Butcher's Moon

Forty-six

Two stretches inside, before he’d smartened up, had bred in Ben Pelzer a taste for orderliness, neatness in everything he did. The third-floor walk-up apartment on East Tenth Street where he was known as Barry Pearlman was always as neat as a pin, and so was his house out in Northglen, where he lived under his own name with his wife and his three-year-old twin daughters, Joanne and Joette.

Pelzer’s life was as neatly organized as his homes, and the beginning of his week was Friday, when he would get up in the house in Northglen, pack his bag, and take a plane; sometimes to Baltimore, or Savannah, or New Orleans, or more rarely New York. He never knew ahead of time where it would be, and he didn’t concern himself. He would simply stop at Frank Schroder’s real estate office, pick up the tickets and his instructions and the bag with the money in it, and be on his way.

In that port city, whichever one it turned out to be, he would usually have a phone number to call, though every once in a while there would be an actual physical meet at the airport; New York was mostly done that way. He would turn over the money, receive his stock, and take the next plane back to Tyler. Then he would drive to the house on East Tenth Street, go up to his apartment, and wait for the first knock on the door.

It was never long in coming. Ben Pelzer was the Man’s Man, the wholesaler for all the street dealers in Tyler. Frank Schroder had other wholesalers for other territories, but the nickel-dime action on the street, for the pillbox or paper twist you bought downtown in a doorway or on a park bench, was where Ben Pelzer’s merchandise changed hands.

And the weekend was the rush season. On Friday night and Saturday morning the retailers would come by Barry Pearlman’s place to stock up, and by Saturday night they’d be coming back again to replenish. They couldn’t buy it all at once because this was strictly a cash business, and none of the retailers ever had enough cash on a Friday to buy a full weekend’s supply.

On an average week, Pelzer’s goods brought in about one hundred thousand dollars on the street. Twenty percent of that stayed with the retailers, the rest coming to the Pearlman apartment. Pelzer’s cut was two percent of the weekly cash in hand, averaging about sixteen hundred dollars, which was a very healthy weekly wage indeed. The remaining seventy-five or eighty thousand, Frank Schroder’s share from which additional stock was purchased and the law was paid off and the main partnership received their dividends, was amassed all weekend in a suitcase under Pelzer’s bed.

That was a lot of cash money to have in one place, particularly when people like Ben Pelzer’s customers knew about it, but there’d never been any attempt to steal it. In the first place, everyone who knew about the money also knew whose it was. And in the second place, Pelzer and the cash were never alone in the apartment; two of Frank Schroder’s men always sat in, arriving on Friday no more than half an hour after Ben himself took occupancy, and staying with him and the money all through the weekend. The two regular men, Jerry Trask and Frank Slade, were big and tough-looking, a strong contrast with slender, neat Ben Pelzer, and over the last few years the three of them had filled in the idle hours on the long weekends with an endless game of Monopoly. They loaned one another money, forgave one another rents, invented easy new rules, and did everything possible to keep the game going. They were all paper millionaires by now, using the cash from three Monopoly sets for their liquid assets, with hotels on every property, and wholesale swaps of entire complexes. None of them ever got tired of the game, which was permanently set up on a card table in the middle of the apartment living room.

Pelzer’s work-week—and his time as Barry Pearlman—ended late Monday night. Following the weekend trade, there was always one last spurt of buying on Monday, as the retailers stocked up for their daily business, the serious customers as opposed to the weekend joy-poppers. By midnight on Monday that final rush of business would be completed, but Pelzer always kept the shop open until one a.m., just to be on the safe side. Finally, at one o’clock on the dot, he would leave the Monopoly game and lock himself in the bedroom while Trask and Slade washed the dishes and generally tidied up. If anybody rang the doorbell after one o’clock, they were out of luck—nobody would answer.

In the bedroom, Pelzer would put the suitcase on the bed, take the money out, and slowly count it. This week the total was eighty-two thousand, nine hundred twelve dollars. His two percent of that would be sixteen hundred fifty-eight dollars and twenty-four cents, but he was supposed to even that off down to the nearest hundred, so this week he was exactly making his average: sixteen hundred dollars. He took that money in the cleanest bills, mostly in twenties and fifties, and stuffed it away in a money belt he took from the closet, then put on under his shirt. He took another five hundred dollars, in tens and twenties, set it to one side on the bed, and closed the suitcase. Then he unlocked the bedroom door and carried the suitcase and the extra five hundred dollars out to the living room.

The five hundred was his associates’ pay: two-fifty apiece. He had never discussed his own salary with them, so they were unaware of the disparity between his sixteen hundred and their two and a half; being unaware of it, they were not made troubled by it.

From here on, the routine was that they would leave the apartment and drive in Pelzer’s car over to the parking lot behind Frank Schroder’s real estate office, where another car would be waiting for them. Trask and Slade and the suitcase would transfer to the other car, and Pelzer would go home, where his wife would be waiting up for him with a midnight snack. They’d eat together, do the dishes, and go to bed, Pelzer then remaining at home, puttering around his garden and his workbench, until Friday morning and the beginning of another week.

It was an easy schedule, clear-cut and relaxed. It gave him four nights and three full days with his family every week, it offered him interesting travel and introduced him to a wide variety of human types, it paid him handsomely, and there had never been a bit of trouble.

Until tonight.

* * *

Carlow said, “Here they come.”

The routine was, they had Pelzer’s Oldsmobile Cutlass spotted, nearly a block from the apartment, and they were parked behind it—in a different car now, Carlow having traded the Mercury in on an American Motors Ambassador. The air-conditioner worked better on this car, but there still wasn’t room for all three in front, not with one of them Dan Wycza. He sat in back, leaning forward with his forearms on the seat back, and he and Devers and Carlow watched the three men come out of the small tenement-style apartment house a block away and turn in this direction. The smaller man in the middle carried an apparently heavy suitcase, while the bigger men flanking him kept looking left and right as they walked.

“I look at them,” Wycza said, “I look at those people, and I know they aren’t sensible.”

Devers said, “You think they’ll give us a hard time?”

“I think we ought to start right off by shooting them in the head.”

Devers looked troubled. “I don’t know,” he said.

“I do,” Carlow said. Nodding his head toward Wycza, he told Devers, “He’s right. The two big ones are hired to mother the money. They lose the money, they’re dead anyway.”

“I’m a pretty good shot,” Devers said. “Let me just plink one, and then we’ll give them a chance to work it out for themselves.”

Carlow twisted around to look at Wycza, get his opinion. These three men didn’t know one another, had never worked together, had only met today, Wycza and Devers on the plane and Carlow in Parker’s apartment. It was hard for them to know how to deal with one another, in what areas each was reliable, in what areas they would be stepping on sore corns. Carlow and Wycza, looking at one another in the faint illumination of a nearby streetlight, tried silently to come to an opinion about Devers, and at the same time to gauge one another. Wycza finally dropped his eyes and nodded slightly, with a small shrug, as if to say, “What the hell, let him have his try. We can cover if we have to.” Carlow pursed his lips and faced front before answering, moves that clearly said to Wycza, “It’s your decision, then, I’m only the driver, and if it bounces back on us later. I’m not the one that did it.” Aloud, Carlow said to Devers, “If you think so.”

“It’s worth a try,” Devers said. Twisting around, he said to Wycza, “Judge it for yourself. If they’re still gonna cause trouble, you jump right in.” So that Devers, too, was being cautious with a new partnership, and not taking all the responsibility on his own shoulders.

Wycza nodded. Devers would shoot one of them in the shoulder, and then Wycza would shoot all three of them in the head. “Fine,” he said.

* * *

The back room never occurred to stockbroker Andrew Leffler when the robbers broke into his house in the middle of the night. He woke up when the ceiling light flashed on, and sat up astonished to see two men in black clothing, with black hoods over their faces, standing in the bedroom doorway, pointing pistols at him. In those first seconds of wakefulness, he thought of them as merely burglars, come to steal anything of value he might have in the house.

Automatically his right hand fumbled to the night table for his glasses. In the other bed Maureen had also awakened, and he heard the sharp intake of breath that said she, too, had seen the men and the guns. But she didn’t scream, and that reminder of Maureen’s stability and presence of mind helped diminish his own rising panic, brought on by the fumbling his startled fingers were doing with his glasses. Not being able to see properly only made things worse.

“Take it easy.” one of the men said, “and nobody gets hurt.”

Finally getting his glasses on, fitting each wing over his ears, he changed his opinion all at once, and decided these two were kidnappers. Let it be me they want, he thought, and not Maureen.

With his glasses on, he could see them more clearly. They were both thin men, seeming even narrower because of the black clothing. They held their guns steadily, and they had separated, moving so they now flanked the doorway. But also. Leffler noticed, so that neither was in a direct line with the windows.

One of them said, “Get up. Both of you. You can put on robes and slippers, that’s all. You won’t need anything else, it’s nice and warm out.”

Leffler thought. Both of us? “Just take me,” he said. “I’m all you want.”

“Don’t waste time,” the man said. His voice was strangely altered and dehumanized by the black hood. “If we have to carry you out,” he said, “we’ll make you regret it.”

Her voice shaky but her manner amazingly firm, Maureen said, “We’d better do what they say. Art.” And she was the first one to throw back the covers and get out of bed.

Leffler hurried to stay with her. It enraged him that these men were seeing his wife in her nightgown, even though the thick cotton showed nothing, and the gown was so voluminous that even the shape of her figure could only be guessed at. But his sense of personal intrusion, of property violation, began with Maureen in her nightgown. His own voice shaking more with outrage than with fear, he said abruptly, “You two will pay for this, you know.”

They didn’t bother to answer, and somehow that was worse than any possible cutting reply. Hearing his brave but ludicrous cliche echoing over and over in his mind, Leffler became embarrassed, and found himself hurrying into his robe and slippers, as though to get this humiliating experience over with as rapidly as possible.

When they were both ready, one of the gunmen said, “We’ll turn this light off now, but we’ll have a flashlight on you, and we can see pretty good in the dark, so don’t get cute. You just walk on through to the front of the house, open the door, and go on outside.”

Argue with them? Try to talk them out of their plan, whatever it was? Leffler hesitated, but he knew no argument would do any good, that he would only finish by embarrassing himself again, so he took his wife’s arm, and the two of them walked together down the hall toward the living room.

For the first few steps they had light-spill from the bedroom for illumination. Then that was turned off, and a small uncertain flashlight beam took its place; mostly it was aimed at their backs and threw great misshapen shadows of them out ahead, lighting little but the walls and furniture to either side. They were moving through their own home, along a route they could have walked blindfolded, but somehow this method was worse than being blindfolded; the constantly altering shadows, the flickering flat distorting light, changed the familiar terrain into unknown territory, and when they entered the living room Leffler struck his knee painfully against the corner of the piano stool.

Maureen’s hand grasped his forearm. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said, and though it hurt like fury, he managed to walk without a limp and to restrain himself from bending down to rub it. He would not display weakness in front of these men. Nor, under the circumstances, in front of Maureen. Patting her hand on his forearm, he whispered, “I’m sorry, dear.”

“Don’t be silly.” She squeezed his forearm, and he felt her smiling at him. “This is just an adventure, that’s all,” she said.

An adventure. I am fifty-seven, he told her in his mind, and you are fifty-four. We have no need for adventure.

But he didn’t say anything aloud. And her calm bravery carried him through the house and out the door, the two gunmen following silently in their wake.

And still he hadn’t thought of the back room.

* * *

Nick Rifkin lived upstairs over the bar. The bar was called Nick’s Place, and the whole building was in Nick Rifkin’s name, but he didn’t actually own any of it. As he explained to his friends sometimes, “I just kinda hold it for some guys.”

Nick was fifty-two years old now, a cheerful heavy-set guy who enjoyed playing bartender, living in a kind of semi-retirement. A reliable soldier with the local organization since he was in his teens, he had stood still for a vehicular homicide rap one time that had really belonged to a very important local guy; he’d served five years and three months, and when he’d gotten out his reward had been Nick’s Place. Downstairs the bar, upstairs the apartment and the unofficial loan operation. He got slices in both places, did very well, had some fun, and enjoyed life.

The loan operation was quiet and simple, and most of the borrowers were people from the straight world: businessmen in a bind, operators who needed some quick short-term cash, people whose square-world credit rating was maybe bad, or credit all used up, or something like that. They could borrow big amounts from Nick, amazingly big amounts, and it didn’t matter much to Nick or the people behind him if the debts were ever paid off. All you had to keep current with was the interest: two percent a month, every month. Miss a month and some guys come to visit and talk. Miss two months and the same guys come back, but not to talk.

With loans going out and interest coming in, there was always quite a bit of cash moving through Nick’s Place, but there wasn’t much to worry about. Nick subscribed to the Vigilant Protective Service, and the local police patrol car knew to keep a special eye on Nick’s Place; and anyway, who would be dumb enough to go after money that belonged to men like Ernie Dulare and Adolf Lozini?

Somebody. The bedroom light went on and Nick opened his eyes and two guys were standing there with hoods and guns. “Holy Jesus,” Nick said, and struggled to sit up. His wife Angela’s heavy arm was across his chest, pinning him to the bed, but he finally managed to shove the arm away and hunch up to a sitting position, blinking in the glare of the overhead light.

“Get up, Nick,” one of the hooded men said. “Get up and open the closet.”

“You’re out of your minds,” Nick said. Squinting, rubbing his eyes, trying to wake up enough to think, he said, “You got to be crazy. You know whose money that is?”

“Ours. Come on, Nick, we’re in a hurry.”

Angela groaned, bubbled, snored, and rolled heavily over onto her other side. One thing you could say for Angela: when she was asleep, she was asleep. Nick, with one tiny corner of his mind grateful that she wasn’t awake to yap and complain and carry on, slowly kicked his legs out from under the covers and over the side of the bed. “Christ on a crutch,” he complained. “What the hell time is it?”

“Move it, Nick.”

The floor was cold. The air-conditioner hummed in the window, making cold air move like invisible fog along the floor. Nick, sitting there in white T-shirt and blue boxer shorts, frowned at the one who was doing the talking, trying to see his face through the hood, trying to recognize the voice that was calling him by first name. He said, “Do I know you?” And then, in the process of asking the question, he suddenly came fully awake and realized he didn’t want to know the answer to it. If a guy has a hood and a gun, then neither one of you wants you to see his face.

Besides, Vigilant had to be on the way. These guys must have busted in here, so that meant Vigilant would be coming, and so would the cops. So all Nick had to do in the meantime was obey orders and be ready to drop to the floor.

Right. He got to his feet, saying, “Forget it. I don’t want to know if I know you.”

“That’s smart. Open the closet, Nick.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He wished he had his slippers. “And the safe,” he said.

“That’s right,” the gunman said.

These people knew a lot. They knew the money was in a safe, and they knew the safe was in the bedroom closet. Thinking about that, wondering how much else they knew and what was letting them be so calm about heisting mob money, Nick opened the closet door and went down on one creaking knee to slowly work the combination dial on the safe. While behind him the two guys stood waiting, guns in their hands. And Angela snored. And Nick wondered how long it would take the Vigilant people to get here.

When the buzzer and light went off in the Vigilant ready room, showing that a break-in had just occurred at Nick’s Place, Fred Ducasse switched it off and went back to the magazine article he was reading on the latest concepts of crowd control, in a trade journal called The Police Chief.

* * *

The problem was, there was only so much you could do with a pinochle deck. So long as Philly Webb had been here they could use the deck for its original purpose—pinochle—and play three-handed, Ducasse and Handy McKay and Webb. But Webb had left half an hour ago to drive for Wiss and Elkins, who were running the job with the stockbroker, Leffler, and that had been the end of it for cards. Ducasse and Handy had tried gin rummy, war, blackjack, ah hell and casino, and not a one of them was worth a damn with a pinochle deck.

So they’d finally hunted around for something to read instead, and in an inner office with a cluttered desk and paneled walls they’d found a shelf full of magazines, all of them specialized law-enforcement or security-agency trade journals. With nothing else to do, and time hanging heavy on their hands. Ducasse was reading about crowd control and Handy was reading about closed-circuit-television security systems.

About five minutes after the Nick’s Place buzzer had sounded, the phone all at once rang. Ducasse and Handy looked at one another, and Ducasse said, “Parker?”

“Maybe not. We better put our boy to work.”

The guard they’d kept out was tied and blindfolded in a chair by a desk with a phone on it. Handy went over there and rested his hand on the guard’s shoulder. “Time for you to go to work,” he said.

The guard licked his lips, but didn’t say anything. Handy could feel the muscles tensed in the man’s shoulder. Rapping the shoulder with his knuckles, gently but firmly, he said, “Remember what we talked about. You bring trouble here, you’ll get unhappy.”

“I remember.” The guard’s voice sounded rusty, like someone locked in solitary for a week. “Clear your throat.”

“I’m all right.”

The phone had rung three times by now; that was enough. “Here we go,” Handy said. He picked up the receiver and held it to the guard’s head, holding it at a slight angle so the guard could feel it against his skin yet Handy would be able to hear what the caller had to say.

There was a very slight hesitation, and then the guard said. “Vigilant.”

”Hello, is this Harry?” “Uh— No, it’s Gene.”

“Whadaya say. Gene? This is Fred Callochio, downtown. Anything shaking?”

“Not here. Not for a couple hours.”

“Nice and quiet, huh? That’s good.”

“How about you?”

“Nothing much. You know, Monday night.”

“Right. Same here.”

“So I’ll see you. Gene.”

“Right, Fred. So long.”

Handy, crouched close to the blindfolded guard so he could hear the conversation, waited for the click of the other man hanging up, then cradled the receiver and said, “What was that all about?”

“He’s a cop.” the guard said. “A desk sergeant downtown. Police Headquarters.”

Ducasse had come over. He said, “Is that normal, him calling you?”

It wasn’t; they could both see it in the guard’s hesitation. Finally he said, “Not every night. Sometimes he calls.”

Ducasse and Handy looked at one another. Handy said, “They know something’s happening. They’re looking around for where it is.”

Ducasse offered a pale grin. “Let’s hope they don’t find it.”

“They won’t,” Handy said. He squeezed the guard’s shoulder in a congratulatory way. “You did very nice,” he said. The guard had nothing to say.

Handy and Ducasse were walking back across the room toward their magazines when the alarm went off again. They both looked at it, startled, and then Ducasse checked the number on the light with the chart on the console in front of it. Then, switching the alarm off, he turned with a grin to Handy and said, “The stockbroker.”

* * *

When Andrew Leffler realized the gangsters were taking him to the brokerage, he knew there was no longer anything to worry about. They had brought along his key ring from the dresser, apparently intending simply to unlock the front door and walk in, not realizing that no one at all could enter the place at night, not even Leffler himself using a key, without setting off an alarm at the protective agency. Within minutes the police and the private protective agency’s guards would be swarming all over the place here, and surely these men were too professional to put up a dangerous kind of resistance. So it would all be over very, very soon.

When they had left their house, they had been put in the back seat of an automobile waiting in the driveway, with a third gunman at the wheel. Leffler and his wife had been ordered to get down on the floor of the car and huddle there during the entire trip; probably to keep them from seeing the faces of their captors, who took their hoods off for the drive through the city streets.

To the office. The men put their hoods back on, hustled the Lefflers in their robes and slippers across the dark empty sidewalk to the storefront office, and one of them put his key in the lock and opened the door. Leffler almost smiled when he saw that.

And still he hadn’t thought of the back room. This was the Tyler office of Rubidow, Kancher & Co., a New York brokerage firm, and he was the man in charge here; he took it for granted these men were after negotiable securities, bearer bonds and paper of that sort, and that he had been brought along to open the vault, with Maureen’s presence to assure his cooperation. But as to the back room, he almost never thought about that himself, and so few other people were even aware of its existence that there was never any conversation about it and no reason to anticipate its mention by anyone. In fact, probably because of his own slightly uneasy conscience toward it, Leffler generally made a conscious effort not to be overly aware of the back room.

It had begun, a dozen years ago, with his next-to-youngest boy, Jim. All of his five children were doing well now, grown and married and scattered across the United States, none of them a cause for worry or upset, but that hadn’t always been true. Jim had gone through a troubled adolescence, involving drugs and theft and other things the Lefflers had never wanted to know too much about, and if it hadn’t been for a man named Adolf Lozini, there wasn’t any question but that Jim Leffler would be in prison today, or at the very best an ex-con out on parole, his record smeared and his future prospects ruined.

An attorney named Jack Walters had been the one to suggest, during that bad time, that Adolf Lozini might be able to help somehow. Leffler hadn’t wanted to put himself in debt to a man who was a known criminal, a syndicate gangster, but what was the alternative? He couldn’t permit Jim to go to prison, not if there was any chance at all to save him.

There had been that chance. And all in all the price Lozini had demanded had not been a hard one to pay; in the course of his dealings with legitimate businessmen over the years, Leffler had more than once been asked to skirt much closer than that to the edge of the law. Because all Lozini had wanted was the back room.

Most people who own stock do not keep the certificates physically in their own possession. Their broker holds the paper for them, both for safety—he will either have a vault on his own premises or will lease vault space from a nearby bank—and for convenience when the inevitable moment comes to sell the stock again. Rubidow, Kancher & Co. being a large firm with a large and aggressive local office in Tyler, the brokerage did have its own vault, a double-roomed structure at the rear of the company’s offices on the first floor of the Nolan Building on London Avenue. The vault shared a wall with the bank next door but had its own security system, installed and maintained by Vigilant. The larger front room of the vault was used for storage of most stocks and bonds, as well as company records. The small inner section, called the back room, was reserved for seldom-used papers, for the more delicate private transactions, for U.S. Treasury bonds and other highly negotiable securities, and for Adolf Lozini.

Lozini kept money there. So did several of Lozini’s associates, men named Buenadella and Schroder and Dulare, Simms and Shevelly and Faran. And Jack Walters, too, the attorney who had originally brought Leffler and Lozini together.

For these men, the back room of Rubidow, Rancher’s vault had a great advantage over either a foreign bank account or an American safety deposit box. Unlike the foreign account, there was never any problem about transporting the funds to or from the back room, nor was there that slightly uneasy feeling of being, after all, at the mercy of European banks and European governments which could at any time alter their politics, change their laws, redefine their banking practices.

As to a local safety deposit box, that was reasonably secure so long as a man was alive; though even so, it was possible for a district attorney with sufficient cause to get a court order and have such a box opened. But if a man should die, that’s when the true flaw in the safety deposit box would reveal itself; as a portion of the dead man’s estate, the box was required by law to be opened in the physical presence of the executor of the estate and a representative of the bank and an official from the Internal Revenue Service.

In the back room at Rubidow, Kancher, such problems didn’t exist. Adolf Lozini and his partners could add or subtract funds at any time, and if one of them should die, the others would take care of things. For Leffler, there was no risk, nor even any inconvenience.

At least, there never had been. But tonight, once Leffler and his wife were inside the office with the two hooded gunmen— the third man had stayed outside with the car—one of the men immediately said, “Okay, Mr. Leffler, let’s go take a look at the back room.”

It wasn’t until later that Leffler thought how impossible it was for these people to know that familiar in-office term; at the moment he only felt the shocked realization that it must be the Treasury bonds they were after. And his immediate response was to try to save the bonds by lying: “I can’t do that. There’s a time lock on the door.”

“You get one try at being stupid,” the gunman said, “and that was it. There’s no time lock on the vault. You do your back-room business at night.”

Leffler stared. Lozini, he thought, but couldn’t believe it. A streetlight outside the plate-glass window filled the front office with a deceptively dark pink glow; in that light, Leffler tried to read the featureless hoods and the stances of the bodies. How much did these two know?

Everything. One of them said, “That’s right, Mr. Leffler, it’s the mob’s money we want.”

It’s caught up with me, Leffler thought, sagging at once into despair, and he moved along uncomplainingly when one of them took him by the elbow and steered him deeper into the office, away from the pink sheen of the streetlight and toward the darkness of the vault.

* * *

Nick Rifkin wished his wife wouldn’t snore like that. It was humiliating to him, in front of these bastards. He stood beside the bed, barefoot, feeling chilly, and watched one of them fill a leather bag with the money from the safe while the other one stood back by the dresser and kept an eye and a gun on Nick. And Angela, undisturbed by light, by conversation, by anything at all, just lay there on her back with her mouth open and snooooored. Christ, she was loud.

Finally he couldn’t take it any more. To the one by the dresser, he said, “You mind if I turn her over?”

“You should turn her off,” the guy said. “Go ahead.”

“Thanks,” Nick said, but he kept the sarcasm muted. Turning, he put one knee on the bed, leaned over, and poked Angela on the shoulder and the upper arm until she snorted and cleared her throat and complainingly rolled over onto her side. And became silent.

Nick straightened up again, to see the other one coming out of the closet, carrying the closed and full leather bag. Nick looked at the bag, sorry to see all that money go. No matter what happened, no matter who else got blamed for this, some of the shit was bound to fall on his own head and he knew it. “You guys are really making me a mess,” he said.

The one by the dresser said, “I’ll give you inside information. You won’t even be noticed in the rush.”

Nick gave him a sharp look. For the first time it occurred to him that maybe something more than a simple heist was taking place here. He’d heard rumbles the end of last week, some kind of trouble, a guy that was being looked for—could this be connected?

Uh uh; that was something else he didn’t want to know. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

The one with the bag said, “You’re such a smart individual, Nick. You’re really okay.”

”Don’t bother to give me a reference,” Nick told him. The other one said, “I’ll give you something better, Nick. A little suggestion.”

Nick watched him, waiting for it.

“Pretty soon,” the guy said, “you’ll want to make a phone call, tell somebody about this.”

“More than likely.”

“Call Dutch Buenadella,” the guy said.

Nick frowned. “Why?” “He’ll be interested, Nick.”

The one with the bag said, “Nick, you have to come for a walk with us now.”

Nick said, “Why don’t I just sit down here and count to a million?”

The one by the dresser said, “Humor us, Nick. Do it our way.”

They’d given him advice about who he should call, so they mustn’t be planning on killing him, or injuring him very badly. Something like a knock on the head he could live with. “Okay,” he said. “It’s your act, why should I horn in?”

As they were leaving the bedroom the snoring started again. Nick shook his head but didn’t say anything, and walked on downstairs, the guy with the money ahead of him, the other one bringing up the rear.

Downstairs they strolled through the bar, and it occurred to Nick to wonder why he wasn’t hearing from the Vigilant people.

So they must have cut the wires, these two.

They opened the front door, and Nick stood to one side for them to go out, saying, “Come back soon.”

“Come on outside with us, Nick. Wave us goodbye.”

“Listen, fellas,” Nick said, “I don’t have any shoes.”

“Just for a minute. Come on.” And the guy took his arm and walked him outside.

It was warmer out there than indoors. Nevertheless Nick felt stupid to be standing around on the sidewalk barefoot, wearing nothing but T-shirt and shorts. The nearest streetlight was half a block away, and there wasn’t any moon tonight, but still he felt exposed and open, as though hundreds of people were watching him.

Not hundreds. Just three: the two thieves, and their driver in the Pontiac waiting at the curb.

The guy with the money hurried directly to the Pontiac, sliding into the back seat, pushing the leather bag ahead of himself. The other one pulled the bar door shut and tested the door to be sure it was locked. “Goodnight, Nick,” he said, and Nick watched him cross the sidewalk and slide in front next to the driver. The car pulled immediately away, and Nick turned back to the bar door.

It was really locked. He rattled the knob, but that wouldn’t do any good. “Shit,” he said to himself, and walked around to the side of the house, where the bright yellow light marked his bedroom window. “Hey, Angela!” he yelled. Then he found some pebbles and threw them up at the window. Then he yelled some more.

Finally he had to go around front and find a big stone and throw it through the window in the front door and let himself in that way.

* * *

They took all the cash; no stocks, no negotiable bearer bonds, nothing but the hidden cash. Leffler watched it all disappearing into two blue plastic laundry bags, and after the first shock he simply waited it out. Lozini and the others couldn’t blame him; after all, he wasn’t a bodyguard or a murderer. He wasn’t a criminal at all, merely a stockbroker, he couldn’t be expected to defend their money against people like this.

The vault lights were on, since they couldn’t be seen from the street: bright fluorescents reflecting hazily from the brushed-chrome fixtures. The two men in their dark clothing and black hoods had a silence and swiftness and coldness to them that seemed invincible; no one could defend that money against these two.

How miserable Leffler felt. Maureen stood next to him, her hands closed around his arm just above the elbow, giving him strength with her presence and her touch, and he knew this whole thing was his fault. Endangering her, getting himself in this horrible position. Somehow, a dozen years ago, there must have been some other way to deal with the problem, to help Jim without entangling himself with such people as Adolf Lozini and these two gunmen.

And now they had the money. Carrying the laundry bags, they moved to the vault entrance, and one of them said, “We’ll leave the lights on. Or do you want them off?”

The switch was outside. “On,” Leffler said. “Please, on.”

“Right.” The man hesitated, then said, “You’ll be okay. Somebody’ll get you out in the morning.”

The compassion in the man’s voice enraged Leffler more than anything else that had happened. “You’re the ones who won’t be all right,” he said, and his voice was trembling with his fury.

The man shrugged; he and his partner stepped outside, and the heavy vault door was pushed shut. “Thank God,” Maureen said.

“I’m through,” Leffler said. His throat kept closing when he tried to talk, his words came out half-strangled. “I don’t care, Maureen, I don’t care what happens. I’m finished with Lozini. No more.”

“It’s all right, dear,” she said, and put her arms around him, cradling his head against her gray-and-black rough-feeling hair. “It’s all right now,” she promised.

And like a fool, like a child, like some helpless ninny, he found himself weeping.

* * *

Ben Pelzer stopped next to his car, the key in his hand. While Jerry Trask and Frank Slade kept an eye up and down the street, he stooped slightly, holding the suitcase full of Frank Schroder’s money as he slipped the key into the lock in the door.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the movement, and looked up with a sudden presentiment. Two men were getting out of the next car back, and even before he saw the guns in their hands he knew it was a hijack.

Trask and Slade were the defenders. Pelzer had a pistol under his jacket but he never even thought of reaching for it. He turned away instead, his movements fast and jerky as a silent film, leaving the key in the car door as he headed diagonally across the sidewalk, behind Jerry Trask, away from the two guys from the other car.

Trask and Slade had seen them at the same time, and both reached for guns. Stan Devers shot Trask in the shoulder and Trask turned half around and fell to his knees on the pavement. Slade was bringing a pistol out and Dan Wycza waited two seconds after Devers’ shot before putting a bullet in Slade’s forehead.

Mike Carlow was starting the engine of the Ambassador, hunching slightly over the wheel, watching the play outside, ready to drop along the seat out of sight if one of those other people actually managed to get a gun out.

It wasn’t going to happen. Trask, on his knees, in profile to Devers and Wycza, went on doggedly tugging at the gun under his jacket.

“Asshole,” Devers said, and shot him in the ear.

Ben Pelzer kept running, zigzagging away down the sidewalk, toting the suitcase. If he’d dropped it, he might have been able to get away. Wycza and Devers fired at the same time, and Pelzer splayed out, then somersaulted onto the sidewalk. The suitcase skidded away until it brought up against a fire hydrant.

Wycza and Devers got back into the Ambassador, and Carlow drove down the block and stopped next to the hydrant. “I’ll get it,” Devers said, acknowledging that he’d been wrong. He got out, picked up the suitcase, put it in back with Wycza, and slid in next to Carlow again.