Breakout Page 6

  “Sometimes,” the volunteer said.

  “And today is one of those times. Do you want me to repeat the story,” Williams asked him, “or do you have it?”

  “Oh, I have it,” the volunteer said. He sounded very depressed. He said, “Please don’t kill them, they’re just working guys.”

  “Come on, Jim,” Williams said, “nobody’s gonna kill nobody, I already told you that. Because we’re all gonna do our part. So if we all do our part, why should there be any extra mess?”

  “More trouble for you,” the volunteer suggested.

  “Exactly! Do it now, Jim, while the story’s fresh in your mind. Pick up the phone.”

  The volunteer picked up the phone. Williams gently touched a finger to the back of the hand holding the phone, and the volunteer flinched. His voice softer than ever, Williams said, “But just remember, Jim. If you do anything at all except what I told you, anything at all, then I’m sorry. You’re an organ donor.”

  Jim did very well.

  17

  The guards were one white and one black, which was useful but not necessary. Their replacements wouldn’t be standing around for inspection.

  Williams crouched under the little desk, where he could come out fast into the volunteer’s back if it looked as though he were coming unstuck. Parker and Marcantoni waited around on the far side of the supplies closet, its one door opened out in front of them, the stacked cartons just a few feet away across the room.

  “It’s the top two there,” the volunteer said, pointing at the boxes, hanging back to hold the door ajar the way Williams had whispered just before the guards got here. He sounded nervous and shaky, but not too much so.

  “No problem,” the white guard said, and they moved forward, the white first, reaching for the top box, jerking upward with it in surprise when it didn’t carry the expected weight, saying, “This is—” He would have said “light,” but Parker and Marcantoni came boiling out from behind them, Parker swinging the file box at the white head, Marcantoni aiming at the black.

  The guards were big guys, and strong. Both went down to their knees when they were hit, but neither of them was out. Standing in the middle of the room, with more space to swing and aim, Parker and Marcantoni slammed those two heads again, and the guards dropped.

  Parker spun away as the volunteer recoiled, letting the hall door go, Williams coming fast out from under the desk to jam a book into the opening to keep the door from closing itself completely, which would automatically lock them in again. Pointing at the volunteer, voice low and fast, Parker said, “Give me your clothes.”

  The volunteer stared at Parker in owlish surprise. “But you’re a lot bigger than I am.”

  “Tom’s bigger,” Parker told him, “so it’s me.” He was already peeling off his jeans. “Come on, Jim.”

  Marcantoni and Williams ripped off their own jeans and stripped the guards, then put on their uniforms. Keeping his own T-shirt, Parker forced himself into the volunteer’s slacks, shirt, yellow tie and sports jacket. He looked like something from a silent comedy when he was done, but nobody would have a lot of time to study him.

  The volunteer stood there in his undershirt and shorts and socks and shoes, holding Parker’s jeans in both hands as though not sure what they were. The others were ready. Parker moved to his right, away from the others, and whispered, “Jim.”

  Jim turned his head, and Marcantoni cracked the lamp base across the back of his head. Parker broke his fall, to keep him from making a racket, while the other two each picked up one of the empty boxes, carrying it high as though it were full and heavy, obscuring whatever was ill-fitting about their uniforms or wrong about their faces. Parker followed, trusting the two large men in front of him to keep him from too close inspection.

  The empty hall. At the far end, as they approached, the door was buzzed open. Straight ahead was the conference room, where Inspector Turley sometimes lurked. To the right was the civilian office space. To the left was the parking lot.

  A volunteer lawyer and, later, two guards had walked in. Now the same seemed to come back out, doing what was expected of them, turning left after the first door. The two guards on duty, hardly noticing them at all, buzzed them through and they went out that final door to the parking lot.

  The door slid shut behind them. “Walk toward the gate,” Parker said.

  The big square blacktop area, surrounded by its high walls on three sides, was half full, haphazardly parked with Corrections buses and private cars. The gate, on the fourth side, a tall electronically run chainlink rectangle with razor wire along the top, was to their right. They walked toward it.

  Marcantoni said, “They should be here.” He sounded very tense, holding the box too tight, so that it might crumble in his hands.

  “They’ll wait to see us,” Parker said.

  They kept walking, not in a hurry. Parker was aware of guard towers up and behind them, of eyes casually on them but on them. They kept walking, diagonally toward the gate, the two guards carrying the big white boxes high like offerings, followed by the ill-dressed attorney. Beyond the gate were farmland and woods. No traffic.

  A blue-black van appeared in the road beyond the chain-link gate. It angled to the gate and jolted to a stop and honked, as the driver leaned out to shout into a speaker mounted on a metal pole out there. “I’m late, goddamit!” Parker heard Mackey yell, and saw that the van had STATE CORRECTIONS ID on its side door.

  Slow, ponderous, the gate began to slide open. Somebody behind them at the building began to yell. With the widening of the gate barely broad enough, the van nosed itself through, scraping against the fixed post on its left side.

  More shouting. The van was half in and half out, the gate jerking to a stop as the side door of the van slid open.

  “Now!” Parker yelled, and the three ran for the van, hurling away the boxes, a flurry of firecrackers going off behind them, Mackey already backing out as they dove headfirst through the side opening onto the metal floor.

  Struggling upward as the van jounced and its side door slammed shut, Parker stared out the meshed rear window as Mackey backed them in a tight U-turn, then jammed them forward. The gate back there was closing again, just as slow, just as certain, but too late. It stopped. Before it could open once more, to permit pursuit, Mackey had taken a forested curve on two wheels and Stoneveldt was out of sight.

  TWO

  1

  When Williams got his rump under him and hands braced on the floor, the van was leaping down a road and sharply around a left turn. There were six of them in here, he the only black; not good. The three who’d come with the van wore dark shirts and jackets and military-style billed caps, to give them the look of Corrections personnel. One of them drove, a second beside him, and the third sat in back with the escapees; he was the one who’d opened and shut the side door.

  There were no seats back here, only thin gray carpet over the metal floor. Williams and Kasper and Marcantoni and the fourth man sat cross-legged on the floor, holding on to whatever they could find, and the driver worked to put a lot of distance between them and Stoneveldt.

  After a minute, Williams noticed that the new guy back here was frowning at him, as though not sure what to do about him. Thinking, let’s work this out right away, Williams gave Kasper a flat look and waited. Kasper looked back at him, then told the new one, “We’re all traveling together.”

  The new one switched his gaze to Kasper, thought a second, then nodded. “Fine with me,” he said. “You’re Parker.”

  “And this is Williams.”

  “I’m Jack Angioni.” He nodded, accepting them both, then pointed his jaw at the passenger up front. “And that’s Phil Rolaski.”

  “Hold tight,” the driver said, and took them on a screaming right turn onto a twisty narrow blacktop road.

  Bracing himself against the driver’s seatback, Angioni said, “Most of the roads around here you can see from the prison. See for miles, with all these open pla
ins. We had to do a tricky route, to keep in the cover of the trees.”

  “It’s all flat and open around here,” the driver called from up front. “It’s disgusting, Parker, I don’t know why you ever came out here.”

  Kolaski, the heel of one hand pressed to the dashboard, half-turned to say, “We got one more turn for Mackey to try to kill us, and then we ditch this thing.”

  “Good,” Marcantoni said. “My bones don’t like this seat.”

  Kasper—or Parker, maybe—said, “Mackey, what about clothes?”

  “In the next cars,” the driver—Mackey—told him. “Hold on, here’s the turn Phil likes.”

  There was a tractor trailer coming the other way, that a lot of people would have waited for; in fact, the driver of the rig kept coming as though he thought Mackey would wait. But Mackey spun the wheel, accelerated hard, and shot leftward past the nose of the truck into another narrow road through forest. The driver of the truck bawled his airhorn at them, but the noise quickly fell away, and Kolaski half-turned again to say, “That was a little quicker than in the practice.”

  Mackey said, “I didn’t have that semi there in the practice.”

  Angioni said, “Ed, no stunts on the dirt road, okay? Dust, remember? You can see it rise up in the air, miles away.”

  “No dust,” Mackey promised, and tapped the brake a few times, slowing them before they made a gentle right turn onto rutted one-lane dirt.

  They moved more slowly now, but the jouncing was worse. They did half a mile like that, surrounded by slender-trunked trees, and then on their left was a body of water instead, gleaming in late-afternoon sun, a few feet below the road. Williams looked past Mackey and out the windshield and saw it was a good-size lake, with some sort of structure far ahead, where the shore curved.

  Parker said, “What is this?”

  “Swimming up there in the summer,” Angioni told him. “Nothing, this time of year.”

  Mackey braked to a stop. “Right here,” he said.

  They all climbed out of the van, stretching, everybody stiff. Williams saw that the road, which had been ten feet or so from the lake before this, had now curved closer, so the water was just there, below the side of the road.

  Mackey and Kolaski peeled off their hats and jackets, tossing them through open windows into the van. Then Mackey said, “Drop it any time. We’ll be back.” And he and Kolaski walked away down the dirt road toward the swimming place.

  Angioni had also stripped off his hat and jacket. “The water’s deep here,” he said. “A lot better than trying to clean this thing.”

  Williams and Marcantoni stripped off the upper parts of the uniforms, while Parker did the same with the lawyer’s jacket and tie and shirt, all the clothing tossed into the van. Then Angioni backed the van in a half-circle, drove it forward to the lakeside edge of the road, put it in Neutral, and climbed down.

  The four of them got behind the van and pushed, and lazily it rolled off the road, its rear end abruptly jumping upward, then sliding at an angle down and away. The van went into the water deliberately, almost reluctantly, air bubbling up from the open windows; then all at once it dropped below the level they could see, and there was only the water, still and black. Not even bubbles any more.

  Williams stepped back, behind the others watching the van sink, wondering if he was supposed to be next now. But they turned without menace, Parker looking away in the direction the other two had gone, while Marcantoni grinned and made a remark into the air about the parking of the van. So maybe it was going to be all right.

  Brandon Williams had grown used to this level of tension, never knowing exactly how to react to the people around him, who and what to watch for, where it was safe to put a foot. Part of it was skin color, but the rest was the life he’d lived, usually on the bent. He’d had square jobs, but they’d never lasted. He’d always known the jobs were beneath him, that he was the smartest man on the job site or the factory floor, but that it didn’t matter how smart he was, or how much he knew, or the different things he’d read. The knowledge would make him arrogant and angry, and sooner or later there’d be a fight, or he’d be fired.

  The people he mostly got along with were, like him, on the wrong side of the law. It wasn’t that they were smart, most of them, but that they kept to themselves. He got along with people who kept to themselves; that way, he could keep to himself, too.

  And to his own kind. The jobs he pulled, suburban banks, places like that, didn’t need a big gang; two or three men, usually. There’d been times when one of the crew was white, but not often.

  Twice in his life he’d taken falls, but both were minor, and he’d wound up spending a total of fifty-seven months inside. But this time was different.

  He’d known he was making a mistake when he’d agreed to team up with Eldon. The more you stayed away from junkies, the better off you’d be. But Maryenne had pleaded, had sworn Eldon was better now, just needed the kind of self-confidence he’d get if Williams agreed to work with him, and Williams had never been able to refuse his youngest sister, so when he went into that bank, Eldon was next to him. The third man, Haye, was in the car outside.

  Maryenne herself wasn’t a junkie, at least Williams hoped she wasn’t, but she sure hung out with the wrong people, and Eldon was still one of them. The kind of self-confidence he brought into the bank was not the kind he’d get from working with Williams but the kind he’d get from the stuff in his veins. There was no reason to start shooting, and just bad luck the off-duty cop was in there looking for a car loan.

  The result was, a guard and Eldon both dead and Williams and Haye both facing murder one. Escape was the only Plan B, and this guy Parker the only one in Stoneveldt with the determination and the friends on the outside to make it happen.

  Williams had been happy to stick with Parker in Stoneveldt, though he would have been more comfortable if his partner had been of color. But nobody of color in that place looked to be making a key to get out of there, and Parker did. So when Parker asked him to come along, he rode with the idea, though at first with every caution. Does this guy really want a partner, or does he want somebody to throw off the sled when the chase starts?

  Throughout their time together inside, Williams had watched the man he’d known then as Kasper, waiting for him to give himself away, and it never happened. It looked as though Parker was just a guy determined to get out of that place, who’d known he couldn’t do it on his own but needed a couple more guys in it with him, and who’d decided Williams should be part of the crew. No more, no less.

  Well, that was then, this was now. They were out, though still not many miles from Stoneveldt. But guards and gates and prison walls didn’t hold them apart any more. Williams watched Parker, thinking, I done my part, I been straight with you. I know you got me out of there, but I got you out of there, too, so what does that mean? Is this crew still together?

  He was dependent on Parker, whichever way he went. It wasn’t possible to ask anything, so all he could do was stand there and watch and wait, and know that, sooner or later, they would both be going to ground, but in very different places.

  While they all stood there, looking at the water where the van had been, nobody with anything else to say right now, here came two cars, both anonymous, a green Ford Taurus and a black Honda Accord. Mackey was first, at the wheel of the Taurus. Both cars stopped, and Angioni said, “You two ride with Ed, he knows where we’re going. See you there.”

  Parker slid into the front passenger seat, Williams into the back. On the seat was a little bundle of clothing. As Mackey drove them forward, Williams slipped out of his shoes and the prison guard’s pants, and put on instead gray chinos and a green patterned shirt. In front, Parker made a similar changeover.

  As they headed on down the dirt road, back the way they’d come in, the Honda following, Williams moved forward to put his forearms on the seatback behind the other two, and watch the road. No one said anything until after they’d reached the
blacktop and turned right, and then Parker said, “Did Tom tell you about this new job?”

  Mackey grinned. “My guess was,” he said, “you weren’t gonna like it, not at first. You and Brenda and me, we want to be in some other part of the world.”

  “That’s what makes sense,” Parker agreed.

  Williams supposed that was what made sense for him, too, the way things were. He was a local boy, who had made a little too good. As soon as possible, he should ease out to some other part of the country. It’s a big country, and a black boy can make himself hard to see.

  Mackey was saying, “It isn’t a bad job. We should be able to work it without problems, and at least we’ll get off this table top with a little cash profit.”

  Williams said, “This is a cash job? It’s tough to find real cash, I mean, enough to make it worthwhile.”

  “No, it’s jewelry,” Mackey told him. “But they’ve got a buyer, in New Orleans, he’ll drive up as soon as we do the job, we’ll have cash a day later.”

  Parker said, “From a jewelry store?”

  “It’s not a jewelry store,” Mackey said, “it’s a wholesaler. He’s the one sells to the jewelry stores, all around this flat part of the world here.”

  They were coming into the city now, with more traffic, with stop signs and traffic lights. Parker said, “This is going to be right in the middle of town.”

  “You know it,” Mackey said.

  “Will we go past it now?”

  “No, it’s more downtown. Where we’re headed now used to be a beer distributor. Just a few blocks up here.”

  This neighborhood was old commercial, little office buildings and manufacturing places and delivery outfits, mostly brick, all seedy. Evening was coming on, traffic moderate, mostly small trucks and vans. The Honda kept a steady distance behind them.