“Same here,” Williams said. Seated on a wooden bench, weights strapped to his shins, he was lifting and lowering both feet together, from the knee.
“Maybe we got something we can share,” Marcantoni said. “You got a religion?” Then he laughed at himself, lost his rhythm with the hand weights, found it again, and said, “Never mind, you were brought up Baptist, I don’t even wanna know about it.”
“And you’re a fish-eater,” Williams said. “I could tell from your nose.”
“We don’t do that any more,” Marcantoni said.
Parker pressed a weighted bar up to his chest. “You don’t have to like each other,” he said.
Williams stood and jogged in place, the weights still on his shins. “But we have to trust each other,” he said.
Marcantoni said, “How come you trust Kasper, that’s what I don’t get. He’s a white guy.”
“He looks like a door to me,” Williams said. “I never did care what color a door was.”
Parker lowered the bar, lifted it again. “We ready to talk?”
“Let’s do it,” Marcantoni said.
Williams said, “The only way out is through the front building.”
“Well, you’re right about that,” Marcantoni told him. “This place’s only got two exits. The back comes here, and we don’t get through or over or under those walls, and the front goes to the front building, with all the ways out.”
Parker said, “We can forget the kitchen. It’s under the mess hall and the only way out from there is kept solid locked, unless they’re bringing supplies in or garbage out.”
“Some places,” Marcantoni said, “some guys got out in garbage cans. A little messy, but there you are, out.”
“Here they know about that,” Parker said. “They use plastic bags, and they back the compactor truck into the door opening, toss in the bags, compress them right there, before they go.”
“Squish,” said Williams.
Marcantoni grinned at him. “That was funny,” he told him. “What you said.”
Williams grinned back. “You think so?”
Parker said, “The dispensary is in the prison building, down by the foot of the stairs, before any doors at all, so there’s no point doing sick call.”
Williams said, “The laundry’s in the basement, across the way from the kitchen. Just as impossible.”
Marcantoni said, “If that leaves nothing but the visitors’ room and the lawyers’ room, I don’t see us doing it without a tank.”
Parker said, “There’s the library.”
Marcantoni put the hand weights on the shelf, stood contemplating the other possibilities lined up there. He said, “What does the library do for us?”
Parker said, “When you first go into the front building, there’s the mess hall on the right, and the first thing on the left is the library.”
“Sure,” Marcantoni said.
“But it isn’t the first thing,” Parker told him. “Before that, at the very start of that wall on the left, there’s another door.”
“Closed and locked,” Marcantoni said, and Williams, taking off his shin weights, said, “I’ve never seen anybody use it.”
Parker said, “It’s the way the guards come to work, a hall there next to the library, goes back to the offices. I think the way it works, the volunteer lawyer in the library, back in the stacks there where we’re not allowed to go—”
“That’s right,” Williams said. “You tell the lawyer what you’re looking for, he goes back and gets it, and you sign out for it.”
“Back there,” Parker said, “I think he’s got a door to the guards’ hall, a side door. He doesn’t come around to the main corridor when he comes to work.”
Marcantoni, sounding surprised that he remembered this detail, said, “He doesn’t come outa there at all. When the library closes, he locks the door from the inside, stays in there.”
“Goes out the back,” Williams said.
Parker said, “We should all talk to our friends on the outside, get what floor plans we can’t see for ourselves.”
“And a car and driver waiting when we come out,” Marcantoni said. “I don’t wanna be calling a cab.”
“When we get a route,” Parker said, “we’ll get a car.”
“Good,” Marcantoni said. “There’s one thing more. I was working on a better thing when I was nabbed on this thing. Half my crew came in with me, they’re lost to me now. The rest will help us get out. But I’m gonna need cash, so I’ve gotta do this other thing, right away. I want you two in with me.”
“Replacements,” Williams said.
Parker didn’t like where this was going. He said, “Is this something near here?”
“In the city, yeah.”
“It’s not smart,” Parker told him, “to break out of here, then hang around the neighborhood, pull a job.”
“It goes down easy,” Marcantoni promised. “And I can keep you both out of sight, for just a few days. Then you’re off wherever you go, with cash in your pocket.”
Parker considered. He couldn’t expect Marcantoni to describe the job to him, inside here, but it wasn’t good to make a jump into the unknown. Still, he needed Marcantoni. So he’d go along with it, and if it looked bad, he could make adjustments.
Marcantoni said, “I’m trusting you in here. I’m asking you to trust me out there.”
Parker nodded. “I’m in,” he said.
“Me, too,” Williams said. “Why not?”
Marcantoni said, “Good. You’re gonna like it.” He grinned at Williams. “You’re okay for a Baptist,” he said.
11
Ed Mackey said, “Marcantoni’s friend was in on the armored car with him. Every day Marcantoni keeps his mouth shut, his friend owes him his life.”
Parker said, “Does that make him grateful, or scared?”
“Grateful,” Mackey said. “They did some things together, like you and me, they trust each other, he’d like his pal outside, be a help here and there.”
“Sometimes,” Parker said, “a guy wants to help somebody get to the outside, it turns out, he just wanted a clear shot on him.”
“Not Marcantoni.”
“Meaning what about Williams?”
Mackey shrugged and shook his head. “There it’s family,” he said. “So that’s a little different, harder to read. Who I’m talking to is a neighbor of Williams’ sister, a guy in a different line of business entirely.”
“What line of business?”
“Import-export,” Mackey said, and touched the tip of his nose. “You know what I mean.”
“Mostly import?”
“I’d say so, yeah.”
“Trade?”
“No, he sells to the trade.” Mackey grinned. “You seen those signs on the stores. ‘To the trade only.’ Wholesalers. He’s like that.”
“But Williams isn’t part of it.”
“No, Williams is strictly a heavy, like you or me. He doesn’t deal in anything and he doesn’t taste anything.”
“And his sister?”
“A simple girl, I think an innocent. Loves her brother.”
“I hate not being able to see these people,” Parker said. “Is there any way she can shop me and not shop her brother?”
“Not that I can see,” Mackey said, and offered a slow smile. “And at this point,” he said, “she and the neighbor are a little afraid of me.”
Parker looked at him. “Just a little?”
“So far,” Mackey said.
That was the twelfth day. The thirteenth, Mackey gave him a verbal map. “From what I hear,” he said, “that doorway you use, when you come in here, that’s a corridor straight down from the cells, mess hall on the right, the other side of that wall there with the kids’ pictures of trees and airplanes and shit.”