Breakout

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 Rolaski.”

“Hold tight,” the driver said, and took them on a screaming right turn onto 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 airhorn at them, but the noise quickly fell away, and Kolaski half-turned again to say, “That was a little quicker than in the practice.”

Mackey said, “I didn’t have that semi there in the practice.”

Angioni said, “Ed, no stunts on the dirt road, okay? Dust, remember? You can see it rise up in the air, miles away.”

“No dust,” Mackey promised, and tapped the brake a few times, slowing them before they made a gentle right turn onto rutted one-lane dirt.

They moved more slowly now, but the jouncing was worse. They did half a mile like that, surrounded by slender-trunked trees, and then on their left was a body of water instead, gleaming in late-afternoon sun, a few feet below the road. Williams looked past Mackey and out the windshield and saw it was a good-size lake, with some sort of structure far ahead, where the shore curved.

Parker said, “What is this?”

“Swimming up there in the summer,” Angioni told him. “Nothing, this time of year.”

Mackey braked to a stop. “Right here,” he said.

They all climbed out of the van, stretching, everybody stiff. Williams saw that the road, which had been ten feet or so from the lake before this, had now curved closer, so the water was just there, below the side of the road.

Mackey and Kolaski peeled off their hats and jackets, tossing them through open windows into the van. Then Mackey said, “Drop it any time. We’ll be back.” And he and Kolaski walked away down the dirt road toward the swimming place.

Angioni had also stripped off his hat and jacket. “The water’s deep here,” he said. “A lot better than trying to clean this thing.”

Williams and Marcantoni stripped off the upper parts of the uniforms, while Parker did the same with the lawyer’s jacket and tie and shirt, all the clothing tossed into the van. Then Angioni backed the van in a half-circle, drove it forward to the lakeside edge of the road, put it in Neutral, and climbed down.

The four of them got behind the van and pushed, and lazily it rolled off the road, its rear end abruptly jumping upward, then sliding at an angle down and away. The van went into the water deliberately, almost reluctantly, air bubbling up from the open windows; then all at once it dropped below the level they could see, and there was only the water, still and black. Not even bubbles any more.

Williams stepped back, behind the others watching the van sink, wondering if he was supposed to be next now. But they turned without menace, Parker looking away in the direction the other two had gone, while Marcantoni grinned and made a remark into the air about the parking of the van. So maybe it was going to be all right.

Brandon Williams had grown used to this level of tension, never knowing exactly how to react to the people around him, who and what to watch for, where it was safe to put a foot. Part of it was skin color, but the rest was the life he’d lived, usually on the bent. He’d had square jobs, but they’d never lasted. He’d always known the jobs were beneath him, that he was the smartest man on the job site or the factory floor, but that it didn’t matter how smart he was, or how much he knew, or the different things he’d read. The knowledge would make him arrogant and angry, and sooner or later there’d be a fight, or he’d be fired.

The people he mostly got along with were, like him, on the wrong side of the law. It wasn’t that they were smart, most of them, but that they kept to themselves. He got along with people who kept to themselves; that way, he could keep to himself, too.

And to his own kind. The jobs he pulled, suburban banks, places like that, didn’t need a big gang; two or three men, usually. There’d been times when one of the crew was white, but not often.

Twice in his life he’d taken falls, but both were minor, and he’d wound up spending a total of fifty-seven months inside. But this time was different.

He’d known he was making a mistake when he’d agreed to team up with Eldon. The more you stayed away from junkies, the better off you’d be. But Maryenne had pleaded, had sworn Eldon was better now, just needed the kind of self-confidence he’d get if Williams agreed to work with him, and Williams had never been able to refuse his youngest sister, so when he went into that bank, Eldon was next to him. The third man, Haye, was in the car outside.

Maryenne herself wasn’t a junkie, at least Williams hoped she wasn’t, but she sure hung out with the wrong people, and Eldon was still one of them. The kind of self-confidence he brought into the bank was not the kind he’d get from working with Williams but the kind he’d get from the stuff in his veins. There was no reason to start shooting, and just bad luck the off-duty cop was in there looking for a car loan.

The result was, a guard and Eldon both dead and Williams and Haye both facing murder one. Escape was the only Plan B, and this guy Parker the only one in Stoneveldt with the determination and the friends on the outside to make it happen.

Williams had been happy to stick with Parker in Stoneveldt, though he would have been more comfortable if his partner had been of color. But nobody of color in that place looked to be making a key to get out of there, and Parker did. So when Parker asked him to come along, he rode with the idea, though at first with every caution. Does this guy really want a partner, or does he want somebody to throw off the sled when the chase starts?

Throughout their time together inside, Williams had watched the man he’d known then as Kasper, waiting for him to give himself away, and it never happened. It looked as though Parker was just a guy determined to get out of that place, who’d known he couldn’t do it on his own but needed a couple more guys in it with him, and who’d decided Williams should be part of the crew. No more, no less.

Well, that was then, this was now. They were out, though still not many miles from Stoneveldt. But guards and gates and prison walls didn’t hold them apart any more. Williams watched Parker, thinking, I done my part, I been straight with you. I know you got me out of there, but I got you out of there, too, so what does that mean? Is this crew still together?

He was dependent on Parker, whichever way he went. It wasn’t possible to ask anything, so all he could do was stand there and watch and wait, and know that, sooner or later, they would both be going to ground, but in very different places.

While they all stood there, looking at the water where the van had been, nobody with anything else to say right now, here came two cars, both anonymous, a green Ford Taurus and a black Honda Accord. Mackey was first, at the wheel of the Taurus. Both cars stopped, and Angioni said, “You two ride with Ed, he knows where we’re going. See you there.”

Parker slid into the front passenger seat, Williams into the back. On the seat was a little bundle of clothing. As Mackey drove them forward, Williams slipped out of his shoes and the prison guard’s pants, and put on instead gray chinos and a green patterned shirt. In front, Parker made a similar changeover.

As they headed on down the dirt road, back the way they’d come in, the Honda following, Williams moved forward to put his forearms on the seatback behind the other two, and watch the road. No one said anything until after they’d reached the blacktop and turned right, and then Parker said, “Did Tom tell you about this new job?”

Mackey grinned. “My guess was,” he said, “you weren’t gonna like it, not at first. You and Brenda and me, we want to be in some other part of the world.”

“That’s what makes sense,” Parker agreed.

Williams supposed that was what made sense for him, too, the way things were. He was a local boy, who had made a little too good. As soon as possible, he should ease out to some other part of the country. It’s a big country, and a black boy can make himself hard to see.

Mackey was saying, “It isn’t a bad job. We should be able to work it without problems, and at least we’ll get off this table top with a little cash profit.”

Williams said, “This is a cash job? It’s tough to find real cash, I mean, enough to make it worthwhile.”

“No, it’s jewelry,” Mackey told him. “But they’ve got a buyer, in New Orleans, he’ll drive up as soon as we do the job, we’ll have cash a day later.”

Parker said, “From a jewelry store?”

“It’s not a jewelry store,” Mackey said, “it’s a wholesaler. He’s the one sells to the jewelry stores, all around this flat part of the world here.”

They were coming into the city now, with more traffic, with stop signs and traffic lights. Parker said, “This is going to be right in the middle of town.”

“You know it,” Mackey said.

“Will we go past it now?”

“No, it’s more downtown. Where we’re headed now used to be a beer distributor. Just a few blocks up here.”

This neighborhood was old commercial, little office buildings and manufacturing places and delivery outfits, mostly brick, all seedy. Evening was coming on, traffic moderate, mostly small trucks and vans. The Honda kept a steady distance behind them.

After another block, Parker said, “The reason they put us in front, it’s in case we change our mind.”

Mackey laughed. “What would they do, do you think,” he asked, “if I suddenly hit a turn, took off?”

“We’re not going to,” Parker said.

Mackey was making Williams nervous. People who didn’t take serious things seriously always made him nervous. Junkies were like that. Mackey wasn’t a junkie, but he had the style. Williams, forearms on the seatback, looked at Mackey in the interior mirror. “I don’t think this is the time to do jokes,” he said.

Mackey grinned in the mirror. “You tell me when,” he said.

2

Tom Marcantoni was pleased with the place Jack and Phil had found. In a low-rent neighborhood of factories and warehouses, no private homes, this two-story brick building was one huge open space inside, concrete-floored, big enough for three delivery trucks and who knew how many cases and barrels of beer. The company had been absorbed by a bigger distributor, making this building redundant, and no one had another use for it yet. Electric and water were still on, Jack and Phil had put cots in the offices upstairs, and so long as they were reasonably cautious they shouldn’t attract attention.

Phil steered the Honda into the building, behind the Taurus, and both cars stopped. Jack jumped out to close the big overhead door, all the others climbed out and stretched, and Marcantoni got out at a more leisurely pace, grinning.

He couldn’t help it. It was all back on track. To think, just a few days ago, he’d thought he was screwed forever, put away like a goldfish in a bowl.

From the minute he’d gone inside, he’d been hoping and looking and waiting for a way to break that bowl, but Parker had been right: You couldn’t do it alone. So now he had these new partners, solid guys he could count on, and he still had the old score, waiting for him, downtown.

It had taken a while to be sure Williams and Kasper — or Parker now, or whoever he was — would stand up. Williams had been easier for Angioni and Kolaski to check up on, being a local boy, and the word had come back that he was sound; for a nigger, very good. For anybody, in fact, very good; cool in the action and never too greedy.

As for Parker, it had been easier for Kolaski to get a handle on his pal, Ed Mackey. Mackey had a good reputation back east, a lot like Williams, but Parker was a more shadowy figure, showing up here and there, solid but dangerous. The word was, after a while, that you could count on him but you had to be wary of him, too. If he got the idea you planned to cross him, he didn’t take prisoners.

Well, that was all right. Marcantoni was also not too greedy, and smart enough not to make trouble inside his own crew. There was plenty in this job for everybody. He wouldn’t cross Parker, and Parker wouldn’t cross him, so neither of them had anything to worry about.

And finally, the best recommendation for Parker was that Mackey would go out of his way for him, be the outside man when it came time to break out of Stoneveldt. Marcantoni would do that for Angioni and Kolaski, and they would for him — they’d just done it — so that was all the guarantee you needed.

There was still a little of the old furniture in the building, including a long table and some folding chairs next to one of the long brick walls. Apparently, this was where the drivers would fill out their forms, get their requisitions and their routes. Now, the six of them crossed to this table, Jack Angioni leading the way for the new guys and Marcantoni just naturally taking his place at the head.

When everybody was seated, he grinned around at them all and said, “I waited six years for this job, and it was beginning to look as though I was gonna have to wait sixty, but here we are. Ed, did these two fill you in?”

“Halfway,” Ed Mackey said.

“Okay, then, I’ll do it from the top.” Talking mostly to Parker and Williams, he said, “Six seven years ago, I was on parole, I had to have a day job, I worked construction here in town. Downtown there’s this big old armory building, brick, from Civil War days. The army still used it for like National Guard and shit until the sixties. Then it just sat there. Every once in a while, the city would borrow it and use the parade field in there — indoor, hardwood floor, you know what I mean — for a charity ball, something like that.”

Ed Mackey said, “There’s old armories like that all over the country.”

Marcantoni nodded. “And we got this one. And finally the government decided to turn a dollar on the thing, and they sold it to some local developers. It’s a big building, it’s a city block square. They put some high-ticket apartments on the upper floors, with views out over the city and the plains and all, but it was tough to know what to do with the main floor, where the parade field was. The outside walls were four feet thick, with little narrow deep windows, ready to repel an attack like if the Indians had tanks. You couldn’t put street-level shops in there, nobody wanted an apartment down in there, and even for a bank it was too grim.”

Williams said, “I was in there sometimes when I was a kid. They used it for track and field. I remember, it was like a fort.”

“It is a fort,” Marcantoni told him. “That’s the point. One of the developers was a guy named Henry Freed-man, got his money from his father’s wholesale jewelry business, which was on two floors of an office building downtown, upper floors for the security but a pain in the ass for the salesmen and the deliveries. So they worked it out, they’d lease part of the main floor of the armory to Freedman’s father, he’d move his wholesale business in there; on the street, but even more secure than the office building. The rest of the space they leased to some dance studio.”

Parker said, “You worked on the refit.”

“That’s just right,” Marcantoni said. “And I found the secret entrance.”

That got the blank looks he’d anticipated. He said, “I looked it up afterward, that’s what they used to do. Like they’re getting ready for a siege, they put in a little back entrance nobody knows about.”

Flat, Williams said, “A secret entrance.”

“No, it’s true,” Marcantoni told him. “I had free time on the job there, I liked to poke around, see what was what, and there was this locked metal door in the basement, no knob, just a keyhole. I wondered, what’s back there? Maybe government gold, everybody forgot about it. So I managed a look at the blueprints in the site office, and there was no door there. It wasn’t on the plans.”

Williams said, “Did you get it open?”

“Sure. I took a bar down, and popped two bricks next to the door so I could pull it open, and I put my flashlight in there, and it was a tunnel, brick all around, like five feet wide, maybe six feet high, going straight out.”

Williams said, “To where?”

“A pile of trash, blocking it,” Marcantoni told him. “Part of the thing fell in some time, who knows when. So I put the door back, put the bricks back, and later I figured out where it had to go, if it was a straight line, and it had to go to the library across Indiana Avenue. That was the first public library here, federal money, built around the same time as the armory.”

Parker said, “You looked over there.”

“I had to break into the library,” Marcantoni said. “But libraries are not tough to break into. I went in three nights, and I finally found it, with storage shelves built up in front of it. They didn’t know anything about it either. I got through that door, and went along the tunnel as far as where it was broken in, and I don’t think there can be more than five or ten feet where it’s blocked. You know, they pulled up the trolley tracks along there maybe fifty years ago, it could be they screwed up the tunnel then, never knew they did it.”

Parker said, “Your idea is, we go in there, clear it, have all night in the wholesaler’s.”

Marcantoni grinned, he was so pleased with the whole thing. He said, “I told myself, wait at least five years, so nobody’s thinking about the crews did the makeover.”

Williams said, “How do you know, when you’re pulling that rubble out of the way, there won’t be some more come down? I don’t like the idea of tunnels that already fell in once.”

“It’s only that one short part,” Marcantoni assured him. “My idea is, we’ll take two or three of those long tables from the reading room in the library, they’re not far away. We clear stuff, shove the tables ahead of us, we go on all fours under them, just that one part of the route. Anything else falls down, they’re sturdy tables, they’ll keep it clear.”

Williams said, “Guns. Alarms.”

“I can tell you about that,” Phil Kolaski said. “I was looking into it before Tom tripped. Because the building’s so solid, the only way into the jewelry place—”

“The only way they think,” Marcantoni corrected.

“Sure,” Kolaski agreed. “But that is what they think. The front door on the street, that’s all they worry about. There’s three separate entrances, for the jewelry operation, the dance studio, the apartments upstairs. They’re right next to each other, and there’s a doorman around the clock for the apartments. The dance studio just has a couple regular locks, you could go in that way except for the doorman. The jewelry operation has an alarmed front door plus a barred gate plus an articulated steel door comes down over the whole thing.”

Williams said, “No motion sensors inside.”

“They really don’t expect anybody inside,” Kolaski said. “Except through that front door. It looks solid.”

There was a little pause and then Williams said, “What are the hours, in this library?”

Marcantoni answered that one: “Sunday they close at five P.M.”

Angioni said, “And Sunday, the jeweler isn’t open at all.”

Williams said, “You want to do it this Sunday, or a week and a half from now?”

“This Sunday,” Marcantoni said. “Who wants to hang around?”

“Nobody,” Parker said.

3

When he heard the first news on his police scanner, Goody popped a call to Maryenne, cellphone to cellphone. “You home?”

“No, I’m at the family center.”

All the mamas read to their babies at the family center. “Read to him tomorrow,” Goody said. “I’ll meet you your place. I got news for you.”

“What news?”

“Tell ya when I see ya, lovey,” Goody said, and broke the connection, because this wasn’t the kind of news you’d talk about, chat away, back and forth, on a cellphone, where any fool in the world can be listening in.

Goody shut off the scanner, started the Mercury, and drove away from the post where he’d been sitting the last hour and a half, one of the few cars moving in this miserable slum neighborhood. Three blocks later he made a left onto a one-way street and stopped next to the Land Rover parked at the left curb, where Buck sat in the backseat with his two bodyguards up front. The bodyguards eyeballed him, but they knew Goody, and looked down the street again instead.

Goody lowered his window and Buck did the same thing on the other side, saying, “You leavin early? Somethin wrong back there?”

“No, I got a family emergency,” Goody told him. He picked up the shopping bag from between his feet, with the merchandise and the money in it, and passed it over to Buck. “I’ll be back tomorrow, same as ever.”

“I didn’t hear nothin on the scanners,” Buck said. He frowned like he was trying to work out what he should be suspicious about.

“No, I got it on my cell,” Goody told him, and raised the phone from the seat to show it. “Family business,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

Buck wouldn’t recognize that name, Brandon Williams, one of the three hardcases that had just bust out of Stoneveldt outside town, leaving behind them one dead inmate and a lot of aching heads. Buck wouldn’t know it, what had all those police dispatchers talking so fast, ordering this car that way, that car this way, but Goody would. And where else would old Brandon go now, when he had to lay as low as a footprint, except to his sister Maryenne? And where else would Goody go, to see the boy?

Maryenne lived in a third floor back with her grandmother and her sister and her sister’s boyfriend and her baby Vernon and her sister’s two babies. Maryenne didn’t have a boyfriend right now that Goody knew of, so he thought he might move in for a while, see how that would play, make life easy while he waited for old Brandon.

When he got there and knocked on the door — the street door downstairs wasn’t locked because the pushbuttons in the apartments hadn’t worked for thirty years — it was opened by a short heavy girl with a baby on her hip. “I’m Goody,” he told her. “Maryenne’s expecting me.”

She gave him the look she probably gave every man since she got the baby — I know your type, keep your distance — and said, “If she’s expecting you, come on in.”

He went on in, and the living room was full of them, young mamas and their babies. It looked as though Maryenne had brought her whole reading group from the family center, and maybe that was supposed to be a hint to Goody that she wasn’t of a mood for romance, but that was okay. He could be the friend of the family, work just as well, be there in moments of need, like when old Brandon showed his face.

It wasn’t only that Maryenne had her whole reading group here, they’d all brought their books, too, and there they were, all over the room, on the couch and the chairs and the floor, babies in their laps, books in their hands, reading out loud. They were all quiet about it, but there sure were a lot of them, and it reminded him of the sound of the pigeons on the roof, in a big cage room that had been on top of one of the buildings where he’d lived when he was a kid, ten or eleven years ago. The guy that owned the pigeons was a bus driver, and he didn’t mind if Goody or some of the other kids came up there with him sometimes, hang out with the pigeons. He and his wife didn’t have any kids of their own, Goody remembered.

Huh; maybe that was why he had the pigeons.

Maryenne was in a chair by the switched-off TV set, Vernon in her lap. Vernon was about a year old now, and Goody couldn’t for the life of him see what the point was in mamas reading to babies that little that they didn’t know anything yet, but it was supposed to do some kind of good or another and everybody believed in it, so maybe so. Vernon was going to need all the help he could get anyway; his papa was Eldon, who’d got himself killed in that bank he was in with old Brandon. The one thing Goody definitely didn’t ever want Maryenne to know was that he’d been Eldon’s dealer, including on that final day.

“Say there,” Goody said, and walked around a lot of mamas and babies to grin at Maryenne up close. She was a nice girl, a lot younger than old Brandon, he being their mama’s first and Maryenne being her last.

She was nice, and she was young, but she also had that same look on her face as the one that had opened the door to him. “You got some kind of news, Goody?” she asked him.

The news was going to be known by everybody in this room, and in this city, soon enough, but Goody wanted it to start off a special secret just between the two of them; the beginning of that closeness he’d need until old Brandon showed up. So he said, “Come on in the kitchen, Maryenne, let me tell you just you.”

“There’s nothing you can’t tell me here,” she said. She still held the book up — thin, bright colors, called The Very Red Butterfly — like she wanted Goody done and gone so she could get back to reading, like she was in a hurry to know how the story would come out.

He put a solemn face on and said, “I think you’d want me to tell this to just you, Maryenne.”

So then she treated him a little more seriously, becoming worried, saying, “Is it something bad?”

“You tell me. Come on, girl.”

Fretful, she got to her feet, dropping the book on her chair, moving Vernon over onto her hip. He would have preferred to talk with her without Vernon, but he realized it would be pushing his luck to try for that, so he just led the way through the cooing mamas out the door, down the hall, and on down to the kitchen doorway, where he stopped, because the grandmother was in there, seated at the kitchen table, reading an astrology magazine.

Goody turned back. “We’ll talk here,” he said, keeping his voice low, and moving so he’d be out of the grandmother’s sight, away from the doorway.

Maryenne was burning with curiosity and worry: “What is it, Goody? Come on.”

“Brandon,” he said. “Him and two other guys, they just bust outa the jail.”

She stared at him. She didn’t seem to know how to react, except to stare at his face, as though to memorize it. Even Vernon stopped his usual gnawing on his fist to look at Goody, his expression thoughtful and a little skeptical.

“Maryenne? You hear what I said?”

“It was that man,” she said. She sounded awed.

He frowned at her. “What man?”

“Chili Greebs brought him around,” she said. Chili Greebs owned a bar not far from here, was in and out of different kinds of businesses. She said, “A white man. Chili said he was all right, and I was supposed to pass on a message to Brandon when I visited, that there was a white man in there with him named Kasper that he could trust.”

“Huh,” Goody said.

“But I thought it was just to help each other in there,” she said. “I didn’t know they meant this.”

Goody said, “You know what it means, don’t you?”

“They’re gonna kill him.” she whispered.

“Waddaya mean, kill him?” Goody demanded. “That’s not what’s gonna happen.”

“They’re gonna hunt him down,” she whispered, “and they’re gonna kill him.” Her eyes were filling.

“No, but that’s why I come here,” Goody told her. “Cause we can help. You and me, with you and me on the case, they’re never gonna find him.”

Finally he had her attention. Frowning, she said, “What do you mean, you and me?”

“Where’s he gonna come?” Goody asked her. “He’s gonna need help now, lie low, get out of this state, probly get outa the whole country, get to Mexico, South America, somewhere. He can’t do that on his own, and who’s he gonna turn to? His favorite sister, that’s who. There’s no place else he’s gonna turn.”

She thought about it. “He’ll call,” she decided. “He won’t come here, because they’d catch him, but he’ll call.”

“And that’s when,” Goody said, “you send him to me.”

“To you? Why to you?”

“Don’t you think the cops’re gonna be keepin an eye on you? Don’t you think they know who you are, where you are? But you’re right, Brandon’s gonna call, and when he does, you send him to me, cause the cops don’t know about me, and we can work it out together.”

She was frowning again. She said, “Why you wanna do that?”

“Cause I always liked old Brandon,” he told her. “And I always liked you. And I was playing with my police scanners, and I heard the first report, so I know I’m ahead of the news here, and you and me can plot and plan before anybody else even knows anything.”

She nodded, thinking about it. Then she said, “It’s for sure, now. He broke out.”

“It’ll be on the news,” he told her, “the first anybody else knows about it. It’ll be on the news. What time is it? Half an hour, it’ll be on the news.”

“Poor Brandon,” she said.

“He’ll call you, you know he will.”

Slowly she nodded. “Yes, he will.”

“And you send him to me. Maryenne? You send him to me.”

“All right,” she said.

“Good.”

“Thank you, Goody,” she said.

“Oh, I knew I had to do it,” he assured her. “Soon as I heard that police report, I knew I had to be on hand, I had to help old Brandon somehow.”

Yes, and by then, for certain sure, there would be a very nice reward out on good old Brandon’s head.

4

The class was called Low Impact Rhythm and was theoretically a preliminary for classes in ballroom dancing, but was actually merely an exercise class with slower music. In addition to Brenda, there were eleven other students here this evening, nine women and two men, and of them all, if she did say so herself, she was the youngest, the fittest, and the cutest. She didn’t need to take some flab off her ass, like that one over there, or learn not to move like an elephant on downers, like that one over there. Watching herself in the side-wall mirror, echoing herself echoing the instructor, a whippet-thin black man in black leotards, she knew she was already at what this class was supposed to move you toward.

The mirror was twenty feet long and eight feet high in this long room, with barres on the end walls, a piano (ignored) at one side, and soundproofing in the ceiling to keep the reverb down. Brenda was interested in the mirror not only for what she saw in it, her own cute ass, firm body, rhythmic movements, but also for what she couldn’t see beyond it.

This hardwood floor she and the group were step-step-stepping on was part of the parade field from the building’s military days. The field, she knew, continued on under the mirrored wall. Over there, imaginable in her mind’s eye, was the jewelry wholesaler, like something out of the Arabian Nights. Another reason to smile at the mirror.

When she traveled with Ed Mackey, Brenda called herself Brenda Fawcett. Since she seemed to travel with Ed all the time, she might as well be Brenda Fawcett, so a while ago, for a birthday present, Ed had given her various kinds of ID — driver’s licenses from different states, credit cards she shouldn’t try to use — all in that name. What made it a real present was, all the IDs made her a year younger.

She’d called herself Brenda Fawcett here at the Johnson-Ross Studio of the Dance out of habit. She wouldn’t be flashing ID here because she was paying for her lessons — this was the third — in cash, explaining to the receptionist at the initial interview, showing a smile that was both confidential and sheepish, “I don’t want my husband to know. Not yet.”

The girl smiled, charmed by her. “Oh, that’s nice,” she said. “You’re not the first like that. It’s such a sweet surprise, I think.”

“Me, too,” Brenda said.

One of the nice things about this low-impact routine, you could have a quiet conversation under the music because, if you were in any shape at all, what you were doing didn’t use up all your breath. The first session, Brenda had taken a position next to a petite blonde in a pink leotard, who turned out to be named June and to be just as gabby as she looked. In two hours and counting, Brenda had learned a lot about June’s love life, which tended toward the high impact, but also about this city, this dance studio, and this building.

Which was the point. What Ed did was always illegal and sometimes dangerous, especially when he was teamed with Parker. More than most people, he needed somebody to watch his back. That’s what Brenda did, and she’d come in useful more than once. To know the territory was, she believed, part of the job.

And June was happy to talk about the territory. “There wasn’t anything like this here before,” she explained. “You’d have to go to LA to see a facility like this. Or maybe Vegas.”

“Then we’re lucky it showed up,” Brenda agreed.

“It’s all Mrs. Johnson-Ross,” June assured her. “She’s a local girl, she went away to New York, she had a career there, and when this opportunity came along, all this space, she came back and snapped it up.”

“Good for her. And good for us.”

That conversation had been during lesson number two. Now, in lesson number three, they were both being quiet, following the leader’s sinuous movements, Brenda feeling the stretch in those long side muscles it’s so hard to tone, and then, in the mirror, she saw the door centered in the wall behind them open and a woman walk in.

Not for a second did Brenda doubt this was Mrs. Johnson-Ross. Tall, too blonde, she carried her just-a-little excess weight as though it were a fashion accessory she was pleased to own. She dressed in verticals, a long dark jacket open over a darker pantsuit with deep lapels, in turn over a blouse in two shades of vertical light blue stripes. The effect was to make the body fade away and emphasize the blonde-framed face, slightly puffy but still very good looking.

Dramatically attractive. How old? Midfifties, maybe.

Brenda turned her head toward June: “There’s the boss.”

June looked at the mirror, and beamed with pleasure. “Isn’t she something?”

“She certainly is.”

Mrs. Johnson-Ross, Brenda knew, herself only took individual students, in modern and jazz and ballet, in other smaller rehearsal rooms, leaving the ballroom dancing and aerobics to her staff, though she did occasionally, like now, drop in to see how one of the classes was coming along. Brenda watched her watch the class, then suddenly she realized she was making eye contact.

Mrs. Johnson-Ross did not look away. Expressionless, her blue eyes cold, she looked at Brenda through four beats of the music, as though to memorize her. Then, abruptly, she turned away and, as silently as she’d come in, left the room.

Jesus, she’s tough, Brenda thought. I wonder what that was all about.

5

The most exciting part of it, Henry Freedman knew, and the thought frightened him as much as it titillated him, was the knowledge that he could be caught at any second, exposed, ruined, as much a pariah as any biblical outcast in his cave. Even more than the sex, it was the danger that aroused Henry. Maybe not the first or second time they’d been together, but every time since.

In the car, driving to or from the assignations, or on the phone, spinning out more tortured lies to Muriel, he kept telling himself he had to stop, he had to stop now, the thrill wasn’t worth the risk, he wasn’t that kind of man. He was fifty-two years of age, for God’s sake, he’d never been unfaithful to Muriel in twenty-two years of marriage until the last year and a half. And now he was helpless, he was like a hypnosis subject, it was as though Darlene had a hand inside his trousers and just steadily, inexorably, pulled him toward her.

He’d met Darlene Johnson-Ross more than five years ago, when she’d moved her dance studio into the Armory, the neighbor of his father Jerome, and for nearly four years she’d merely been the attractive if somewhat over-the-hill person he occasionally saw when he visited his father or met with Harrigan, the Armory manager. Henry was one of the more active principals in Armory Associates, the consortium that had bought the old white elephant from the GSA and given it, and the downtown around it, a whole new life. He’d been proud of his part in it, and he’d never for a second suspected that the Armory would be the source of his ruin.

Oh, well, he thought, driving yet again toward the Armory, grin and bear it, though in fact he was doing neither. Tortured, obsessed, so deeply mired in his midlife crisis he couldn’t even see it, like a disoriented diver plunging toward the depths while trying desperately to reach the air, Henry drove the Infiniti around the Armory that late afternoon at five-thirty — at least he could still take pride in that, the elegance of the conversion — to the garage entrance at the rear, where the massive moatlike gates of the army’s time had been removed without a trace.

The garage, one flight down a reinforced ramp, had held obsolete army vehicles for many years, but didn’t show it now. At the foot of the ramp, arrowed signs led residential tenants through a locked gate straight ahead, dance studio customers to the left, and Freed-man Wholesale Jewels employees — not customers — through an elaborately alarmed gate to the right.

Henry never parked in the dance studio area. As an Armory Associates partner, he had a right to the electronic box on his visor that opened the simple metal-pole barrier to residents’ parking, which he now used. He left the Infiniti in the visitors’ section, rode the elevator up one flight to the main floor, and emerged into the broad low-ceilinged lobby. No one got up to the residential area without being vetted by the doorman.

Who Henry knew very well. “Evening, George,” he said, striding across the lobby toward the inner door.

George, in his navy blue uniform with golden piping, had been standing flat-footed, hands behind his back, cap squared off on his head as he gazed out at the street through the glass of the front door, but now he said, “Evening, Mr. Freedman,” and moved briskly to his wall-mounted control panel, where he buzzed the inner door open just before Henry arrived, hand already out.

Henry was noted for his “tours of inspection” of the Armory, and saw no reason why anyone would think twice about them. He’d been doing the same thing, though not as often, for years before he’d become besotted with Darlene.

The inner lobby was more spacious, with never-used sofas, all in muted tones of gold and avocado. At the left rear, past the second bank of elevators, was an unmarked gold door to which Henry had the credit-card-style key. Now he inserted it, saw the green light, removed the card, and stepped through into Darlene’s private office, all stark silver and white, with accents of an icy blue. But it was empty.

Usually, Darlene was here when he entered, not one to tease by being late, to keep him waiting. Usually, she was right here, either elegant in her businesswoman mode or hot and perspiring in leotard from a private lesson, when she would be girlish and giggly and out of breath, crying, “Oh, I’m all sweaty, let me shower, I’m too sweaty!” And he’d say, “I’ll lick it off. Come here, let me help, don’t wriggle so much.”

But today she wasn’t here. The office was actually part of a suite, with a small bedroom and bath and kitchenette, but when he went through they were all empty as well.

He got back to the main office just as she came in from the hall, beyond which were the studios. She looked very different, not her normal self at all. She was still beautiful and desirable, today the businesswoman in a long dark jacket and pantsuit and blue striped blouse, but her manner was troubled, almost angry.

“Henry,” she said, and her manner was not at all sexy or kittenish, “I’m glad you’re here.”

What an odd thing to say. “Darlene,” he reminded her, “we have a date.”

She blinked at him, as though trying to make him out through some sort of fog. “Yes, of course we do,” she said. “But it’s just — I’ve come across something, and I don’t like it.”

Doom! he thought, and his heart contracted like a rubber ball. “Come across something? What?”

“There’s a young woman here,” Darlene told him, and Henry’s heart and body and mind all relaxed. This was just business, that’s all, it wasn’t exposure. Not yet.

Darlene was saying, “She’s in the low-impact class, I wouldn’t have noticed her, except she’s in better shape than most of them when they start in that class; in fact, they start there because they need to get in shape—”

“Darlene,” Henry said, ready to be helpful and reassuring, now that it was merely a business problem, “just tell me what’s wrong.”

“All right,” Darlene said. “Make me a drink.”

She usually didn’t have her scotch-and-water until after they’d been to bed. He said, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said, in a tone that asked for no argument.

“Fine, fine.” Lifting his hands in amiable surrender, he went over to the credenza behind her desk where the liquor cabinet and glasses and tiny refrigerator were concealed.

While he made her a drink — pointedly, nothing for himself — she said, “I wouldn’t have noticed a thing, but Susanna told me — you know, the girl now on the front desk.”

“Is that her name?”

“She told me, this new one, Brenda Fawcett, was paying cash because she didn’t want her husband to know she was learning to dance. We get some like that from time to time. I don’t think it usually turns out to be the happy surprise the lady had in mind.”

Henry brought her her drink: “Don’t be cynical.”

“It’s hard not to be.” She sighed. “All right. The first thing I thought, if this Brenda Fawcett is here to learn dancing behind her husband’s back, why is she in the low-impact class? Why isn’t she in ballroom dancing?”

Henry shrugged. “Getting in shape, like you said.”

“She’s in shape.” Darlene took a healthy swallow of her drink. “Then I noticed,” she said, “our Brenda doesn’t wear a wedding ring.”

“Some people don’t,” Henry suggested.

“Some men don’t,” Darlene told him. “Women wear that band.”

Marriage discussions with Darlene could be a tricky area. “Fine,” Henry said.

“So,” Darlene went on, leaving marriage behind, “I looked at the card Susanna filled out, when Ms. Fawcett first enrolled, and it’s all false.”

Henry frowned at her. “It’s what?”

“The home address,” Darlene told him, “the phone number, all fake. And she’s paying in cash, so she doesn’t have to prove her identity. So what’s she up to?”

Oh, my God, Henry thought, because he knew. Private detectives! That’s what it was, that’s what it had to be!

Muriel must have found out — the way he’d been flaunting himself, for God’s sake, she had to find out — and instead of confronting him, she’d done it this way. Private detectives.

Yes, that was her style, that’s how she’d handle it. No discussion, no hope for forgiveness. Just get the evidence, sue for divorce, all open and public and forever damning.

Darlene paced, frowning at the carpet. “All I can think is,” she said, “the IRS. Or more likely the state tax people. That’s why she’s paying cash, trying to trap us, see what we do with unrecorded income.”

I can’t tell her the truth, Henry realized. I should pack a suitcase, keep it in the trunk of the car. In case... Whenever...

“The little bitch!” Darlene raged. “Henry, am I right? What else could it be?”

“You’ll just have to—” Henry began and coughed, and tried again: “You’ll just have to keep an eye on her. I believe I’ll — I believe I’ll have a drink now, too.”

“No, wait,” she said, surprising him.

He paused, halfway to the drinks cabinet. “Why not?”

“That class is almost over,” she told him. “Go get your car, bring it around front. We’ll follow her. We’ll see if she doesn’t wind up in the State Office Building.”

Or the private detective’s office, Henry thought. Much more likely, the private detective’s office.

But wouldn’t it be better to know the worst, know it and be able to decide what to do?

Looking around the office, eying the open bedroom door, he said, “Our lovely afternoon.”

“We’ll still have it, Henry,” she promised him. “We’ll follow her, we’ll find out what she’s up to, and then we’ll come right back here. Henry...”

He looked at her. “Yes?”

He loved that lascivious smile she sometimes showed; not often enough. “It’ll be better than ever,” she whispered.

On the way back to the Infiniti, he thought, I’ll have to phone Muriel, I’m going to be later than I thought. I’ll have to phone her, I’ll have to tell her... whatever I tell her.

6

When CID Detective Jason Rembek, a big shambling balding man with thick eyeglasses sliding down his lumpy nose, reached his cubicle at Headquarters at 8:34 Saturday morning — according to the digital clock on his desk, which was never wrong — the overnights were stacked waiting for him, escape-related materials on top, lesser cases underneath, just as he’d instructed.

The flight of the three hardcases from Stoneveldt Thursday afternoon had kept him on the hop all day yesterday. He hoped things would be quieter today. He had other Opens on his desk, not just these three punks taking a little vacation.

Detective Rembek had been on the state force fourteen years, with very little experience of prison breaks. None, from Stoneveldt; that trio had made the record books. Nevertheless, it was his own experience and the experience of others he’d talked to or read about, that the boys in prison were mostly there in the first place because they didn’t know how to handle life on the outside, not even when they weren’t on the run. Very very rare was the guy who disappeared forever, or showed up thirty years later a solid citizen, mayor of some small town in Canada.

Mostly, the escapees ran until they got tired and then just stood there until they were rounded up. Sometimes they’d steal a car or rob a convenience store, but there was no plan in their lives, no long-term goal. Three, four days, they’d start to get hungry, they’d start to miss that regular life they had in the cells, and they’d call it quits. Detective Rembek believed it was true almost without exception that once an escapee had thought about escape, he was finished thinking.

Were these three going to fit the pattern? Why not? On Rembek’s desk were photos and bios of the three, and there was little in them to make him believe they were going to beat the odds. The two local boys, anyway. Given their histories, their family ties, their dependency on this small area of the world, it was only a matter of time before they’d show up somewhere they’d been before, that they just couldn’t stay away from. A relative, a girlfriend, a bar, a fellow heister. And then the net would scoop them up, put them back where they belonged.

The out-of-towner was the wild card; Ronald Kasper, or whatever his name was. No one had ever escaped from Stoneveldt, but these three had, and neither Marcantoni nor Williams seemed to Rembek the kind of guy to break that cherry. So was Kasper the one who’d made it happen? Was he the one they had to find, the one they had to outthink and outguess, if they were going to collect all three?

Rembek studied the few pictures he had of Kasper. A hard face, bony, like outcroppings of stone. Hard eyes; if they were the windows of the soul, the shades were drawn.

Rembek didn’t pick up any of the pictures, but leaned closer and closer over them, his nose almost touching the surface of the desk. Had this bird gone through plastic surgery some time in the past? Did he have other histories, beyond the broken burglary at the warehouse and the escape from Stoneveldt? Rembek craved the opportunity to interrogate that face, see what was behind those eyes.

Well. There were other ways to come at them. The three escapees now on his desk had three contact points, being the people who had visited them during their time inside; one each. Ronald Kasper had been visited several times by his brother-in-law, named Ed Mackey. Thomas Marcantoni had been visited twice by his brother, Angelo. And Brandon Williams had been visited three times by his youngest sister, Maryenne.

The first of these was the most interesting. After Kasper broke out, police naturally went to the motel where Mackey was living, only to learn he’d checked out that morning, no forwarding address, no useful ID. Detective Rembek doubted very much it was a coincidence that Mackey checked out of his motel in the morning on the same day that Kasper checked out of prison in the afternoon.

The top report on Detective Rembek’s desk told him that no progress had been made in either finding Mackey or learning who he actually was. The next two folders were mostly the results of the wiretaps on Angelo Marcantoni and Maryenne Williams, wiretaps that had been granted by the judge at nine P.M. on Thursday, less than four hours after the escape, and had been in operation ever since. No police officer actually sat next to the recording machine twenty-four hours a day; it was a voice-activated tape, picked up at eight every morning, and four in the afternoon, and midnight.

Angelo Marcantoni, according to the transcript, did very little on the telephone, and then it seemed to be mostly about bowling; if that were a code, as far as Detective Rembek was concerned, Marcantoni was welcome to it. In any event, he appeared to be the law-abiding brother, married, three children, with absolutely no criminal record of any kind and an unblemished work record with a supermarket chain. Detective Rembek thought it unlikely he would risk all that to help a brother who’d been in increasingly serious trouble since he was ten.

As for Maryenne Williams, she appeared to be a young mother who spent all her waking hours on the phone with other young mothers, discussing their babies, discussing their babies’ (mostly absent) fathers, and discussing boys they thought of as “cute” as though they didn’t have trouble enough already. That’s what the MW transcripts had been up till now, and that’s what they looked like for last night, too, boring and tedious to read but necessary.

And then:

11:19 P.M.

MW: Hello?

C: Hi, it’s me.

MW: (audible gasp) Are you okay?

Detective Rembek sat straighter, holding in both hands the paper he was reading.

C: Yeah, I’m fine.

MW: What are you gonna do?

C: I think I gotta go away.

MW: Oh, yeah, you do. You need money?

C: I’m gonna get money in a couple days, I’m okay. I got a good place to stay, and next week I’ll take off.

MW: Listen, uh—

Almost said his name there, Detective Rembek thought.

MW: —you remember Goody?

C: Yeah, that one.

MW: Well, he come around, he said, any way he can help, buy you tickets or stuff, whatever, you should call him, because it wouldn’t be good for me to do anything.

C: No, no, you shouldn’t do anything. I’m just calling — I wanted to tell you I’m okay, and I’ll be going away, next week.

MW: That’s the best thing. If you need help—

C: Goody.

I wish I could hear how he said that name, Detective Rembek thought. Does he think Goody will help him, or does he think Goody isn’t any use? He won’t tell his sister, because she thinks this Goody is all right.

MW: I’m glad you called.

C: Well, yeah, I had to. Listen, kiss Vernon for me.

MW: I will, (crying) Bye, now.

C: Bye, now.

The call had been traced, after the event, to a pay-phone on Russell Street, a nondescript working-class neighborhood. Two police officers were at this moment searching the area, with no realistic expectation of finding anything.

Detective Rembek took notes. Goody; find this fellow Goody, squeeze him a little, see where he leads.

And there was one other thing. Detective Rembek looked back through the transcript and found it:

C: I’m gonna get money in a couple days, I’m okay.

Going to get money in a couple days. Where?

7

It took Buck two days to figure it out. He’d known from the get-go there was something funny going on with that little scumbag Goody, to make him all of a sudden up and leave his sales post early on a Thursday, but he just couldn’t see in his mind what Goody was up to. A family emergency; shit. What would a piece of garbage like Goody be doing with a family?

But if it was something else that took Goody away in the middle of the best sales period of the day, when the workingman wanted a little taste to bring home with him after another eight hours throwing his life away for pennies to the Man, what was it? I’m not stupid, Buck reminded himself. If there’s something there, and there’s got to be something there, what the hell is it?

Of course he saw all the stuff on the television Thursday night about the three boys broke out of Stoneveldt prison, and he even noticed that one of them was a brother, but he never made the connection. And he didn’t make that connection because he didn’t think about the police scanner in brother Goody’s car until Goody forgot and left it on that Saturday evening when he swung by the Land Rover to turn in the day’s cash and stash. With both windows open, Buck’s Land Rover and Goody’s Mercury, all of a sudden there was that harsh cop-radio voice, jabber-jabber-jabber, until Goody quickly reached down and switched it off. And even then Buck didn’t put two and two together, because he was distracted by business, there being three more salesmen to report in, and it wasn’t until he was dealing with the second of those that he suddenly saw the light.

The brother’s on the run. Big-time manhunt, all the cops excited because these three guys rubbed their nose in it, escaped from their im-preg-nable slammer, and Buck knew what that meant. And he knew that Goody would instantly know what that meant, too.

Reward.

He’s got a connection to the brother, Buck told himself. He’s looking to collect; turn the boy in and collect, without telling his best friend — and employer, don’t forget — Buck.

“Leon,” he said to the bodyguard in the passenger seat up front, “call my mama, tell her bring the Lincoln up, leave it out front. Raydiford,” he said to the bodyguard at the wheel, “as soon as Hector check in, you drop Leon and me at the Lincoln, then take Rover and all this shit to the store.”

Leon looked happy. “We goin somewhere?”

“We’re goin callin,” Buck told him.

One thing you could say for Goody; he didn’t put all his profits in his nose. A lot of them, they could only function at all because they were too scared of Buck to allow themselves to fuck up totally, but Goody had a brain and knew how to stay on plan.

Look at his house. An actual real house, not some rathole apartment in the very slums you’re dealing so you can get out of. Not as good a place, of course, as Buck’s horse ranch out in the country, but for a street dealer not bad; a big sprawling brick home with a wide porch on the front and sides, late nineteenth century, set on a wide lawn amid similar houses in a residential section that had been a suburb when the doctors and the college professors first built their places out here. That had been before cars, so some of these places still didn’t have garages, just driveways, including Goody’s, and there was his Mercury now, parked beside his house. Goody was home.

A telephone company truck was in front of the house, a lineman in a cherry picker doing something at the top of the pole, so Leon had to drive beyond it and pull the Lincoln in at the curb in front of the house next door. Buck, spread out in back, waited while Leon came trotting around to open his door, and then the two of them went up to Goody’s house, stepped up onto the wide wood-floored porch, and Leon rang the doorbell.

They had to wait a pretty long time, and Buck was just about to tell Leon to bust the door in, when it opened, and there stood a white girl, college girl, in blue jeans and white tank top, coked to the eyebrows. She frowned through her personal mist at Buck and Leon and said, “Yes? What can I do for you?”

“Not a thing,” Buck said, and brushed by her.

She tottered, very shaky, but didn’t fall down because she still had a good hold of the doorknob. “Hey!” she cried, but her outrage was unfocused, and she didn’t seem to notice when Leon copped a feel on the way by.

You can take the boy out of the pisshole, but you can’t take the pisshole out of the boy. There was barely any furniture at all in these big echoing rooms with the good old wood floors. In the front room, a television set with its other machines sat on an assemble-it-yourself bookcase from the home center, full of tapes and DVDs. Two big white wicker chairs with peacock-tail backs stood across the room, facing the TV, with a couple of mismatched shitty little tables, table lamps standing on the floor, telephone on the floor.

Pool table in the next room, what would have been the dining room, with two scruffy backless couches along one wall. And here came Goody, out of what must be the kitchen, a beer bottle in one hand, cigar in the other.

He came out of there full of swagger, a tough guy, wanting to know what the commotion was at his front door, but when he saw Buck he stumbled, next to the pool table, and got scared. He didn’t know yet what the problem was, but if Buck himself was all of a sudden in Goody’s house, Goody knew it was time to get scared.

“Hey, Buck,” he said. “You didn’t tell me you were comin over, man.”

“I was in the neighborhood,” Buck told him, but he didn’t bother to smile. He said, “You been in touch with Brandon Williams yet?”

Surprise, and being scared, made Goody stupid. He said, “Who?”

Now Buck did smile, in a not-friendly way. “Think of that, Leon,” he said. “This fool here’s the only man, woman, or child in this city never heard of Brandon Williams.”

“Oh, Brandon Williams!” Goody cried, acting out all kinds of sudden recognition. “I didn’t connect the name, you know, all of a sudden like that.”

“Leon,” Buck said, “go hit that fool, like he was a TV wouldn’t come into focus.”

“No, wait, Buck — Aa!”

Buck looked at him, leaning against the wall. In the front room, the college girl had sat in one of the peacock wicker chairs and was gazing at the television set, which was turned off. Buck said, “You in focus now, fool?”

“Just tell me, Buck,” Goody begged him. The beer bottle and cigar were both at his feet, but he paid them no attention. “All you gotta do is tell me,” he said. “You know I come through for you.”

Buck said, “Tell me about your family emergency, Thursday.”

A whole lot of lies hovered just inside Goody’s trembling lips, Buck could see their meaty wings in there, but finally Goody wasn’t that big a fool, and what he said was, “The police scanner. I heard it on the scanner.”

“Brandon Williams is outa the box.”

“His sister, his little sister, Maryenne, she’s an old friend of mine, Buck. A good girl, I like her, not like this white trash here, I thought, I gotta go be there when she finds out, I gotta tell her myself, so it won’t be that big of a, you know, a shock.”

“Reward money,” Buck said.

“Aw, no, Buck,” Goody said, because he was still to some extent a fool, “I wanna help that girl, old-friend like—”

“Leon,” Buck said, “He’s losin his focus.”

“No, Buck, I— Aaoww! Listen, don’t— Ohh! Owww!”

“Okay, Leon,” Buck said, “let’s see is he tuned in.”

“Jesus, Buck, he’s gonna break somethin on me, don’t do this, man.”

“Tell me your story, Goody.”

Goody looked at the beer bottle at his feet. Most of the beer had spilled onto the floor, but a little was left in the bottle, visible through the green glass. Goody licked his lips. “Uhh,” he said. He met Buck’s eyes, wincing, and nodded, and said, “I called her, on the cell. Her cell, from my cell. When I heard on the scanner. I went over there, you know, her place, told her, she can’t help her brother, cops be all over her, watchin, see what she—”

“Move it along, Goody,” Buck said.

Goody nodded, quickly. “She says okay,” he said. “We both know he’s gonna call her, she’s gonna tell him, call good old Goody, he’ll help out, get you airplane tickets, whatever.”

Buck said, “When did he call?”

“He didn’t yet,” Goody said, then looked wide-eyed at Leon, then back at Buck: “Honest to God! I figured, tomorrow morning, I’d go over there, see Maryenne again, after her and her family get outa church.”

“Churchgoing people,” Buck said.

“I told you,” Goody said, “she’s a good girl, she’s okay, I wanna help out, I really do, Buck.”

“You want that reward,” Buck said.

Goody spread his hands. “What reward? I didn’t see nothing about no reward. If you know about—”

“Leon.”

“Buck, no! Aii! Ow! Oh, no! All right, Buck, I — Ow! Gee-ziz! I said right! Ow! Stop! Ow!”

“All right, Leon,” Buck said. To Goody he said, “It’s when I say all right that Leon hears it.”

“Ohhh. I can’t stand up no more, Buck.”

“We could nail you to the wall, you like.”

“Buck, please.”

“This Brandon Williams,” Buck said, “he’s gonna call his sister. Then he’s gonna call you. Right?”

“That’s the plan. That’s the plan, Buck.”

“When he calls you,” Buck said, “the second thing you’re gonna do is call the police, start the negotiation. What’s the first thing you’re gonna do, Goody?”

“I’m gonna call you,” Goody said. He was very subdued now. He didn’t like the situation, but he knew he was defeated. He was also in pain.

“That’s right,” Buck said. “You call me first, then you can go on and do the negotiation with the law, same as you planned. You’ll collect the reward, same as you already figured.”

Trying to look hopeful, Goody said, “And we split it, right?”

“We’ll work that out, Goody,” Buck said. “Okay, Leon, we’re done here.”

They left Goody huddled against the wall. Going through the front room, Buck nodded at the college girl and said, “You oughta wring that out before you put it back where you found it.”

“That’s what I planned on, Buck,” Goody said. His voice was high, with a new tremble in it. “But now,” he said, “I think I just gotta rest awhile.”

Outside, the telephone company truck was gone. Some other emergency taken care of, working this late on a Saturday night.

8

“Hold on, Brenda,” Ed Mackey said. He held tight to her hips, felt her knees press to both sides of his rib cage, and looked up at her grinning grimace as she concentrated on that inner rhythm, bore down, eyes staring at some point inside her own head. “Hold on, Brenda, hold on.”

“You know,” she muttered, “you know, you know, come along with me, you know, you know—”

“Hold on—”

“Come along with me!”

“Hold oonnn!”

He thrust endlessly upward, back arched, and she shivered all over like a bead curtain. “Oh!” she cried. “You know!”

The shower stall, when they got to it five minutes later, was big enough for them both. This was one of the most expensive top-floor rooms in one of the most expensive hotels in the city, and Brenda had been checked in here for five days now, ever since Parker had told Mackey when he and the other two would be coming out of Stoneveldt. Mackey had kept the old motel room for himself until Thursday, and was not registered in this hotel, was merely a visitor, because he’d known, once Parker was out, the law would want to have a word or two with the guy who’d been coming to see Parker inside.

So Brenda was here to give him somewhere else to wait out the jewelry job, and she was here because Mackey believed, when the cops were looking for somebody, they looked first in places at the same economic level where they’d known the guy to live before. So let them spend a week on cut-rate motels; by the time they thought to look at someplace like the Park Regal, Mackey and Brenda would be long gone from here.

Out of the shower, Mackey dressed in dark, loose comfortable clothes, with a Beretta Jaguar .22 automatic in a deerskin holster at the small of his back, under his shirt, upside down with the butt to the right, ready to his hand if he had to reach back there. He’d gotten similar gear for Parker and Williams. Rubber gloves and a small tube of talcum powder were in his jacket pocket. He packed a small canvas bag with a few of his things, because he’d be staying with the rest of them at the former beer distributor’s place between the job and the arrival of the fence from New Orleans. Then he’d phone Brenda, she’d pick him up, and they’d be off. With Parker, if he wanted a ride, or on their own.

He kissed her at the door, and she said, “Try to stay out of trouble.”

“What you should do,” he told her, “is stay away from that armory. Don’t call attention.” Because he knew she liked to be nearby when he was at work, in case he needed her. He’d needed her in the past, but not this time. “Just stay away, Brenda,” he said. “Okay?”

“I’ll go over there tomorrow,” she told him, “for one more class at the dance studio. I like that workout. I won’t go today, there’s nobody there today, everything’s closed on Sunday.”

“We know,” Mackey said, and grinned, kissed her again, and left.

Downstairs, Phil Kolaski was supposed to be waiting for him in the Honda, down the block from the hotel entrance, and there he was. Mackey tossed his bag in back, got into the passenger seat in front, and said, “Everything still on?”

“Don’t see why not,” Phil said, and drove them away from there.

It was Phil Kolaski that Mackey had gotten in touch with, when he was the outside man to help Parker put together a string on the inside. They had studied each other very closely, looking for danger signs, and had both decided they could take a chance.

It was like a marriage, that, or more exactly like an engagement. The two people start off strangers to each other, have to find reasons to trust each other, have to learn each other well enough to feel they aren’t likely to be betrayed, and then have to pop the question:

“Tom’s got a job lined up for when he gets out. He’ll want you and your friend in on it, to take the place of the guys got nabbed with him.”

Mackey had been comfortable with that idea — if he was in this part of the world anyway, he might as well make a profit on it — but knew that Parker would want, once out, to keep moving. He’d told Phil that, and Phil had said, “Tom will talk to him, before they come out,” so it seemed to be all right.

Two blocks from the Park Regal they went through the intersection with the Armory on the left and the library, another heavy brick pile from the nineteenth century, on the right. Mackey laughed: “We’re gonna be under this street!”

“With our hands,” Phil said, “full of jewels.”

9

The Margaret H. Moran Memorial Library was theoretically closed as of five P.M. on Sundays, but by the time the last patron and the last book/tape/DVD were checked out it was usually closer to five-thirty. Then whichever staff was on duty had to go through the public parts of the building for strays, occasionally finding one (usually in a lavatory), so that they were lucky if they were out of there, front door locked behind them and alarms switched on, by quarter to six.

This evening, late October twilight coming on fast, the library was dark and empty at six P.M., when a black Honda and a green Taurus drove slowly by. The two cars traveled on another block to a parking garage where they entered, took checks from the automatic machine at the entrance, left the cars, walked back down the concrete stairwell to the street, and separated. Parker and Mackey turned left, away from the library and Armory, while Williams crossed Indiana Avenue and Marcantoni and Kolaski and Angioni walked back to the library.

At the library, Marcantoni hunkered in front of the door while the other two stood on the sidewalk in front of him, chatting together, blocking the view of Marcantoni at work from passing cars. There was little traffic and no pedestrians in this downtown area at six on a Sunday.

Marcantoni opened a flat soft leather pouch on his knee; inside, in a row of narrow pockets, were his picks. Patiently he went to work on the locks, not wanting to disturb them so much as to set off the building’s alarms.

The fire law required the door to open outward. Marcantoni pulled it ajar just enough so he could put a small matchbox in the opening, to keep the spring lock from shutting it again. Then he put his picks neatly away, and was straightening when Parker and Mackey approached, with Williams behind them, just coming around the corner.

The six men went into the building, closing the re-locked door behind them. Marcantoni said, “There’s wastebaskets behind the main counter there, we’re gonna need them. There’s a lot of trash to move.”

Parker said, “Then you need shovels.”

“Right,” Marcantoni said. “I’ve got that figured out, too.”

There were three large metal wastebaskets, gray, square, behind the long main counter, all having been emptied by the staff before they left. Kolaski stacked the three and carried them, and Marcantoni, the only one who knew the route, led the way down the center aisle, book stacks on both sides. He carried a small flashlight, with electric tape blocking part of the lens, and Angioni carried a similar one, coming last. They picked up two more wastebaskets from desks along the way, these carried by Williams.

Toward the rear of the main section Marcantoni turned left to go down a broad flight of stairs that doubled back at a landing. This led them down to the periodicals section, with its own stacks full of bound magazines and its own reading room lined with long oak tables. “We’ll come back for a couple of those,” Marcantoni said, waving the flashlight beam over the tables as they walked toward the rear of the section.

Back here was another counter, for checking out magazines and microfilm. They picked up two more wastebaskets there, plus something else. “Look at this,” Marcantoni said.

On a separate wheeled metal table behind the counter were stacked several rows of small metal file drawers. Marcantoni opened one, pulled the full drawer out completely, and dumped the cards onto the floor. Shining the flashlight into the empty drawer, sixteen inches long, six inches wide, four inches deep, he said, “A shovel. Everybody grab one.”

They did, and moved on. In the rear wall, next to a coin-slot copying machine, was a broad wooden door marked NO ADMITTANCE. Marcantoni handed his flashlight to Williams, then got down to one knee and brought out his picks. “This one’s nothing,” he said.

Angioni and Williams shone light on the lock, Marcantoni worked with smooth speed, and he pushed the door open in just under a minute. The others waited while he put his picks away and stood, then Williams gave him back the flashlight. Carrying the wastebaskets and file drawers, they entered a storage area lined with rows of metal shelving.

“There’s no windows down here,” Marcantoni said. He closed the door they’d just come through, then hit the switch beside it. Fluorescent ceiling fixtures lit up to show a deep but narrow room with the metal shelves on both sides and across the back. “It’s down there,” Marcantoni said, and led the way to the rear, where the shelves were stacked with copier supplies.

Even with all the light on it, the door was hard to see, through the shelves stacked with boxes and rolls. It was painted the same neutral gray as the wall and the metal shelving.

Marcantoni said, “These shelves aren’t fixed to the wall. I just pulled one end out, the other time.”

There was not much clearance between the rear and side shelving. Williams tugged on the shelving’s left end and its legs made a shrieking noise on the floor, so he lifted the end instead. Mackey went over to help, and they wheeled the shelving out till it faced up against the right-side shelves.

Angioni was studying the door, featureless metal with barely visible hinges on the right side. In its middle, at about waist height, was a round hole less than an inch in diameter. Angioni said, “That’s the keyhole?”

“That’s it,” Marcantoni said. Walking over to the door, he took from his pockets a small socket wrench and a star-shaped bit. As he fitted them together at right angles, he said, “The last time, I didn’t want to mess up this door so somebody might notice something. I looked at the lock on the door at the other end, and I figured this one would be the same. It’s a double bar that extends beyond the door to both sides, hinged in the middle so it’ll pivot to unlock it. This works.”

Bending to the door, he inserted the bit into the hole, with the wrench extended to the right. With both hands on the wrench, he lifted. The wrench barely moved upward, and from beyond the door they could hear the scrape of metal on metal. “It’s goddam stiff,” Marcantoni said, “but I got it last — Here it comes.”

Slowly he pulled the wrench upward until it was vertical above the hole. “That should do it.”

He pulled the bit out, separated the wrench into its two components, and put them away in his pocket, bringing out a short flat-head screwdriver instead. Going down to one knee, he said, “Here’s where I pulled it out before. I figured nobody’d notice.”

Down close to the floor, where the bottom shelf would have covered it, the edge of the door and its wooden frame showed scratches. Marcantoni forced the screwdriver in there, levered it, and all at once the door popped an inch inward. He got to his feet, putting the screwdriver away. “There,” he said. “From now on, it’s easy.”

To show that, he put the fingers of both hands onto the protruding edge of the door and tugged. More metal-on-metal complaint, and then the door grudgingly came open. The old hinges didn’t want to move, but Marcantoni insisted, and at last the door was wide open, angled back away from the entrance.

Now they could look through into the tunnel, illuminated for the first several feet by the fluorescents in the storage room. It was narrow, about the width of an automobile, with brick floor and brick walls up to an arched brick ceiling. Angioni shone his flashlight, but it didn’t show much more than the fluorescents did. “It’s angled down,” he said.

“Yeah,” Marcantoni agreed, “it slopes down, not steep, then levels out, then slopes up again on the other side.”

“Well,” Angioni said, “shall we go?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Mackey pointed out.

Marcantoni said, “Let me get the tape off this flash.” He and Angioni peeled the electric tape from the flashlight lenses, and then they started into the tunnel, moving in loose single file, carrying the wastebaskets and the file drawers.

Had the tunnel ever been used? If so, the people who’d been in here left no marks. At the time this had been built, gaslight was common in this part of the world, but it hadn’t been installed in here. If someone had been in the tunnel, using some kind of torch for light, there might be smoke smudges on the curved ceiling, but none appeared. It looked as though the tunnel had been built simply because that was the way the plans had been laid out, then it was locked and forgotten.

They walked down the easy slope, the tunnel absolutely straight, then headed along the level section. There was no sound but the brush of their feet. The air was cool and dry, with a faint mustiness. Every twenty feet or so there was a large iron ring jutting from the right side wall at about shoulder level. For sconces? For a guide rope, to be followed in the dark? There was no way to tell.

“There it is,” Marcantoni said, and they all came up to cluster at the beginning of the collapse. Just ahead of them, the ceiling had started to fall, three bricks wide at the peak to begin with, then wider. On the floor were the bricks, some broken, and a little debris. Farther on, the two flashlights showed that the collapse had become wider, with a combination of dirt and stone fallen from the hole. By twenty feet from the beginning of the rupture, the debris made a steep mountain slope that completely blocked the tunnel, top to bottom and side to side.

Marcantoni said, “My idea is, the bricks we can push against the side walls, and the rest of it we scoop into the wastebaskets, carry it back a ways, dump it out, leave room to get by.”

Williams said, “What if more comes down, when we start moving this shit?”

“It’s an old fall,” Marcantoni said. “Whatever happened was a long time ago. It’s stable now.”

Parker said, “When we start to move it, it won’t be stable any more.”

“Well,” Marcantoni said, “this is the route. This is the only way in. And we’re here.”

They took turns with the flashlights, looking up at the early part of the rupture. The remaining bricks to both sides were solid, hadn’t been loosened at all by whatever had happened to the part that fell. Here in its narrowest section, there was shallow emptiness just above where the bricks had been, and then compacted earth. Farther on, more dirt and stone had fallen from above the displaced bricks, so maybe Marcantoni’s idea was right, that this was an accident done by the crew removing trolley tracks half a century ago, who never knew they’d done it.

Finally, Mackey said, “I think we can try it, anyway. If more of it starts to fall in, though, I’ve got to tell you, I’m going back to the library, and anyone who wants my share can have it.”

“Listen, we can do it,” Angioni said. “Come on, Tom. A couple you guys go get tables.”

Williams and Mackey went away, pleased to go, taking one of the flashlights. Parker held the other, and the remaining three moved slowly forward, at first kicking bricks and debris to the side, and then, when it got to be more than that, scooping the file drawers into the slope of the debris mountain, dumping dirt and stones into the wastebaskets. They stacked bricks to the sides, and carried heavy baskets back along the tunnel to empty into little pyramids of trash. From time to time, the slope ahead of them made small shifts, and they could hear stones pattering down its side, but then it would be silent again.

By the time Mackey and Williams had made three round-trips, bringing one of the eight-foot-long tables back with them each time, lining the tables up in a long row, the other four had progressed into the trash mountain, which was loose and easily disassembled. Parker had spelled Kiloski, and then Kiloski had given the flashlight to Angioni, and now Marcantoni had it.

Above them, they were now at the serious part of the rupture, where the tear in the ceiling was a dozen bricks wide and where, when the flashlight beam was aimed up there, it was all a dark emptiness, like a vertical cavern. But nothing else seemed to want to come down out of there, so they kept working, and now Mackey and Williams joined them, and from that point on three cleared debris while two carried the full wastebaskets back to empty, and one held both flashlights.

They worked for more than three hours, from time to time sliding the tables forward. They didn’t try to clear all the trash out of the way, just enough so they could keep moving forward and bringing the tables along after them.

Finally, Marcantoni said, “Listen!”

They all listened, and heard the faint sound, the rustle of dirt sliding down a slope, and Angioni said, “Is that the other side?”

“You know it is,” Marcantoni told him. “We’re almost through.”

Still it took another half hour to finish this part of it. When they moved the tables forward now, the easiest way was to go on all fours underneath and juke them along that way. Soon they could start emptying the wastebaskets into the cleared area ahead, which made things go faster.

And it looked as though Marcantoni’s estimate of the length of the collapse was right. The length of the three tables would total just a little longer distance than the rupture above them. Nothing additional fell while they worked, but the tables gave them a sense there’d still be a way out if things went bad.

Williams had the flashlights when they first broke through. “Hey, wait,” he said. “I can see it. Tom, there’s your damn door.”

They were looking through an ellipsis, less than a foot wide, brick and rupture above, rubble below, at a dark continuation of the tunnel. At the far end, just picking up the gleam from the flashlights, was the black iron door.

At this end, the rupture in the ceiling had narrowed again, with less debris having fallen down. They moved more quickly, wanting to get this part over with, and then Marcantoni strode on ahead, not bothering about a flashlight. When he reached the door, he had his wrench-and-bit assembled, and with one move he had the door unlocked; one kick, and it was open.

A dry breeze whispered through the tunnel, maybe for the first time. A few pebbles rattled onto the tables.

On the far side, the iron door led to a nearly empty storage room, thick with dust. A few old glass display cases had been shoved haphazardly against the side wall, along with an upright metal locker with a broken hinge, a jeweler’s suitcase with a broken wheel, and other things that should have been thrown away. Whatever the army had used this space for, if anything, Freedman Wholesale Jewel used it, when they remembered it at all, as a garbage dump.

Crossing this room to the door in the opposite wall, Marcantoni said, “I was only here during the rehab, so I don’t know the layout now. I only know the plans didn’t have a lot of interior alarms, because they counted on the building to take care of that.” He tried the knob and cursed. “What the hell’d they lock it for?”

Kolaski said, “That’s a rare antique suitcase.”

“Shit,” Marcantoni said. “Gimme a minute.”

It didn’t take much more, and then they moved on into a broad dimly lit area; the employees’ parking lot under the main store, empty on a Sunday night. Exit lights and a few fire-code lights led them diagonally across the big concrete-floored room with its white lines defining parking spaces to where an illuminated sign, white letters on green, read STAIRS.

The stairs were also concrete, with a landing at the top and a closed firedoor that was also locked. “Shit,” Marcantoni said, and reached for his tools.

Parker said, “That door is going to be alarmed.”

Angioni said, “Why? I thought the whole idea was, these people don’t give a shit about security because they’ve got this whole armory around them.”

Mackey said, “No, Parker’s right.”

“Damn it,” Marcantoni said, “this is the only way in. This, and the front door. Front door for customers, this door for employees that park their cars downstairs. No other way in.”

Williams said, “This is also gonna be a firewall. Concrete block. So we don’t bypass the alarm by going through the wall.”

Marcantoni said, “We come this far. Now what?”

“We go in,” Parker said.

Marcantoni gave him a surprised look. “But you just said it’s alarmed.”

“It’ll be just this door,” Parker told him. “There isn’t any reason to link it with the entrance up at the front, so it isn’t part of a whole system, there’s nothing else to hook up to it.”

Marcantoni nodded. “That sounds right.”

Parker said, “Since it’s just this one door, there’ll be a keypad on the inside, and we’ll have thirty seconds, maybe forty-five seconds, to short-circuit it.”

Kolaski said, “I’m very good at that, that’s a specialty of mine.”

“It’s yours,” Marcantoni told him.

Parker said, “What it means is, he’s got to be able to get in there fast. Once you start playing with it, the countdown starts.”

Marcantoni gave the door lock a look of contempt. “This? A sneeze and it’s open.”

“Then go sneeze, Tom,” Kolaski said, taking out his own canvas pouch of tools, saying to Angioni, “Hold this open for me, will you?”

Marcantoni looked around to see that everybody was in agreement and ready, then bent over the lock. He worked with concentration and speed, then pushed the door open, stepped back, and said, “Go, Phil.”

Kolaski stepped through the doorway, followed by Angioni holding up the opened tool pouch. A small pale keypad was mounted on the wall to the left of the door, near the lock. Four Phillips-head screws held it in place. Kolaski chose a tool, spun the screws loose, chose a tool, popped the top of the keypad cover loose so that it flopped forward and down to hang from its wires, chose tiny alligator clips, put them on the connectors at the back of the keypad, stepped back, said, “Done.”

Angioni laughed as Kolaski put his tool pouch away. “I love a showboat,” he said.

“It’s just talent,” Kolaski assured him.

They stepped through into a space that wasn’t entirely dark, since it was spotted with red exit signs, one over the door they’d just come through. They were at a T intersection of hallways, one going left and right, the other straight ahead, exit signs over the doors at the far ends. Closed or open doors were spaced along the halls.

Angioni said, “This doesn’t look like a jeweler.”

“It isn’t,” Kolaski told him, “it’s a wholesaler. It’s more about offices and salesmen, not display.”

Parker said, “What we want will be toward the front.”

They walked down the hall ahead of them, seeing ordinary offices through the open doorways they passed. The door at the end of the hall swung inward, and when they opened it they read on its other side NO ADMITTANCE. That made Kolaski laugh: “Comin outa the No Admittance, that’s somethin new.”

Directly in front of them, beyond the No Admittance door, were three large messy desks mounted with computers and phones and reference books and stacks of sales and tax forms, flanked by extra chairs. These desks faced outward, away from them, toward a broad sales or display floor, where display cases mingled with smaller desks and cashier stations. Globe lights hung low all around the room from a high metal gridwork; these were all switched off, but lights gleamed within display cases here and there, enough to dimly illuminate the room.

Angioni, grinning at it all, said, “This is the place, all right.”

Williams said, “Does the doorman out front get to see in here?”

“No,” Marcantoni told him, “there’s a solid metal door comes down over the entrance at night.”

“So it’s all ours,” Kolaski said, “so let’s get to it.”

They all had rubber or plastic gloves, which they now pulled on. Before this, Marcantoni had done most of the touching, except for when the tables were moved, and he and the others had wiped prints away as they went, but from now on that wouldn’t be possible. They all pulled supermarket plastic bags from their pockets, two each, and started moving through the display area, picking whatever attracted their eyes.

The displays were different from those in a retail store. They gave as much space to manufacturers’ brochures and specifications as they did to the items being offered for sale. Two or three of the cases contained only different kinds of small gift boxes for jewelry, and one other presented a great variety of clasps and hooks and pins.

But most of the cases contained value. Wedding and engagement rings; bracelets, necklaces, brooches; gold money clips shaped like dollar signs, pound signs, euro signs; watches that would cost retail as much as a midsize car.

The six moved among it all like the gleaners who come through the field after the main harvest, picking and choosing only the best of what was on offer, breaking the glass that was the final barrier in their way. It had taken them more than three hours to get in here, but only twenty minutes before all twelve bags were full, looped to their belts so their hands were still free.

“A good night,” Marcantoni said, and grinned at Parker. “I told you you’d like to stick around.”

“You told me,” Parker said.

Going back, they paused while Kolaski reclaimed his alligator clips, replacing them, now that he had the leisure for it, with a simpler wire connection. Then they moved on, letting that spring-mounted door close behind them as they trotted down the stairs to the parking garage, across the broad concrete floor tinged green from the stairs sign behind them, through the nearly empty storage room, and back into the tunnel.

Now they needed the flashlights again. Marcantoni still had his, and Mackey now had the other. They shone the lights ahead, and the air floated with dust, like mist over a swamp.

“Now what?” Marcantoni said.

They walked forward into the tunnel, smelling the dry chalky dust, feeling the grit of it in their noses and mouths. Ahead, the mountain of rubble was back.

They stopped to look at it. Maybe the vibration of their passage had done it, or just the new movement of air from both doors being open at the ends of the tunnel, but something had caused a further fall from above the ceiling. Some bricks had come down, but mostly it was dirt and stone, loose but compacting. It covered the tables, except for a narrow bit at this end. Above, it sloped up and away to where the ceiling used to be and farther.

“All I hope,” Mackey said, “is we don’t wind up with some delivery truck down here with us. This is under the street.”

“We’re too far down,” Marcantoni told him. “Besides, we’re not gonna stay.” He was on one knee again, bending down, shining the flashlight under the end of table that jutted out from the fresh fall of debris. “I can see all the way through,” he said. “These things did their job.”

“They damn well better,” Angioni said. “We got no other way outa here.”

“I’ll go first with the light,” Marcantoni said, and on elbows and knees started through the tunnel-within-a-tunnel created by the tables.

“I’m with you,” Angioni said, and went down on all fours to crawl after him.

Marcantoni was the biggest of the six, and he found the space cramped under the tables, particularly with the two thick plastic bags of loot hanging from his waist. Loose rubble kept falling in from the sides, roughing up the floor, piling a few inches high here and there to make the clearance even narrower. Marcantoni went through slowly, flashlight stuck out ahead of him, his eyes on that distant area beyond the last table, where it was still clear. He passed under the second table as Kolaski followed Angioni and then Williams followed Kolaski.

It was still falling, slight but relentless, the dry crap was still coming down, shifting this way and that. As Marcantoni reached the far end of the second table, a sudden cascade of dirt and dust streamed down in a curtain line from the narrow space between the tables, falling on his head and neck, blinding him. He jerked away, his shoulder hitting a table leg and jostling the table an inch to the left, as Mackey started to crawl after Williams, carrying the second flashlight.

More dirt fell. Marcantoni, unable to see anything, dropped the flashlight while trying to hold his hands over his face, keep the dirt out of his eyes. But the dirt was tumbling faster now down through the hole he’d widened, and more was sliding in from the sides. He kicked out, the plastic bag on his left side struck against something, and he hit the middle table. Now all three tables were awry, and the dirt thudded down into all that newly available space.

Parker was about to crawl after Mackey when Mackey abruptly backed out, one forearm over his eyes. A dust cloud followed him. Mackey veered right-ward out of its way, held the light aimed into the darkness under the table, and said, “Something’s wrong. Something’s gone wrong.”

Parker crouched, looking where Mackey aimed the light down the line beneath the tables, and they both saw nothing but the dust in there, and a spreading fall of dirt, and Williams’ legs writhing, as he struggled for purchase, as he tried to pull back from the dirt that was burying him.

“Hold the light on me,” Parker said, and slid in under the first table, crawling forward till he could reach Williams’ thrashing ankles. He grabbed the ankles, pulled, pulled harder, and finally Williams’ body began to slide along the brick floor.

Parker kept pulling, until Williams was back far enough that he could help with his own arms. Parker backed out of the narrow space, holding his breath against the dust cloud Williams caused by his movements, and Williams backed out after him, covered with dirt. “My God,” he said, and coughed. “I was a dead man.”

Mackey said, “The others?”

“It was Tom got in trouble first,” Williams said, “and then everybody else. I don’t think anybody got out, man.”

Bricks fell near them. They backed away, Mackey shining the light at the rupture in the ceiling, which was larger now, more dirt falling down. “We’re not gonna get to those guys,” he said.

Williams said, “I don’t know how you even got to me, but I’m grateful. I owe you my life.”

Parker shook his head. “I didn’t do it for you,” he said. “Forget all that. I’ll give you the truth here. What I need is a crew, the more the better. I wish I could have those three back.” Looking around at the useless tunnel, he said, “Because we’re going to have to cut that armory back there a new asshole. We have to find a new way out of there.”