The Heckler

by Ed McBain

  Again, the deaf man grinned.

  I’m really terribly sorry to report, Mr. McDouglas, that your lovely night watchman’s uniform was burned to ashes in an incinerator. But that was the only way, you see. We shall do the same thing with these costumes. The police may get to you eventually, Mr. McDouglas, but we certainly don’t want them reaching you any sooner than they ordinarily might.

  And when they get to you, you will of course describe me.

  The deaf man grinned.

  But is my hair really blond, Mr. McDouglas? Or is it bleached especially for this jolly little caper? And am Ireally hard of hearing? Or is the button in my ear a further device to confuse identification? Those are the questions the police must ask themselves, Mr. McDouglas.

  I somehow feel they’ll have themselves a merry little chase.

  “Here we are,” McDouglas said, coming from the back of the shop. “How do you like them?”

  The deaf man studied the white uniforms.

  “Very nice, Mr. McDouglas,” he said. “How much is that?”

  “Pay me when you bring them back,” McDouglas said.

  The deaf man smiled graciously. “Thank you.”

  “I’ve been in this business twenty-five years,” McDouglas said, “and I’ve never been stuck with a bum check, and I’ve never yet had anybody steal a costume from me. And in all that time, I never once took a deposit and the people always paid for the costumes when they brought them back.” McDouglas rapped his knuckles on the wooden counter. “I’ve never been robbed yet.”

  “Well,” the deaf man said, grinning, “there’s always a first time,” and McDouglas burst out laughing. The deaf man continued watching him, grinning.

  When his laughter subsided, McDouglas said. “Who’s directing this movie of yours?”

  “I am.”

  “That must be hard. Directing a movie.”

  “Not if you plan everything beforehand,” the deaf man answered.

  THAT NIGHT,they put the first part of their plan into action.

  At 11:01, a moment after the night watchman at the Pick-Pak Ice Cream Company entered the elevator which would take him to the top floor of the building, Rafe ran a bony hand through his straw-blond hair, adjusted his gold-rimmed eyeglasses and, without uttering a sound, promptly picked the lock on the front gate. Chuck, burly and apelike, pushed the gate back far enough for both men to enter. He rolled it closed again and they both walked to the nearest truck. Chuck got to work on the front license plate and Rafe got to work on the rear one.

  At 11:03 they looked up to the top floor of the factory and saw the night watchman’s flashlight illuminating the blank windows like a flitting soul behind a dead man’s eyes.

  By 11:05 the transfer of plates had been effectively accomplished, Chuck opened the hood of the truck and climbed in behind the wheel. Rafe found the ignition wires and crossed them. Then he went to the gate and rolled it all the way open. Chuck backed the truck out. Rafe climbed in beside him. He did not bother to close the gate again. The time was 11:07.

  It took them fifteen minutes to drive crosstown to the rented store near the new shopping center. Pop and the deaf man were waiting in the back yard when the truck pulled in. The deaf man was wearing dark-grey slacks and a gray sports jacket. His black loafers were highly polished. They glowed even in the dim light from the street lamp.

  Pop was wearing the uniform of a night watchman, the second uniform rented by the deaf man in McDouglas’s shop.

  The time was 11:23.

  “Everything go all right?” the deaf man asked.

  “Fine,” Chuck said.

  “Then let’s get the signs on. Pop, you can take up your post now.”

  The old man walked out to the sidewalk near the front of the shop. The other men went into the store and came out carrying a drill and a bit, an extension cord, a flashlight, two huge metal signs reading “Chelsea Pops” and a box of nuts and bolts. Chuck began drilling holes into the side of the truck. Rafe and the deaf man began fastening on the first sign as soon as Chuck was finished.

  The time was 11:34.

  At 11:45, the patrolman appeared. His name was Dick Genero, and he ambled along the sidewalk nonchalantly, not expecting trouble and not looking for it. He could see a light flashing behind the store rented by that ice cream company, but the truck was effectively screened from the street by the building itself. On the sidewalk, he saw a man in uniform. At first, he thought it was another cop then he realized it was only a night watchman.

  “Hello,” he said to the man.

  “Hello,” Pop replied.

  “Nice night, huh?” Genero asked.

  “Beautiful.”

  Genero glanced toward the light in the back yard. “Working back there?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Pop replied. “The ice-cream people.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Genero said. “Couldn’t be the shopping-center people. They’re all finished with their construction, aren’t they?”

  “Sure,” Pop said.

  “You a new man?”

  Pop hesitated. “How do you mean?”

  “Used to be another fellow here,” Genero said. “When they were first building the center.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Pop said.

  “What was his name?” Genero asked.

  For a moment, Pop felt as if he’d walked into a trap. He did not know the name of the man who’d preceded him. He wondered now if this cop knew the name and was testing him, or if he was just asking a simple question to make conversation.

  “Freddie, wasn’t it?” Pop said.

  “I forget,” Genero replied. He glanced over at the center. “They sure put these things up fast, don’t they?”

  “They sure do,” Pop answered, relieved. He did not look toward the back yard. He did not want this stupid cop to think anything unusual was happening back there.

  “The supermarket opened yesterday,” Genero said, “and the drugstore, too. Bank’s moving in tomorrow afternoon, be ready for business on the first. It’s amazing the way they work things nowadays.”

  “It sure is,” Pop said.

  “A bank is all I need on my beat,” Genero said. “Another headache to worry about.” He studied Pop for a moment, and then asked, “You going to be here steady?”

  “No,” Pop answered. “I’m just on temporary.”

  “Until all the stores are in, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Too bad,” Genero said, grinning. “You’da made my job easier.”

  The light behind the ice-cream store went out suddenly. Genero looked toward the back yard.

  “Guess they’re finished,” he said.

  “I wishI was,” Pop answered. “I’ll be here all night long.”

  Genero chuckled. “Well, keep an eye on the bank for me, will you?” he said. He clapped the old man on the shoulder. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  Whistling, he walked up the street past the ice-cream store, turned the corner, and moved out of sight.

  The time was 12:00 midnight.

  The truck behind the store now belonged to Chelsea Pops, Inc.

  The three men who’d fastened the new signs into place went back into the store, and down into the basement, and then into the tunnel they’d dug across the back yard.

  The tunnel was no makeshift job. They had, after all, been working on it for a very long time. It was high and wide, and shored up with thick wooden beams which braced the ceiling and the walls. It had been necessary to make a sturdy tunnel because men and equipment had been working aboveground all the while the tunnel was being dug. The deaf man had been certain they were deep enough to avoid any cave-ins, but he’d made the tunnel exceptionally strong anyway.

  “I don’t want anyone dropping in on us,” he had punned intentionally, and then grinned with the other men and got back to work.

  The construction work aboveground, the legitimate work that went into the building of the shopping center, had really been an ex
cellent cover for the daylight digging of the tunnel. With all that noise and confusion on the surface, no one even once imagined that some of the noise was coming frombelow the ground. During the night, of course, the men had to exercise a little more caution. But even then, they’d been protected by their phony night watchman.

  The interesting part of the job, the deaf man thought, was that their construction of the tunnel had kept pace with the legitimate construction of the bank. The construction aboveground was open to all viewers. Painstakingly, the deaf man had watched while the vault was being built, had watched while the all-important wiring box for the alarm system had been imbedded in the concrete floor of the vault and then covered over with another three-foot layer of concrete. The alarm, he knew, would be of the very latest variety. But he also knew there wasn’t an alarm system in the world which Rafe could not render useless provided he could get at the wiring box.

  The men had proceeded to get at the wiring box. As the shell of the bank took form and shape around the impregnable vault, the tunnel drove relentlessly across the back yard and then under the vault itself, and finally into the concrete until the underside of the vault was exposed. A web of steel had been crisscrossed into the vault floor between layers of concrete. The steel was almost impregnable, the rods constructed of laminated layers of metal, the grain of one layer running contrary to the grain of the next. A common hack saw would have broken on those laminated steel rods in the first thirty seconds of sawing. And the crisscrossing web made the task of forcible entry even more difficult since it limited the work space. Set an inch apart from each other, crossed like a fisherman’s net, each laminated rod of steel became a separate challenge defying entry. The steel mat was like an army of die-hard virgins opposing an undernourished rapist. And beyond the mat, embedded in the second layer of concrete, was the wiring box for the alarm system. Assuredly, the vault was almost impregnable.

  Well, almost is not quite.

  The men had a long time to work. They used acid on the steel, drop by drop, eating away each separate rod, day by day, working slowly and surely, keeping pace with the shell of the bank as it grew higher over their heads. By the twenty-sixth of April they had cut a hole with a three-foot diameter into the mat. They had then proceeded to chip away at the concrete until they reached the wiring box. Rafe had unscrewed the bottom of the box and studied the system carefully. As he’d suspected, the system was the most modern kind, a combination of the open- and closed-circuit systems.

  In an open-circuit alarm system, the cheapest kind, the alarm sounds when the current is closed. The closed-circuit system operates on a different electrical principle. There is always a weak current running through the wiring and if the wires are cut, the alarm will sound when that current is broken.

  The combination system works both ways. The alarm will sound if the current is broken, and the alarm will also sound when contact is established.

  Anyone with a pair of shears can knock out the open-circuit system. All he has to do is cut the wires. The closed-contact system is a little more difficult to silence because it requires a cross-contacting of the wires. Rafe knew how to knock out both systems, and he also knew how to take care of the combination system—but that would have to wait until the evening of the thirtieth. It was the deaf man’s contention that the alarm system would be tested when the money was put into the new vault. And when it was tested, he wanted it to sound off loud and clear. So the cover was screwed back onto the wiring box—the box was left exactly the way it had been found—and the men ignored it for now, hacking away at the concrete floor until they were some four inches from the inside of the vault. Four inches of concrete would hold anyone standing on it, the deaf man figured. But at the same time, four inches of concrete could be eliminated in ten minutes with the use of a power drill.

  The belly of the vault was open.

  When the alarm was set on the day the bank opened, no one in the world would be able to tell that the vault, for all practical purposes, had already been broken into. The belly of the vault was open.

  And so was its mouth. And its mouth was waiting for the more than two million dollars which would be transferred from the Mercantile Trust Company under Dave Raskin’s loft to the new bank at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.

  Tonight as the men chipped away at the concrete floor, the deaf man grinned securely. Pop was outside and waiting to turn away any curious eyes. Authority loved other authority, and a night watchman, in the eyes of the police, somehow became an automatic honorary member of the force.

  “Let’s play some poker later,” the deaf man said, almost cheerfully, secure in the knowledge that not a single living soul knew they were under the ground looking up at the ripped-out guts of an impregnable bank vault. Not a damn living soul can guess where we are at this moment, he thought, and he clapped Chuck on the shoulder in a sudden gesture of camaraderie.

  He was wrong.

  Therewas a living soul who could have made a pretty good guess as to where they were at that moment.

  But he was lying flat on his back in a hospital room, and he was deep in coma.

  His name was Steve Carella.

  16.

  IT WAS THURSDAY,the last day of April.

  Not one cop working out of the 87th was happy to get up that morning. Not one cop would be any happier by the time night fell.

  To begin with, no cop liked the idea of another cop getting shot. It was sort of hard luck, you know? Sort of hoodoo. It was something like walking under a ladder, or stepping on a crack in the sidewalk, or writing a book with thirteen chapters. Nobody liked it. They were superstitious, yes. But more than that, they were human. And, whereas during the course of the working day they were able to pretend that their profession was compounded mainly of pleasant interviews with interesting people, delightful phone conversations with lovely debutantes, fascinating puzzles which required stimulating brainwork, bracing legwork in and around the most exciting city in the world, fraternal camaraderie with some of the nicest colleagues to be found anywhere, and the knowledge that one was part of a spirited and glorious team dedicated to law enforcement and the protection of the citizens of these United States—whereas every cop fed himself this crap from time to time, there was the persistently throbbing, though constantly submerged, knowledge that this wonderful, exciting, spirited, bracing, fraternal job could get a guy killed if he didn’t watch his step.

  The squadroom was inordinately silent on that last Thursday in April.

  Because coupled with the knowledge that Steve Carella lay in coma in a hospital bed was the somewhat guilty relief usually experienced by a combat soldier when his buddy takes a sniper’s bullet. The men of the 87th were sorry as hell that Steve Carella had been shot. But they were also glad it had been he and not they. The squadroom was silent with sorrow and guilt.

  THE HOSPITALwas silent, too.

  A light drizzle had begun at 11A.M ., gray and persistent, moistening the streets but not washing them, staining the hospital windows, dissolving the panes of glass, covering the floors with the projection of the rain pattern, giant amoeba-like shapes that gnawed at the antiseptic corridors.

  Teddy Carella sat on a bench in the corridor and watched the rain pattern oozing along the floor. She did not want the shifting, magnified globules of water to reach her husband’s room. In her fantasy, the projected image of the darting raindrops was the image of death itself, stealthily crawling across the floor, stopping at the very edge of the window’s shadow, just short of the door to Steve’s room. She could visualize the drops spreading farther and farther across the corridor, devouring the floor, battering at the door, knocking it down, and then sliding across the room to envelop the bed, to engulf her husband in gelatinlike death, to smother him in shadow.

  She shuddered the thought aside.

  THERE WAS A TINY BIRDagainst a white sky. The bird hung motionless. There was no wind, no sound, only the bird hanging against a white sky, emptiness.

&nbs
p; And suddenly there was the rushing sound of a great wind gathering somewhere far in the distance, far across the sky, across the huge, deserted, barren plain, gathering in volume, and suddenly the dust swarmed across the barren plain, dust lifting into the sky, and the noise of the wind grew and grew and the bird hanging motionless was swept farther upward and began to drop like a stone, falling, falling, as the wind darkened the sky, rushing, the wind heaving into the sky, overwhelming the sky until it turned to gray and then seemed to invert itself, involuting, turning to a deep black while the roar of the wind carried the bird down, down, descending yellow beak, black devouring eyes.

  He stood alone on the plain, his hair whipped by the wind, his clothing flapping wildly about his body, and he raised his fists impotently to the angry descending bird, and he screamed into the wind, screamed into the wind, and his words came back into his face and he felt the beak of the bird knifing into his shoulder with fire, felt the talons ripping, tearing, felt flame lashing his body, and still he screamed into the towering rush of the black wind against his frail body, his impotent fists, screaming, screaming.

  “What’s he saying?” Lieutenant Byrnes asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hernandez answered.

  “Listen. He’s trying to say something.”

  “Ubba,” Carella said. He twisted his head on the pillow. “Ubba,” he mumbled.

  “It’s nothing,” Hernandez said. “He’s delirious.”

  “Ubba,” Carella said. “Ubba cruxtion.”

  “He’s trying to say something,” Byrnes insisted.

  “Ubba crusha,” Carella said.

  And then he screamed wordlessly.

  THE TWO MEN,Chuck and Pop, had started work at twelve noon. They had synchronized their watches when leaving the store, and had made plans to meet at the ferry slip at four-oh-five. A revised estimate of the time it would take to accomplish their jobs had caused them to realize they could never catch the two-fifteen boat. So, the four-oh-five it was. And, if either one of them did not appear at that time, the other was to proceed to Majesta without him.