Cops and Robbers

6

They both had the day off, and were at home. There was a birthday party going on in the kitchen of Joe’s house. It was his daughter Jackie’s ninth birthday, and the kitchen was crammed with kids and mothers, a lot more of them than the room could really hold. But nobody seemed to mind. The kids seemed to enjoy being squeezed in together like that, and the mothers were having a good time pretending to be working too hard.

Joe stood in the kitchen doorway, watching with a little grin on his face. He got a kick out of the racket and the mess the kids were making, and he also liked looking at the mothers’ bodies as they moved around trying to keep things organized. It was a hot day anyway, and the kitchen was small, and everybody was sweating, and nobody was wearing a lot of extra clothing in the heat. The women were very sexy moving around, with their hair plastered to their foreheads and their faces shiny and their dresses wet in the small of the back and their legs making brushing sounds against each other as they walked.

Joe had a little fantasy going in the back of his head, in which he would catch the eye of one of the mothers and give her a little come-here kind of head gesture, and she’d come over and say, “What is it?”

“Telephone,” he’d say.

“For me?” she’d say.

“Come take it in the bedroom,” he’d say. (He grinned to himself at that sentence, he really liked it.)

So they’d go into the bedroom and she’d pick up the phone and turn to him a little confused and say, “There isn’t anybody here.”

And he’d grin at her, and maybe wink, and say, “I know. What do you say we rest a minute?”

And she’d grin back, and give him a look, and say, “What do you have in mind, Joe?”

And he’d say, “You know what I have in mind,” and he’d put her down on the bed and fuck her into the basement.

All of which was going on in the back of his mind, while mainly he was just standing there, leaning against the doorjamb, getting a kick out of watching all the kids at their birthday party.

Tom came into the house, coming in the front way for once, because he knew the birthday party was going on in the kitchen and he’d figured Joe would be staying far away from it. He searched the house, and was surprised at last to find Joe practically inside the kitchen, standing there in the doorway and letting the waves of heat and noise roll over him.

Tom tugged at his elbow. Joe, enjoying the party and his fantasy, gave him an irritable look and didn’t move, but Tom made a head gesture meaning come-with-me-I-want-to-talk. Joe nodded at the kitchen, meaning he wanted to stay and watch the party, but Tom jabbed his thumb urgently toward the living room and finally Joe gave up and went with him.

The two of them walked into the living room, where it was a lot quieter, and where Joe said, “Okay, what is it?”

Excited, talking in a half-whisper, Tom said, “I’ve got it!”

Joe was feeling very irritable. “You got what?”

Tom held up one finger and grinned. “Half,” he said. “I’ve got our problem half-solved.”

Joe displayed his irritation by humoring Tom in a heavy-handed way. “Which problem was that, Tom?” he said.

“The heist.”

Suddenly Joe was frightened of being overheard. “For Christ’s sake!” he said, and looked over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

“It’s okay, they can’t hear us with that racket.”

Joe hadn’t been thinking about the robbery idea, and he didn’t want to think about it. To get it over with, he moved in closer to Tom and said in a low voice, “All right, what is it?”

This time, Tom held up two fingers. He said, “You remember, we decided we needed two things. Something we could turn over right away for a lot of money, and somebody with a lot of money to do the buying.”

Joe nodded, listening but not really involved. His attention was still back with the party and his fantasy. Up till now, they’d both enjoyed talking about the robbery at dull times when there was nothing else to do, like while driving in to the city to go to work, but it was only a theoretical kind of thing that they said they were going to do but that neither one of them really intended to pull off. Now there’d been a change, and the robbery had grown more real to Tom. That hadn’t happened yet with Joe, so he just nodded, listening with half of his attention, and said, “Yeah, I remember.”

“I’ve got the buyer,” Tom said.

Joe frowned at him, and didn’t bother to hide his skepticism. “Who?”

“The Mafia.”

“What?” Joe stared at him. “Are you crazy?”

“Who else has two million dollars cash? Who else buys hot goods at that volume?”

Joe looked away, gazing across the living room, starting to think about it. “Christ, Tom,” he said, “they do, don’t they?”

Tom said, “I told you about those cargo heists on the piers that I worked on that time. It all went straight to the Mafia. Four million a year, they figured that was worth.”

Joe thought about it, looking for flaws. “But that wasn’t one robbery,” he said. “That’s over a whole year.”

“They’re in the business.” Tom said. “That’s the point.”

“All right,” Joe said. “So what do we sell them?”

“Whatever they want to buy,” Tom said.