Breakout (11 page)

Muriel must have found out—the way he’d been flaunting himself, for God’s sake, she
had
to find out— and instead of confronting him, she’d done it this way. Private detectives.

Yes, that was her style, that’s how she’d handle it. No discussion, no hope for forgiveness. Just get the evidence, sue for
divorce, all open and public and forever damning.

Darlene paced, frowning at the carpet. “All I can think is,” she said, “the IRS. Or more likely the state tax people.
That’s
why she’s paying cash, trying to trap us, see what we do with unrecorded income.”

I can’t tell her the truth, Henry realized. I should pack a suitcase, keep it in the trunk of the car. In case… Whenever…

“The little
bitch!
” Darlene raged. “Henry, am I right? What else could it be?”

“You’ll just have to—” Henry began and coughed, and tried again: “You’ll just have to keep an eye on her. I believe I’ll—I
believe I’ll have a drink now, too.”

“No, wait,” she said, surprising him.

He paused, halfway to the drinks cabinet. “Why not?”

“That class is almost over,” she told him. “Go get your car, bring it around front. We’ll follow her. We’ll
see
if she doesn’t wind up in the State Office Building.”

Or the private detective’s office, Henry thought. Much more likely, the private detective’s office.

But wouldn’t it be better to know the worst,
know
it and be able to decide what to do?

Looking around the office, eying the open bedroom door, he said, “Our lovely afternoon.”

“We’ll still have it, Henry,” she promised him. “We’ll follow her, we’ll find
out
what she’s up to, and then we’ll come right back here. Henry…”

He looked at her. “Yes?”

He loved that lascivious smile she sometimes showed; not often enough. “It’ll be better than ever,” she whispered.

On the way back to the Infiniti, he thought, I’ll have to phone Muriel, I’m going to be later than I thought. I’ll have to
phone her, I’ll have to tell her… whatever I tell her.

W
hen CID Detective Jason Rembek, a big shambling balding man with thick eyeglasses sliding down his lumpy nose, reached his
cubicle at Headquarters at 8:34 Saturday morning—according to the digital clock on his desk, which was never wrong—the overnights
were stacked waiting for him, escape-related materials on top, lesser cases underneath, just as he’d instructed.

The flight of the three hardcases from Stoneveldt Thursday afternoon had kept him on the hop all day yesterday. He hoped things
would be quieter today. He had other Opens on his desk, not just these three punks taking a little vacation.

Detective Rembek had been on the state force fourteen years, with very little experience of prison breaks. None, from Stoneveldt;
that trio had made the record books. Nevertheless, it was his own experience and the experience of others he’d talked to or
read about, that the boys in prison were mostly there in the first place because they didn’t know how to handle life on the
outside, not even when they
weren’t
on the run. Very very rare was the guy who disappeared forever, or showed up thirty years later a solid citizen, mayor of
some small town in Canada.

Mostly, the escapees ran until they got tired and then just stood there until they were rounded up. Sometimes they’d steal
a car or rob a convenience store, but there was no
plan
in their lives, no long-term goal. Three, four days, they’d start to get hungry, they’d start to miss that regular life they
had in the cells, and they’d call it quits. Detective Rembek believed it was true almost without exception that once an escapee
had thought about
escape
, he was finished thinking.

Were these three going to fit the pattern? Why not? On Rembek’s desk were photos and bios of the three, and there was little
in them to make him believe they were going to beat the odds. The two local boys, anyway. Given their histories, their family
ties, their dependency on this small area of the world, it was only a matter of time before they’d show up somewhere they’d
been before, that they just couldn’t stay away from. A relative, a girlfriend, a bar, a fellow heister. And then the net would
scoop them up, put them back where they belonged.

The out-of-towner was the wild card; Ronald Kasper, or whatever his name was. No one had ever escaped from Stoneveldt, but
these three had, and neither Marcantoni nor Williams seemed to Rembek the kind of guy to break that cherry. So was Kasper
the one who’d made it happen? Was he the one they had to find, the one they had to outthink and outguess, if they were going
to collect all three?

Rembek studied the few pictures he had of Kasper. A hard face, bony, like outcroppings of stone. Hard eyes; if they were the
windows of the soul, the shades were drawn.

Rembek didn’t pick up any of the pictures, but leaned closer and closer over them, his nose almost touching the surface of
the desk. Had this bird gone through plastic surgery some time in the past? Did he have other histories, beyond the broken
burglary at the warehouse and the escape from Stoneveldt? Rembek craved the opportunity to interrogate that face, see what
was behind those eyes.

Well. There were other ways to come at them. The three escapees now on his desk had three contact points, being the people
who had visited them during their time inside; one each. Ronald Kasper had been visited several times by his brother-in-law,
named Ed Mackey. Thomas Marcantoni had been visited twice by his brother, Angelo. And Brandon Williams had been visited three
times by his youngest sister, Maryenne.

The first of these was the most interesting. After Kasper broke out, police naturally went to the motel where Mackey was living,
only to learn he’d checked out that morning, no forwarding address, no useful ID. Detective Rembek doubted very much it was
a coincidence that Mackey checked out of his motel in the morning on the same day that Kasper checked out of prison in the
afternoon.

The top report on Detective Rembek’s desk told him that no progress had been made in either finding Mackey or learning who
he actually was. The next two folders were mostly the results of the wiretaps on Angelo Marcantoni and Maryenne Williams,
wiretaps that had been granted by the judge at nine
P.M.
on Thursday, less than four hours after the escape, and had been
in operation ever since. No police officer actually sat next to the recording machine twenty-four hours a day; it was a voice-activated
tape, picked up at eight every morning, and four in the afternoon, and midnight.

Angelo Marcantoni, according to the transcript, did very little on the telephone, and then it seemed to be mostly about bowling;
if that were a code, as far as Detective Rembek was concerned, Marcantoni was welcome to it. In any event, he appeared to
be the law-abiding brother, married, three children, with absolutely no criminal record of any kind and an unblemished work
record with a supermarket chain. Detective Rembek thought it unlikely he would risk all that to help a brother who’d been
in increasingly serious trouble since he was ten.

As for Maryenne Williams, she appeared to be a young mother who spent all her waking hours on the phone with other young mothers,
discussing their babies, discussing their babies’ (mostly absent) fathers, and discussing boys they thought of as “cute” as
though they didn’t have trouble enough already. That’s what the MW transcripts had been up till now, and that’s what they
looked like for last night, too, boring and tedious to read but necessary.

And then:

11:19
P.M.

MW: Hello?

C: Hi, it’s me.

MW: (audible gasp) Are you okay?

Detective Rembek sat straighter, holding in both hands the paper he was reading.

C: Yeah, I’m fine.

MW: What are you gonna do?

C: I think I gotta go away.

MW: Oh, yeah, you do. You need money?

C: I’m gonna get money in a couple days, I’m okay. I got a good place to stay, and next week I’ll take off.

MW: Listen, uh—

Almost said his name there, Detective Rembek thought.

MW:—you remember Goody?

C: Yeah, that one.

MW: Well, he come around, he said, any way he can help, buy you tickets or stuff, whatever, you should call him, because it
wouldn’t be good for me to do anything.

C: No, no, you shouldn’t do anything. I’m just calling—I wanted to tell you I’m okay, and I’ll be going away, next week.

MW: That’s the best thing. If you need help—

C: Goody.

I wish I could hear how he said that name, Detective Rembek thought. Does he think Goody will help him, or does he think Goody
isn’t any use? He won’t tell his sister, because she thinks this Goody is all right.

MW: I’m glad you called.

C: Well, yeah, I had to. Listen, kiss Vernon for me.

MW: I will, (crying) Bye, now.

C: Bye, now.

The call had been traced, after the event, to a pay-phone on Russell Street, a nondescript working-class neighborhood. Two
police officers were at this moment searching the area, with no realistic expectation of finding anything.

Detective Rembek took notes. Goody; find this fellow Goody, squeeze him a little, see where he leads.

And there was one other thing. Detective Rembek looked back through the transcript and found it:

C: I’m gonna get money in a couple days, I’m okay.

Going to get money in a couple days. Where?

I
t took Buck two days to figure it out. He’d known from the get-go there was something funny going on with that little scumbag
Goody, to make him all of a sudden up and leave his sales post early on a Thursday, but he just couldn’t see in his mind what
Goody was up to. A family emergency; shit. What would a piece of garbage like Goody be doing with a family?

But if it was something else that took Goody away in the middle of the best sales period of the day, when the workingman wanted
a little taste to bring home with him after another eight hours throwing his life away for pennies to the Man, what was it?
I’m not stupid, Buck reminded himself. If there’s something there, and there’s got to be something there, what the hell is
it?

Of course he saw all the stuff on the television Thursday night about the three boys broke out of Stoneveldt prison, and he
even noticed that one of them was a brother, but he never made the connection. And he didn’t make that connection because
he didn’t think about the police scanner in brother Goody’s car until Goody forgot and left it on that Saturday evening when
he swung by the Land Rover to turn in the day’s cash and stash. With both windows open, Buck’s Land Rover and Goody’s Mercury,
all of a sudden there was that harsh cop-radio voice,
jabber-jabber-jabber
, until Goody quickly reached down and switched it off. And even then Buck didn’t put two and two together, because he was
distracted by business, there being three more salesmen to report in, and it wasn’t until he was dealing with the second of
those that he suddenly saw the light.

The brother’s on the run. Big-time manhunt, all the cops excited because these three guys rubbed their nose in it, escaped
from their im-
preg
-nable slammer, and Buck knew what that meant. And he knew that Goody would instantly know what that meant, too.

Reward.

He’s got a connection to the brother, Buck told himself. He’s looking to collect; turn the boy in and collect, without telling
his best friend—and employer, don’t forget—Buck.

“Leon,” he said to the bodyguard in the passenger seat up front, “call my mama, tell her bring the Lincoln up, leave it out
front. Raydiford,” he said to the bodyguard at the wheel, “as soon as Hector check in, you drop Leon and me at the Lincoln,
then take Rover and all this shit to the store.”

Leon looked happy. “We goin somewhere?”

“We’re goin callin,” Buck told him.

One thing you could say for Goody; he didn’t put all his profits in his nose. A lot of them, they could only function at all
because they were too scared of Buck to allow themselves to fuck up totally, but Goody had a brain and knew how to stay on
plan.

Look at his house. An actual real house, not some rathole apartment in the very slums you’re dealing so you can get out of.
Not as good a place, of course, as Buck’s horse ranch out in the country, but for a street dealer not bad; a big sprawling
brick home with a wide porch on the front and sides, late nineteenth century, set on a wide lawn amid similar houses in a
residential section that had been a suburb when the doctors and the college professors first built their places out here.
That had been before cars, so some of these places still didn’t have garages, just driveways, including Goody’s, and there
was his Mercury now, parked beside his house. Goody was home.

A telephone company truck was in front of the house, a lineman in a cherry picker doing something at the top of the pole,
so Leon had to drive beyond it and pull the Lincoln in at the curb in front of the house next door. Buck, spread out in back,
waited while Leon came trotting around to open his door, and then the two of them went up to Goody’s house, stepped up onto
the wide wood-floored porch, and Leon rang the doorbell.

They had to wait a pretty long time, and Buck was just about to tell Leon to bust the door in, when it opened, and there stood
a white girl, college girl, in blue jeans and white tank top, coked to the eyebrows. She frowned through her personal mist
at Buck and Leon and said, “Yes? What can I do for you?”

“Not a thing,” Buck said, and brushed by her.

She tottered, very shaky, but didn’t fall down because she still had a good hold of the doorknob. “Hey!” she cried, but her
outrage was unfocused, and she didn’t seem to notice when Leon copped a feel on the way by.

You can take the boy out of the pisshole, but you can’t take the pisshole out of the boy. There was barely any furniture at
all in these big echoing rooms with the good old wood floors. In the front room, a television set with its other machines
sat on an assemble-it-yourself bookcase from the home center, full of tapes and DVDs. Two big white wicker chairs with peacock-tail
backs stood across the room, facing the TV, with a couple of mismatched shitty little tables, table lamps standing on the
floor, telephone on the floor.