Out of Sight Read online

  He looked around at the mess of scrap lumber the prison carpenters, not giving a shit, had wasted. A piece of two-by-four caught his eye. Foley had thought of using pipe for what he’d have to do—there was enough of it around—but he liked the way this piece of scrap wood was split and tapered to a thin end, like a baseball bat.

  He picked it up, took a swing and imagined a screaming line drive sailing out to the athletic field where half the population—he could see them through the window openings—five, six hundred cons slouched around with nothing to do, not enough jobs here to keep them busy. It was going dark now, the sky showing a few last streaks of red, and there it was, the whistle: everybody back to the dorms for evening count. It would take a half hour, then another fifteen minutes to do a re-count before they’d know for sure six inmates were missing. By the time they got out the dogs, Chino and his boys would be running through sugar cane.

  Strung-out lines of inmates were coming from the athletic field now, passing through a gate to the prison compound. Foley watched them thinking, You’re on the clock now, boy.

  In the chapel again he placed his baseball bat in one of the pews, on the seat, and took off his denim jacket to lay over it. Chino would be down there in the muck telling his boys to be patient, making sure it was dark before they came out.

  Foley turned, hearing the chapel door open. He watched the Pup come in and glance around before closing the door. No weapon on him, just his radio and flashlight, the peak of his cap down on his eyes, the man anxious. His hand went to the light switch on the wall by the door and Foley said, “Leave it off.” The Pup looked at him and Foley put his finger to his lips. It was happening now and he took his time.

  “They’re right underneath you, Pup. They dug a tunnel.”

  Now the guard was unhooking the radio from his belt.

  Foley said, “Wait. Not just yet.”

  TWO

  * * *

  KAREN LEFT WEST PALM AT FIVE, DROVE INTO THE SUNSET past miles and miles of cane and had her headlights on by the time she turned into the parking area and sat facing the prison. Her high beams showed a strip of grass, a sidewalk, another strip of grass, the fence strung with sound detectors and razor wire, dark figures in white T-shirts inside the fence, brick dorms that looked like barracks, picnic tables and a few gazebos used on visiting days. Lights were coming on, spots mounted high that showed the compound with its walks and lawns; at night it didn’t look all that bad. She lit a cigarette and dialed a number on her car phone.

  “Hi. Karen Sisco again. Did Ray ever get back? . . . I tried, yeah. He calls in, tell him I won’t be able to meet him until about seven. Okay?”

  She watched prisoners massing at the gate from the athletic field, straggling through and then spreading out, moving toward their dorms in the spotlight beams. She picked up the phone and dialed a number.

  “Dad? Karen. Will you do me a big favor?”

  “Do I have to get up? I just made myself a drink.”

  “I’m out at Glades. I’m supposed to meet Ray Nicolet at six and I can’t get hold of him.”

  “Which one is that, the fed, the ATF guy?”

  “He was. Ray’s with the state now, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, he switched over.”

  “He’s still married though, huh?”

  “Technically. They’re separated.”

  “Oh, he’s moved out?”

  “He’s about to.”

  “Then they’re not separated, are they?”

  “Will you try calling him, please? He’s on the street. Tell him I’m gonna be late?” She gave her dad Ray’s beeper number.

  “What’re you doing at Glades?”

  “Serving process, a Summons and Complaint. Drive all the way out here . . .” Headlights hit Karen’s rearview mirror, a car pulling into the row behind her. The lights went off, then came on again and Karen adjusted the mirror to deflect the glare. “I have to drive all the way out here because some con doing mandatory life doesn’t like macaroni and cheese. He files suit, says he has no choice in what they serve and it violates his civil rights.”

  Her dad said, “What’d I tell you? Most of the time you’d be serving papers or working security, hanging around courtrooms, driving prisoners to hearings . . .”

  “You want me to say you were right?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “I’m giving the West Palm office a year. They don’t put me back on warrants, I quit.”

  “My daughter the tough babe. You know you can always step in here, work with me full time. I just got a case you’d love, the rights of the victim at stake.”

  “Dad . . .”

  “Guy pulls a home invasion, beats up an old lady and takes her life savings she has hidden away, eighty-seven thousand, cash. They get the guy and his lawyer cuts a deal with the state attorney, two to five and the guy will come out and make full restitution. He does fifteen months, gets his release and disappears. The old lady’s son hires me to find him.”

  Karen said, “You do, then what? The guy pulls armed robberies to pay her back?”

  “See? You like it, you’re thinking. Actually, the old lady’s son would settle for beating the shit out of the guy.”

  “I have to go,” Karen said.

  “When am I gonna see you?”

  “I’ll come Sunday and watch the game with you, if you’ll call Ray.”

  “You get dressed up for this guy?”

  “I’m wearing the Chanel suit—not the new one, the one you gave me for Christmas a year ago. I happen to be wearing it.”

  “With the short skirt. You want him to leave home tomorrow, huh?”

  “I’ll see you,” Karen said and hung up.

  Her dad, seventy, semi-retired after forty years in the business, ran Marshall Sisco Investigations, Inc., in Coral Gables. Karen Sisco, twenty-nine, was a deputy United States marshal, recently transferred from Miami to the West Palm Beach office. She had worked surveillance jobs for her dad while in college, the University of Miami, decided she might like federal law enforcement and transferred to Florida Atlantic in Boca Raton to take their criminal justice program. Different federal agents would come to the school to give talks and recruit, FBI, DEA—Karen was smoking grass at the time, so she didn’t consider Drug Enforcement an option. She thought about Secret Service, but the agents she met were so fucking secretive—ask a question and they’d go, “You’ll have to check with Washington on that.” She got to know a couple of marshals, nice guys, they didn’t take themselves as seriously as the Bureau guys she met. So Karen went with the Marshals Service and her dad told her she was crazy, have to put up with all that bureaucratic bullshit.

  Karen was five-nine in the medium heels she wore with her black Chanel suit. Her marshal’s star and ID were in her handbag, on the seat with the court papers. Her pistol, a Sig Sauer .38, was in the trunk with her ballistic vest, her marshal’s jacket, several pairs of handcuffs, leg irons with chains, an expandable baton, Mace, and a Remington pump-action shotgun. She had locked the pistol in the trunk so she wouldn’t have to check it inside the prison. The Sig Sauer was her favorite, her evening-wear piece; she didn’t want to have to worry about some guard fooling with it.

  Okay, she was ready. Karen took a final draw on the cigarette and dropped it out the window. She straightened the rearview mirror to look at herself and right away turned her face from the glare: the headlights of the car behind her still on high beam.

  THREE

  * * *

  BUDDY SAW THE MIRROR FLASH AND BLOND HAIR IN HIS headlights, a woman in the blue Chevy Caprice parked right in front of him, Florida plate.

  He didn’t see anyone in the other cars in the first row. Good. Cons were coming in from the athletic field, but he didn’t see any hacks running around like crazy or hear any whistles blowing. That was even better. He was on time. After busting his tail to get out here he wouldn’t mind relaxing for a few minutes. He still couldn’t believe his luck, getting hold of
Glenn with just a few hours to spare, tell him it was on. Not Sunday, today, now. Glenn wanting to know how come. Buddy said, “We don’t have time to chat, okay? Pick up a car and be waiting where I showed you. Sometime after six. Glenn? A white car.”

  Glenn didn’t see what difference it made.

  “So we’re fairly sure it’s you,” Buddy said, “not some cop sitting in an unmarked car with a radar gun. And don’t wear your sunglasses.”

  Glenn argued about that, too, and Buddy told him, “Boy, do as I say and you’ll get by.”

  Buddy had to hurry to pick up a car himself, a white one Foley would spot without looking all over the parking lot, then drive most of three hours to get here from the Miami area.

  As minutes passed he wondered if the woman in the Chevy was sitting there waiting for Cubans to come crawling out of a hole. He knew Latins liked Chevys and this woman could be Latina herself with dyed hair. Buddy turned his head this way and that looking around, wondering if there were other cars here waiting to pick up convicts. Like a commuter station, wives come to pick up their hubbies.

  The blonde was in the right spot. Foley had told Adele the second fence post from the gun tower by the chapel, that was where they’d come out.

  Buddy hated gun towers, even from outside the fence, the idea of a man up there with a high-powered rifle watching every minute you’re in the yard. Foley would look up at a tower and say, “Imagine hoping to see a man on the fence so you can shoot him off it. Praying for the chance. What kind of a man is that?” Buddy would say your common, garden variety hack, mean and stupid.

  This was when they first met, found they’d both been doing the same kind of work and became friends for life at USP Lompoc: five miles from the Pacific Ocean and full of big-time California dopers, con men, swindlers . . . Foley would say, “Buddy, what’re a couple of pros like us doing in this dog pound, associating with misfits, snitches and dysfunctional assholes?”

  They got their release three months apart.

  Buddy, out first, stayed in L.A. with his older sister, Regina Mary, an ex-nun who lived on welfare, drank sherry wine and went to Mass every day to pray for Buddy and the poor souls in Purgatory. When Buddy was on the road doing banks he’d call her every week and send money. In the joint all he could do was write, since Regina wouldn’t accept charges if he phoned.

  Foley came out with his fifty dollars gate money and took a bus to L.A. where Buddy was waiting for him in a car he’d boosted for the occasion. That same afternoon they hit a bank in Pomona—the first time either one had worked with a partner—cleared a total of fifty-six hundred from two different tellers at the same time, and drove to Las Vegas where they got laid and lost what was left of their fifty-six hundred. So they went back to L.A. and worked southern California a few months as a team: two tellers at the same time, seeing who could score more than the other without setting off alarms. Buddy sure missed his partner.

  When Foley first called him about this business, Buddy was still out in California staying with his sister. He said, “For Jesus sake, what’re you doing back in the can?”

  “Looking for a way out,” Foley said. “A judge with bugs up his ass gave me thirty years and I don’t deserve to be here. It’s full of morons and misfits but only medium security, if you get my drift.” The reason he was in Florida, he said, he’d come to see Adele.

  “Remember how she wrote the whole time we’re at Lompoc?”

  “After she divorced you.”

  “Well, I was never much of a husband. Never helped her out with expenses or paid alimony.”

  “How could you, making twenty cents an hour?”

  “I know, but I felt I owed her something.”

  “So you did a bank in Florida,” Buddy said.

  “It reminded me of the time in Pasadena, I come out and the goddamn car wouldn’t start.”

  “You talked about it for seven years,” Buddy said, “wondering why you didn’t leave the engine running. Don’t tell me the same thing happened in Florida.”

  “No, but it was like that. Like my two biggest falls were on account of cars, for Christ sake.”

  “You got in an accident?”

  Foley said, “I’ll tell you about it when I see you.”

  From then on it was Adele who called, always from a pay phone, to speak about this business with the Cubans.

  By the time a date was set, Buddy had motored out from California and rented a one-bedroom unit in the Shalamar Apartments in Hallandale. It was on the ocean, just north of Miami.

  Then Adele had called to say it was tonight and, man, he’d have to move. Got Glenn off his ass, then went out to look for a car and found the ideal getaway vehicle in a Dania strip mall: white Cadillac Sedan DeVille Concours. Buddy was about to jimmy the door when he saw a woman coming from Win-Dixie, middle-aged, wearing pearls and high heels in the afternoon, but pushing the cart full of groceries herself, so she wouldn’t have to tip a carryout boy, some poor Haitian who’d come here in a rowboat. Buddy stuck the jimmy in his pants, against the small of his back. He waited until the woman was opening her trunk before coming forward with, “Here, lemme help you with those, ma’am.” She didn’t seem too sure about it, but let him load the groceries in the trunk and take the key out of the lock. The woman said, “I didn’t ask for your help, so don’t expect a tip.”

  Buddy waved it off. “That’s okay, ma’am.” He said, “I’ll just take your car.” Got in and drove off. The woman might’ve yelled at him, but with the windows shut and the air on high he didn’t hear a thing. It was the first time he’d ever picked up a car this way, sort of like what they called car-jacking.

  A quarter to six. If it was going to happen the way Foley said, it should be any second now. Almost all the cons were in from the athletic field, a few stragglers coming along in no hurry, moving through the spotlights.

  Now Buddy was watching the woman in the Chevy again. He saw her hand come out the window to drop a cigarette and it made him think she did know about the break and was getting ready. He saw her other hand raise, inside the car, to the mirror and saw his headlights flash on the mirror again, the same way it happened before, when he first arrived. Moments later the Chevy’s lights were turned off. Buddy was pretty sure she’d be getting out of the car now.

  He waited, anxious to see what she looked like.

  FOUR

  * * *

  FOLEY WATCHED THE PUP CREEP UP THE AISLE TOWARD THE front of the chapel, eyes on the floor, no doubt listening for sounds from below. Sure enough, he said, “I don’t hear nothing.”

  “They’re not digging now, Pup, they’re done. Six of ’em in the tunnel as we speak, ready to go.” Foley thought of something he might need to know and said, “What do you say when you’re reporting a break?”

  “That’s an amber alert,” Pup said. “You sure they’re down there?”

  “I saw ’em duck into the crawl space.”

  “Where’s the tunnel come out?”

  “Second fence post from the tower out there. Go on, take a look.”

  Pup turned his back, walked up the aisle and across the front of the pews to a window. Lights in the compound reflected on the glass and turned the shades a dirty yellow. Pup said, “I don’t see nothing there.”

  Foley, picking up his jacket with the two-by-four baseball bat, moving through the pews to the window aisle, said, “You will directly. Keep watching.”

  Pup said, “They’s nobody in tower six this time of day—if they do come out.”

  Foley said, “You think they don’t know that?” moving up behind Pup, seeing the guard shirt stretched tight across the man’s back, a lot of heft to him. Foley let his jacket slip to the floor; he held the two-by-four in his left hand now, down against his leg.

  Pup said, “There some car headlights out there . . .” Now he was pulling his radio from his belt saying “Jesus Christ . . .” Saying into the radio, “Man outside the fence! By tower six!” Nothing about it being an amber alert�
�too excited. Foley edged in closer to see the car headlights in the parking lot shining on the fence, a dark-blue car and a white one behind it that had to be Buddy, bless his heart. Foley on his toes now looking at freedom, feeling it—man, right there—as the Pup was identifying himself, saying this was Officer Pupko and where he was, sending out the word too soon, before Foley was ready. He saw a figure by the fence now, lit blue in the headlights, as Pup was yelling into his radio, “I’m looking at him, for Christ sake!”

  Foley took a moment to remind himself not to hold back, to follow through. Hold back, you make a mess. He got the angle he wanted, stepped in like he was going for a high hard one and laid the two-by-four smack against the side of Pup’s head. Dropped him clean with the one swing, bounced him off the window frame and down without a sound coming from him. Foley took another look outside, saw two figures now by the fence, before he stooped down to get Pup undressed. Undo his shirt buttons and then roll him facedown, the Pup alive but dead weight. Man, it was work getting the shirt off, Pup not helping any. Foley quick put it on over his T-shirt. He heard a car horn blowing now, somebody leaning on it, maybe Buddy trying to tell him something. Like come on, move. He saw he wouldn’t have time for the pants; he’d have to chance his prison blue wouldn’t be noticed in the dark. Foley squared Pup’s cap, too small for him, tight over his eyes, picked up the flashlight and slipped out the front door into the ficus bushes.

  • • •

  KAREN HAD THE COURT PAPERS IN HER HAND, READY TO GET out of the car. She saw prisoners still coming in from the athletic field, passing left to right in her view, all of them some distance from the fence. She opened the car door . . .

  Wait a minute.

  One of the guys, a figure she hadn’t noticed before this moment, was right by the fence. Close enough to touch it. The guy crouched . . . or on his hands and knees. Karen popped on her headlights again and saw him clearly.