Parker sapped him as he stepped down. He and Skimm tied and gagged the driver and the second guard, while Handy started moving the sacks and boxes from the armoured car to the Dodge. Parker and Skimm tossed the trussed two into the good truck with the first guard, and then Parker locked the door while Skimm went to help Handy. When the door was locked, Parker helped finish the transfer from the armoured car to the Dodge.
Inside the diner, Alma walked across Benjy’s wet floor while Benjy glared at her, and looked out the window. She saw they were finishing, so she went through the kitchen and out the back door, slipping a paring knife into her purse.
Skimm got behind the wheel of the Dodge, and Parker and Handy walked back around to the Ford. The job had taken three minutes. Alma came out as Handy was changing his shirt, and said, “See you at the farmhouse.”
“Right,” said Handy. Parker was behind the wheel of the Ford and didn’t say anything.
The Dodge came around the corner of the building, its rear end low because of the weight in it now, and stopped. Skimm slid over, and Alma got behind the wheel. The Dodge shot off along the dirt road.
Handy finished changing his shirt and came around to get into the Ford on the passenger’s side. He tossed the blue shirt and the belt and holster and the garrison cap on the floor behind the front seat. Parker started the Ford and they went around the diner and paused near the two trucks and the armoured car.
Traffic went by, headed south, and then there was no traffic. When the traffic started again, Parker joined it and they went over the course with no trouble, catching all the lights. They went across the bridge and paid the fifty-cent toll at the Mission-style tool booth and went around the circle to 440. They felt easier now, because they were in a different state, but Parker still drove fast. There was a car far ahead of them, nothing behind them. One car went by in the other direction, towards the bridge.
When they got to the spot they’d chosen for the trap, Parker turned left through the gap in the mall. He shifted into neutral, put on the emergency brake, and got out of the car. In the truck were sunglasses and a red baseball cap and a red flat and a large metal sign that said, “Detour”, in black letters on a yellow background.
Parker put on the sunglasses and the baseball cap, and stuck the red flag in his back pocket. He looked both ways, but there was no traffic, so he crossed the road and found a dead branch on the other side. He used that to prop up the detour sign in the right-hand lane, but beyond the dead-end turnoff. In the meantime, Handy turned the Ford around so it was backed into the bushes and facing across the road. When Alma took the detour, he’d drive across and block her exit.
Parker lit a cigarette and waited. A pale green Volkswagen came along, and slowed when it saw Parker and the detour sign. Parker took out the red flat and motioned for the Volkswagen to go by in the passing lane. The Volkswagen did, with a young man driving and the girl beside him wearing a yellow bandana and reflecting sunglasses. She looked at Parker as they went by, and then twisted around to look at him some more through the rear window. “He looked tough.”
The young man looked at her, but because of the reflecting sunglasses he saw his own face instead of her eyes. But then she licked her upper lip, the top of her tongue moist and trembling, and he said, “Ah. A ditchdigger.”
Parker finished smoking his cigarette, and looked across at Handy. Handy was hunched at the wheel, the position of his body looking nervous. Parker began to wonder if Skimm had been in on the cross. If he had been, she wouldn’t be coming along this road. But it didn’t make sense that Skimm had been in it, it didn’t figure that way at all.
Another car came into sight way down the road and Parker stood up straighter. But when it came closer it turned out to be an old black Packard with a prim old woman at the wheel, and Parker motioned for her to go by in the passing lane. She stopped instead, and leaned out the right-hand window. “What seems to be the trouble, young man?”
“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 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 fifty, and when he got to the stream again Handy had already slashed one of the bags open and was dumping rolls of quarters out on to 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.