by R.J. Ellory
Amundson smiles. He is a man who often recognizes the simplicities of people, the way in which their idiosyncrasies and oddities are actually the things that make them human. Without such things there would not be a great deal left to like.
The Hispanic woman then destroys the effect by jamming the cash machine. A security guard is on hand; he speaks Spanish, fluently, and while he calms the over-emotional woman, while he tries to catch the attention of one of the bank assistants, Amundson steps to the plate glass window and looks down to the corner. The queues for the external machines, if anything, have merely doubled in his absence.
Amundson glances at his watch: nine-twenty-one. He turns and hurries to the counter.
Had he used the machines outside, had he been fractionally more patient, had he recognized that Murphy’s Law dictated that whatever change he made to his position in one queue it would merely be replicated in the next, he would have driven out of the car lot behind the Associated Union Finance Bank on West Broadway at approximately nineteen minutes after nine.
At that precise moment he would have been turning right onto Duane and heading up Church towards the Lispenard junction.
But he wasn’t.
At nine-twenty-two, Christmas Eve morning, as he steps to the counter with his bank card in his hand, three men burst through the front doors of the building and start screaming at the tops of their voices. Led by Charlie Beck, the other two are Lewis Parselle and Sol Neumann. Neumann carries an M-16 and a heavy cloth-wrapped metal pipe. He swings it like a baseball bat, takes one of the security guards down by bringing it around back of the man’s knees. The guard goes down, Neumann sideswipes him with the butt of the assault rifle, and then stoops to remove the handgun from the man’s holster. The man doesn’t move, won’t for a good eighteen minutes.
Four blocks east, on West Twelfth Street, a second black Ford Econoline, this time driven by Maurice Rydell and carrying Victor Klein, Larry Benedict and Leo Petri, swerves violently to avoid a red Berlinetta coming out of a sidestreet, and screeches to a halt outside the East Coast Mercantile and Savings Bank.
Victor Klein is not as young as he once was, but even as the doors of the Econoline open he is running across the sidewalk, M-16 in his hand, and comes through the front double doors of the bank like a tornado. He steps aside, holding the door open for Benedict and Petri, and before the security guards understand what is happening Klein has come up behind the other two men and taken a woman by the hair. Young woman, name is Trudi Mostyn, once did a stint at Bloomingdale’s on the nail-care counter; today she is the primary hostage in a violent armed robbery. Three months’ time she will sue the bank for damages, the cost of counselling to support her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but her case will fail. Twelve months from now she still won’t go in a bank, no matter the time of day, no matter who is with her.
Nine-twenty-eight a.m., West Ninth and Washington. Three men – Joe Koenig, Albert Reiff and Karl Merrett – thunder across the foyer of the New York Providence Bank. They are dressed head-to-foot in black, all-in-one coveralls, heavy boots hammering a staccato on the marble flooring, the sound of labored breathing, faces closed up inside balaclavas, eyes wide and white, looking like a nightmare coming at sixty miles an hour. Each of them is armed, once again M-16s, and Karl Merrett, unstable at the best of times, figures that he’s always wanted to shoot some motherfucker and today will be as good a time as any. Merrett is part of the Marcus crew, a wild card, a flying ace, and when he passes through the inner door and is confronted by one of the security staff he believes his time has come.
In his coveralls pocket he has a back-up piece, a snub-nosed .38. It is with this that he shoots the security guard through the left eye. The rush of blood that is jettisoned from the back of the man’s head showers a white artificial Christmas tree standing behind the door.
People start screaming, screaming like fire sirens, and they keep on screaming until Joe Koenig releases a burst of rounds into the ceiling.
The bank is silent, deathly so.
‘On the floor, motherfuckers!’ Albert Reiff is shouting. ‘On the floor. No sound. No movement. One down, plenty more to go!’
The people drop like bowling pins.
Somewhere, out of sight, a woman tries to calm a crying baby.
Nine-twenty-nine a.m.
McLuhan stands in the narrow toilet adjacent to his office when he hears the phone shrilling at him. In his hurry to zip up he pisses on his own shoes, the legs of his pants.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he mutters as he hurries out of the toilet and across the corridor. He snatches the receiver from his desk. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s him, Captain.’
‘Well, for fuck’s sake put him through.’
A second’s silence, and then: Captain McLuhan . . . been trying to get you since last night.
‘So I hear. What is going on with you now, Detective?’
Heists.
‘You what?’
Heists Captain . . . several of them simultaneously.
‘What in fuck’s name are you talking about Duchaunak?’
Haven’t got time to explain. Only one I know about for definite is on West Twelfth. It’s going to be one of a number of armed robberies that Freiberg and Marcus are going to pull off at the same time. West Twelfth, that’s all I know. I need as many people as you’ve got down there immediately.
‘Right . . . you need as many people as I’ve got.’
Captain, this is no fucking joke. This is it . . . what I’ve been telling you about. Two, maybe three armed robberies simultaneously today . . . Christmas Eve—
‘I know what day it is, Detective—’
You have to get some squad cars down there . . . SWAT, whatever the fuck you can lay your hands on.
‘I don’t have to do a fucking thing, Detective, not until you tell me exactly what you know and exactly how you came by this information.’
Harper.
‘Who?’
John Harper.
‘Bernstein’s son?’
Yes, Bernstein’s son. He went to a meeting yesterday with Freiberg and Marcus. Marcus is buying Bernstein’s territory. That was the plan before Bernstein got hit. Freiberg needed Harper in New York to stand for his father at the meeting—
‘Okay, enough already Duchaunak . . . this is just fucking Alice in Wonderland shit. You need to come in right now and see me. You need to get your ass in a fucking car and come down here right fucking now and tell me what the fuck is going on. I also need you to tell me where Faulkner is, because as God is my fucking witness when you pair are involved in anything together someone’s going to get damaged.’
I can’t come in, Captain . . . I can’t come in. I have to do something to stop this going down. I need you to back me up on this Captain—
‘Back you up? Fuck you! Who the fuck d’you think you’re talking to—’
The line goes dead.
McLuhan frowns, shakes his head. ‘Duchaunak?’ he says to a disconnected receiver.
‘Ah, fuck this,’ he states emphatically. ‘This is just too fucking much.’ He sets the receiver down, comes out from behind his desk and steps into the corridor.
‘Oates! Oates! Where the fuck are you?’
Sergeant Warren Oates appears at the end of the corridor.
‘Get a black and white over to Duchaunak’s place and see if he’s there. And have another black and white go up to West Twelfth and see if anything’s happening.’
‘Anything?’ Oates asks. ‘Can you give me something more specific to go on?’
McLuhan, who is in the process of stepping back into his office, turns suddenly and glares at Oates. ‘An armed robbery Sergeant, a fucking armed robbery! Have someone drive to West Twelfth, and if there happens to be an armed robbery going on down there then ask them if it wouldn’t be too much fucking trouble to perhaps give me a call, okay?’
Oates doesn’t speak; merely nods, turns, hurries down the corridor.
; McLuhan walks to the office window and looks down into the street. Ten minutes before he’d been figuring out how to get his wife a Christmas present, something that would appear to have required a great deal of thought and consideration.
Now he is thinking about Frank Duchaunak running down West Twelfth with a handgun. He closes his eyes, bows his head. If there is no reward in Heaven he is going to be mightily pissed off.
SIXTY-TWO
Nine-thirty a.m.
Same moment that Frank Duchaunak finally gives up on trying to reach Faulkner, as he kneels beside his bed and drags out a shoebox within which is an ancient-looking .45, as he snatches a jacket from the back of a chair, as he hurries towards the front door of his apartment, as his heart kicks up into high-drive and he starts to feel the adrenaline pulling his stomach into his chest . . .
At that precise moment: same vehicle, Ford Econoline E-250, Henry Kossoff at the wheel, Ray Dietz hunched behind him, hands gripping the headrest of the passenger seat, back of him Walt Freiberg and Cathy Hollander, hooded faces, each of them unrecognizable, and on the floor between them handguns, M-16s, three heavy-duty kitbags, a tension like hot whipcord stretched to its limit . . .
Junction of Bethune and Greenwich, across the road the facade of the American Investment & Loan Bank, and as Kossoff eases his foot off the brake he doesn’t so much as head for the front entrance, he aims the vehicle at it. Like some heat-seeking missile the Econoline hurtles across the road, cuts between moving cars with seemingly impossible inches to spare, and before the drivers even have a chance to lean on their horns the black van jumps the sidewalk, crosses the brief gap between the curb and the building, and ploughs right through a half-inch plate glass window into the foyer itself.
Inside the vehicle the three passengers are thrown against the seats, hands grabbing for anchor, shoulders undoubtedly bruised, muscles strained, but the sheer rush of the moment, the combination of fear and energy, makes such impacts and abrasions irrelevant. No-one feels a thing but the way the front window gives, and the skidding of the tires as they attempt to make purchase against the highly polished floor within.
Freiberg is out first, Dietz beside him, Hollander at the rear, each of them running across the foyer and through the internal doors.
Two security guards, one of them a good six and a half feet tall, each of them coping with shock, terror, the split-second hesitation that means the difference between reaction and overwhelm. Neither one is adequately trained to deal with such a scenario. The shorter one manages to withdraw his gun but he goes down beneath a terrific thundering blow from Ray Dietz. Ray Dietz is not a small man, and he just clothes-lines the guy, breaks his neck, and then keeps on running until he reaches the counter.
People are scattering now, and Freiberg makes it across the floor to the taller guard.
‘Down!’ he’s screaming, and even as his voice breaks pitch the guard is falling like a tree. Face down, hands out before him, gun gathered up and emptied of shells. The shells are pocketed, and then Freiberg hurls the gun across the high-ceilinged entranceway. It lands with a clatter somewhere out of sight.
Cathy Hollander is quick, quicker than both of the men, and by the time the guards have been disarmed she is already herding the customers against the back wall of the main concourse.
Dietz runs beside her, and then he turns left, suddenly, almost as an afterthought, and jumps up onto the counter that runs the length of the floor. Cashiers and assistants are screaming. People overturn desks and chairs in an effort to get as far away as they can.
Dietz releases a burst of gunfire into the ceiling and the screaming ceases, more from shock, the deafening roar that such a thing produces, than anything else.
‘Cashiers back to the counter!’ Dietz screams. One of the customers steps from the gathered crowd against the wall. Cathy Hollander drives the butt of her M-16 into the man’s lower gut. He goes down soundlessly.
‘Cashiers . . . everyone on cash back to the counter!’ Dietz repeats.
A single girl starts to edge forward.
Freiberg jumps up alongside Dietz, and then comes down on the other side. He hurries to the back of the enclosure, merely feet from the group of employees, and he grabs a young man by the collar of his shirt and pushes him down to the ground. He withdraws his handgun and presses it against the back of the man’s head.
The young man is in shock, starts crying, heaving, eyes wide, face white with abject terror.
‘Cashiers,’ Freiberg shouts. ‘All of you . . . everyone who has a cash desk position back to the counter. There are eight of you. Each of you back to the counter. All cash – fives, tens, fifties, hundreds – all of it up on the counter. No bullshit. No alarm buttons. No dye packs. Anything aside from taking money out of the drawers and placing it neatly on the counter . . . ’
Freiberg pauses, leans down until his face is no more than six inches from the young man’s. ‘Name?’ he asks.
The young man doesn’t respond, doesn’t seem capable of speech. A wide dark area has already grown from his crotch and spread across his pants.
Freiberg shakes his head, looks at a girl nearest him. ‘His name?’ Freiberg asks.
‘Steve,’ she says, her voice hesitant. ‘His name is Steve Tyler.’
‘Serious? His name is Steve Tyler?’
She nods.
‘Okay, folks . . . co-operate like you never co-operated before or Mr fucking Aerosmith here loses the back of his head in a riot of color!’
The eight cashiers hurry forward, each of them to their stations, each of them immediately occupied with unloading cash drawers onto the counter. Dietz stands over them, walks back and forth along the counter, stepping over their hands as they hurry to empty all they can onto the surface.
Cathy Hollander stays back with the customers, never looking back at Freiberg and Dietz, scanning the faces of the people ahead of her, looking for the wiseass, the one who’s going to try something – the retired cop, the off-duty security guard, the jujitsu nut who figures he can take three armed people with a rolled-up newspaper and a guardian spirit. Every few seconds she surveys the street, watching not only for people who might walk into the bank, but also any indication of police activity. There is nothing. Her heart thunders like a freight train. Her pulse has long since left the scale. She’s never been so frightened in her life.
‘Okay,’ she hears Freiberg say. ‘Where the fuck is Frederick Ross?’
Harper hails a cab.
Standing on the sidewalk, one foot in the gutter, raising his hand and waving like a maniac, it is nevertheless some minutes before a cab pulls up alongside him.
Once inside he leans forward.
‘Where to?’ the driver asks.
‘West Twelfth,’ Harper says. ‘You know West Twelfth?’
The driver laughs. ‘Know West Twelfth . . . Christ, I know the whole of New York like I know my own name.’
Harper leans back in the seat. He feels a sense of panic, something dark and close; he believes that whatever he may be able to do will not be enough.
Frank Duchaunak saw the commotion outside the East Coast Mercantile & Savings before he left the shadow of St Vincent’s. He came from the east side – from Perry, crossing Bleecker, West Fourth, up onto Seventh Avenue.
At first he was uncertain, hurrying down past the hospital, glancing left at the facade and wondering whether Lenny Bernstein was still alive. He was uncertain why barriers had been erected, why there were black Hummers parked behind sawhorses, yellow and black crime scene tapes strung between them in an effort to keep people back. Uncertain because he’d heard nothing on the radio, nothing on the closed-channel police receiver in his car. Uncertain because nothing seemed to be making sense.
He believed he had coincidentally walked into something else entirely.
Down by the barriers he was stopped by an armed and helmeted police sergeant. Breast-badge gave his name as Mackey.
Duchaunak showed his ID. ‘What we got down
here?’ he asked.
‘Bankjob. East Coast Mercantile. Seems to be three men inside.’
‘This was called in?’ Duchaunak asked.
Mackey shook his head. ‘We had forewarning.’ He leaned a little closer to Duchaunak. ‘Feds are here for Christ’s sake.’
‘Feds? What the fuck are Feds doing here?’
Sergeant Mackey shook his head. ‘What the fuck exactly?’
‘I can come through?’
Mackey shook his head. ‘Not through this way. You got a car?’
Duchaunak nodded.
‘Take it round the back, up to Fourteenth, head west and come down the Americas way. Think West Twelfth is open at the other end. What’s your interest in this anyway?’
Duchaunak shrugged. ‘Day off. Got bored. Figured I’d go stake out a bank robbery.’
‘Fuck that,’ Mackey said. ‘Go get the kids some more toys, for God’s sake.’
‘I’ll check out the other end of the street,’ Duchaunak said. ‘Then I’ll go get some more toys.’
‘Have a good ’un,’ Mackey said, and raised his hand.
Duchaunak backed up, turned, and by the time he reached the facing sidewalk he was running.
SIXTY-THREE
Nine-forty-two a.m.
Kennet Wiltsey hits the ground.
Before his head even bounces off the parquet floor Reiff has him by the shirt collar and is dragging him across the floor. He leaves a wide, and ever widening, trail of blood as he goes. The color seems too bright, unnatural beneath the fluorescents, and when Reiff heaves the man’s body up against the wall to the right of the main counters Joe Koenig knows that they have long since passed the point of no return.
There are now four dead.
The first was the security guard, shot in the eye by Karl Merrett. Second was some hero-of-the-moment bank employee; came up back of Koenig, figured he could floor him with a trashcan. Reiff was there, moved far faster than Koenig would have expected from such a big man. Trashcan hero neither saw nor felt what came. Reiff had him by the hair, jerked his head back with such force and at such an unnatural angle that his neck snapped like a greenstick. Man’s body went limp and useless, rag-doll lifeless, and crumpled to the ground. Merrett realized what had happened, turned, looked down at the guy, and with a heavy boot stamped on the side of his face. His face sort of folded inwards like a watermelon. Lot of blood. More than Wiltsey.
