Cops and Robbers

by Donald E. Westlake

  So I was there again, going back and forth at the foot of the bed. Paul was in a semiprivate room, but the other bed was empty right now. His windows gave a good clear view of a brick wall. If you stood right next to the window and looked down you could see green grass, but if Paul could have stood next to the window he wouldn’t have to be in the hospital, and from the bed what you saw was brick wall.

  The television set mounted on the wall was turned on, but the sound was off. Paul was sitting up in bed, newspapers and magazines all around him, and he kept sneaking glances at the TV.

  I was trying to think of something to say. I hate long uncomfortable silences.

  Paul said, “Listen, Joe, if you want to get back out there, it’s okay.”

  I stopped walking, and tried to look interested. “No, no, this is fine. What the hell, let Lou drive around a while.” Lou was Paul’s replacement in the car, a rookie.

  Paul said, “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s okay,” I said. I shrugged, not much caring. Then I tried to keep the conversation alive, saying, “He’s too gung ho, that’s all. I’ll be glad to get you back.”

  “Me too.” He grinned and said, “Can you believe it? I want to go to work.”

  “A couple of times,” I told him, “I would have traded places with you.”

  All of a sudden he started scratching his leg through the covers. “They keep telling me it won’t itch anymore,” he said.

  “I haven’t seen the doctor yet,” I said, “that knew his ass from his elbow.” I nodded at the other bed. “At least you don’t have the old geek around anymore. They send him home?”

  “Naw,” Paul said. “He died.” He was still scratching through the covers.

  “That must have been fun.”

  “Middle of the night.” He stopped scratching, and yawned. “He fell right out of bed,” he said. “Woke me up. Scared the crap out of me.”

  “Nice little vacation for you,” I said. And I thought, Nice little conversation we’re having.

  “Oh, it’s great,” he said.

  I didn’t have anything else I wanted to say about an old man falling out of bed and dropping dead, so the silence came back again for a while. I looked up at the television set, and it showed a guy in a rowboat floating around in a toilet tank. Television is fucking incredible sometimes.

  Paul shifted around in the bed, kicking his legs out this way and that, and a couple of his magazines slid off onto the floor. Like the old man, I thought. “Boy, my ass gets to hurting,” he said. He couldn’t seem to decide what position he wanted to be in. “Pins and needles, you know?”

  “I know,” I said. I picked the magazines up and tossed them on the bed again. “You ought to roll over on your other side,” I told him. “Lie on a nurse, that’ll help.”

  “Have you seen the beasts around here?”

  “I’ve seen them.”

  And so much for that conversation. I looked at the television set again, and the commercial was over—I hope that was a commercial—and what was up there on the screen? A hospital room, one guy in the bed and one guy walking around the room, talking to him. “We’re on television,” I said.

  Paul said, “The guy in the bed has amnesia.”

  I looked at him. “Where’d you get it?”

  He grinned at me. “I forgot.”

  No place to go from there either. Christ, conversation is impossible in the hospital, it really is.

  Paul glanced over at the empty bed. He had a thoughtful look on his face, and he said, “You know what used to get me about him?”

  “What, the old guy?”

  “He was always saying he hadn’t done anything yet.” Paul gave me a look, with this strange-looking kind of crooked smile on his face. He said, “He’d wasted his life, that’s what he thought, he hadn’t done anything with himself. He was older’n hell, but all he wanted was to get healthy and get out of here, so he could start doing something.”

  “Like what?”

  “He didn’t know, the poor old fart.” Paul shrugged. “Just something different, I guess.”

  I looked at the other bed. I could almost see the old man falling out of it onto the floor. I wondered what he’d done for a living.

  9

  They both had that Saturday off, so they took the families to Jones Beach, using both cars. The beach was hot and crowded, the way it always is, but the kids liked the chance to run around in the sand sometimes instead of just jumping in and out of the pool in the backyard, and the wives liked any excuse at all that would get them out of the house. And Tom and Joe liked to look at women in bathing suits.

  After a while, the two men were the only ones left on the blankets, spread out well back from the ocean. Mary and Grace were both down by the water’s edge with the smallest kids, and the other kids were all off running around somewhere, pestering people. Tom was sprawled on his stomach on the blanket with his chin propped on his forearms so he could look at the girls in bikinis, and Joe was sitting cross-legged on the next blanket over, reading the News.

  The planning of the robbery had settled into a sort of hobby they had, like two guys who operate a model railroad set together. Tom had been casing the brokerages and the general Wall Street area, checking out possible getaway routes, collecting maps of the financial district and writing out long descriptions of the security arrangements at various brokerages. Joe had been raiding the Police Department files downtown for information on burglar alarms and any special police surveillance arrangements there might be in that area. The two of them had maps and charts and memos and lists enough to choke a whale, a huge growing pile of paperwork they kept locked away in the liquor closet in the game room in Tom’s basement. They’d thought it over and decided that was the best place to keep it all because nobody ever went down into the game room, and Tom was the only one with a key to that closet. Mary had had a key at one time, but she’d lost it a couple of years ago and hadn’t ever replaced it because she didn’t have any need for it.

  In a way, the planning of the robbery had by now become an end in itself. When they’d first started talking about it there hadn’t been any reality in the plans at all, it had just been a funny and interesting thing to talk about on the way to work. But gradually it had become more real to both of them, and the way it had become real was that now they were really doing the preliminaries. They would go out and talk to the Mafia, they would study different brokerages, they would make lists and keep records, they would talk over various plans for the robbery; they would do everything except the robbery itself. Although they never acknowledged that to themselves, not consciously.

  The thought of the robbery was never very far from either of their minds these days; it gave them an interest in life. Including while they were at the beach.

  “Well, here’s one thing,” Joe said, tapping the newspaper. “We don’t do it the seventeenth.”

  Idle, unalert, still looking at girls in bikinis but automatically knowing what Joe was talking about, Tom said, “How come?”

  “Parade for the astronauts.”

  A vision came into Tom’s head; narrow streets, filled with crowds and bands. “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  Joe folded the paper and put it down. He was feeling vaguely irritable, as though some of the sand here had gotten into his brain. He said, “When the hell are we gonna do it?”

  Tom shrugged one shoulder, and kept on watching the bodies all around him. “When we figure out how,” he said. “Look at that one with the volley ball.”

  “Fuck the one with the volley ball,” Joe said. He didn’t feel like listening to a lot of horseshit.

  “Gladly,” Tom said.

  Joe said, “Listen, I’m serious.” He said it low-voiced and tense, and held his newspaper tight in his right fist.

  Tom rolled over onto his side and gave Joe a look. He was vaguely surprised, and still feeling lazy and at peace with the world. He said, “What happened to you all of a sudden?”

  What ha
d happened to Joe, he hadn’t been able to get out of his mind the vision of the old man in the hospital, dying and falling out of bed. It seemed to him when he thought about it that the old man had been making one last desperate leap toward life, and had fallen, and it had been all over for him; too late. Usually, Joe was more interested even than Tom in looking at girls in bikinis, but for the last few days it seemed that all he could think about was time going by.

  But he couldn’t very well talk about all of that, Tom would think he was crazy. Or turning into a weak sister. He shrugged, irritable and angry and frustrated, and said, “Nothing happened to me. We just keep fucking around on the fringes, that’s all.”

  Tom frowned. Joe was talking very tough and mean, and Tom wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted to take offense or not. Holding that issue in abeyance for a second, he said, “So what do you want to do?”

  “The robbery,” Joe said. “Or at least get moving on it.” He slapped the newspaper down onto the blanket with a disgusted gesture.

  “Fine,” Tom said. He was beginning to get a little irritated himself. “Like how?” he said.

  “You’ve been checking out the brokerages. What’s the story?”

  Tom sat up, grudgingly giving up his leisure. “The story,” he said, “is that they’re very tough.”

  “Tell me.” Joe wanted action, he wanted movement, he wanted the sense that something was happening now.

  “Well,” Tom said, “half of them are no good to begin with.”

  “Why not?”

  “In a brokerage,” Tom told him, “there’s two places where they have guards. I mean, in addition to the main entrance. And the two places are the cage and the vault.”

  “The cage?”

  “That’s what they call the place where they do the paperwork, where they move the stocks and bonds in and out of the company. And the vault is where they store them.”

  “So we want the vault,” Joe said. Simplicity, that was what he wanted, simple questions and simple answers.

  “That’s right,” Tom said. “We want the vault. But with half of them, the vault is down in the basement and the cage is up on some other floor, and they’ve got closed-circuit TV between them.”

  Joe made a face. “Ow,” he said.

  “You see the problem,” Tom said. “While we’re taking care of the guards down in the basement, there’s some clown up on the seventh floor watching us do it. And taking pictures of it.”

  “Taking pictures?”

  “They put it all on video tape.” Tom made a sour smile, and said, “Which they can run for the jury at our trial.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. “So the ones with the cage and the vault on different floors, they’re out.”

  “With the rest of them,” Tom said, “where the cage and the vault are both on the same floor, you’ve still got guards in both places, plus guards at the entrance, and you’ve still got closed-circuit TV.”

  Joe frowned. None of this was making him feel any better. He had, “They’ve all got that?”

  Tom nodded. “Any outfit big enough to have what we want,” he said, “has TV. The little companies don’t, but we’re not going to find ten million dollars in bearer bonds lying around at one of the little companies.”

  “Then we can’t do it at all,” Joe said. “It just can’t be done.” There was an angry sense of relief in that, in giving it up for good and for all, and knowing there wasn’t any hope.

  A voice behind them suddenly said, “Are you robbers?”

  They both turned around, and there was a little kid standing there behind them, a little boy of maybe five or six. He had a shovel in his hand, and he was covered with sand, and he was looking at them with bright curious eyes like a parrot. Tom just sat there staring at him, but Joe quickly said, “No, we’re the cops. You’re the robber.”

  “Okay,” the kid said. He was agreeable.

  “You better take off now,” Joe said, “before you get arrested.”

  “Okay,” the kid said again, and turned around, and toddled off through the sand.

  They both looked after him. Their hearts were pounding like sixty, it was amazing. “Christ,” Joe said.

  Tom said, “We better do our talking in the car from now on.”

  “What talking?” Joe was bitter, and he let it show. “You already described the situation, and it can’t be done.”

  “Maybe it can,” Tom said. “As long as the cage and the vault are both on the same floor, there’s a chance we can pull it off.”

  Joe studied his face. “You think so?”

  “People commit robberies all the time. We should be able to.”

  “Maybe,” Joe said.

  “What bothers me most,” Tom said, “is how we’re going to stash the bonds after we get them. Remember, we kept saying we didn’t want anything we were going to have to hold onto.”

  Joe shrugged. “We can only sell Vigano what he wants to buy,” he said. “Besides, we can call him right away afterward, we won’t have to keep the bonds very long at all.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “The time that bothers me,” Joe said, looking away toward the water, “is the two years.”

  Tom gave him a warning look. “We agreed, Joe.”

  “Yeah, I know we did. But look what happened to Paul. Shot in the leg. Another eight inches, he’d be shot in the balls. A little higher, he’s shot in the heart, he’s dead.”

  Tom shrugged that off, saying, “Paul’s going to be okay, you said so yourself.”

  “That isn’t the question,” Joe said. “I don’t want a million dollars buried in the ground, with me buried right next to it.”

  “We can’t do it and run, we talked that over—”

  Joe interrupted, saying, “Yeah yeah yeah, I know we did. I still think that’s a good idea. But not for two years, that’s too long.”

  Tom said, “What, then?”

  “One year.”

  “What, cut it in half?”

  “A year is a long time, Tom,” Joe said. “You want to live like this any longer than you absolutely have to?”

  Tom frowned, looking away. He was staring at a girl in a bikini, without seeing her.

  “The idea is to get out of this,” Joe said. “Remember?” Tempted against all his resolves, Tom shook his head and said, “Ahhh, Christ.”

  “One year,” Joe said.

  Tom held out a few seconds longer, but finally he shrugged and said, “All right. One year.”

  “Good,” Joe said. He grinned, a lot happier than before, and grudgingly Tom grinned back.

  Tom

  That was one of the days when our schedules didn’t match. Joe was in the city working, and I had the day off. Naturally it was raining, so I moped around the house and read a paperback and watched some of the game shows on television. Mary took off in the car for the Grand Union in the middle of the day, so when the show I was watching came to an end I wandered back into the bedroom to take a look at my old uniform. If we ever really did do this robbery, that’s what I’d be wearing for my disguise.

  I hadn’t worn the uniform in three or four years, but it was still there, hanging in the bedroom closet, pushed way down to one end, behind the raincoat liner for the raincoat I left in a restaurant two years ago. I laid it out on the bed and looked it over for a minute; no holes, no buttons missing, everything fine. I changed into it, and studied myself in the mirror on the back of the closet door.

  Yeah, that was me, I remembered that guy. The years I’d worn this blue suit, hot weather and cold, rain and sun. For some damn reason I suddenly found myself feeling gloomy, really sad about something. As though I’d lost something somewhere along the line, and even though I didn’t know what it was I felt its absence. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that; it was a sense of loss I felt.

  Well, crap, I didn’t come in here to get the rainy-day blues. I came in here to check out my disguise for the big robbery. And it looked fine, it was in perfect shap
e, no problem.

  I was still standing there, trying to forget that I was feeling sad about something I couldn’t remember, when all of a sudden Mary came walking in, and looked at me with her mouth hanging open.

  I’d thought she’d be at the store at least another hour. I turned and gave her a sheepish grin, and tried to figure out what the hell I was going to say to her. But I couldn’t think of a thing, not a single word came into my mind to explain what I was doing here in the bedroom in my old uniform.

  After her first surprise, she helped me out of my paralysis by making a joke out of it, coming farther into the bedroom and saying, “What’s this? You’ve been demoted?”

  “Uh,” I said, and then finally my brain and my tongue started working again. “I just wanted to see how I looked in it,” I said, and turned to study myself in the mirror again. “See if it still fit.”

  “It doesn’t,” she said.

  “Sure it does.” I turned sideways and gave myself a good view of my profile. “Well, it’s maybe a little tight,” I admitted. “Not much.”

  Past me in the mirror I could see her smiling at me and shaking her head. She’d kept her own figure almost exactly the same, in spite of having kids and being a housewife for years, so she was in a good position to be thinner-than-thou if she wanted. And even though it was ridiculous, I felt defensive on the subject. I turned and said, “Listen, I could still wear it. If I had to, I could. It wouldn’t look that bad.”

  “No, you’re right,” she said. “It isn’t terrible.” I couldn’t tell if she meant it or if she was humoring me.

  Being agreed with was just as bad as having an argument. I patted my stomach, looking at it in the mirror, and said, “I’ve been drinking too much beer, that’s the trouble.”

  She made an I-wouldn’t-argue-with-you face, and walked over to the dresser. I watched her in the mirror. She picked up her watch from the dresser top and headed for the door, winding it. In the doorway, she looked back at me and said, “Lunch in fifteen minutes.”

  I said, “I’ll have iced tea today.”