his right, hovering beside him a minute, so the people up there could study his car without blinding him. Then it swung on out to the front and moved ahead.
A few minutes later, as the two floodlights still walked like laser stilts across the night, Parker passed Dalesia in the truck, stopped and lightless beside a closed gas station. He was waiting for the helicopters to leave, knowing they’d be too interested in any truck-sized vehicle moving around in this area right now.
The light to the left disappeared first, and then the one straight ahead veered rightward and also disappeared. When Parker reached the church and drove around behind it, McWhitney paced back and forth just outside the lean-to, looking irritated. Parker opened his window and said, “What did you do with your pickup?”
Pointing farther back behind the church, McWhitney said, “There’s some trees back there.”
Parker steered that way, saw the pickup nosed in among some scrubby trees, and put the Dodge in the same area, though he doubted those trees would hide much in the daytime. Then he walked back to McWhitney, who said, “You see Nick?”
“Yeah, he was getting out of the way. He’ll be along.”
“I don’t like how fast they’re being,” McWhitney said.
3
Dalesia drove the truck in around the side of the church ten minutes later. With hand gestures, Parker and McWhitney guided him to maneuver the truck in deeply under the lean-to until its right side was an inch from the rear wall of the church. Then Dalesia climbed down from the cab and said, “We made a stir.”
“Don’t need it,” McWhitney said.
“No, we don’t,” Dalesia agreed. “But we got it. Let’s get the tarp over this thing.”
Earlier, they had stashed in here, hidden beneath creche figures, a gray canvas tarp that would not reflect the light. Now, with Parker holding a flashlight to guide them, Dalesia and McWhitney draped it over the top and hood and left side of the truck. Then Parker switched off the light, and McWhitney said, “Now we go in the church, right? Wait it out.”
Dalesia said, “Where’d you put your cars?”
“Back in the trees,” McWhitney told him.
“There’s too many choppers out,” Dalesia said. “Why not put them across the road, beside the house there?”
“It’s empty,” McWhitney objected. “The locals are gonna know they don’t belong.”
Parker said, “Nick’s right. From the helicopter, our cars look as though we’re trying to hide. Next to a house, they’re normal. Tomorrow, we’ll get them out of here.”
“Not in the morning, though,” Dalesia said. “This heat isn’t gonna go away for a while.”
McWhitney said, “I tell you what. I’ll put my pickup in front of the church, and Parker puts his car next to the house across the street. That way, during the day tomorrow, I’m a guy doing maintenance and he’s the real estate broker.”
Dalesia laughed. “I like your story lines,” he said. “Parker?”
“Sure.”
They stepped out from under the lean-to, but then, from far off to their right, they heard the flap-flap again, and moved back inside. The helicopter never came close, but the noise of it ricocheted from the ground for about three minutes, while that thin vertical light moved over there like a pendulum made of a fluorescent tube.
At last the helicopter moved on, out of sight and out of sound, and then they moved the cars, Parker leaving the Dodge in front of the separate garage at the end of the driveway on the left side of the house.
He was about to turn back when he saw headlights approaching from the right, the same direction they’d come from. He dropped to the ground beside the Dodge and watched a car with a bubble light on top, unlit, hurry by; SHERIFF could be faintly read on the door.
After the sheriff’s department car left, Parker stood and went back across the road, where Dalesia had the church front door open and called to him, “Come in over here.”
It was very dark inside the church. There were too many large windows down both sides to permit them to use a light. Parker shut the door behind himself and spoke into the dark: “That was a sheriff’s car.”
“Well, they’re out and about,” Dalesia said. “You got that flashlight?”
“For what?”
“There’s got to be a basement in here,” Dalesia told him. “For Boy Scout meetings, ladies’ auxiliary, AA.”
McWhitney said, “Maybe the coffeemaker’s still there.”
Parker held his fingers over the flashlight lens, switched it on, separated the first two fingers slightly, and by that faint light they moved around the church, which had wide straight lines of dark wood pews and a central aisle, a railing across the front, and beyond it a bare plaster wall. Whatever altar and decorations had once been there were gone.
A door to the left of the entrance opened on stairs up to a pocket choir loft and down to a U-turn a half flight below. “That’s what we want,” Dalesia said.
It was. They went down, past the U-turn in the stairs, and below the church was a long, low-ceilinged rectangular room with cream walls and a pale, worn linoleum floor. Shelves and counters filled the wall along the back, amid spaces where stove, refrigerator, and dishwasher had been. The double sink was still there, but when they twisted the faucets, nothing happened.
The most interesting part was the windows, narrow horizontal ones down both sides of the room, high up near the ceiling, that cranked out and up. To each window had been added two narrow wooden strips, attached to the wall above and below the window, with a sliding cream-painted sheet of thin plywood between that could be moved either to block the window or to clear it. The system looked crude and homemade, but effective.
