Cops and Robbers

Joe

I’d been in a bad mood ever since we pulled it off. Tom didn’t feel that way, he was going around happy and chipper and easy in his mind, but as for me, most of the time I felt like punching somebody in the head.

It would have been a different thing if we had the money in our hands. Even if we had the bonds, something we could sell, something we could touch and hold and know that this was the result of our labors. But what did we have? A blue plastic laundry bag full of air.

I’m not arguing. I know the case for doing it that way, and we did it that way, and I agree with it. As Tom said, the Mafia is not going to give away two million dollars if it doesn’t absolutely have to, so we can take it for granted when the time comes to make the switch they’ll try to double-cross us. And, since they already know this is a one-shot operation, we’re never going to be useful to them again, they’d be smart not only to cheat us but also to kill us.

Why not? We’re the only connection between the bond robbery and the mob, the only ones that know the whole story. Kill us, and they not only save two million dollars, they protect themselves from getting implicated just in case we should ever get picked up by the law later on.

So they’ll try to double-cross us, and they’ll try to kill us. We knew that before we went ahead and did the job. Because the next step is, we’re the ones who decide the method of transfer. And to bring us to the transfer point, they have to produce the cash, the two million for us to look at and touch. We can make it a part of the arrangement, that we see the cash before we give them the bonds.

They’d expect that. They’d expect us to be careful with them, because they’d expect us to be afraid of them.

What they wouldn’t expect is a double cross right back.

As Tom said, money isn’t just green pieces of paper in your wallet, it’s credit cards and charge accounts and all kinds of things. It’s bonds. It’s anything you think is money.

You know what we stole from Parker, Tobin, Eastpoole & Company? The idea of ten million dollars. And that’s what we figured to sell Vigano. His newspaper and television set would tell him we did the job. He’d have no reason to think we didn’t have the bonds anymore. So when the time for the switch came around, they’d have to have real cash, and all we’d have to have was a good plan and a lot of luck.

But the point is, we’d be needing that anyway. Double-crossing them on the bonds wouldn’t make any difference, they were going to try to cheat us and kill us whether we showed up with ten million dollars’ worth of bonds or two dollars’ worth of ripped-up newspapers. It made no difference whether we conned them or not. And in pulling the robbery, it had been easier not to carry the bonds away with us, to destroy them. So that’s what we did.

You see, I understand the argument and I agree with it. But that still didn’t change the fact I would have liked something in my hand afterward to show me I’d accomplished something. And not having anything meant I was spending my time in a really lousy mood.

For instance. When I was on duty now, I was becoming a real hard-ass with the tickets. I was giving them out left and right, citing store owners for dirty sidewalks, hitting delivery trucks for driving down streets where commercial traffic was prohibited, even going after jaywalkers. I’m telling you, I was mean.

Paul was out of the hospital now, so that was good, but he wasn’t back on duty yet. He’d have a couple months at home for rest and recuperation, the lucky bastard. In the meantime, I still had Lou to contend with.

He wasn’t bad, but his attitude needed work. He was over-eager, that was his problem. For instance, Paul would have known how to calm me down when I was out there ticketing the entire population of the Upper West Side, but so far as Lou was concerned I was tough but good. It got so he was becoming pretty nearly as mean as I was, though nobody is ever going to top the time I ticketed the pregnant woman for obstructing the sidewalk with her baby carriage. That’s one of those records where you retire the trophy.

As an example, though, of where Lou’s attitude went overboard, there was the night about a week and a half after the robbery when we really did lose our car for repairs. Which I already considered ironic.

What happened, late at night we caught sight of these two guys coming out of a jewelry store on Broadway. We yelled at them to stop, and they jumped into a four-door Buick parked in front of the shop and took off southbound. I was driving, and I could keep on their tail but I couldn’t catch up with them, not with the piece of crap I was driving. I’d been putting in requests for a new car for eight months, and never even got a response.

Meanwhile, Lou was on the radio. But shit, that time of night, everybody’s either already got problems of their own or they’re off someplace cooping. You know, having a doze.

The Buick headed straight down Broadway, with me a full block back. I had the siren and flasher going, mostly to make other traffic stop up ahead and keep the clown in the Buick from killing somebody while running a red light. Of course, at that time of night, nearly four in the morning, there’s practically never any traffic anyway.

He was a good driver, I’ll say that much for him. His brake lights didn’t go on until less than half a block before he made his right turn onto a cross-street in the Fifties. His inside wheels left the ground as he shot around the corner, but he made it without losing control, and by the time I came screeching around the intersection after him he’d leveled himself out and was tear-assing away, the other side of Eighth Avenue already, heading due west along a narrow side street with cars parked along both curbs and just barely room for two cars next to one another in the middle.

“Jesus!” Lou yelled. “We’re losing him!”

Boy, are you hot to trot, I thought, but I was too busy driving to say anything out loud.

The light was with us both on Ninth Avenue, though it wouldn’t have made any difference. We both shot through, him not getting away but me not gaining any ground. What we needed was another car in front of us, to head him off before somebody got hurt.

The block between Ninth and Tenth is mostly red-brick tenement buildings, half of them with shops in the ground floor, but the block between Tenth and Eleventh is warehouses, and there’s trucks parked along both sides instead of passenger vehicles. The same thing is true between Eleventh and Twelfth, and after that you can’t go any farther west without a boat. That’s the Hudson River out there, and you have to turn either north or south.

He wasn’t quite as sure as I was on this narrow street, with the parked cars crowding in on both sides, and that was doubly true after we crossed Tenth and he was traveling down between two walls of trucks. The trucks take up more room than cars do, leaving less space down the middle for driving, and I could tell the guy in the Buick didn’t care for that. Given another two or three miles of the same kind of street and I probably could have caught up with him. But what actually happened was, he almost creamed a cab on Eleventh Avenue.

The light was red down there. Big-sided trucks were parked along both curbs right down to the corner, restricting everybody’s vision, making a kind of tunnel out of the street. The trucks and the warehouses also probably contained my siren too much, so that it couldn’t be heard by somebody out on Eleventh Avenue.

And there was somebody out there; a cab, going north, traveling empty. He was probably on his way to check in at one of the garages farther uptown on the West Side, having been out for eight or ten hours hacking around the city. In other words, tired. And alone in the area, so far as he knew. And with the light in his favor.

Well, he entered the intersection just as the Buick did. And he was damn lucky God had given him fast reflexes because he just about stood on his brake with both feet and threw an anchor out back besides. The Buick swerved to its right, just nicked the front bumper of the cab on the way by, swerved to the left again, and kept going toward Twelfth Avenue.

And here was I, half a block away. The cabby had to figure the first guy through was a nut, but with me he could see the flashing red light even if he had all his windows closed and maybe air-conditioning on and couldn’t hear the siren. So he had to know I was a cop. And twice in a row he did exactly the right thing.

Because he hadn’t managed to completely stop before the Buick went by. In fact, the nose of the cab was still down like a pig looking for truffles, and the vehicle was still in motion. Which put it right directly in front of me.

“Stop!” yelled Lou. As though I could have stopped by then, any more than the cab could. It takes a long distance to stop, hundreds and hundreds of feet — the only time you can stop on a dime is when you’re walking.

Besides, the cabby was doing his second right thing in a row. The instant the Buick was past him, he hauled in that anchor, switched both feet away from the brake and over to the accelerator, tromped down hard, and yanked that yellow mother out of the intersection.

I had to swerve left to miss his ass, just as the Buick had had to swerve right to miss his nose. But I did miss, and I never took my foot off the accelerator, and I entered the next block in fine shape.

In a lot better shape than the Buick. The near miss with the cab had loused him up for good. He shot into that next block angled wrong, coming in from the right because of having gone around the cab, and didn’t get straightened out in time. He sideswiped a truck on his left, scraping along the body, and then careened off that and headed down the block at an angle to the right, and damn if he didn’t hit another truck over on that side. He was like a drunk running down a hallway, bouncing from one wall to the other.

All the sideswiping, and all the struggling to get his car under control, were slowing him down. He did it a third time, over on the left again, and this time his front bumper or fender or something must have got hooked for a second on a truck cab, because all at once the Buick swerved around and jolted to a stop crossways in the street, the front bumper inches from the side of one truck and rear bumper inches from a truck across the way. The driver’s side was toward us, and I could see his white face in there in my headlights.

I stood on the brakes myself the second I saw what the Buick was doing, and the squad car dug its nose in and screamed, me fighting a skid to the left every inch of the way.

The passenger door of the Buick, the one on the far side, had popped open the second the Buick came to a stop, and somebody jumped out and laid what looked like a black stick across the roof of the car, pointing at us. That is, it looked like a black stick until the end of it blew up in red and yellow, and the windshield got peppered with a dozen sudden new holes.

Lou yelled, “What the fuck is that?”

“Shotgun!” I was still fighting that leftward skid, the squad car was still in motion, I was still praying for it to quit so I could get my head down out of the way of that shotgun. And finally we did shudder to a stop, no more than twenty feet from the Buick.

I hit the switch that turned off the siren, and shoved my door open. The driver’s face was no longer showing in the window of the Buick, and the black stick was no longer pointing at us over the top of the car. I leaned my head out to the side, and heard them running into the darkness in the opposite direction.

As I was getting out of the car, I saw Lou jumping out on his side and making a dash for the Buick. “Hey!” I yelled. “Where the hell are you going?”

He looked back and saw me standing behind the open door, which would give me some protection if they opened up with that goddam shotgun again. He stopped running forward and crouched there, pistol pointing straight ahead but head still turned around facing me. Looking baffled, he said, “After them. Don’t we—?”

I said, “In that darkness? With a shotgun? They’ll blow your ass off.”

He straightened out of his crouch, all momentum gone, but he still didn’t come back. “But we’ll lose them,” he said.

“We lost them,” I told him. I would never have had to explain that to Paul. “Get back here,” I said, “and call in.”

The footsteps had faded away. Those two were gone for good, and just as well. I came out from behind the door and walked around to look at the front of the car. Very little of the shotgun blast had reached the windshield, so where had the rest of it gone?

Into the radiator, as I’d thought. Red cooling fluid was oozing out of a thousand holes. The headlights had also been smashed. A little higher, I thought, and my face would look like that.

It was in that instant that I knew Tom had to stop fucking around on this Vigano deal. He had to call him, we had to make the arrangements and get the money, and we had to do it and get it over with. I was still willing to hang around the six months before I’d pack up my family and go off to Saskatchewan, but God damn it, I wanted to see what I’d accomplished. I wanted that money in my hand, where I could touch it.

Lou was walking by me, heading for his side of the car. I told him, “They shot the shit out of our radiator. When you call in, tell them we need wheels.”

“Okay,” he said.

I stood there looking at the radiator, thinking about what I was going to say to Tom.

And another thing. After this, they’d have to give us a new car.