The volunteer stood there in his undershirt and shorts and socks and shoes, holding Parker’s jeans in both hands as though not sure what they were. The others were ready. Parker moved to his right, away from the others, and whispered, ‘Jim.’
Jim turned his head, and Marcantoni cracked the lamp base across the back of his head. Parker broke his fall, to keep him from making a racket, while the other two each picked up one of the empty boxes, carrying it high as though it were full and heavy, obscuring whatever was ill-fitting about their uniforms or wrong about their faces. Parker followed, trusting the two large men in front of him to keep him from too close inspection.
The empty hall. At the far end, as they approached, the door was buzzed open. Straight ahead was the conference room, where Inspector Turley sometimes lurked. To the right was the civilian office space. To the left was the parking lot.
A volunteer lawyer and, later, two guards had walked in. Now the same seemed to come back out, doing what was expected of them, turning left after the first door. The two guards on duty, hardly noticing them at all, buzzed them through and they went out that final door to the parking lot.
The door slid shut behind them. ‘Walk toward the gate,’ Parker said.
The big square blacktop area, surrounded by its high walls on three sides, was half full, haphazardly parked with Corrections buses and private cars. The gate, on the fourth side, a tall electronically run chain-link rectangle with razor wire along the top, was to their right. They walked toward it.
Marcantoni said, ‘They should be here.’ He sounded very tense, holding the box too tight, so that it might crumble in his hands.
‘They’ll wait to see us,’ Parker said.
They kept walking, not in a hurry. Parker was aware of guard towers up and behind them, of eyes casually on them but on them. They kept walking, diagonally toward the gate, the two guards carrying the big white boxes high like offerings, followed by the ill-dressed attorney. Beyond the gate were farmland and woods. No traffic.
A blue-black van appeared in the road beyond the chain-link gate. It angled to the gate and jolted to a stop and honked, as the driver leaned out to shout into a speaker mounted on a metal pole out there. ‘I’m late, goddamit!’ Parker heard Mackey yell, and saw that the van had STATE CORRECTIONS ID on its side door,
Slow, ponderous, the gate began to slide open. Somebody behind them at the building began to yell. With the widening of the gate barely broad enough, the van nosed itself through, scraping against the fixed post on its left side.
More shouting. The van was half in and half out, the gate jerking to a stop as the side door of the van slid open.
‘Now!’ Parker yelled, and the three ran for the van, hurling away the boxes, a flurry of firecrackers going off behind them, Mackey already backing out as they dove headfirst through the side opening on to the metal floor.
Struggling upward as the van jounced and its side door slammed shut, Parker stared out the meshed rear window as Mackey backed them in a tight U-turn, then jammed them forward. The gate back there was closing again, just as slow, just as certain, but too late. It stopped. Before it could open once more, to permit pursuit, Mackey had taken a forested curve on two wheels and Stoneveldt was out of sight.
TWO
1
When Williams got his rump under him and hands braced on the floor, the van was leaping down a road and sharply around a left turn. There were six of them in here, he the only black; not good. The three who’d come with the van wore dark shirts and jackets and military-style billed caps, to give them the look of Corrections personnel. One of them drove, a second beside him, and the third sat in back with the escapees; he was the one who’d opened and shut the side door.
There were no seats back here, only thin gray carpet over the metal floor. Williams and Kasper and Marcantoni and the fourth man sat cross-legged on the floor, holding on to whatever they could find, and the driver worked to put a lot of distance between them and Stoneveldt.
After a minute, Williams noticed that the new guy back here was frowning at him, as though not sure what to do about him. Thinking, let’s work this out right away, Williams gave Kasper a flat look and waited. Kasper looked back at him, then told the new one, ‘We’re all traveling together.’
The new one switched his gaze to Kasper, thought a second, then nodded. ‘Fine with me,’ he said. ‘You’re Parker.’
‘And this is Williams.’
‘I’m Jack Angioni.’ He nodded, accepting them both, then pointed his jaw at the passenger up front. ‘And that’s Phil Kolaski.’
‘Hold tight,’ the driver said, and took them on a screaming right turn on to a twisty narrow blacktop road.
Bracing himself against the driver’s seatback, Angioni said, ‘Most of the roads around here you can see from the prison. See for miles, with all these open plains. We had to do a tricky route, to keep in the cover of the trees.’
‘It’s all flat and open around here,’ the driver called from up front. ‘It’s disgusting, Parker, I don’t know why you ever came out here.’
Kolaski, the heel of one hand pressed to the dashboard, half-turned to say, ‘We got one more turn for Mackey to try to kill us, and then we ditch this thing.’
‘Good,’ Marcantoni said. ‘My bones don’t like this seat.’
Kasper or Parker, maybe said, ‘Mackey, what about clothes?’
‘In the next cars,’ the driver Mackey told him. ‘Hold on, here’s the turn Phil likes.’
There was a tractor trailer coming the other way, that a lot of people would have waited for; in fact, the driver of the rig kept coming as though he thought Mackey would wait. But Mackey spun the wheel, accelerated hard, and shot leftward past the nose of the truck into another narrow road through forest. The driver of the truck bawled his
