Keep going, fellas, she thought, as she put the car in reverse and U-turned backward away from there. Keep going, and I’ll see you in a couple days.
Quickly the fires shrank and then disappeared from her mirror.
2
Parker spun the wheel hard right, pounded the brake, and the police car skewed around to a juddering stop, crossways on the road. He jumped out to the asphalt, looked over the car’s roof at the oncoming armored car, and put both arms up over his head, waving them back and forth to tell the driver to stop. He could see the driver plain in his dashboard lights, hunched so far forward over the wheel, his nose nearly touched the flat glass pane of the divided windshield. Beside him, the guard was shouting into a microphone with a spiral black cord.
The driver hit his brakes, pushing himself back from the window with one hand, then waved his own arms, asking Parker in dumb show what he was supposed to do next. Parker pointed at him and then at the roadside, telling him to get out of there, but the guy firmly shook his head. He knew he was supposed to stay with his vehicle.
But then he twisted around, staring backward, and so did the other guard, so the one in back must have seen Dalesia and McWhitney coming. Yes, now Parker did, too: the two running forward from where they’d left the Celebrity behind the armored car, Dalesia on the driver’s side, McWhitney on the other. Both now wore white hooded sweatshirts with the hood up over their heads and forward beside their faces, and both had on deeply black sunglasses with very large lenses. Both ran with the Colt Commandos held in front of their chests at port arms.
The driver put his engine in gear, and the armored car lurched forward as he labored the wheel around, hoping to drive around the police car in his way, but Dalesia stopped beside his door and fired twice from the hip directly into the doorlock. On the other side, McWhitney showed his weapon to the guard but didn’t fire it.
The armored car stopped. Dalesia tugged on the door he’d hit, and it eased open, and Dalesia went nuts, screaming,
“I’m coming! I’m coming! Here I come, take it easy, honest to God—”
As the driver and then the guard climbed out, both on the driver’s side, McWhitney ran back to deal with the third guard.
“Over there! Over there!”
Dalesia, jumping around as though he couldn’t control his legs, pointed at the dirt road that angled off from here, and the two guards moved toward it. Parker came around the back of the police car, carrying the handcuffs, as Dalesia made the two lie facedown on the road and McWhitney brought up the third, who’d come out of his compartment without trouble.
The three were handcuffed, and then Parker ran back to the police car, Dalesia to the armored car, and McWhitney to the Celebrity. In that order they drove away from there, only Parker showing headlights, the other two staying close, guided by his lights.
It was fifteen minutes to the factory, where the rented truck waited for them. Parker and McWhitney wiped down the cars they’d been driving, while Dalesia backed the armored car around to the open back of the truck. Then they looked to see what they had.
The interior of the armored car was less than two-thirds full, and a quarter of that was canvas bags, which would be coins. They didn’t want the coins. Dalesia, climbing up into the armored car as McWhitney shone a flashlight into it, lifted the lid off one of the boxes, and they all saw the neat stacks of green.
Dalesia laughed. “My favorite color,” he said, and put the lid back down on the box, and they started the transfer.
Dalesia, staying in the armored car, moved each box to the rear door, Parker lifted it over the space to the truck, and in the truck McWhitney stacked them all.
The whole operation took less than ten minutes. Then Dalesia got behind the wheel of the truck and said, “I’ll see you there.” He drove out, and that left only the illumination from the interior light of the rental Dodge, with the driver’s door open.
“We’ll give him a couple minutes,” Parker said.
They leaned against the side of the pickup, and McWhitney said, “I like that Carl-Gustaf. You point it at something, the thing stops.”
“Briggs earned his cut,” Parker said. “We can go now.”
But as they turned away, they heard a distant flapping sound, high and repetitive. They looked at each other, and Parker said, “Helicopter.”
“That was fast.”
“Everybody’s on alert,” Parker said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be two cars traveling together.”
McWhitney nodded. “You want me to go first?”
“You remember the way?”
“I’ll find it.”
McWhitney climbed into the pickup and drove out of the building. As he left, the flapping sound got louder, though never directly overhead, and then it got softer again, and then it faded out. When it was gone, Parker got into the Dodge and drove out to the black night, switching on his headlights once he was on the road.
He hadn’t gone far when the flapping sound came back, and this time he saw them: two long, narrow floodlight beams angled down from beneath two helicopters, one behind him near the scene of the robbery, the other up to his left, in case they’d continued northward.
The one from behind was coming this way. Parker drove steadily, and the finger of light illuminated trees and houses in his rearview mirror, closer and closer. He kept going, and the light approached him, then angled away to
