Cops and Robbers

Tom

Until the second Joe reached out and grabbed Eastpoole’s elbow and said, “Hold it,” I still hadn’t been one hundred per cent sure we were actually going to go through with this. Maybe it had been necessary that I keep some doubt in my mind, maybe that was what had made it possible for me to go on moving along through all the preparations and then get out of bed today and come to New York and in real life start step by step to do the things we’d decided on. That small uncertainty had been a kind of escape hatch for me, I suppose, to keep me from getting too nervous and frightened of what we had in mind.

Well, now the escape hatch was gone. We were in it now, we’d started. If there was anything we hadn’t thought of, it was too late to think of it. If there was any fact that we should know that we hadn’t picked up in our studies, it was too late to find it out. If there was any flaw in our plan, anything at all, it was too late now to fix it. It would fix us instead.

The first part, escorting Eastpoole to his office and keeping him calm and tractable, hadn’t been too bad. It wasn’t that different, really, from dealing with a suspect about whose guilt you weren’t really sure, but who could possibly make things very tough if he weren’t handled just right. It was like a variation on a part of my job I already knew about, so I could almost let automatic responses do it for me.

Besides, Joe and I had been working together at that point. I don’t know if my presence made things easier for him, but his presence definitely made things easier for me. Seeing him in the same position I was in, knowing we were locked into this together, had made it easier to keep moving.

But now I was on my own. Eastpoole’s secretary, that he’d called Miss Emerson, was walking with me through offices filled with people. What if she suddenly panicked, started to scream? What if her fright was only an act, and she was just waiting her chance to pull a fast one? What if a thousand different things happened that weren’t supposed to happen? I hadn’t the first idea how I’d handle it if she didn’t obey orders, and I wasn’t sure anymore what was the best way to treat her to make sure she would obey. Her physical being, walking beside me, terrified me, and all I knew for sure was that I couldn’t let her know how nervous I was. It would either throw her into a complete panic or make her start thinking she could outsmart me, and I didn’t want either of those things to happen.

There was a sexual element, too, which surprised me; I hadn’t expected anything like that. I don’t mean my sexual instincts are dead, or that my awareness is limited to Mary. I covet other women as much as any man, and in fact several years ago I had an affair with a woman in the neighborhood. She lived down the block from us, her husband worked for Grumman Aircraft. They’re gone now, they left a few years ago and moved out to California. It happened in the fall, early in October, and it was possible because of the funny shifts I work that have me around the house a lot in the daytime. This woman — Nancy, her name was — came around one day setting up a car pool for something with the kids. Mary wasn’t home but I was, and Nancy had just the night before had a big fight with her husband, and all of a sudden there we were screwing on the living-room floor. It was amazing.

It was also the only time we made it in my house. From then on, if I was home in the daytime and felt like it, I’d drift on down to her place and we’d have sex in her bedroom, on the bed. She had slightly different preferences and manners from Mary, and newness makes things exciting, and for a while I was really pleased with myself, having two women on the same block. Then the holidays came along, and there was a whole different mental attitude developed in both our minds, where we both grew much more interested in our own families again, and it all sort of faded away. We never had a fight or anything, we never officially broke it off, but by the middle of December I wasn’t making any more visits and she wasn’t calling up — as she’d done a couple times in October and November — to suggest it was a nice day for a bounce on the bed.

Nevertheless, good-looking women definitely still turn me on, and I can get a real letch for something tall and slender with a good figure and a good walk, all of which is a pretty good summation of Miss Emerson. I’d noticed her in the usual sexual way when I’d first walked into Eastpoole’s office, but then my mind had been distracted by the problems of dealing with Eastpoole, and in the normal course of events that would have been the end of it.

Which was why I was so surprised and troubled at the sexual aura that hung between us now. It was a different sort of thing from my usual awareness, it was both stronger and unhealthier, and the most embarrassing thing about it was that I knew what was doing it. She was my prisoner. “Ah, me proud beauty, you are in my power!” It was that number. It wasn’t really true that she was my prisoner in the sense that I could do anything I wanted with her, but there was a feeling of that between us, of her actually being in my power and of me being in the role of the villain.

And of course, I was in the role of villain, wasn’t I? I was there to commit, as I’d told her, a major robbery. Which helped to make the situation different from those rare times when I actually have had good-looking female prisoners in my control, in the course of my working life. In those instances I haven’t been the villain, I’ve been on the good guy’s side. Also, I’ve been limited by the rules of my profession and the laws of the land. None of which applied this time.

Well, I wasn’t going to rape her, though God knows she had a body I would have liked to touch. But it was much more important to keep her calm than to satisfy irrelevant bodily urges of my own that I didn’t really want to have in the first place. So I wanted to talk to her, to ease her tension a little, but I wasn’t sure what to say that wouldn’t just increase the sexual discomfort hanging around us, so for too long a time I walked beside her in silence; which couldn’t have been very reassuring.

Finally I decided the best thing to do was to be brisk and businesslike, so I said, “I’m going to tell you exactly what we want. You’ll have to go into the vault alone, so I’ll tell you what to get from it.”

She didn’t look at me. Facing front as she walked along next to me, she nodded and said, “Yes.” Her face showed strain, the skin stretched tight over her cheekbones, her eyes open a little too wide.

I said, “We want bearer bonds. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” she said.

Of course she knew what I meant, she worked here. “Right,” I said. “Now, we don’t want any of them with a face value over a hundred thousand dollars, and nothing under twenty thousand, and we want them all together to add up to ten million.”

She gave me a surprised look then, but immediately faced front again and nodded and said, “All right.”

I said, “Now, I know you’re going to be smart and do things right, but I just want to remind you. My partner’s in your boss’s office, and he can see the vault on one of the TV screens there, and the vault anteroom with the guard. If you try talking to the guard, or doing anything you shouldn’t in the vault, he’ll be able to see you.”

“I won’t do anything,” she said. She sounded terrified again, and on the verge of tears.

“I know you won’t,” I said. “I just thought I should remind you, that’s all, but I know you won’t do anything.”

We’d been passing through one of the big offices with all the empty desks and crowded windows. Thirty or forty people in the room, all with their backs to us, looking out the windows at the parade going by. I was still marching along in time to the drums, whether I liked it or not, but Miss Emerson was walking in an erratic sort of way, quick steps and then an occasional slow step, no consistent rhythm at all. I supposed it was part of her nervousness that made her walk like that, and I did my best to adjust my speed to hers, though I still paced myself to the sound of the parade.

In the doorway, leaving that office and entering a corridor that led away to the right, she suddenly stumbled. I automatically reached out to grab her arm and help her keep her feet, and she pulled away from me, terrified, wide-eyed. Keeping her balance by fear alone, she staggered backwards across the corridor and brought up against the wall on the other side.

I followed her into the corridor, looked down to the right, and saw we were alone. “Take it easy,” I said, fast and low. I was afraid there was a scream in her throat just dying to come out. “Take it easy, nobody’s going to hurt you.”

Her right hand went up to her throat again, as it had in the office. I could see her forcing herself to take long deep breaths, to get control. She was really very good, she got hold of the reins herself and pulled the whole thing back together. I stood there, waiting it out, and finally she said, in a low voice, “I’m all right now.”

“Of course you are,” I said. “You’re doing fine. There’s nothing to worry about, I promise you. All we want is money, and none of it is yours, so what’s there to be afraid of?” I grinned at her, spreading my hands.

She nodded, and came away from the wall at last, but she wouldn’t respond to my grin, and as much as possible she avoided meeting my eye. How much of that was simple fear and how much the sexual overlay I don’t know, but there was no point trying to calm her entirely. It wouldn’t have been possible anyway, and all I really needed was her functional and rational.

Which she was, again. We walked down the corridor together, and then she gestured at a closed door ahead of us and said, “That’s the anteroom.”

Where the vault guard would be stationed. The vault itself would be just beyond. “I’ll wait out here,” I said. “Now, you know what I want.”

Not looking at me, she nodded her head, a sudden jerky movement.

I said, “Tell me. Take it easy, don’t get upset, just tell me what I said.”

She had to clear her throat before she could talk. Then she said, “You want bearer bonds. Nothing over a hundred thousand dollars, nothing less than twenty thousand.”

“Adding up to?”

“Ten million dollars,” she said.

I nodded. “That’s right,” I said. “And remember, my partner can watch you.”

“I won’t do anything,” she said. She still didn’t look at me. “Should I go in now?”

“Sure.”

She opened the door and went inside, and I leaned against the wall to wait; either for ten million dollars or the roof to fall in.