Bank Shot

by Donald E. Westlake

  ‘Didn’t think anything of it. He lives in Queens, and they stopped him at a roadblock going through. That’s when he found out what happened and told them he’d seen it.’

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘On Union Turnpike. They’ve got a roadblock set up there, and –’

  ‘No,’ Captain Deemer said. Patiently he said, ‘Where did he see the bank?’

  ‘Oh. Up by Cold Spring.’

  ‘Cold Spring, Cold Spring.’ The captain hurried to the map, looked at it, found Cold Spring. ‘Right on the county line,’ he said. ‘They’re not trying to get off the Island at all. Heading the other way, up toward Huntington.’ He spun around. ‘Get that out to all units right away, Lieutenant. Last seen at one forty-five in the vicinity of Cold Spring.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Hepplewhite spoke briefly into the phone, broke the connection, dialed the dispatcher’s room.

  Gelding said, ‘You seem pleased, Captain. This is a good sign, eh?’

  ‘The best so far. Now if we can only get to them before they open the safe and abandon the bank –’

  ‘I don’t think you have to worry too much about that, Captain,’ Albert Docent said. In the heat of the argument his bow tie had become twisted, but now he was calm again, and straightening it.

  Captain Deemer looked at him. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I was telling you about the advances that have been made in safe construction,’ Docent said. He glanced at Wallah, who said nothing, and looked at the captain again to say, ‘Given any force that will open that safe without destroying the contents, whether nitroglycerine, acid, laser, diamond-tip drill, any of the safe cracker’s arsenal of equipment, it will take those thieves a minimum of twenty-four hours to break it open.’

  Captain Deemer broke into a broad smile.

  ‘Captain,’ said the lieutenant. He was excited again.

  Captain Deemer turned the broad smile on him. ‘Yes, Hepplewhite?’

  ‘They found the seven guards.’

  ‘Did they! Where?’

  ‘Asleep on Woodbury Road.’

  The captain was already turning toward his map, but he stopped and frowned at the lieutenant. ‘Asleep?’

  ‘Yes, sir. On Woodbury Road. In a ditch beside the road.’

  Captain Deemer looked at Albert Docent. ‘We’re going to need twenty-four hours,’ he said.

  23

  ‘Oh, I can do it,’ Herman said. ‘That isn’t the question.’

  ‘Tell me the question,’ Dortmunder said, ‘because I’m dying to ask it.’

  They had come to rest now. Murch had delivered them to an open slot in the rear of the Wanderlust Trailer Park, a kind of nomadic village far out on Long Island. The owners of the Wanderlust lived elsewhere, in a proper house, and so wouldn’t be aware of the freeloader until tomorrow morning; as for the occupants of the other mobile homes here, some of them might have been awakened by the sound of the truck engine going past their units, but it isn’t unheard of for people to arrive or leave a trailer park in the middle of the night.

  Murch had now departed with the truck cab, which he would ditch about fifteen miles from here, at the spot where they’d already stashed the Ford station wagon that would be their getaway car. May and Murch’s Mom had finished giving the place a gloss of hominess, and the idea now was that Herman would have been working on the safe since they’d left the football stadium and would have it open by the time Murch got back with the Ford. Only now Herman was saying he wouldn’t.

  ‘The question,’ Herman explained, ‘is time. This is a newer safe than I’ve seen before. The metal is different, the lock is different, the door is different, everything is different.’

  ‘It’ll take longer,’ Dortmunder suggested.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We can wait,’ Dortmunder said and looked at his watch. ‘It isn’t even three o’clock yet. Even if we’re out of here by six, six-thirty, we’re still all right.’

  Herman shook his head.

  Dortmunder turned and looked at May. They were still moving around by the light of flashlights, and it was hard to read May’s expression, but it wasn’t hard at all to read Dortmunder’s. ‘I been kept out of mischief,’ Dortmunder said. ‘That’s one thing for sure.’

  ‘Herman,’ May said, coming forward, the cigarette bobbing in the corner of her mouth, ‘Herman, tell us. How bad is it?’

  ‘Lousy,’ Herman said.

  ‘How lousy?’

  ‘Terrible lousy. Rotten lousy.’

  ‘How long would it take to open the safe?’

  ‘All day,’ Herman said.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ said Dortmunder.

  Herman looked at him. ‘I’m as happy about this as you are. I take pride in my work.’

  ‘I’m sure you do, Herman,’ May said. ‘But the point is, sooner or later you could open it.’

  ‘Given time. The original idea was I’d have all the time I wanted.’

  Dortmunder said, ‘We couldn’t find a place to put this goddam thing under cover. All we could do was this – paint, curtains on the windows, put it in a trailer camp. They’ll find the thing this morning, but we should have it camouflaged enough so we’re clear and home and dry before they do. If we leave no later than six, six-thirty.’

  ‘Then we leave without the cash,’ Herman said.

  May turned to Dortmunder. ‘Why do we have to leave?’

  ‘Because they’ll find this thing.’

  Murch’s Mom came forward, carrying the flashlights. ‘Why will they?’ she wanted to know. ‘It’s like The Purloined Letter, we’ve got a trailer hidden in a trailer camp. We’ve changed the color, we put license plates on, we put curtains on the windows. How are they gonna find us?’

  ‘Sometime in the morning,’ Dortmunder said, ‘the owner or the manager of this place will come along, and he’ll know this trailer doesn’t belong here. So he’ll come knock on the door. And then he’ll look inside.’ Dortmunder waved an arm to indicate what that owner or manager would see.

  Murch’s Mom already knew what the interior looked like, but she obediently flashed her light around anyway and said, ‘Mmmmm.’ Not very encouraging. Mobile homes come in a lot of different styles, colonial and French Provincial and Spanish and Victorian, but no one so far has decided to live in a trailer done up as Suburban Bank.

  May squinted past cigarette smoke and said, ‘What if we pay rent on it?’

  They all looked at her. Dortmunder said, ‘I missed a couple words there, I think.’

  ‘No, listen,’ she said. ‘This slot is empty anyway. You look out that door, you’ll see maybe five other empty slots. So why don’t we just stick with the trailer, and when the owner comes around in the morning we pay him his fees? Pay him his rent for a couple days, a week, whatever he wants.’

  Herman said, ‘That’s not bad.’

  ‘Sure,’ Murch’s Mom said. ‘Then it really is The Purloined Letter. They’ll be looking for us, and looking for the trailer, and we’ll be in the trailer in a trailer camp.’

  ‘I don’t know about puh-purlayed letters, whatever it is,’ Dortmunder said. ‘But I do know about robbery. You don’t … when you knock over a bank, you don’t live in it after you knocked it over, you go away someplace else. I mean … that’s just the way it’s done.’

  Herman said, ‘But wait a minute, Dortmunder. We haven’t knocked it over yet. That goddam safe is giving me trouble. And if we stay here, we can hook into the electricity supply, I can use decent tools, I can really do a job on that mother – uh, on that safe.’

  Dortmunder frowned, looking around the interior of the bank. ‘It makes me nervous to stay here,’ he said. ‘That’s all I can tell you, maybe it means I’m old-fashioned, but it makes me nervous.’

  May said, ‘It isn’t like you to give up. It just isn’t your style.’

  Dortmunder scratched his head and looked around some more. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But this is not a traditional robbery. You go in, you get what you come fo
r, you go away. You don’t set up housekeeping.’

  ‘Just for one day,’ Herman said. ‘Just till I get into that safe.’

  Dortmunder kept scratching, then suddenly stopped and said, ‘What about connecting up? The electricity and the plumbing. When they do it, what if they have to come inside?’

  ‘We don’t need the plumbing,’ Murch’s Mom said.

  ‘After a while we will.’

  May said, ‘They have to connect it up; it’s the sanitary laws.’

  ‘There you are,’ Dortmunder said.

  Herman said, ‘We’ll do it ourselves.’

  Dortmunder looked at him with true annoyance. Every time he’d safely relegated the idea to the Impossible shelf, somebody had to come along with another suggestion. He said, ‘What do you mean, do it ourselves?’

  ‘Connect everything up,’ Herman said. ‘You and me and Murch, we can do it ourselves right now. Then it’s all done, and when the manager comes around in the morning Mrs. Murch goes out, or May goes out, somebody, and we pay him off. And if he wants to know how come everything’s already connected up, we tell him we got in late at night, we didn’t want to disturb anybody, so we did it ourselves.’

  May said, ‘You know, if we took this counter apart, and put this piece on top of that piece, and ran it across here, then you could open this door and somebody outside wouldn’t see anything strange at all. Just like a corridor in the trailer.’

  Murch’s Mom said, ‘Down here, we could move this stuff out of the way, and take that chair and that chair and that table, and put them around this way like this, and then somebody could stand outside this door, too, and what would it be?’

  ‘A disaster,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘A breakfast nook,’ Murch’s Mom said firmly.

  ‘They can’t search every trailer on Long Island,’ Herman said. ‘They may come around to the trailer parks, the cops –’

  ‘You just know they will,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘But they won’t be looking for a green trailer with Michigan license plates and curtains in the windows and a couple nice middle-aged ladies that answer the door.’

  ‘And what if they say they want to come in?’

  ‘Not now, Officer,’ May said, ‘my sister’s just come out of the shower.’

  ‘Who is it, Myrtle?’ Murch’s Mom called in a high falsetto.

  ‘Just some police officers,’ May called back, ‘wanting to know if we saw a bank go past here last night.’

  Dortmunder said, ‘You two ladies could get accessory. You could wind up working in a state-pen laundry.’

  ‘Federal pen,’ Murch’s Mom said. ‘Bank robbery is a Federal rap.’

  ‘We’re not worried,’ May said. ‘We’ve got everything figured.’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ Dortmunder said, ‘how many guys I met behind bars that said the exact same thing.’

  Herman said, ‘Well, I’m going to stay, that’s all. That goddam safe is a challenge to me.’

  ‘We’re all going to stay,’ May said. She looked at Dortmunder. ‘Aren’t we?’

  Dortmunder sighed.

  ‘Somebody coming,’ Herman said.

  Murch’s Mom doused the flashlights, and the only illumination was the red glow of May’s cigarette. They heard the car approach, they saw its headlights flash by the windows. The engine stopped, the door opened and closed, and a few seconds later the bank door opened and Murch stuck his head in. ‘Set?’ he called.

  Dortmunder sighed again as Murch’s Mom switched the flashlights back on. ‘Come on in here, Stan,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Let’s talk.’

  24

  Victor said:

  ‘Steely-eyed Dortmunder surveyed his work. The wheels were under the very floor of the bank itself. Hungry, desperate men, their hat brims pulled low, his gang had worked with him beneath the shield of night to install those wheels, turning the innocent-appearing bank into an …

  ENGINE OF GREED!

  ‘I myself had been one of those men, as recounted in the earlier tale, Wheels of Terror!, in this same series. And now, the final moment had come, the moment that had filled our every waking thought for all these days and weeks of preparation.

  ‘“This is the payoff,” Dortmunder snarled softly. “Tonight we get the whole swag.”

  ‘“Right, boss,” whispered Kelp eagerly, his scarred face twisting into a brutal smile.

  ‘I repressed a shudder at that smile. If my companions but knew the truth about me, how that smile would alter its effect! I wouldn’t last long with this crew of desperate ruffians, if ever they penetrated my disguise. I was known to them as Lefty the Lip McGonigle, late of Sing Sing, a tough customer and no friend of the law. I had used the McGonigle monicker twice before, once to capture the evil Specter of the Drive-In! and once to invade the criminal-infested precincts of the dread Sing Sing itself, that time to solve the slaying of the stoolie Sad Sam Sassanack, in the adventure later related under the title Brutes Behind Bars!

  ‘And now, I was Lefty the Lip yet again, in the course of my duty to my God and my Nation as …

  SECRET AGENT J-27!

  ‘None of Dortmunder’s hoods had ever seen my real face. None knew my real name. None knew the –’

  ‘Victor?’

  Victor leaped, dropping the microphone. Spinning around in his chair, he saw Stan Murch standing in the open bookcase, framed by the night behind him. Victor was so deeply into his story line by this time that he recoiled when he realised he was looking at one of Dortmunder’s men.

  Murch took a step forward, his expression concerned. ‘Something the matter, Victor?’

  ‘No no,’ Victor said shakily, shaking his head. ‘You just – you just startled me,’ he added lamely.

  ‘Kelp told me this was where I’d probably find you,’ Murch said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Victor said inanely. Looking down, he saw that the cassette was still running and switched it off. ‘This is where I am,’ he said aimlessly.

  ‘There’s been a problem at the bank,’ Murch said. ‘We all got to assemble again.’

  ‘Where?’ Victor asked interrogatively.

  ‘At the bank.’

  ‘Yes, but where’s the bank?’ Victor pursued puzzledly. He had last seen the bank in the high-school football field and didn’t know precisely where it would be kept for the rest of the night.

  ‘You can follow me in your car,’ Murch said. ‘You ready?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Victor said uncertainly, looking around the garage. ‘But what’s gone wrong?’ he asked belatedly.

  ‘Herman says it’s a new kind of safe, it’ll take him all day to break into it.’

  ‘All day!’ Victor exploded, aghast. ‘But surely the police –’

  ‘We’re setting it up with a front,’ Murch said. And then added, ‘We’re in kind of a press for time, Victor, so if you could –’

  ‘Oh, of course!’ Victor said abashedly. He leaped to his feet, then picked up the cassette and microphone and stuffed them into his jacket pocket. ‘Ready,’ he announced earnestly.

  They left, Victor carefully switching off the lights and locking the door behind himself, and the two of them walked down the dark driveway to the street. While Murch got into the station wagon parked there, Victor hurried across the street to the garage he rented from a neighbor, in which he kept his Packard. This was a more modern garage than his own, with an electronically operated lift door that he could raise or lower by touching a button on the dashboard of the car. For several months he’d been trying to get up enough nerve to ask his neighbor’s permission to do some work on the outside of the building, but so far hadn’t developed sufficient courage. What he wanted to do was make the front look like a seemingly abandoned warehouse, without doors, so that a section of wall would appear to lift when the dashboard button was pushed. There were two difficulties with this conception. First, he didn’t know what cover story to give the owner for wanting to make the change, an
d, second, a seemingly abandoned warehouse would look definitely out of place in this neighborhood – particularly in somebody’s back yard. Still, it was a pleasant idea, and he might yet be able to work something out.

  At night, though, the effect was almost as good with the building just the way it was. Victor entered through the side door of the garage, switched on the dim red bulb he’d installed in the overhead light fixture, and by its darkroom-like illumination removed the plastic cover from the Packard, folding it like a flag and then putting it away on its shelf. Next he got into the car, took the cassette and microphone from his pocket and put them on the seat beside him, and started the engine. The Packard motor grumbled quietly but menacingly in the enclosed space. Smiling to himself, Victor turned on the parking lights only and pushed the button that caused the door to slide up. With a distinct sense of drama, he tapped the accelerator and steered the Packard out into the night, then pushed the button again and watched in the rear-view mirror as the door folded down once more behind him, the red-lit view of the garage interior narrowing from the top and at last disappearing completely. Only then did he switch on his headlights.

  Murch seemed impatient. He was revving the engine of the station wagon, and the instant Victor and the Packard reached the street he shot away from the curb and dashed away down the street. Victor followed at a more stately pace, but soon had to pick it up a little if he was going to keep Stan in sight at all.

  The first time they were stopped at a red light, Victor ran the tape back a bit in the cassette, found the spot where he’d left off, and took it from there, dictating into the microphone as he followed Murch and his scuttling station wagon across Long Island:

  ‘None of Dortmunder’s hoods had ever seen my real face. None knew my real name. None knew the truth about me, and it would be curtains for me if they did!

  ‘Now, gimlet-eyed Dortmunder nodded in satisfaction. “Forty-eight hours from now,” he boasted evilly, “that proud bank will be ours! Nothing can stop us now!”’

  25

  ‘If you’ll put the flashlight on my work,’ Herman said, ‘things’ll go a lot faster.’