Bank Shot

20

Dortmunder, Kelp and Murch were the only gang members present at the actual theft of the bank. Kelp, earlier that evening, had picked up a tractor-trailer cab without its trailer near the piers in the West Village section of Manhattan and had met Dortmunder and Murch with it on Queens Boulevard in Long Island City, just across the 59th Street bridge from Manhattan, shortly after midnight. Murch had done the driving after that, with Kelp sitting in the middle and Dortmunder on the right, resting his elbow on the open windowsill. Below his elbow read a company name: Elmore Trucking. The cab had North Dakota plates. Stuffed inside with them, amid their feet as they headed east out Long Island, were a twenty-five-foot coil of black rubber garden hose, several lengths of thick heavy chain and a carpenter’s tool kit.

They arrived at the bank at one-fifteen and had to move a car parked in the way. They pushed it down in front of a fire hydrant and took its place and waited silently with the lights and engine off until they saw the patrol car — car nine — drive by just after one-thirty. Very quietly then they backed the cab up to the trailer and left its engine idling but lights off while they hooked the two parts together.

Which was a little complicated. The tractor cab was of the sort that fits under the front of a cargo-carrying trailer equipped only with rear wheels; that is, the cab’s rear wheels normally served as the front wheels of any trailer it towed, with the front section of the trailer resting on the low flat rear section of the cab. But this particular trailer, the bank, being a mobile home instead of a cargo transporter, wasn’t set up for that kind of rig, having instead a kind of modified V hitch in front, which was supposed to lock onto a ball at the rear of the towing vehicle. So Dortmunder and Kelp and Murch had to attach the two together with the loops of chain, shushing each other at every rattle and clank, squeezing links shut with the pliers from the tool kit in order to complete the loops and attach trailer to cab with four heavy circles of chain.

One end of the garden hose was then stuck into the cab’s tailpipe, and while Kelp wrapped lots of black tape around the hose and that end of the pipe Dortmunder stood on the rear of the cab and shoved the other end through an air vent high in the trailer wall, so the cab exhaust would now go into the bank. More tape was used to fasten that end of the hose in place, and to keep the length of it flat against the front of the trailer all the way down, and to attach the extra coils of hose to the rear superstructure of the cab.

All of which had taken only three or four minutes. Murch and Kelp got back into the cab, Kelp carrying the tool kit, and Dortmunder made one last check before trotting around and swinging up into the cab on the right side. “Set,” he said.

“I’m not gonna start slow,” Murch said. “We’re gonna have to jerk it loose and then go like hell. So hold on.”

“Any time,” Kelp said.

“Now,” Murch said, threw it in first, and jumped on the accelerator with both feet.

The cab lunged forward like a dog that had backed into a hot stove. There was a grinding noise that none of them heard over the engine roar, and the bank snapped its moorings — these being the water pipe in and the sewage pipe out of the bathroom. As water spurted up from the broken city water pipe like Old Faithful geyser, the bank slid away leftward over its concrete wall, like a name card being slipped out of a slot in a door. Murch, not wanting to turn before the bank’s rear wheels had cleared the concrete blocks, tore straight ahead across the side street, began to spin the steering wheel only as his front tires thumped up over the curb on the other side, and as Kelp and Dortmunder both yelled and waved their arms he angled the cab leftward so it just missed the bakery windows on the corner, drove catty-corner across the sidewalk at the intersection, thumped down off the curb again on the other side, shot out across the main street at a long angle, straightened out at last on the wrong side of the street, and took off.

Behind them, the left rear wheel of the bank had just nicked the edge of the concrete block wall, but aside from an extra jounce it caused no obvious damage, though it did loosen a couple of the screws holding the rear wheels to the bottom of the trailer. The bank followed the cab, thumping and bumping up and down over curbs, missing the bakery windows by even less than the cab because it was so much wider, and shuddered and rocked from side to side as it swept on away down the street in the cab’s wake. An automatic cutoff valve had already shut down the water from the main line into this spur, and the geyser had stopped.

Murch had planned his route with the greatest care. He knew which secondary streets were wide enough to allow the bank passage, which major streets could be traveled for brief periods without the likelihood of running into traffic. He made left turns and right turns with a minimum use of brakes or lower gears, and behind him the bank rocked and reeled and occasionally took corners on two wheels but never did go over. The greatest weight in the thing was the safe, which was at the back, which gave it more stability the faster Murch drove.

Kelp and Dortmunder and the tool kit, meanwhile, were all over each other. Dortmunder surfaced at last to shout, “Are they on our tail?”

Murch gave a quick look to the outside mirror. “Nobody back there at all,” he said, and took a left turn so hard it popped the glove-compartment door open and a package of No-Doz dropped into Kelp’s lap. Kelp picked it up in trembling fingers and said, “Never did I need you less.”

“Then slow down!” Dortmunder yelled.

“Nothing to worry about,” Murch said. His headlights showed a pair of cars parked up ahead, opposite each other, both too far out from the curb, leaving a space that was under the circumstances very small. “Everything under control,” Murch said, jiggled the wheel as he went through, and simply amputated the outside mirror from the car on the right.

“Uh,” said Kelp. He dropped the No-Doz on the floor and shut the glove compartment.

Dortmunder looked past Kelp at Murch’s profile, saw how absorbed it was, and understood there was no way right now to attract Murch’s attention without actually setting up a roadblock ahead of him. And that might not do it, either. “I trust you,” Dortmunder said, since he had no choice, and sat back in the corner to brace himself and to watch the night thunder at their windshield.

They drove for twenty minutes, mostly heading north, sometimes heading east. Generally speaking, the south shore of Long Island, which faces the Atlantic Ocean, is less prestigious than the north shore, which faces Long Island Sound, a mostly enclosed body of water protected by the island on one side and Connecticut on the other. In taking the bank from the south-shore community it had serviced so well, and in heading north with it, Murch and Dortmunder and Kelp were moving by gradual stages from smaller older houses on narrower plots of land to larger newer houses on broader plots of land. Similarly, westward, toward New York City, the houses were poorer and closer together, but eastward they were richer and farther apart. In going both east and north, Murch was giving this branch of the C&I Trust a literal kind of upward mobility.

They were also moving into an area where there was still undeveloped land between the towns, rather than the undifferentiated sweep of suburb that characterized the section where they’d started. After twenty minutes, they had crossed a county line and were on a deserted bit of cracked and bumpy two-lane road, with a farmer’s field on the right and a stand of trees on the left. “This is close enough,” Murch said, and began tapping the brake. “God damn it,” he said.

Dortmunder sat up. “What’s the matter? Brakes no good?”

“Brakes are fine,” Murch said through clenched teeth, and tapped them some more. “Goddam bank wants to jackknife,” he said.

Dortmunder and Kelp twisted around to look through the small rear window at the bank. Every time Murch touched the brakes, the trailer began to slue around, the rear of it moving leftward like a car in a skid on ice. Kelp said, “It looks like it wants to pass us.”

“It does,” Murch said. He kept tapping, and very gradually they slowed, and when they got below twenty miles an hour Murch could apply the brakes more normally and bring them to a stop. “Son of a bitch,” he said. His hands were still clawed around the wheel, and sweat was running down his cheeks from his forehead.

Kelp said, “Were we really in trouble, Stan?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Murch said, breathing slowly but heavily. “I just kept wishing Christopher was still a saint.”

“Let’s go take a look at things,” Dortmunder said. What he meant was that he wanted to go stand on the ground for a minute.

So did the others. All three got out and wasted several seconds just stomping their feet on the cracked pavement. Then Dortmunder took a revolver from his jacket pocket and said, “Let’s see how it worked out.”

“Right,” Kelp said, and from his own pocket took a key ring containing a dozen keys. Herman had assured him that one of those keys would definitely open the bank door. “At least one,” he’d said. “Maybe even more than one.” But Kelp had said, “One will do.”

So it did. It was the fifth key he tried, while Murch stood back a few feet with a flashlight, and then the door swung outward. Kelp stayed behind it, because they weren’t sure about the guards inside, whether the carbon-monoxide truck exhaust had knocked them out or not. They had made careful calculations on how much of the cubic-foot capacity the gas would fill after x minutes and x + y minutes, and were certain they were well within safety limits. So Dortmunder called, “Come out with your hands up.”

Kelp said, “The robbers aren’t supposed to say that to the cops. The cops are supposed to say it to the robbers.”

Dortmunder ignored him. “Come out,” he called again. “Don’t make us drill you.”

There was no response.

“Flashlight,” Dortmunder said quietly, like a doctor asking for a scalpel, and Murch handed it to him. Dortmunder moved cautiously forward, pressed himself against the wall of the trailer, and slowly looked around the edge of the door frame. Both his hands were in front of himself, pointing the gun and the flashlight at the same spot.

There was no one in sight. Furniture lay scattered all over the place, and the floor was littered with credit-card applications, small change and playing cards. Dortmunder waggled the flashlight around, continued to see no one, and said, “That’s funny.”

Kelp said, “What’s funny?”

“There’s nobody there.”

“You mean we stole an empty bank?”

“The question is,” Dortmunder said, “did we steal an empty safe.”

“Oh oh,” Kelp said.

“I should have known,” Dortmunder said, “the first second I saw you. And if not you, when I saw your nephew.”

“Let’s at least look it over,” Kelp said.

“Sure. Give me a boost.”

All three of them climbed up into the bank and began to look around, and it was Murch who found the guards. “Here they are,” he said. “Behind the counter.”

And there they were, all seven of them, stuffed away on the floor behind the counter, jammed in amid filing cabinets and desks, sound asleep. Murch said, “I heard that one snoring, that’s how I knew.”

“Don’t they look peaceful,” Kelp said, looking over the counter at them. “It makes me woozy myself just to look at them.”

Dortmunder too had been feeling a certain heaviness, thinking it was the physical and emotional letdown after a successful job, but all at once he roused himself and cried, “Murch!”

Murch was half draped over the counter; it was hard to tell if he was looking at the guards or joining them. He straightened, startled by Dortmunder’s shout, and said, “What? What?”

“Is the motor still on?”

“My God, so it is,” Murch said. He reeled toward the door. “I’ll go turn it off.”

“No no,” Dortmunder said. “Just get that damn hose out of the ventilator.” He gestured with the flashlight toward the front of the trailer, where the hose had been pumping truck exhaust into the trailer for the last twenty minutes. There was a strong smell of garage inside the bank, but it hadn’t been enough to warn them right away not to fall into their own trap. The guards had been put to sleep by carbon monoxide, and their captors had almost just done the same thing to themselves.

Murch staggered out into the fresh air, and Dortmunder said to Kelp, who was yawning like a whale, “Come on, let’s get these birds out of here.”

“Right, right, right.” Knuckling his eyes, Kelp followed Dortmunder around the counter, and they spent the next few minutes carrying guards outside and depositing them in the grass by the side of the road. When they were finished with that, they hooked the door open, propped the trailer windows open, and got back into the cab, where they found Murch asleep.

“Oh, come on,” Dortmunder said, and joggled Murch’s shoulder hard enough to bump his head into the door.

“Ow,” Murch said and looked around, blinking. “What now?” he said, obviously trying to remember what situation he was in.

“Onward,” Kelp said.

“Right,” Dortmunder said and slammed the cab door.