Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (23 page)

 
          
He
raised his eyes again, and clasped his hands in his lap. Christ, he looked like
Lillian Gish. Wistfully, remembering having liked the bastard, he told us, “He
said his name was Jim.”

 
          
I
took another step backward and looked up at the sky. It was one of those rare
nights in
New
York
when you can see a few stars.

 
          
I’d
been in a bad mood ever since we pulled it off. Tom didn’t feel that way, he
was going around happy and chipper and easy in his mind, but as for me, most of
the time I felt like punching somebody in the head.

 
          
It
would have been a different thing if we had the money in our hands. Even if we
had the bonds, something we could sell, something we could touch and hold and
know that this was the result of our labors. But what did we have?
A blue plastic laundry bag full of air.

 
          
I’m
not arguing. I know the case for doing it that way, and we did it that way, and
I agree with it. As Tom said, the Mafia is not going to give away two million
dollars if it doesn’t absolutely have to, so we can take it for granted when
the time comes to make the switch they’ll try to double-cross us. And since
they already know this is a one-shot operation, we’re never going to be useful
to them
again,
they’d be smart not only to cheat us
but also to kill us.

 
          
Why
not? We’re the only connection between the bond robbery and the mob, the only
ones that know the whole story. Kill us, and they not only save two million
dollars, they protect themselves from getting implicated just in case we should
ever get picked up by the law later on.

 
          
So
they’ll try to double-cross us, and they’ll try to kill us. We knew that before
we went ahead and did the job.

           
Because the next step is, we’re the
ones who decide the method of transfer. And to bring us to the transfer point,
they have to produce the cash, the two million for us to look at and touch. We
can make it a part of the arrangement, that we see the cash before we give them
the bonds.

 
          
They’d
expect that. They’d expect us to be careful with them, because they’d expect us
to be afraid of them.

 
          
What
they
wouldn’t
expect is a double
cross right back.

 
          
As
Tom said, money isn’t just green pieces of paper in your wallet,
it’s
credit cards and charge accounts and all kinds of
things.
It’s
bonds. It’s anything you
think
is money.

 
          
You
know what we stole from Parker, Tobin, Eastpoole & Company?
The
idea
of ten million
dollars.
And that’s what we figured to sell Vigano. His newspaper and
television set would tell him we did the job. He’d have no reason to think we
didn’t have the bonds any more. So when the time for the switch came around,
they’d have to have real cash, and all we’d have to have
was
a good plan and a lot of luck.

 
          
But
the point is, we’d
be needing
that anyway.
Doublecrossing
them
on the bonds wouldn’t make any
difference, they were going to try to cheat us and kill us whether we showed up
with ten million dollars’ worth of bonds or two dollars’ worth of ripped-up
newspapers. It made no difference whether we conned them or not. And in pulling
the robbery, it had been easier not to carry the bonds away with us, to destroy
them. So that’s what we did.

 
          
You
see, I understand the argument and I agree with it. But that still didn’t
change the fact I would have liked something in my hand afterward to show me
I’d accomplished something. And not having anything meant I was spending my
time in a really lousy mood.

 
          
For instance.
When I was on duty now, I was becoming a real
hard-ass with the tickets. I was giving them out left and right, citing store
owners for dirty sidewalks, hitting delivery trucks for driving down streets
where commercial traffic was prohibited, even going after jaywalkers. I’m
telling you, I was mean.

 
          
Paul
was out of the hospital now, so that was good, but he wasn’t back on duty yet.
He’d have a couple months at home for rest and recuperation, the lucky bastard.
In the meantime, I still had Lou to contend with.

 
          
He
wasn’t bad, but his attitude needed work. He was over-
eager,
that
was his problem. For instance, Paul would have known how to calm me
down when I was out there ticketing the entire population of the
Upper West Side
, but so far as Lou was concerned I was
tough but good. It got so he was becoming pretty nearly as mean as I was,
though nobody is ever going to top the time I ticketed the pregnant woman for
obstructing the sidewalk with her baby carriage. That’s one of those records
where you retire the trophy.

 
          
As
an example, though, of where Lou’s attitude went overboard, there was the night
about a week and a half after the robbery when we really did lose our car for
repairs.
Which I already considered ironic.

 
          
What
happened, late at night we caught sight of these two guys coming out of a
jewelry store on
Broadway.
We yelled at them to stop,
and they jumped into a four-door Buick parked in front of the shop and took off
southbound. I was driving, and I could keep on their tail but I couldn’t catch
up with them, not with the piece of crap I was driving. I’d been putting in
requests for a new car for eight months, and never even got a response.

 
          
Meanwhile,
Lou was on the radio. But shit, that time of night, everybody’s either already
got problems of their own or they’re off some place cooping. You know, having a
doze.

 
          
The
Buick headed straight down Broadway, with me a full block back. I had the siren
and flasher going, mostly to make other traffic stop up ahead and keep the
clown in the Buick from killing somebody while running a red light. Of course,
at that time of night, nearly four in the morning, there’s practically never
any traffic anyway.

 
          
He
was a good
driver,
I’ll say that much for him. His
brake lights didn’t go on until less than half a block before he made his right
turn onto a cross-street in the Fifties. His inside wheels left the ground as
he shot around the comer, but he made it without losing control, and by the
time I came screeching around the intersection after him he’d leveled himself
out and was tear-assing away, the other side of Eighth Avenue already, heading
due west along a narrow side street with cars parked along both curbs and just
barely room for two cars next to one another in the middle.

 
          
“Jesus!”
Lou yelled. “We’re losing him!”

 
          
Boy,
are you hot to trot, I thought, but I was too busy driving to say anything out
loud.

 
          
The
light was with us both on
Ninth Avenue
, though it wouldn’t have made any
difference. We both shot through, him not getting away but me not gaining any
ground. What we needed was another car in front of us, to head him off before
somebody got hurt.

 
          
The
block between Ninth and Tenth is mostly red-brick tenement buildings, half of
them with shops in the ground floor, but the block between Tenth and Eleventh
is warehouses, and there’s trucks parked along both sides instead of passenger
vehicles. The same thing is true between Eleventh and Twelfth, and after that
you can’t go any farther west without a boat. That’s the Hudson River out
there, and you have to turn either north or south.

 
          
He
wasn’t quite as sure as I was on this narrow street, with the parked cars
crowding in on both sides, and that was doubly true after we crossed Tenth and
he was traveling down between two walls of trucks. The trucks take up more room
than cars do, leaving less space down the middle for driving, and I could tell
the guy in the Buick didn’t care for that. Given another two or three miles of
the same kind of street and I probably could have caught up with him. But what
actually happened was
,
he almost creamed a cab on
Eleventh Avenue.

 
          
The
light was red down there. Big-sided trucks were parked along both curbs right
down to the comer, restricting everybody’s vision, making a kind of tunnel out
of the street. The trucks and the warehouses also probably contained my siren
too much, so that it couldn’t be heard by somebody out on Eleventh Avenue.

 
          
And
there was somebody out there; a cab, going north, traveling empty. He was
probably on his way to check in at one of the garages farther uptown on the
West Side, having been out for eight or ten hours hacking around the city.
In other words, tired.
And alone in the
area, so far as he knew.
And with the light in his favor.

 
          
Well,
he entered the intersection just as the Buick did. And he was damn lucky God
had given him fast reflexes because he just about stood on his brake with both
feet and threw an anchor out back besides. The Buick swerved to its right, just
nicked the front bumper of the cab on the way by, swerved to the left again,
and kept going toward Twelfth Avenue.

 
          
And
here was I, half a block away. The cabby had to figure the first guy through
was a nut, but with me he could see the flashing red light even if he had all
his windows closed and maybe air-conditioning on and couldn’t hear the siren.
So he had to know I was a cop. And twice in a row he did exactly the right
thing.

 
          
Because
he hadn’t managed to completely stop before the Buick went by. In fact, the
nose of the cab was still down like a pig looking for truffles, and the vehicle
was still in motion. Which put it right directly in front of me.

 
          
“Stop!”
yelled Lou. As though I could have stopped by then, any more than the cab
could. It takes a long distance to stop, hundreds and hundreds of feet—the only
time you can stop on a dime is when you’re walking.

 
          
Besides,
the cabby was doing his second right thing in a row. The instant the Buick was
past him, he hauled in that anchor, switched both feet away from the brake and
over to the accelerator, tromped down hard, and yanked that yellow mother out
of the intersection.

 
          
I
had to swerve left to miss his ass, just as the Buick had had to swerve right
to miss his nose. But I did miss, and I never took my foot off the accelerator,
and I entered the next block in fine shape.

 
          
In
a lot better shape than the Buick. The near miss with the cab had loused him up
for good. He shot into that next block angled wrong, coming in from the right
because of having gone around the cab, and didn’t get straightened out in time.
He sideswiped a truck on his left, scraping along the body, and then careened
off that and headed down the block at an angle to the right, and damn if he
didn’t hit another truck over on that side. He was like a drunk running down a
hallway, bouncing from one wall to the other.

 
          
All
the sideswiping, and all the struggling to get his car under control,
were
slowing him down. He did it a third time, over on the
left again, and this time his front bumper or fender or something must have got
hooked for a second on a truck cab, because all at once the Buick swerved
around and jolted to a stop crossways in the street, the front bumper inches
from the side of one truck and rear bumper inches from a truck across the way.
The driver’s side was toward us, and I could see his white face in there in my
headlights.

 
          
I
stood on the brakes myself the second I saw what the Buick was doing, and the
squad car dug its nose in and screamed, me fighting a skid to the left every
inch of the way.

 
          
The
passenger door of the Buick, the one on the far side, had popped open the
second the Buick came to a stop, and somebody jumped out and laid what looked
like a black stick across the roof of the car, pointing at us. That is, it
looked like a black stick until the end of it blew up in red and yellow, and
the windshield got peppered with a dozen sudden new holes.