Death's Sweet Song (6 page)

“You might as well go on saving it,” I said. “But for somebody else.”

The fourteenth was a long time coming that July. The days dragged as I stood in the station doorway watching the traffic go past, thinking: Maybe the next car will be that Buick, maybe the Sheldons will come early to make sure there are no slip-ups.

Then I'd get to thinking: Maybe they won't come back at all. Maybe something happened and they decided to call the whole thing off.

What would I do then? They
 
had
 
to come! I couldn't stand this lousy place much longer. I couldn't stand this flea-bitten service station. I wanted to feel that money in my pocket. I wanted Paula close to me, where I could reach out and touch her.

Meanwhile, I was alone. That business with Beth at the lake—Lord, I hope I never get into a mess like that again. She cried. She didn't say a single word, just lay there with great tears streaming down that pale, pinched face of hers. I had hated her at the time, but now I felt nothing. I hadn't heard a word from
Bern
since that night. I knew I never would.

Now there was the robbery to be thought about. I wasn't worried about Manley and Sheldon; I was holding all the cards. If they pulled the robbery, there was no way they could keep me out of it. And they would pull it, all right, because Paula would have it no other way.

Still, I was taking no chances.

On the thirteenth I decided to do something that I should have done at the very beginning. I was going over that box factory with a fine-tooth comb. I wasn't going to rely on Bunt Manley.

I thought: This is going to look damn funny, Hooper. You haven't been near that factory since you stopped working there. Is this going to be smart, sticking your nose into things the day before the robbery?

Smart or not, I couldn't take chances on something going wrong. And about that time I remembered Pat Sully—good old Pat Sully, who had loaned me five dollars six months ago and had probably kissed it good-by long since.

Well, Pat was going to get a surprise, because I was going to pay him back, and I was going to pay him back because he happened to be a bookkeeper for Max Provo and did his work in the factory's front office, which was exactly the place I wanted to visit.

About three that afternoon I turned the station over to Ike Abrams and took the Chevy into town. The factory was north and west of town, sprawled out on the red slope of a clay bill. There were two main buildings, two-story red-brick affairs, connected by a plank runway at the second-story level.

One building was the factory itself, where the boxes were made, and that one didn't interest me at all. The other was a conglomeration of warehouse-garage-storeroom-office, and this one interested me plenty.

I parked the Chevy in the company parking space at the west side of the factory, got out, and started walking around to where the front office was. There was a good deal of activity at the loading ramp, where two big semis were backed up to be loaded. Sweating roustabouts formed an endless chain with their loaded dollies, warehouse to trailer and back again, working like so many ants around an anthill. I had been one of those ants once. Never again. The office itself was a busy place and not much to look at. It was just one big room, the working space partitioned off by wooden railings. Truck drivers and warehousemen were coming and going, and some of them were trying to make themselves heard over the noise of typewriters-and adding machines. There were maybe a dozen girls on one side of the room, filing things, typing letters, or whatever they do in an office like that; and on the other side of the room the bookkeepers and department managers were going about their business and ignoring everything else.

The temperature must have been a hundred in that room. No air-conditioning, not even an electric fan. Those things cost money, and anything that cost money wasn't for Max Provo.

I had been in that office a hundred times or more, but this time I really looked at it. There was a big double door at the back of the office; one of the doors was open— for better ventilation—and I could look into the warehouse, on the other side of the plyboard partition. Nothing had changed since I had worked here. Everything was the same, but this time I was taking a picture of it in my mind.

“Then my gaze landed on the thing I was really looking for, the safe.

It looked like a hell of a safe to me. It looked like the great-great-grandfather of all the safes in the world. I had seen it before, I
 
must
 
have seen it before, but I didn't remember it as being that big. It was the biggest, heaviest, ruggedest-looking damn safe I'd ever seen. It was six feet tall; at least six feet tall, and almost as wide, and there was no telling how thick or heavy the thing was. It looked as big as a
Sherman
tank.

That Sheldon better be good, I thought, because it's going to take more than a can opener to get into that thing.

“Hello, Joe. Not lookin' for a job, are you?”

I looked, around and there was a man grinning at me from me other side of the railing, a little sharp-faced, stoop-shouldered man whose name was Paul Killman and who, so the story went, rode in on the first load of brick when they started building the box factory thirty years ago and had been there ever since.

I said, “Hello, Mr. Killman. I.just happened to be passing this way and remembered that I wanted to see Pat Sully about something. Do you know where he is?”

“Why, I think he's at his desk. Yes, there he is.”

I'd been so busy looking at that safe that I hadn't seen Pat at all. But I saw him now, a big, red-faced guy about my own age, sleepily putting figures inter an open ledger.

“All right if I talk to him a minute?” I asked.

“Sure, sure, Joe. You know your way around here.”

I pushed open the gate and went around on the business side of the railing. I put a five-dollar bill on Pat's ledger and said, “The age of miracles hasn't passed, after all, and here's something to prove it. Remember that five you loaned me?”

His head snapped up. “Hell, Joe, you didn't have to come all the way out here to give it to me. To tell the truth, I'd forgotten all about it.”

Like hell he had. He was quick enough to put it in his pocket.

We talked for maybe five minutes about things that neither of us cared a damn about. Pat kept looking anxiously at Old Man Provo's desk, in the far corner of the room, as though he expected the sky to fall. I was sizing up that room. I was getting a picture of it in my mind that couldn't be erased. That safe was the only thing that bothered me.

I said, “Is the water cooler still in the warehouse? Let's go back and have a cigarette. Old
Provo
can get along without you for a few minutes.”

Pat didn't like it much; old
Provo
was hell on getting his pound of flesh from the office force. Then he shrugged. Maybe he was getting tired of the job anyway. “All right, but just for a minute.”

I wanted to get a good look at that warehouse, because that was the way we had to come in. We couldn't come in the front way; that was well lighted and facing the highway. It had to be the back way, through the warehouse. I deliberately counted the steps from Pat's desk, which was about in the center of the room, to the warehouse partition.

I swung close enough to the safe to get the brand name; it was a Kimble. A Kimble Monarch, the lettering said, Model K-467. It was an elephant of a safe. Why hadn't I noticed it before? No wonder the place had never been robbed, with a safe like that. If you're smart, I thought, you'll drop this thing right where it is. Let Manley and Sheldon beat their brains out trying to get inside that iron blockhouse. It's crazy to think that a man could ever open a monster like that.

Then I was crazy, because I was not dropping it now. Sheldon was the expert on safes; let
 
him
 
worry about it.

The water cooler was a big galvanized can with two spigots at the bottom, sitting on a couple of sawhorses just on the other side of the office partition, in the warehouse itself. Entering that warehouse was like stepping into the bleak, empty spaces of a desert. It looked as big as those hangars they used to house dirigibles in. The ceiling was two stories high, and up there somewhere, in the gloom, cranes rolled back and forth, the noise echoing and bouncing from one wall to the other. All over the floor there were skeleton crates filled with flattened cardboard cartons of every size and shape imaginable, and the roustabouts were continually bringing them in or taking them out.

At the back of the building there was a giant steel sliding door, and I immediately counted that out. A door like that might turn out to be tougher to open than the safe. That left the windows, and they didn't look much better. To start with, they were small, and they had iron bars on them.

I stood there at the water cooler talking to Pat, but I don't know what about. I was studying those windows at the back of the warehouse. Then one of the workers, a big swarthy guy in overalls, saw me and yelled.

He had a grin a yard wide. His name was Matt Souel and he had been just another roustabout when I had worked at the factory, but now he was the warehouse foreman.

“What the hell you doin' out here with us workin' folks, Joe?”

Pat Sully was nervous and happy enough to make a quick excuse and get back on the job before
Provo
discovered that he was missing. I went back and talked to Matt Souel for a while, glad that he had called to me. It gave me a chance to have a closer look at those rear windows.

We'd wake the whole town trying to get past those iron bars. But the thing that really decided me had nothing to do with the bars. The thing that decided me was about twenty feet of makeshift electrical wiring and an oblong box fixed to the rear wall, above the windows.

There were limits, it seemed, to how far even a man like Max Provo would go to save money. He was tight, all right, but he hadn't been too tight to invest in a burglar alarm.

The windows were out.

Everything was out unless I could find a way of disconnecting, that burglar alarm, and I didn't know a damn thing about burglar alarms. I didn't know where the switch was, or how it was set, or anything else. And even if I did know, I couldn't very well start fooling with that wiring when there were fifteen or twenty roustabouts looking on.

Matt Souel was still talking, and I stood there grinning like an idiot while my spirits sank like a truck falling down an elevator shaft.

Hell, I thought, we're beat even before we start. If the back of this building is wired, then so is the front. Touch one of those doors or windows after closing time and the whole town is going to know about it. You'll have Otis Miller and the rest of the police force on your back before you know what hit you.

Then I remembered something. I remembered the garage, on the other side of the warehouse, and I remembered the two master switch boxes that controlled the electrical output to both buildings. They were in the garage. And the garage wasn't locked at night, because that was where the night watchman stayed most of the time.

I was beginning to feel better. I felt fine. Burglar alarms were electrically operated; all we had to do was open the circuit to this warehouse building, and you could knock the walls down and the burglar alarms wouldn't do a thing.

I felt great. I felt like a man whose parachute had finally opened a hundred feet above the ground. Not even those barred windows worried me now. Not even that steel monster of a safe could worry me.

The next day, about four in the afternoon, the blue Buick pulled under the station shed and Karl Sheldon said pleasantly, “Here we are again. I hope you've got a vacancy for us.”

I felt as big as a house. I grinned right in his face and said, “Yes, sir, I've been saving one for you.”

Paula was back in shorts again, white duck shorts and white T shirt and thong sandles. Just looking at her was all I needed to get me excited again. She didn't say a word. She just sat there smiling that slow smile, knowing that she was being stared at and liking it.

She knew what I was thinking, all right. She knew what was in my mind.

Sheldon said, “We're in luck, honey. He's saved a place for us.”

You sonofabitch, I thought. Do you think I'm so stupid that I don't know sarcasm when I hear it? I was tempted to hit him with it right there. I wanted to grab him by the throat and say, “Listen to me, you pompous bastard, I'm cutting myself in for one third of your take tonight. What do you think of that?”

But I played it straight. I signed them in, then took them to the cabin.

Sheldon came around to the back of the car and began unlocking the trunk. I didn't offer to help. Somewhere in that car there was enough nitroglycerin to blow us to hell, and I wanted no part of it. I unlocked the cabin and opened some windows. When I turned around, Paula was standing right behind me. I grabbed her.

I hadn't meant to. I had it all planned not to do a thing until I got everything settled with Sheldon. But I simply couldn't keep my hands off her. That bright hot arc jumped between us and suddenly she was straining against me.