Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (5 page)

 
          
They
were both on the four-to-midnight shift that time, so they got to drive home
pretty late at night, after most of the traffic had thinned out That was the
advantage of the four-to-twelve; they got to drive into town in the middle of
the afternoon, before the rush hour, and in any case in the opposite direction
from most of the traffic, and then at the other end of the shift they could
drive home along practically empty roads.

 
          
The
disadvantage of the four-to-midnight was that it was the busiest shift of all.
They weren’t driving during the rush hour, but they were
working
during it, and then on into the evening, the high-crime
period of the day. Muggings hit their peak between six and eight, when people
are coming home from work. Around the same time, the husbands and wives start
fighting with each other, and a little later the drunks join in. And store
robberies—like the one Joe had pulled—occur most frequently in that period
between sundown and
ten o’clock
, when most of the stores finally close. So
when they were on the four-to- midnight shift they tended to spend most of
their time working, and very little of it sitting down.

 
          
But
then
midnight
would come around at last, and this shift too would come to an end, and they
would get to sail home along practically deserted highways once they’d left
Manhattan
, all by themselves, thinking their
thoughts.
Which is what they were doing now.

 
          
Tom
was driving his Chevrolet tonight; six years old, bought used, a gas burner and
an oil eater, with bad springs and a loose clutch. He kept talking about
trading it in on something a little newer, but he couldn’t bring himself to
take it to a used-car dealer and try to get a price on it He knew too well what
this car was worth.

 
          
They
were riding along without any conversation between them, both tired from the
long day, both remembering things that had happened earlier in the week. Tom
was going over in his head the conversation with the hippie junk dealer, trying
to find better answers to the things the guy had said, and also trying to
figure out why he couldn’t seem to get that conversation out of his mind. And
Joe was remembering the blood drying on his arm in the sun, stretched out
across the roof of the patrol car, looking like something from a monster movie
and not anything that could ever have been a part of
himself
at all. He didn’t particularly want to remember that scene, but it just seemed
to stay in his head, no matter what.

 
          
Gradually,
as they left the city behind them, Tom’s thoughts shifted away from the hippie,
roamed around, touched on this and that, and settled on a new subject
It
wasn’t exactly Joe’s liquor store, though the liquor
store was behind what he was thinking about now. All at once he broke the
silence, saying, “Joe?”

           
Joe blinked. It was like coming out
of sleep, or a dentist’s anesthetic. He looked at Tom’s profile and said,
“Yeah?”

 
          
“Let
me ask you a question.”

 
          
“Sure.”

 
          
Tom
kept looking straight ahead through the windshield. “What would you do,” he
said, “if you had a million dollars?”

 
          
Joe’s
answer was immediate, as if he’d been ready for
this question
all of his life. “Go to
Montana
with Chet Huntley,” he said.

 
          
Tom
frowned slightly and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I mean really.”

 
          
“So
do
I
.”

 
          
Tom
turned his head and studied Joe’s face—they both had very serious
expressions—and then he looked out the windshield again and said, “Not me. I’d
go to the
Caribbean
.”

 
          
Joe
watched him. “You would, huh?”

 
          
“That’s
right.” Tom grinned a little, thinking about it.
“One of
those islands down there.
Trinidad
.”
He stretched the word out, pronouncing it
as though saying it was
tasting
something sweet.

 
          
Joe
nodded, and looked around at the glove compartment. “But here we are instead,”
he said.

 
          
Tom
glanced at him again, then faced front. He felt very cautious now, like a man
with a bag of groceries walking on ice. He said, “Remember what you told George
last week?”

 
          
“Big mouth?
No, what did I tell him?”

 
          
“That
we could get anything we want,” Tom said, “only we restrain ourselves.”

 
          
Joe
grinned. “I remember. I thought you were gonna tell him about my liquor store.”

 
          
Tom
wasn’t going to get distracted by side issues now; he’d started moving, and he
was going to keep moving. Ignoring the liquor-store remark, he said, “Well,
what the hell, why don’t we?”

 
          
Joe
didn’t get it. “Why don’t we what?”

 
          
“Do
it!” Tom said. He’d been bottling
this up for
days,
his voice was vibrating with it.
“Get everything we want,” he said, “just like you said.”

 
          
Skeptical,
Joe said, “Like how?
Liquor stores?”

 
          
Tom
took one hand off the wheel to wave that away, impatient with it. “That’s
nothing, Joe,” he said, “that’s crap! That stinking city back there is full of
money, and in our position by God we really
can
get anything we want.
A million dollars apiece, in one job.”

 
          
Joe
didn’t believe it yet but he was interested. “What job?”

 
          
Tom
shrugged. “We’ve got our choice. Anything we want to work out
Some
big jewelry company.
A bank.
Whatever we want.”

 
          
Suddenly
Joe saw it, and he started to laugh.
“Disguised as cops!”

 
          
“That’s
right!” Tom said. He was laughing, too.
“Disguised as cops!”

 
          
The
two of them sat in the car and just laughed.

 
          
The
subway had fucked up again. Paul and I were positioned at a manhole on
Broadway, where the people were coming up. They’d been down there for over an
hour, and there’d been some smoke, and now they’d had to walk single file in
the tunnel for a ways, and come up a metal ladder, and at last out onto the
street. It was nine-thirty at night, traffic was being detoured around us, and
we had our patrol car between the manhole and the street, flasher going.

 
          
Most
of the people coming up were just stunned, all they wanted was to get the hell
away from there. A few were grateful and said thank you to Paul or me for
helping them up the last few steps. And a few were pissed off and wanted to
take it out on a representative of the municipal government, which at the momen
was Paul and me. These last few we ignored; they’d make an angry remark or two,
and then they’d stomp off, and that would be the end of it

 
          
Except this one guy.
He stood around on the other side of
us, away from the manhole, and yammered at us. He was about fifty, dressed in a
suit, carrying an attach6 case. He was like a manager or supervisor type, and
all he wanted to do was stand there and yell, while Paul and I helped the rest
of the people up out of the manhole.

 
          
He
went on like this: “This city is a disgrace! It’s a disgrace! You aren’t safe
here! And who cares? Does anybody care? Everything breaks down, and nobody
gives a God damn! Everybody’s in the
union!
Teachers on strike, subways on strike, cops on strike,
sanitation on strike.
Money money money, and when they work do they
do
anything? Do they teach? Don’t make
me laugh! The subways are a menace, they’re a menace!
Sanitation?
Look at the streets! Big raises, big pay, and look at the streets! And you
cops1
Gimme gimme gimme, and where are
you? Your apartment gets robbed, and where
are
you? Some dope addict attacks your wife in the street, and
where’s
the
cops
?”

 
          
Up
till then we ignored him, the both of us; like he was a regular part of the
city noise.
Which in a way he was.
But then he made a
mistake, he overstepped himself. He reached out and tugged at my elbow, and he
yelled, “Are you listening to me?”

 
          
They’re
not going to start grabbing me. I turned around and looked at him, and he was
so amazed he went back a step. The city had finally noticed him. I said to him,
“I’m coming to the conclusion you fell coming up those stairs and broke your
nose.”

 
          
It
took him a second to work it out, and then he back-pedaled some more, and
yelled, “You mustn’t care much about keeping that badge of yours.”

 
          
I
was about to tell him what he could do with the badge,
pin
first, but he was still backing away, and the hell with him. I turned back and
helped Paul with a fat old lady who was having trouble climbing because of bad
ankles. But I kept thinking about what the guy had said.

 
          
It
was a hot sunny day, and they were both in Joe’s backyard. Where the barbecue
was in Tom’s backyard, Joe had put in a pool; one of those above-the-ground pools,
four foot high and ten foot across. They were both drinking beer, Joe was in a
bathing suit and Tom was in slacks and shirt, and Joe was trying to fix the
pool filter. The damn thing was always getting screwed up one way
another,
it was about the most delicate machine ever made.
It sometimes seemed as though Joe spent his entire summers fixing the pool
filter.

 
          
They’d
lived next door to one another for nine years now. Tom had bought his house
first, eleven years ago, and when Joe wanted to move out of the city after
Jackie was bom it happened the house next door to Tom was just going on the
market. Back then, they’d both been in uniform, and sometimes even partnered.
They’d known each other for years, liked one another, it seemed they ought to
make good neighbors. And they did.

 
          
The
houses weren’t the greatest in the world, but they were livable. They were in a
development put up right after the war, back when the notion of curving streets
was still new. They had three bedrooms, all on one floor, and a smallish attic
that a lot of the guys in the neighborhood had converted to a fourth bedroom.
Fortunately, neither Tom nor Joe had families big enough to need that, and
neither intended to have families bigger than they already had, so they could
keep their attics as attics, and
fill
them with all that
junk everybody gradually collects through life, that nobody has any use for any
more, but that nobody wants to throw away.

 
          
The
houses weren’t bad. They were old enough to have been built before plastics
were really big, which meant they were constructed fairly well, mostly of wood.
They had clapboard siding that had to be painted every few years, they had
half-basements for the utilities, the backyards were a pretty good size, and
there was a detached one-car garage at the rear of each and every property.
Gravel driveways separated the houses and defined the property lines, and every
house in three or four blocks in all directions looked exactly the same, except
for color of paint job or any special additions or changes that anybody might
have made. Neither Tom nor Joe had made any special changes, so they both had
the original basic house, just the way it had come from the architect’s drawing
board; only a little older.

 
          
Most
people put up fences along the sides of their backyards, mostly to keep little
kids inside, but Tom and Joe hadn’t done that Between Tom and his neighbor on the
right there was a basket-weave wooden fence put up by the neighbor, and between
Joe and his neighbor on the left there was a chain-link fence covered with
vines put up by that neighbor, but between their own two yards there was
nothing but the remains of a hedge planted by some previous owner of one of
their houses. The hedge had big gaps in it where they walked back and forth all
the time, and they could never agree who was supposed to keep it trimmed, so
nobody did, and it was gradually dying.
And taking years to
do it.

 
          
In
every single house in the development that either of them had ever heard of,
the kitchen linoleum was all cracked and buckled. In a lot of houses, including
both of theirs, the basement leaked.

 
          
They
hadn’t done any more talking about the robbery idea since that one time in the
car, but they’d both been thinking about it. Not that it was real, not that
they thought they would actually commit a major robbery somewhere, but just
that it was nice to daydream about a possible way of getting themselves out of
this grind.

 
          
Joe
wasn’t thinking about the robbery idea at the moment, mostly because his mind
was taken up with the problem of the pool filter, but Tom’s mind was ticking
along on the subject, and all at once he said, “Hey.”

 
          
Joe
was sitting cross-legged on the ground, surrounded by hoses and washers and
nuts. He put a double handful of parts down, wiped his face with his hand,
drank beer, looked over at Tom, and said, “What?”

 
          
“What
do you think the Russians would pay for him,” Tom said, “if we kidnapped their
ambassador?”

 
          
Joe
squinted at him in the sunlight.
“You serious?”

 
          
“Why not?
Profitable and patriotic both.”

 
          
Joe
thought about it for a couple of seconds, and then he looked all around the
backyard and said, “Where the hell are we going to keep the Russian
ambassador?”

 
          
Tom
looked off toward his own yard next door. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s a problem.”

 
          
Joe
shook his head and went back to the pool filter. Tom drank some more beer. They
both thought their thoughts.