Breakout Page 7

  After another block, Parker said, “The reason they put us in front, it’s in case we change our mind.”

  Mackey laughed. “What would they do, do you think,” he asked, “if I suddenly hit a turn, took off?”

  “We’re not going to,” Parker said.

  Mackey was making Williams nervous. People who didn’t take serious things seriously always made him nervous. Junkies were like that. Mackey wasn’t a junkie, but he had the style. Williams, forearms on the seatback, looked at Mackey in the interior mirror. “I don’t think this is the time to do jokes,” he said.

  Mackey grinned in the mirror. “You tell me when,” he said.

  2

  Tom Marcantoni was pleased with the place Jack and Phil had found. In a low-rent neighborhood of factories and warehouses, no private homes, this two-story brick building was one huge open space inside, concrete-floored, big enough for three delivery trucks and who knew how many cases and barrels of beer. The company had been absorbed by a bigger distributor, making this building redundant, and no one had another use for it yet. Electric and water were still on, Jack and Phil had put cots in the offices upstairs, and so long as they were reasonably cautious they shouldn’t attract attention.

  Phil steered the Honda into the building, behind the Taurus, and both cars stopped. Jack jumped out to close the big overhead door, all the others climbed out and stretched, and Marcantoni got out at a more leisurely pace, grinning.

  He couldn’t help it. It was all back on track. To think, just a few days ago, he’d thought he was screwed forever, put away like a goldfish in a bowl.

  From the minute he’d gone inside, he’d been hoping and looking and waiting for a way to break that bowl, but Parker had been right: You couldn’t do it alone. So now he had these new partners, solid guys he could count on, and he still had the old score, waiting for him, downtown.

  It had taken a while to be sure Williams and Kasper—or Parker now, or whoever he was—would stand up. Williams had been easier for Angioni and Kolaski to check up on, being a local boy, and the word had come back that he was sound; for a nigger, very good. For anybody, in fact, very good; cool in the action and never too greedy.

  As for Parker, it had been easier for Kolaski to get a handle on his pal, Ed Mackey. Mackey had a good reputation back east, a lot like Williams, but Parker was a more shadowy figure, showing up here and there, solid but dangerous. The word was, after a while, that you could count on him but you had to be wary of him, too. If he got the idea you planned to cross him, he didn’t take prisoners.

  Well, that was all right. Marcantoni was also not too greedy, and smart enough not to make trouble inside his own crew. There was plenty in this job for everybody. He wouldn’t cross Parker, and Parker wouldn’t cross him, so neither of them had anything to worry about.

  And finally, the best recommendation for Parker was that Mackey would go out of his way for him, be the outside man when it came time to break out of Stoneveldt. Marcantoni would do that for Angioni and Kolaski, and they would for him—they’d just done it—so that was all the guarantee you needed.

  There was still a little of the old furniture in the building, including a long table and some folding chairs next to one of the long brick walls. Apparently, this was where the drivers would fill out their forms, get their requisitions and their routes. Now, the six of them crossed to this table, Jack Angioni leading the way for the new guys and Marcantoni just naturally taking his place at the head.

  When everybody was seated, he grinned around at them all and said, “I waited six years for this job, and it was beginning to look as though I was gonna have to wait sixty, but here we are. Ed, did these two fill you in?”

  “Halfway,” Ed Mackey said.

  “Okay, then, I’ll do it from the top.” Talking mostly to Parker and Williams, he said, “Six seven years ago, I was on parole, I had to have a day job, I worked construction here in town. Downtown there’s this big old armory building, brick, from Civil War days. The army still used it for like National Guard and shit until the sixties. Then it just sat there. Every once in a while, the city would borrow it and use the parade field in there—indoor, hardwood floor, you know what I mean—for a charity ball, something like that.”

  Ed Mackey said, “There’s old armories like that all over the country.”

  Marcantoni nodded. “And we got this one. And finally the government decided to turn a dollar on the thing, and they sold it to some local developers. It’s a big building, it’s a city block square. They put some high-ticket apartments on the upper floors, with views out over the city and the plains and all, but it was tough to know what to do with the main floor, where the parade field was. The outside walls were four feet thick, with little narrow deep windows, ready to repel an attack like if the Indians had tanks. You couldn’t put street-level shops in there, nobody wanted an apartment down in there, and even for a bank it was too grim.”

  Williams said, “I was in there sometimes when I was a kid. They used it for track and field. I remember, it was like a fort.”

  “It is a fort,” Marcantoni told him. “That’s the point. One of the developers was a guy named Henry Freed-man, got his money from his father’s wholesale jewelry business, which was on two floors of an office building downtown, upper floors for the security but a pain in the ass for the salesmen and the deliveries. So they worked it out, they’d lease part of the main floor of the armory to Freedman’s father, he’d move his wholesale business in there; on the street, but even more secure than the office building. The rest of the space they leased to some dance studio.”

  Parker said, “You worked on the refit.”

  “That’s just right,” Marcantoni said. “And I found the secret entrance.”

  That got the blank looks he’d anticipated. He said, “I looked it up afterward, that’s what they used to do. Like they’re getting ready for a siege, they put in a little back entrance nobody knows about.”

  Flat, Williams said, “A secret entrance.”

  “No, it’s true,” Marcantoni told him. “I had free time on the job there, I liked to poke around, see what was what, and there was this locked metal door in the basement, no knob, just a keyhole. I wondered, what’s back there? Maybe government gold, everybody forgot about it. So I managed a look at the blueprints in the site office, and there was no door there. It wasn’t on the plans.”

  Williams said, “Did you get it open?”

  “Sure. I took a bar down, and popped two bricks next to the door so I could pull it open, and I put my flashlight in there, and it was a tunnel, brick all around, like five feet wide, maybe six feet high, going straight out.”

  Williams said, “To where?”

  “A pile of trash, blocking it,” Marcantoni told him. “Part of the thing fell in some time, who knows when. So I put the door back, put the bricks back, and later I figured out where it had to go, if it was a straight line, and it had to go to the library across Indiana Avenue. That was the first public library here, federal money, built around the same time as the armory.”

  Parker said, “You looked over there.”

  “I had to break into the library,” Marcantoni said. “But libraries are not tough to break into. I went in three nights, and I finally found it, with storage shelves built up in front of it. They didn’t know anything about it either. I got through that door, and went along the tunnel as far as where it was broken in, and I don’t think there can be more than five or ten feet where it’s blocked. You know, they pulled up the trolley tracks along there maybe fifty years ago, it could be they screwed up the tunnel then, never knew they did it.”

  Parker said, “Your idea is, we go in there, clear it, have all night in the wholesaler’s.”

  Marcantoni grinned, he was so pleased with the whole thing. He said, “I told myself, wait at least five years, so nobody’s thinking about the crews did the makeover.”

  Williams said, “How do you know, when you’re pulling that rubble out of the
way, there won’t be some more come down? I don’t like the idea of tunnels that already fell in once.”

  “It’s only that one short part,” Marcantoni assured him. “My idea is, we’ll take two or three of those long tables from the reading room in the library, they’re not far away. We clear stuff, shove the tables ahead of us, we go on all fours under them, just that one part of the route. Anything else falls down, they’re sturdy tables, they’ll keep it clear.”

  Williams said, “Guns. Alarms.”

  “I can tell you about that,” Phil Kolaski said. “I was looking into it before Tom tripped. Because the building’s so solid, the only way into the jewelry place—”

  “The only way they think,” Marcantoni corrected.

  “Sure,” Kolaski agreed. “But that is what they think. The front door on the street, that’s all they worry about. There’s three separate entrances, for the jewelry operation, the dance studio, the apartments upstairs. They’re right next to each other, and there’s a doorman around the clock for the apartments. The dance studio just has a couple regular locks, you could go in that way except for the doorman. The jewelry operation has an alarmed front door plus a barred gate plus an articulated steel door comes down over the whole thing.”

  Williams said, “No motion sensors inside.”

  “They really don’t expect anybody inside,” Kolaski said. “Except through that front door. It looks solid.”

  There was a little pause and then Williams said, “What are the hours, in this library?”

  Marcantoni answered that one: “Sunday they close at five P.M.”

  Angioni said, “And Sunday, the jeweler isn’t open at all.”

  Williams said, “You want to do it this Sunday, or a week and a half from now?”

  “This Sunday,” Marcantoni said. “Who wants to hang around?”

  “Nobody,” Parker said.

  3

  When he heard the first news on his police scanner, Goody popped a call to Maryenne, cellphone to cellphone. “You home?”

  “No, I’m at the family center.”

  All the mamas read to their babies at the family center. “Read to him tomorrow,” Goody said. “I’ll meet you your place. I got news for you.”

  “What news?”

  “Tell ya when I see ya, lovey,” Goody said, and broke the connection, because this wasn’t the kind of news you’d talk about, chat away, back and forth, on a cellphone, where any fool in the world can be listening in.

  Goody shut off the scanner, started the Mercury, and drove away from the post where he’d been sitting the last hour and a half, one of the few cars moving in this miserable slum neighborhood. Three blocks later he made a left onto a one-way street and stopped next to the Land Rover parked at the left curb, where Buck sat in the backseat with his two bodyguards up front. The bodyguards eyeballed him, but they knew Goody, and looked down the street again instead.

  Goody lowered his window and Buck did the same thing on the other side, saying, “You leavin early? Somethin wrong back there?”

  “No, I got a family emergency,” Goody told him. He picked up the shopping bag from between his feet, with the merchandise and the money in it, and passed it over to Buck. “I’ll be back tomorrow, same as ever.”

  “I didn’t hear nothin on the scanners,” Buck said. He frowned like he was trying to work out what he should be suspicious about.

  “No, I got it on my cell,” Goody told him, and raised the phone from the seat to show it. “Family business,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

  Buck wouldn’t recognize that name, Brandon Williams, one of the three hardcases that had just bust out of Stoneveldt outside town, leaving behind them one dead inmate and a lot of aching heads. Buck wouldn’t know it, what had all those police dispatchers talking so fast, ordering this car that way, that car this way, but Goody would. And where else would old Brandon go now, when he had to lay as low as a footprint, except to his sister Maryenne? And where else would Goody go, to see the boy?

  Maryenne lived in a third floor back with her grandmother and her sister and her sister’s boyfriend and her baby Vernon and her sister’s two babies. Maryenne didn’t have a boyfriend right now that Goody knew of, so he thought he might move in for a while, see how that would play, make life easy while he waited for old Brandon.

  When he got there and knocked on the door—the street door downstairs wasn’t locked because the pushbuttons in the apartments hadn’t worked for thirty years—it was opened by a short heavy girl with a baby on her hip. “I’m Goody,” he told her. “Maryenne’s expecting me.”

  She gave him the look she probably gave every man since she got the baby—I know your type, keep your distance—and said, “If she’s expecting you, come on in.”

  He went on in, and the living room was full of them, young mamas and their babies. It looked as though Maryenne had brought her whole reading group from the family center, and maybe that was supposed to be a hint to Goody that she wasn’t of a mood for romance, but that was okay. He could be the friend of the family, work just as well, be there in moments of need, like when old Brandon showed his face.

  It wasn’t only that Maryenne had her whole reading group here, they’d all brought their books, too, and there they were, all over the room, on the couch and the chairs and the floor, babies in their laps, books in their hands, reading out loud. They were all quiet about it, but there sure were a lot of them, and it reminded him of the sound of the pigeons on the roof, in a big cage room that had been on top of one of the buildings where he’d lived when he was a kid, ten or eleven years ago. The guy that owned the pigeons was a bus driver, and he didn’t mind if Goody or some of the other kids came up there with him sometimes, hang out with the pigeons. He and his wife didn’t have any kids of their own, Goody remembered.

  Huh; maybe that was why he had the pigeons.

  Maryenne was in a chair by the switched-off TV set, Vernon in her lap. Vernon was about a year old now, and Goody couldn’t for the life of him see what the point was in mamas reading to babies that little that they didn’t know anything yet, but it was supposed to do some kind of good or another and everybody believed in it, so maybe so. Vernon was going to need all the help he could get anyway; his papa was Eldon, who’d got himself killed in that bank he was in with old Brandon. The one thing Goody definitely didn’t ever want Maryenne to know was that he’d been Eldon’s dealer, including on that final day.

  “Say there,” Goody said, and walked around a lot of mamas and babies to grin at Maryenne up close. She was a nice girl, a lot younger than old Brandon, he being their mama’s first and Maryenne being her last.

  She was nice, and she was young, but she also had that same look on her face as the one that had opened the door to him. “You got some kind of news, Goody?” she asked him.

  The news was going to be known by everybody in this room, and in this city, soon enough, but Goody wanted it to start off a special secret just between the two of them; the beginning of that closeness he’d need until old Brandon showed up. So he said, “Come on in the kitchen, Maryenne, let me tell you just you.”

  “There’s nothing you can’t tell me here,” she said. She still held the book up—thin, bright colors, called The Very Red Butterfly—like she wanted Goody done and gone so she could get back to reading, like she was in a hurry to know how the story would come out.

  He put a solemn face on and said, “I think you’d want me to tell this to just you, Maryenne.”

  So then she treated him a little more seriously, becoming worried, saying, “Is it something bad?”

  “You tell me. Come on, girl.”

  Fretful, she got to her feet, dropping the book on her chair, moving Vernon over onto her hip. He would have preferred to talk with her without Vernon, but he realized it would be pushing his luck to try for that, so he just led the way through the cooing mamas out the door, down the hall, and on down to the kitchen doorway, where he stopped, because the grandmother was in the
re, seated at the kitchen table, reading an astrology magazine.

  Goody turned back. “We’ll talk here,” he said, keeping his voice low, and moving so he’d be out of the grandmother’s sight, away from the doorway.

  Maryenne was burning with curiosity and worry: “What is it, Goody? Come on.”

  “Brandon,” he said. “Him and two other guys, they just bust outa the jail.”

  She stared at him. She didn’t seem to know how to react, except to stare at his face, as though to memorize it. Even Vernon stopped his usual gnawing on his fist to look at Goody, his expression thoughtful and a little skeptical.

  “Maryenne? You hear what I said?”

  “It was that man,” she said. She sounded awed.

  He frowned at her. “What man?”

  “Chili Greebs brought him around,” she said. Chili Greebs owned a bar not far from here, was in and out of different kinds of businesses. She said, “A white man. Chili said he was all right, and I was supposed to pass on a message to Brandon when I visited, that there was a white man in there with him named Kasper that he could trust.”

  “Huh,” Goody said.

  “But I thought it was just to help each other in there,” she said. “I didn’t know they meant this.”

  Goody said, “You know what it means, don’t you?”

  “They’re gonna kill him.” she whispered.

  “Waddaya mean, kill him?” Goody demanded. “That’s not what’s gonna happen.”

  “They’re gonna hunt him down,” she whispered, “and they’re gonna kill him.” Her eyes were filling.

  “No, but that’s why I come here,” Goody told her. “Cause we can help. You and me, with you and me on the case, they’re never gonna find him.”

  Finally he had her attention. Frowning, she said, “What do you mean, you and me?”

  “Where’s he gonna come?” Goody asked her. “He’s gonna need help now, lie low, get out of this state, probly get outa the whole country, get to Mexico, South America, somewhere. He can’t do that on his own, and who’s he gonna turn to? His favorite sister, that’s who. There’s no place else he’s gonna turn.”