Carter threw his clothes on, splashed water on his face and rubbed a finger against his teeth instead of a proper brushing. Then he ran out the door. At the back of her mind, Mary Lou thought it was sweet how Carter was concerned about such things. That such things mattered to him, because they were the normal things, the usual things most Americans had to worry about every day of the week. And part of Mary Lou yearned to be that Norma Joe.
Carter ran back into the bedroom having reached the front door but not quite beyond it. Back into the bathroom and the sloshing sound indicated Carter’d realized he hadn’t shaved in all the rush. Mary Lou laughed as he ran back, kissed her on the forehead and sprinted to the front door, this time slamming it shut behind him. Then silence.
◆◆◆
Carter got to the bank at one minute to six, receiving the latest in a long line of disapproving looks from Grimble on the door. Ex-cop and strutting cock.
Taking his coat off and throwing it under his desk, Carter sat down, opened a file and started moving papers about to look like he was engrossed in his work. Then he stood up and went to the rear exit of the bank to wait for the arrival of the Pooled Deposit drop, the first for the Lansdowne branch of the First Bank of Baltimore. This was a proud day for JH who, despite not being on his son’s roster, had got up especially early to make sure he was there to receive the consignment. To be seen to receive the consignment of cash.
Just after six, an armored truck reversed to the rear door and a guard, with a pistol on his hip and a peaked cap on his head, knocked on the door using a pre-arranged signal. JH indicated to Theresa to open the door which she dutifully did.
An appropriate form signed by JH and the guard and his companion brought the racks of notes into the back, down the stairs and into the vault. JH stood there counting the $10,000 bricks as they went past him and once all were in the vault, JH counted them again. All present, correct and accounted for, so he signed another form, keeping a copy for himself and passed the carbon paper to Theresa to dispose of appropriately. All the while, Carter stood there not sure quite what his role was apart from to remain standing and, presumably, catch JH if he fell or somehow injured himself.
After twenty minutes of this futility, Carter settled into his day and was considerably calmer than when he entered the building. He started to get his head together.
On his list of things to do for the morning was get a coffee, because with the rush first thing, he’d not had a drop to drink apart from the sweet touch of Mary Lou’s body - and that wasn’t going to sustain him until lunch time, no matter how beautiful that woman was.
Second was his regular Monday morning check of the cases. He’d brought this into his routine about a month after he’d got them. One day he stretched his legs under the desk and accidentally kicked the case and was surprised it was there. Somehow he’d managed to forget its very existence; it had quite literally become part of the furniture. So now, every Monday, without fail, Carter would open each case and check he knew where the keys were and remind himself of their capacity. One day that would be important. Incredibly important.
Finally, he should get on with some work. There were a pile of quotations he needed to work on: those investments don’t get made without him, you know.
So the most important task of the day kicked off as Carter stood up and ambled over to the staff door and waited for Theresa or Mrs. Pieck to open up the steel door for him.
Sure enough, as soon as their sole customer had left the counter, Theresa smiled and buzzed him in. She sure had a cute smile, he thought. But he also knew there was never a moment in his life when he would have done anything about that smile. Of course, there was Rita, but even without his wedding vows, Carter would never have made a move on someone in the bank, no matter how cute the smile attached to the curvaceous body. It was something he just wouldn’t do, at least not since his affair with Monica, which caused the move to the Bank of Baltimore in the first place.
Carter set the coffee machine in the staff room to brew and went to his locker, opened the door and looked inside. He made sure he was alone and took the case out and checked its innards. All was well. It was larger than the one under his desk and he figured that, when the moment came, he should be able to get most, if not all, of the big notes from the vault into the pair of cases. Carter had decided there was no point worrying about the small notes because they would take up a lot of space, but wouldn’t score him any points with Frank Senior.
Locking up, Carter grabbed his mug of coffee and returned to his desk. Just as he sat down, his phone rang.
◆◆◆
“First Bank of Baltimore, Lansdowne Branch. Carter Reinfeldt here. How can I help you?”
“Hey darling.”
There was only one female voice in his life who might start a phone conversation like that. He knew the days of it being Rita had long since paled into impossibility.
“Hey, you.” His voice emanated warmth, happiness and a calm air of satisfied pleasure.
“You left in a flash this morning. I thought we were having fun.”
Carter’s mind zoomed back to the two of them naked, with his hand on her rose. The inkling of an erection formed in his trousers.
“Yeah, sorry about that. If we’d woken earlier, we could have had more fun, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
“Sure thing... I know.” Carter discerned disappointment in Mary Lou’s voice.
“There’s always tonight...” and Mary Lou let her words hang in the air for Carter to catch, because Monday wasn’t one of their usual days.
“Hell yes. We’ll have to keep arrangements loose though, because I don’t know what time I’m going to be finished here.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, it’s the first of the new payroll deliveries, remember?”
“Shoot, yes.”
“But we can still hook up, right?”
“Sure thing, darling. You give me a call when you’re leaving so’s I know to get ready for you, okay?”
The erection got ever so slightly harder.
“You can bet your bottom dollar I will,” he reported, perhaps a bit too eagerly.
“See you tonight, then.”
Carter heard a kissing sound in his ear and just as the phone went click, he whispered: “Love you,” but there was no-one to hear his words at the other end of the line because Mary Lou had replaced the receiver and taken a deep breath. They’d been waiting for months. This was the big one. Another deep inhalation and she dialed Frank back home.
“Game on tomorrow,” and then she hung up. There was nothing else to say and Frank needed to hear nothing more.
◆◆◆
Mary Lou sat on the sofa in the living room, with her left foot tucked under her right knee. There was a strange silence in the room, which she’d never experienced before. Like the whole world had ground to a halt and reduced in size to Mary Lou, the couch and the surrounding space.
After a year, it had come to this. Tomorrow morning, Frank would walk into that bank with a gun in his hand and Carter would leave just before with a case full of cash. One way or another before nine fifteen the First Bank of Baltimore, Lansdowne branch, was going to be robbed. And another thing that was certain was she would be by the side of the man who had the cash in his hand.
Quite what ended up happening tomorrow was beyond her knowledge, but Mary Lou knew it would be scary and by the time the roller coaster came to a halt, she would be living in a totally different place.
The question she had to face was this: should she just follow the money or should she chose between the men instead? The former was easier, but it was so passive Mary Lou had to wonder if she possessed any backbone at all.
But deciding between Frank and Carter was far from easy. For sure, Frank had his big dreams and if Carter and Frank Senior didn’t get in the way tomorrow, his dreams would become the reality, but Mary Lou wasn’t sure that was enough for her in some strange way.
&nbs
p; Of course, the money was enough for her; enough for nearly anyone on the planet, but was Frank the right man to be with? Carter was as much a risk taker as Frank, but he had a different way about him. Carter certainly knew less of the underbelly of life and that was the core of much of his charm - and helped Mary Lou feel quite superior to him at times. But there was also a gentleness to his bearing Frank lacked. Sure Frank had become a more caring lover over the last while, but that was learned not natural and Carter’s was a natural charm.
The other practical question was how Carter would handle himself when Frank Senior came a-knockin’ to get his money back - and how would they get to spend the money if it was dirty. Mary Lou didn’t have many good answers to that thorny old chestnut, but she was sufficiently street-wise to know crossing her fingers and hoping for the best was no solution. One way or another, the world - or at least her world - would be better off if the old gizzard was a goner.
Then again, if there was any trouble from Frank Senior, her Frank would know what to do immediately. During the time she’d known him, he might have spent more days in jail than out, but he had been a good provider - even when he was in the penitentiary.
Carter talked a good talk but he’d managed to steal enough cash from his wife to land himself in a whole world of trouble with Frank Senior. Basically, he’d borrowed money off every other Shylock in town so the only person left to get money from was Frank Senior. And you don’t put yourself in that situation without incredibly bad gambling judgment and a bunch of dumb on the side.
But careful, considerate and clear of jail time were all positive aspects of Carter’s calling card. The man might have leeched off his wife - she did sound like a bitch - but he was filled with good intentions and dreams of his own he wanted to share with her. That was cute.
Mary Lou felt her pinky finger getting tickled, which snapped her out of her daydream. She was still sat on the sofa and her pinky was definitely getting a slight tickling sensation on one side. She looked down at her hand, which was lying on her lap. The cause was simple: somehow she’d let her hand rest upside down and her pinky was next to her pubes, rising and falling with her breathing, getting tickled by her hairs.
She blushed with the realization she’d spent all this time naked on the sofa. There was no real reason for embarrassment: she’d spent so much time naked in this apartment, but her nudity shocked her, perhaps because her thoughts were so personal, so intimate. Mary Lou went straight into the bedroom, there and then, and put on clothes to hide her body from herself and then went into the kitchen to make some breakfast.
◆◆◆
For the next couple of hours, Mary Lou went round the apartment gathering anything that was hers and putting it in a travel case - however Tuesday ended, she was not going to be coming back to this place and all her things needed to vanish before the day was over.
After making a quick call, Mary Lou was done. She walked round the place one more time and took the travel bag out of the apartment and brought it round to Frank’s place.
She unpacked the bag and stuck around for the afternoon, only returning to Carter’s apartment when she thought he might call her to tell her when he’d be home. Might be a good idea to at least check all was still right before spending the night away from him so she could be fresh for the morning.
At the back of Mary Lou’s mind was the fact she was going to be setting off some explosives in the morning - and she really hated dealing with things like that. C4 made her nervous because she didn’t really understand quite how it worked and that always made her anxious.
So there she sat in an empty apartment waiting for a call from Carter, with only a TV, one of his suits and his toothbrush for company. For some reason, Carter never really kept his possessions in the apartment. It was like he never really believed he lived there. For sure, he paid the rent and dealt with the landlord and so on, but his footprint was so light in the place, if you sauntered around, you’d be forgiven if you thought he just wasn’t there. Maybe, that’s how he coped with his flitting between Rita and herself. Maybe it was a reflection of how he actually felt about their relationship. Mary Lou couldn’t tell, but all his other actions made her believe he was serious about her. Serious about them.
34
Frank received the call from Mary Lou at nine thirty. He heard just three little words then she hung up: “Game on tomorrow.”
His whole world reduced to five small syllables. His dreams for the future encapsulated in that singular thought. His whole world reduced to a spinning dime.
Frank sat back down after the call. There was a tense, fluttering sensation in the pit of his stomach. The back of his throat became intensely dry and he cleared his throat. Again and again, until the throat clearing became a cough and the cough became a retching sound and he rushed to the bathroom, just in time to throw up in the sink.
He spat out the gunk left in his mouth and sloshed a mouthful of water round to remove the acid taste still lingering. Then he left the tap running and washed away the remnants from the sink and, finally, grabbed a toothbrush to clean his teeth.
Frank looked up at the mirror on the bathroom wall and saw his red stained eyes staring back and was glad it was over. This always happened to him the day before a job and the good thing was it had occurred early in the day, so he could now get on with the rest of his life and dreams.
Having shaken his body around with the retching and vomiting, Frank sat on the toilet and pondered the world a while. He thought about what he needed to do between now and the end of the day and he imagined how the first few hours of tomorrow would pan out - until he segued from imagination to fantasy.
Frank knew even his plan, which was well thought through, would go awry. Something always got in the way of your intentions on jobs like these. The successful people were the ones who made the right decisions at the time when things went wrong. The failures ended up back in jail or with a bullet through the chest and neither option sounded like a great idea to Frank.
He played the movie of Tuesday morning through his mind again, anticipating anything where reality might force him to shift away from his imagined scenarios. There was nothing obvious, but if there had been the hours and hours of talking the matter through with Mary Lou, Pete and Uncle Frankie would have been completely wasted.
Frank went back to replay his list of chores for today. There were only a couple of things he absolutely needed to do. First, he needed to kick off the chain so everyone knew the job was finally on. Then he’d need to hook up with Frankie some time before evening and, finally, he needed to be on the receiving end of the chain before nightfall - otherwise all bets were off and he’d have to nix the game before anyone made any foolish moves in the morning. But Frank knew better than to get ahead of himself. So he finished on the toilet, washed his hands and face to help give him a super clear head, put on some clothes and left the apartment. First stop, Andrew’s place.
◆◆◆
Frank fired up the jalopy and headed over to the apartment on the other side of Halethorpe. He parked a couple of blocks away and walked over to the brownstone, just as a precaution. Up the stairs to the second floor, turned right at the hallway and third on the left. Frank knocked on the door and waited.
And waited. An eternity passed, the door opened up and Andrew stood there. And quite surprised to see him, judging by the expression on his face. Frank was hoping to be invited in, more out of curiosity than anything else. He’d never been inside Andrew’s pad and he was interested to see what it looked like. But no.
Andrew stood at the door, barring Frank’s further progress, so he said what needed to be said, out in the corridor.
“I’ll make this quick, Andrew,” said Frank, trying to crane his eyes around the door to get a glimpse of at least the decor.
“Okay. What’s up?” snapped Andrew back at him. A bit sharp for Andrew, thought Frank. What was the matter with him? Or maybe he just wasn’t expecting Frank to appear at his front door
at ten in the morning.
“The job’s tomorrow. Game on.” Frank let the words hang in the air because he knew how immense the impact those words would have on the rest of the gang. They were all going to galvanize behind that single phrase.
“Game on, Frank,” replied Andrew with a smile, although his eyes showed more fear than the pleasure showing on his lips. Before Frank could say another word, Andrew shut the door on his face. Frank shrugged and decided not to take it personally although it was damn strange behavior. People react weird at the best of times.
◆◆◆
Andrew smiled as he closed the door on Frank, his heart racing with the adrenaline Frank’s words generated. Game on tomorrow. A simple code for a simple game. They each passed on the news to another fella and until the message reached all of them. Then the last person fed what they were told back to Frank. That way he could be certain they hadn’t been playing the Telephone Game.
Andrew sat on the sofa and let the news soak in, dripping into his brain. First, the sheer immediacy of it all: tomorrow morning they would wake up and a couple of hours later, they’d be in the bank with guns in their hands and cash in their pockets. Second, the thudding realization this meant he was shooting Pete tomorrow too.
Third, and this was taking the longest time to feel real to Andrew: from some point tomorrow morning, they’d be lying low for weeks with just a phone number, and a pre-arranged time, provided by Frank, to hold them together. He and Brian wouldn’t be seeing their apartment for a while. They’d better not leave anything open in the fridge or it will walk out by itself by the time they got back.
Finally, there was the thought maybe they wouldn’t be seeing this apartment again. Either because they’d hit easy street or because they were either dead or in jail. The last two options didn’t appeal, but Andrew tried to process their implications, nonetheless.
After two minutes, a wave of melancholia descending upon him and he decided the best option was a long walk. The smart thing was to walk around Lansdowne and give himself one last chance to get the street map in his head before the game began.
The Heist Page 17
