The Specialists

by Lawrence Block

  He looked at her and froze. For a second or two they were figures in a painting, incapable of any movement, and then she saw Nicholson with his gun in his hand and she pointed at him and shouted, “Jordan, look out! Look out!”

  Then the shots came.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Giordano was almost fast enough. He was squeezing the trigger as he turned, and he got off one wild shot before the guard’s pistol snapped three times. One bullet scraped his side. Another buried itself in his thigh and hurled him harshly to the ground.

  Then Murdock was leaping down from the back of the truck, emptying his big automatic into the guard. Giordano felt hands lifting him, carrying him to the truck. Blood welled from his thigh. He put the palm of his hand over the wound and pressed directly on it. His brain reeled, he couldn’t concentrate.

  “The girl,” he managed. “Knows me.”

  Patricia was still standing stiffly in place. The braver ones were pushing their way out of the bank, staring at her, at the dead guard. Murdock raised his pistol.

  “Don’t shoot her. Knows me. Helped me. Bring her.”

  Murdock hesitated only for an instant. Then he darted across the sidewalk and grabbed the girl by the arm. If she had offered the slightest resistance, he would have killed her with a rabbit punch, but she let him haul her to the truck and help her in back with Giordano and the sacks of cash. Then Murdock, too, was up in the truck and they were pulling away from the curb, the tires squealing.

  Giordano went blank, lost some of it.

  Then he was conscious of her hand on his forehead, her voice in his ear. “You’ll be all right, Jordan. You’ll be all right”

  Giordano opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Don’t try to talk.”

  His eyes went blurry, then came into focus again. He looked at her, looked over her shoulder at Murdock, who seemed faintly amused. He opened his mouth again.

  “Don’t try to talk, Jordan, darling.”

  “We fucked it up,” he said, and passed out.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Dehn’s car was stashed on Front Street, and Simmons drove to it first. The hassle on the sidewalk had knocked everything slightly out of kilter. According to plan, Dehn and Giordano were to be dropped in the open after stripping themselves of guns and gloves. Then they would find their own way back to their stashed cars and take separate routes to Tarrytown. Now Giordano had a bullet in his leg and there was a girl along to complicate things, and the shooting made the brown truck hotter than a stove.

  Simmons said, “We make it up as we go along. Frank, grab that rag, wipe the outside of the door. Take it right down to the underpaint.”

  He checked the rearview. There was nobody on them, and the only sirens he could hear were blocks away.

  “We drop the bread in your trunk, Frank.”

  “Check.”

  “And Lou, I figure.”

  “And the girl?”

  “No other way.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Makes your car hot as three stoves. That’s your own car, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, damn it.”

  “Your own plates on it?”

  “The whole bit.”

  “I wouldn’t use my own car on a job——”

  “Well, I didn’t figure to be driving money or tellers or people with bullets in them, Howard.”

  “True. You better not run any red lights.”

  “Very funny.”

  “And count on shooting any cop who stops you.”

  “That certainly is wonderful.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Howard? That girl is gonna be a problem. Who is she? The teller Lou was banging?”

  “Right. I thought Ben would shoot her.”

  “Should of.”

  “Never should have started banging her in the first place. Same as Eddie never should have gone inside. You know what we did? We got too fucking cute with this one. A nice easy touch and we had to go and make it complicated.”

  “You said the other day you didn’t like it.”

  “But I didn’t know why. Now I know. It was too cute.”

  “Uh-huh. Say, you want to take Ben, too?”

  “In the car?”

  “Yeah. Want to?”

  “The way we tore it all, I guess I might as well.”

  The transfer went smoothly. In a matter of seconds Dehn and Murdock transferred the money sacks to the trunk of Dehn’s car. There was barely room beside the golf clubs. Murdock strapped the still-unconscious Giordano in the front passenger seat, then got in back with the girl. Simmons hopped down and finished cleaning the tempera paints off both the doors. He was back behind the wheel by the time Dehn had the car in gear.

  Simmons waited while the rest of them drove off. The roadblocks would be up by now, he knew, but they wouldn’t make much difference. The area was just too dense a web of suburban sprawl with overlapping jurisdictions, infinite roads, and alternate access routes, and it would take several hours to seal an area effectively. The colonel had mapped out the money route, a safe passage which would be followed by whoever wound up carrying the boodle. Simmons had planned to go back that way himself, but now he had to find another way.

  Which meant getting another car.

  Murdock’s, he remembered, was in the Rolling Acres development at Alder and Summerwood. He drove there and saw the Dodge wagon in place at the curb. The house was vacant, the lot overgrown, and this inspired Simmons to park in the driveway. The garage door was unlocked. He opened it, parked the truck inside, and closed it. He quickly shucked off the overalls, balled them up, dropped them into an empty trash can, and emerged from the garage in suit and tie.

  Across the street a woman stood in the doorway staring. Simmons looked at her for a moment in puzzlement before he got the message. He smothered a laugh, then walked quickly across the lawn. He had to give the FOR SALE sign a couple of kicks to loosen it. He pulled it from the ground, carried it around back, and left it with the trash.

  When he came back, the woman was gone. On the phone already, he decided. But not to call the police. Right now she’d be calling her husband, and then the neighbors, and after that she’d be on the phone to her friendly neighborhood realtor. With any luck at all, half the houses on the block would be offered for sale within the next two days.

  And of course the people in them would sell them to Negroes. They wouldn’t think twice, since a Negro had already bought one of the houses.

  Simmons got into the Dodge. He connected the jumper wire and the engine caught immediately.

  He started to laugh.

  All he had really wanted to do was get rid of a hot truck. And what he had done was integrate the goddamned neighborhood.

  Patricia Novak huddled in the back seat. She hugged her arms against her chest and tried to keep from shivering. It was warm in the car, but she couldn’t seem to stop shivering.

  At first she had tried talking. She didn’t remember what she had said, something about Jordan, but before she had her sentence half finished, the huge hillbilly beside her set his gun on his knee and smiled broadly, and told her that what she ought to do was sit very still and kindly keep her mouth shut tight or he would have no choice but to kill her deader than hell.

  She had not said a word since then.

  But she couldn’t shut out the thinking. It seemed indisputable that Jordan Lewis, whom she had abruptly realized she was in love with, was not actually an advertising salesman for a chain of country-and-western radio stations after all.

  He was, it seemed, a bank robber.

  A knot formed in her throat. All those casual questions about her work—for the first time she realized why he had asked them. And then, on the heels of that realization, it came to her why he had gotten interested in her in the first place. It was not, she knew, a case of his getting interested in robbing the bank because he had met her. It worked the other way around.

  He only asked her out because she worked at the b
ank.

  He only slept with her to learn what she could tell him.

  She felt her face reddening and lowered her eyes, staring dully at the floorboards. What a fool she was! Obviously his name wasn’t even Jordan. And how he must have been laughing at her behind her back!

  But.

  But, she thought, he had kept the hillbilly from killing her. The hillbilly had pointed that huge pistol at her, and Jordan had said something that made him change his mind. And of course it would have been easier for Jordan to have let the man kill her. Alive, she was a problem to them, a loose end.

  Did that mean Jordan cared for her?

  He must, she thought. She remembered his touch, his manner. Of course it had to have been an act at first (and she blushed at the memory of the first night, the shyness, the meticulously planned accidental trail that led to his bed). But somewhere along the line it must have turned real, or at least partially real. Or else why would he have let her live?

  Unless, of course, they had decided to kill her later.

  She shuddered violently. Everything was happening too fast for her and she was unable to react to it She thought briefly of her parents, her children. She couldn’t focus on them. They now had no reality for her. All of her sense of reality was concentrated here, in this car, with these men.

  These bank robbers.

  Jordan, her Jordan, was a bank robber. (And to think that she had feared never to see him again. “You’ll never look pretty again”—talking to mirrors like an idiot.) A bank robber, a bank robber.

  And she held on to the thought and blushed furiously; between her legs she was suddenly marvelously wet.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Giordano came to in a bed. He sat up and looked around warily. His memory was spotty and he wasn’t sure where he was. Then he recognized a picture on the opposite wall. He was in a bedroom at the Tarrytown house. He checked his thigh, which ached furiously. It was bandaged now and the bandage looked competent enough. There was more pain on the left side of his rib cage, and he discovered another bandage there where the first bullet had grazed him. Giordano didn’t even remember that he’d been hit there.

  He decided he was in a safe place and in reasonably good condition. He stretched out and let himself pass out again.

  When he opened his eyes another time, the colonel was sitting by his bedside reading a book. Giordano coughed softly and the colonel set his book aside. “You’re in Tarrytown,” Cross said. “You were shot in the course of the robbery. Do you remember it, Louis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

  “I don’t think so. What time is it?”

  “Twenty-three forty-five.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “In New Jersey. To rescue Edward.”

  “Just three of them? Jesus.” He sat up, then winced at a spasm of pain from his leg. “You get the bullet out?”

  “Yes. You were quite fortunate, incidentally. No bone damage and it missed the artery. It did nick a vein, so that you lost a bit of blood, but you should be ready to travel in a day or so. And you couldn’t possibly have gone with them tonight. Don’t even think of it.”

  “It’ll be tough with three.”

  “I doubt it. They know the grounds and the placement of the guards and the procedure. I don’t expect trouble.”

  “You don’t look happy, sir.”

  “I’m not happy. I won’t be happy until I learn Edward is all right.” The colonel’s face clouded. “The guard died,” he said.

  “Oh. Did I get him or was it Ben? My memory’s a little spotty.”

  “It was Ben.”

  “Well.”

  The colonel sipped his drink. He was drinking Scotch and soda, and Giordano thought about Scotch and soda and decided that he didn’t want anything at all just yet.

  “The girl,” he said suddenly.

  “Sleeping. Helen gave her a sedative.”

  “I forgot all about her.” He straightened up in the bed. “I could use a cigarette,” he said.

  “Right there on the table.”

  “Oh, right.” He lit up and drew smoke into his lungs. “What do we do now?”

  “She can’t return to her former life, Louis. Witnesses reported that she recognized one of the holdup men and called him by name. And got the name wrong, believe it or not. She must have called you Jordan. The witnesses heard George.”

  “That’s a break.”

  “Yes. But you see where we stand. She’s in a position to give them full descriptions of all of us. Even if she were determined not to talk, the police wouldn’t leave her alone.”

  “If she went away for a while until things cooled down——”

  “We took that bank for almost a quarter of a million dollars. And as far as the police are concerned, we were also the ones who took the Passaic bank. They’ve made that much of the connection already, incidentally. By tomorrow they should know of Platt’s relationship to both of the banks, which will dot the last I and cross the final T. In any case, they can only regard that girl as the sole key to two robberies in which three lives were lost. Things will never cool down, Louis.”

  “Then, what do we do with her?” The colonel didn’t say anything, and Giordano said, “No, I don’t buy that. It’s no good, sir.”

  “I didn’t say anything yet, Louis.”

  “But what you didn’t say was that we kill her, and no, sir, I just won’t buy it.”

  “I haven’t tried to sell it to you, Louis.”

  Giordano didn’t seem to have heard. “The guard was something different. The guard was completely different. He was one of the soldiers on the other side, and on top of everything he was a schmuck who had to try and be a hero. It wasn’t his money. It wasn’t even that he was just doing his job. He must have run his ass off getting out the side and around the building in time to get himself killed. Screw the guard. And the bank VP that Frank shot, screw him too. He’s a gangster. So the hell with him.

  “But not the girl. If we start killing good people just because they’re in the goddamned way, no, I’m sorry, sir, no, I don’t like it.”

  The colonel was silent for a few minutes, and Giordano wondered if maybe he had talked too freely. He reviewed his words and decided he meant what he had said.

  Cross said, “Would you rather marry her?”

  “Her? Christ, no. I don’t want to marry anybody. And not her. She’s a good kid but nothing special. No, I don’t want to marry her.”

  “It might be one or the other, Louis. Marry her or kill her, because the first law of nature has to be self-preservation.”

  “I know, but——”

  “Even if you or I were willing to risk the consequences of releasing her, we couldn’t do it. We have our responsibilities to the others.”

  “I know, sir.”

  “You’ll want to give this some thought, Louis.”

  “Yes.” He considered. “If I gave her a chunk of dough and let her run——”

  “They’d pick her up in a week.”

  “I guess they would, sir.”

  Cross pushed his chair backward and pivoted to face the door. “I’ll get out of your way for a while, Louis. Will you take something to eat now? Steak and eggs?”

  “That does sound like a good idea.”

  “And a drink? Or would you rather have coffee?”

  “I think coffee.”

  “Good.” He paused at the door. “Louis? You ought to take your time thinking about this. See the girl before you decide. Sort out your own feelings.”

  “I’m sure as hell not going to marry her.”

  “Don’t make any decision just now.”

  “So I guess we’ll have to kill her, sir.”

  “You’ll think it over, Louis.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Simmons and Murdock went over the fence at the back of the Platt estate. Even with the current on, it wasn’t a hard fence to get over. They hit the backyard at opposite sides and
killed the three yard men in under five minutes. Simmons got two with a twenty-inch garrote of piano wire. Murdock used a knife on the other one.

  When they encountered each other over the body of the third guard, Murdock cupped his hands and made a sound like an owl. When Dehn heard that he stood up from behind the bushes across the road and shot down the two guards at the front gate. He used a .22 rifle with a few yards of Turkish towel wrapped around the barrel. The two shots still sounded like shots, but the noise didn’t carry far enough to matter.

  They left the garage alone. Manso had reported that no one lived in the rooms upstairs except for some of the servants, and cooks and cleaning women posed no great threat to them. They went to the backyard and played a pencil beam flashlight over the lawn. There were no traces of a fresh grave.

  “He’s in there,” Dehn said. “He’s alive. I feel it.”

  “You been going a lot by feelings lately.”

  “They’ve been working better for me than thought. Lately.”

  “Yeah. Burglar alarm feeds on household current?”

  “Right.”

  Murdock wanted a look at it. When he saw the make, he told them it was no good. “Batteries cut in if the power cuts out. Eddie must not know how this model works, but I knew a boy in Chicago who went and bought himself five-to-ten in Joliet making the same old mistake. Cut the lines to the house and walked right on in and the alarm went off louder than a cat on barbed wire.”

  He checked the window glass in the house. There was tape around the perimeter of each pane, a silvery tape that was hooked into the alarm system, so that if you broke the window and the break ran through the tape, you would set off the alarm.

  “But you can cut the glass,” Murdock whispered. “Give me that whatchacallit, glass cutter.”

  When Manso heard footsteps, he moved behind the door and flattened out against the wall. He didn’t know if it was day or night. He didn’t know whose walk he heard or whether whoever it was was coming for him. He knew one thing only. If Platt opened that door, he was going to kill him the first chance he got.