Williams said, “Is it time?”
“Might as well,” Marcantoni said.
Williams sat on the corner of the volunteer’s desk. “Jim,” he said, “this is where you’ve got to do it right, or you’re in big trouble.”
The volunteer looked at him, tense, waiting.
“You’re gonna call out to the guards at the end of the corridor,” Williams told him. “The way you do every day, phone to them to unlock your door here so you can go home. But today you’re gonna tell them you’ve got two heavy cartons of law books to be carried out of here, and you’d appreciate it if a couple guards could come down and give you a hand. You’ve done that kind of thing before, the guards carrying the heavy stuff for the civilians like you, am I right?”
“Sometimes,” the volunteer said.
“And today is one of those times. Do you want me to repeat the story,” Williams asked him, “or do you have it?”
“Oh, I have it,” the volunteer said. He sounded very depressed. He said, “Please don’t kill them, they’re just working guys.”
“Come on, Jim,” Williams said, “nobody’s gonna kill nobody, I already told you that. Because we’re all gonna do our part. So if we all do our part, why should there be any extra mess?”
“More trouble for you,” the volunteer suggested.
“Exactly! Do it now, Jim, while the story’s fresh in your mind. Pick up the phone.”
The volunteer picked up the phone. Williams gently touched a finger to the back of the hand holding the phone, and the volunteer flinched. His voice softer than ever, Williams said, “But just remember, Jim. If you do anything at all except what I told you, anything at all, then I’m sorry. You’re an organ donor.”
Jim did very well.
17
The guards were one white and one black, which was useful but not necessary. Their replacements wouldn’t be standing around for inspection.
Williams crouched under the little desk, where he could come out fast into the volunteer’s back if it looked as though he were coming unstuck. Parker and Marcantoni waited around on the far side of the supplies closet, its one door opened out in front of them, the stacked cartons just a few feet away across the room.
“It’s the top two there,” the volunteer said, pointing at the boxes, hanging back to hold the door ajar the way Williams had whispered just before the guards got here. He sounded nervous and shaky, but not too much so.
“No problem,” the white guard said, and they moved forward, the white first, reaching for the top box, jerking upward with it in surprise when it didn’t carry the expected weight, saying, “This is—” He would have said “light,” but Parker and Marcantoni came boiling out from behind them, Parker swinging the file box at the white head, Marcantoni aiming at the black.
The guards were big guys, and strong. Both went down to their knees when they were hit, but neither of them was out. Standing in the middle of the room, with more space to swing and aim, Parker and Marcantoni slammed those two heads again, and the guards dropped.
Parker spun away as the volunteer recoiled, letting the hall door go, Williams coming fast out from under the desk to jam a book into the opening to keep the door from closing itself completely, which would automatically lock them in again. Pointing at the volunteer, voice low and fast, Parker said, “Give me your clothes.”
The volunteer stared at Parker in owlish surprise. “But you’re a lot bigger than I am.”
“Tom’s bigger,” Parker told him, “so it’s me.” He was already peeling off his jeans. “Come on, Jim.”
Marcantoni and Williams ripped off their own jeans and stripped the guards, then put on their uniforms. Keeping his own T-shirt, Parker forced himself into the volunteer’s slacks, shirt, yellow tie and sports jacket. He looked like something from a silent comedy when he was done, but nobody would have a lot of time to study him.
The volunteer stood there in his undershirt and shorts and socks and shoes, holding Parker’s jeans in both hands as though not sure what they were. The others were ready. Parker moved to his right, away from the others, and whispered, “Jim.”
Jim turned his head, and Marcantoni cracked the lamp base across the back of his head. Parker broke his fall, to keep him from making a racket, while the other two each picked up one of the empty boxes, carrying it high as though it were full and heavy, obscuring whatever was ill-fitting about their uniforms or wrong about their faces. Parker followed, trusting the two large men in front of him to keep him from too close inspection.
The empty hall. At the far end, as they approached, the door was buzzed open. Straight ahead was the conference room, where Inspector Turley sometimes lurked. To the right was the civilian office space. To the left was the parking lot.
A volunteer lawyer and, later, two guards had walked in. Now the same seemed to come back out, doing what was expected of them, turning left after the first door. The two guards on duty, hardly noticing them at all, buzzed them through and they went out that final door to the parking lot.
The door slid shut behind them. “Walk toward the gate,” Parker said.
The big square blacktop area, surrounded by its high walls on three sides, was half full, haphazardly parked with Corrections buses and private cars. The gate, on the fourth side, a tall electronically run chainlink rectangle with razor wire along the top, was to their right. They walked toward it.
Marcantoni said, “They should be here.” He sounded very tense, holding the box too tight, so that it might crumble in his hands.
“They’ll wait to see us,” Parker said.
They kept walking, not in a hurry. Parker was aware of guard towers up and behind them, of eyes casually on them but on them. They kept walking, diagonally toward the gate, the two guards carrying the big white boxes high like offerings, followed by the ill-dressed attorney. Beyond the gate were farmland and woods. No traffic.
A blue-black van appeared in the road beyond the chain-link gate. It angled to the gate and jolted to a stop and honked, as the driver leaned out to shout into a speaker mounted on a metal pole out there. “I’m late, goddamit!” Parker heard Mackey yell, and saw that the van had STATE CORRECTIONS ID on its side door.
Slow, ponderous, the gate began to slide open. Somebody behind them at the building began to yell. With the widening of the gate barely broad enough, the van nosed itself through, scraping against the fixed post on its left side.
More shouting. The van was half in and half out, the gate jerking to a stop as the side door of the van slid open.
“Now!” Parker yelled, and the three ran for the van, hurling away the boxes, a flurry of firecrackers going off behind them, Mackey already backing out as they dove headfirst through the side opening onto the metal floor.
Struggling upward as the van jounced and its side door slammed shut, Parker stared out the meshed rear window as Mackey backed them in a tight U-turn, then jammed them forward. The gate back there was closing again, just as slow, just as certain, but too late. It stopped. Before it could open once more, to permit pursuit, Mackey had taken a forested curve on two wheels and Stoneveldt was out of sight.
Two
1
When Williams got his rump under him and hands braced on the floor, the van was leaping down a road and sharply around a left turn. There were six of them in here, he the only black; not good. The three who’d come with the van wore dark shirts and jackets and military-style billed caps, to give them the look of Corrections personnel. One of them drove, a second beside him, and the third sat in back with the escapees; he was the one who’d opened and shut the side door.