Authors: George V. Higgins
The Digger's Game
Praise for George V. Higgins
“Posing as a tough-guy documentarian, Higgins is an experimental virtuoso.”
—Newsweek
“Nobody talks the talk like the late George V. Higgins. His mastery of the patois of the Boston criminal class is legendary.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“The Balzac of the Boston underworld.… Higgins is almost uniquely blessed with a gift for voices, each of them … as distinctive as a fingerprint.”
—The New Yorker
“He can rival and surpass Ross MacDonald.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A marvelous writer.”
—Providence Sunday Journal
ALSO BY GEORGE V. HIGGINS
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972)
FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2011
Copyright © 1973 by George V. Higgins
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2011. Previously published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 1973.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-94727-7
v3.1
Contents
T
HERE WERE THREE KEYS
on the transmission hump of the XK-E. The driver touched the one nearest the gearshift boot. The fat man, cramped in the passenger bucket, squinted at it in the moonlight.
“Back door,” the driver said. “Three steps, aluminum railing, no outer door. No alarm. You got a problem of being seen. There’s a whole mess of apartments back up on the place, and they got mostly kids in them and them fucking bastards never go to bed, it seems like. What can I tell you, except be careful.”
“Look,” the fat man said, “I’m gonna act like I was minding my own business. This is what you say it is, tomorrow morning nobody’s even gonna know I was there. Nobody’ll remember anything.”
“Uh huh,” the driver said, “but that’s tomorrow. First you got to get through tonight. It’s tonight I’d be worried about, I was you.”
“I’ll decide what I’m gonna worry about,” the fat man said.
“You got gloves?” the driver said.
“I don’t like gloves,” the fat man said. “In this weather especially, I don’t like gloves. What the hell, somebody spots me, the heat comes, I’m dead anyway. Gloves ain’t gonna help me. You wait like you say you’re gonna, nobody’s even gonna know I was in there until everybody’s been around handling things and so forth.”
“That’s what I thought,” the driver said, “no gloves. I heard that about you. The Digger goes in bare-ass.”
The driver pulled a pair of black vinyl gloves out of the map pocket on his door. “Wear these.”
The Digger took the gloves in his left hand. “Whatever you say, my friend. It’s your job.” He put the gloves in his lap.
“No,” the driver said, “I really mean it, Dig. You want to go in bare-ass, you go in bare-ass. That’s all right with me. But you get to that paper, the actual paper, you put them gloves on first, and you keep them on, okay?”
“I wouldn’t think it’d help them,” the Digger said. “So many people handling the stuff and all. I wouldn’t think it’d make much difference, time they found out.”
“Well, take my word for it,” the driver said, “it does. It really does. Now I really mean it, you know? This is for my protection. Gloves on as soon as you get to the paper.”
“Gloves on,” the Digger said.
“You get inside,” the driver said, “you go left down the corridor and it’s the fourth door. The fourth door. There’s about six doors in there and they all got the company name on them, but this is for the fourth door.” He touched the second key. “It says ‘General Manager’ down at the bottom, there, so in case you get screwed up, that’s the one you’re looking for.”
“Can I use a light?” the Digger said.
“Not unless you really have to,” the driver said. “Near as I can make out, there’s no windows anybody can look in and see you moving around, but you never know what’ll reflect off something. I was you, unless I absolutely had to, I wouldn’t.”
“Okay,” the Digger said, “no light.”
“I don’t think you’re gonna need one anyway,” the
driver said. “We got a pretty good moon here and all. You should be able to get along all right.”
“Fourth door,” the Digger said. “Must be some kind of suspicious outfit, got a different key for every door and all. They must be afraid somebody’s gonna come in after hours or something and steal something.”
“Well,” the driver said, “I don’t know that for sure. It could be, this’ll open any door, once you get inside. But the offices’re separate, you know? They haven’t got any doors between them. So it’s not gonna do you any good, you get into the third door or something, because what we want isn’t in there. I’m just trying to save you time, is all.”
The driver touched the third key. It was smaller than the first two. “ADT,” he said. “Metal box right behind the door, just about eye level. The lock’s on the bottom on the right. It’s got the yellow monitor light, so you won’t have no trouble finding it anyway. Twenty-second delay before it rings. Plenty of time. Oh, sometimes they forget to set it when they lock up. If the yellow light’s off, don’t touch it. You do and you’ll turn it on and then you’re gonna have all kinds of company. I’m pretty sure it’s on. So you turn it off. I told him, I said, ‘Make sure that alarm’s on. I don’t want nobody coming in Monday and seeing the alarm’s off and looking around.’ He said he would. But just to be on the safe side, don’t touch it if the light isn’t on.”
“Do I still go in if it’s off?” the Digger said.
“Sure,” the driver said. “The important thing is, get the paper. I’m just saying, it’d be better if the alarm was on when you go in. And you shut it off and get what we want and then turn it on again and get out. You got another twenty seconds when you turn it on.
Oh, and it’s a cheapie. No puncher for when it’s on and off, no signal anywhere it got turned off. Single stage, it all works off the key. If it’s on, and you don’t turn it off, it rings. But that’s all it does.”
“Chickenshit outfit,” the Digger said.
“Well,” the driver said, “it’s really just for the typewriters and, you know, in case the junkies come in and start tearing the place apart. They don’t keep any real dough there. It’s just for intruders, is all.”
“Trespassers,” the Digger said.
“Yeah,” the driver said, “trespassers. Speaking of which, I assume you’re not a shitter or anything.”
“No,” the Digger said.
“You
know
you’re not a shitter, too, don’t you?” the driver said.
“Well, I’m pretty sure,” the Digger said. “I never done much of this, but when I been in some place, I never did, no.”
“Well, in case you get the urge,” the driver said, “wait till you get home or something. I had a real good guy that I always used, and he was all right. He could get in any place. You could send him down the Cathedral and he’d steal the cups at High Mass. But Jesus, I used him probably six or seven years and I never have the slightest problem with him, and the next thing I know, he’s into some museum or something they got out there to Salem, and he’s after silver, you know? And he shits, he turned into a shitter. Left himself a big fuckin’ pile of shit right on the goddamned Oriental rug. Well, he wasn’t working for me or anything, and hell, everybody in the world was gonna know the next day he was in there, because the silver was gone. But that was the end of him as far as I was concerned, I
didn’t have no more use for him. The thing is you don’t want nobody to know you been in there until you’re ready, okay? So no shit on the desks or anything. Keep your pants on.
“The stuff we want,” the driver said, “you go over to the file cabinets and they keep them in the third one from the window. The middle drawer, okay? In the back, behind the ledgers. They keep the ledgers up to the front, and then there’s the divider there, and the books’re behind the divider. There’s three of them. The one they’re actually using’s on top and then there’s two more, the reserve ones.”
“You got a key for the cabinet?” the Digger said.
“Usually not locked,” the driver said. “If it’s locked, the key’s on the frame of the door you just came through. Up on the wood there, over the door. But it’s probably not gonna be locked. If it’s locked, unlock it and then when you’re through, lock it again and put the key back. If it’s not locked, just open it and take the stuff and then close it up again. Okay?”
“Okay,” the Digger said. “You want some canceled checks, I assume.”
“Don’t need them,” the driver said. “Somebody might go looking for something and then they notice they’re gone. I got a way, I got something I can copy all ready.”
“They don’t use a check-signer or anything?” the Digger said.
“Sometimes they do,” the driver said, “sometimes they don’t. It’s got a meter on it and they’re pretty careful about that anyway. It’s only when the guy’s away they use that, and I guess they must’ve had some trouble or something because they keep that locked up
pretty good and it’s in another one of them offices, in a safe. So I’m not gonna bother with trying to get that.”
“Okay,” the Digger said.
“Take from the first book,” the driver said. “They’re all numbered in sequence and they’re about, they just started using that book. So they’re probably going to, by the end of the month they’ll be getting down to where they’d be using it up. It’s a six-across book. Take the last five pages, okay?”