To the bottom, where he made it to his feet again and found another impossibly heavy door. Once again he forced his way through, and came out to one side of the main waiting room. Two of its walls, to his left and ahead, were glass in the upper half, on his left showing the admissions desk, straight ahead a side view of the front entrance. There were people in their own glass-sided room beyond the admissions desk, but none looked over here.
Jake kept to the wall and moved slowly around the room till he reached the next heavy door, this one mostly glass. He pushed through it and moved to the entrance, which was a revolving door, and even that was heavier than it should have been.
But he made it, around and out, and slowly but steadily walked away into the cool night air. No stars, no cars, no people. Just Jake, getting away. Everything would be all right now.
As the armored car crews climbed into their vehicles, shutting the rear doors, Jack Langen stood beaming in self-satisfaction on the sidewalk. What a night, what a beautiful night. As he stood there, Bart Hosfeld from the security company came over with his own broad smile and said, “So far, it goes down like cream.”
Nodding at the last of the armored cars, Jack said, “That’s the only one I’m really worried about. All that commercial paper, bonds. What a nightmare to lose that.”
Bart said, “Really? Not the cash?”
“Well, the cash, too,” Jack agreed, “but not as much. From the minute we knew this move would take place, we’ve been cutting back the cash at this location, not adding to it. It’s still a lot, but not as much as it was.”
“Well, it’s all going fine,” Bart said. Looking around, he said, “I wanted to say good night to your good wife.”
“Elaine? She left hours ago. Before dinner ended.”
“Really? I could have sworn I saw her car, not an hour back.”
“She’s long since asleep,” Jack said, and smiled. He preferred to think of Elaine asleep.
As the line of armored cars moved away from the bank, preceded by one private security car and followed by another, Dalesia and McWhitney arrived in the Celebrity at the intersection. They saw the police car but went on by, started out the road to the right, stopped, and reversed around in a half turn on the shoulder of the road. The right side of the car now faced the intersection.
Sandra had noticed several police cars stopped along the route she’d taken north, but she’d reached Rutherford without seeing anything actually happen. She’d decided to retrace her steps south when she heard, from the scanner on the seat beside her, “They’re on their way.”
Oh, really? Sandra made a U-turn and headed fast toward Deer Hill.
Jack Langen and Bart Hosfeld and a few of the others who would have work to do tonight at the Rutherford end of the operation left in a short caravan of vehicles, taking a different route from the armored cars, faster in some ways and more direct, but through built-up areas that were too chancy for the transport of the bank’s assets. Driving along, listening to a Frank Sinatra CD, at moments even singing along, Jack thought to himself that today, tonight, he had at last completed the first step in separating himself from what he now liked to think of as the first Mrs. Jack Langen.
The first one bought me, he thought. The second one I’ll buy. “It was a very good year.”
As she waited for the red light to change at Hurley, Sandra saw one of the uniforms get out of the police car stopped there and go over to the pole containing the control panel for the traffic light. It switched to green before he got there, but he unlocked and opened the door anyway, as Sandra drove on.
It was happening now. Whatever it was, it was happening. She remembered the various police cars she’d seen along the way, and then she remembered the first one she’d seen, silent and dark behind a diner, and this time it struck her as strange. That would be just ahead now, wouldn’t it? All the other police cars tonight were out and obviously waiting for something. That one had been . . . hiding?
Ahead of her was the very intersection, and vehicles were just coming into it from the other direction. Sandra slowed when she saw what they were. First a white car with yellow and red words and symbols on its doors and hood and a warning light unlit on its roof. Then a large, square red box of an armored car, with a black hood. And another one behind it. And another.
This is it. She knew it; this was what was happening tonight. And was this what those three friends of Mike Harbin were involved with?
Sandra slowed almost to a stop. The first car passed through the intersection and continued, coming this way. The first armored car followed it across the intersection. Two more were behind it, in the intersection, and now a fourth was visible, behind the third.
Sandra was trying to see if there was a fifth armored car, and wondering what all these armored cars would be used for, when all at once flashes and explosions erupted from the darkness on the left, and then more explosions happened at the armored cars themselves. The whole engine compartment of the first one exploded into the air, raining chunks of black metal, and at the same time the same thing happened to the fourth in line, throwing the whole intersection into a sudden garish glare.
Sandra slammed on the brakes. She stared, amazed, as the lead car slued around, trying to get back, and men tumbled out of the lead armored car and, simultaneously, another flash and explosion on the left met an explosion onto the third armored car as lights suddenly flashed behind the diner, white lights and red lights, and, siren screaming, the police car came tearing out from behind the diner to slide to a stop next to the only armored car that hadn’t been hit.
An amplified voice from a loudspeaker in the police car ordered, “FOLLOW ME. DON’T STOP; FOLLOW ME.” And the police car veered away, the driver’s uniformed left arm out his window, urgently gesturing at the armored car to follow. Which it did, lurching rightward, then hurrying off after the cop and away from its maimed companions, while Sandra thought, that’s not right. There’s something wrong about that.
The lead escort car had given up trying to get around and past the burning wreckage of the first armored car, and now brown-uniformed men came crowding out of it, guns in their hands. The armored car crews, having escaped from their destroyed vehicles, wandered in a daze or sat on the asphalt in the middle of the intersection, holding their heads. Sandra watched it all, glaring and distorted by the light of the three flaming trucks, and suddenly thought, it’s a fake. “It’s a phony,” she said out loud. “The police car’s a phony!”
She had to tell them; she had to let them know. The story isn’t
