Cops and Robbers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Paul saw it too. “There!” he said pointing.

  I accelerated, then hit the brakes as we got closer. I could see now that the tall young one had a small zippered bag in one hand and a small pistol in the other. The short guy was clinging to the tall guy’s waist, holding on for dear life, and the tall guy was trying to club him with the pistol. There were a lot of pedestrians on the sidewalk, as usual, but they were falling back, giving the two men plenty of room.

  Paul and I both jumped out of the car at the same time. He was closer to the curb, while I had to run around the front of the car. At the same time, the tall guy finally managed to break loose from the short one. He gave him a shove backwards, and the short guy staggered a couple of steps and then sat down hard. The tall guy had seen us coming, and he waved the pistol at us.

  I yelled, “Drop it! Drop it!”

  All of a sudden the son of a bitch fired two shots. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Paul go down, but I had to keep my mind on the guy with the gun. He’d turned and started to run southward along the sidewalk.

  I reached the sidewalk, went down on my left knee, propped my forearm on my raised right knee; all those years of practice paid off after all. I was sighted on his back, with the green polo shirt, and then on his legs. But the sidewalks were full, there were too many faces and bodies past him, right in the line of fire. And he was smart enough not to run in a straight line but to shift back and forth as he went.

  I kept the pistol aimed, in case I could get a clear shot with nobody beyond him, but it didn’t happen. “Damn it.” I whispered. “Damn it.” And he disappeared around the corner.

  I got back to my feet. Over by the storefront, the older man was also getting up. Paul was on his back on the sidewalk, but struggling to sit up, moving like a turtle on its back. I moved to him, holstering the pistol, and crouched beside him as he finished sitting up. He looked stunned, as though he didn’t know where he was. I said, “Paul?”

  “Jesus,” he said. His voice was slurred. “Jesus.”

  His left trouser leg was wet, stained dark, sodden with blood, midway between the knee and the crotch. “Lie down,” I said, and poked at his near shoulder. But he wasn’t really conscious at all; he didn’t hear me, or didn’t understand me. He just went on sitting there, his mouth hanging open, his eyes blinking very slowly.

  I got up again, turning toward the squad car, and the old man clutched at my arm. When I looked at him, pulling my arm away, he shouted, “The money! The money!”

  I could have killed him. “Shut up about money!” I yelled, and ran to the car to call in.

  8

  They both had that afternoon off. Tom was mowing his front lawn, wearing just a bathing suit in the sunshine, when Joe came around from between the houses and said, “Hey, Tom.” He too was dressed in a bathing suit, and he was carrying two open cans of Budweiser beer.

  Tom stopped. He was panting and sweating. “What?”

  “Come take a break.”

  Tom pointed at the beer. “Is that for me?”

  “I even opened it for you,” Joe said, and handed him one of the beers. “Come on, the kids are out of the pool for once.”

  Tom took a swig of beer, and they walked down the drive-way between the houses and over into Joe’s backyard. It was a really hot sunny day in July, and the pool looked great to the both of them. Cool water in a container of light blue, nothing looks better than that on a hot day. Except a beer.

  Tom said, “The filter’s working?”

  Joe put his finger to his lips. “Easy, it’ll hear you. Come on, cool off.”

  Joe had a short sturdy wooden ladder in an A shape over the side of the pool; you went up three steps on one side of the A, and down three steps into the water on the other side. They both climbed up and over, Joe first, and while Joe waded around the four-foot-deep water throwing out leaves and sticks and pieces of paper and dead bugs, Tom sat back on one of the steps of the ladder, so he was in water up to his neck. With his right hand he held the beer can up out of the water.

  Joe looked over at him and laughed. “You look like the Statue of Liberty.”

  Tom grinned, saluted with the beer, and took a swig. It was tough to drink in that position, but Joe was watching, so Tom did it for the effect. Then he said, “You know what I was thinking before? When I was over there with the lawn-mower?”

  “What?”

  “Remember I told you I used to go to City College nights?”

  Joe waded over to lean against the side of the pool to Tom’s left. “So?”

  Tom moved up a step, so the water was only chest-high and it was easier to drink. “What I was thinking,” he said, “if I’d kept at it, you know where I’d be today?”

  “Where?”

  “Right here. I still wouldn’t be a lawyer, not for two more years.”

  “Sure,” Joe said. He nodded. “You put a penny away every day, at the end of the year you’re still poor. It’s the same principle.”

  Tom stared at him. “It is?”

  They looked at one another, both bewildered, until Tom lost interest in the subject and changed it, saying, “Listen, what about the wives?”

  Joe switched his bewilderment to the new topic. “What?”

  “What do we tell the wives?”

  “Oh,” Joe said. “About the robbery, you mean.”

  “Naturally.”

  Joe didn’t see any problem. He shrugged and said, “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? I don’t know about you and Grace,” Tom said, “but if I put Mary in Trinidad, she’s going to know she’s in Trinidad.”

  “Sure,” Joe said. “Then. When we’re ready to move, that’s when we tell them. After it’s all over.”

  Tom hadn’t made up his own mind about that yet. There were times, particularly at night, when he very strongly wanted to tell Mary about it, talk it over with her, see what she had to say. Frowning, he said, “Not now at all?”

  “In the first place,” Joe said, “they’d worry. In the second place, they’d be against it, you know they would.”

  Tom nodded; that was what had kept him quiet up till now. “I know,” he said. “Mary wouldn’t approve, not ahead of time.”

  “They’d throw cold water on the whole idea,” Joe said. “If we tell the wives, we’ll never do it.”

  “You’re right,” Tom said. He was disappointed, but he was also relieved that the question was resolved. “Not till it’s all over,” he said. “Then we tell them.”

  “When we’re ready to take off out of here,” Joe said.

  “Right,” Tom said. Then he said. “The thing is, you know we can’t leave the country right away.”

  “Oh, sure,” Joe said. “I know that. They’d be on our asses in five minutes.”

  “What we’ve got to agree right now,” Tom said, “is that we bury the money and neither one of us goes near it until we’re ready to leave.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “The big advantage we’ve got,” Tom said, “is that we’ve seen every mistake there is.”

  “That’s right. And we know how not to make them.”

  Tom took a deep breath. “Two years,” he said.

  Joe winced. “Two years?”

  “We’ve got to play it cool,” Tom said.

  Joe looked pained, as though he had an ankle cramp down underwater. He wanted to argue against it, but on the other hand he had to agree with the theory of it; so he was stuck. Reluctantly, but giving in, he said, “Yeah, I suppose. Okay, two years it is.”

  Tom

  In the weeks after my visit with Vigano, I got to learn an awful lot about stocks and bonds, and about brokerages, and about Wall Street. I had to, if we were going to take ten million dollars away from there.

  Wall Street itself is only about five blocks long, but the brokerages are scattered all around that whole area down there below City Hall; on Pine Street and Exchange Place, on William Street and Nassau Street and Maiden Lane.

 
; I’ve heard the Wall Street district described as the only part of New York that looks like London. I can’t say about that, since I’ve never been to London, but I do know it has the narrowest and crookedest streets of any part of the city, with narrow sidewalks, and the big bank buildings crowding as close to the curb and each other as they can get. Writers all the time talk about that section in terms of “canyons,” and I can see why. With the streets so narrow and the stone buildings so tall and close together, the only time the sun shines on Wall Street is high noon.

  For the first time in my life I was beginning to see that breaking the law could be just as complicated as upholding it. I’d always thought of the police side of things as being tougher than the crook side, but maybe I’d been wrong; there’s nothing like standing in the other guy’s shoes to make you sympathize with him.

  There were so many details to figure out. How to do the robbery, for instance; whether it should be day or night, whether we should try for a diversion, just exactly how we were going to work it. And how to be sure we were taking the right bonds; before this, neither one of us had known zip about stocks and bonds. And how to make a getaway after the robbery in those narrow crowded streets. And how to hide the loot afterward until we sold it to Vigano; which was ironic, since all along we’d been telling each other we had to steal something that didn’t need to be held onto or stowed out of sight.

  But there it was. And the brokerages didn’t make it any easier. They were guarded like banks; no, they were tougher than banks.

  Let me tell you just how tough they were. First of all, there’s a special section of the Police Department with headquarters down in the Wall Street area that deals with nothing at all except stock market crime. There are cops in that section that know more about the financial world than the editor of the Wall Street Journal, and those cops keep tabs on the brokerages all the time, talking to the personnel directors, talking to the security directors, checking up on their ways of handling things and protecting themselves, and always no more than one phone call away in case there’s any kind of trouble.

  And then there’s the internal security departments. All the big brokerages have them; private uniformed guards, security files, closed-circuit TV, and all of it run usually by an ex-cop or an ex-FBI man. Guys that treat a stock brokerage as though it were a top-secret atomic-testing laboratory, and whose entire job is to see to it that none of the millions of pieces of paper that flow through Wall Street every day ever gets stolen.

  Of course, some do. But most stock market robberies are inside jobs, and there’s a good reason for it. Stocks and bonds, like dollar bills, carry serial numbers. Usually, the only way to steal securities and get something for your pains is to be an employee of a stock brokerage and alter the records so the brokerage isn’t aware that anything has been stolen. With bearer bonds, it’s possible for somebody like Anthony Vigano, with his expertise and his contacts, to alter the numbers and peddle the bonds back into legitimate channels, but other than that an inside job is the only kind of job possible on Wall Street.

  But even if it weren’t, even if there were any point in breaking into a stock brokerage and stripping the vault, they’ve gone out of their way to make things tough. For instance, a couple of years ago a bank down in that area closed down, and a restaurant was going to move into the space they left vacant. Before they could, though, they had to pull the vault out, and they had one hell of a time doing it. Not only was it wired with all kinds of alarms, not only did it have sixteen-inch-thick concrete walls reinforced with steel rods, but it actually had two separate walls all the way around the vault, and the area between the two walls was filled with poison gas. The workmen taking the vault walls down had to wear gas masks.

  That isn’t merely being tough; it’s being insane.

  Still, Joe and I had an edge over the normal safecracker or the normal dishonest employee. We had the facilities of the Police Department to help us, to provide us with material for the robbery and specific information—such as blueprints of alarm systems and other security measures—on whichever brokerage we finally decided to concentrate on.

  There was one that looked promising, called Parker, Tobin, Eastpoole & Co. They were in a building near the corner of John and Pearl streets, and I went down there one day to check them out. The building had the typical small lobby of that area—they really don’t like to waste space, those financial people—and three elevators. Parker, Tobin, Eastpoole & Co. was on the sixth and seventh and eighth floors, but I already knew it was the seventh floor I wanted, since I’d checked out the alarm-system on file at Police Headquarters downtown.

  The elevator was pretty full, and three of us got off together at the seventh floor. Which was good; it gave me a chance to hang back and look at things while the other two went forward to the counter.

  The elevator had opened onto a fairly large room, much wider than deep, divided the long way by a chest-high counter. The security arrangements seemed to be typical for a large brokerage. Two armed and uniformed private guards were on duty behind the counter. On the wall in back of them was a large pegboard with maybe twenty plastic ID tags hanging from it, plus room for about a hundred more. Each tag had a color photograph on it of the person it belonged to, plus a signature written underneath. Mounted on the short wall down to the right were six closed-circuit television sets, each showing a different area of the brokerage, including one showing this reception area I was standing in. Above the sets was the TV camera, turning slowly back and forth like a fan. On the other short wall, the one down to my left, was a second pegboard, smaller than the first, holding about twenty-five ID tags marked in big letters: VISITOR. Doorways at both ends of the room led into the work areas.

  There was a steady stream of activity around the counter. Arriving employees were picking up their ID tags, departing employees were turning them in, messengers were delivering manila envelopes. I got to stand there for maybe a full two minutes, checking things out.

  The first thing I noticed was that only one of the guards dealt with the people who came to the counter. The other one stood back by the rear wall, keeping an eye on things; watching the people, looking over at the television sets, staying alert while his partner did the detail work.

  Then there were the television sets. They were in black-and-white, but the pictures were crisp and clear. You could see the people moving around in different rooms, and you could make out their faces with no trouble at all. And I knew this bank of six sets would be repeated probably three or four other places on this floor; in the boss’s office, in the security chief’s office, in the vault anteroom, maybe one or two other places.

  It was also more than likely to be going on video tape. They have video tape now that can be erased and recorded on again, the same as regular sound tape, and that’s what they’d have. They might keep the tape for a week or a month or maybe even longer, so that if it turned out later that somebody had pulled a fast one, they could run the tapes through again and see who was where at what time.

  “Can I help you?”

  It was the guard, the one who dealt with people, looking across the counter at me. He was brusque and impatient, because of the amount of work he had to do, but he wasn’t suspicious. I stepped forward to the counter, trying for the world’s most innocent and stupid smile. Pointing at the television sets, I said, “Is that me?”

  He gave a brief bored look at the screens. “That’s you,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve never been on television before,” I said. I looked at the screen as though I was fascinated; and to tell the truth, I was. I’d worn the moustache again, and I was amazed at what I looked like with a moustache. Totally different. I wouldn’t have recognized me if I met me walking down the street.

  The guard was getting impatient. He looked me over for manila envelopes and said, “You a messenger?”

  I didn’t want to hang around and pester him for so long that I became memorable. Besides, I’d seen
all I was going to see out here, and there was no way I was going to get inside. Not today. I said, “No, I’m looking for the personnel office. I’m supposed to come to work here.”

  “That’s on the eighth floor,” the guard said, and jabbed a thumb toward the ceiling.

  “Oh,” I said. “Then I’m in the wrong place.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said, and went back over to the elevators and pushed the button. While waiting, I looked around some more. You sure had to admire their security. And yet, this was the likeliest prospect.

  Joe

  I didn’t much like visiting Paul in the hospital. I don’t like hospitals anyway, but I particularly don’t like them when there’s a brother officer in there. I don’t like that reminder.

  Did you ever watch pro football on television, and notice what happens when one of the players gets hurt? He’s laying there on the ground, moving his knees a little, and maybe one or two other players go over to see what the story is, but all the rest kind of walk off by themselves and pretend they have a problem with their shoes. I know exactly how they feel, I do. It isn’t they’re heartless or anything, it’s just they don’t like to be reminded how easy it could turn out to be one of them.

  Same with me. I had plenty of chances to visit Paul, but until I was feeling really good and guilty I wouldn’t go at all. Then I’d finally go and there’d be nothing to say, and we’d sit around and watch soap operas together for half an hour. It’s a funny thing, we always had plenty to talk about in the car, but not in the hospital. The hospital is death on conversation.