Bank Shot

by Donald E. Westlake

  Dortmunder was waiting in the doorway to give her a hand up. ‘Whoop, thanks,’ she said. ‘The cops are here.’

  ‘I saw them. We’ll get back of the partition.’

  ‘Right.’

  Murch’s Mom said, ‘Let’s not get those cards mixed up. Everybody hold onto your own hand.’

  Murch said, ‘Mom, will you please put the brace on?’

  ‘For the last time, no.’

  ‘You could blow the whole case for us right here.’

  She stared at him. ‘I am standing in a stolen bank,’ she said, ‘which is about nine felonies rolled into one already, and you’re worried about a lawsuit with an insurance company?’

  ‘If we get picked up on this thing,’ Murch said, ‘we’ll need all the cash we can lay our hands on for the defense.’

  ‘That’s a cheerful thought,’ May said. She was standing by the door, looking out toward the office.

  Dortmunder had gone around behind the partition to join Herman and Kelp, and now all sound stopped from back there. A second later, Victor came out and said, ‘So they’re here, are they?’ He had a big smile on his face.

  ‘Just coming out of the office,’ May said. She shut the door and went over to look out a window instead.

  ‘Remember,’ Victor said, ‘they can’t come in without a warrant.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  But the troopers made no attempt to come in. They walked down the gravel roadway between the lines of trailers, looking this way and that, and gave the green-painted bank no more than a passing glance.

  Victor was watching out another window. ‘It’s starting to rain,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to get back in their car.’

  It was, and they did. A slight sprinkle had developed, and the troopers walked a bit faster on their way back down the line of trailers toward their car. May, looking up, saw heavy clouds coming on fast from the west. ‘It’s really going to come down,’ she said.

  ‘What do we care?’ Victor said. ‘We’re warm and dry inside this bank here.’ He looked around with that big smile on his face and said, ‘They even have electric baseboard heat.’

  Murch’s Mom said, ‘Are they gone?’

  ‘Just getting in their car,’ May said. ‘There they go.’ She turned from the window, and now she was smiling. ‘I suddenly realise,’ she said, ‘that I was very nervous.’ She took the stub of cigarette from her mouth and looked at it. ‘I just lit this,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s play cards,’ Murch’s Mom said. ‘Dortmunder! Come on out and play cards.’

  Dortmunder came out, Victor went back in with Herman and Kelp, the four outside sat down to play cards again, and Murch’s Mom shot the moon. Murch said, ‘See? See? I told you!’

  ‘So you did,’ Murch’s Mom said. She smiled at her son and riffled the cards as she shuffled.

  Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door. Everybody at the table stared, and May quickly got up to look out the nearest window. ‘It’s somebody with an umbrella,’ she announced. It was really pouring out there now, puddles everywhere.

  ‘Get rid of him,’ Dortmunder said. ‘I’ll go back by the safe again.’

  ‘Right.’

  May waited till Dortmunder was out of sight, then opened the door and looked out at the nervous manager, more nervous than ever and miserable-looking under the black umbrella. ‘Uh,’ May said. How could she avoid inviting him in, with all that rain?

  He said something, but the drumming of the rain on both the bank roof and his umbrella drowned out the words. May said, ‘What?’

  Shrilly, he yelled, ‘I don’t want any trouble!’

  ‘That’s wonderful!’ May shouted back. ‘Neither do I!’

  ‘Look!’

  He was pointing down. May leaned forward, getting her hair wet, and looked at the ground beside the trailer, and it was pale green. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said and looked to the left and right. The bank was blue and white again. ‘Oh, good Christ,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want any trouble!’ the manager shouted again.

  May took her head in from the rain. ‘Come on in,’ she invited.

  He took a step back, shaking his head and his free hand. ‘No no. No trouble.’

  May called to him, ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t want you here!’ he yelled. ‘The boss would kick me out! No trouble, no trouble!’

  ‘You won’t call the police?’

  ‘Just go away! Go away and I won’t call them and it never happened!’

  May tried to think. ‘Give us an hour,’ she said.

  ‘Too long!’

  ‘We have to get a truck. We don’t have a truck here.’

  His quandary was making him so nervous he was hopping from foot to foot, as though he had to go to the bathroom. Maybe, with all the rain beating down, he did. ‘All right,’ he yelled at last. ‘But no more than an hour!’

  ‘I promise!’

  ‘I’ll have to unhook you! The water and electricity!’

  ‘All right! All right!’

  He fidgeted out there until she realised he was waiting for her to shut the door. Should she thank him? No, he didn’t want thanks, he wanted reassurance. ‘You won’t have any trouble!’ she yelled at him, and waved, and shut the door.

  Dortmunder was standing beside her. ‘I heard,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll have to take it somewhere else,’ she said.

  ‘Or give up.’

  Herman and Kelp had wandered out from behind the partition. Herman said, ‘Give up? I’ve just begun to fight!’

  Kelp said, ‘What’s the problem? How’d he tip to us?’

  May told him, ‘We used water-base paint. The rain washed it off.’

  Herman said, ‘We can’t give up, that’s all. We just have to take it someplace else.’

  Dortmunder said, ‘With every cop on Long Island out looking for it. And with the green paint gone. And with no place in mind to put it.’

  Murch said, And no truck to drive it anywhere.’

  Kelp said, ‘That’s never a problem, Stan. Trucks are never a problem. Trust me.’

  Murch gave him a glum look.

  Victor said, ‘In this rain, there won’t be much of a search.’

  ‘When you’re looking,’ Dortmunder said, ‘for something fifty feet long and twelve feet wide, colored blue and white, you don’t need much of a search.’

  May had been silent during all this, thinking about things. She had no particular craving for money herself, and so didn’t care so much about the contents of the safe as that the job be successful. Dortmunder was gloomy enough in his natural state; life with him if this robbery failed would be about as cheerful as a soap opera. ‘I tell you what,’ she said. ‘I got us an hour here.’

  The lights went off. Gray and rainy illumination seeped in through the windows, depressing everyone even further.

  ‘An hour,’ Dortmunder said, ‘is just enough time for us all to go home and get to bed and make believe none of this ever happened.’

  ‘We have two cars,’ May said. ‘We can spend that hour looking for someplace to move. If we don’t find anything, we give up.’

  ‘Fine,’ Herman said. ‘And I’ll keep working on the safe.’ He hurried back behind the partition.

  ‘It’s getting cold in here,’ Murch’s Mom said.

  ‘You’d be warmer with the brace on,’ her son said.

  She gave him a look.

  Dortmunder sighed. ‘The thing that scares me,’ he said, ‘is that we probably will find a place.’

  27

  Dortmunder said, ‘I suppose it’s unfair to blame you for this job.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Kelp said. He was driving, and Dortmunder was in the front seat beside him.

  ‘But I do,’ Dortmunder said.

  Kelp gave him an aggrieved look and faced front again. ‘That isn’t fair,’ he said.

  ‘Nevertheless.’

  They had until nine-thirty to get back t
o the bank, and it was now about nine-fifteen. Kelp and Dortmunder and Murch had started out in this station wagon together, until Kelp had found a truck big enough to do the job. It said HORSES on the sides, and the interior had a slight smell of stable to it, but it was empty. Kelp had started it up and turned it over to Murch, who had taken it away to the trailer court. Now, Kelp and Dortmunder were roaming the earth looking for somewhere to move the bank. Victor and Murch’s Mom were doing the same thing in Victor’s Packard.

  ‘We’d better get back,’ Dortmunder said. ‘We aren’t going to find anything.’

  ‘We might,’ Kelp said. ‘Why be so pessimistic?’

  ‘Because we covered all this ground last week,’ Dortmunder said, ‘and there wasn’t any place to hide the bank then. So why would there be someplace now?’

  ‘Just five minutes more,’ Kelp said. ‘Then we’ll head back.’

  ‘You can’t see anything in this rain anyway,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘You never know,’ Kelp said. ‘We might get lucky.’

  Dortmunder looked at him, but Kelp was concentrating on his driving. Dortmunder considered several things he might say, but none of them seemed adequate, so after a while he turned his head and looked out the windshield at all the rain and listened to the wipers clicking back and forth.

  ‘It’s really coming down,’ Kelp said.

  ‘I see it.’

  ‘You don’t usually get a rain like this on a Friday,’ Kelp said.

  Dortmunder looked at him again.

  ‘No, I mean it,’ Kelp said. ‘Usually you get this kind of a rain on a Sunday.’

  Dortmunder said, ‘Are the five minutes up?’

  ‘One minute to go. Keep looking for a place.’

  ‘Sure,’ Dortmunder said and looked out the windshield again.

  The only good thing was the absence of cops. They’d seen a couple of patrol cars, but no more than normal; the search was obviously being hampered by the rain.

  It seemed to Dortmunder, sitting there in the stolen station wagon while Kelp optimistically dragged him around through all this rain on a wild goose chase, that this was the story of his life. His luck was never all good, but it was never all bad either. It was a nice combination of the two, balanced so exactly that they canceled each other out. The same rain that washed away the green paint also loused up the police search. They stole the bank, but they couldn’t get into the safe. On and on.

  Dortmunder sighed and looked at his watch. ‘Your minute is up,’ he said.

  Reluctantly, Kelp said, ‘Okay, I guess so.’ Then he said, ‘I’ll take a swing around and head back that way.’

  ‘Go straight back,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘I don’t want to go back the same roads. What’s the point of that?’

  ‘What’s the point of the whole thing?’

  ‘You’re just depressed,’ Kelp said. ‘I’ll turn right at that light up there and swing back that way.’

  Dortmunder was about to tell him to make a U-turn, but memories arose and he changed his mind. ‘Just so we’re back by nine-thirty,’ he said, though he knew they wouldn’t be.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Kelp said. ‘Definitely.’

  Dortmunder slumped in the corner and fantasised a return to the trailer in which May would meet him at the door by saying, ‘Herman opened it!’ Then Herman would appear, smiling, holding handfuls of money. ‘Well, I got it,’ he’d say. Murch’s Mom would be seen kicking her neck brace into the rain, shouting, ‘We don’t need that lawsuit money any more!’ Victor would stand in the background, smiling, as though waiting his turn to come forward and recite ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck.’

  Kelp slammed on the brakes, and the station wagon skidded dangerously to the right. Dortmunder, jolted out of his daydream and practically into the glove compartment, shouted, ‘Hey! Hey, watch it!’ He stared out front, and there was nothing in front of them; just the top of a hill they’d been driving up, a long gradual slope with nothing at the top, no reason at all for Kelp to slam his brakes on that way.

  ‘Look at that!’ Kelp shouted and pointed at nothing.

  But Dortmunder looked instead out the rear window, saying, ‘You want another rear-end collision? That’s your trademark? What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘All right, I’ll drive off the road. But will you take a look at that?’

  Kelp drove the station wagon onto a gravel parking lot, and Dortmunder at last looked at what he was so excited about. ‘I see it,’ he said. ‘So what?’

  ‘Don’t you get it?’

  ‘No.’

  Kelp pointed again. ‘We put the trailer right there,’ he said. ‘See what I mean?’

  Dortmunder stared. ‘Well, God damn it,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll work,’Kelp said.

  Dortmunder couldn’t help it; against his better judgment, he was smiling. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Kelp. ‘That’s absolutely right.’

  28

  ‘I hate rain,’ Captain Deemer said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Lieutenant Hepplewhite.

  ‘I always have hated rain,’ Captain Deemer said. ‘But never as much as today.’

  The two officers were in the back seat of the patrol car the captain was using as his mobile headquarters during the search for the elusive bank. In the front were two uniformed patrolmen, the driver on the left and a man to operate the radio on the right. The radio was the contact not only with the precinct but also with other cars and with other organisations engaged in the bank hunt. Unfortunately, what the radio was mostly contacting was static, a fuzzing and butsing and crackling that filled the car like the aural expression of the captain’s nervous system.

  The captain leaned forward, resting one heavy hand on the seat-back near the driver’s head. ‘Can’t you do anything with that goddam radio?’

  ‘It’s the rain, sir,’ the radio man said. ‘The weather is doing this.’

  ‘I know goddam well the goddam weather is doing it,’ the captain said. ‘I asked you can’t you do anything about it.’

  ‘Well, we get pretty good reception when we’re on a hill,’ the radio man said. ‘Driving along the flat, though, all I get is this static.’

  ‘I hear it,’ the captain said. He poked the driver on the shoulder and said, ‘Find me a hill.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The captain leaned back and brooded at Lieutenant Hepplewhite. ‘A hill,’ he said, as though hills were in themselves an insult.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘A mobile headquarters, and I can’t contact anybody unless I stand still on a hilltop. You call that mobile?’

  Lieutenant Hepplewhite looked tortured as he tried to figure out whether the proper response was yes, sir or no, sir.

  Neither was needed. Captain Deemer faced front again and said, ‘You found a hill yet?’

  ‘I believe there’s one up ahead, sir,’ said the driver. ‘Hard to tell in this rain.’

  ‘I hate rain,’ said the captain. He glowered out at it, and no one spoke as the mobile headquarters started up the long gradient of the hill. The radio spackled and fizzed, the windshield wipers swish-clicked, the rain drummed on the car top, and the captain’s right eyelid fluttered soundlessly.

  ‘Shall I pull in by the diner, sir?’

  The captain stared at the back of the driver’s head and considered leaning forward and biting him through the neck. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I guess the insurance company paid off,’ the radio man said.

  The captain frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The diner, sir,’ the radio man said. ‘They had a bad fire last year, burned to the ground.’

  ‘Well, it’s back now,’ Lieutenant Hepplewhite said.

  ‘Doesn’t look open,’ the radio man said.

  The captain wasn’t feeling kindly toward irrelevances. ‘We’re not here to talk about the diner,’ he said. ‘We’re here to contact headquarters.’

>   ‘Yes, sir,’ everybody said.

  The diner was set back from the road, fronted by a gravel parking lot, with a large sign out by the road, reading, MCKAY’S DINER. The driver parked near this sign, and the radio man went to work on contacting headquarters. After a minute, the static receded and a tinny voice was heard, as though they’d reached somebody who lived in an empty dog-food can. ‘I’ve got headquarters,’ the radio man said.

  ‘Good,’ said the captain. ‘Tell them where we are. Where the hell are we?’

  ‘McKay’s Diner, sir.’

  The captain lowered his head, as though he might charge. ‘When I say where are we,’ he said, ‘I do not want an answer I can read off a sign right outside the goddam window. When I say where are we, I want to know –’

  ‘Near Sagaponack, sir,’ the radio man said.

  ‘Near Sagaponack.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Tell headquarters that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Find out what’s going on, if anything.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Tell them we’ll be here until further notice.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Until the bank is found, or the rain stops, or I go berserk.’

  The radio man blinked. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Whichever comes first.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The captain turned to Lieutenant Hepplewhite, who was looking very pale. ‘Even as a child I hated rain,’ the captain said. ‘I used to have a Popeye doll that you could punch and it would fall over and come back up again. It was as tall as I was, with a weighted bottom. Rainy days, I used to take that Popeye doll down in the basement and kick the shit out of it.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the lieutenant.

  The captain’s eyelid drooped. ‘I’m getting tired of hearing “Yes, sir” all the time,’ he said.

  ‘Yessss,’ said the lieutenant.

  The radio man said, ‘Sir?’

  The captain turned his heavy head.

  ‘Sir,’ the radio man said, ‘I told headquarters our position, and they said there’s nothing to report.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the captain.