Plunder Squad (15 page)

Now Parker and Tommy moved out closer to the road. The second Plymouth had come to a stop just beyond where they’d been waiting, and in the Christmas-tree array of rear lights on the truck the four men inside the Plymouth could be seen in silhouette, their heads turning as they talked to one another, undoubtedly about the accident up ahead.

Ed Mackey came trotting back past the truck toward the Plymouth. In motion, he looked more sensible in the uniform. He hurried to the driver’s side, and as the driver rolled his window down, Mackey called, loudly enough to be heard by everyone inside the Plymouth, “Looks like we got somebody under the car up there. We’re gonna try to roll it off him.”

The driver said something. It was probably an objection to doing anything with an injured man before proper medical attention could show up, because Mackey answered, “Out here? This time of night? Our first job is get that car off him and stop him bleeding to death. Come on.”

Four men got out of the Plymouth: two in front wearing uniforms, and two in back wearing civilian clothes. Mackey shouted to them to hurry it up, and all five went trotting away past the truck.

Parker and Tommy came out onto the road and walked quickly to the car. The driver had shut his door behind him, but the other guard had left his open; Parker slid in on that side, reached over to the steering column, and turned the key to shut off the engine. With the louder growl of the truck cab closer to them, the people from this car wouldn’t hear the Plymouth’s engine cutting out. Parker took the keys, got out of the car again, and slipped the keys in his shirt pocket.

Tommy was at the rear of the truck, looking around the corner toward the Dodge. As Parker came around the front of the Plymouth, Tommy turned his head and grinned at him, his face yellow and red in the truck lights. “They’re all out,” he said.

Parker stood behind him and looked around the corner of the truck. Up ahead, twelve men were milling around in the Dodge’s headlight glare. Mackey and Devers were both shouting at everybody now, trying to keep them all moving, not give any of them a chance to look under the Dodge and see nobody there. Mackey was shouting, “Stand along the side of the car!
Against
the car! We’ve all got to work together here, God damn it! Get
against
the car!”

They were doing it, ten of them lining up along the side of the Dodge, facing the car, their backs to Mackey and Devers. Mackey was standing back a ways, shouting at them as a group, while Devers worked in closer, moving individuals into place; it was as though Mackey were the shepherd and Devers was his dog.

Parker moved out from behind the truck and walked along next to it, Tommy following behind him. Five private guards,
four civilian passengers, one truck driver, all lining up beside the Dodge. Parker’s revolver was in his hand now, and he walked smoothly, neither hurrying nor making any attempt to be unobtrusive. Things were under control now.

Mackey put the lid on. He took the revolver out of the holster at his right side, aimed it away at the woods, and fired once. The sound of the shot wasn’t particularly loud in the open air, but it cut through the noise and confusion as though a radio had been switched off. Ten startled silent faces turned to stare. Devers quickly backed away, drawing his own gun. Parker and Tommy moved up on either side of Mackey, both with pistols in their hands. And Mackey shouted, “Everybody stop! Stay right where you are.”

The switch was too fast. It was four against ten, but the ten were too confused by the sudden change, it would take a few seconds for them to understand that the police officers were something other than police officers, and the few seconds were all that would be needed. Confused men don’t make any moves, and when the confusion was over, the new status quo would already be a fixed situation.

Mackey made it more of a sure thing by leaning on them while they were still bewildered: “The first man that moves is dead! Turn around, face the car. Turn around, God damn it, I don’t care which one of you I kill!”

They all turned around, shuffling, bumping elbows into one another, staring at one another with shocked faces. Each man obeyed because the men flanking him were obeying, and very quickly all ten were facing the Dodge.

It was a good situation, but it couldn’t be held forever. While Parker and Mackey stood guard, Tommy and Devers frisked the ten men, starting at the outside ends and working toward the middle, searching for nothing but weapons. It turned out that only the five guards were armed, with a holstered revolver each. The five revolvers were taken away and thrown into the ditch.

Next, they had to be immobilized. Lengths of cord were in
the trunk of the Dodge. Tommy got them out, and he and Devers went down the line tying wrists.

By now, the first shock and bewilderment were over, and several of the men were starting to get verbally tough: “We’ll get you for this.” “You won’t get away with this.” That sort of thing. Which was fine; so long as they bled off their hostility and embarrassment that way, they wouldn’t cause any serious trouble.

After four of the men had been tied, Mackey holstered his revolver and went to help, leaving Parker the only one still holding a gun. If all ten of them were simultaneously to start running now, several of them would surely get away. But there was no way for them to plan a move together, and none of them wanted to be the only one running, so nothing happened.

The next step looked like something from a prisoner-of-war movie. All ten were herded across the road to the beginning of the side road Parker and Tommy had driven down before. Then Parker got into the Dodge, backed it out of the ditch, turned it around, and followed slowly as Mackey and Devers marched the ten men down the side road in the shine of the Dodge’s headlights. The uniforms on Mackey and Devers and on the five guards helped to reinforce the prisoner-of-war idea.

Tommy meanwhile had swung up into the cab of the truck. Originally Mackey was to have driven the truck away at this stage, but when it turned out that Tommy, among his other unexpected abilities, had experience driving big rigs, the jobs had been switched around, Mackey being a more believable and intimidating figure than Tommy when holding a gun on somebody. Now Parker saw in the rear-view mirror Tommy swing the truck out past the front Plymouth and accelerate away.

They didn’t go very deep into the woods with their ten prisoners before tying them to trees with their belts in the same style as the two troopers. Mackey stood guard on the dwindling untied group while Parker and Devers did the work. Then all three went back to the Dodge, Parker driving, the other two in the back seat with their change of clothing. Parker backed the
Dodge out to the road, and he and Devers moved the two Plymouths into the side road, just deep enough to be invisible to anyone driving by. Devers was down to socks and T-shirt and uniform trousers by now, and kept up a muffled yelling of “Ouch, ouch, ouch” as he ran back along the stony dirt road with Parker to the Dodge. Parker got behind the wheel again, Devers slid once more into the back, and Parker drove north.

He caught up with the truck, doing about fifty, just before the town of Oconee, and stayed behind it the next few miles to the gas station south of Pana with the FOR LEASE sign huge in its window.

False dawn was a blurred gray line far to the east, but the land was still dark. When Parker stopped the Dodge and switched off its headlights, and when at the side of the station Tommy did the same with the truck, the blackness in contrast was at first almost total. Parker opened the car door and the interior light went on, but it showed almost nothing away from the car. He stepped out onto the tarmac, aware of Mackey and Devers doing the same, both of them now in their regular clothing, and when the doors were slammed the night was complete again.

The bulk of the station itself was the only guide. Parker walked carefully around it, not wanting to trip over any unseen curbs, and came to the second bulk of the truck. He touched the metal side of the trailer, and he could almost feel the paintings inside it: canvas, wood, oils. Kirwan and the department store on Mother’s Day; Beaghler and the six statuettes from San Simeon; and the third try was beginning to work out.

But just beginning. There was still a lot to do.

Yellow lights came on—dim, but enough to see by. They were the parking lights of a dark green Reo truck cab with red lettering on the doors:
Great Lakes Long Haul Moving, Kenosha, Wisconsin 552-6299
. The Reo was tucked in close beside the station building, facing the road; Tommy had come to a stop with his own cab very close to it, so the Reo’s parking lights now shone on the length of the truck.

Lou Sternberg climbed carefully down from the driver’s
seat of the Reo. He was still dressed too warmly for the weather, including the same billed cap as before, but now instead of the raincoat he was wearing a short brown leather jacket with a zip-up front. The jacket and cap, with green work pants and heavy shoes, converted him from a short stout accountant to a short stout truck driver. He came around to meet the others at the front of the Reo and said, by way of greeting, “Damp tonight. Hell on the sinuses.”

“Should remind you of home,” Tommy said.

Sternberg gave him a look of disapproval. “Have you ever been in London?” He was taking a pack of sugarless gum from his jacket pocket.

“Naw,” Tommy said. “Too damp for me.”

“Don’t talk about what you don’t know about.” Sternberg unwrapped one piece of the gum.

Parker said, “Let’s go.”

Sternberg nodded. “Right.” He put the gum in his mouth, stuck the wrapper in his jacket pocket, and led the way around to the back of the Reo cab. Parker followed him, while the other three went off to do other things. They’d rehearsed all this, but never with this little light.

At the rear of the cab, on the flat greasy surface where a trailer would be hitched, there were instead two ladders tied down with lengths of rope. Working silently, Parker and Sternberg untied them and tossed the ropes into the cab. Then they carried the ladders over to the stolen truck, one on each side.

The others had gotten the rest of the equipment from the trunk of the Dodge: spray cans of red enamel and large cardboard stencils, each sheet two feet by three and containing just one letter.

It was difficult working in the dark. Mackey and Devers on one side, Parker and Tommy on the other, they fixed the stencils high on the trailer sides with masking tape, while Lou Sternberg went about the process of unhitching the trailer from the Mack cab that had brought it here. He finished separating all hoses and wiring, and drove the Mack cab out of the way, just as the
stencils were all put up; in the dim glow of the Reo’s parking lights, the cut-out letters could dimly be read: GREAT LAKES, stretching most of the length of each side of the trailer.

Tommy and Devers, being the lightest, stayed up on the ladders and did the spraying, while Parker and Mackey dragged each ladder backward across the tarmac. At the same time, Sternberg was putting the Reo cab in position, though he didn’t try to connect it to the trailer while the spraying was still going on. Instead, he climbed down from the cab with a Wisconsin license plate and a screwdriver, and switched the rear plate on the trailer.

The sky to the east was getting lighter. A car went by, southbound, without pausing, and a minute later a pickup truck went past heading north. The stencils were pulled down from the sides of the truck and packed away again with the empty spray cans in the trunk of the Dodge. Sternberg began attaching the Reo cab to the trailer while Mackey took a short crowbar and popped open the trailer’s rear doors.

Immediately a siren sounded, loud and abrasive, a one-tone buzzing too loud to shout over. But they’d expected that, been planning for it. While Parker and Mackey put the ladders in the truck, stuffing them in among the tied-down crates, Devers traced the siren to its source and cut the wires. The silence after the noise seemed a kind of sound of its own, swelling and falling.

Tommy had kept out one spray can of paint, and was now spraying the doors of the Mack cab, removing the company name. The red he was spraying on didn’t match the original red of the body exactly, but it didn’t matter; used trucks often enough have a former company name painted out in a sloppy way.

Sternberg finished hitching cab and trailer together as Parker and Mackey reclosed the trailer doors. They wouldn’t shut as neatly as before, but by slamming them they could be made to stick.

The Mack cab engine started with a roar, and then the headlights
flashed on. Tommy backed it around in a tight U, and Parker studied the right side of the trailer as the headlights swept across it. There had been a very little running of paint, not much. Not enough to worry about. With a cab of a different make and a different color, with a different license plate on the back, and with a company name spread across both sides, it was no longer the same truck. Sternberg had registration papers for the cab that would hold up if necessary. There was no way to pass an inspection of the trailer except to avoid one, and the way to do that was to keep ahead of pursuit. Move fast, and keep moving.

All the lights of the truck switched on, and Sternberg climbed down from the cab to walk around and make a quick inspection. It would be stupid to get stopped for a missing light, and then be arrested for grand larceny.

The Mack cab had finished making its turn, and now bounced out from the gas station tarmac to the road, and headed north. It was about forty-five miles to Springfield. Tommy would leave the Mack cab there, near the railroad station, and then connect up with Noelle and the Volkswagen Microbus. The two of them would head straight west into Missouri, crossing the Mississippi at Hannibal, and then turning north into Iowa. They planned to spend tomorrow night in Davenport, and then take Interstate 80 east the next day. They had friends in Cleveland, and would get there sometime Thursday night. Mackey would phone them there before Sunday.

Sternberg finished walking around the truck and climbed back up into the cab. He started the engine and made a sweeping turn to take him out onto the highway just a minute behind Tommy, though he wouldn’t be able to travel as fast. He too went north, but it would only be for a few miles; at Pana he’d turn east on State Highway 16, take that over to Interstate 57, and head straight north to Chicago. He’d put the truck in a safe place there and wait for Mackey to call him with the arrangements for turning everything over to Griffith.