by Patrick Mann
He heard the detective laughing on the other end of the line. “Joe, I guess your hostages are in good shape, right?”
“Just make sure we get the pizzas.”
“It’s a deal. Look, I been turning myself inside out for you. It’s time you did something for me,” Moretti said.
“You got the million in cash?”
“Not yet.”
“Then hang up and order the pizzas.”
“You get the pizzas, Joe. A promise is a promise. I need something from you before I can get any final action out of my higher-ups. You can understand what I mean when I tell you they don’t trust you. Your word isn’t good enough for them. I believe you. I stand by your word. That don’t cut any ice with my bosses or the FBI. They’re reluctant to go through with ransom, safe conduct, plane, unless they get some kind of evidence of good faith on your part.”
“Good what?”
“Faith,” Moretti repeated. “I got faith in you. They need something more than my faith. They need evidence.”
“Like what?”
“Like . . . oh, let’s say . . . like releasing your hostages.”
“Kiss, kiss,” Littlejoe cooed. “Fuck, fuck.”
“I keep telling you, Joe, I don’t need evidence. They need it.”
“They must think I’m an idiot. My hostages are all that keep the pig from slaughtering us.”
“Don’t use that word.”
“Pig? You don’t like pig?”
“Listen, Joe, you and I are the ones who have to understand each other,” Moretti warned him. “You have to give me my respect as a man. You can’t do it when you use words like that. Understand? You give me my respect and I give you yours. Otherwise, fuck the whole deal.”
“Okay, okay.” Joe pulled his feet off the desk. “A touchy cop, Jesus. But the answer’s still no. I give up hostages, I commit suicide.”
He watched Maria lugging a corrugated cardboard carton into the lobby. “Here,” he said. “Open it up.”
“What?” Moretti asked.
“Nothing. No deal. No hostages.”
“They won’t move without I show them you’re sincere, Joe. I have to show them you can be trusted.”
“No hostages.”
“One hostage,” Moretti begged.
“No.”
“One. You’ll still have four, right? Four is more than enough, Joe. All you need is one, really, to keep with you out to the airport.”
“No.”
“Just give me one hostage now. I promise I’ll have the wheels spinning and the ransom here in an hour.”
“Kiss, kiss. If you didn’t collect the cash yet, it’s too fucking late now,” Littlejoe said. Boyle joined Maria in unpacking the tiny Japanese black-and-white television set. He plugged it in and pulled out the single collapsible antenna. “Channel Two,” Joe said.
“Not two,” Moretti begged, “just one. Give me one. Don’t worry about the cash. The FBI has cash reserves just for this purpose. We’ll have the million for you. But you have to show you can be trusted.”
“Shee-it. Hold the phone.” Joe put the instrument down on the desk. “Sam,” he said, “they say they’ll speed everything up if we show we’re in good faith. They want one hostage. We’ll still have enough to protect us.”
“Which one?”
Littlejoe looked at Boyle. “I’ll show you who’s in good fucking faith, Boyle. You bank people choose. Pick one.”
Both Boyle and Marge turned to look at each other. Then they both looked at Leroy, the guard, who had barely stirred in the past hour from the armchair in which he’d been put. Boyle glanced over at the other bank people. “How about Leroy? His heart . . .”
“Yeah, Leroy,” Maria agreed.
Ellen’s face remained stiff. “I . . . guess so.”
“Leroy,” Boyle called. “You want it to be Ellen? She has a small baby.”
The guard’s eyes fluttered. “Whatever,” he mumbled. “Whatever.”
“Ellen’s out,” Joe announced. “Ellen’s my ace in the hole. Forget Ellen. Give ’em Leroy, then?”
Everyone nodded. Joe went over to the guard and lifted him to his feet.
“This is your lucky fucking day, Leroy. Come on.”
“S-slow an’ easy,” the guard muttered. “My chest hurt bad.”
“No problems, Leroy. If it was your heart you’d be dead by now. It’s gas. One good fart’ll clear it up.” He escorted the guard to the door. “Wait there.” He went back to the phone. “Okay, Moretti, you get the dinge. He says his heart’s bad so the bank people voted to let him go. Isn’t that democratic, Moretti? More’n they’d do for a guinea, right?”
“Send him outside.”
“In front of the door, Moretti. This is proof I’m in good faith. Make sure your people keep the faith, too.”
He hung up and returned to a position just behind Leroy. “Don’t be nervous now, Leroy. The old ticker is strong enough for this. The cops will take you to the hospital and it’ll be fine, and Chase might even give you a twenty-five-buck bonus.”
“For what?”
“How should I know?” Joe unlocked the door. “Okay, Leroy, move them feet.” He swung the door open and, planting his hand in between Leroy’s shoulders, gave a shove.
The guard, slightly off balance, and weak-kneed to begin with, tottered forward into the hot sun. The street erupted with confusion. Joe saw dozens of guns trained on Leroy: submachine guns, shotguns, rifles, riot guns, revolvers, automatics. He saw Moretti explode out the front door of the insurance office.
“Don’t fire!” Moretti yelled. “Hold your fire!”
Littlejoe very distinctly heard a cop nearby ask: “Did he say fire?” From across the street another cop said: “When do we fire?”
“Hold . . . your . . . fire!” Moretti screamed at the top of his voice.
Tugging his straw hat more firmly down over his forehead, he started across the hot black asphalt for Leroy, who had fallen to his knees on the sidewalk in front of the bank.
Joe watched a young cop with longish hair and a moustache run squatted down, like a Western gunfighter, to get a closer aim at Leroy. He held the gun in both hands and trained it directly on Leroy’s face from twenty feet away.
“Don’t shoot,” Moretti shouted. “Get the hell out of the way.”
The young cop swiveled and aimed the gun at Moretti, then realized what he had done and swung it back on Leroy.
Moretti had crossed the white line in the middle of the street. “Put it down, you stupid bastard,” he told the cop. The young man blinked, almost winced, but held his pose.
Suddenly the street broke up into bits and pieces of action. Joe saw cops run for Leroy, throw him to the pavement. One cop got his foot on Leroy’s back. Two others grabbed his arms. One shoved a shotgun against his eye.
Moretti reached him at this point. He began batting away at the uniformed cops, trying to get them to release Leroy. One of them was frisking Leroy for weapons. Another yanked his arms behind him and locked handcuffs in place.
Joe locked the door and moved back into the bank. “There,” he told Boyle, “there’s your law.”
16
Thinking about it as he checked what each person inside the bank was doing, Littlejoe decided that if he’d been one of the hostages, or a dumdum like Eddie, he’d long ago have been bored to sleep. But, being the leader, the one who had to dream up the ideas and give the orders, he found he felt more alive, more wide-awake, more real than ever before in his life. This was what he’d been born for, obviously. To lead. To be obeyed.
He checked Boyle, sitting behind a desk in the far corner of the lobby, talking quietly to Marge. Joe wasn’t afraid they were plotting anything. Both of them knew better than that. They were probably wondering if they could get out of this alive to continue their little middle-aged affair. Probably they both had families they went home to at night. But there was always the motel along the way from five to seven. “Late work at the office, d
ear.”
Littlejoe wondered what Marge could see in a bald guy with a thickening middle like Harry Boyle. He had a little style, a touch of class, maybe, but handsome he wasn’t. What Boyle saw in Marge, of course, anybody could see.
Littlejoe’s monitoring glance shifted to Ellen, sniveling quietly into a soaked Kleenex, Sam watching her as intently as ever. Joe felt a warm rush of emotion about Sam. He was more than a good kid. He was a man. He was to be relied upon. Maybe he was a little funny about jail. You could understand that, after what’d happened to him there. Maybe some people would think he was a killer type or something. Joe did not. Sam had his odd spots, but he was solid, the right guy in the right place.
As for Eddie . . . where was he?
Joe frowned. He pulled the .38 out of his belt and moved toward the back of the lobby, where Sam and Ellen were. “What’s with Eddie?”
Sam jerked the muzzle of the .45 Colt in the direction of the vault. “Back there out of sight.”
Joe glanced around. “With Maria?”
“I guess.”
Joe’s frown deepened. He could feel the creases deepen between his eyebrows, and he made a conscious effort to smooth out the skin there. He didn’t want to grow up with a permanent frown like his shitty old man. “Eddie?” he called into the rear of the bank. “What’s up?”
After a long moment he heard a snicker. “Me.”
Joe’s glance locked with Sam’s. “He’s in the vault with Maria?”
Sam nodded. “Want me to look?”
“You keep these monkeys covered. I’ll look.” Littlejoe moved behind the lobby sign and turned toward the vault. Even from that angle, his line of sight slanted through the bars of the vault door, he could see that Maria was on the floor on her back. As he came abreast of the vault entrance, he saw that Eddie was on his knees straddling her, his weight holding down her torso, his hands on her arms, his erect cock ramming up against her face, her nose, into her eyes.
Hearing him, Eddie turned to gloat at Joe. His face was red, skin damp. His lips looked wet. He was breathing hard, but not uncomfortably so. “This spic cunt won’t give head,” he complained.
“Please, mister.” Maria’s lips parted for an instant. “Please.”
As a spectator sport, a way of spending the afternoon if your TV set wasn’t working, Littlejoe thought, he could think of a hundred better things to do than watch this dumb ox brutalizing a broad half his size and weight.
“How’d you manage to get this far, Eddie,” he asked, “without her yelling for help?”
“Easy,” the driver bragged. “She knows if she opens it even a crack, she eats the whole thing.”
“You gotta be careful with Puerto Rican women, Eddie,” Joe said, keeping his voice serious. “They try to stay very pure. She’s gonna bite your head off for you.”
A shadow of doubt crossed Eddie’s heated face, then flickered out. “No way, man.”
Littlejoe backed away from the vault. The entire conversation had been carried on at a pitch he felt sure no one in the bank had heard. This Eddie, this was what came of picking up unknown helpers at the last minute. If he ever got out of this alive and loose, he was going to give his cousin Mick a piece of his mind, saddling him with this animal.
“Sam,” he said as he moved out into the lobby. “You wanna see something that belongs in a zoo?”
“That one?” Sam cocked his head in Eddie’s direction. “What’s going on?”
“Take a look. I’ll guard everybody.”
Sam lowered the .45 to his side and started toward the vault. Joe raised the Police Positive and showed it to everyone. “We’re still thinking of your greater comfort and convenience, folks. Just hang easy and nobody dies.”
“Bruto animale!” Sam cursed.
Joe tried to see what was happening in the vault. After a moment he heard a single noise, once, a kind of thock! He stepped back to see what was happening. Sam had hold of Eddie’s leg and was pulling him that way out of the vault, like a giant beached whale.
The fact that Eddie didn’t seem to object to this was explained a moment later when Eddie’s face came into view as Sam dumped him where everyone in the lobby could see him. Sam had obviously clouted Eddie’s chin and cheek with the side of the Colt, holding it flat so that its weight knocked Eddie almost unconscious. Eddie groaned now and touched his cheek where blood was rilling up.
“Hey!” he whimpered. “Looka this?”
Sam grabbed his hair and pulled him into an upright position, his back against the far wall of the lobby. “You fucking animal,” he said.
He pulled the Colt sideways in a tight arc and, pivoting like a golfer, slammed the muzzle into Eddie’s left eye. Blood spurted from the skin across Eddie’s temple. He started to slump to his right.
Sam brought the Colt around in a backhand swing and smashed it across the bridge of Eddie’s nose, straightening him upright on the floor and producing a new wound somewhere inside the nose, which began to pump blood out of Eddie’s right nostril.
Eddie leaned forward slightly, knuckles on the floor, to lever himself up onto his feet. Sam took a step back and flicked the Colt up against Eddie’s chin. The front sight of the gun punched into the flesh of the throat, producing a kind of bluish-black puncture. As Eddie’s head hit the back wall, the thump rattled a sign on the wall over his head that announced to everyone that their deposits were insured for up to $15,000 by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
Littlejoe glanced past Eddie’s bloody head, to see Maria, on her knees, watching wide-eyed through the open gate of the vault. He swung around to keep the rest of the bank people covered.
“We’re moving right along, folks,” he said. “Just a technical problem with Eddie’s cock, that’s all.”
“Now I’m taking him out,” Sam announced. He had taken another step back, and raised the Colt with great calmness until it pointed at Eddie’s gory face.
“No, Sam.”
“He goes.”
“Sam, the shot. Remember what I said about shots.”
“This stronzo dies.”
“Not now.”
“I gotta kill him, Littlejoe. You promised.”
“When did I do that, baby?” Joe said in a soothing voice.
He watched Sam’s cherub face darken from the blood pumping within. His eyes had gone coal black, and his pretty mouth had frozen into a line of stone. He was having trouble breathing, almost as much trouble as Eddie was through his blood-clotted nose. Joe had never seen Sam this way. But, then, he had never seen Sam under real pressure of any kind.
“You fire a shot,” he told Sam, “and you could end up killing all of us.” Joe moistened his paper-dry lips. “The cops could go ape if they hear a shot from inside, figure we’re killing hostages and come in shooting.”
“So?”
“Whadya mean so?”
“So fucking what?” Sam asked coldly.
Littlejoe took a step toward Sam. The boy pivoted until the .45 was aimed at Joe’s abdomen. “Watch it, Littlejoe. If we all go, we all go.”
“We don’t have to.”
Sam’s eyes burned almost out of control for a moment, as if his inner vision of the way they would all go was too powerful, too luscious, too glorious to forsake. “Watch it, Littlejoe,” he said again, his voice as dry as ashes. “Just . . . watch it.”
But the fire had gone out of his words. Joe could hear it die away. After a moment, the Colt lowered slightly, until it was aimed at Eddie’s groin. “You really want me to let this animal live,” Sam said then, musingly, as if not quite sure of Joe’s sanity.
“I don’t care if he lives or dies. I just don’t want any shots.”
Sam nodded then. “Okay, baby, no shots.” He seemed to get shorter for a moment. Littlejoe couldn’t tell what had happened, then saw that Sam was bending at the knees like a skier.
In the next second he jumped high in the air. An instant later he was coming down full force with both clo
g heels on Eddie’s exposed penis. He landed with a thud that rocked the FDIC sign again. Eddie screamed, choked on his own blood, and fainted.
Sam stepped back daintily out of the puddle that was Eddie. He reached down, managed to find an arm, and lugged Eddie back into the vault. He returned a few moments later, leading Maria with him and looking pleased with himself.
“That’s a lot better now, huh, Littlejoe?”
The beatific smile on his face seemed to light up the lobby.
17
“. . . and that is the situation up to this hour, a complete standoff with a million dollars and the lives of four innocent people at stake. This is Ron Aronowitz, CBS News, Queens, New York.”
Joe sighed unhappily and snapped off the television set. “No Oscar. No Emmy. No Tony. Huh, Sam?”
Sam shrugged. “You looked pretty good out there, though, Littlejoe.”
“I was squinting too much. That fucking sun. That heat.”
“Too bad you didn’t have your good threads on.”
“That’s all right,” Joe assured him. “Anybody knows me could recognize me. They must’ve all seen it, huh? Tina. My mother, Flo. Probably Lana seen it, too. It’s a red-letter day, baby.” His face grew solemn. “I’m just sorry you didn’t get on camera, Sam. Next time, okay?”
“Maybe they don’t give us no next time.”
“You’re kidding. We call the turns, baby. We tell them, not them us. You want to be on TV, Sam? Just say the word.”
“I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“They feed you questions. It’s easy.”
“For you, Littlejoe, not for me.”
“Whatever you want.” Joe let the subject drop. Sam was a little easier to talk to now that he’d bloodied up Eddie. He seemed calmer, happier.
Of course, as someone to rely on, Sam was finished, Littlejoe told himself. From being a Rock of Gibraltar, he’d turned into a maniac of some kind. The way he’d finished off Eddie was not a sane thing to do. It went a long way beyond what a good kid would do to help a buddy. And it didn’t do Eddie a whole hell of a lot of good.