Cops and Robbers

Tom

The difference between committing a crime and planning a crime is the difference between being in a snowstorm and looking at a picture of the blizzard of ’eighty-eight. Joe and I had spent a long time planning this robbery, organizing things, working out the details, and none of it had ever bothered me; but all of a sudden we were in the storm, and no fooling.

I slept lousy the night before. I kept waking up and being afraid there was somebody in the house. I never felt so defenseless in my life, lying there in the darkness, listening, trying to hear whoever it was that was in the next room. Then I’d drift off again and have bad dreams, and wake up once more.

I only remember one of the dreams. Or just one part. I was very small, and I was in a very big empty dark room, and the walls were falling outward. Slowly. Just falling out and back. Terrifying.

We’d picked a day that I had off and Joe was working, so I spent the morning hanging around on my own, trying not to show Mary how tense and irritable I was. Joe had already told Grace he’d be on double shift today, and Mary thought I was supposed to be working this afternoon, so we were both covered for the time of the robbery.

But how the early part of the day dragged on! Half a dozen times, I was on the verge of getting into the car and driving on into the city just to be doing something, even though it would be hours before I was supposed to meet Joe, and I’d have a tougher job killing time in New York than at home. But it was just impossible to sit still, I had to be up and around and moving. I took the Chevvy down to the local car wash and then drove around for half an hour, I spent some time cleaning out the garage, I even took a walk around the neighborhood, something I’ve never done in my life before. And it was weird how close to the house I became a stranger, walking past houses that looked like mine but that didn’t have any more to do with my life than some shepherd’s hut in Outer Mongolia. That walk did more harm than good, and I was glad when I got back to my own block, to houses I knew, and the sense of safety that comes from being where you belong.

Then, when it was finally time to go, I got very jittery and nervous, and couldn’t seem to get myself organized to leave the house. I kept forgetting things and having to come back. Including the uniform. I had it packed in a little canvas bag, and I damn near left without it. That would have been bright.

Did you ever have a tense situation sometime in your life, and you turn on the radio, and all the song lyrics seem to refer directly to the problem you’re going through? That’s what happened on the drive into the city. Every song that came on was either about somebody making a mistake that loused up his whole life, or somebody who has to give up his home and go wandering around the world, or somebody putting himself in danger even though this girl that loves him doesn’t want him to do it.

I was almost sorry we hadn’t told Mary and Grace what we were doing, because they really would have talked us out of it. That way, neither one of us would have backed down, but I still wouldn’t be driving west on the Long Island Expressway this morning, with my old patrolman’s uniform in a canvas bag beside me on the seat.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean I wanted to give it up. I still wanted to do it, the reasons for doing it were still just as valid as they’d ever been, and my plans for afterward still excited me as much as when I’d first worked them out. But if the situation had been taken out of my hands one way or another, and I’d been forced to turn back, I admit I wouldn’t have put up too much of a fight.

Well. I got to Manhattan with time to spare, drove over to the West Side, and parked in the low Forties, near Tenth Avenue. Then I walked down to the Port Authority terminal, carrying the bag with the uniform in it, and changed clothes in a pay stall in the men’s room there.

Leaving, heading across the main terminal floor for the Ninth Avenue exit, I was stopped by a short old woman wearing a black coat — in weather like this — who wanted to know where to buy tickets for a Public Service bus. She irritated me at first, distracting me when I was so tense anyway, and I couldn’t figure out why she was bothering me with questions like that when just ahead of us there was a huge sign reading: INFORMATION; but then I remembered I was in uniform. I shifted gears, became a cop, and gave her courteous directions over to the ticket windows along the side wall. She thanked me and scurried away, pulling the coat tight around her as though she were in a high wind that nobody else could feel. Then I walked on, left the building without being asked any more questions, and headed back for the car.

Walking along, I got this sudden vision in my head of the same thing happening again, only in a more serious way than with the old woman. I could see Joe and me on our way to commit a felony and being stopped by somebody who’d just been mugged, or getting mixed up with a lost child, or being the first cops on the scene at a serious automobile accident.

And what could we do if something like that happened? We’d have to stay, we’d have to play out the policeman’s role. There just wouldn’t be any choice, it would be far too suspicious for us to refuse to have anything to do with whatever it might be. The next cops to come along would surely be told about it, and we didn’t want the idea getting around ahead of time that there were a couple of fake cops up to something in the city.

That would be damn ironic; kept from committing a robbery by the call of duty. I grinned as I walked along, thinking I would tell Joe about it when I saw him. I could just see his face.

At the Chevvy, I opened the trunk and put the canvas bag in it, with my other clothes. The license plates and numbers were in there, in a shopping bag; they’d been there for a week, ever since we’d picked them up.

I shut the trunk, got behind the wheel, and drove over by the piers. The New York City piers have gone to hell in the last ten years or so, with most of the harbor business now being done over in Jersey, so there’s plenty of places in through there, particularly under the West Side Highway, where you can have all the privacy you want. Some of the trucking companies store empty trailers there, which form walls to shield you from the sight of the occasional car or truck heading down Twelfth Avenue.

I tucked the Chevvy in by a highway stanchion, next to a parked trailer, and looked at my watch. I was still running ahead of schedule, but that was all right. And now that I was really committed to it, and I’d made the first couple of moves in the planned operation, I was actually calming down, getting less and less nervous. The buildup had made me tense, but now the tension was draining away and I felt as easy in my mind as if I was just waiting here for Ed Dantino to show up so we could go on duty. Very strange.

It was a hot day, too hot to sit in the car. I got out of it, locked it, and leaned against the fender to wait for Joe.