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Janine. That’s enough for a conversation with him now, I figure.”
    Crockett snorted. “A conversation, yeah. Well, he and I don’t exactly work the same circles, you understand.” Crockett grinned. “Guys like him are dog shit to guys like me. He does do stores, liquor and milk stores. I’ll ask around, but there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to find out today.”
    Ross sighed. “I’ve got no time. Janine’s got no time. What do you think about Datano’s offer, the five hundred? What if we gave that to the guy? That’s still a hell of a lot of money for a guy used to robbing stores.”
    Crockett shrugged. “What do I look like, a psychic?”
    “I know. I’m grasping at anything.”
    “Giving him the five hundred could buy some time, I guess. A few days, maybe. Then you could come up with the balance.”
    “Once the land’s gone, we’re tapped.”
    “Not necessarily.” Crockett paused, then said, “I never would’ve approached you on this before. You were different than the others inside. I know you figured that sentence as a one-shot fluke, that you’d probably die without a jaywalking ticket… .”
    “You’ve got a job planned?”
    “Armored car. Kenmore Square. Right about one-thirty. Driver likes his onion bagel with lots of chives, every day about now. Two coffees in his hands. Walks them back to the passenger door, guy opens up. Sloppy, the both of them. I need someone who’s a hell of a driver, who could hop a truck or four-wheel drive onto the sidewalk while me and one other guy make the snatch. Then get us out of there and to a clean car within three, maybe four minutes.”
    “There’s enough in there?”
    “My info, your cut would be right around a mil.”
    “What about today?” Ross felt disassociated from himself, hearing the words. Thinking about going back to prison. Thinking that there were no guarantees the guards wouldn’t put up a fight, that innocent men wouldn’t be killed.
    “No.” Crockett shook his head firmly. “We need another guy. And I don’t intend to get caught, so it has to be the right one. You, I know, won’t shoot me in the back.”
    Ross felt a dull flush of resentment well up inside him. Greg wouldn’t be able to do this, Ross knew. But it could well be the only way to get the money in time. “I’ll think about it.”
    Crockett checked his watch. “Just after one now. Why don’t you check it out?”
     
    Ross pulled up in front of the restaurant and waited. College students milled around the square, looking far younger than Ross remembered himself looking at that age. He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. His black hair was already salted with gray. Ross was only thirty, but he could pass for forty.
    He thought about what the first day back in would be like. Walking in with the bars behind clanging shut, the bars in front waiting to open and take him in deeper.
    He thought of Janine, of holding her when she was just three hours old.
    Logically, he knew the kidnapper may have just been trying to throw a bluff into Greg. But Ross had believed the man himself. He’d known enough people at Concord who could kill a person, a child even, and look at you with incredulity if you suggested they’d done something wrong. Could imagine this guy saying, “I told the kid’s old man what I’d do.”
    Ross had always considered himself different from the rest of the inmates. He had been certain he’d never be putting himself in the way of the law again. Yet here he was. Ross couldn’t help but resent Greg. He should’ve been here, not Ross.
    The armored car pulled up. As Crockett said, the driver went into the restaurant. He was a middle-aged man with sunburned skin and a bristling gray crew cut. A little on the heavy side, not too fat. Ross tried to divine by looking at him if the man would resist.
    Sweat beaded Ross’s forehead. This is wrong, he thought abruptly. It’s wrong, it’s stupid, and I just can’t do it.
    He felt ashamed,