by Patrick Mann
YOUR NAME IS LITTLEJOE
AND YOU HAVE BIG IDEAS
Some men are afraid of the law. You’re not. As far as you’re concerned, the law had better be scared of you—scared enough to hand you a million dollars and a jet airliner to take you to a place where you can enjoy the money. And there’s nobody to say you’re wrong as you and your crew hold a bank full of hostages and start turning on the heat while the TV cameras whirr and the public gasps and the New York City Police Department and the F.B.I. sweat and squirm on the edge of surrender . . .
DOG DAY AFTERNOON
the hottest afternoon you’ll ever live through!
IT BEGAN IN GREENWICH VILLAGE
where the New York sexual underground and the Mafia rubbed more than shoulders, and the weirdest crew of bank robbers ever assembled was put together by a man named Littlejoe
IT SWUNG INTO ACTION IN A BANK IN QUEENS
where a dream heist suddenly exploded into an out-of-control nightmare of violence and terror
IT CLIMAXED AT J.F.K. INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
where a fueled-up Boeing 707 waited to take off, and the police knew they had just minutes for one last desperate gamble before the most successful getaway in history
DOG DAY AFTERNOON
Don’t reveal the ending!
DOG DAY AFTERNOON
is based in part on material created by Frank R. Pierson.
Published by
DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.
1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
New York, New York 10017
Copyright © 1974 by Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of Delacorte Press, New York, N.Y. 10017, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper.
Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press, New York, N.Y.
Printed in the United States of America
First Dell printing—July 1975
PROLOGUE
It happened on the hottest day of the year during the last soap opera of the day.
Flo usually didn’t watch the soap opera, not in summer, because summers her husband worked nights and slept mornings. By the time the day had heated up to its fullest, mid-afternoon, he was awake, bitching, yelling for his six-pack of Piel’s and whatever game was on TV.
This day had begun even hotter than usual, a real dog day afternoon in August, when New York City was a pizza left too long in the oven, burnt around the edges, damned near poisonous, impossible to swallow.
Irritably, Flo’s husband switched channels back and forth. The heat was so fierce inside their tiny house in Queens that even a cold beer and a baseball game failed to keep him quiet.
“Shit,” he told Channel 2. “Shit,” he informed Channel 4. “More shit,” he announced as he kept switching. The only reason he paused at Channel 7 was that a rather attractive young woman had just allowed an older man to pull her into his arms and kiss her.
“No, Doug, no,” she was moaning. “I’ll never be able to look Amy in the eyes ever again, don’t you understand?”
“Look ’er inna twat,” Flo’s husband suggested, switching to Channel 9. He paused because the word BULLETIN filled the screen.
Flo had stopped behind his chair, because she wanted to see whether Amy’s husband, Doug, would now let the girl alone. She found herself wondering what could be so special in the middle of a broiling afternoon to warrant the word BULLETIN.
“Will you shaddap?” her husband asked, although she had said nothing.
Now a man seated at a desk filled the screen. The camera pulled back for a moment, then started to close in on him as he began to read from a sheet of paper, barely looking up now and then.
“This special bulletin just in from Police Headquarters. A neighborhood branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank is in the process of being robbed by two armed gunmen in Queens. With the robbery in progress, this now from Channel Nine’s camera crew on the scene.”
Her husband’s knuckles whitened as he prepared to turn the dial. “Augie,” Flo said. “Wait a second.”
“F’ what? Some cockamamie heist?”
“Wait a second. You got something better to watch?”
The picture changed: a section of a street baked in the sun. Uniformed police milled around. A storefront bank with one rather small picture window stood in the center of the screen. Two men seemed to be arguing in front of the door of the bank.
“Here at the scene of the armed robbery now in progress,” the announcer was saying, “and a dramatic confrontation between one of the armed robbers and Detective Sergeant Moretti of the Two Hundred Seventy-fourth Precinct. Moretti here wearing the hat with the confrontation in progress and Channel Nine’s camera crew on the scene for this confrontation.”
“The robber,” Flo said. She could hardly get the words out.
“What?”
Her throat started to close over in fright. “Th-the robber!”
The zoom lens was closing down inexorably on the two men in front of the bank, the detective in the hat gesturing, the other man, younger, in chino pants and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, looking cool and calm. “Augie,” Flo said. Her voice came out in a moan. “That man. That armed bandit.”
“Fuck ’im,” Augie muttered. He switched to Channel 11, but the tube showed the same scene from a different angle.
“. . . here with Channel Eleven’s camera crew at the scene of the crime to bring you the latest developments in this bizarre and unprecedented—”
“Shit,” Augie grumbled. He snapped the dial back through 9 to 7.
“Amy is my best friend,” the woman was telling Doug. Beneath the image, a line of white type was moving slowly past from right to left. “. . . ARMED ROBBERY OF CHASE BANK BRANCH NOW IN PROG . . .”
“Shit again.” Augie twisted the dial to 5, and once more the man in the light shirt was arguing with the detective in the hat.
“Mamma mia,” Flo moaned. “Maria e Gesu Cristo.”
“What?” Augie demanded. “What’s all the guinea cursing about now?”
“Don’t you see him, Augie?”
“I see they ain’t nothing on the tube but some shit-head holding up some bank.”
“It’s Joey,” Flo moaned. “It’s our boy, Joey.”
“What?”
Augie sat up in his armchair, his scrawny neck stretched as he stared fiercely at the screen. “Shit and shit again! It’s him.”
“Joey’s holding up . . . a bank,” Flo said, her voice swimming in tears like an anchovy in olive oil, shimmering, drowning sleekly. “My son, my little Joey, he’s robbing a b—”
“Your fucking son maybe,” her husband cut in. “Not mine.”
“Yours too.”
“Not any more.” Her husband got to his feet suddenly. “I ain’t got no son. I never did have no son. Not that shit-ass little bastard, not ever and especially not no more.” He stamped out of the room.
Flo moaned wordlessly for a moment, then sat down in her husband’s chair. She adjusted the fine tuning to get a better image and turned up the sound to make sure she heard every word.
Her son was all over the tube. All of New York City was watching him. The whole tri-state area was seeing him rob a bank. She wanted to be sure she didn’t miss any of it.
1
Joe was of two minds.
He sat in the waiting room with the rest of the people who had come to be interviewed. Some had been far-sighted enough to bring newspapers to read. Being out of work, they brought smudged copies of the News or the Times, th
at morning’s newspaper salvaged from subway trash baskets. Nobody was reading the afternoon Post, Joe noticed. Nobody had the extra fifteen cents to blow on it. Post want ads weren’t worth fifteen cents.
Joe surveyed the four people in the room, all men, all about his age, late twenties. He wondered how many of them had been in Nam. Half, maybe? They were the right age for it. A third?
He felt of two minds because he needed this job badly but the idea of getting it made him want to puke.
Okay, he told himself, cool it. The ad had been running all week and the job wasn’t filled yet. The bank was a big one with hundreds of offices around town. The job was not one of your crappy beginner’s jobs like teller-trainee. The ad said very plainly: “Must have yr’s exp. or equiv.”
Okay, he had the experience. He knew the ropes. He could talk bank talk. He had the job in the palm of his hand, even without the interview. These guys sitting around reading their stolen Newses were shit out of luck.
But, Jesus, the idea of actually working in a bank again. That day-in-day-out, punch-the-clock, wall-to-wall, buttoned-down boredom. When he remembered how it felt, something heavy and indigestible inside Joe moved up against the bottom of his lungs, like a beast turning over in its sleep and you better not wake it up. It made his lungs smaller. They couldn’t seem to pump enough air. His stomach felt as if it were being wrung out like a dishrag. All the sour juice dripped on his liver.
Don’t wake it up, baby. Cool it. Keep the beast asleep. “Come on cool ’cause you ain’t no fool.” Who used to say that? Some spade cat, some black sergeant back at the copter base in Nam, a mechanic in the Air Force.
Joe’s eyes lidded halfway as he continued to look over his competition for the job. Run of the mill. None of them had a prayer. Not them. He had the job. The only question was wheth—
“Mr. Nowicki.”
Nice-looking legs, small tits. Joe’s glance moved up the young woman’s body. He liked them slender, tender and tall. This one was shorter than he liked. He took his time getting to his feet, because that was his style.
Then he stood there without saying anything. That was cool, wasn’t it? Any jerkball could holler “Here!” or whatever. The four doggies in the room would hop to and hit a brace if you yelled their name. But the girl didn’t seem to understand that he was who he was. Her big eyes locked into his glance.
“Are you, uh, Mr. uh?”
Joe nodded. Just once, cool, but it failed to stop the girl from mispronouncing his name again. Not that anybody ever got it right except another Polack, and this one was no Polack, he thought, not with those big wet eyes and that full, hot mouth. How would those lips feel when he rammed the old Avenger between them?
“This way, please.”
Joe had not expected the interviewer to be a woman, much less one this young. But after the girl had escorted him into the room, she sat herself down behind the big desk. “I’m Miss Panetta,” she said.
How the hell could she be guinea meat with those baby tits, Joe wondered. No hips, either. He sat down across from the interviewer. “I’m here for the systems job you people advertised for.”
For a moment he toyed with the idea of letting her know his mother was a wop. Not only that, but he was tied by blood on her side to one of the really big Maf families. Should he mention it? He decided to hold off awhile.
Miss Panetta nodded, and her dark hair seemed to bounce for a moment after her head was still. Tina’s hair had done that once, years ago, before Joe had married her. Tina had been one cute cunt in those days. Short, like this one, but massive breasts and thighs. That had been back in the days, he remembered, when you could still see the cow’s shape. Nowadays there was nothing to see but acres of soft, drippy meat. Her tits hung down like—
“Could you give me an idea of your experience?”
Where had she learned that trick with the pencil, pushing it against her lower lip until it almost popped into her soft, luscious, wet mouth, but not quite?
“Sure.” He leaned back in the padded armchair they provided for interviewees, the kind of chair made with chrome-steel legs and soft black leather everywhere else. Style was the thing. He knew how to come on with this one, oh yes. Easy. Cool. He dropped one elbow behind the back of the chair and held on to the edge of the back with his hand. Calm. Careless. He crossed his legs. He smiled.
“Sure,” he repeated. He ran the tip of his tongue across his lower lip, to get it as wet as hers. “I used to work for Chase. I did about eighteen months with Chase, as a matter of fact, before I shipped out to Nam. I was teller-trainee for a few months but they realized I had a certain style so after the first week I was put in charge of the other recruits, I was kind of a supervisor-trainee, you could say, and I showed them the ropes in a way because, let me tell you, some of them were nervous, and I’m putting it mild. Some of them were shi—some of them were shaking in their shoes, and I was a steady hand who was their age. I set an example of how you go about that kind of thing. I mean, you get your average teller-trainee, they’re pretty raw. I say they’re fresh out of high school and worried because they think they have to be a whiz with numbers, which I know isn’t so, and I knew it even before they told us, I figured it up front, you might say. I knew machines would do the figuring, because machines nowadays do the whole thing, like, faster and without mistakes. Am I right? And I got that over to the recrui—the new people picked it up from me and in no time at all I had them calmed down. ‘Come on cool ’cause you ain’t no fool,’ I used to tell them. You know, a lot of them were colored, and I had to talk to them in their own language if I wanted to get through on their level. So I said—”
“What branch of Chase were you in?” Miss Panetta interrupted.
Joe’s hand, holding easily to the back of his chair, lost its grip and fell. He repaired his stylish posture and moistened his lip again. “Fifty-seventh and Broadway.”
He was disheartened to see her scribble a note with her pencil. Would she check the reference? Who was she kidding? Nobody checked references any more. “And your immediate supervisor was . . . ?”
He blinked. She was going to check. “Mr., uh, Fo—” He stopped. No sense handing it to her on a silver platter. Fogarty was the bastard who had fired him. “Mr. Fogel,” he lied.
“F-o-g-e-l?” she spelled.
“Uh, double l.”
She nodded. “And the dates you were there?”
He started to sigh, then stopped himself. They didn’t leave you much room, did they? All these interviews were the same. Once they started closing you out, they began slamming doors faster than you could find new ones to open. “That was three years ago,” he said. “Before I volunteered for Vietnam,” he added, stressing the verb.
Her pencil ticked off a few more words. “Volunteered?”
“I know,” he said easily, recrossing his legs the other way. “I sound stupid, don’t I? I mean, what guy in his right mind volunteers for a mess like Nam, right? But I didn’t know that at the time.” He hunched forward in his chair, to try to rivet her attention. “I was a kid. I believed what I read in the newspapers. I was a loyal Republican, too. I believed my President. I thought the President of the United States had to be Number One in everything. What does a kid know? They told me things and I did what I was supposed to do, I volunteered. Call it patriotic. I’m half Italian and there’s nobody more patriotic than the guin—I mean, you know. Three long years. Purple Heart twice. Air Corps Medal for—”
“You were wounded twice?” she cut in.
“Four times, but only two Purple Hearts. I—”
“Did you bring your papers with you, by any chance?” Her big wet eyes looked up at him. “Discharge papers?”
“I, uh . . .” He patted his chest pocket, then stopped the charade. Okay, she had him. The last door was slamming shut. “I can bring them in tomorrow,” he said then. “I can—”
“That won’t be necessary, Mr., uh. We can check it out if we have to.” Slam.
&n
bsp; “Right.” He nodded authoritatively. The clock on the table behind her showed close to five o’clock. Joe found himself wondering how many of the dummies waiting outside would be sent home without an interview and told to come back tomorrow. Bastard banks. All alike. Do what they want. License to steal.
No sense letting her know she’d won. “Can you tell me something about the job?” he asked. Best defense is an offense, right?
“It’s in systems,” she said, getting up. “We are looking for a few people who understand work flow and we hope to train them to go to the smaller branches and handle routing and re-check and that sort of thing.”
He refused to stand. “Pushing around pieces of paper, huh?”
She smiled faintly. “That’s just about what everyone does in a bank, isn’t it?” She started past him for the door and swung it open. “Thank you very much, Mr., uh . . .” Her voice died away.
Joe sat there, enjoying her embarrassment. He liked throwing her off base. He was supposed to get up like a good little soldier? Fuck her. She could wait till he was goddamned good and ready to get up. They were all alike, these guinea broads. Tina was the same way, always had been. So was his mother, only not as bad. It’s always whatever they want, not what you want. Never once.
And now that Tina had the two kids, it was even worse. The only people who needed things were her and the kids. Nothing Joe wanted carried any weight. She used the kids like clubs, slamming his head with them, calling him selfish and a rotten father and a lousy provider and all the garbage that collected in her meathead mind, spilling all over him, and the kids watching their old man eat shit until he couldn’t take it any more and just took off for a bar somewhere. Not one of those creep hardhat bars in Queens, where he lived. A bar with class. Like the one down in the Village where Lana hung out. Now, Lana was something else.
He pictured Lana’s figure against that of Miss Panetta. Lana was tall, sleek, like a racehorse or one of those greyhounds. This one here was sleek but small, like a chihuahua or a whippet.