Free Breakout by Richard Stark Page B

Mackey would go out of his way for him, be the outside man when it
     came time to break out of Stoneveldt. Marcantoni would do that for Angioni and Kolaski, and they would for him—they’d just
     done it—so that was all the guarantee you needed.
    There was still a little of the old furniture in the building, including a long table and some folding chairs next to one
     of the long brick walls. Apparently, this was where the drivers would fill out their forms, get their requisitions and their
     routes. Now, the six of them crossed to this table, Jack Angioni leading the way for the new guys and Marcantoni just naturally
     taking his place at the head.
    When everybody was seated, he grinned around at them all and said, “I waited six years for this job, and it was beginning
     to look as though I was gonna have to wait sixty, but here we are. Ed, did these two fill you in?”
    “Halfway,” Ed Mackey said.
    “Okay, then, I’ll do it from the top.” Talking mostly to Parker and Williams, he said, “Six seven years ago, I was on parole,
     I had to have a day job, I worked construction here in town. Downtown there’s this big old armory building, brick, from Civil
     War days. The army still used it for like National Guard and shit until the sixties. Then it just sat there. Every once in
     a while, the city would borrow it and use the parade field in there—indoor, hardwood floor, you know what I mean—for a charity
     ball, something like that.”
    Ed Mackey said, “There’s old armories like that all over the country.”
    Marcantoni nodded. “And we got this one. And finally the government decided to turn a dollar on the thing, and they sold it
     to some local developers. It’s a big building, it’s a city block square. They put some high-ticket apartments on the upper
     floors, with views out over the city and the plains and all, but it was tough to know what to do with the main floor, where
     the parade field was. The outside walls were four feet thick, with little narrow deep windows, ready to repel an attack like
     if the Indians had tanks. You couldn’t put street-level shops in there, nobody wanted an apartment down in there, and even
     for a bank it was too grim.”
    Williams said, “I was in there sometimes when I was a kid. They used it for track and field. I remember, it was like a fort.”
    “It
is
a fort,” Marcantoni told him. “That’s the point. One of the developers was a guy named Henry Freed-man, got his money from
     his father’s wholesale jewelry business, which was on two floors of an office building downtown, upper floors for the security
     but a pain in the ass for the salesmen and the deliveries. So they worked it out, they’d lease part of the main floor of the
     armory to Freedman’s father, he’d move his wholesale business in there; on the street, but even more secure than the office
     building. The rest of the space they leased to some dance studio.”
    Parker said, “You worked on the refit.”
    “That’s just right,” Marcantoni said. “And I found the secret entrance.”
    That got the blank looks he’d anticipated. He said, “I looked it up afterward, that’s what they used to do. Like they’re getting
     ready for a siege, they put in a little back entrance nobody knows about.”
    Flat, Williams said, “A secret entrance.”
    “No, it’s true,” Marcantoni told him. “I had free time on the job there, I liked to poke around, see what was what, and there
     was this locked metal door in the basement, no knob, just a keyhole. I wondered, what’s back there? Maybe government gold,
     everybody forgot about it. So I managed a look at the blueprints in the site office, and there was no door there. It wasn’t
     on the plans.”
    Williams said, “Did you get it open?”
    “Sure. I took a bar down, and popped two bricks next to the door so I could pull it open, and I put my flashlight in there,
     and it was a tunnel, brick all around, like five feet wide, maybe six