Cops and Robbers

10

There’s a strange sense of dislocation in leaving one’s family at ten or eleven o’clock at night and going off to work. There’s more of a feeling of leaving them, of a deep break between family life and job life. Neither Tom nor Joe had ever gotten over that atmosphere of loss, but it was another of the things they’d never discussed together.

Maybe if they’d worked the midnight-to-eight shift all the time they would have gotten used to it, and not felt any stranger about it than a guy who leaves for work at eight in the morning. But constantly switching around from shift to shift the way they did, they never really got a chance to become used to the idiosyncracies of any one schedule.

Since the incident with the little kid out at Jones Beach, they’d done most of their talking about the robbery in the car on the way to or from work, and they both seemed to prefer for that the drive at eleven o’clock at night, heading in toward the city. The sense of dislocation from home and family probably helped, and so did the darkness, the interior of the car lit by nothing but the dashboard and oncoming headlights. It was as though they were isolated then, separate from everything, capable of concentrating their minds on the question of committing the robbery.

This night, they were both quiet for the first ten or fifteen minutes in the car, westbound on the Long Island Expressway. Traffic was moderate coming out of the city, but light in the direction they were going. There was plenty of leisure to think.

Joe was driving his Plymouth, his mind only very slightly on the road and the car, but mostly away, on Wall Street, in brokerage offices. Suddenly he said, “I go back to the bomb scare.”

Tom’s mind had been full of his own thoughts, involving burying the bonds and calling Vigano and figuring out the safest way to make the switch for the two million dollars. He blinked over toward Joe’s profile in the darkness and said, “What?”

“We ought to be able to do that,” Joe said. “Phone in, tell them there’s a bomb in the vault, then answer the squeal ourselves.”

Tom shook his head. “Won’t work.”

“But it gets us in, that’s the beauty.”

“Sure,” Tom said. “And then a couple other guys come to answer the squeal before we get out again.”

“There ought to be a way around that,” Joe said.

“There isn’t.”

“Bribe a dispatcher to give the squeal to us instead of one of their own cars.”

“Which dispatcher? And how much do you bribe him? We get a million and he gets a hundred? He’d turn us in within a week. Or blackmail us.”

“There’s got to be a way,” Joe said. The bomb-scare idea appealed to him on general dramatic grounds.

“The problem isn’t to get in,” Tom said. “The problem is to get away afterwards with the bonds, and where we stash them, and how we make the switch with Vigano.”

But Joe didn’t want to listen to any of that. He insisted on the primacy of his own area of research. “We’ve still got to get in,” he said.

“We’ll get in,” Tom said, and all of a sudden the idea hit him. He sat up straighter in the car, and stared straight ahead out the windshield. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

Joe glanced at him. “Now what?”

“When’s that parade? Remember, there was a thing in the paper about a parade for some astronauts.”

Joe frowned, trying to remember. “Next week sometime.” It had been on Wednesday, he remembered that. “Uhhh, the seventeenth. Why?”

“That’s when we do it,” Tom said. He was grinning from ear to ear.

“During the parade?”

Tom was so excited he couldn’t sit still. “Joe,” he said, “I am a goddam mastermind!”

Skeptical, Joe said, “You are, huh?”

“Listen to me,” Tom said. “What are we going to steal?”

Joe gave him a disgusted look. “What?”

“Give me a break,” Tom said. “Just tell me, what are we going to steal?”

Shrugging, Joe said, “Bearer bonds, like the man said.”

“Money,” Tom said.

Joe nodded, being weary and long-suffering. “Okay, okay, money.”

“Only not money,” Tom said. He kept grinning, as though his cheeks would stretch permanently out of shape. “You see? We still got to turn it over before it’s money.”

“In a minute,” Joe told him, “I’m going to stop this car and punch your head.”

“Listen to me, Joe. The idea is, money isn’t just dollar bills. It’s all kinds of things. Checking accounts. Credit cards. Stock certificates.”

“Will you for Christ’s sake get to the point?”

“Here’s the point,” Tom said. “Anything is money, if you think it’s money. Like Vigano thinks those bearer bonds are money.”

“He’s right,” Joe said.

“Sure, he’s right. And that’s what solves all our problems.”

“It does?”

“Absolutely,” Tom said. “It gets us in, gets us out, solves the problem of hiding the loot, solves everything.”

“That’s fucking wonderful,” Joe said.

“You’re damn right it is.” Tom played a paradiddle on on the dashboard with his fingertips. “And that,” he said, “is why we’re going to pull off that robbery during the parade.”