Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  He said, “You’re telling me there’s no way in or out of that place, whatever the place is”

  “The money room,” she said. “It’s called the money room.”

  “Because that’s the whole point of the operation, isn’t it?” he demanded. “The money. And what happens to it next.”

  “Mister Assemblyman, the company’s books are”

  “Very attractive, I have no doubt,” he interrupted. “Ms. Cahill, do you suddenly have something to hide from me? The very cruxof this matter is what happens to gambling money once it has been lost to the casino operator.”

  “Mister Kotkind,” she said, voice rising, forgetting to call him by his title, “we hide nothingon this ship! Every penny is accounted for.”

  “And yet you tell me there’s no access to the, what did you call it, money room. And if this ship were to sink, the people in that money room would simply die? If it caught fire? Is thatwhat you’re telling me? You have human beings in that room, and their safety is at risk for money?”

  “Of course not.” She was scrambling now, not sure how to stay ahead of him. “They can unlock themselves out if it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “And unlock others in,” he insisted. “I haven’t even seen the doorto this place. Is there”

  “It has its own staircase,” she said reluctantly, “down from the restroom area, with a guard at the top and a verylocked door at the bottom.”

  “Oh, does it. And I assume that door has, like any apartment in my district in Brooklyn, an intercom beside the door, and a bell. You can ring that bell and explain the situation and they can open up and let me in to inspect that room and I can see for myselfwhat’s happening with that money.”

  “Mister Ambas Assemblyman, I

  ” She shook her head, and moved her hands around.

  “And without,”he told her, as heavily as any prosecutor, “warning them ahead of time that they are going to be observed.”

  She’d run out of things to say, but she still didn’t want to give in. She was desperate, confused, blind-sided but not yet defeated. She stood staring at Sternberg, trying to find a way out.

  No; no way out. He let the full flood of his exasperation wash over her: “Ms. Cahill, do I have to go to the captain?This absolutely corepart of my inspection you are unreasonably denying me, and you claim there’s nothing to hide? Is thatwhat I must take back to the assembly with me and report to my colleagues? Shall I explain what my report is going to be to the captain?”

  Silence. Cahill took a deep breath. Her previously perfect complexion was blotched. She sighed. “Very well, Mister Assemblyman,” she said. “Come along.”

  8

  As far as George Twill was concerned, no matter who upstairs won or lost, he himself was the luckiest person on this ship. He was fifty-one years of age, and he’d been more than two years out of a job, after the State Street in Albany branch of Merchants Bank downsized him. Twenty-two years of steady employment, and boom. Unemployment insurance gone, severance pay almost used up, savings dwindling, no jobs anywhere. Supermarket assistant manager; movie theater manager; parking garage manager; even motel desk clerk: every job went to somebody else. George was feeling pretty desperate by the time he joined the hundreds of other people who responded to the newspaper ad for jobs on this ship, to fill in for the people who hadn’t traveled with it up from the south. And he got the job. Teller in the money room, so here he was a teller again, though a very different kind of teller from before. But the people in the money room had to not only have some banking background but they also needed solid reputations, because they’d be bonded, so that was why George Twill was at last employed again, at better than his old salary at the bank. And thisjob wouldn’t be taken over by an ATM machine.

  He was by far the oldest of the five people who worked in here, probably twenty years older than his immediate boss, Pete Hancourt, whose job title was cashier but who was known in the room as Pete. They were a pretty informal bunch in here, happy in their work, and with one another. The two women were Helen and Ruth, and the other male teller was Sam. They worked day shift four days, then three days off, then night shift three nights, then four days off. Good pay, easy hours, fine co-workers; heaven, after the hell of the last two years.

  The other thing George had, because he was the oldest here, was one extra responsibility. He was in charge of the panic button. It was on the floor, a large flat metal circle that stuck up no more than an inch, and it was an easy reach, maybe eighteen inches, from where his left foot was normally positioned when he was seated at his counter. If anything ever happened in here that wasn’t supposed to happen, like a fire or a sudden illness or a leak in the side of the ship all of them extremely unlikely it would be George’s job to reach over with his left food and press down just once on that button. Otherwise, his responsibility was not to bump into that button inadvertently. No problem; it was tucked well out of the way.

  The work here was easy and repetitious and he didn’t mind it a bit. The vacuum canisters came down, with cash for chips, or chips for cash. George and the other three tellers made the transactions and kept track of the drawers of money and the drawers of chips. No cash was used up in the casino; even the slots took only chips.

  At the beginning of each run, down here in the money room, they’d have a full supply of chips and just a little money. By the end of each run, they’d be down fifty or a hundred chips, because people forgot they had them in their pockets or wanted to keep them as souvenirs, and they would have a lotof money, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. It was fascinating to see the efficiency with which it worked. And if George Twill had ever had a tendency toward being a betting man which he had not being around this efficient money machine would have cured it.

  When the buzzer sounded, all of a sudden, at twenty minutes to one, it startled them all, and at first George had no idea what that sound was. Then he remembered; it was the bell for the door, the entry to and from the rest of the ship that was always kept locked and that none of them ever used. He’d only heard it once before, the third day of his employment, and that time it had been the ship’s nurse, a recent hire like George, bringing around medical history forms to be filled out. Apparently she hadn’t realized she wasn’t supposed to have done it that way, but mailed it to their homes. Pete said he’d heard that a couple of executives from the company had really reamed her out that time.

  So whatever this was, it wouldn’t be the nurse again. Feeling his responsibility, and feeling also a sudden nervousness, wondering what this would turn out to be, George moved his foot closer to the panic button and watched Pete, frowning deeply, walk over to the door and speak into the intercom there.

  George could hear that it was a woman’s voice that answered, but he couldn’t make out the words. Pete said something else, the woman said something else, Pete said something else, and then Pete unlocked the door.

  Susan Cahill came in. George remembered her, she was one of the people who’d interviewed him when he applied for the job. She’d seemed remote and cold and a little scary, and he’d thought she didn’t like him and would recommend against his being hired, but apparently he’d been wrong. This was the first time he was seeing her since, and the familiar face eased his tension and brought his left foot back to its normal spot on the floor.

  Three men followed Susan Cahill into the room. The first was short and stout and grumpy-looking, glaring around at everybody as though looking for the person who stole his wallet. The other two men were large one of them huge blank-faced, tough-looking, in dark suits and ties.

  Susan Cahill said, “Thank you, Pete,” then addressed the rest of the room. She seemed to George to be annoyed or upset about something, and trying to hide it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “this is Assemblyman Morton Kotkind, from the New York State legislature, and he’s here on an inspection tour of the ship. We operate, as you know, at the discretion of the legislature. Assemblyman Kotkind wanted to see where
the money eventually comes. These are his

  aides, they are state troopers, Trooper Helsing and Trooper Renfield.”

  “That’s funny,” Pete said, grinning at the two troopers.

  They turned and gave him blank looks that seemed to contain a hint of menace. Susan Cahill, sounding frazzled, said, “What’s funny?”

  Pete seemed to belatedly realize this was a formal occasion, not a casual one. “Nothing,” he said, and avoided the troopers’ eyes as he turned to say to George and the others, “Folks, just keep doing what you’re doing. The congressman is here to see how the operation works.”

  “Assemblyman,” the grumpy man said.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  A vacuum canister slid into the basket in front of George. He picked it up, twisted it open, and five one-hundred-dollar bills dropped out, along with the upstairs cashier’s transit slip. Only an hour left on the cruise, and they were still buying chips.

  Grey Hanzen, in the darkness at the water’s edge, stripped out of shoes and socks and pants. What he really wanted to do was get back in his car and drive down to the Kingston bridge and across the Hudson River and line out west and not stop until the water in front of him was the Pacific Ocean. If only.

  How had he got himself into this mess? It had all been so simple and easy to begin with. Now there were all these different bunches of people, and him in the middle like a grain of wheat in a goddam mill. Any one of those people could crush him in a second, and most of them would have reason. How in the good Lord’s name was he going to steer himself through these rapids and come out safe and alive on the other side?

  “I should just get the hell out of here,” he told himself out loud as he waded into the cold water. Gloomy, despairing, not even pretending to have hope, he waded out to his boat, threw his clothing into the bottom and climbed in.

  Nothing else to do. You can’t escape your goddam fate, that’s all.

  He was certainly taking his time about it, this assemblyman. George found it hard to concentrate on the task at hand, the numbers coming in, the numbers going out, with those three silent men moving around and around the room, slowly pacing, stopping from time to time to watch a particular operation. They didn’t ask any questions at all, which was a relief. But their presence was distracting and made the room feel uncomfortable.

  Now the assemblyman was standing beside George, just to his right, watching George twist open a canister, make his entries into the computer terminal in front of him, slide the greenbacks into their bins in their drawer, put the transit slip in its bin, scoop out the right denomination of chips

  He was on the floor. He had no idea what happened, he just had a moment of disorientation and panic. Why am I on the floor? Heart attack?

  He was on his right side on the floor, and the left side of his head felt a sharp stinging pain. He blinked, thinking he’d fallen, blacked out, and the pain spread across his head from that electric grinding point just above his left ear, and when he looked up, the bigger of the two state troopers was standing over him, but not looking at him, looking across him at the other people in the room, pointing at them, saying

  A gun. Pointing a gun. A pistol, a gun. Pointing a gun at the people in the room, saying, “Hands on your desks. Helen, Ruth. Come on, Sam, you don’t want to die.”

  And another voice the other trooper, it must be was saying, “Pete, hands on your head. Susan, if you reach for that beeper, you’re dead.”

  He hitme, George thought, and felt more astonishment at that than even at the fact of the gun and the things they were saying. We aren’t children in a schoolyard, we don’t hit each other, we don’t

  It’s a robbery.

  The shock of it, being hit, being all at once on the floor, feeling such pain, seeing the astonishing sight of that gun in that man’s hand, had befuddled George for so long that only now thirty seconds? forty? did he realize what this meant. These people were robbing the ship!

  The big one, who’d hit him with the side of that gun, it must be now looked down at George. He didn’t point the gun at him, but he didn’t have to, not with those cold eyes. He said, “George, you can sit up, cross your knees, put your hands on your knees. Don’t reach a foot toward that button, George.”

  He knows! They know everything, they know my name!

  A sudden spasm of guilt washed through George, and he twisted around to stare toward Pete and Susan Cahill. They’ll think it’s me! They’ll think I’m the one told these people everything, and I’ll lose my job, and I’ll go to jail!

  The assemblyman no, he can’t be an assemblyman, it’s all a fake he was frisking Pete, while the other non-trooper, also now holding a gun, was taking the beeper off Susan Cahill’s belt. Pete looked frightened, but Susan Cahill was looking outraged. Both were too involved in what was happening to see George stare at them, so George quickly shifted to look at something else. Don’t act guilty, he told himself. Don’t make them suspect you.

  Susan Cahill, her voice trembling with fury, suddenly spoke: “This is outrageous! How dare you men, how dareyou behave like this! The police will get you, the police will get you, and Avenue Resorts will be verytough, you can count on that!”

  The non-trooper who’d taken her beeper ignored her, turning away to look at the non-trooper standing over George. “Tape,” he said, and pocketed his gun.

  “Sure.”

  This one reached inside his jacket and took out a compact roll of duct tape. He tossed it across to the other one, then looked down and said, “George, I told you to sit up.”

  “Yes. Yes. All right.” He didn’t want to be hit again, or whatever worse might happen. He scrambled into a seated position, making a point of moving away from that button, that he could see just over there, under the counter. But no power on Earth would make him move toward that button, not even to save his job.

  The non-trooper with Susan Cahill peeled off some tape and said to her, “Hands behind your back.”

  “I certainly will not!” She folded her arms under her breasts and glared. “If you think you’ll get awaywith”

  He slapped her, left-handed, open-handed, but hard, the sound almost like a baseball being hit by a bat. All of them in the room jumped at the sound, George and Pete and Helen and Ruth and Sam. The three robbers didn’t jump.

  Susan Cahill staggered from the slap, and stared at the non-trooper, who stepped closer to her and said, as though he really wanted to know the answer, “Are those your teeth?”

  She gaped at him. “What?”

  “Are thoseyour teeth?”

  She didn’t know the reason for the question, but she was suddenly afraid not to answer. “Yes.”

  “Do you want to keep them?”

  This answer was smaller, more defeated. “Yes.”

  “Hands behind your back.”

  She put her hands behind her back, quivering now with fear, but George could tell that the outrage and the fury were still there inside her, merely prudently banked for the moment. The non-trooper duct-taped her wrists, then started to put another piece of duct tape over her mouth, but she pulled her head away. He stopped, and looked at her, and the next time he moved the duct tape she didn’t resist. As he put it over her mouth, he said, “If I was a bad guy, or if you irritated me, I’d put this over your nose, too. You’re going to sit down now.” He took her arm to help her, and she sat on the floor, and he duct-taped her ankles together.

  Meantime, the fake assemblyman had been ordering the others around, telling Helen and Ruth and Sam by name to keep doing what they were doing, handling the money and the chips, and not to vary the routine in any way. For instance, not to send anything more or less than normal up to the cashier’s cage in each vacuum canister.

  “I’ll tell you why,” he said. “It isn’t your money, and it would be stupid to die for it. The line’s insured, you’ll still get your salary. If there’s trouble, we may get caught but you will absolutely certainly get dead. So cooperate, and this little unpleasantnes
s will soon be over. Pete?”

  Pete jumped again, as when Susan Cahill was slapped. “Yes? What?”

  “Easy, Pete, gentle down, there’s a love. And here’s a plastic bag. I want you to fill it with the cash from George’s station, since he won’t be working any more tonight.”

  “All right.”

  As Pete came over with the white plastic bag kitchen can size the one non-trooper finished with Susan Cahill and tossed the duct tape back to the one by George, who said, “Okay, George, your turn. Hands behind your back.” And, as he put his gun in his pocket, the other one across the room took his out again.

  George said, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, but I”

  “Come on, George.”

  No long explanations, not with these people; only short explanations. George blurted out, “I have asthma!”

  The big man looked at him. He seemed really interested. “Yeah? Had it long?”

  George hadn’t expected that question. He said, “Fifteen years. And I can’t always breathe through my nose, I’m afraid, if you put that tape on”

  “I get it, George,” the big man said. “If you got asthma real bad like that, you probably carry some kind of medicine for it, am I right? An inhaler, something like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How slow can you take it out of your pocket, George?”

  “Very slow.”

  “Go ahead.”

  George kept his inhaler in his inside jacket pocket, and now realized that was exactly where a tough guy or a bad guy would keep a gun. Hand trembling, sweat starting to trickle down his face, breath becoming raspy already, he reached into his pocket, grasped the inhaler, lost it through his trembling fingers, grasped it again, jerked his hand back, shuddered the motion to a stop, and slowly and shakily brought the little tube into sight.

  The big man seemed pleased. “Good, George,” he said. “Now, if you gave yourself a spray or two with that, you’d be okay for a while, wouldn’t you?”