Authors: Richard Stark
“That’s right,” the volunteer said.
“So there won’t be any killing,” Williams assured him, “there won’t even be any danger for anybody, if we all just stay calm
and do it by the book. And Jim, what I mean here is
their
book. They’re gonna ask you to do a couple things pretty soon, nothing bad, nothing hard to do. Jim, I want you to promise
me, you’re not gonna make me look bad. Just do what these fellas say, and you’ll be outa this mess in no time.”
The volunteer nodded. “I know what you’re saying,” he said. He sounded better now.
Parker walked back toward the counter. “There’s a chair back here.”
“I think Jim would like to sit awhile,” Williams said.
“Time,” Marcantoni said.
“Oh, you’re right,” Williams said. ’Jim, I’m not gonna steal your watch, but I would like to look at it. Could you twist your
arm around here? Thanks. It’s twelve minutes to five. You gonna be okay if Tom lets go of your tie?”
“Yes,” said the volunteer, so Marcantoni released the tie and the volunteer slid backward off the counter until his feet were
on the floor, then stood there reeling a bit, holding to the counter edge with both hands.
Williams, sounding concerned, said, “Your vision a little blurry, Jim?”
“Yes.”
“What you’ve got there,” Williams told him, “you’ve got a slight concussion. Nothing serious. But when this is done, just
a few minutes from now, you’ll take my advice, you go straight to your family doctor. Not the ones in the dispensary here,
they’re not that good, if you want the truth. You go to your family doctor, right?”
“Yes,” the volunteer said.
Marcantoni said, “Have somebody drive you. Don’t drive yourself.”
Williams said, “Good thinking.”
While Parker looked around the back library area for anything useful, he listened to Williams and Marcantoni herd the volunteer.
They knew how to go about it, hard and soft, a menace but not quite a mortal threat. He’d needed to find a crew in this place,
and he’d found one.
Williams said, “Jim, whyn’t you sit down in your chair.”
The volunteer made it across the clear space from the counter to his small desk and chair, tucked away in a corner out of
sight of anybody in the inmates’ area. He dropped there, both forearms on the desk, mouth slightly open.
Marcantoni was fooling with the volunteer’s cellphone. Now he said, “How do I get this thing to work?”
“It doesn’t work in here,” the volunteer told him.“You have to take it outside.”
“Well, that’s where I’m going,” Marcantoni said, but when he and Williams hoisted themselves over the counter he left the
cellphone behind with the rest of the volunteer’s stuff.
Parker told them, “There’s cartons back here. Some kind of legal boxes.”
“Good,” Marcantoni said, looking at them. Stacked in a corner were four empty white cardboard cartons with separate cardboard
tops, like the boxes used to carry evidence into court. They’d most likely been used here to bring books in.
Williams said, “What have we got for persuasion?”
“This desk lamp,” Marcantoni said, and picked up from in front of the volunteer a heavy metal lamp with a pen trough in its
broad base and a long green glass globe around the bulb. Marcantoni yanked the end of the cord from the outlet, then took
the base of the lamp in one hand and its neck in the other and jerked them back and forth against each other until something
snapped. Then he started to separate them and said, “Damn the cord. Jim, you got scissors?”
“In the top drawer,” the volunteer said. He looked mournfully at his lamp.
Opening the drawer, taking out the scissors, Williams told the volunteer, “They still make those lamps, the state’ll buy you
another one.” Turning, he snipped the cord, so Marcantoni could drop the glass globe in the wastebasket and heft the base.
With a conspiratorial grin at the volunteer, Williams put the scissors back in the drawer and shut it.
Meantime, Parker had found the supplies closet; a metal stand-alone armoire with two doors on the front. Inside were mostly
forms, papers, various kinds of tape. But on one shelf was a green metal file box, sixteen inches long, meant for 3×5 cards.
It was full of the cards, half in use for various records, the rest still in their clear packaging. The file box was unwieldy,
but heavy; Parker ran duct tape over the front of it, to keep it closed, so he could carry it by the front handle.
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.
T
he 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.
W
hen 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.”