The main result of the activity in the park was a notice on the bulletin boards in all the Manhattan precinct houses, a couple days later, urging caution if anybody ever had to travel the wrong way on a one-way street. The Department surely would have liked to find out who had done that stuntman number on Sixth Avenue, but there was no way they were going to do it, and they probably didn’t even try.
They’d been sitting there in Joe’s Plymouth in silence for a pretty long while, inching along in stop-and-go traffic, when Tom suddenly sat up and said, “Hey, look at this.”
Joe glanced at him. “What?”
Tom was staring at the newspaper. “Vigano’s dead,” he said.
Joe glanced at him. “What?”
Tom was staring at the newspaper. “Vigano’s dead,” he said.
“No shit.” Joe faced front again, and moved the Plymouth forward a little bit. “Read it to me.”
“Uhh. Crime kingpin Anthony Vigano, long reputed to be an important member of the Joseph Scaracci Mafia family in New Jersey, was shot to death at ten forty-five yesterday evening as he emerged from Jimmy’s Home Italian Restaurant in Bayonne. The killing, which Bayonne police say bears all the earmarks of a gang-type slaying was done by an unidentified man who stepped from an automobile parked in front of the restaurant, shot Vigano twice in the head, and left in the automobile. Police are also seeking the two men who had been with Vigano in the restaurant and who left with him but who had disappeared before police reached the scene. Vigano, who was still alive when the first police officers responded to a call from the restaurant owner, Salvatore “Jimmy” Iacocca, died in the ambulance en route to Bayonne Memorial Hospital. Vigano, fifty-seven, first attracted the attention of the police in nineteen—uhh, the rest is all biography.”
“Is there a picture?”
“Just of the restaurant. A white X where he got it.”
Joe nodded. A small smile of satisfaction was on his face. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
“He lost the mob’s two million dollars,” Tom said, “and they didn’t like it.”
“Besides that.”
“What else?”
“They can’t find us,” Joe said. “They’ve tried, and they can’t do it, and they gave up.”
“The mob doesn’t give up,” Tom said.
“Bullshit. Everybody gives up, if there’s nothing left to do. If they thought they could still find us and get the money back, they wouldn’t kill Vigano. They’d let him keep looking.” Joe gave Tom a big smile and said, “We’re free and clear, buddy, that’s what that thing in the paper means.”
Tom frowned at the newspaper report, thinking it over, and gradually he too began to smile. “I guess so,” he said. “I guess we are.”
“Fucking A well told,” said Joe.
They rode along in silence again for a while, both of them thinking about the future. A little later, Joe glanced toward Tom, and beyond him he saw the next car over, stopped like they were, and it was a gray Jaguar sedan, one of the big ones. The windows were rolled up, and the middle-aged guy inside there was neat and cool in his suit and tie. As Joe looked at him, the guy in the Jaguar turned his own head, met Joe’s eye, and gave him that quick meaningless smile that people invariably flash when they cross glances with somebody in another car. Then he faced front again.
Joe smiled back at him, but with something savage in it. “That’s right, you bastard, smile,” he said to the Jaguar driver’s profile. “Six months from now you’re going to be six months closer to your coronary, and I’m going to be in Saskatchewan.”
Tom looked at Joe while he was talking, puzzled; then turned and saw the Jaguar driver and understood. The surf on a beach in Trinidad crashed lazily in his mind, and he smiled.
It was going to be a hot day. They sat there in the car, their elbows out the open windows, reaching for a little breeze. Endless stalled traffic stretched away into the hazy distance, and far away they could just make out the scum-covered smoky island of Manhattan, squatting there like that portion of Hell zoned industrial.
The car in front of them moved a little.
About the Author
Donald E. Westlake (1933–2008) was one of the most prolific and talented authors of American crime fiction. He began his career in the late 1950s, churning out novels for pulp houses—often writing as many as four novels a year under various pseudonyms—but soon began publishing under his own name. His most well-known characters were John Dortmunder, an unlucky thief, and a ruthless criminal named Parker. His writing earned him three Edgars and a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
Westlake’s cinematic prose and brisk dialogue made his novels attractive to Hollywood, and several motion pictures were made from his books, with stars such as Lee Marvin and Mel Gibson. Westlake wrote several screenplays himself, receiving an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of The Grifters, Jim Thompson’s noir classic.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1972 by Donald E. Westlake
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5160-6
This 2018 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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nald E. Westlake, Cops and Robbers
Cops and Robbers Page 22
