Cops and Robbers

7

There was a certain amount of leeway in setting up the work schedules at the precinct, so Tom and Joe could usually adjust things around to be on duty at the same hours. They got cooperation from the precinct because it was understood they had a car pool together. If they’d both been patrolmen, or both on the detective squad, they could probably have worked it out one hundred per cent of the time, but operating out of two different offices the way they did there were bound to be times when the work schedules were in conflict, with nothing to be done about it.

Because of one of those conflicts, it was three days before they got to talk about Tom’s meeting with Vigano, and when at last they did get together Joe was too worn out to pay much attention. He’d been on a double shift, sixteen hours straight, caused by some special activity over at the United Nations. In fact, it was the stuff at the United Nations, involving a couple of African countries and the Jewish Defense League and some anti-Communist Polish group and who knows what all, that had created the conflict in the work schedule in the first place.

It wasn’t that Joe himself had had to go over to the UN, but a lot of uniformed men from the precinct had been sent down there for the duration of the special circumstances, and that meant the guys who were left had to double up to cover the territory.

That was one of the big differences between the patrolmen and the detective squad. The detectives were chronically short-handed, and used to it, but there was never any time when orders would come down that would strip out half the men from the squad and leave the rest to take up the slack. The patrolmen though, were under normal circumstances up pretty close to full strength, until every once in a while the phone would ring in the Lieutenant’s office, a couple of buses would pull up out front to take the boys away, and the ones left would have to start scrambling. Like today.

Today, the result was that they rode back together in Tom’s car that afternoon with Tom excited and ready to talk, and Joe just sitting there as though he’d been hit by a fire hydrant. In fact, having come to work eight hours before Tom, he had his own car in the city, the Plymouth, and was just leaving it there, because he didn’t think he had the stamina to drive it all the way home. He’d come back in with Tom tomorrow, and drive the Plymouth home tomorrow night, if all went well.

At first, Tom didn’t realize just how far out of it Joe was. They got into the car together and Tom headed for the tunnel, and as they drove he gave a quick rundown on what Vigano had said. Joe didn’t make any response, mostly because he was barely listening. Tom tried to capture his attention by talking louder and faster, trying to push some of his own enthusiasm into Joe’s ear. “It’s simple,” he said. “What are bonds? They’re just pieces of paper.” He glanced over at Joe. “Joe?”

Joe nodded. “Pieces of paper,” he said.

“And the great thing is,” Tom said, “we can actually do it.” He gave Joe another look, with some annoyance in it. “Joe, you with me?”

Joe shifted around in his seat, moving his body like a sleeper who doesn’t want to wake up. “For Christ’s sake, Tom,” he said, “I’m dead on my feet.”

“You aren’t on your feet.”

Joe was too tired for humor; it just made him grouchy. “I been on my feet,” he said. “Double shift.”

“If you pay attention to me,” Tom said, “you can say good-bye to all that.”

They were just entering the Midtown Tunnel. Joe said, “You really believe in this?”

“Naturally.”

Joe didn’t make any answer, and Tom didn’t say anything else while they were in the tunnel. Coming out the other side, Tom said, “You got change?”

Joe roused himself and patted his pockets, while Tom slowed for the toll booths. Joe didn’t have any change, so he got out his wallet. “Here’s a dollar,” he said.

“Thanks.” Tom took the dollar, gave it to the attendant, got the change back, and passed it to Joe, who sat there looking at the coins in his palm as though he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with them.

Driving away from the booth, Tom said, “How’d you like a job like that?”

“I don’t want any job at all,” Joe said. He dropped the coins in his shirt pocket and rubbed his face with his palm.

“Just standing there all day,” Tom said, “taking money in.”

“They all rake off a little,” Joe said.

“Yeah, and they get caught.”

Joe squinted at him. “We won’t?”

“No, we won’t,” Tom said.

Joe shrugged, and looked out the side window at the black buildings and brick smokestacks of Long Island City.

Tom said, “The big difference is, we won’t do it over and over. One big job, and quit. I go to Trinidad, you go to Montana.”

Joe turned his head to Tom again. “Saskatchewan,” he said.

Tom, thrown off the track, frowned at the trucks he was driving among, and said, “What?”

“I thought it over,” Joe told him. He was beginning to wake up despite himself, though he was still in a bad mood. He said, “What I’d really like to do is get Grace and the kids out of this country entirely. But completely out, before it goes to hell altogether.”

“Where’s this you want to go?”

“Saskatchewan.” Joe made a vague gesture, as though pointing northward. “It’s in Canada,” he said. “They give you land if you want to be a farmer.”

Tom gave him a grin of surprise and disbelief. “What do you know about farming?”

“A hell of a lot less than I’ll know next year.” They were now on that part of the Expressway lined on both sides with cemeteries, and Joe brooded out at it all. It’s like somebody’s idea of a sick joke, all those tombstones stretching away on both sides of the Expressway just a couple miles from Manhattan; like a parody of a city, in bad taste. Neither of them had ever mentioned it to the other, but those damn cemeteries had bugged them both from time to time, over the years of driving back and forth. And the funny thing was, they bothered the both of them more in the daytime than at night. And more on sunny days than rainy days. And more in the summer than in the winter.

This was a sunny day in July.

Neither of them said any more until they were past the cemeteries. Then Joe said, “I’m really thinking about that, you know. Just pack everybody in the car and take off for Canada. Except with my luck, it’d break down before we got to the border.”

“Not if you had a million dollars,” Tom said.

Joe shook his head. “There are times,” he said, “I almost believe we’re gonna do it.”

Tom frowned at him. “What’s the matter with you? You’re the one that’s done it already.”

“You mean the liquor store?”

“What else?”

“That was a different thing,” Joe said. “That was—” He moved his hands, trying to think of the word.

“Small-time,” Tom said. “I’m telling you to think big-time. You know what Vigano had?”

Small-time wasn’t the word Joe had been looking for. Irritated, he said, “What did he have?”

“His own bowling alley. Right in the house.”

Joe just stared. “A bowling alley?”

“Regulation bowling alley. One lane. Right in the house.”

Joe grinned. That was the kind of high life he could understand. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

“Go tell him crime doesn’t pay,” Tom said.

Joe nodded, thinking it over. He said, “And he told you securities, huh?”

“Bearer bonds,” Tom said. “Just pieces of paper. Not heavy, no trouble, we turn them right over.”

Joe was wide awake now, interested, his irritation forgotten. “Tell me the whole thing,” he said. “What he said, what you said. What’s his house look like?”