The Specialists

by Lawrence Block

  He unzipped his windbreaker, reached inside the waistband of his slacks. The .38 fit snugly in his hand. He checked the load for the third time, put the gun back where it belonged, and, fingers nimble despite the gloves, zipped up the jacket again.

  He walked a block from the car. He turned, and nobody had taken any interest in it, so he turned again and pointed himself toward the bank. He had close to two hours to walk three miles, and that was a pretty slow pace if you were climbing mountains. In the middle of a damn city it was the pace a kid might walk if he was worried he might be early for school. Sort of two steps forward and one step back.

  Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t hold his pace down that slow. When he reached the bank building, he looked at his watch and it read 1:37. “Thirteen hundred thirty-seven hours,” he said aloud, pleased with the cadence of the phrase. But he wasn’t pleased with the time. He could enter the bank and fool around with a deposit slip at 1352 hours and not before. Which gave him fifteen minutes to kill.

  He walked along Broad Street, gazing thoughtfully into store windows.

  At 1:48, Giordano dropped a dime in a drugstore telephone booth and dialed the bank. When a girl’s voice answered, he said, “This is Dr. Perlin at Sisters of Mercy Hospital. You employ a Patricia Novak?”

  “Yes, we do——”

  “Have her come to the emergency ward immediately, please. That’s Sisters of Mercy Hospital. Her father was injured in an auto accident and he’s not expected to live.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “You’ll see that’s she’s informed at once.”

  “Oh, God, yes. Sisters of Mercy. And you’re Dr.——”

  “Dr. Fellman.”

  “Dr. Feldon. Yes, I’ll tell her immediately.”

  At 1:52 Murdock entered the bank via the Broad Street door. He almost collided with a frenetic, wide-eyed young woman who was struggling into her spring coat and rushing out the door at the same time. He clucked to himself and walked on through to the customers’ desk, where he selected a deposit slip and a ballpoint pen. The pen was attached to the countertop by a length of chain. A hell of a thing, Murdock thought. All the money they had in a place like this and they like to worry over someone walking off with one of their ball pens.

  He wanted very much to laugh. But he hunched over the deposit slip and penned meaningless figures into the little boxes.

  At 1:53 Giordano entered the bank through the Revere Avenue door. He stood in line in front of the third teller’s cage. There were four people ahead of him in line. If the line moved too quickly, he would invent some business that would make him head back to the stand-up desk—to endorse some nonexistent check or other. But the line was going to be properly slow. It would have been shorter if Pat was on duty, but now two tellers had to do the work of three and that slowed things down.

  Also at 1:53 Simmons pulled the brown truck into the bank’s parking lot on Revere Avenue. Now he, like Murdock, like Giordano, was wearing gloves. He took out one of the guns he had purchased in Newark, checked its load, and set it on the seat beside him.

  He thought, Esther, and for a crazy instant she was there with him so that he might have spoken to her. Then she was gone. He had spoken to her the night before. With luck he would speak to her again in a couple of hours, and she wouldn’t know that anything had happened, but there would be something in his voice that hadn’t been there the night before.

  Or would there? Because there was still Eddie Manso in that big stone house.

  He lit a cigarette and waited.

  At 1:55 Dehn stepped through the electric eye beam. The vault guard appeared instantaneously. “Ah, Mr. Moorehead,” he said. “Now you’re a regular customer, aren’t you, though?”

  “I guess I am at that.” Dehn was making his fourth visit to the box today. He signed the signature card, rubbing his sleeve against it to eliminate the possibility of prints. Then he and the guard went through the little game with the keys, using first the guard’s key and then Dehn’s key to liberate the safe deposit box.

  “All filled up with hundred dollar bills, I’ll bet.”

  “Oh, just some torn-up newspaper. I’m just putting up a front.”

  The guard laughed cooperatively. Dehn took the box to a booth, opened it, removed the manila envelope, returned it to his attaché case, and gave the metal box a quick wipe to rid it of prints. From the attaché case he withdrew an eight-inch length of lead pipe that had been wrapped first with quarter-inch-thick foam rubber and then with several layers of Mystik tape. His gun was in a shoulder rig under his jacket, the .45-caliber Ruger automatic that Murdock had bought in Passaic.

  He hoped he wouldn’t have to shoot it.

  He unlocked the door of the booth and eased it open an inch or so. The vault room was silent. He reached into the attaché case a final time and took out a pair of sheer rubber gloves. He put them on.

  And looked at his watch.

  It was 1:59.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Wells Fargo truck pulled into the Revere Avenue lot at two minutes of two. The driver stayed behind the wheel. The two guards, dressed in gray uniforms with blue piping, went into the bank. One of them carried a pair of cloth sacks. The other was empty-handed. As they opened the side door of the bank Simmons ground the starter of the brown truck.

  He did this a couple of times, staying clear of the gas pedal so that the engine couldn’t catch. Then he swung down from the truck, scooped up the gun, and went over to the Wells Fargo driver.

  “Can’t help you, buddy,” the driver said. “Not allowed to leave the truck. Now there’s a gas station on Broad and Ivy, that’s two blocks down and—oh, shit.” He saw the gun. “All we got is nickels and dimes, is why I’m all alone here.”

  “Shut up and turn around.”

  “Listen, it’s their money. Not mine. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So what do I care about it? Right? I got a wife, I got a kid——”

  Simmons hefted the gun.

  “Oh, shit,” the driver said. “You could tie me up and gag me, but I suppose it’d take too much time, huh? Look, do me a favor, don’t hit too hard. Believe me. I should care about their money. I could care less, right? One little tap and I’ll guarantee I’m out cold for hours. And I got a lousy memory for faces, believe me. And——”

  Simmons knocked him cold.

  Dehn was waiting when they came downstairs. Two Wells Fargo men and Matthew Devlin, the bank’s vice-president and, according to Manso, one of Platt’s finest. Outside of Devlin and Caspers, the president, it was unlikely that any bank employees knew about the racket connection. But those two were in the know.

  Dehn opened the door of his booth the rest of the way. He emerged carrying the empty safe deposit box under one arm. The hunk of taped pipe was held out of sight behind his back in his free hand. He ignored the three men clustered around the vault door and turned over the safe deposit box to the guard.

  “Now, Mr. Moorehead,” the guard said, grinning. “Feels lighter, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure does,” Dehn said.

  The guard took the box, turned, raised it up to return it to its slot. Out of the corner of his eye Dehn saw Matthew Devlin open the vault door. “I’ll have your key now, Mr. Moorehead,” the vault guard said, and Dehn hit him behind the right ear with the length of lead pipe.

  The guard fell forward, against the wall, and slid gently down to the floor. Before he got there, Dehn had the pipe transferred to his left hand and the Ruger drawn in his right.

  He said, “Freeze. Nobody move.”

  The guards were very good. They froze on command and held that way. But Devlin made a try for the vault. Dehn got to him, shouldered him out of the way.

  “Just cool it, Matt. Don’t screw it up now.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Stay loose, for Christ’s sake. Didn’t Platt tell you about it?”

  Devlin stared.

  “Yeah, the same drill as Passaic
.” He chuckled lightly, then turned to the two Wells Fargo men. “Sorry, fellows,” he said, and put them both out with the pipe.

  Devlin said, “Platt must be crazy.”

  “All I do is follow orders.”

  “And why did you call me Matt? And for the love of God, why talk like that in front of them?”

  “In front of who?”

  “Those two soldier boys. You’ll have to kill them now.”

  “Oh?” Dehn’s eyes flicked to his wristwatch, then back to Devlin. “Why’s that, Matt?”

  “They heard what you said. They could repeat it to the police, you idiot!”

  “They could at that,” Dehn said. He heard sounds from upstairs, the sounds he had been listening for. “They definitely could do that,” he said, “and it might give the police ideas.”

  And he shot Matthew Devlin twice in the face.

  When the two Wells Fargo men and the bank VP had been downstairs for three minutes, Murdock stuck his gun in a guard’s back. Just about that time Giordano was leaning over the rail of the tellers’ counter. He held a gun on the two girls while with his other hand he used a knife to cut through the alarm wire.

  “Clean out the drawers,” he said pleasantly. “Don’t stall—use the cloth sacks behind you on your left. Good girl, good girl. Now fill them up with the fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds. Don’t bother with anything smaller or larger. Very good, very good.”

  And behind him Murdock had the guards and customers and two bank officers all fanned out very nicely. When the tellers had their drawers clean, Giordano motioned them around to join the party. He kept the whole crowd in place while Murdock ran the two sacks of bills to the side door to hand them over to Simmons. Then Murdock went on downstairs to help Dehn clean out the vault, and Giordano stayed where he was, keeping everything and everybody cool.

  “Now don’t anybody be nervous and don’t anybody be a hero,” he said. He kept talking gently to them, telling them that nobody was going to be hurt, that they would all be on their way in two or three minutes. He called the bank executives and the tellers by name, almost as if he knew them.

  Like silk, he thought. In and out and everything smooth and easy. He had one tense moment when two muffled reports reached the first floor, the sound of the two bullets that Dehn put in Matthew Devlin. He hadn’t expected any shooting, and his first guess was that the Wells Fargo men had tried to be cute. When a few seconds crawled by without any uproar from the vault room, he decided that everything was still going the way it was supposed to. A customer asked about the shots and Giordano was so loose and cool he told her it was just the sound of the vault being blown open. The crowd seemed to believe it.

  He held them all in place. In no time at all Dehn was coming up the stairs, heading out the side door. A few seconds later Murdock appeared, also carrying a large sack. He headed through the crowd and went out the front door. By then Simmons had the truck out of the lot and around the corner, and Murdock flipped the sack in back and leaped up after it, and Giordano, gun in hand, started backing toward the front door.

  Smooth as pie and easy as silk, he thought, and all of this with them one man short and working on a short-notice improvised plan. The bank was a piece of cake and that was all there was to it. They could have knocked it over with two men and a four-year-old crippled girl, all armed with beanshooters and spitballs. Unloaded beanshooters. Dry spitballs.

  He double-checked to make sure the phones were all dead. He told the customers and staff to stay inside the bank for twenty minutes or they would be shot. He didn’t expect them to believe it, but the moustached man at the Passaic job had thrown it in for effect, and it was about time they did something that at least vaguely suggested the Passaic job. The colonel’s substitute plan had left out some of the subtler touches of the original operations program, but you couldn’t have everything. If they got the money and got away clean, that was enough. The police could figure the rest out on their own.

  And if they didn’t, and if the FDIC paid for the robbery loss and the government got a screwing, Giordano did not, in the final analysis, really care. The colonel cared. The colonel got all hung up on questions of right and wrong. Giordano cared a little about right and wrong but felt that the most important thing to do in any given set of circumstances was take the money and get the hell out.

  So he worked his way to the door, kicked it open, spun, took three steps onto the sidewalk, and the shit hit the fan.

  TWENTY-THREE

  It had been a rotten day for Pat Novak from the beginning. A bad night’s sleep for openers, with the little one up intermittently with nightmares. When the alarm went off at seven thirty, it dragged her unwillingly awake, shaky and headachy. She had coffee and put an English muffin in the toaster. When it popped, she took a long look at it, threw it in the garbage, and made herself a second cup of coffee.

  And she just couldn’t take the bank that morning. The usual people with their usual nothing conversation (How do you want the hundred dollars, Mr. Frischauer? Oh, make it two thirties and a forty, Pat). Irma, on her left, was busy indicting another in a long line of patent medicines that did nothing for her sinuses. (Hodestly, they say id the commercial that id draids all eight sidus cavities. How do they get away, that is what I wadda dow. Hodestly!) And the other girl, Sheila, was driving her batty with her latest kick. She had gotten all buggy about astrology a couple of weeks back and ever since then Pat heard more about the stars than she really cared to. (You’re Aquarius, right? Let me find it here. Yes, here. Listen to this, will you? “A day of great contrasts, sharps and flats with few grace notes. Before you answer the door, determine whether it’s Opportunity or the Wolf.” That’s a wonderful one, Pat.)

  If it was a wonderful one, Pat couldn’t figure out why. As far as she could tell, the best thing about it was that it meant whatever you wanted it to mean. Not that she didn’t sort of believe in it. With all the people who believed in it, and they included plenty of intelligent people as well as dummies like Sheila, well, you couldn’t help feeling there had to be something to it The only thing was, she decided, that she didn’t really want to find out what the stars held in store for her. She knew that life was going to be increasingly rotten. If you knew that you didn’t tend to ask for details.

  At ten thirty she went over to the Greek’s for coffee. In the ladies’ room she checked her lipstick and found herself staring vacantly into the mirror. She couldn’t stand the way she looked, so washed out and stupid.

  For a few days she had been quite beautiful. She stood looking at her reflection that morning and couldn’t understand it. It was the same face, wasn’t it? Why should a fellow make that much difference in a girl’s face? Why should liking a fellow, or even loving a fellow (if she did really love Jordan, and she guessed she did) make such a vast difference? Just going to bed with somebody didn’t do it. It might give you circles under your eyes and take the worry lines out of your forehead, but that was about all. It didn’t make you beautiful.

  Jordan had made her beautiful.

  He was such a shy little guy, she thought. But when they were alone together, the shyness went away and he was almost unbelievably strong. In bed he was resourceful and inventive. He had taught her to do things she had always resisted, even during marriage, and she had found herself not only doing what he wanted but actively enjoying it. Somehow Jordan had a way of making things seem all right.

  She wondered if she would ever see him again. Probably not, she decided. She was reasonably certain that he wasn’t married, but she was equally certain that he had not told her the whole story. There was nothing she could pin down, just a hunch, an impression that something was being kept from her. He didn’t seem the type, but she guessed he was one of those who had a girl in every town he worked in. And why should he come back to her? She was nothing special. He had made her feel special, but now the glow was gone and she was alone again and not special at all.

  So she looked in the mirr
or, and aloud she said, “You’ll never look pretty again, you poor bitch.” And wiped her eyes and went back to work.

  The rest of the morning was more of the same, and by the time she had gone out for lunch, she was ready to disagree strongly with Sheila’s astrology book. All sharps and flats? She couldn’t remember a grayer, deader, duller day.

  Then the phone call came.

  Her first reaction was blind panic. An auto accident, her father in the hospital, condition very critical—she rushed out of the bank and started to hurry across town to the hospital. It was only a few blocks away, and it was easier to walk there than to wait for a bus.

  Something stopped her halfway there. Something made her pause at an outdoor phone booth to call her house. She wanted to make sure the kids weren’t home alone, wanted to know if her mother was all right. So she dialed her number, and it rang five maddening times, and just as she was about to hang up her father answered.

  He was obviously not at the hospital. Nor, he informed her, was her mother or the children or, indeed, anybody else.

  She couldn’t understand it.

  She started to go back to the bank, then considered. Perhaps the message was supposed to be for one of the other girls. She made another call, this one to the hospital. She asked for the emergency room. She talked to several nurses and left the booth with the certain knowledge that someone somewhere had played a pointless and rather horrid joke on her. A really rotten joke.

  She walked back to the bank, her heels clicking furiously on the pavement, her mind spinning with combined rage and guilt. What have I done, she wondered, to be so bad that it would make someone hate me so much? She approached the bank, saw the brown truck race around the corner and pull to a stop, saw the door fly open, saw the guard, Nicholson, scamper around the corner from the Revere Avenue exit, and saw, suddenly in front of her, gun in hand, moustached and bright-eyed, the man she had never thought to see again, the man she needed, wanted, loved. Jordan Lewis.