Cops and Robbers Page 15

  Joe was at the window. He looked out and to the right. He saw the parade, but he also saw a cop at another window on this floor. The cop was glancing in this direction, and when he saw Joe he waved. Joe nodded and waved back, and brought his head back in.

  Tom was ripping the bonds into smaller and smaller pieces, working quickly but efficiently. Joe came over to the desk, gave the stack of paper a regretful look, and said, “Less than a block away.”

  “Help me with this.”

  “Sure.”

  Joe picked up a dozen bonds and gazed at them. “This one’s for a hundred grand,” he said.

  “Come on, Joe.”

  “Right.” Smiling sadly, shaking his head, he started to rip up the bonds.

  Outside, the parade noises were getting louder; mostly the crowd noises, nearly blotting out the sounds of the bands. Turning his head for a fast look at the windows, Tom saw bits of paper already starting to flutter down. And less than a quarter of the bonds had been ripped up so far.

  The two of them stood there, ripping paper. Shouting and yelling from down below. Then, in a different broken rhythm, a foot started thudding against the bathroom door.

  They looked at one another. Tom said, “Will it pop open?”

  “Christ.”

  Joe dropped the paper in his hands and ran down to the other end of the office. Eastpoole was kicking steadily and strongly at the door; apparently with the flat bottom of his shoe, sole and heel together. The door itself seemed solid enough to hold against that, but the catch could pop at any time and the door swing open.

  What Joe would have liked mostly would have been to open the door and start doing some kicking himself; but there was a chance Eastpoole and the girl would be able to see through the latticework what Tom was doing. And the point of all this was that everybody think the crooks had gotten away with the bonds.

  Joe looked around, grabbed one of the chairs away from the dining room table, and propped the back of it under the doorknob. He kicked the rear legs to jam them more firmly into the carpet, then stood back and watched. Inside, Eastpoole was still kicking at the door, but there wasn’t even a tremor showing around the knob or the chair.

  Tom was still ripping paper, back by Eastpoole’s desk. Joe trotted over and said, “Fixed. It won’t open now.”

  “Good.”

  There was a mound of ripped paper on the desk, all little irregular pieces no more than an inch square. Joe grabbed a double handful, carried it over to the window, and leaned his head out slightly first to see if the other cop was still visible down to the right. He was, but he was turned the other way, watching the roofline across the street.

  Down below, through thousands of descending specks of paper, Joe could see the three convertibles in a row, each one with an astronaut sitting up on the back, waving and smiling. The lead car wasn’t quite opposite this building yet, and they were all moving very slowly, no more than three miles an hour. The air was full of cheers and paper.

  Joe grinned, and tossed his handful of ripped-up bonds out the window. The mass went out like a snowball, and disintegrated at once, all the pieces mixing with the rest of the torrent of paper coming down.

  Tom’s thumbs and wrists were getting sore. The bonds had been printed on heavy paper, and he’d been tearing them up as quickly as he could, the stacks as thick as he could manage. Now he took a break, grabbing up a handful of shreds and turning toward the window.

  Joe was coming back. “Be careful leaning out,” he said. “There’s a cop down the row to the right. Waved at me.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Tom tossed the paper out without showing himself, or trying to see the cop at the other window. When he turned back, Joe was picking up more paper. Tom hurried over, saying, “No, not that. Smaller pieces, smaller. They aren’t ready yet.”

  Joe nodded at the window. “They’re going by, Tom. The cars are going by right now.”

  “Small, Joe,” Tom said. “So nothing shows.” He pushed a little stack of paper together. “Take this.”

  Joe gave an irritable impatient shrug, gathered up the stack Tom had made, and carried it over to the window. Tom went back to ripping, and when Joe came to the desk again he also started shredding the bonds that were still left.

  For the next minute or so the two of them stood side by side at the desk, tearing the last of the bonds into tiny remnants. Then they threw them all out, double handfuls fluttering down through the paper-filled air, disappearing. The three convertibles had all gone by, were all in the next block by now, but there was still enough paper coming down from all the buildings in this block so that Tom and Joe’s contribution didn’t show.

  Tom gathered up the last few pieces left on the desk, hurried to the window, and tossed them out. Joe walked slowly around the desk, searching the floor, and found half a dozen pieces that had fallen in their hurry to be done. Tom spent time looking at the floor around the window, and found three more pieces that he picked up.

  When Joe came over to the window with the few scraps he’d just gathered up from the floor, Tom said, “We can’t leave any.”

  “We won’t,” Joe said. He tossed the last scraps out. “Let’s go,” he said. “It’s time to get out of here.”

  But Tom kept prowling around, frowning down at the floor. “If we leave even one little piece for them to find,” he said, “it blows the whole thing. They’ll know what we’ve done, and that kills it.”

  “We’ve got them all,” Joe insisted. “Come on, let’s go.”

  “Hah!” Tom pounced on one last bit of paper midway between desk and window. He hurried to the window, where the snowfall of paper was starting to thin, and tossed the final piece out. “Now,” he said.

  Joe was already opening desk drawers. He found a stack of typewriter paper in one and pulled out a handful. Tom joined him at the desk, opened the blue laundry bag, and Joe dumped the paper into it. Then they both took a quick last look around.

  “Okay,” Tom said.

  Joe was looking at the television screens. All quiet. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  They walked out of Eastpoole’s office together, through the secretary’s office, and down the corridor toward the reception area and the elevators. Tom carried the laundry bag over his shoulder. It was very obvious there, but that was the point; they had to be seen carrying the loot out with them.

  Walking along, Tom said, “I wish we knew a way out that wouldn’t take us past any of those damn cameras.”

  Joe nodded. “I know. It’d be better if the guards didn’t know we were coming.”

  “We could try,” Tom said. They’d come to an office entrance now, but Tom stopped and said, “There’s a camera in there. Why don’t we go down this other way instead? Maybe we can go around, come at it from the other side.”

  “Get lost in here? Wander around until we get picked up?”

  “It isn’t that big,” Tom said. “And if we get lost, we just stop somebody and ask.”

  Joe grinned at him. “You get funny ideas,” he said. “Okay, let’s try it, what the hell.”

  So they went off into new territory. They both had a pretty good sense of direction, and they had a general idea of the way things were set up around here. If they kept to the right for a while, then made a left farther on, they should come at the reception area from the opposite side.

  It worked, all right, insofar as getting them to the reception area along a different route was concerned. But it didn’t do any good when it came to avoiding television cameras. There had been two along the old route, which left a third, and they found that halfway to the reception area.

  They didn’t notice it until they were already in the room with it, with the damn thing pointing at them. Then Joe said under his breath, “You see what I see?”

  “I see it,” Tom said.

  They walked through that office, casual and unconcerned, then began to move faster once they were away from the camera. They already knew there
was a rule around here that visitors didn’t travel unescorted, even if the visitors were policemen in uniform. They were traveling unescorted, from Eastpoole’s office; the guards on duty in the reception area might not leap to the conclusion they were thieves, but they’d suspect something was wrong, and they’d start right away to look into it.

  First they’d try phoning the boss. They wouldn’t get any answer, either from Eastpoole or his secretary, and that would upset them even more. But making the phone call would take time, maybe all the time needed for Tom and Joe to cover the rest of the ground and get them under control.

  If not, if they didn’t get there in time, what would the guards do next? Would they put in an alarm right away? Since the visitors were supposed to be cops, they might be a little more careful, a little more cautious. They might get in touch with the guard in the vault anteroom. They might send somebody to alert the other three cops up here, the ones assigned to the security detail for the astronauts. They might get in touch with somebody Tom and Joe didn’t know about, down at the street level. There were a thousand different things they might do, and Tom and Joe could be pretty sure they wouldn’t like any of them.

  They hurried, but it still took a while to travel the rest of the way to the reception area, and when they got there only one guard was behind the counter. It was the same one who’d been here when they’d first come up. He looked at them now, and he was very nervous and trying not to show it. They angled across toward the elevators, and he called over, “Where’s Mr. Eastpoole?”

  Tom gave him a smile and wave of the hand. “In his office,” he said. “Everything’s okay.”

  Joe pressed the down button for the elevator.

  The guard couldn’t keep the nervousness from affecting his voice. He pointed at the laundry bag Tom was carrying and said, “I’ll have to inspect that bag.”

  Tom smiled at him and said, “Sure. Why not?”

  Joe stayed behind, by the elevator doors, while Tom walked over to the counter and set the laundry bag atop it. The guard, losing some of his nervousness because they were acting as though nothing was wrong, came down the counter to look into the bag. As he was reaching for it, Tom nodded toward the screens down on the far wall. He said, “The guy in the vault anteroom. Does he have a set of screens like that?”

  The guard looked over at the screens. “Sure,” he said.

  “He can see us?”

  The guard gave Tom a warning look. “Yes, he can,” he said.

  Joe, back by the elevators, was watching the screens very carefully; all of them. The guard in the anteroom was still reading his Daily News. On one of the office screens, the other guard from out here suddenly appeared, moving fast. He wasn’t quite running, and he was apparently headed for Eastpoole’s office.

  Tom, still talking in a conversational tone of voice, said, “Well, if he can see us, I guess you don’t want me to show a gun.”

  The guard stared. “What?”

  “If I show a gun,” Tom told him, “he’ll know something’s wrong. Then I’ll have to kill you so we can take off out of here.”

  From his position by the elevators, Joe called to the guard, “Take it easy, pal. Don’t get anybody upset.”

  The guard was scared, but he was a professional. He didn’t make any large moves that the anteroom guard might see on his screen. Holding himself in tight control, he said, “You’ll never get out of the building. You’ll never make it.”

  Joe said, casually, “It isn’t your money, pal, but it is your life.”

  “Come around the counter,” Tom said. “You’re going out with us.”

  The guard didn’t move. He licked his lips and blinked, but he had guts. He said, “Give it up. Just leave that bag on the counter and take off. Nobody’ll chase you if you don’t have the goods on you.”

  An elevator arrived. Its door sliding open prompted Joe’s next remark. “Come on, pal,” he said. “Don’t waste time. We’d rather do it the easy way, but we don’t have to.”

  Reluctantly, the guard moved, going down to the flap at the end of the counter, lifting it, stepping through. On the anteroom screen, the guard could be seen still reading his paper. He hadn’t noticed yet that the reception area was about to be left undefended. When he did, he’d know something was wrong, but it would still take him a minute or two to figure out the right procedure to deal with the situation. He’d try to call Eastpoole, he’d try to call the reception area. He wouldn’t want to leave the vault, just in case the whole thing was a stunt to lure him out. His indecision would give them time.

  The elevator was empty. Joe was holding the door open and watching the television screens. Tom was carrying the laundry bag again, and watching the guard.

  “If you take a hostage,” the guard said, coming out from behind the counter, “you run the risk you’ll have to shoot somebody.”

  He meant himself, and all things considered he delivered the sentence very calmly. Joe said to him, “Just get in the elevator.”

  The three of them stepped into the elevator, and Joe pushed the button for the first floor. The door closed, they started down, and the guard said, “You can still get out of this. Go down to one, leave the bag with me, take off; by the time I get back upstairs you’ll be gone. And you won’t have taken anything, so who’ll be looking for you?”

  They already knew the answer to that, far more than he could guess, but neither of them said anything. Tom was watching the guard, and Joe was watching the numbers showing which floor they were passing.

  You couldn’t hear the parade in the elevator at all. It had Muzak in it, playing some melody they both recognized but neither of them knew the name of.

  The guard said, “Listen. With a hostage, you’re risking a shoot-out. Plus kidnapping, it’s technically kidnapping.”

  The elevator was passing the fourth floor. Joe reached out and pressed the button marked 2. The guard looked at that and frowned. He didn’t know what they were doing, and his bewilderment shut him up. He didn’t have anything else to say at all.

  The elevator stopped on the second floor. Joe reached over, plucked the guard’s pistol out of his holster, and said, “Move.”

  “You aren’t going to—”

  “No, we’re not,” Joe said. He was snappish and in a hurry. “Just move.”

  The guard stepped out. They made as if to follow him, but when the door started to slide shut they stepped back again. The guard was turning, open-mouthed, as the door finished closing and the elevator descended to the first floor.

  “Christ,” Joe said. He took off his hat, showing big beads of perspiration high on his forehead. He used the hat to smear his prints from the guard’s pistol, then put the pistol on the floor in the rear corner of the elevator. As he straightened, the elevator stopped, the door opened, and the lobby floor was in front of them.

  Clear. They were ahead of pursuit, and if they just kept moving briskly along they’d stay ahead of it.

  They walked out across the lobby, Tom carrying the laundry bag. They pushed through the doors and went out to the street, and the parade crowd was beginning to break up. Some paper was still floating down from windows in the upper stories, but not much.

  It was tougher to get through the crowd this time; the convenient empty lane between crowd and building fronts had gone, swallowed up by the generalized movement of the crowd away from here.

  The pursuit would be slowed just as much, they had to keep reminding themselves of that.

  They reached the arcade, and it too was full of people now, though not quite as bad as the street; they moved through at a good pace.

  The squad car was right where they’d left it, just as it was supposed to be. A lot of people were milling around, but none of them were interested in two cops. Tom paused by a wire trash can at the curb. He held the laundry bag by a bottom corner, and quietly upended it into the trash can. The typewriter paper fell out, and the weight of it all together in a pack drove it down through the crumpled newspa
pers and cigarette packages and paper cups, halfway out of sight.

  They moved on toward the squad car. Tom squashed the laundry bag into a ball and stuffed it into his pocket. They got into the car, Joe behind the wheel, and drove away.

  Two blocks later, they had to stop at an intersection to let two other patrol cars rush by, sirens screaming and lights flashing. Then they drove on.

  13

  Once again they changed the license plates and the identifying numbers on the squad car, this time switching everything back to the original way. Their actions were shielded by the highway stanchion and the parked trailer. Joe made the transfer on the rear plate and Tom the front, and then they met at the back of Tom’s Chevvy. Tom opened the trunk lid, and they tossed the plates and numbers and the two screwdrivers in with the canvas bag containing Tom’s civilian clothing.

  Neither of them said anything. They were both feeling very down, very deflated. It was the letdown after all the excitement, and they knew it, but knowing what the trouble was didn’t change it.

  Tom was making some attempt to shake the feeling off. Pulling the blue plastic laundry bag out of his pocket, he shook it out to its full length and then held it up in front of himself like a doctor holding up a newborn baby. His hand was trembling as he held the bag, and he gave it a shaky, uncertain grin. “Well, there it is,” he said.

  Joe gave the bag a sour look. He wasn’t fighting against his depression at all. “Yeah, there it is, all right,” he said.

  “Two million dollars,” Tom said.

  Joe shook his head. “Air,” he corrected.

  Tom gave him a grin that was supposed to be brave and sure of itself. “We’ll see,” he said.

  Joe shrugged. The gesture meant that he was skeptical, and that he was too weary to give a damn. “Yeah, we will,” he said.

  Suddenly feeling defensive, Tom told him, “We talked it over, Joe. We agreed this was the way to do it.”

  Joe shrugged again, and gave an exhausted nod. “I know, I know.” Then, seeing Tom’s expression, he tried to act more friendly, and to explain himself. “I just wish we had something to show for it,” he said.