Matt Lennox - The Carpenter

— Peace be with you, said the usher.

Instead of taking the candle, Pete stood up and looked once more to the front. Then he turned from the usher and went back down the aisle to the doors.

He was about to go down to the street when someone said his name.

Stan Maitland was sitting on a deacon’s bench against the entryway wall. Pete hadn’t noticed the old man leaving the sanctuary.

— Mr. Maitland.

— You’re not going to stay to the end of the service?

— Well, I could ask you the same thing.

Stan sat back against the wall and smiled. He said: We’re both a couple of truants. I slipped out five minutes ago.

— It was warm in there, said Pete. A lot of people.

— I started out Catholic, said Stan. I was an altar boy. If I think hard I believe I can still say the rosary in Latin and French both. But my wife, before she was my wife, when I first took a shine to her, this was her church. She taught Sunday School and she played piano for the choir. Thirty years she played. They named a room after her …

— Emily talked about her a few times. Said she learned to play from her grandmother.

— Yes, that’s true. Her grandma knew she had it right from the beginning.

— You missed hearing her tonight.

— It was too hot in there for an old bastard like me. If you want to know, Pete, a good many Christmases I used to work. A lot of Christmas Eves. I always thought it was a funny night to work, a funny kind of night for people to get up to this or that.

Pete put his hand on the newel post at the top of the banister. He wanted the relief of the cold outside.

— Well, Mr. Maitland-

— One time on Christmas Eve we got a call to a car accident. This would of been 1960 or so. So I drove out there with Dick Shannon. This young fellow, he’d robbed a liquor store in another town. He’d made it all the way up here before he wrapped his car around a telephone pole.

— Was he okay?

— He shouldn’t of been, but he was. He was thrown out of the car and into the snow and that had to be what saved him. He was pretty drunk when we got out there. He was sitting on the snowbank on the other side of the road. Just sitting there, having himself a Christmas Eve snort of Scotch. Watching.

— Watching what?

— Well, it was snowing that night, same as it is tonight. And this boy had a trunk full of stolen liquor. When he crashed the car, the liquor caught on fire, and then the upholstery in the car caught on fire, and then just about the whole car itself. When me and Dick got out there, strange as it might seem to you, I thought that was one of the prettiest things I ever saw. All that fire in the middle of the dark and the snowfall.

Pete looked down at his boots.

— I should get back to work.

— Careful driving.

— See you around, Mr. Maitland.

Lee was sitting at the bar in the Corner Pocket. He was on his third beer. A cigarette was perched on an ashtray before him.

Events were moving quickly. He’d spent much of the past two days in the storeroom at the roadhouse, where he’d been brought in on certain aspects of the plan. Gilmore had not been specific, but he’d let on he’d done other bank-jobs before, in the Maritimes, mostly in Quebec. He’d come to believe that daytime stickups ran too much risk. An overnight job was how to go. Patience was his watchword. Lee had the sense that Gilmore had been laying low for a time. He also sensed that Gilmore wasn’t even the man’s real name, but what did that matter. Work was work.

Gilmore was the overall planner. Maurice was to take care of the internal alarm system, and provide heavy lifting when it was needed. What heavy lifting consisted of was not explained to Lee, but they’d told him again they did not foresee any trouble. Maurice was spending all of the twenty-fourth doing surveillance on the intended location. Speedy was to put his welding skills to the vault. They would go through the wall. Speedy was proud of this. He’d said with an oxygen lance he could cut through anything and, perhaps unconsciously, he’d touched the scar on his face.

And Lee. The eyes and ears. The six. The man for the odd jobs.

Much of the security of the plan rested on monitoring a police scanner and on watching the street. They were to be three hours from start to finish. The police could be there in four minutes. If anything was coming, they were all to drop what they were doing and go their separate ways.

— Quickly but not running, Gilmore had said, you get it? If it’s the street, you just go back down the alley and go home. If you’re in the van, you just get out and leave it where it’s at. Same thing. Split. We all go in different directions.

— And?

— And what? Wait. Keep quiet. Give it a few weeks. What nobody’s doing, Lee, is any time. Nobody’s going up.

Gilmore said there was ten thousand dollars in it for Lee, maybe twelve, maybe more. They would hit the deposit boxes, but there would also be cash in the vault that stores had deposited, last minute, before Christmas. He reminded Lee that it was the season of giving.

But the take would have to be moved first so it could be laundered before they divided it up. And here was the last piece. They weren’t going to drive the take anywhere. At seven-thirty on Christmas morning, a friend of Gilmore’s would land his Cessna Skywagon just outside, right down there on the ice. From there they would fly, all of them, with the take, to the lake country east of Maniwaki. And then by car to Montreal, where Gilmore knew some people. In Montreal they would get the take laundered, see what was happening on the news, and then split up. After that, Lee could take the first-class coach on the passenger train. Gilmore wanted to know if Lee had ever done that, taken first-class anywhere?

Lee drank his beer and asked the barman for another. He had still not been told what bank it was going to be.

Earlier that day, Lee had surprised himself by sleeping in, dreamlessly, waking late in the morning. An hour after he’d finished his breakfast there was a knock on his door. His visitor was the same young man he’d met before, the man whose wheelchair-bound mother had given them the canvas duffle bag.

The man had a Datsun crew-cab in the parking lot. They got in and drove wordlessly to a garage in the industrial park on Douglas Avenue. Behind the garage was a fleet of various cars and trucks, mostly derelict. There was no one in the yard, but the back of the garage was open and Lee thought he spied some movement within.

The man parked the Datsun out front and he and Lee walked around to the back, where the cars and trucks were.

— This is your place? said Lee.

— A friend of mine owns it.

— So you have something for me? said Lee.

— It’s over here.

The man led Lee past a stripped car and a damaged pickup truck to a ‘74 Dodge B100 van. There was a crack in the windshield and one of the side-view mirrors was mended with duct tape. The van had been painted in a kind of matte grey that Lee associated with warships. Or institutions. The man opened the side door. One bench seat. A lot of space in the back.

— Just like Gilmore wanted, said the man.

Lee nodded. He lit a smoke and offered his pack. The man, watching him, took one and lit it. Then he opened the passenger door. The transmission was an automatic floor shifter. The upholstery was old blue vinyl.

— See the radio?

Set in the dash was the faceplate of an AM/FM radio.

— It’s the scanner, said the man. We have the bands for the cops. I was sitting in here listening to the cocksuckers all morning.

The man showed Lee how the scanner was wired to its own battery, hidden at the back of the glovebox, so that it could be used while the engine was off. The rest of the van was in as good shape as it needed to be, but Lee thought he might have a look under the hood anyway, later, when there was nothing much else to do but wait. The man gave him the key.