker slit open another bag, this one containing rolls of pennies, and walked up the stream a ways, then started dumping. He stamped the rolls of coins into the ground and kicked them into the stream.
It took them a while to get all the coins scattered around. They didn’t want them, because they weren’t worth the trouble to carry. There was probably less than six hundred dollars in all the five bags put together, and that six hundred was more awkward to carry and more dangerous to dispose of than the entire fifty-four thousand in paper. Banks in the area would be on the alert for a stranger wanting to unload rolls of coins. Getting rid of one roll here and one roll there would be a full-time job. The police knew that, and all professional thieves knew it, and so coins were practically never a part of any boodle.
After they’d finished mining the whole area with rolls of coins, they slashed the canvas bags to ribbons and buried them. Then they went back to the cars. Parker had already moved the detour sign off the road and now he took it deeper into the woods and threw it away. Handy, meanwhile, started the Dodge; hitting the tree hadn’t hurt it much, just dented the fender and bumper. It was his getaway car, since he wasn’t going back to New Jersey with Parker.
They said so long to each other. “You can get in touch with me through Joe Sheer,” Parker said.
“Arnie La Pointe usually knows where I am,” Handy answered.
“Right.”
Parker turned the Ford around, and headed back for the bridge. In the rearview mirror, he saw the green Dodge come out of the turnoff and go up the road toward the ferry. He took a long way around to get to the farmhouse, not wanting to be too near the diner. He went around through New Brunswick, and it was nearly two o’clock before he got there.
He walked in and the first thing he saw was that the automatic was gone from the card table. The second thing he noticed was that the door to the fruit cellar was still barred. He backed out, looking all around him, and walked around the farmhouse until he came to the ragged hole in the outside wall where Stubbs had knocked the clapboard through and crawled out. He walked over to the dirt road and saw where Stubbs had walked on the soft clay between the tire tracks. He grimaced and went back to the farmhouse and saw that Stubbs had even taken time to shave.
He couldn’t wait one more day, thought Parker. He had to go complicate things again. He looked around at the empty slopes around the farmhouse, dotted with scrub. Where the hell have you got to, Stubbs? he thought. Where did you go, Stubbs?
Three
1
Darkness. Pitch-black darkness, and no sound other than the sounds you make yourself. Blackness and silence and absolute solitude, twenty-two hours a day for two weeks.
Stubbs was lucky. Up and down the country roads of California in the thirties, traveling with the migrant crop-pickers, fighting with the scabs and being stomped every once in a while in a back room by the deputies, had dulled Stubbs’ brain. Whole areas of emotion and understanding were muffled for him now, and his brain was no longer capable of complicated thoughts or abstract ideas, and that was lucky. He could stand up under the silent solitary darkness a lot better than a man with a whole brain.
He didn’t panic, and he didn’t talk to himself, and he didn’t concoct crazy complicated schemes that would have forced Parker to kill him. He’d butt his head against a wall like a rat in a maze. He stopped shaving and he stopped fighting back, because his brain was good enough to tell him there was no reason to shave and no reason to fight back. But other than that he didn’t do anything that a more sensitive man might have done.
Since he was starting with only part of a mind anyway, it was easier for Stubbs to revert to the animal. A man with a whole brain would panic first, do all the idiotic things that come from panic, and if he survived the panic then he would be reverted to the animal. For Stubbs it was simpler and more direct.
When an animal is enclosed, he concentrates on only one thing — getting out. And the first way he tries is by digging. Sometime after Parker left on the third day, Stubbs felt his way across the concrete floor to the nearest wall, and then crawled along the wall, feeling the concrete floor and the concrete blocks of the wall where they angled together, looking for a break in one or the other, but he couldn’t find a thing. Then he went around again, and this time he found a place where the floor had crumbled a little bit, just at the edge of the wall.
He tried to remember the place without being able to see it, and stumbled away to the broken-down shelves where the farmer’s wife had once kept her canning. He got a chunk of wood and went back and for a while he couldn’t find the tiny place where the floor had crumbled, but then he did. He poked at the broken place in the floor with the jagged end of the piece of wood, and for a long while he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere at all. It would have been easier if he could see what he was doing. Every once in a while he felt the broken place with his fingers, and a few more grains of concrete would brush away, and he’d poke at it some more.