Looking at the windows, Dalesia said, “They showed movies down here. Close them, we’re gonna be fine.”
They slid all the plywood panels shut, and McWhitney said, “Shine your flash on a couple windows on that side, I’ll go up and see does anything show through.”
He was gone, up into the darkness, for about three minutes, while Parker shone the light at two of the plywood panels, and when he came back down, he said, “Dark as hell up there. Nothing showed.”
“Good,” Dalesia said.
“Also,” McWhitney said, “another chopper went by.”
“Not good.”
“You know it. I just got back inside before the light went right over this place.”
Dalesia said, “It did? We didn’t see a thing.”
“So that’s good, then,” McWhitney said, and looked around, saying, “Do you suppose the power still comes in here?”
“The panel’s back there, where the refrigerator used to be,” Dalesia said, and they went back to take a look. When they opened the circuit breaker box, the main switch at the bottom had been moved to Off, and all the circuit switches were also set at Off. A paper chart pasted to the inside of the metal door showed which breaker ran which circuit.
Dalesia studied the list. After a minute he said, “Rec. That would be rec room, right? Suppose there’s any law going by out there?”
McWhitney said, “I’ll go up. When I get there, you throw the switch. If I holler, switch it off again.”
“Good.”
Parker said, “Let’s make sure something’s on,” and he walked back to the stairs with McWhitney, where a set of four light switches was mounted on the wall. He flipped one of them up and said, “We’ll see what happens.”
“Give me a minute,” McWhitney said, and went away upstairs. Parker stayed by the light switches, and Dalesia, with Parker’s flashlight, stayed by the circuit breaker box.
McWhitney called down, “Try it now.”
Parker said to Dalesia, “He says, now.”
Dalesia moved first the main switch and then the circuit breaker switch marked “rec,” and fluorescents in the dropped ceiling, down at his end, began to sputter into life. Parker called up to McWhitney, “It’s on. Anything up there?”
“Nothing.” McWhitney came back down and said, “I had to close the door at the top of the stairs, some light comes up there. But now we’ll be fine.” Looking out at the rec room, he said, “Snug. We’re gonna be snug.”
Parker flipped on one more switch, so now they had pockets of light at both ends of the room. Dalesia came over to give Parker back his flashlight and to say, “No coffeemaker, though. In fact, no water.”
“We got bottled water and candy and stuff stashed out back,” McWhitney said. “And now we got light and a roof down here. Come on, we’ll get the stuff and bring it down, and then we’ll just wait it out till morning, see what we got then.”
They started for the stairs, Parker flicking on the flashlight, and Dalesia paused to say, “You know what we got here? It’s not just light and a roof. We’re in a church, Nels. What we got, we got sanctuary.”
4
Parker woke first. The original idea had been, they would come here and divvy the boxes from the truck right away, Dalesia taking Jake’s piece with him, Parker taking Briggs’s. They might sleep a while in the vehicles, but then they would leave early in the morning. McWhitney would drive the rental truck, because his name was on the paperwork, while Dalesia would take McWhitney’s pickup with his and McWhitney’s shares in it. Parker, finished, would head home, while McWhitney dropped off the truck at a nearby office of the rental company and then drove Dalesia to the municipal parking lot in Rutherford where the Audi had been left.
Except it wasn’t going to work like that. Law enforcement in recent years had come to expect an attack from somewhere outside the United States, that could hit anywhere at any time and strike any kind of target, and they’d geared up for it. Because of that, the few hours Parker and the other two had been counting on weren’t there.
They couldn’t leave this place, not yet, not with the money from the bank on them, but they couldn’t stay here either. Having electricity all by itself wasn’t enough. They needed food, they needed water, and they needed a better place to sleep than a wooden pew in the church, which was at least a little less hard and cold than the linoleum floor downstairs.
When Parker opened his eyes, lying on his back on the pew, pale early morning light gleamed in through the windows on the left side of the church, and darkness seemed to be drawn out through the windows on the right. His body stiff, he sat up and saw that Dalesia and McWhitney still slept on nearby pews. He got to his feet, stretched, bent, and then went to the front door. He opened it, made sure no traffic was going by, then went out, moved around to the rear of the church, relieved himself, and washed face and hands with bottled water. Far away, he heard the flap-flap, but then it faded.
Back inside the church, he went up to take a look at the choir loft, and saw that it had a round window at the back, above the front door. As he looked out through it, a state police car drove by. He watched it, then stepped back and looked at the space.
It was very cluttered. As wide as the church below, it was a narrow area with a railed opening at the front, above the main church. At one time, it had been lined with rows of wooden folding chairs. These, along with a lot of cardboard boxes of the same sort as the ones they’d taken from the bank, were now stacked up almost everywhere. Parker opened one of the boxes, and it was full of hymnals, heavy books with thick shiny paper and speckled dark red covers.
Was there anything to do with these boxes? They weren’t exactly like the ones from the bank, though very similar. It was a style of box with a separate cardboard top and fairly long sides that was sold to be used as storage. A dull white, they had handholds cut into the two narrow ends. When television showed U.S. marshals carrying evidence into federal courtrooms, they used these boxes.
