Cops and Robbers

by Donald E. Westlake

  “You’d do the same thing,” Joe said.

  Smoothly, Tom said, “Not necessarily, Joe.” He was a natural host, he eased groups through the rough spots. He said to Joe, but for George’s benefit, “Everybody hustles, but nobody wants to. I don’t want Mary to work, you don’t want Grace to work, George doesn’t want Phyllis to work, but what are you gonna do?”

  George probably embarrassed at having gotten mad, made a heavy attempt at humor. “Lose the house to the bank,” he said.

  Tom said, “The way I see it, the problem is really very simple. There’s so and so much money, and there’s so and so many people. And there isn’t quite enough money to go around. So you do the only thing that’s left; you steal to make up the difference.”

  Joe gave Tom a warning look, but Tom hadn’t been thinking about the liquor store just then, and in any case didn’t notice him.

  George, still trying to make up for his bad temper, said, “Okay. I can go along with that. You got to make up the difference, and you do a little of this and that. Like me with the groceries.” Then, with a smirk, and another heavy attempt at humor, he added, “And you guys with whatever you can get.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Joe said. He was still serious. He said, “In our position, we could get whatever we wanted. We restrain ourselves, that’s all.”

  George laughed, and Tom gave Joe a thoughtful look. But Joe was moodily glaring at George; he was thinking he’d like to give him a ticket.

  Tom

  The way to take somebody out of a place full of his friends is to do it fast. This was a coffee shop on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village, a hangout of several different kinds of freaks, and at one o’clock on a Saturday night it was full; college students, tourists, local citizens, hippies passing through town, a general cross-section of people who don’t like cops.

  Ed waited outside on the sidewalk. If worse came to worse, I’d push Lambeth into running and he’d run straight into Ed’s arms.

  He was at a table midway along on the right, just as the finger had said. He was with four other people, two male and two female, and he had a bunched-up handkerchief in his left hand and kept patting his nose with it. Either he had a cold or he was on something; most of them sooner or later try a free sample of what they sell.

  I stopped behind his chair, and leaned over him slightly. “Lambeth?”

  When he looked up over his shoulder, I saw that his eyes were watery and red-lined. It was still maybe a cold, but it was still more likely heroin. He said, “Yeah?”

  Despite what they say in the movies, a plainclothes detective is not instantly recognizable as a cop. “Police,” I said, low enough so he’d be the only one to hear the word clearly. “Come on along with me.”

  He had a loose kind of grin. “I don’t think so, man,” he said, and faced around to his friends again.

  He was wearing a fringed deerskin vest. I reached over his shoulders and yanked the vest back around his arms, pinning him like a straitjacket. At the same time, I lifted him and kicked the chair out from under him.

  Nobody thinks faster than his body. If he’d just let himself drop to the floor then, he would have gotten away from me. Maybe long enough for his friends and some busybody bystanders to louse me up. But his body reacted automatically, getting his feet under him, helping him to stand, and the instant he had his balance I turned him toward the front and ran him full speed at the door.

  He yelled, and tried to squirm to the side, but I had him pinned and moving. The door was closed, but would open with a push; I pushed it with his head. We’d gone through so fast there hadn’t been time for anybody to react along the way.

  Lambeth was still struggling when we hit the street. Ed was standing there, and our Ford was parked right in front. I didn’t slow down, but kept running across the sidewalk and slammed Lambeth into the side of the car. I wanted the wind and the fight out of him. I pulled him back a foot or two, and bounced him off the car again, and this time he sagged and quit fighting.

  Ed was beside me with the cuffs. I let go of the vest, slid my hands down Lambeth’s arms, and lifted his arms up behind him like pump handles, bending him over the trunk of the car. Ed clicked the cuffs on, and opened the Ford’s rear door.

  I was shifting Lambeth over into position to shove him into the car when somebody tapped me on the upper arm, and a female voice said, “Officer?”

  I looked around at a middle-aged tourist woman in a red-and-white flowered dress and a straw purse. She looked angry, but as though she was making a great effort to be reasonable. She said, “Are you absolutely sure that much violence was necessary?”

  Lambeth’s friends would be coming out any second. “I don’t know, lady,” I said. “It’s how much I used.” Then I turned away from her again and kicked Lambeth into the car and followed him in. Ed shut the door behind me, got behind the wheel, and we pulled away from there as the coffee-shop door opened and people began to pile out into the street.

  Lambeth was crumpled up on the right side of the rear seat like a dead dog. I adjusted him around into a sitting position. He looked dazed, and he mumbled something, but I couldn’t tell what.

  Up front, Ed said, “Tom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Looks like you’re gonna get another letter in your file.”

  I looked at him, and he was checking the rear-view mirror, looking at the situation behind us. “Is that right,” I said.

  “She’s taking down the license number,” he said.

  “I’ll blame you,” I said.

  Ed chuckled, and we turned a corner, and headed uptown.

  After a couple of blocks, Lambeth suddenly said, “My arms hurt, man.”

  I looked at him. He was wide awake, and apparently rational. You don’t switch off a cold that easily. I said, “Don’t stick needles in them.”

  “With these cuffs on, man,” he said. “I’m all twisted around.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Will you take them off?”

  “At the station.”

  “If I give you my word of honor, I won’t try—”

  I laughed at him. “Forget it,” I said.

  He gave me a level look, and then a sad kind of smile. “That’s right,” he said. “Nobody’s got any honor around here, do they?”

  “Not the last time I looked.”

  He wriggled around for thirty seconds or so, and apparently finally got himself into a more comfortable position, because he stopped moving, and sighed, and settled down to watch the city go by.

  I settled down, too, but not that much. We were traveling without siren or flashing light, in an unmarked green car, which meant we were going with the general flow of the traffic. Unless there’s a specific reason to make a fuss, it’s better not to. But the result was, we were from time to time being stopped by red lights, and from time to time crawling along in very slow traffic, and I didn’t want Lambeth to suddenly decide to jump out of the car and make a run for it with Ed’s cuffs. The door was locked, and he seemed quiet, but I nevertheless kept my eye on him.

  After three or four minutes of watching the world outside the window, Lambeth sighed and looked at me, and said, “I’m ready to get out of this city, man.”

  I had to laugh again. “You’ll get your wish,” I told him. “It’ll probably be ten years before you see New York again.”

  He nodded, grinning at himself. He seemed less freaky, more human, than he’d been back in the coffee shop. “I dig,” he said. Then he gave me a serious look, and said, “Tell me something, man. Give me your opinion on a question I have in my mind.”

  “If I can.”

  “What do you say; is it the bigger punishment to get sent out of this city, or to stay here?”

  “You tell me,” I said. “Why’d you stay here long enough to get yourself into a bind like this?”

  He shrugged. “Why do you stay, man?”

  “I’m not dealing,” I said.

  “Sure you are,”
he said. “You’re dealing in machismo, man, just like I’m dealing in scat.”

  Ever since drugs got tied in with the cultural revolution, the junkies have had a richer line of horseshit. “Anything you say,” I said, and turned away to look out my own window.

  “None of us started out this way, man,” he said. “We all started out as babies, innocent and pure.”

  I looked at him again. “One time,” I said, “a guy a lot like you, full of talk, he showed me a picture of his mother. And while I was looking at it he made a grab at my hip for my gun.”

  He gave a big broad grin; he was delighted. “You stay in this town, man,” he said. “You’re gonna like what it does to you.”

  Joe

  The woman was all right coming down the stairs. She was bleeding from a long cut on her right arm, and she had blood all over her face and hands and clothes, some of it her own and some of it her husband’s and I guess she was still dazed by it all. But when we went out the front door and she looked down the tenement steps and saw the crowd of people standing around gaping at her, she flipped her lid. She started screaming and struggling and carrying on, and it was hell to get her down the steps to the sidewalk, particularly because all the blood made her slippery and tough to hold onto.

  I didn’t like that situation at all. Two uniformed white cops dragging a bloody black woman down the steps into a crowd in Harlem. I didn’t like any part of it, and from the expression on Paul’s face he didn’t like it either.

  The woman was yelling, “Let me go! Let me go! He cut me first, let me go! I got a right, I got a right, let me go!” And finally, as we neared the bottom of the stoop, I could hear over her yelling the sound of a siren coming. It was an ambulance, and I was glad to see it.

  We got to the sidewalk just as the ambulance came to a stop at the curb. The crowd was keeping out of it so far, giving us a big open space on the sidewalk, moving out of the way of the ambulance. All I wanted was to get this over with and go away somewhere for a while. The woman was wriggling and squirming like an eel, a long black eel covered with blood and screaming with a voice like a fingernail on a blackboard.

  It was one of those high-sided ambulances, a boxy van, and it carried four attendants, two in front and two in the back, all dressed in white. But not for long. The four of them climbed out and came running over to us and got hold of the woman. One of them said, “All right, we’ve got her.”

  “About time you got here,” I said. I knew they’d been as fast as could be expected, but the situation had me scared, and when I’m scared I get mad, and when I’m mad I sound off.

  They didn’t pay any attention to me, which was the right thing to do. One of them said to the woman, “Come on, honey, let’s fix the old arm.”

  Their being dressed in white had made a connection with the woman, because now she started to yell, “I want my own doctor. You take me to my own doctor!”

  The four attendants hustled the woman to the ambulance, having as much trouble with her as we’d had, and a second ambulance arrived, pulling in behind the first. Two guys came out of this one, both also dressed in white, and came over to us. One of them said, “Where’s the stiff?”

  I couldn’t say anything; I was having trouble breathing. I just pointed at the building, and Paul said, “Third floor rear. In the kitchen. She really cut him to pieces.”

  Two more had come out of the back of the second ambulance, carrying a rolled-up stretcher. The four of them went up the stoop and into the building. At the same time, the first four were getting the woman into the first ambulance, with some trouble. So much movement, so many flashing red lights, kept the crowd from deciding to join in; they’d just be spectators this time.

  Paul and I were finished with this one, for right now. We still had to call in, and later on there’d be forms to do at the station, but for the next couple minutes the action had moved away from us. And it hadn’t happened any too soon.

  Excitement carries you through the tense parts. It had been that way from the beginning, from the first time I was around at a violent situation, which was a ten-year-old kid hit by a cab on Central Park West. He was still alive, the kid, and when you looked at him you wished he wasn’t. But the excitement and noise and movement had carried me through the whole scene, and it wasn’t until we were driving away from it that I had Jerry, an older cop who was my first partner, pull the car over to the curb and stop so I could get out and up-chuck.

  That’s never changed, from that day to this. I don’t upchuck anymore, but the run of emotions is still the same; the excitement carries me through the tense part or the ugly part or the violent part, and then there’s a sick queasy letdown that comes after it.

  The patrol car was across the street where we’d left it, with its engine off and its flasher on. The two of us went over there, pushing our way through the crowd, ignoring the questions they were asking us and ignoring what was going on behind us. When we got to the car, we stood beside it a minute, not talking or moving or doing anything. I don’t know what Paul was looking at; I was looking at the car roof.

  A siren started again. I looked around, and the first ambulance was leaving, taking the woman to Bellevue. I turned to look at Paul, and he had blood smeared all over his shirt-front, and dotted on his face and arms like measles. “You got blood on you,” I said.

  “You, too,” he said.

  I looked down at myself. When we’d come down from the third floor, I’d been on the side of the woman where her cut arm was, and I had even more blood on me than Paul did. My bare arms, from elbow to wrist, were soaked in blood, the hair all matted, like a cat that’s been run over. Now that I was looking at myself, with the sun beating down on me, I could feel the blood drying against my skin, shrinking up into a thin wrinkled layer of scab.

  “Christ,” I said. I turned away from Paul and leaned my left side against the car and stretched my left arm away from me across the white car roof, where the flashing light kept changing the color of it. I couldn’t think about getting clean, I couldn’t think about what I was supposed to do next, all I could think was, I’ve got to get out of this. I’ve got to get out of this.

  3

  They were both on the four-to-midnight shift that time, so they got to drive home pretty late at night, after most of the traffic had thinned out. That was the advantage of the four-to-twelve; they got to drive into town in the middle of the afternoon, before the rush hour, and in any case in the opposite direction from most of the traffic, and then at the other end of the shift they could drive home along practically empty roads.

  The disadvantage of the four-to-midnight was that it was the busiest shift of all. They weren’t driving during the rush hour, but they were working during it, and then on into the evening, the high-crime period of the day. Muggings hit their peak between six and eight, when people are coming home from work. Around the same time, the husbands and wives start fighting with each other, and a little later the drunks join in. And store robberies—like the one Joe had pulled—occur most frequently in that period between sundown and ten o’clock, when most of the stores finally close. So when they were on the four-to-midnight shift they tended to spend most of their time working, and very little of it sitting down.

  But then midnight would come around at last, and this shift too would come to an end, and they would get to sail home along practically deserted highways once they’d left Manhattan, all by themselves, thinking their thoughts. Which is what they were doing now.

  Tom was driving his Chevrolet tonight; six years old, bought used, a gas burner and an oil eater, with bad springs and a loose clutch. He kept talking about trading it in on something a little newer, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it to a used-car dealer and try to get a price on it. He knew too well what this car was worth.

  They were riding along without any conversation between them, both tired from the long day, both remembering things that had happened earlier in the week. Tom was going over in his head the convers
ation with the hippie junk dealer, trying to find better answers to the things the guy had said, and also trying to figure out why he couldn’t seem to get that conversation out of his mind. And Joe was remembering the blood drying on his arm in the sun, stretched out across the roof of the patrol car, looking like something from a monster movie and not anything that could ever have been a part of himself at all. He didn’t particularly want to remember that scene, but it just seemed to stay in his head, no matter what.

  Gradually, as they left the city behind them, Tom’s thoughts shifted away from the hippie, roamed around, touched on this and that, and settled on a new subject. It wasn’t exactly Joe’s liquor store, though the liquor store was behind what he was thinking about now. All at once he broke the silence, saying, “Joe?”

  Joe blinked. It was like coming out of sleep, or a dentist’s anesthetic. He looked at Tom’s profile and said, “Yeah?”

  “Let me ask you a question.”

  “Sure.”

  Tom kept looking straight ahead through the windshield. “What would you do,” he said, “if you had a million dollars?”

  Joe’s answer was immediate, as if he’d been ready for this question all of his life. “Go to Montana with Chet Huntley,” he said.

  Tom frowned slightly and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I mean really.”

  “So do I.”

  Tom turned his head and studied Joe’s face—they both had very serious expressions—and then he looked out the windshield again and said, “Not me. I’d go to the Caribbean.”

  Joe watched him. “You would, huh?”

  “That’s right.” Tom grinned a little, thinking about it. “One of those islands down there. Trinidad.” He stretched the word out, pronouncing it as though saying it was tasting something sweet.

  Joe nodded, and looked around at the glove compartment. “But here we are instead,” he said.

  Tom glanced at him again, then faced front. He felt very cautious now, like a man with a bag of groceries walking on ice. He said, “Remember what you told George last week?”