Strangers

this experience left in us, if we've any hope of getting on with normal lives."
        
        Connecticut to New York City.
        
        After the money had been removed from the armored car, Jack and his men drove only nine miles and parked the two phony Department of Highway vans in a four-stall rented garage leased with fake IDs, where they had left their cars. The garage was one of a long row that faced both sides of a litter-strewn alley in a shabby neighborhood, where relaxed zoning laws permitted intermingling of commercial and industrial facilities with residences. The area was characterized by peeling paint, grime, broken streetlamps, empty storefronts, and mean-looking mongrel dogs on the loose.
        They emptied the contents of the canvas bags on the oily concrete floor of the garage and did a hasty count of the cash. They split it quickly into five shares of approximately three hundred fifty thousand dollars each, all in used bills that could never be traced.
        Jack felt no triumph, no thrill. Nothing.
        In five minutes, the gang had dispersed like dandelion fluff on a brisk wind. Clockwork.
        As Jack headed home to Manhattan, spits of snow fell in brief squalls, though not enough to dust the highway or interfere with travel.
        During the drive from Connecticut, in a strange mood, he underwent a change he could not have anticipated. Minute by minute and mile by mile, the grayness in him began at last to be colored by emotion; his ennui gave way to feelings that surprised him. He would not have been surprised by a new welling-up of grief or loneliness, for Jenny had been dead only seventeen days. But the emotion that steadily tightened its grip on him was guilt. The stolen money in the trunk of the car began to weigh on his conscience as heavily as if it were the first ill-gotten goods ever to fall into his hands.
        Through eight busy years of meticulously planned and triumphantly executed larcenies, several on an even grander scale than the armored car, he had never experienced the mildest quiver of guilt. Until now. He had seen himself as a just avenger. Until now.
        Cruising to Manhattan. through the blustery winter night, he began to see himself as little more than a common thief. Guilt wrapped him like flypaper. He tried repeatedly to shake it off. It clung.
        Sudden as it seemed, the guilt had actually been building for a long time; that was where his growing dissatisfaction had been leading for months. Disillusionment had set in noticeably with the jewelry-store job last October, and he'd thought the changes had begun then. But now, forced into self-analysis, he realized he had stopped getting a full measure of pleasure from his work long ago. As he scrolled backward in his memory, seeking the most recent job that had left him fulfilled, he was startled to discover it was the McAllister burglary in Marin County, north of San Francisco, the summer before last.
        Ordinarily, he worked only in the East near Jenny, but Branch Pollard - with whom he had pulled off the just - completed Guardmaster heist-had settled in California for a while, and during that Pacific sojourn he had spotted Avril McAllister, a sheep waiting to be sheared. McAllister, an industrialist worth two hundred million, lived on an eight-acre estate in Marin County, protected by stone walls, a complex electronic security system, and guard dogs. With information developed from a half-dozen sources, Branch had determined that McAllister was a collector of rare stamps and coins, two eminently fenceable commodities. Besides, the industrialist was a gambler who went to Vegas three times a year, usually dropping a quarter of a million each visit, but sometimes winning big; he always took his winnings in cash to avoid the taxman, and some of that cash was surely in the mansion. Branch needed Jack's sense of strategy and expertise in electronics, and Jack needed a change of scenery, so they pulled it off with the help of a third man.
        After considerable planning, getting onto the estate and into the house went smoothly. They were prepared with an electronic listening device that could detect the soft tick of a safe's tumblers and amplify them, which made deducing the combination mere child's play, but as insurance they also took a full set of safe-cracking tools and a plastic explosive. The problem was that Avril McAllister had no mere safe. He had a damn vault.