how we’re gonna do it? No. Does she know who we are when we’re at home? No. The only thing she can do is blow the whistle on her brother, so instead of
He waited, watching her eyes, as she went from defiant to frightened to something like desperate. Then he said, “You want to talk to the cops, go ahead. Don’t worry about us. I gotta pack now. Goodbye.”
FOUR
1
Dalesia left the Trails End first, followed a few minutes later by McWhitney, and a few minutes after that by Parker, who drove out past the covered swimming pool just around the time Wendy Beckham sat down in the hospital room with her brother to try to figure out how to keep him out of trouble, now that Jake’s bad companions had announced they were not going to cancel their robbery.
“I’m sorry I told you,” Jake said. He was sulky, and getting bored in the hospital bed.
“Unless I can think of something to get you out of this,” Wendy told him, “so am I.”
And they sat together in grim silence. This was the first day Jake’s leg was out of the sling and he could sit up normally, but he wasn’t even allowed to enjoy that.
When Parker got to the old mill in West Ruudskill, Dalesia and McWhitney had already driven their cars across the old, littered concrete floor, lumpy and powdering beneath their tires as they circled around rusted pieces of machinery, rolls of wire, moldering stacks of cartons, until they’d reached as deep into the building as they could drive. From the broad open entrance at the other end of the place, long since stripped of its huge metal sliding doors, they were invisible back here.
Now they had nothing to do until Dalesia would drive off to meet Briggs at the motel at six. The inside of the old brick building was colder than the outside air, so they went out a squeaking side door to the remains of an old iron bench on a concrete platform over the stream. There they sat or paced, and saw that the white sky was not going to clear today. Heavy cloud cover or even rain could only be an advantage to them tonight.
Across the way they could occasionally, not often, hear a passing vehicle approach and cross the bridge, but where they were, the bushes and trees screened them from the road, and they could neither see nor be seen.
This was a dead time, nothing to do. Even McWhitney didn’t feel like talking, though at one point he did say, “What do we do if your friend Briggs doesn’t show up?”
“We go home,” Parker said.
McWhitney looked at him. He’d clearly been expecting some endorsement of Briggs. Not getting it, he realized he hadn’t needed it. So he nodded, and looked out at the quick stream, and said nothing else.
While they were out there, in the last of the day’s thin warmth, one hundred sixty miles to the east, in Chelsea, just north of Boston, behind an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence, four armored cars were finishing their prep. The company was Harbor Coin Services, and the cars had all been bought used and were then refurbished. They were all the International Navistar Armored Truck model 4700, more or less the standard of the industry. They had been manufactured in America in the late eighties or early nineties and were as good as ever. The reinforced metal box that was their reason for being did not weaken or grow old. The parts that did, the engines and transmissions and brakes and the rest of it, could be repaired or rebuilt or replaced, but the metal box remained solid.
Each car held a crew of three: a driver and a guard riding shotgun in the front compartment, and a guard with his own fold-down seat in the sealed-away rear compartment. A shatterproof glass panel between the two compartments could be slid open for communication, but otherwise the wall between front and rear sections was as thick and tough as the outer walls.
The four trucks, their bodies painted red and hoods black, went through the company car wash as the final step in their preparation for the night’s work, and then lined up behind the chain-link fence, awaiting departure time. The twelve men of their crews had an early dinner, without beer or wine, and got to Harbor Coin Services at six-thirty, ready to roll.
At six-thirty, Dalesia got into his Audi and maneuvered it back out of the building, on his way to meet Briggs, who was supposed to arrive at the motel at seven. He would be taking over Dalesia’s room, and then Dalesia would lead Briggs and his van back to the mill. An evening chill had settled in, so after Dalesia left, Parker and McWhitney moved back inside, sitting in the Dodge, Parker in front, McWhitney in back.
The four armored cars lumbered like costumed circus elephants out of the Harbor Coin secure area onto city streets until they reached the Northeast Expressway. They took that west, over the Mystic-Tobin bridge to Interstate 93, and then took 93 and 95 in the long loop south and west and north around Boston and up to Interstate 90, which would take them across the state. They couldn’t make much time in this early part of the drive, because the Boston area roads were full, but once they got west of Newton, the traffic thinned out enough so they could get into a line in the right lane and do a steady sixty-five while all the traffic around them snapped by at eighty.
Dalesia came back at ten to seven, trailed by a dark green Ford Econoline van with Florida plates. Briggs, when he got out of the van, looked as fussy and dissatisfied as ever, but offered no complaints beyond saying, “Long drive.” He was still neat, though, in white dress shirt open at the collar, a tan zippered cotton windbreaker hanging open, and dark gray work pants. He looked like an office-machine repairman.
Briggs and Dalesia and Parker had worked together some years before, in the failed job that had led Briggs to opt for retirement, but Briggs and McWhitney were now meeting for the first time. Dalesia made the introductions, and Briggs and McWhitney shook hands while eyeing each other with some skepticism. Both were generally dissatisfied people, in different ways, and couldn’t be expected to take to each other right away.
While Briggs and McWhitney were sizing each other up, Wendy Beckham was leaving the hospital, fretful, no closer than before to figuring out how to save her brother from his own carelessness. And Elaine Langen was on her way from home down to the former bank headquarters in Deer Hill. Her husband had been there all day, working with Bart Hosfeld, the professional who’d been hired to be in charge of the move, but Elaine only had to be there for the part she dreaded most, which was the farewell dinner.
The Deer Hill branch would continue as a bank, a part of Rutherford Combined Savings, but it would now be a Rutherford bank branch in the old-fashioned marble space of the bank building’s main floor. The former Deer Hill Bank offices upstairs would be rented to other concerns, one of which would pay for the right to rename the building after itself.
For tonight, however, a different kind of transition would be taking place. For tonight only, the marble hall of the Deer Hill Bank, with its high ceiling and glittering chandeliers installed back in the twenties, was going to be a banquet hall.
Caterers were even now wheeling in round tables, chairs, tablecloths, place settings for eighty, and a wheeled rostrum for speeches, and the branch manager’s office tonight would be the caterer’s base of operations, with warming ovens and portable refrigerators and many trays lined with canapes.
At eight tonight, old-line bank employees and important local citizens would gather in this original branch of Deer Hill Bank to say farewell to that bank and to watch it be eaten in one giant gulp by Rutherford Combined. Speeches would be made, maudlin and tedious. Promises would be made, never to be kept. Memories would be
