until October, that’s less than two weeks from now.”
“I think so, too,” she said.
“So when you know the date,” he told her, “you write just that, the day, seven or fifteen or whatever—”
“I get the idea.”
“You write just that on a piece of paper,” he said, “and fax it to this number. It’s somebody I know that’s not gonna ask me what it’s about. All I want you to do, get rid of the fax number afterwards.”
“I assume,” she said, “it’s a long-distance call. It will be on my bill.”
Parker said, “There are fax machines in your bank branches.”
Surprised, she said, “That’s true. All right, I can do it.”
Dalesia already had the number on a small slip of paper in his pocket. He handed it to her and said, “Don’t copy it anywhere.”
“Don’t insult me any more,” she said, and put the paper in her bag.
“Sorry,” Dalesia said.
Parker said, “You were gonna tell us about the armored cars.”
“Four of them. They’ll be coming that day from Boston,” she said. “There’ll be rooms for the drivers at the Green Man Motel outside Deer Hill for that night. They’ll get some sleep, then get up and get to the bank at one- thirty to start the move. We’ll have people from a moving company to do the heavy lifting. One decision that’s been made for sure is that the car with the cash will not be the first or the fourth, so it’ll be one of the two in the middle.”
Parker said, “When do you know which?”
“When they start to load.”
Parker shook his head. “That’s no good. The idea was, we’d know which armored car of the four, not which two of the four.”
Sounding dubious, she said, “I could fax that number, I suppose, that night, a two or a three.”
“Too late,” Dalesia said.
Parker said, “Are you going to be there, to watch the move?”
“For a while, at the start,” she said. “It’s interesting, it’s kind of fascinating, to make a move like that. But I don’t intend to stay up all night.”
Parker said, “You’ll leave before they finish loading.”
“That’s what I plan to do, yes.”
He took out of his pocket the map she’d given him, unfolded it onto the table. “Which way do you drive, to go home?”
“The same route, really, most of the way. I turn west before Rutherford, on Route Twenty-seven. It’s a little county road.”
“I see it,” Parker said, tracing the road with his finger. “Where do you meet a stop sign on that road?”
Again she made her bitter, unamused laugh. “Everywhere. I hit four of them on the way home.”
“How about Route Thirty-two here?”
“That’s one of them.”
“What time do you want to get there? One-thirty? Two?”
“No later than two. But you know, they’ll still be loading, back at the bank. I might not know whether it’s going to be the second or the third when they leave.”
“Those armored cars,” Parker told her, “are part of a fleet. They’ll have their own numbers on them. By the time you leave, you’ll know which one is getting the cash. You write the fleet number of that car on a piece of paper, you get to that intersection at two o’clock, and when you stop there a car will come the other way, with one of us in it. We stop, you hand the paper over, you drive home. Will your husband still be at the bank?”
“Until the bitter end, absolutely.”
“Then, when you get home, you phone him. He knows what time you left, he knows what time you got home, he knows you didn’t have time to stop and talk to anybody.”
Frowning, she said, “You really believe it, don’t you? That Jack will suspect
“Whether he does or not,” Parker said, “do you like to take risks?”
“To wind up in jail, you mean?” Her mouth twisted again. “Prison orange is not my color.”
“You’ll stop at the stop sign at two, you’ll call your husband when you get home.”
Dalesia said, “Just call us worrywarts.”
She looked at him, and could be seen to relax, just a bit. “Good cop, bad cop,” she said, and looked at Parker again. “Is there anything else?”
“No. We won’t see you again, except at the stop sign. Now, you want to leave here before we do; we’ll give you a few minutes.”
“Good.” She gathered up her bag, but paused before she got out of the booth. “You didn’t even buy me a cup of
