Guns

One

The night of the liquor-store job, you could fry eggs on the sidewalk. It was seven o’clock already, and outside it was still an oven. Colley was all for calling off the job. Even there inside the cafeteria, with the air conditioner going, he was sweating.

“No,” Jocko said. “I think we’re primed for it, we should go ahead.”

“Because when it’s this hot,” Colley said, “things could go wrong.”

“Nothin’ll go wrong, don’t worry.”

“Guys lose their temper, guys take stupid chances,” Colley said.

“Only one guy in the store,” Jocko said, “and he won’t take no chances, don’t worry.”

“Or lose his temper or something, this heat,” Colley said.

“Only heat he’s gonna know is the gun I stick in his face,” Jocko said. “I’ll tell him up front he opens his mouth, his brains are on the wall.”

“Same as always,” Teddy said, and shrugged.

Colley looked at him. Teddy shrugged again. He was their driver, what the hell did he care if something happened inside the store? If something started in there, he’d throw her in gear and ride off into the sunset, the hell with the two dopes inside with guns in their hands. With heat like this, you never knew what was going to happen. When you got a guy on a cold winter day, he’d open the register without a peep. But on a day like today, when his underwear was creeping up his behind, or he maybe had an argument with a delivery man, who knew what might happen? When it was hot like this, you told him to open the register, he was liable to take a swing at you. So then you’d have to use the gun.

“Look,” Colley said, “have I ever backed off a job before?”

“No,” Jocko said. “What’s right is right.”

“I just got a thing about heat.”

“I can understand that,” Jocko said. “But there’s nothing to worry about here.”

“People act unpredictable when it’s hot,” Colley said. “I myself, I find myself getting irritated sitting here with you guys and trying to convince you to call this job off.”

“It ain’t hot in here,” Teddy said.

“It’s nice and cool in here,” Jocko said.

“To me it’s hot, and to me I’m getting irritated. This heat’s been building here in the city for the past five days. We’re gonna get a storm soon, I say we do the job after the storm. When everybody’s cooled off, then we go in there and show the pieces and the old man does just what we tell him to do without no fuss.”

“How you know when this heat’s gonna break?” Jocko asked.

“They said any day now.”

“Who’s they?”

“The guy on television. What the hell’s his name? The one used to do the weather for Con Ed.”

“I don’t know his name,” Jocko said.

“Him. He said the heat’ll break soon.”

“The one with the mustache?” Teddy said.

“Yeah, him.”

“We postpone the job, we have to wait another week,” Jocko said. “Cause that’s when there’s the biggest take in there. We have to wait till next Saturday night.”

“So what’s so bad about that?”

“Okay, suppose we postpone, okay? And it rains. And then by next Saturday it’s hot again. This is New York, this is August, it rains, it gets hot, it’s up and down all the time. Also, how do we know that old fart ain’t planning to go on vacation or something? We go back next Saturday, we find grilles up all over the place, the guy went to the mountains for a week. Here’s what I say, Colley...”

“Yeah, I know what you say.”

“I say you plan a job, then you go through with it for when it’s planned.”

“That’s right,” Teddy said.

“Otherwise, it’s amateur night in Dixie.”

“I’m saying you got to bend with the wind,” Colley said.

“There ain’t no wind,” Teddy said, and laughed. “That’s exactly your beef, ain’t it, Nicholas?”

“Lay off the Nicholas shit,” Colley said, and gave him a look that was supposed to be full of menace and threat. Teddy only shrugged again. They knew each other too long, that was it. The three of them had done twelve jobs together in the past eight months, that was a long time for guys to be together.

The funny thing was they hadn’t known each other from a hole in the wall before Christmas, when Colley met Jocko in a bar on Eighth Avenue. Jocko had his hand under this black hooker’s skirt. They struck up a conversation across the hooker. She was sitting in the middle, Jocko on one side, Colley on the other, they started talking across her about various cops they had known. The hooker had her legs spread on the stool there, Jocko was exploring under her skirt, and meanwhile telling Colley about the Texas Rangers and what sons of bitches they were. Colley’d never been to Texas in his life. He was born and raised in New York, he’d never been further west than New Jersey, went there to see the burlesque in Union City; that was when he was only seventeen, before the whole city opened up with skin flicks and body-rub joints and topless dancers and whatever the hell you wanted. If you couldn’t find what you wanted in New York City, then, man, you just weren’t looking. Jocko was telling him the Texas Rangers just enjoyed being mean sons of bitches. Not only to niggers. To white guys like you and me, Colley. Is that your name? Colley?

The black girl was looking at Jocko because he used the word nigger in her presence. He had his hand halfway to Yugoslavia, but that didn’t upset her. What did upset her was he said nigger. She kept looking at him. Jocko didn’t even know he’d said anything to upset her. He kept going on about the Texas Rangers. By that time the hooker was beginning to realize she didn’t have a true john here, all she had was a honky telling Texas Ranger stories and feeling her up freebies. So she got up off the stool and wandered over to where a live nine-to-fiver was sitting there nursing a beer, and she started pitching at him— Good riddance, Jocko said.

That’s when they got down to straight talking.

It turned out Jocko had been in it a long time, done his first robbery when he was eighteen, well, almost nineteen. That was in Waco, Texas, held up a supermarket down there, came away with close to a thousand in cash. He was Texan by birth, six feet two inches tall, weighing two hundred and twenty pounds, hair as red as fire, pale-blue eyes, freckles all over his face. He had a baby face, Jocko, but he was built like a gorilla and there was a mean streak running through him that showed in the slight curl of his lip and the cold, flat look in his eyes. Colley was a little scared of him; big men like that always scared him. He himself was five-ten, which wasn’t short, but he was built narrow and the idea that Jocko could pick him up and throw him against the wall if he wanted to... well, that scared him a little. He told Jocko he’d done a few things in his life, too; he didn’t want to tell him too much, he hardly knew the guy.

They sat there drinking, and before you knew it Jocko was sounding him about a job he’d been casing for a couple of weeks. Pawnshop on Lenox and a Hun’ Twelfth, up in nigger Harlem. Jocko had himself a wheel man, but he still needed a fall partner to go in there with him, keep the place pure while he was cleaning out the register. Colley said he might be interested, depended on who the driver was, and also on whether or not he could get himself a gun. He had to tell Jocko, then, that he’d only been out of jail a little more than a month, that he’d taken a fall for armed robbery four years ago, and just got out after doing three and a bit more. That was why he didn’t have a piece yet; he was on parole, he wasn’t organized yet. Well, Jocko said, what you need to do is meet some people who’ll help you get organized, that’s all.

The people Jocko had in mind, or what it looked like at first, were two girls in his apartment up in the Bronx. Colley thought they were maybe hookers, but he wasn’t sure. They were both in their early twenties, one of them a skinny blonde, the other one a skinny brunette. The blonde had pimples all over her face; maybe she was younger than Colley had guessed. They both came into the apartment wearing fake furs. It was snowing outside, but neither one of them was wearing stockings. Just the fake furs, and short skirts, and boots.

Teddy came in a little while later.

“This is Teddy Stein,” Jocko said. “This is the driver I was telling you about. Teddy, meet Colley Donato.”

“Hey, how you doin?” Teddy said, and took Colley’s hand. “Colley, huh? I never heard that name before. Is it short for something?”

“It’s short for cauliflower,” the blonde with the pimples said, and laughed.

“It’s short for Nicholas,” Colley said.

“Colley, huh?”

“That’s right. Colley Donato.”

“How come they don’t call you Nick?” the brunette said.

“How come they don’t call you Abigail?” Colley said.

“What do you mean? My name’s Ginny, why should they call me Abigail?”

“Forget it,” Colley said.

“Why don’t you and Teddy talk a little?” Jocko said. “Girls, come on in the other room.”

“What’s so special in the other room?” the blonde asked, and laughed. But she and the brunette went out with Jocko.

“So you interested in this job, huh?” Teddy said. He was a little shorter than Colley, and a little stouter. He wore eyeglasses, and he was going bald at the back of his head. Colley guessed he was in his late thirties, which was old for a guy doing robberies. Then again, he was only a driver. In this business, Colley found it important to separate the dudes with heart from the ones who only thought they had heart. The dude sitting behind the wheel might kid himself into thinking he was at the center of the action, but he wasn’t. The dude who went in there with the gun, he was the one calling the tune, man.

“I’m maybe interested,” Colley said. “It depends on how it’s set up.”

“Well, I thought Jocko told you all about it,” Teddy said. “No, all Jocko told me was he’s got a pawnshop picked out, and somebody to drive a car.”

“So what do you want to know?”

“Has this pawnshop been cased good?”

“Yeah, Jocko done that himself.”

“When?”

“Two, three weeks ago.”

“How many of us will be on the job?”

“Just the three of us. If you come in.”

“No lookout, huh?”

“Not outside the shop, no. The way Jocko figures it, that’ll be your job. He’ll be at the register, you’ll be at the door, blow the whistle you see any trouble coming.”

“Mm,” Colley said.

“So how does it look?” Teddy said.

“Who’s runnin the show, you or Jocko?”

“It’s Jocko’s job.”

“What’s the split?”

“You got to talk to Jocko about that.”

“You ever do a job together before?”

“No, this’ll be the first one.”

“What’s he promised you?”

“Well, you talk to Jocko about that, okay?”

“If he wants me in on it, I get the same as him,” Colley said.

“That’s up to him.”

“No, that’s up to me. Cause otherwise, I ain’t interested.”

“If the split’s okay, you think you might be interested?”

“It sounds like he done his homework,” Colley admitted.

“Oh, yeah, he’s a very thorough guy. He’s got it all worked out so smooth, it’s almost boring.”

“Boring, huh? You in this for thrills or money?” Colley asked.

“Well, money, sure. What I meant—”

“You ever been busted?”

“Only once.”

“What for?”

“Hanging paper.”

“How’d you get from that to this?”

“I figured if I got caught passing queer checks, then maybe I wasn’t so good at it.”

“How do you know you’re good at driving?”

“I don’t. There’s always a first time, though, am I right?”

“Yeah,” Colley said, and thought Who the hell wants to be with an amateur his first time out? “What about Jocko? He ever done time?”

“Twice. In Texas.”

“What for?”

“Robbery both times.”

Great, Colley thought. I got a punk who never drove before, and I also got a mastermind who’s so good at plotting robberies he’s already been busted twice. This is certainly the job for me.

“I’ll think about it,” he said to Teddy.

That night they fixed him up with the blonde, who was not too bad in bed once you got past the pimples. And the next morning, which was three days before Christmas, Jocko came around with a Colt Detective Special and said it was a present. Counting the blonde, that was the second present. They went out for breakfast together, and Jocko said, “Well, Colley, what do you think? Are you coming in with us or what?” Colley spooned cornflakes into his mouth, and said, “Only if I get the same action you get.” Jocko nodded and held out his hand across the table.

So that was it, that was how it all started. Twelve jobs counting that first one on Christmas Eve, and all of them exactly the same, all of them coming off without a hitch, knock wood. But today the heat was bothering Colley. And besides, this was the thirteenth job. He debated mentioning this.

“This is number thirteen, you know,” he said.

Jocko looked at him and smiled. “Always got to be a number thirteen,” he said. “Less you want to retire after number twelve.”

“I’m only saying...”

“He’s superstitious,” Teddy said.

“I’m not. All I’m saying is if we got to do number thirteen, then for Christ’s sake let’s do it when it ain’t so fuckin hot!”

“Colley, I’m going to tell you something,” Jocko said. There was no menace in his voice, he spoke softly and reasonably. It was just that you could read meanness behind his pale-blue eyes and in the telltale curl of his lip. If Jocko hadn’t become an armed robber, he’d have made a good Texas Ranger. “I’m going to tell you why we have to do this job tonight, okay, Colley? Now, after I finish telling you, you’re free to do what you like. If Teddy and me has to do it just the two of us, him outside and me going in there alone, why then, that’s what we’ll have to do, and no hard feelings, I mean it.”

“Well, you know I wouldn’t let you—”

“I mean it, Colley, there’d be no hard feelings. Man has to do what he wants to do, and that’s that. But let me explain why I feel it’s essential that we go in there tonight. Never mind that we’d have to wait another whole week, we don’t do it now. So we’ll wait another week, so what, waiting a week ain’t important one way or the other. Except, of course, the man may go away on vacation, this is August, remember. But here’s the real reason, Colley; I am being as honest with you as I know how to be. The real reason I want to do this job tonight is because I am stone dead broke. That is the real reason. I am down to the bare soles of my feet, Colley, and I need to get in there and come out with some bread. That’s the long and the short of it.”

“I can lend you some money,” Colley said.

“Colley, I don’t borrow from nobody,” Jocko said, and grinned. “Hell, man, reason I started stealing was cause I’m too proud to borrow.”

Teddy laughed. “That’s a good one,” he said.

“Ever since Jeanine come up from Dallas,” Jocko said, “my expenses have gone sky-high, I don’t have to tell you. She’s a good woman, a good wife, but man, she does enjoy clothes and whiskey and having herself a gay old time. So what can I tell you?” Jocko said, and shrugged. “I got to do that job tonight, I got to get me some bread. I’ll tell you the truth, Colley, was you to back out, was Teddy to back out, I’d do it all by my lonesome, that’s the truth, I’m that hard up for cash. Jeanine was telling me only this morning she was thinking of maybe taking a job in one of them massage parlors, help out a little, you know: Well now, man, you know and I know that those massage-parlor girls ain’t nothing but whores, am I right? I told Jeanine I’d kick her ass clean around the block she even mention such a idea to me again. Point is, she’s worried, and she’s got reason to be. Woman has a right to expect her man to provide. I got to go in there tonight, and that’s that.” Jocko shrugged. “With you or without you, Colley, I’m goin in. Besides, it sounds to me like maybe all this business about it being hot and all is really cause this is number thirteen and that’s somehow got you spooked.”

“No, it’s just it’s so hot,” Colley said.

“Well, either way, the choice is yours, friend.”

“You’d go in there alone, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“End up in jail before the night’s out,” Colley said.

“Ain’t nobody ever going to bust me again,” Jocko said. “You don’t have to worry about that, I can take care of myself.” He spread his hands wide, said, “So that’s it,” and looked at his watch. “It’s quarter past seven now, the liquor store closes nine o’clock on Saturday nights. I want to go in about five to, what do you say, Colley?”

“Well, I can’t let you go in there alone.”

“I told you that’s no worry of yours.”

“If I don’t go in with you,” Colley said, “I guess that’s the end of us three, huh?”

“I guess so,” Jocko said.

“End of the Three Musketeers,” Teddy said.

“Well, I can’t let you go in alone.”

“Then you still with us?”

“I’m still with you,” Colley said.

“Good,” Jocko said.

“Good,” Teddy said.

In the movies, it was always a caper. The movies made it sound like somebody dancing a jig in the street. A caper. Fun and games. Mastermind plots it down to the last detail, everybody rehearses it, gets everything down like clockwork, the day of the job something goes wrong. Crime does not pay. The thing that goes wrong is something the mastermind never thought of in a million years. Or else it’s something about one of the characters. A flaw in his character, like he digs girls in boots. The day of the job a girl in boots marches by, he takes his eyes off the bank guard, watches the girl, there goes the caper.

Those two girls in boots that night in Jocko’s apartment. Ginny and whoever — the blonde was the one whose name he’d forgotten, and the blonde was the one he’d gone to bed with. Surprised she didn’t keep her goddamn boots on in the sack. Took off everything but the boots, went parading around the room for the longest time, tiny tits, narrow hips tufted blond crotch hair, looked like a teenager in a kinky English movie. Colley finally asked her was she going to march around the room all night long. The blonde said she was loosening up. He told her to come get in bed, he’d loosen her up. If it hadn’t been for the blonde, he probably wouldn’t have thrown in with Teddy and Jocko. Well, the gun, too. Jocko bringing him that gun, must’ve cost him a good two-fifty on the street, that was what decided him. He began to feel like himself again, hefting that gun in his hand. Yeah. That was the part they forgot to mention in all the movies. The gun. Well sure, how could they? Do a thing that’s about a caper, all the guys talking about a fuckin caper instead of a job, then the gun becomes a minor part of it. The major part is the clockwork timing and the breathless suspense that’s going to lead up to that girl in boots walking by at just the crucial moment— Alice, that was her name.

They forgot to mention the gun.

They forgot to mention what it felt like to have that big mother gun in your hand, to know that when you went in there and shoved that piece in somebody’s face, why, that person was going to look at that gun, and his eyes were going to go wide, and you were going to smell the stink of fear on him, man, and from that minute on, from the minute you yanked that piece out of your coat and saw his eyes bug with fright, you were the boss. And from that minute on, you knew the man there was going to get off his money and hand it to you nice and peaceful.

Here’s your caper movie, Colley thought; here’s tonight’s job the way it would be in a caper movie. We go in, right? I’ve been bitching about the heat all day long, so at the very last minute I wipe sweat out of my eyes and I miss seeing the cop on the beat who’s coming around shaking doors. The cop barges in the liquor store with his gun blazing, shoots Jocko in the back, and is putting the cuffs on me even before I’m finished wiping away the sweat. End of caper.

Or else how about this, yeah, this would be even better. We go in the store, right? Jocko does his number with the old man, I’m standing watching the outside, everything goes off without a hitch. The old man opens the register, nobody comes anywhere near the store, we’re home free and are running to where Teddy’s waiting with the car. But right at the crucial moment, a black cat crosses my path. And since I’ve been worried about this being number thirteen and all, why, naturally I panic and shoot the fuckin cat and we get the whole damn precinct up there down on our asses in ten seconds flat. Also end of caper.

In real life, nothing like that ever happens. In real life, a job ends only one of three ways. You get the money and you get away; or you don V get the money, but you get away; or you don’t get the money, and you get busted besides. Usually, if there’s trouble, it’s because somebody blows his cool. Now, unless you’re dealing with amateurs, the person who blows his cool is not one of your people. A dude holding a gun has nothing to worry about, he’s the one in control of the situation. What causes the trouble, usually, is some fat lady beginning to yell at the top of her lungs, or the guy who owns the store all of a sudden deciding to become John Wayne, or even just a passer-by outside seeing the action in there and marching in to make a citizen’s arrest. Blow your cool when somebody’s holding a gun on you, and you’re forcing that man to use the gun. And that’s trouble.

A man going in someplace with a gun had to be ready to use it, of course, but Colley hardly knew any robbers at all who actually wanted to use it. You found some kooks, yes, who enjoyed blowing a man’s brains out, but they were in the wrong racket, they should have been hiring out to do contracts instead. Your armed robber was a man who showed face, don’t forget; he went into a place unmasked, usually, and one reason for his sticking a gun under a man’s nose was to scare the guy not only for now but for later, too. If you scared him enough, he wouldn’t be so quick to identify you if you happened to get picked up later. The chances of getting picked up, unless it was right at the scene, were pretty slim anyway. What’s the guy going to do, wade through hundreds of mug shots of armed robbers? That was for the movies, too. Guy sitting at a desk with patient, kind detective. “That’s the man, Officer! I’d recognize him anywhere!” Bullshit.

You shove a gun in a man’s face, he suddenly loses his mind, his memory, his courage, and ten pounds of weight. “See this, mister? I’ll shoot your face off you don’t open the register fast. Now do it!” Colley had heard Jocko using that same line a total of twelve times now. He said it the same way each time. Each time the man opened the register. Fast. There was something in Jocko’s voice that told the man he meant business. Jocko would use the gun if he had to. The man knew it, and the man didn’t want to get shot. That was simple arithmetic.

In one of the holdups — this was a Mom and Pop grocery store in Queens, they hit it on a Friday night in April, gorgeous spring night, this was about six o’clock the place was just closing. Teddy was outside in the car, it was a car he’d boosted that afternoon, they always used a stolen car on their jobs. Jocko went in, walked straight to the counter, Colley came in behind him, was closing the door when he heard Jocko doing his monster routine. “See this, mister? I’ll shoot your face off you don’t open the register fast. Now do it!” This was Colley’s cue to take his own gun from his pocket, keep it low, under the glass panel of the door, but have it ready to bring it up if there was trouble of any kind. The old ginzo behind the counter was opening the register almost before Jocko got the words out of his mouth. This store had been hit four times already by two different gangs, that’s why Jocko had picked it, cause it was an easy mark. The guy’s wife was standing right alongside him. She looked a little like Colley’s Aunt Anna, big fat Italian lady wearing a black dress, faint black mustache over her lip. She was scared but at the same time angry, and you could see she was thinking her husband was a coward for not doing something. This was the fifth holdup here, and all the guy did was open the cash register each time. Which he was also doing this time.

Colley was at the door, half watching the action at the counter, half watching the street outside. It was stickball time, you could hear kids up the street yelling. Nice April noises. City noises. He loved this fuckin city. Outside, a woman came up to the door, she was talking to somebody over her shoulder, she didn’t even look at the knob. She’d been coming here maybe half her life, she could find the place and the doorknob blindfolded. She grabbed the knob, she walked in, she saw Colley’s gun. Nice Italian lady, also like one of his aunts, but not as fat as most of them. Ready to scream down the whole neighborhood.

Colley lifted the gun so the muzzle was pointing up at her head; that hole in the muzzle could look mighty big when it was pointing up at you. He slitted his eyes. He made his voice a rasp. In Italian, he said, “Signora, sta zitta.” That meant, “Lady, cool it.” He didn’t have to say another word. The lady went over near the shelves where the macaroni was, and she started saying a novena. Forty Hail Marys and a few dozen Our Fathers Who Art in Heaven while Jocko was cleaning out the register. When Jocko started for the door, the lady fell to her knees because she knew from television and the movies that the two bad guys were going to kill her now. “Signora,” Colley said, “è finita, la commedia.” That meant, “Lady, the comedy is finished.” It was a famous line from something. Colley’s grandfather, who used to go to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the operas there, was always quoting that line. Colley figured it was from an opera. The lady looked up at him. She still thought she was going to get shot. Colley started laughing. Jocko thought Colley had lost his marbles, and began tugging on his sleeve, trying to get him out of the store. The lady meanwhile thought Colley was Richard Widmark in that picture where he threw a lady just like herself down the stairs. She was shaking so hard she was knocking La Rosa boxes off the shelf. Jocko finally got Colley to put the gun away, and they both went outside, the guns back in their pockets now, two gentlemen out for an evening stroll. Behind them, a real-life opera started in the grocery store. Teddy threw open the car doors. Colley was still laughing.

He was really worried about the hot weather. And about this being the thirteenth job. But he’d given them his word on it, said he was going along with them, so the only thing to do now was shut up and go along. Still, he was worried. His grandmother wouldn’t even go out of the house on the thirteenth of each month. “Hoodoo jinx of a day,” she’d say, sounding more like an Irish washerwoman than a lady who’d been born in Naples. His grandmother was dead now. Cancer when he was twenty-five. That was four years ago. Hoodoo jinx of a day, she used to call the thirteenth, and refused to budge from the house on that day. Even when her brother Jerry died in New Jersey, she wouldn’t go to the funeral because it took place on the thirteenth of the month. Well, this had nothing to do with a day. of course. But still, it was the thirteenth job, wasn’t it? Well, that was stupid, that really was being superstitious. Teddy was right. And Jocko was right, too. There had to be a number thirteen unless you wanted to retire after number twelve.

Colley wasn’t nervous, he was never nervous before a job. But he was worried that this time somebody who was irritated by the heat would do something dumb. He didn’t know what. Just something that would force one or the other of them to use the gun. He had never had to use the gun. Jocko had once used the gun in Texas. He had blinded a man in a gas station. Shot him in the eye when the guy told him he didn’t have the combination to the safe. “See this, mister? I’ll shoot your face off...” and that’s just what he’d done. Bam, right in the eye. Jocko got busted; that was the second fall he’d taken. If you used the gun, there was always the chance of fuzz descending. Very dangerous. Also, you got into much heavier raps once you used the gun. On top of the robbery-one charge, you got felonious assault added. Or homicide, God forbid. Jesus, he would never want to kill anybody. Never. In his nightmares he used the gun and killed somebody.

“This is a nice heap,” Teddy said. “It handles nice.”

The car was a 1974 Ford station wagon. Teddy had boosted it that afternoon in Brooklyn. There was no need to put on different license plates or anything like that. If you boosted a car that morning, it didn’t show up on the police department’s hot-car sheets till sometime the next day. The police wouldn’t be looking for it till maybe two, three days after it got stolen. Besides, nobody in the police department went around constantly checking license plates against the numbers in their little black books. The only time they checked out a plate was if they saw something suspicious. Three guys sitting in a car watching the street, that’s suspicious. The cop on the beat’ll check out the license-plate numbers in his book, just on the off chance he’s got a stolen vehicle there. Wants to know what he’s going up against. Are those three guys just sitting there watching the girls go by, or are they thieves casing a joint they’re going to make in the next five minutes, or are they junkies waiting for the man to show with their dope? These are all considerations for the cop on the beat. He doesn’t want to rap on a closed car window with his stick and all of a sudden three guys are shooting at him. So he checks out the plate first. If the car is stolen, he calls back to the ranch for help.

Another time he’ll check a plate is if something accidentally rings a bell. At muster, the sergeant will read off the hot-car sheet, and all the patrolmen’ll make notes, and maybe something’ll stick in the guy’s head — red and white Buick with a smashed right headlight, something like that. So while he’s walking the beat he’ll see a red and white Buick with a smashed right headlight, it doesn’t take a mastermind to figure that maybe this is the car that was stolen. Out comes the book, and he checks the numbers. Thing is, your professional car thief is a man who doesn’t steal a car in the Bronx, for example, and then drive it all over the Bronx so every cop on the beat can get a good look at it. If he steals it in the Bronx, he’s usually from Brooklyn. And the cop on the Brooklyn beat couldn’t care less what the hell was stolen in the Bronx.

“Don’t you think it rides nice?” Teddy said.

“Yeah, it rides nice,” Colley said.

“I grabbed it outside a supermarket. Lady must’ve been inside doing her shopping.”

“Comes out, finds her wagon gone,” Jocko said.

“That’s life,” Teddy said.

“She leave the keys in it?”

“No, but it was unlocked. I opened the door and got at the hood latch. Thing that always amazes me, I can be working on a car four, five minutes, hood up, crossing the wires so I can start it, nobody’ll say boo to me. I once had a cop come over, would you believe it, stood there on the sidewalk with his hands behind his back, watching me while I crossed the wires. He nodded when I got the job finished. Nice work, he was telling me. You fixed whatever was wrong with it.”

The men laughed. The sense of familiarity in the car was beginning to dispel whatever worries Colley had about the heat or the hoodoo jinx number thirteen. They had done this a dozen times before, they had talked easily and casually on the way to one job or another. Teddy, in fact, had probably told that very same story on the way to each and every job, and they had laughed genuinely each time he told it. He would now explain that he had rigged a switch...

“What I done,” he said, “was rig a switch here on the dash. So I can start it without going under the hood each time.”

“Yeah, good,” Jocko said.

“Is that clock right?” Colley said. He was sitting alone in the back, and he leaned forward toward the front seat.

Jocko checked the dashboard clock against his wrist-watch. “I’ve got a quarter to,” he said.

“That’s what I’ve got,” Colley said.

“I never had a car in my life the clock worked,” Teddy said. “I stole Cadillacs, Mercedes-Benzes, Continentals, you name it. The clock never works.”

“They build them so they won’t work,” Jocko said.

“What do you mean?”

“They don’t want them to work.”

“Why wouldn’t they want them to work?” Teddy asked.

“If they wanted them to work, don’t you think they could build them so they worked? Man, they build a machine costs fifteen thousand dollars, whatever, everything all precision-made, you mean to tell me if they wanted that old clock to work, it wouldn’t work?”

“I guess they could make it work if they wanted to,” Teddy said.

“Sure,” Jocko said.

“Then why don’t they?”

“Who knows what their motive is?” Jocko said. “These big companies are all screwed up.” Abruptly, his voice and his manner changed. “Listen, I just want to go over this one more time, Teddy. After we come out, you’re going crosstown to Jerome Avenue, and we’ll ditch the car someplace near Yankee Stadium, wherever you find a good spot.”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Then we go our separate ways, and meet tomorrow morning at my place.”

“Right,” Teddy said.

“Colley?”

“Fine.”

“You still worried?”

“No, no.”

“Just make believe it’s number fourteen. One after this will be fourteen, so just make believe it’s this one instead.”

“That don’t bother me no more,” Colley said.

“Or make believe it’s a baker’s dozen,” Teddy said.

“What’s that, a baker’s dozen?”

“That’s thirteen,” Teddy said.

“So how does that change anything? If a baker’s dozen is thirteen, I think of it as thirteen, it’s still thirteen, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Teddy said.

“Jesus,” Colley said.

“Don’t think about it at all,” Jocko said. “That’s the best way.”

“I’m not thinking about it,” Colley said. “I’m hot, that’s all. I can’t stand this kind of weather, that’s all.”

“Probably cool off later tonight,” Teddy said.

“Won’t cool off till we get some rain,” Colley said.

“Jeanine likes this kind of weather,” Jocko said. “She’s from Fort Myers originally — you ever been down that part of Florida?”

“I never been to Florida, period,” Colley said.

“Gets mighty hot down there in the summer. July and August, it’s a blast furnace down there.”

“Sounds like just the place for me,” Colley said.

“Yeah,” Jocko said, and laughed. “Jeanine loves it. A day like today, that’s a little too brisk for her.”

“Yeah, it sure is brisk,” Colley said.

“You want to take a right when we get to the corner,” Jocko said.

“Yeah,” Teddy said.

“Then it’s four blocks up.”

“Yeah.”

Jocko reached in under the blue poplin windbreaker he was wearing and pulled from the pocket of his trousers a Colt Cobra. The gun was almost identical to the Detective Special that Colley was carrying, except that it was partially made of aluminum and was lighter — fifteen ounces to twenty-one ounces for Colley’s gun. Both pistols were snub-nosed revolvers, with fixed sights and walnut stocks. Each gun carried six .38 Special cartridges. Jocko rolled out the cylinder now, idly glanced at the cartridges, nodded briefly, flipped the cylinder back into position, and put the gun in his pocket again. Teddy had made the turn onto the avenue now, and was heading north toward the liquor store.

Neither Colley nor Jocko had permits or licenses for the guns they were carrying; both guns had been purchased from receivers of stolen goods. If a cop stopped and searched them and found the pieces on them, they would both be charged with violation of Section 265.05 of the Penal Law — Possession of Weapons and Dangerous Instruments and Appliances. Colley practically knew the Penal Law by heart. Possession of a loaded firearm was a Class D Felony, punishable by a minimum of three and a maximum of seven. Teddy was driving very carefully. No one wanted the fuzz coming down on them for a bullshit gun violation. Get busted holding up a store, okay, that was a legitimate beef. But get stopped for passing a traffic light and then spend seven in jail on a gun rap — no way.

The Penal Law sections on robbery were very clear, with none of the fine print that existed in the burglary sections, where the degree of the crime was figured by whether the breaking and entry had been done in the daytime or in the night, in a dwelling or in a building, with a gun or without — man wanted to become a burglar, he first had to become a lawyer so he’d know what crime he was about to commit! But the robbery sections were in straightforward, almost blunt English, starting right off with the definition: Robbery Is Forceful Stealing. You couldn’t make it plainer than that. The various degrees of robbery were also plain to understand:

Any kind of robbery was a felony. For robbery three, you could get a maximum of seven years in prison; for robbery two, you could get fifteen; for robbery one, which was a Class B felony and nothing to sneeze at, you could get twenty-five. The three of them were about to commit, by definition, robbery one.

“There it is,” Jocko said. “Just up ahead.”

The crime itself began for them the moment Jocko said those words; until then there had been only the preparation for the crime. Until then the atmosphere had been relaxed and informal; now it became charged and tense. They had done this a dozen times before, and each time the risk was the same. Each time Colley and Teddy gambled whatever was in the cash register or safe against a possible twenty-five years in prison. Jocko gambled a possible life sentence; he had already taken two falls, another bust would be his third. He was twenty-seven years old and had already spent fourteen years of his life in detention centers, county jails, adolescent correctional facilities and hard-ass prisons. Colley had been sentenced to seven for the robbery-two fall, and had got out on parole after serving a little more than three. That had been shortly before last Christmas. He was twenty-eight at the time.

He had gone home to pick up his clothes and then had moved in with a girl he knew, a go-go dancer in one of the joints on Forty-ninth, just off Broadway. That had lasted about a week and a half, a total bummer. She kicked him out at the end of that time, called him a freeloader, said he wasn’t even any good in bed. He was living in a fleabag on Forty-seventh when he ran into Jocko in the bar that night. Only reason he’d sat down next to him was because he was hoping to make time with the black hooker. The next day he was holding a gun in his hand again. And two days after that, on Christmas Eve, he committed another robbery.

They knew just how to do it, they had done it together often enough and they expected to do it exactly the same way tonight. There was something athletic about their performance — an end running wide, perhaps, to receive a quarterback’s pass, a guard taking out the sole opposing tackle; or a smooth double-play combination, Tinkers to Evers to Chance — Teddy swiftly pulling the stolen automobile in toward the curb and cutting the engine, Jocko and Colley getting out on the curb side and beginning to walk purpose fully but not too swiftly toward the front door of the liquor store. There was something theatrical in their performance as well — Teddy looking bored at the wheel of the car as he lit a cigarette and let out a long stream of smoke, Colley and Jocko making small talk as they approached the store, some bullshit about Jeanine’s mother having come down with a summer cold, those were the worst kind, each of them responding to every hem and haw, every pause, every lifting of the eyebrow while robbery drummed in their heads, robbery hummed in their blood, robbery propelled them to the front of the liquor store.

And finally, there was something sexual in the way they worked together, a trio that had in the short space of eight months learned each other’s skills and shortcomings, and moved now to supplement or correct, the thrill of what they were doing undeniable; Teddy confessed one night that he always waited at the wheel of the car with an erection. There was for Colley and Jocko — Teddy never experienced this, or at least mentioned it — the feeling that they were on dope. That everything was being slowed down by a fix. Not all the way down to slow motion, but somewhere much slower than what the real tempo was.

Colley saw Jocko’s hand reach out in the shimmering August neon, saw clearly and precisely the small heart-shaped tattoo on the ball of the hand where thumb and forefinger joined, saw the fingers grasping the brass knob, and turning the knob, and easing the door open, slowly, slowly — everything moved so slowly when the juices ran high. He heard the tinkling of the bell over the door as though it were coming from a distant lush valley, and he moved into the store behind Jocko, moved on feet that seemed cushioned — he was somehow in sneakers again, though he was wearing black-leather loafers, he was running in high-topped Keds, he was ten years old and going for a base that had been chalked onto the asphalt, running in slow motion, Go, Colley, they are yelling at him. Go.

He closes the door behind Jocko. Jocko is moving across the store. The bottles are catching light and reflecting it; brilliant color explodes from the shelves and the stacked displays, bourbon browns and Scotch ambers, sauterne yellows and burgundy reds, crème de menthe greens. Jocko is walking toward the counter and Colley watches him and sees him moving through a stained-glass window toward an altar where a baldheaded priest stands in a brilliant red surplice: the counterman wearing a red cotton jacket, the pocket of it embroidered in white with the words Carlisle Liquors. Colley wonders if this is Mr. Carlisle himself, he wears the name so proudly, Carlisle Liquors, it might easily be a family crest, a proud and ancient family name, like Donato is a proud and ancient family name if your grandmother happens to come from a slum in Naples. Or is Carlisle the man’s first name? Is he perhaps Carlisle Abernathy the Third, standing there beaming behind the counter as Jocko takes forever to cross the stained-glass room.

Colley closes the door.

Has it taken him all this time to close the door? He hears the snug whisper of the door easing into the jamb, hears a tiny ear-shattering click as the strike plate engages the bolt. There is a shade on the door, he wonders if he should pull down the shade. He has never had a door with a shade before. Never on any of the dozen jobs they pulled. He wonders now if the shade on the door is the big mistake the mastermind made. Is the shade on the door the thing that is going to wreck the caper? But this is not a caper. This is a job. The job is armed robbery. You fuck up on this job, mister, you go to jail for twenty-five years.

Is Jocko at the counter yet? Colley turns from the door, glances toward the counter for just a moment, sees that the baldheaded man in the red cotton jacket is looking suspiciously at Jocko as he approaches, the smile more tentative now: Is this a holdup here? Are these two guys together, the one coming toward the counter and the other one standing over there near the door? They have to be together, otherwise why doesn’t the one near the door either start looking at the wine bottles on the rack there to the left, or else come toward the counter himself to state what sort of alcoholic beverage he wishes to purchase here in Carlisle Liquors, a proud and ancient family name... the gun is coming out of Jocko’s pants.

He holds the gun like a huge cock, waving it in the bald guy’s face. Colley suppresses a sudden urge to giggle, and looks out at the street. People are moving past slowly in the stifling heat, cool here in the store, though, air conditioner humming, no chance of anybody doing anything stupid in here, too cool in here for anything stupid. Behind him he hears the words he’s heard a dozen times before, spoken exactly the same way, the same voice-level and tone, the same inflection, “See this, mister? I’ll shoot your face off you don’t open the register fast. Now do it!”

There is another voice.

Colley ignores the words at first; they are too loaded with everything he has feared since he woke up this morning. He hears the words, of course, and he knows what they mean, but he chooses to react instead to the fact that there is another voice in the store, an unexpected voice that follows so quickly upon Jocko’s set opening speech that it seems like an altar boy’s response to a priest’s litany, and makes suddenly valid the image of the counterman-priest in his stained-glass store.

Colley is suddenly trapped inside a movie. It is a caper movie, and everything is going wrong. It is the next-to-the-last scene in the picture, where everything goes wrong. The mastermind forgot something. Or a character flaw exposes itself. In the instant before he turns toward the counter, he tries to think what it is that possibly could have gone wrong, knowing full well what it is because he has heard the words and understood them, but refuses to accept the words and the meaning of the words until he can see for himself that what the voice claims is actually so. He knows, too, that he cannot do anything to change this situation. This is the scene where everything goes wrong, and there is nothing that anyone can ever do to change it.

This is the hoodoo-jinx scene; it cannot be changed because it was filmed too long ago. Jocko said his lines a long time ago, and they were recorded on film, just as the other voice was recorded. The movie is playing here in this liquor store for the first time anywhere, folks, it is a world premiere. But it really all happened a long time ago, when it was being filmed, and nothing the actors can do or say now will change a frame of what has been frozen for posterity. Colley knows the Penal Law, he now thinks, “the actor or another participant in the crime,” and he thinks yes, Jocko has said his lines, the scene is progressing nicely. The voice that answers Jocko raps into the store with machine-gun authority. Jocko knows his lines because he’s said them so often, and the man responding on cue has surely said his lines at least as often — oh, the scene is going beautifully. If only Colley wasn’t so scared shitless, he could maybe eat his popcorn and enjoy the rest of the movie. He is scared only because of what the other voice has just said, even though he has not yet turned toward the counter to make sure this isn’t merely old bald Carlisle Liquors making his voice big and barrel-chested; there are some short guys like that who can find a voice deep in the soles of their feet someplace and imitate wrestling champs.

“Police officers!” the voice says. “Don’t move!”

Instead of not moving, Colley moves. He turns from the door, where he has been watching the street, which suddenly seems like a foolish occupation, since the thing that is going wrong is not coming from the street but from inside the store. At first he thinks he has made a mistake. Nothing seems to be changed there at the counter. Jocko is still holding a gun in his fist, the barrel pointed up at Carlisle Liquors’ face, and the old man is looking into the muzzle, nothing has changed, it is all a mistake. Not the mistake, not the big blunder that fucks up the caper, but simply an auditory mistake. Colley didn’t really hear anybody saying anything about cops, all he really heard was the counterman saying “Yes, sir, I will open the register in a jiffy,” and somehow, probably because of the shitty acoustics, thought he heard “Police officers! Don’t move!”

But no, this is number thirteen, this hoodoo jinx of a movie was shot a long, long time ago — probably when his grandmother was a teenager walking the streets of Naples and refusing to meet a neighbor’s glance for fear either of them would be suspected of casting the Evil Eye — and what Colley sees are two police officers, sure enough, both as big as life and twice as wide. They are neither of them wearing the blue, they are not uniformed cops, but then, who would expect uniformed cops to be sitting a liquor store? They look exactly like any detective Colley has ever seen in his life, and they are both holding guns in their fists, and Colley notices something else that is wrong, notices it at once, and has the feeling now that this goddamn movie he is in has suddenly turned into a negative print because the detectives are holding their guns wrong.

He realizes all at once that both of them are left-handed, they are both holding their pieces in their left hands as they come down a narrow aisle formed by two standing racks. The racks are made of metal, they are green, they are maybe eight or ten feet high, and they are neatly stacked with whiskey bottles. The detectives are each at least six feet tall, they come charging down the narrow aisle like bulls coming into an arena. At the far end of the aisle, Colley sees an open door. There’s a room back there, he can see cartons piled on the floor. That’s where the cops were staked out, in the room back there, waiting for somebody to hold up the joint. Probably a lot of liquor-store holdups in the neighborhood, cops decided to stake out one or two places, see if they’d get lucky. Either that, or some stoolie heard him and Jocko were going to hit the joint, in which case the cops weren’t here waiting for just anybody, they were here specifically waiting for him and Jocko to come in and make their move. Colley wonders which it is. He will spend the rest of his life wondering about it. In the meantime, the cops are here. Whyever or however, they are here.

Cops have always scared him, and they scare him now. The one in the front position is ludicrously holding a shield in his right hand. The shield is a regular detective’s shield, gold with blue enamel, maybe three inches long, two inches wide, pinned to a leather case. The flap of the case is hanging down toward his wrist, and he’s got the shield cupped in the palm of his right hand. In his left hand he’s got the piece. He holds the piece close to his hip, almost resting on the hipbone there; it’s the same gun Colley is holding in his hand, a Colt Detective Special. The other cop keeps weaving from side to side as he comes down the aisle, as if he’s trying to get a look around his partner at the bad guys who are holding up the store. When they reach the end of the aisle, they fan out in two directions, one of them coming toward Colley, the other going toward Jocko at the counter.

The one coming toward Colley is the man holding the shield. He holds it like a warrior’s shield, never mind just a little badge. He holds it like one of King Arthur’s knights. With that shield out in front of him, nothing’s going to happen to him. He’s Lancelot, with his fuckin shield there. For the first time in his life Colley wants to use the gun. Not because he’s that scared (though he is very scared) and not because he’s angry the job is going wrong (though he’s angry, too) but only because he wants to show the cop how fuckin dumb he’s being with that shield. What does he think it is, a magic shield or something? Hold it out in front of you, it protects you from the bad guys? Hell it does, Colley thinks, and pulls the trigger.

The cop is about to say “Police officers!” again. He gets only part of the word out. He says “Po” and then the bullet takes him right in the mouth. It’s as if the bullet rams the rest of the word back into his throat and breaks it up into a thousand red and yellow and white globules that come flying out the back of his head and splatter all over a Seagram’s poster behind him. He does an almost comic skid, the force of the bullet knocking him backward, his feet still moving forward and flying out from under him. He goes into the air backward, hangs there for an instant in an upside-down swan dive, his arms thrown wide, the shield in one hand, the gun in the other, his back arched, his head thrown back and spurting blood. Then he crashes suddenly to the white vinyl tile floor, knocking over a wine rack. There is the sound of bottles crashing. Burgundy, Chianti and Bordeaux are suddenly spilling deeper reds into and around the bright screaming red that is still pouring from the back of the cop’s head. Colley watches all this in fascination. He does not yet realize he’s shot a man. He certainly does not realize the man is already dead.

Jocko is now facing the aisle the cops came out of. The second cop, the one who’d been weaving down the aisle like a broken-field runner, stops cold in his tracks when he hears the gun exploding and the bottles crashing. He doesn’t turn toward the noise. Instead he immediately levels his gun at Jocko, as if Jocko is the one who fired the shot. Colley stands just inside the door, looking at the man on the floor. In the background, near the register, he sees Jocko and the second cop squaring off, but he keeps his eyes on the man he just shot. It is beginning to dawn on him that he shot a man. The man lies there like a bundle of old clothes. Move, Colley thinks. Get up! There are two shots in rapid succession now, crack, and then crack, it never goes BANG like in the comic strips. Two sharp cracks, differently pitched. Colley registers the fact that the shots come from two different guns, but he keeps watching the man on the floor, he does not take his eyes off the man on the floor. There is another crack, the air is hanging blue with smoke now, the store stinks of cordite, the air conditioner is causing the smoke to swirl in patterns that make the room go in and out of focus. For a moment Colley thinks he is going to faint.

There are two men on the floor now.

Jocko is coming toward him.

Colley’s eyes go one, two, three: the man he shot, the other man lying on the floor some six feet from the cash register, and Jocko staggering toward him. He does not realize at first, he is very slow to grasp things in this fuckin movie, he does not realize that Jocko has been hit. Then he sees that Jocko has his left hand hooked like a claw, and he sees that blood is pouring from under the sleeve of the windbreaker and into Jocko’s cupped hand, and spilling from the hand onto the floor as he comes toward Colley. Jocko’s eyes are out of focus, it looks as if he is going to pass out. He has the gun in his right hand, and to steady himself he reaches out with the hand that’s running blood and clamps the hand onto Colley’s sleeve. The summer-weight fabric soaks up the blood, the blood spreads along the sleeve, Colley can feel it wetting his skin. He loops his arm around Jocko’s waist. Jocko’s gun clatters to the floor, and all at once he goes limp. Colley starts dragging him toward the door.

At the door, he stops and looks back at the man he shot.

The man is not moving.

There are suddenly too many things to think about. Where’s the car? — that’s the first thing; he can’t remember where Teddy parked the car. He has one arm wrapped around Jocko, his left hand clutched in Jocko’s belt, supporting him that way, Jocko’s left arm dripping blood onto Colley’s hand, he can feel the blood sticky and hot. In his right hand he’s still got the gun, but he can’t turn the doorknob without putting the gun away, and this suddenly becomes another problem that seems impossible to solve. He stands there supporting Jocko, and feeling the steady flow of Jocko’s blood, and behind him the counterman is yelling obscenities at him, yelling them in a steady monotonous senseless stream, and he cannot for the life of him figure out how to put away the gun and turn the doorknob.

The door opens magically.

He expects it will be an entire police precinct coming in the store here, but it’s only Teddy. Teddy’s face is all squinched up and sweaty, he looks as if he’s going to start bawling any second. But he loops Jocko’s right arm over his shoulder, and together they drag him out on the sidewalk. The heat out there comes up into Colley’s face like a puff of black smoke. He almost chokes on the heat. He begins to sweat profusely as they carry and drag and pull Jocko up the block — where’s the car, does Teddy know where the car is? — the sweat coming through his clothes, or is that Jocko’s blood? A lady stops in the middle of the sidewalk and looks at them. Colley yells at her, he doesn’t even know what he yells, and she backs off a pace. He yells again, and she moves away even further, and he remembers one time at the Bronx Zoo when a tiger in his cage began roaring and everybody backed away; the lady is backing away like that now.

Teddy opens the front door of the car, and Colley throws Jocko in on the seat, but Jocko’s front legs are hanging out on the sidewalk. This becomes another problem he doesn’t know how to solve. He can’t close the door with Jocko’s legs hanging out like that, but Teddy is already running around the front of the car, Teddy is already in the car, Teddy is slamming the door on his side, Teddy is starting the fuckin car, he yells at Teddy to hold it a fuckin minute! He keeps staring at Jocko’s legs hanging out of the car, trying to figure out how to get them inside. Teddy is hollering at him now Get in, Colley, for Christ’s sake, get in! but he keeps staring at Jocko’s legs until finally it occurs to him that all he has to do is swivel Jocko around on the seat, change the position of his body so that his legs are inside the car too. He puts both arms under the backs of Jocko’s knees, and he swivels him in that way, and then he steps back as though he has all the time in the world to examine what he’s just accomplished, even though Teddy is still yelling at him to get in the car.

He floats on sneakered feet to the back door of the car, and reaches out in slow motion for the handle, and opens the door and gets inside. He hears the solid thump of the door when it closes behind him, but he has no recollection of having pulled it closed. He is remembering instead the ridiculous gold and blue shield. He is remembering the red and white and yellow globules that exploded from the back of the man’s head. What he finally tells Teddy is close to the truth, but it is not the exact truth. He is unconsciously editing the memory, the way in confession when he was a kid he edited his sins so Jesus Christ our Lord wouldn’t have suffered in vain and so God Almighty wouldn’t send down a lightning bolt to strike him dead right there in St. Augustine’s.

“I shot a man,” he says.

He does not say, “I killed a cop.”

As Teddy runs the red light on the corner, Colley is thinking only that his grandmother wouldn’t go to her own brother’s funeral because it took place on the thirteenth day of the month.