One Endless Hour (13 page)

    "It was the Schemer's list. He said you had nerve."

    "That's me." He said it complacently. The compliment appeared to mollify him. "Okay. Just don't try putting a ring in my nose, see?"

    I didn't answer him. I picked up the telephone and ordered sandwiches and beer from room service. When the knock came at the door and I opened it to admit the boy with the tray, Dahl disappeared into the bathroom without my having to say anything. He had passed a test, and I began to feel a little better about him.

    In the next two minutes he lost the ground he had gained. He paced the floor while gulping down a sandwich. Then he flicked aside the draperies pulled across the window. He seemed charged with nervous energy. "Good-lookin' head in a bikini by the pool," he announced. "Be right back."

    He was out the door by the time I reached the window. He strode across the intervening courtyard, unlimbering his camera as he went. He took a slow, sweeping panoramic shot of the pool area, then the camera lingered lovingly on the mini-bikinied girl, who eventually reached self-consciously for a towel. Dahl gave her a white-toothed grin and a wave of his hand as he started back toward my room. En route he paused to take a shot of two school-teacherish-looking women who were unlocking the door to their room.

    "Suppose the girl's boyfriend or husband had arrived and objected to your making free that way?" I said to Dahl when he was inside again.

    "The chick would slow him down," he asserted cheerfully. "They love bein' on film, with or without clothes. Ninety-eight percent of 'em, anyway."

    "What about the two older women?"

    "Never know when you can blend alfresco shots like that. Cut to a pair of lesbians frolickin' on a bed an' you've saved some footage."

    "You mean you'd show innocent people in the kind of stuff you film?"

    "Don't get shook, cousin. There's two hundred million people in this country, an' a lot of them look like other people. I never been sued yet." He sank down into a chair. "What time's Harris gonna get here? I got to get back to New York."

    "If that's the case, what are you doing here at all with a job in prospect?":

    "I'm here to do a quick job, cousin, an' then cut out."

    "It's not that kind of a job," I began, and stopped at the sound of a knock at the motel door. Dahl did his disappearing act again while I opened it. None of us wanted to be seen together by anyone who could identify us as a pair or a group afterward.

    The man at the door was tall, slim, and dapper. He had deep-set eyes, and there was a touch of gray in his brown hair. He wore a dark suit and carried a Panama with a conservative band in one hand. "I'm Harris," he said.

    "Drake," I returned, letting him inside. Dahl emerged from the bathroom when I closed and chain-latched the door.

    "Hiya, cousin," he greeted Harris, who nodded. "How've the dominoes an' celluloids been treatin' ya?"

    "Not too well," Harris said with a faint smile. His voice was as low-keyed as his personality.

    "I could use a touch, too," Dahl said promptly. He looked at me. "So how about gettin' down to business?"

    "A sandwich?" I suggested to Harris.

    He shook his head. "I had lunch on the plane."

    Dahl was energetically shoving chairs together in the center of the room. "Let's go, cousins," he urged, plunking himself down into the easy chair and leaving straight backed chairs for Harris and me. "Time's money an' all that silt."

    Harris and I seated ourselves, and I talked for ten minutes. I told them everything except the name and location of the bank. I went over in detail the Schemer's dossiers on the bank operation and the personal lives of the bank's chief officers.

    "The bank manager has three children, the assistant manager none," I concluded. "If we go to the assistant manager's home at three A.M. and take him and his wife to the manager's home, we'll have the two key employees -the ones with the bank vault combination-under our thumb, plus a ready-made group of hostages in the persons of the wives and children, who will assure the two men's good behavior. We'll take the men to the bank before daylight on Thursday morning, and after that it will be-"

    "Hold it," Dahl interrupted me. "Thursday morning? And today's Monday? I can't hang around here that long."

    "I'm not talking about this Thursday. Or even next Thursday. It might take a month to set the job up properly."

    Dahl rose to his feet. "Count me out, cousin. I've got other perch to fry."

    The mild-looking Harris was apologetic when I turned to him. "I can't hold off for a month, either. Financially, I mean."

    I would be shaving it close to the bone myself, but I damn well wasn't going to put my head into the lion's mouth without pulling as many teeth as possible. "Why don't we relax and go over this again and work out what we have to do to make-"

    "Listen, why the horsing around?" Dahl interrupted again. "What's the matter with setting something up right now and knocking it over in the next hour?" He said it challengingly.

    "Not in the next hour," Harris said after a glance at his watch. "Banks close in the next fifteen minutes. But what about tomorrow morning?"

    I might not have gulped, but I felt like it. Both men were looking at me. "What about this job?" I temporized, indicating the Schemer's file folder.

    "You set it up an' we'll be back in a month an' knock it over on its back, too," Dahl said confidently. Harris nodded. "We'll work out the split to cover your time," Dahl continued. His tone turned silky. "If you come in with us on a job in the mornin'."

    I vibrated on the brink of flat refusal. I wanted nothing to do with a walk-in. They were always high-risk operations with uncertain returns. But there was my own empty pockets to consider. A walk-in with three men stood a better chance than a walk-in with one man. And if I said no, I lost these two prospects for the Thornton job and would have to start all over again.

    "I'd want you both on the ground a week beforehand," I said at last. "For the big one, I mean."

    "We're in, if you're in," Dahl said. "Right, Preacher?"

    The taciturn Harris nodded.

    "So we each scout a location tonight, meet here in the mornin' at eight, take a vote, get the job done, an' be halfway home by noon," Dahl declared. His eyes were focused on me. "You aboard, cousin?"

    "All right," I said reluctantly. "What about a car for the job? Pick up a rental?"

    "Naaah," Dahl said disdainfully. "Not for a quickie like that. Leave the wheels to me." He tapped himself on the chest. "Dick Dahl, Boy Car Thief. I never saw a piece of iron I couldn't roll."

    "Eight o'clock tomorrow morning, then," I said.

    "Great!" he enthused, and went out the door like a brigantine under full sail.

    In my own mind, eight o'clock committed me to nothing. If I didn't like the sound of what I heard in the morning, I'd cut out. Harris eyed me while he waited for an interval to elapse before he followed Dahl from the motel room. "You don't like it," he said in his quiet voice.

    "I won't like it if one of us doesn't come up with a likely-looking opportunity."

    "I scouted a bank across the District line a year ago," he said. "Near Rockville. I'll take another look at it tonight. But we'll find something." He left the room.

    One thing about Preacher Harris, I reflected as I walked to the window and parted the draperies to watch him cross the motel yard: in any crowd I'd ever seen he could blend as the Invisible Man. Nothing about him clashed with his surroundings.

    I went back to the armchair that Dahl had preempted and ran through the situation again. Number one, although I didn't like it, I desperately needed the cash myself. And number two, if I cancelled out and went back to the Schemer for new partners there was no guarantee I'd do any better, and I'd have lost valuable time. I tried to convince myself that I was spoiled because I'd been so used to calling all the shots myself and picking my own partners.

    I certainly didn't care for a job in Rockville, though. Rockville was in the jurisdiction of the Montgomery County Police who, although not numerous, tended to react quickly over a wide area. The District cops, in contrast, were more plentiful in their ten-square-mile enclave but often got in each other's way.

    Harris's suggestion reminded me of something, though. A few years ago, when Bosco Sheerin had been my partner-before an irate husband returned home unexpectedly one evening and discovered Bosco in the intimate embrace of the husband's wife and sent both Bosco and the wife to join the angels-we had cased a job in the District of Columbia. It was a branch bank located near the intersection of Piney Branch Road and Georgia Avenue. This placed it only two miles from the northern border of the District, assuring a quick crossover into Maryland if it seemed convenient. Other escape routes abounded.

    I sat there trying to remember why Bosco and I had finally decided against trying it. Police patrols? It seemed unlikely that the area was any more heavily patrolled than any other section of the nation's capital. I couldn't recall why we had abandoned the project. If not too much had changed in the interval, though, it was a bank I knew something about, which was a hell of a lot better than taking on one stone-cold. I rose from my chair and checked the Yellow Pages in the phone book to make sure the branch bank was still in the same location.

    It was, and I went outside to my car and drove across Key Bridge to the District. I followed M Street and Rhode Island Avenue to Logan Circle, then traveled north on Thirteenth Street. I turned eastward on Decatur and moved over onto Georgia Avenue. The area seemed very much the same. Above Brightwood, it consisted principally of used-car lots, cleaning establishments, and aging restaurants.

    I looked to my left at the Piney Branch Road intersection. A filling station took up the northwest corner. Just beyond it on Georgia Avenue was the bank, not a particularly prepossessing building. The same wide alley I remembered still served as part alley, part parking lot between the bank and the neighboring A&P store. At the present hour in the afternoon the alley was congested, but it was less likely to be so in the morning.

    I drove past the bank in the flow of traffic. In the first mile beyond it the area turned from commercial to seedy residential. A mile from the Maryland line I made a U-turn at the east gate of Walter Reed Army Hospital and wheeled back to the bank. It still looked all right. Alternative exits and escape routes were plentiful. It was hard to imagine being cornered by patrol cars after pulling off the job.

    I turned into the alley and drove along its length, reverifying that a left turn at its upper end led out to Piney Branch, bypassing the traffic light at the Georgia Avenue intersection. There was a new warehouse-type building at the end of the alley, but nothing else appeared changed. It was hard to escape the feeling that a quick run down the alley and out onto Piney Branch would be the best way of losing pursuers in the teeming morning traffic. And if by some chance the Piney Branch exit were blocked, it was just as easy to turn right at the end of the alley, beyond the new warehouse, and double back onto Georgia Avenue, there to head north or south as the situation dictated.

    I was still sour on the idea of a hit-and-run job with so little advance preparation, but I had to admit that for the first time in a long time I had little choice.

    I drove back to Virginia and the motel room, made a couple of sketches of escape routes from the bank, and went to bed although it was still daylight.

    

    

    I was glad that Preacher Harris arrived at the motel in the morning before Dick Dahl. "What about it?" I asked him bluntly. "Is this your usual style of operation?"

    "No, it isn't." Harris had on a fresh shirt and tie and looked even more conservative than he had the previous day, if that were possible. "But I need the cash." It was his turn to become blunt. "You're afraid of it?"

    "Not as much as I was last night. I went out and scouted one I'd looked over some time ago."

    "You liked it for today?"

    I handed him my sketches and a large-scale map of the District. "Take a look at this. It'll go like a player piano," I said, turning on the hard sell.

    He sounded relieved. "Good. I took another look at the setup in Rockville and didn't think as well of it."

    So I hadn't needed the hard sell. Harris sat down in a chair and spread the map and sketches on his knees. He was still studying them when Dahl arrived. Dahl carried a briefcase, which he tossed onto the bed. "Everything set?" he inquired breezily after I chain-latched the door. He opened the briefcase and took out three Halloween masks. "Greatest little deceivers in the world, boys." He looked at Harris in his chair. "What'cha got there?"

    "Drake sized up a job after we left here yesterday" Harris said. "It looks good."

    "Fine with me," Dahl said. He looked and sounded completely indifferent as to which job it was. "So long's I'm out of town by noon. With the kind of operation I've got in New York, things tend to go to pieces if I'm not there to keep my finger on the button. Where do we take our shot?"

    I let Harris tell him as a means of checking Preacher's absorption of the details. Watching Dahl, I got the impression he wasn't even listening closely. He kept nodding his head and glancing at his watch. "All right," he interrupted Harris's very sound explanation of the elements involved. "Let's put it on the road."

    "Do we split up right after the job?" Harris asked me.

    "We sure as hell do," Dahl replied before I could say anything. Since his statement echoed my own sentiment, I kept my mouth shut. I picked up the map of the District and showed it to Dahl. "We'll park my car on Military Road, halfway between Georgia Avenue and Thirteenth Street so we can approach it from either direction if there's pursuit. We'll meet-"