Breakout

1

Parker, disgusted, removed his belt so he could let the full plastic bags fall to the brick floor of the useless tunnel. Mackey watched him, frowning, then said, “You’re leaving the swag?”

Sliding the belt back through the loops, Parker said, “What do we do with it? The people who knew who to call in New Orleans are down in there, under the dirt.”

“God damn it,” Williams said, “we don’t have the customer.”

“We don’t have anything,” Parker told him.

He hadn’t liked this thing from the beginning. Mostly, it had been the simple matter that he hadn’t wanted to stay in this part of the world after getting out of their prison, but he also didn’t like to be pressured into doing something he felt wrong about.

And it had felt wrong to him, all the way. He hadn’t known why, or what to look out for, but from the minute Marcantoni introduced the idea, back in Stoneveldt, when it was clear to Parker that he had to agree to be part of this thing or lose Marcantoni — and he’d needed Marcantoni even more then than he needed him now — Parker believed it was all going to turn sour, one way or another, before he could get clear of this place. He’d never thought Marcantoni or the others would try to keep it all for themselves, when the time came to split up the proceeds; they were more professional — and sensible — than that. But he could feel it, out there, hovering. Something.

And here it was. A building that was famous for having only one way out, and now they had to find another way.

Williams was looking up at that long ragged split in the ceiling. “The street’s up there,” he said. “Suppose we could get up and out that way?”

Mackey said, “Dig a hole upwards, over my head? Into a street full of traffic? I’ll stand over here and watch.”

Parker said to Williams, “That doesn’t work. Even if it doesn’t cave in, and it probably wouldn’t, you’ve got a hundred fifty years of paving up there, layer over layer of blacktop.”

Mackey said, “That’s why, when they want to get through it, they use a jackhammer.”

Williams stopped looking up. With a shrug, he said, “That’s the only idea I had.”

Parker said, “We’ll go back the way we came, see what we find.”

The other two got rid of their plastic bags of jewelry and they left the tunnel, went back through the mostly abandoned storage room, and into the green-tinged parking area, where Mackey said, “Maybe it would be easier to get out down here. There’s more garage space past this, for people who live in this place.”

They walked over to the exit, which was covered by a heavy metal mesh gate that lowered from a drum overhead. Through the mesh, they could see the ramp extend upward toward the street, and a bit of the dark night up there.

But there was no way through or under or around the mesh. The barrier was seriously alarmed, firmly seated into deep metal tracks on both sides, and flanked by concrete block walls two layers thick. Above, the walls met a massive ceiling that was part of the original parade field inside the Armory, capable of bearing the weight of a company of horses, or tanks.

“We don’t get out down here,” Parker decided, and they went back upstairs, through the door Marcantoni had opened and Kolaski had unalarmed. Just inside that door, they stopped to look around. Halls extended away ahead of them, toward the display area where they’d been, and to both left and right.

Mackey said, “I think we gotta explore all these doors along here.”

Williams said, “They won’t lead out.”

“Maybe we’ll find something we can use,” Mackey told him, and gestured to the hall on the right. “I’ll take a look down there.”

Williams said, “Parker?” Pointing at the two halls, he said, “You want this one, or that one?”

“I’ll do the one straight ahead.”

They separated, and Parker went forward to the first door on the right, which was closed. Opening it, he felt a wave of warm air come out, and when he found the light switch beside the door he saw that this was where the company’s on-line operation was kept. The room was mostly empty, with free-standing metal shelves along both side walls like the ones fronting the tunnel door back in the library. On the shelves were bulky dark metal boxes that ran the wholesaler’s Web site, displaying the wares and making the deals with customers anywhere in the world.

The machines also gave off heat, which was drawn away by a fan inside a metal grid high on the opposite wall. Mackey still had the flashlight, so Parker went down the hall until he found an open door with an ordinary office inside, took a gooseneck lamp from there, and carried it back to the Web site room. The outlet he found in there gave him just enough cord so he could aim the lamp through the grid to see what was inside.

A powerful-looking fan, attached to a solid iron A-frame, was mounted in the middle of a rectangular galvanized duct, about thirty inches wide and fifteen inches high. Using the lamp, he couldn’t see very far into the duct, but it did go upward at a fairly steep angle, straight back from the grid.

It had to exit the building. It would angle up until it got above the ceiling of the other rooms back here, then run straight to an outer wall. Some sort of screen would have to be set up at that far end. With bars on the outside? Some sort of protection, anyway.

It would be a very tight fit, and it might have some impossible corners in it, and it could end at an opening it would be impossible to get through. There had to be something better than this.

Parker left the lamp on the floor in there and tried the door across the hall. The mail room, plus copier and fax. Nothing of interest.

The other four rooms along this hall also offered nothing of use. One near the front was where the staff took its breaks, with a refrigerator, coffeemaker, sofas, and chairs. The refrigerator contained some snack foods, which they might get to later on.

But not much later on; they couldn’t afford to stay in this building a whole lot longer. They’d started this operation a little after six, and it was nearly eleven now. If they were still in this place after five in the morning they were in deep trouble.

The other three rooms were offices of various kinds; accountant, manager, and personnel, it looked like. Parker went through all the desks, but found nothing that looked like a control to open the garage exit downstairs, which would have been a simple way out. But nothing.

He was coming out of the last room, the manager’s office, when Mackey came down the hall, saying, “You know what you’ve got down there to the right, you’ve got an apartment.”

Parker said, “Somebody lives here?”

“I don’t think so,” Mackey said. “Not usually. It looks like the owner, a guy named Jerome Freedman from what it said in there, things I looked at, he keeps the place for any time he might want to stay over in town, or maybe when they do inventory here, or whatever. But it’s a complete one-bedroom apartment with a full kitchen. Looks as though nobody’s used it for a while.”

Parker said, “Anything useful in it?”

Mackey grinned. “You mean, like a buzzer to open the garage gate? I looked, believe me.”

“And I looked around here,” Parker said, as Williams came down the hall.

Mackey turned to him, saying, “I’ve got the owners’ apartment, what’ve you got?”

“Storage rooms,” Williams said, “and down at the end, a gym, with exercise machines. Nothing to give us a damn bit of help.”

Parker told them about the duct in the Web site room, but neither of them wanted to explore that route. “It’s the big room we want,” Mackey said.

So they went back to the room with the display cases, many of them now with shattered glass, making jagged reflections in the small lights. Without discussion, they moved out into the dim room, each studying the place on his own, seeing it in a different way from the first time they’d come in here.

Parker moved to the right, to the exterior side wall of the building. This room was thirty-six feet long, with four windows spaced evenly along this wall. The windows were a foot wide and four feet high, with arched tops, and started at chest height. They were inset into the middle of a wall four feet thick, with decorative wrought-iron bars on the outside. Parker looked out at nighttime traffic, silent from in here, and the street seemed very far away. The deep-set narrow windows were like looking through the wrong end of binoculars.

So the windows were too narrow, too deep, and too barred to be of any use. Parker moved around to the front, with three more windows exactly like the others, and came to Williams looking at the closed front door. Through the glass they could see a brushed-steel articulated panel closed down over the entryway, the same as the one they’d seen earlier downstairs at the garage entrance.

Parker said, “We can’t do anything in this direction.”

“I know,” Williams said. “But I’m beginning to think we can’t do anything in any direction. If we could break through that, we don’t care if it sets off alarms, or if the doorman out there hears us. If we get through, we take off.”

“But we won’t get through,” Parker said. “Not here. It would take too long and it would make too much noise. The doorman could have the law here before we had the thing opened up.”

From above, Mackey’s voice called, “You can forget the ceiling.”

Parker looked up, and Mackey had climbed ladder rungs mounted into the front wall. He was standing on the metal gridwork up there, holding a vertical support and looking down. He shook his head, and called to them, “Standing here, the ceiling’s still too far away to touch. I don’t know if there’s anything up there might help us, but there’s no place to get a whack at it.”

Parker said, “Then it has to be something down here.”

As Mackey came back down the ladder, Williams said, “What about a fire?”

“I don’t think so,” Parker said.

Jumping the last few feet, Mackey said, “You don’t think what?”

Parker said, “Williams thought, maybe start a fire, we go out when the firemen come in.”

Williams said, “If nothing else works.”

“I don’t know,” Mackey said. Looking around, he said, “It’ll take them a while to get in, won’t it? We’re down with smoke inhalation, they’re still banging away with axes.”

Parker said, “That’s the problem, we’d have to make it a big enough fire to get noticed, but not big enough to knock us down.”

Pointing at the left side wall, Mackey said, “If there’s a way, it’s there. The other side of that is the dance studio.”

Williams said, “That’s the new wall they put in when they converted. It won’t be as tough as these outside walls.”

“The only thing,” Mackey said, “is mirrors. Brenda told me, they’ve got the big workout room where she was, it’s got a whole mirrored wall. If we hit a mirror ten feet by twenty, it’ll make a sound when it comes down, and somebody’s gonna hear it.”

Parker said, “What else did Brenda tell you about the dance studio?”

“Not much,” Mackey said. “You know, she wasn’t casing it, she was just going there. Lemme see, there’s an office up front, and one time she said, when she’s looking at the mirror in the room where she was taking the classes, she was thinking, all that jewelry’s just the other side of that mirror.”

Williams said, “Do we want to go up front, then, so we don’t hit the mirror?”

Mackey shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s gonna be too close to the lobby and the doorman, we don’t want him to hear demolition.”

Parker said, “Is it all studios along here?”

“I’m not sure.” Mackey frowned, trying to remember. “I think the big room where she was, it was maybe third back. First the front office, then a locker room where they changed, and then the big room with the mirror. And beyond that I think there’s smaller rooms, but I don’t know. And I don’t know about any more mirrors.”

Parker said, “What about all the way back? Williams, what’s at that end of the hall?”

“The gym,” Williams said. “The end door opens into it, and it’s across that whole space.”

“Same kind of wall as this?”

“Painted Sheetrock, yeah. There’s mirrors, but they’re on the back wall.”

“If we go through at the rear corner back there,” Parker said, “we might be able to figure out what the wall’s made of before we go too far in.”

Williams said, “There’s tools in the janitor’s closet along that hall.”

“Good,” Parker said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

The three left the main room and went back down the hall to the door they’d come in from the stairs, then turned right and Williams led them to the janitor’s closet, with brooms and mops and an electric floor polisher on one side, shelves piled with cleaning supplies on the other. Part of one shelf was tools; two hammers, a pliers, half a dozen screwdrivers. They took everything and went to the end of the hall, where Williams opened the door and they went on into the gym, which was dark.

“We need light,” Parker said. “No matter what happens.” He found the switch beside the door, and fluorescents in the ceiling flicked on, showing a broad white room with black composition flooring. One of the tall narrow windows was in the wall to the left, with a long mirror fastened beside it. Exercise equipment stood on the floor or was fixed to the walls. To the right were a bathroom and a storage closet. Attached to the wall that interested them were weights with pulleys. Mackey went over to look at how they were held in place, and said to Parker, “This has got to be a pretty good wall, if it takes this. Just screws into studs, with all this weight and people pulling on it, somebody’d yank it right out.”

“I’m guessing concrete block,” Williams said.

Parker said, “There’s one way to find out.” Crossing to the far left corner, where the dance studio wall met the rear of the building, he swung the claw of the hammer into the white-painted Sheetrock, twisted, and pulled away a long vertical powdery V of the panel. He slashed at it again, this time crosswise, and a second zigzag piece broke free. Behind it was one-by-three lath, attached to gray concrete block.

Parker nodded at it. “That’s what we have to go through,” he said. “Before morning.”

2

The only way to attack this wall was to go after the mortar between the blocks of concrete. To do that, they had to wedge a flat-head screwdriver against the mortar, as though it were a chisel, and hit it with the hammer. They worked two abreast, one hitting a vertical line, the other the horizontal line below it to its left, hitting the mortar leftward, to spray the wall beside them.

It went so slowly it didn’t look at first as though anything was happening at all. Gray dust and rubble formed on the black floor, but how much had they removed? A quarter of an inch? Half an inch? Williams took over from Parker, and Mackey from Williams, and then Parker again, and they were no more than two inches into the mortar below and beside that one block.

Mackey was resting again, watching the other two at work, when he said, “A concrete block’s eight inches thick. Those screwdriver blades are four inches long.”

They stopped to look at him. Williams said, “We don’t accomplish anything if we only go halfway.”

“Let me see what I can find up front,” Mackey said, and took the flashlight and left.

Parker said, “We might as well keep going.”

To hit the mortar at an angle shortened the reach of the screwdrivers even more. They were three inches deep into the wall, and nearly at the end of the screwdrivers’ reach, when Mackey came back with two lengths of chrome-covered metal. They were parts of the frame of one of the display cases that he’d broken off by bending them backward and forward, leaving jagged ends. They were L-shaped, less than an inch on a side.

“Let me straighten these,” Mackey said. Taking one of the hammers, he laid first one, then the other, length of metal on iron weights taken from the exercise equipment and hammered the right angle out of them. Finished with that, he bent each length over on itself and hammered the crease. “Now,” he said, “we can get in there with the V of the bend, scrape it back and forth. Slower than the screwdrivers, but it should break up the mortar.”

It did. They used small towels from the gym closet to protect their hands, and scraped back and forth into the narrow slits they’d already made with the screwdrivers, pulling the crumbled mortar out, two working at a time, the third resting.

They’d been at it just over an hour when Parker, at the horizontal line, suddenly stopped and said, “It’s through. Mackey, give me something to mark the metal.”

Mackey gave him a screwdriver, and Parker scored the metal where it met the concrete block. “We know that’s how far to go. We don’t want to push too hard. We need to know what’s beyond this.”

It was only a few more minutes before both slits appeared to be through to the far side of the block, where they could feel an empty space back there. They started on the other two sides of the same block, the left and the top, and it went faster now that they knew how to do it. It was tiring work, and it felt hot in the gym, even with the thermostat off and the hall door open, but they kept working, and in just under an hour the block suddenly lurched downward, shutting the slit beneath it, widening the space above.

The problem now was how to get a purchase on the block to pull it out. Parker tried wedging the hammer claw into the top space to pry it out, but the block wouldn’t lever, it just dug hard against the block below it. They had to come at it from the sides, pounding one hammer’s claw into the space with the other hammer, prying it out, feeling the block move an eighth of an inch, then wedging the hammer in on the other side to do it again.

This part went even more slowly, or at least it seemed that way. It was very hard work, to force the hammer in, force the block to move, a small and grudging move every time. When it was out an inch, protruding from the wall around it, Williams crouched beneath the loose block to push up on it while Parker and Mackey pressed the heels of their hands against the exposed sides and tried to lever it out.

But it was too soon, they couldn’t get enough purchase on it. They had to go back to the hammers, taking turns, beating the claw into the space, prying out, the block not seeming to move at all. Finally, when it was two inches out, twice as far as the first time, they tried again, doing it the same way, and this time the block suddenly jolted out another inch, and then another.

Williams got out of the way, and Parker and Mackey juked the block out by hand, back and forth, back and forth, hearing it scrape along on the mortar rubble, pulverizing it more. They got it almost all the way out and it hung there, angled downward, the top edge against the bottom edge of the block above.

Parker said, “We’ll both pull out, bottom corners.”

They wrenched, and the block jumped out of the space to fall hard onto the floor. Williams picked it up and carried it out of the way while Mackey shone the flashlight into the oblong hole. “Sheetrock,” he said, seeing it an inch beyond the end of the concrete block wall, one furring strip a vertical line of wood near the right edge.

Mackey scraped the Sheetrock with the jagged edge of the metal bar. “I think there’s something else behind it. Hold on, let me try. Parker, take the flashlight, will you?”

Parker held the light on the rectangle of Sheetrock and Mackey worked the bar back and forth, scraping away Sheetrock, trying not to simply puncture it. “Yeah, there’s something.” He prodded some more, breaking strips of Sheetrock away, and they looked through at another surface beyond the Sheetrock, dull white.

“Tile,” Parker said. “It’s a tile wall.”

Mackey reached in to pull a strip of the Sheetrock away. He held it in both hands and they looked at the face of it, which was pale green. “It’s waterproofed,” Mackey said. “We found a bathroom.”

Williams said, “We won’t know if there’s a mirror on it until we break it.”

“A mirror in a bathroom,” Mackey decided, “this far to the back of the building, isn’t gonna wake anybody up. If it comes down to it, I’ll volunteer for the bad luck.”

“We’ve all got the bad luck already,” Williams told him. “Parker and me, we already broke out once, and here we are again.”

Picking up a hammer and screwdriver, Parker said, “We’re running out of time,” and went back to work.

3

The others were easier to get at, but still hard work. It was almost three in the morning before they’d removed the six blocks they needed to get out of their way; the one just above waist height they’d done first, then the two centered below that, the one below that, and the two below that. Now they had an opening in the wall thirty-two inches high and effectively sixteen inches wide.

“Shine the light,” Parker said, and went to one knee in front of the opening. The bottom of it was just about at knee height; Parker reached in with the hammer and rapped a tile just above the next lower concrete block. He had to hit it twice, but then it cracked and fell backward, taking parts of two other tiles with it.

They looked through the new small hole into the darkness beyond, the flash gleaming on something glass, near to them, pebbled to bounce and refract the light. Mackey said, “What the hell is that?”

“A shower stall,” Parker said. “That’s the door.”

“A nice door,” Williams said. “At last.”

Now that they knew there was nothing except the tile in their way, they quickly hammered it out of there, then clawed the one furring strip in their space with a hammer, weakening it so they could snap it in the middle and break the pieces off at top and bottom. Now they had a new doorway.

Mackey went through first, with the flash. The other two followed, as Mackey opened the shower door and stepped out to the bathroom. He switched on the lights there, and Williams said, “I think we oughta turn out the light behind us. No need to attract attention before we have to.”

“Good,” Parker said.

They waited while Williams went back to switch off the gym lights, then came back through the new opening to join them in what turned out to be an apartment connected to the dance studio.

“All these people,” Mackey said, “they build themselves little nests at work, and then don’t use them.”

Williams said, “Better for us if they don’t.”

Once out of the bathroom, they limited themselves to the flashlight, moving through the rest of the dance studio area. They were out of the jeweler’s now, but they were still inside the Armory, and the problem of getting out was still the same. The exterior walls on all sides were impregnable, windows too narrow to be useful, and a twenty-four-hour doorman at the only exit. And time running out.

Moving through the dance studio, they went first through the small neat apartment, then the offices, then the studios themselves. They saw the long mirror Brenda had told Mackey about, and Mackey laughed at it: “We coulda called attention with that thing.”

The receptionist’s room at the front was faintly illuminated by streetlights. A mesh barrier was closed over the front window and door; not impossible to get through but impossible to get through immediately and without noise.

As they turned away from that useless exit, Williams said, “We gotta get next door, into that lobby.”

Mackey said, “Not another wall. Don’t give me another wall.”

“Maybe there’s a door,” Parker said.

There was. It took them twenty minutes to find it, but then there it was, a spring-locked door on the far wall of the main office, toward the readjust in front of the apartment. The door opened inward; Parker pulled it ajar, just enough to look through, and saw the lobby, dim-lit, with elevators nearby to the left and the front entrance far away at the other end of the low-ceilinged space.

Parker stepped back, letting the door shut. “That’s the lobby,” he said. “But I can’t see the doorman from here, and you know he’s going to have video monitors.”

“Lemme look,” Williams said. “I’m pretty good at finding those things.”

He hunched in the doorway, peering through the narrow space, then leaned back, shut the door, and said, “Two. One over the doorway this side of the desk, aimed at the elevators, and one over the elevators, aimed at the front.”

Parker said, “And the stairwell door, that’s just this side of the elevators.”

“He’ll see it,” Williams said, “on his monitor.”

Parker shook his head, angry at the obstacles. “If we try to just go straight through the front, deal with him along the way...”

“He’ll be on the phone,” Williams said, “before we can get to him. We could get to him, but the cops would be on the way.”

Mackey said, “We don’t want that kind of footrace.”

“There has to be a way past him,” Parker said. “If we can get into the stairwell, get down to the parking area, that’s not gonna have security as tough as everything else around here.”

Williams said, “He’ll have a monitor shows him the garage.”

“If we don’t take a car,” Parker said, “if we just walk out, walk along the side wall and out, we won’t give him a reason to get excited. But first we’ve gotta get down there.”

“Somebody switch on the lights in here,” Mackey said, “I got an idea.”

Parker had the flashlight. He shone it across the room, found the light switch by the opposite door, and crossed to turn it on. Two lamps on side tables made a warm glow, showing walls filled with prints of various kinds of dancers, in performance.

Mackey went to the desk, sat at it, lit a lamp there, and looked in drawers until he found a phone book. He leafed through it, read, and gave the open page a satisfied slap. “That’s what we like,” he said. “Twenty-four-hour service.”

Parker and Williams sat in comfortable chairs in front of the desk while Mackey pulled the phone toward himself, dialed a number, waited, and then said, “Yeah, you still delivering? Great. The name’s O’Toole, I’m in the Armory Apartments, apartment C-3. I want a pepperoni pizza. Oh, the eight-inch. And a liter of Diet Pepsi, you got that? Great. How long, do you figure? Twenty minutes, that’s perfect.”

He hung up and grinned at them. “By the time they work it out, we’re in the stairwell, and this goddam place’s history.”

It was twenty-five minutes. They had the office lights switched off again, and took turns watching through the narrow crack of the open door, and at last they heard the building’s front doorbell ring and heard the sound of the chair as the doorman got to his feet.

The delays were grinding them down. They had to get out of here before it was morning and the world was awake and in motion, but every time they moved they were forced to stop again. Stop and wait. All three of them had nerves jumping, held in check.

Five seconds since the doorbell rang. They stepped out of the office, single file, moving on the balls of their feet. They angled across the dim lobby and through the door into the stairwell.

Where the stairs only went up.

4

Parker said, “It’s the goddam security in this place. They don’t want anybody in or out except past that doorman.”

“Well,” Mackey said, “that’s what people want nowadays, that sense of safety.”

Williams said, “Bullshit. There’s no such thing as safety.”

“You’re right,” Mackey told him. “But they don’t know that.”

Parker said, “That can’t be the only way in or out, because garbage has to go out, and they’re not gonna send it out the front door. And deliveries have to come in.”

Mackey said, “It seems that way.”

“The fire code,” Williams said. “They can’t have a building this big, full of people living here, and only one staircase.”

Parker said, “So there has to be service stairs, leading to a service entrance. We go up one flight here, we look in the halls, we find that other way.”

Williams said, “What if there’s video cameras in the halls, too?”

“Can’t be,” Mackey said. “It’s too big a building, and one lone doorman. He can’t look at fifty monitors.”

“We’ll check it out,” Parker said, and started up the stairs.

This first flight was double in length, with three landings, to bring them higher than the ceiling of the former parade field next door. When they reached the first door, it had a brass 2 on it.

Stepping past Parker, Williams said, “Let me look for cameras.”

They waited, while Williams cautiously pulled the door open and looked out, moving his head from side to side rather than stretch out into the hall. Then he opened it wider, leaned out, looking, and shook his head back at Parker and Mackey. “Nothing.”

“Like I said,” Mackey reminded them.

They went out to a crossing of hallways, all quietly illuminated. The elevator bank was to their right, a hall extended to their left, and another hall ran both forward and back. A plaque on the wall facing the elevators read RENTAL OFFICE, with a bent arrow to show the office would be at the end of the hall to the front.

Without speaking, they went the other way, because the service stairs, if they existed, would be at the rear of the building. They moved silently, on pale-green carpeting, past apartment doors with identifying numbers and peepholes.

The door at the end of the hall had neither; instead, in small black letters, it said EMERGENCY EXIT. They went through into a barer, more utilitarian stairwell, all concrete and iron. At the bottom was a concrete landing with a broad metal door beside another of those tall narrow windows. The door had a bar across its middle to push it open, but the bar was bright red, with its message in block white letters: WARNING. WHEN DOOR OPENED, ALARM WILL SOUND.

Williams said, “Well? Do we push and run?”

Parker shook his head. “With no place to go to ground? Look out there, that street’s empty.”

Williams frowned out at the late-night emptiness, the closed stores across the street, this being a narrower street than the one in front. “Everywhere we go,” he said, “there’s something to stop us.”

They were all silent a minute, looking out at the empty dark street, then Mackey, sounding reluctant, said, “What if I call Brenda?”

Parker said, “To come pick us up, you mean.”

“I don’t like her in these things,” Mackey told them, “but maybe this time we gotta. She drives over, we see the car, go out, let the alarm do what it wants to do, Brenda drives us away from here.”

Williams said, “I can’t think of any other way.”

“Neither can I,” Mackey said.

Parker looked out. No traffic. “Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said.

5

Parker hated going back, but there was no choice. Turn around, go up the stairs, the other way along that hall, toward the rental office. Instead of getting out of the maze, turn around and go back into the maze. And less time than ever.

The rental office door was locked, but not seriously. They went through it, and found a suite of offices illuminated by a few pale narrow strips of light. The tall thin windows continued up here, though not in the apartments farther up, and these windows were just above the level of the streetlights outside. It was their glow, coming through the deep-set narrow windows, that made the stripes of light across ceiling and desks and walls.

Mackey sat at the nearest desk, just outside a band of light, and opened drawers until he found the local phone book, then called the place where Brenda was staying. He spoke with the clerk there, then hung up, shook his head, and said, “She’s got a no-disturb until her wake-up call at eight.”

“We need a car,” Parker said. “We need somebody with a car.”

“Shit,” Williams said.

They looked at him. Mackey said, “You got something?”

“I hate to think I do,” Williams said. “I called my sister, you know, I went—”

“No,” Parker said. “We didn’t know.”

“It wasn’t dangerous,” Williams promised him. “I left that beer company place where we were staying, late at night, I walked maybe five blocks, found a phone booth, called from there, came back. Nobody saw me, no sweat.”

Parker said, “The law is listening to your sister’s phone.”

“I know that,” Williams said. “I was just calling to say goodbye, because I gotta get away from here.” He looked around at the rental office. Disgusted, he said, “If I ever get away from here, I mean, then I gotta get away from this town.”

Mackey said, “You can’t call your sister again. She would definitely bring the cops down on us. Not meaning to; they’d just come along.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that,” Williams told him. “I wouldn’t do a thing to mess up her life. But the thing is, when I called her, she told me, there’s this guy we both know, his name is Goody, or everybody calls him Goody, he already been in touch with her, soon as he heard I busted out, said to her she couldn’t help me because of the cops but he could, give me money, whatever, I should call him, he’d help out.”

Mackey said, “This is a good guy? Friend of yours?”

Williams shook his head. “This is a scumbag,” he said. “He’s a dealer, street dealer, works for some big-deal drug guy.”

Parker said, “So he told your sister, have Brandon get in touch with me, I wanna help him, but what he means is, he’ll turn you in.”

“Sure,” Williams said. “I knew that from the first second. I wasn’t gonna call Goody at all. But now, maybe so.”

Mackey said, “If you call this guy, tell him where we are, he just calls the cops, tells them where we are, goes back to bed, goes downtown tomorrow to collect the reward.”

Williams said, “Well, I’m the only local guy in this room, and he’s all I got.”

Parker said, “Then we’ll work with him.”

Williams looked at him. “How?”

“You’ll tell him a story.”

“What story?” Williams spread his hands. “Soon as I tell him to come here, he knows I’m here.”

“You don’t tell him to come here,” Parker said.

Mackey said, “Then what good is he?”

“Just wait,” Parker told him. To Williams, he said, “When we were looking out that back way, across the street, there were stores. There was one of them, second or third in from the corner, a camera shop, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah,” Williams said. “Yeah, I been seeing that all my life, it’s, uh, Nelson’s Lens Shop, that’s what it’s called.”

“Okay.” Parker went over to one of the other desks, saying, “Come on over. Let’s write this down.”

Williams sat at the desk, found a pen and a sheet of letterhead stationery, and Parker said, “You call this Goody. You tell him you’re hiding out in Nelson’s Lens Shop, but you’ve gotta get out of there, you’ve gotta be out in— How fast could he get here, if you woke him up at home?”

“Half an hour.”

“Okay, good. You tell him — it’s almost three-thirty now — you tell him you’ve gotta be out of there by four. You just can’t stay after that, one way or another you’ve gotta get out of there, even if it means just walking down the street. You’ve got two thousand dollars for him, cash money, if he’ll come right now, pick you up, drive you to— What’s a place he’ll believe you want to go to, hide out?”

Williams thought. “There’s a little town,” he said, “Stanton, about ten miles down the river, it’s all black, dying town, just some old people still living there. I got a couple relations living down there, he’d believe me if I said I was gonna go hide out with them awhile.”

Parker said, “And he’ll believe you think you can buy him off with two grand.”

Williams laughed. “So he thinks I’m stupid, and I think he’s stupid.”

“No,” Parker said. “He thinks you’re stupid, but you think he’s greedy. If he thinks there’s money in it from you, in cash, he’ll take you where you want to go first, and then call the law.”

Mackey said, “So we go down to that door, and what? Soon as he shows up, we run out there?”

“No,” Parker said. To Williams he said, “You tell him, you’re hiding in the back of the store. When he gets there, he should come over and knock on the door.” To Mackey, Parker said, “That way, he’s out of the car before we move. And we get to see if it’s Goody or somebody else that shows up.”

6

When Williams hung up, his grin was both nervous and confident. “He’ll do it,” he said.

From just listening to this side of the conversation, Parker believed Williams was right. Williams had been hushed and urgent throughout the brief call. “I’ll tell you in the car, man!” he’d exclaim, every time Goody started asking questions. “If you don’t get here, I just gotta go, I don’t know where, I just gotta get outa here!” And at last, “Good man, Goody, Maryenne says I could count on you, see you, my man.” And he hung up and gave them his grin.

Mackey said, “I know it’s more comfortable in this place, but I wanna be down by that door.”

They all did. They left the rental office, strode to the far other end of the hall, past the sleeping residents of the Armory Apartments, and trotted down the service stairs to the door with the alarmed bar. Williams leaned against the window frame, looking out that deep narrow space at the camera store across the street, and Parker and Mackey sat on the stairs to wait.

The feeling at the bottom of this stairwell was like being in the base of a mineshaft. Even though they were at street level, the sidewalk just the other side of that door in front of them, it felt in here as though they were buried much deeper in the earth than when they’d been in the tunnel. The feeling reminded Parker of his more than two weeks in Stoneveldt. He wanted out of here.

It was three minutes to four when Williams suddenly straightened, looking out the window. Reading his body language, Parker and Mackey both got to their feet, watching Williams as he leaned closer to the window.

“It’s him,” Williams said. His voice was hushed, as though he was afraid the man out there could hear him. Then he shook his head. “Get out the car, Goody!”

Parker and Mackey moved in close to look out past Williams’ shoulders. A black Mercury, several years old, was stopped now across the street, in front of the camera store. Gray exhaust sputtered from the tailpipe. The driver was indistinct, but clearly alone in the car.

Mackey said, “What’s he waiting for?”

“He’s got to get out of the car,” Parker said.

And then he did. The driver’s door opened, the interior light switched on, and Parker could see a skinny black man, any age from twenty to forty, jiggling in nervous fidgety motions inside there. He pushed his door open, hesitated, looked around, then abruptly jumped out of the car. Exhaust still puffed from the tailpipe. The driver closed the door, but then leaned his chest against the side of the car and stared off at something to his right, down the street.

Mackey said, “What’s he looking at?”

Parker took his S&W Terrier .32 from its holster in the middle of his back. “We’ll be finding out,” he said.

The other two both brought out their pistols, as Goody finally moved across the street. Jerking like a marionette, he hurried around the front of the Mercury and ran to the inset doorway of the camera store. As he knocked on the glass over there, Parker rammed his body into the barred door. It popped open, outward to the street. A great metal scream rose up, and Parker and Mackey and Williams ran out to the street.

Parker was already looking to his right as he came out past the door, and what was parked down there, a dozen car lengths behind the Mercury, wasn’t the law. It was a dark green Land Rover, with three burly black men boiling out of three of its doors. They were all shouting, but nobody could hear anything with the scream of that siren laid over them all.

Already there were lights coming on in windows up above, and the three men from the Land Rover waved guns as they ran forward. The two from the front seat would be muscle, the one from the backseat brain. All three started to fire their guns as they ran, which meant the bullets went anywhere.

Parker stopped in the street, one step beyond the curb, aimed down his right arm, dropped the brain. Mackey and Williams were also firing. Parker looked toward the Mercury, and Goody was running for it, across the sidewalk from the camera store, reaching for the passenger door. Two-handed stance, Williams shot him through both closed windows, and Goody bounced off the car, sprawled on his back on the sidewalk, shards of window glass glittering around him.

The three from the Land Rover were all down. That was the better car. Parker ran for it, knowing Mackey and Williams had to see him, because he couldn’t shout to them under the siren. Windows were opening upstairs, people staring down at the street, where three men were fallen in twisted positions, one lay spread-eagled on his back on the sidewalk next to a black Mercury, and three men with guns in their hands raced for a hulking dark Land Rover.

Still running, Parker half-turned, pointed to Williams running behind him, pointed to the driver’s seat of the Land Rover; Williams knew this town. The three piled in, Mackey following Parker through the same door to the back seat, and Williams tore them away from there.

As soon as the siren was behind them, Parker said, “Go to ground. Don’t drive a lot.”

“Where we put the cars,” Williams told him. “It’s just down here.”

Parker looked back. No law yet. They’d been out of the building less than a minute.

Williams drove without lights, nothing else moving on the street, and when he got to the parking garage he stopped to get the ticket that opened the barrier, then circled upward three stories before he finally found a space to park. Cutting the engine, he turned to the two in back and said, “I think the big guy was the one Goody worked for.”

“He should have stuck to drugs,” Parker said.

7

“What now?” Mackey asked. “Do we get the Honda and drive out of here?”

“We move to the Honda,” Parker said. “We don’t want to be in this thing.”

“That’s right,” Williams said. “They’ll be looking for these wheels everywhere around here.”

They left the Land Rover, Williams locking it and taking the keys, and walked down the ramp to the Honda. Mackey had the keys for that; he unlocked it and took the wheel, Williams beside him, Parker in back. Putting the key in the ignition, Mackey said, “So now what? Drive out of here?”

“Too early,” Parker told him. “We’d be the only car on the street.”

“And with three guys in it,” William said.

“But we should be above the Land Rover,” Parker said.

“Right,” Mackey said, and drove them up the ramp, past the Land Rover and one level more to an area that was no more than half full. He tucked the Honda in between two other vehicles, both larger, then opened his window, shut off the engine, and said, “What do they do after they find it, that’s the question.”

Williams said, “Do they search the whole building?”

“No,” Parker said. “They’ve got too much to do. This is a big place, a lot of cars, and pretty soon they’ll be thinking about the jewelry place.”

Mackey laughed. “Pretty soon they’ll have a lot to think about,” he said.

Williams said, “But they’ve at least got to look around in here.”

“Sure,” Parker agreed. “They ask the cashier if any car went out since four o’clock, he says no. They make a pass up to the top and back down. We duck down below window level while they go by. There’s no car alarms going off, nothing looks wrong, that’s it.”

“But,” Williams said, “they leave somebody at the exit.”

“Both exits,” Mackey said. “Car, and pedestrian.”

“They probably will,” Parker said. “They’re looking for three guys. When traffic starts, around six o’clock, I’ll get in the trunk, Williams lies on the floor here in back, it’s just one guy in the car.”

“Or maybe,” Williams said, “I just walk down and out, meet you two around the corner.”

Parker said, “You got any useful ID on you?”

Williams grinned and shook his head. “I see what you mean. I’ll lie down there on the floor.”

“Wait,” Mackey said. “I hear something.”

“That was fast,” Williams said. “Suppose somebody saw me turn in here?”

“Let’s hope not,” Mackey said. “Because then they’d search every car.”

Parker said, “Could you be hearing a civilian?”

“I don’t think so.” Mackey leaned leftward, listening at his open window, then shook his head. “I think it’s two cars. They’re just easing along, coming slow up the ramp, taking their time. They’re searching.”

They all listened. Parker could now hear it, too, the low grumble of two cars throttled back, spiraling very slowly up the ramp.

Williams said, “This job was fucked up from the beginning, wasn’t it?”

“It felt wrong,” Parker agreed, “but we were stuck in it.”

“Stuck in the job or stuck in the jail.” Williams grinned back at Parker. “Some choice.”

“They stopped,” Mackey said. “So they’re at the Rover. I’m closing the window now.” And he did.

Parker said, “If they do like we thought at first, loop up, turn around, loop back down, we’re all right. If they go up and they don’t come back down, that means they’re searching everything.”

Mackey said, “Do we have a Plan B?”

Parker shrugged. “Only leave the car, go down the stairs, see how hard it is to get through whatever they’ve got to guard the exit.”

“And be on foot,” Williams added.

“I like Plan A better,” Mackey said.

Parker looked out his window to the right. Being in the backseat, he had the better view of the ramp curling up from below. It was gray concrete, flanked by the rears of cars. He kept watching it.

They had nothing left to say, and with the window closed nothing to hear. They stayed in silence, Parker watching the ramp, the other two watching Parker, and then the black-and-white cruiser nosed around the curve and Parker said, “Down.”

They all ducked low, Williams folding himself into the footwell, Mackey doing a kind of slow-motion limbo, squeezing himself under the steering wheel. In back, Parker lay on the floor, looking now upward and out of the left window, where he could see the double row of car roofs coiling away and up. After a minute, he saw the black roof of the cruiser move among the other roofs, gliding up and out of sight. He watched, and then said, “Only one went up.”

“Other one with the Rover,” Mackey said. “Calling in.” He sounded compressed.

They waited, two minutes, three minutes, and here came the cruiser again, angling back down the ramp, moving at the same slow pace. “Coming back,” Parker said. “Just looking it over.”

“Good,” Williams said.

The cruiser left Parker’s angle of vision. He waited, then turned around to look down the ramp. “It’s gone,” he said.

Everyone climbed back into the seats. “Been a while since I breathed,” Mackey said. “I’m gonna open this window again.”

“All I want,” Williams said, “is to be in a place I’m not trying to get out of.”

8

After a while they heard the tow truck arrive, a deeper sound with more snarl in it. A while later, it went away again. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the world to wake up and start moving around.

They all napped from time to time, not getting much out of it, but they were all awake when they heard the first car engine start, probably two levels below them. Mackey looked at his watch: “Ten to six.”

“We’ll wait awhile,” Parker said.

“Oh, yeah.”

By 6:15, they’d heard half a dozen cars start up and drive away, none of them from this far up the ramp. Then Mackey said, “I think we could try it now.”

“Fine,” Parker said, and got out of the Honda, pausing with the door open to say, “Leave me in the trunk until we get there.”

Climbing out of the passenger seat in front, Williams said, “And I’ll stay on the floor.”

“Close me in,” Parker said to him. Going to the back of the Honda, he drew the Terrier from its holster, to have ready in his hand in case anything went wrong, and opened the trunk.

As Parker climbed over the rear bumper, Williams grinned at him and said, “I know why you want you in there and me on the floor in back.”

Parker looked at him. “You’re darker.”

“Right. You set?”

Parker lay curled on his side. The trunk was a little messy, but mostly empty, and not too uncomfortable. He had to keep his knees bent. With his head cushioned on his folded left arm, right arm resting across his waist, weight of the Terrier on the floor, he was in a position he could maintain for a while. “Set,” he said.

“See you there,” Williams said, and shut the trunk.

Now he had only his ears to tell him what was happening. In the blackness, he felt the car dip when Williams got aboard, then heard the engine fire up, then felt a jolt as Mackey backed out of the slot.

The experience was different, done this way. Braking and accelerating seemed more exaggerated, turns more abrupt. Parker was more aware of the Honda going down a fairly steep slope than he would have been if seated in the normal way in the car. He felt the change when they leveled out at the bottom, and gripped the Terrier tighter, waiting for something to go wrong.

If Mackey was challenged, they’d quickly find Williams in back. They’d know they were looking for three men, so would they open the trunk right away? If they did, he’d do what he could. If they impounded the car before searching it, took it away to their pound, he’d try to find the best moment to get out of here.

The car stopped. Was Mackey paying the cashier now, or answering questions? The car started again. It jounced heavily down to street level, turned hard, drove straight, jolted to a stop. Red light. They were out of there.

It was a twenty-minute drive, with red lights and turnings. At the end, the Honda stopped, the door slammed, there was a pause, the door slammed, the Honda jerked forward again, and again it stopped. The door slammed, and then a second door slammed, and the trunk lid lifted. Parker saw Williams raising the lid, Mackey behind him closing the overhead door. They were back at the beer distributor’s.

Parker got out, stiff in a lot of his body, and put the Terrier away, as Mackey came back from the closed door, looking at his watch. “Still too early to call Brenda,” he said, “with that block on her calls, so we can’t get out of here yet.”

“We need sleep,” Parker said. “We’ll stay here now, leave this afternoon.”

Mackey nodded. “That’s probably a good idea.”

Williams said, “I’m taking off. I’m too itchy, man, I wanna get out of here.”

Mackey said, “You got a place to go?”

“Out of this state,” Williams told him, “then south, then I don’t know.”

Parker said, “You don’t have the money you thought you’d have.”

“I’ll promote some.”

Mackey said, “You want to take the Honda?”

Williams raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah?”

“If it belonged to anybody,” Mackey s aid, “it belonged to those other guys. Brenda’s got wheels and Parker’s gonna ride with us.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Williams said. “Thanks.”

Mackey said, “You sure you don’t want to get some sleep first?”

“The other side of the state line,” Williams told him, “I’ll sleep like a baby.”

“Then go for it,” Mackey said.

Mackey opened the overhead door again, and Williams backed the Honda out into early dawn. He waved at them through the windshield, and Mackey slid the door shut.

Upstairs, in the former offices, is where they’d set up temporary housing for themselves, with cots, each of the six of them with his own room. Parker and Mackey went up there now, and Parker took off only his shoes before he lay down, Terrier under pillow, and went immediately to sleep. He woke reaching for the Terrier, but it was Mackey who’d come into the room, saying, “They arrested Brenda.”