Bank Shot (16 page)

Dortmunder sat up. ‘What's the matter? Brakes no good?'

‘Brakes are fine,' Murch said through clenched teeth, and tapped them some more. ‘Goddam bank wants to jack-knife,' he said.

Dortmunder and Kelp twisted around to look through the small rear window at the bank. Every time Murch touched the brakes, the trailer began to slue around, the rear of it moving leftward like a car in a skid on ice. Kelp said, ‘It looks like it wants to pass us.'

‘It does,' Murch said. He kept tapping, and very gradually they slowed, and when they got below twenty miles an hour Murch could apply the brakes more normally and bring them to a stop. ‘Son of a bitch,' he said. His hands were still clawed around the wheel, and sweat was running down his cheeks from his forehead.

Kelp said, ‘Were we really in trouble, Stan?'

‘Well, I'll tell you,' Murch said, breathing slowly but heavily. ‘I just kept wishing Christopher was still a saint.'

‘Let's go take a look at things,' Dortmunder said. What he meant that he wanted to go stand on the ground for a minute.

So did the others. All three got out and wasted several seconds just stomping their feet on the cracked pavement. Then Dortmunder took a revolver from his jacket pocket and said, ‘Let's see how it worked out.'

‘Right,' Kelp said, and from his own pocket took a key ring containing a dozen keys. Herman had assured him that one of those keys would definitely open the bank door. ‘At least one,' he'd said. ‘Maybe even more than one.' But Kelp had said, ‘One will do.'

So it did. It was the fifth key he tried, while Murch stood back a few feet with a flashlight, and then the door swung outward. Kelp stayed behind it, because they weren't sure about the guards inside, whether the carbon-monoxide truck exhaust had knocked them out or not. They had made careful calculations on how much of the cubic-foot capacity the gas would fill after
x
minutes and
x + y
minutes, and were certain they were well within safety limits. So Dortmunder called, ‘Come out with your hands up.'

Kelp said, ‘The robbers aren't supposed to say that to the cops. The cops are supposed to say it to the robbers.'

Dortmunder ignored him. ‘Come out,' he called again. Don't make us drill you.'

There was no response.

‘Flashlight,' Dortmunder said quietly, like a doctor asking for a scalpel, and Murch handed it to him. Dortmunder moved cautiously forward, pressed himself against the wall of the trailer, and slowly looked around the edge of the door frame. Both his hands were in front of himself, pointing the gun and the flashlight at the same spot.

There was no one in sight. Furniture lay scattered all over the place, and the floor was littered with credit-card applications, small change and playing cards. Dortmunder waggled the flashlight around, continued to see no one, and said, ‘That's funny.'

Kelp said, ‘What's funny?'

‘There's nobody there.'

‘You mean we stole an empty bank?'

‘The question is,' Dortmunder said, ‘did we steal an empty safe.'

‘Oh oh,' Kelp said.

‘I should have known,' Dortmunder said, ‘the first second I saw you. And if not you, when I saw your nephew.'

‘Let's at least look it over,' Kelp said.

‘Sure. Give me a boost.'

All three of them climbed up into the bank and began to look around, and it was Murch who found the guards. ‘Here they are,' he said. ‘Behind the counter.'

And there they were, all seven of them, stuffed away on the floor behind the counter, jammed in amid filing cabinets and desks, sound asleep. Murch said, ‘I heard that one snoring, that's how I knew.'

‘Don't they look peaceful,' Kelp said, looking over the counter at them. ‘It makes me woozy myself just to look at them.'

Dortmunder too had been feeling a certain heaviness, dunking it was the physical and emotional letdown after a successful job, but all at once he roused himself and cried, ‘Murch!'

Murch was half draped over the counter; it was hard to tell if he was looking at the guards or joining them. He straightened, startled by Dortmunder's shout, and said, ‘What? What?'

‘Is the motor still on?'

‘My God, so it is,' Murch said. He reeled toward the door. ‘I'll go turn it off.'

‘No no,' Dortmunder said. ‘Just get that damn hose out of the ventilator.' He gestured with the flashlight toward the front of the trailer, where the hose had been pumping truck exhaust into the trailer for the last twenty minutes. There was a strong smell of garage inside the bank, but it hadn't been enough to warn them right away not to fall into their own trap. The guards had been put to sleep by carbon monoxide, and their captors had almost just done the same thing to themselves.

Murch staggered out into the fresh air, and Dortmunder said to Kelp, who was yawning like a whale, ‘Come on, let's get these birds out of here.'

‘Right, right, right.' Knuckling his eyes, Kelp followed Dortmunder around the counter, and they spent the next few minutes carrying guards outside and depositing them in the grass by the side of the road. When they were finished with that, they hooked the door open, propped the trailer windows open, and got back into the cab, where they found Murch asleep.

‘Oh, come on,' Dortmunder said, and joggled Murch's shoulder hard enough to bump his head into the door.

‘Ow,' Murch said and looked around, blinking. ‘What now?' he said, obviously trying to remember what situation he was in.

‘Onward,' Kelp said.

‘Right,' Dortmunder said and slammed the cab door.

21

At five past two, Murch's Mom said, ‘I hear them coming!' and raced to the car for her neck brace. She barely had it on and fastened when the headlights appeared at the end of the stadium, and the cab and bank drove across the football field and stopped on the drop cloth. Meanwhile, Herman and Victor and May were standing by with their equipment ready. This high-school football stadium was open at one end, so that at this time of night it was both accessible and untenanted. The stands on three sides, and the school building beyond the open side, shielded them from curious eyes on any of the neighborhood roads.

Murch had barely stopped the cab when Victor was setting up the ladder at the back and Herman was climbing the ladder with his roller in one hand and paint tray in the other. Meanwhile, May and Murch's Mom had started, with newspapers and masking tape, to cover all sections on the sides that wouldn't get painted – windows, chrome trim, door handles.

There were more rollers and ladders and paint trays. While Victor and Murch helped the ladies mask the sides, Kelp and Dortmunder started painting. They were using a pale-green water-based paint, the kind people use on their living-room walls, the kind you can clean up afterward with plain water. They were using this because it was the fastest and neatest to apply, it was guaranteed to cover in one coat, and it would dry very quickly. Particularly in the open air.

In five minutes, the bank wasn't a bank any more. It had lost its ‘Just watch us
GROW!'
sign somewhere along the way and was now a pleasing soft green color instead of its former blue and white. It had also gained Michigan license plates appropriate to a mobile home. Murch drove forward till it was off the drop cloth, and then the drop cloth was folded up and put into the paint-company truck that had been stolen this afternoon for just this purpose. The ladders and rollers and paint trays were stowed away in there, too. Then Herman and May and Dortmunder and Murch's Mom climbed up into the trailer, the ladies both carrying packages, and Kelp drove away in the paint-company truck, followed by Victor in the Packard. Victor had brought the ladies out here and would take Kelp home after he ditched the truck.

Murch, alone in the cab now, made a sweeping U-turn and drove out of the football field. He drove more slowly and carefully now, both because the urgency was gone and because his Mom and some other people were in the back.

What they were doing in the back, May was putting up on the windows the curtains she'd been making all week. Murch's Mom was holding the two flashlights that were their only illumination, and Dortmunder was cleaning up the mess a bit while Herman was squatting on the floor in front of the safe, looking it over and saying, ‘Hmmmmm.' He didn't look pleased.

22

‘A bank doesn't just disappear,' Captain Deemer said.

‘Yes, sir,' said Lieutenant Hepplewhite.

Captain Deemer extended his arms out at the sides as though he would do calisthenics and wiggled his hands. ‘It doesn't just fly away,' he said.

‘No, sir,' said Lieutenant Hepplewhite.

‘So we have to be able to
find
it, Lieutenant.'

‘Yes, sir.'

They were alone in the captain's office, a small and deceptively quiet life raft in a sea of chaos – the eye of the storm, as it were. Beyond that door, men were running back and forth, scribbling messages, slamming doors, making phone calls, developing heartburn and acid indigestion. Beyond that window, a massive bank hunt was already under way, with every available car and man from both the Nassau County police
and
the Suffolk County police. The New York City police in both Queens and Brooklyn had been alerted, and every street and road and highway crossing the twelve-mile-long border into the city was being watched. There was no land exit from Long Island except through New York City, no bridges or tunnels to any other part of the world. The ferries to Connecticut from Port Jefferson and Orient Point didn't run at this time of night and would be watched from the time they opened for business in the morning. The local police and harbor authorities at every spot on the Island with facilities big enough to handle a ship that could load an entire mobile home on it had also been alerted and were ready. MacArthur Airport was being watched.

‘We have them bottled up,' Captain Deemer said grimly, bringing his hands slowly together as though to strangle somebody.

‘Yes, sir,' said Lieutenant Hepplewhite.

‘Now all we have to do is
tighten the net!
' And Captain Deemer squeezed his hands shut and twisted them together, as though snapping the neck off a chicken.

Lieutenant Hepplewhite winced. ‘Yes, sir,' he said.

‘And get those sons of bitches,' Captain Deemer said, shaking his head from side to side, ‘that woke me up out of bed.'

‘Yes, sir,' Lieutenant Hepplewhite said and flashed a sickly grin.

Because it had been Lieutenant Hepplewhite who had awakened Captain Deemer out of his bed. It had been the only thing to do, the proper thing to do, and the lieutenant knew the captain didn't blame him personally for it, but nevertheless the act had made Lieutenant Hepplewhite very nervous, and nothing that had happened since had served to calm him down.

The lieutenant and the captain were different in almost every respect – the lieutenant young, slender, hesitant, quiet and a reader, the captain fiftyish, heavyset, bullheaded, loud and illiterate – but they did have one trait they shared in common: Neither of them liked trouble. It was the one area in which they even used the same language: ‘I want things
quiet
, men,' the captain would tell his men at the morning shape-up, and at the night shape-up the lieutenant would say, ‘Let's keep things
quiet
, men, so I don't have to wake the captain.' They were both death on police corruption, because it might tend to endanger the quiet.

If they'd wanted noise, after all, New York City was right next door, and its police force was always looking for recruits.

But it was noise they had tonight, whether they liked it or not. Captain Deemer turned away from the lieutenant, muttering, ‘It's just a goddam good thing I was home,' and went over to brood at the map of the Island on the side wall.

‘Sir?'

‘Never mind, Lieutenant,' said the captain.

‘Yes, sir.'

The phone rang.

‘Get that, Lieutenant.'

‘Yes, sir.'

Hepplewhite spoke briefly into the phone-he stood beside the desk, not wanting to sit at it in the captain's presence-and then put the caller on hold and said, ‘Captain, the people from the bank are here.'

‘Have 'em come in.' The captain kept brooding at the map, and his lips moved without sound. ‘Tighten the net,' he seemed to be saying.

The three men who entered the office looked like some sort of statistical sampling, a cross-section of America perhaps; the mind boggled at the attempt to see them as a group connected with one another.

The first in was portly, distinguished, with iron-gray hair and black suit and conservative narrow tie. He carried a black attaché case, and fat cigar tips protruded from his breast pocket. He looked to be about fifty-five, prosperous, and used to giving orders.

The second was stocky, short, wearing a tan sports jacket, dark-brown slacks and a bow tie. He had crewcut sandy hair, horn-rimmed glasses, leather patches on the elbows of his jacket, and carried a brown briefcase. He was about forty and looked thoughtful and competent in some specialty.

The third was very tall and very thin, with shoulder-length hair, deep sideburns and Western-sheriff mustache. He was no more than twenty-five and wore a yellow pullover polo shirt, tie-dye blue jeans and white basketball sneakers. He carried a gray cloth bag of the kind plumbers use, which clanked when he put it down on a chair. He grinned all the time and did a lot of bobbing in place, as though listening to music.

The portly man looked around with a tentative smile. ‘Captain Deemer?'

The captain remained by the map but looked over with brooding eyes and said, ‘That's me.'

‘I am George Gelding, of C. and I.'

The captain gave an irritated frown. ‘Seeing-eye?'

‘Capitalists' and Immigrants' Trust,' said Gelding. ‘The bank you lost.'