Cops and Robbers

5

They had the midnight-to-eight shift that week. It’s the quietest of the three shifts, but at eight o’clock in the morning, driving home eastward into the rising sun, a man’s eyes feel covered with sand and he thinks his stomach will never be comfortable again.

Joe left the station first and got the Plymouth out of the lot and drove down the block to double-park across the street from the precinct house. He had to wait ten minutes before Tom came out, looking disgusted, and slid into the passenger seat.

Joe said, “What’s the problem?”

“Little talk from the Lieutenant,” Tom said. “Some damn thing about narcotics.”

“What about it?”

Tom yawned, fighting it, and gave an angry shrug. “Anything you pick up, be sure you turn it in. The usual noise.”

Joe put the Plymouth in gear and started through the maze crosstown and downtown to the Midtown Tunnel. “I wonder who they caught,” he said.

“Nobody from this house,” Tom said. He yawned again, giving in to it this time, and rubbed his face with both hands. “Boy, am I ready for sleep.”

“I got me an idea,” Joe said.

Tom knew at once what he meant. Looking at him, interested, he said, “You do? What?”

“Paintings from a museum.”

Tom frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“Listen,” Joe said. “They got paintings in those museums, they’re worth a million dollars each. We take ten, we sell them back for four million. That’s two million for each of us.”

Tom’s frown deepened. He scratched the side of his jaw, making a sound like sandpaper. “I don’t know,” he said. “Ten paintings. They’d be as tough to hide as my Russian ambassador.”

“I could put them in my garage,” Joe said. “Who’s gonna look in a garage?”

“Your kids would wreck them in a day.”

Joe didn’t want to give this up; it was the only idea he’d managed to come up with. “Five paintings,” he said. “One million apiece.”

Tom didn’t answer right away. He chewed the inside of his cheek and brooded out at the traffic and tried to figure out not only what was specifically wrong with the paintings idea, but also a general rule to live by, to guide his thinking on the subject of the robbery. It was a way of taking it seriously and yet not taking it seriously at the same time. Finally he said, “We don’t want something we have to give back. Nothing we have to keep around us or hide for a while. We want something with fast turnover.”

Reluctantly, Joe nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said, admitting it. “We’re not in a position for that kind of thing.”

“That’s right.”

“But we don’t want cash. We talked about that.”

Tom nodded. “I know. Everybody keeps serial numbers.”

Joe said, “So it isn’t that easy.”

“I never said it was.”

They were both quiet for a while, thinking it over. They were practically to the tunnel when Tom spoke up again, restating the rule he’d worked out earlier; narrowing the range of it, refining it. Gazing out the windshield, he said, “What we want is something we can unload fast, for big money.”

“Right,” Joe said. “And a buyer. Some rich person with a lot of cash.”

They were about to enter the tunnel. “Rich people,” Tom said. He was thinking very hard. They both were.