Fall Down Easy

by Laurence Gough

  It wasn’t.

  A uniformed cop stood in the shelter of the Rialto’s grime-encrusted doorway. The cop was young, looked like he still worked out. He was wearing non-regulation mirror sunglasses that reflected the pale blue sky, passing traffic. Willows couldn’t read him. He had no idea if the cop was the type who’d take a moment to visit the Science & Technology Center, grab a little culture. But he was juggling a trio of bright yellow balls made of crumpled wax paper, so Willows was fairly sure he’d explored the wonders of French fries and cheeseburgers.

  The cop finally noticed the two detectives. Rattled, he fumbled the ball.

  Now the cop was staring at Parker. Willows couldn’t blame him, but didn’t like it. He kicked the balled-up cheeseburger wrapper into the gutter, brushed wordlessly past the cop and started up the stairs, into the musty, crumbling heart of this fleabag hotel.

  Parker, right behind him, said, “Outside, I counted five floors. Body’s on the fifth, right?”

  Willows said, “It’s all the climbing that gets you, in the end. Homicide detectives never die, they just run out of wind and take early retirement.”

  Parker started laughing. It wasn’t all that funny, but she hadn’t cracked a smile all day. Now she was laughing so hard she had to pause and catch her breath. Willows slowed his pace and glanced over his shoulder, smiled down at her.

  “You okay?”

  Parker leaned against a wall that was clearly out of plumb. She said, “Yeah, sure. I’m fine.”

  Willows was frowning, looking concerned. “You want to, we can go back to the main floor, take the elevator.”

  The chances of finding an elevator in a dump like this were about the same as finding a water cooler in the anteroom to hell. Parker started laughing again. After a moment, Willows joined in.

  The only cars in front of the building were the blue and white and Willows’ unmarked Caprice. The ME hadn’t showed up yet, and neither had the techs.

  For a moment or two, the body could wait.

  Three

  A wind that smelled faintly of iodine had kicked in from somewhere out in the Pacific. The clouds were low, crumpled, moving fast across the sky. Sharp splinters of sunlight came and went. Greg was wearing a cheap throwaway raincoat but he regretted not bringing an umbrella. A downpour would wash the complexion right off his face.

  He walked to a nearby Muffin Break restaurant, dropped a quarter in the pay phone in front of the shop, dialled Black Top and ordered a cab, went inside and bought a ham and pineapple and a takeout coffee. The Black Top dispatcher had said five minutes, and he was right on the money.

  The cab took him to a three-story medical building with an underground parking lot that was only two blocks from the bank. Greg paid the fare, strolled in the front door, loitered for a few minutes in the lobby and then took the elevator down one level to the parking lot. The brown Ford Taurus station wagon was right where he’d left it, the brown paper bag containing his change of clothes still on the backseat floor.

  Greg wandered around the lot, a set of keys dangling from his hand, whistling tunelessly as he pretended he couldn’t remember where the hell he’d left his car. If there were any undercover auto squad guys in the parking lot, he couldn’t find them.

  He went over to the stolen Taurus and took a closer look at it. The tires still had air in them. The gas tank hadn’t been drained. He opened the door and tapped the horn. The battery was still charged. Greg smiled. Maybe Ford really did have a better idea. He shut the door, dropped the keys in his pocket and strolled out of the building.

  Time to case the bank.

  One of the reasons he’d chosen this particular bank was because there happened to be a convenience store located directly across the street. Greg loitered at the magazine rack, a copy of StreetBike magazine clutched in his grimy hands but his mind on the bank, the ebb and flow of customers, pattern of pedestrian and automobile traffic. There were two easy ways to get busted. The best way was to tell a snitch what you were up to. The second best way was to loiter on the premises. Greg believed the cops had a response time of somewhere in the neighbourhood of three minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds. He never allowed his visits to exceed half that time. Ninety seconds — that was his personal limit. After that, no matter how much fun he was having, hasta la vista baby, he was gone.

  The biker magazine was weird. There were more nude women in it than you’d find in the average Penthouse. And fewer motorcycles. He put the magazine back in the rack and checked his watch. Twenty-seven minutes past four. Patterns were dangerous, but sometimes necessary. Banks were like donuts. Any time was a good time. But he favoured the start of the lunch hour and also between four and six in the afternoon. Later was best, because when the streets were jammed it slowed the cops’ response time, rendering their lights and sirens all but useless.

  Not that Greg’d ever been involved in a hot pursuit. If he ever came that close, he’d have to take a long hard look at a career change — retail sales, something along those lines.

  He walked down a narrow aisle to the freezer at the back of the store and pawed through the icecream. So many choices, so little appetite. He helped himself to a lime popsicle and then changed his mind and snatched up the last of the fudgicles. On his way to the cash register he developed a limp, dragged his left heel so it left a black skidmark on the linoleum.

  The guy behind the counter saw how he was disfiguring the store and gave him a look that clearly said — If you were a horse, I’d gladly put you out of your misery, pal.

  Greg asked for and was reluctantly given a dollar’s worth of quarters in his change. Snuffling and shadow-boxing, he limped out of the store and went around to the side of the building where there was a concrete retaining wall he could sit on while he nibbled at his icecream and studied the traffic patterns a little longer.

  He finished the fudgicle, lit a cigarette. It was 4:35.

  He limped over to the phone booth and dropped the first of three quarters, dialled Black Top and Yellow and finally Checker Cabs. All three cabs were scheduled to arrive at exactly five o’clock. The Black Top would pick him up in front of the bank, the Yellow would arrive at the convenience store, and the Checker would pull up in front of a Bino’s restaurant a few doors down the block.

  This was a new thing, the multiple use of taxis. He hoped it would work out. If not, he’d yank some commuter fool out from behind the wheel and borrow his car; all he needed was something to get him to the Taurus stashed in the garage of the medical building. Or he could hop on a bus, steal a tricycle. Whatever, the idea was to get out fast. Because if they trapped you inside the bank, you might as well jump in the vault and slam shut the door, it was all over, mama, roll the credits.

  On the other hand, Greg believed that the minute he hit the street, he was a free man. Because if there was one thing he was good at, it was thinking on his feet, the fine art of improvisation.

  Given a little elbow room, they could drop a drift net over the whole damn city and never catch him. The thing was, they didn’t know who they were looking for or what he looked like. And they never would.

  Greg used the sleeve of his shirt to wipe his prints off the telephone. He lit another cigarette. He felt as if he was going to live forever — that’s how slowly time was passing.

  At 4:51 he started across the convenience store’s parking lot towards the intersection, timing his limping gait perfectly, so he hit the comer at the exact moment the albino pedestrian appeared — a symbol of reassurance to all but the blind.

  At 4:54 he elbowed open the glass door and stepped inside. There were only three customers in the bank; an elderly woman wearing a pink pant suit and a cheap straw hat decorated with artificial roses; a skinny blonde in her early twenties; and a pudgy bald guy in his forties dressed in white coveralls with the logo of a local cablevision company.

  The blonde was the wide-awake-and-extremely-observant type, a good witness. She’d memorize everything about the heist and tell
it to all her friends but never say a word to the cops because she didn’t want to get involved. The cable guy got paid by the hour — he wasn’t going to risk his ass to save the corporation’s money.

  That left the old lady, and it was the old lady that experience had taught him to worry about. She knew right from wrong and was proud of it, had lived long enough to think she was immortal, and probably swung a mean purse.

  Greg decided that if he had to, he’d show her the Browning. If that didn’t cool the old babe off, he’d put a bullet right between her eyes, turn that goofy straw hat into a gravestone.

  Greg smiled at the cable guy. Just kidding, fella. The cable guy suddenly took an interest in the terrazzo, avoiding eye contact. The shy type. Where’d he get that tan? Hawaii, no doubt. The annual vacation, two weeks all included. Didn’t somebody tell him about the deadly ozone layer thing, the deadly skin cancer thing?

  Only two of the five teller’s cages were open for business. The blonde was at the one near the window, and the old woman had the other — Hilary’s — nailed down.

  The cable guy shifted his weight from side to side, unable to keep still. Greg’s smile seemed to have made him a little nervous. Well, that’s what smiles were for. Greg tapped him lightly on the shoulder. The guy jumped. He was carrying a shiny black briefcase and it seemed to Greg he might have squeezed the handle a little tighter.

  Greg said, “How come channel seventeen’s impaired?”

  Without missing a beat, the guy said, “Maybe it ain’t the reception — maybe it’s you.” He had a strong accent. Cuban or Mexican? The guy’d suddenly lost his shyness, was staring at Greg with dark brown, Rottweiler eyes. Greg gritted his teeth, resisted the urge to drop the mug with an overhand right. After what seemed like a very long time the cable guy muttered a word Greg wasn’t familiar with, and turned his back on him. Puta, was that it, puta? Was that a nice thing to say, puta?

  Greg didn’t think so. He pictured himself screwing the Browning into the guy’s ear, yanking the trigger and watching his head light up.

  He sensed movement behind him, and turned and saw a woman who looked too old and frazzled and worn-out to even consider having children shove a doublewide stroller through the door. Greg counted two babies. Twins. Redheads. Tiny little things, but were they ever noisy. The one closest to Greg dumped its bottle overboard. The bottle skidded across the terrazzo and spun to a stop a few inches from Greg’s foot. He gave it a kick, sending it back towards the stroller. The woman glared at him. She knelt and picked the bottle up and stuck it in the baby’s screaming mouth. The other kid dumped his bottle. Greg let it lie.

  The blonde’s lips moved as she counted her money, slowly made her way towards the door.

  The puta guy moved towards the teller’s cage nearest the window. Which meant, hopefully, that Hilary’s cage would be free next, and Greg could step right up and say hello. If it didn’t work out that way, Greg’d let mommy step in front of him, crash the lineup.

  The stroller jerked back and forth, back and forth.

  Greg was very tense. In his stomach, the fudgicle had turned into a sludgicle. He felt like he’d spent most of his life in the damn bank. He checked his watch. One minute to five.

  He glared at the old lady. As if in response, she snapped shut her purse so forcibly that it sounded like a maximum security cell door clanging shut. Then turned and walked right past him.

  Greg limped up to Hilary’s cage. She was watching him with those cool green eyes of hers, aware of him but completely uninterested. And who could blame her? The whole point of a disguise was being able to shuck what was memorable. Greg smiled at her, said hello in his throaty fighter’s voice, then looked her over, made a slow pass with his squinty eyes. She wore a plain white silk blouse and a skirt with more pleats than the average accordion. She hadn’t bothered with the top buttons of the blouse, giving the customers a peek at a frothy underlayer of pink silk and the rope-design gold necklace Greg’d given her. She looked terrific. Sexy, full of juice.

  Greg passed her the note, which he’d laboured over for almost an hour the previous evening. The note was in rhyming couplets. It needed a rap beat to do it justice but Greg was too shy to try. He watched as Hilary read the note, saw her begin to smile, the smile fade as the content began to sink in. She looked up, stared across the counter at the worn-out but kind of beady-eyed hulk who was trying to rob her. To Greg, Hilary looked tense, but not frightened, more like she was trying to remember what to do.

  Greg picked up the lightweight plastic nameplate that had Hilary Fletcher engraved on it and slammed it down on the counter hard enough to make a dent in the wood. “Just give me the money, that’s all.”

  Hilary stared at him.

  Greg said, “Gimme the money, sweetheart, or I’ll blow away the Bobbsy Twins and phone the papers and tell them I’m real sorry but Hilary made me do it.”

  She still didn’t move. She was frozen, stiff as a brand-new icicle. Against his better judgement, Greg gave her a quick peek at the Browning. Hilary’s head fell back. She opened her mouth so wide that Greg could count each and every last filling, then screamed with so much enthusiasm that the twins, awestruck, fell silent.

  After that, several things happened at once. A man in his fifties wearing a dark blue pinstripe suit walked out of the manager’s office with an expression on his face like someone’d turned the stereo up too loud. The twins started screaming again. The blonde, standing at the door with a fist full of twenty-dollar bills, did a little pirouette and stared open-mouthed at the scene. The old lady hurtled back into the bank. But what really got Greg’s attention was the puta guy.

  The puta guy didn’t even turn around.

  Greg reached over the counter and grabbed a handful of silk, shoved the muzzle of the Browning up against Hilary’s forehead. She immediately stopped screaming and started pushing money across the counter.

  Greg said, “That’s the idea — now you’re cooking!’ He began to stuff his pockets.

  The pinstripe veered away from Greg. His face was white, sweaty. The puta was no threat but the way he was holding the briefcase made Greg want to grab it away from him. Had to be something more valuable in there than a peanut butter sandwich in a brown paper bag.

  Greg, acting on the spur of the moment, took a step backwards and said, “That’s mine, pal,” and snatched at the briefcase. The cable guy lost his balance. His arms windmilled. Greg shifted his grip on the briefcase and yanked hard.

  Hilary started yelling again. Something about a hold-up. Thanks, babe.

  Greg stomped on the cable guy’s wrist, heard a bone snap. The high-pitched electronic shriek of the silent alarm filled him with pain. He stomped down again, the heel of his shoe digging into the guy’s collarbone. The dude finally let go of the briefcase. Greg staggered back, hit the stroller. He was bleeding, could feel the blood streaming down his leg. He glanced down at himself as he went for the Browning.

  He was standing in a puddle of warm milk. My God, he thought, I almost shot a baby.

  Somebody behind him yelled, “Hold it!”

  It was the cable guy, the puta. Back on his feet. He had something in his hand — a small mirror. What did he think he was up to? Greg was a boxer, not some kind of fruitcake vampire! Greg started towards the door, the briefcase clutched tightly to his chest. Hilary, bless her heart, was still throwing money at him but he had a hunch it was small spuds compared to the briefcase. He held the Browning loosely in his right hand, pointed at the floor.

  Suddenly the puta had a gun, was pointing a gun at him. The sound of his shot slapped Greg in the ears. He heard the bullet zip past just as the second round struck him in the chest, on the left side, just below his heart. Greg staggered, held his ground, squeezed the trigger as he began to raise the Browning. His first three rounds wailed off the polished terrazzo. The next three or four punctured the plate glass window in a diagonal line moving from left to right. An incredibly lucky hit took out the security camera nex
t to the front teller’s cage. Greg couldn’t tell where the next several shots went, but the last time he pulled, he scored a direct hit.

  Loops of arterial blood spun through the air. The redheaded twins suddenly looked as if they were moulting. Mommy shrieked hysterically and fell across the stroller. The tubular chrome frame buckled under her weight. The twins started screaming again. Fair enough. The puta guy waved a limp hand, as if to signal defeat.

  But he hadn’t dropped his weapon, had he? Greg took a bead on him, shot out an eyebrow.

  The puta guy got that plucked and de-boned look that meant he was dead on his feet. Gravity took him by the hand. He started to drop. Now the blonde was screaming, and so was the old woman in the pink suit. Hilary, always a joiner, was yelling her head off.

  The puta hit the floor and did not bounce. His left hand fell open. Greg saw that the mirror was a goddamn badge. He picked it up. The metal was warm. There was a single drop of blood just above the word DETECTIVE.

  Greg couldn’t believe it. All he’d wanted to do was rob a bank, steal a little money and go home and have a hot bath and unwind, and here he was all of a sudden in the middle of an a cappella nightmare. He’d shot a cop. Shot him more than once, if you wanted to get technical.

  Greg snuck a look. Spent casings littered the floor. The puta cable guy was dead, no question, lay flat on his back in the middle of a pool of blood so big they’d need a canoe to retrieve the body.

  He glanced at his watch. Sweat blurred his eyes. He had to bring his wrist up almost to his nose before he could get the dial in focus, read the numbers.

  5:04.

  No way. Impossible.

  Greg peered at the big electric clock high up on the wall at the back of the bank.

  5:05.

  He tried to think of some way to travel backwards in time, but his brain had turned into a hornets’ nest, all abuzz and aswirl. What was the point of leaving when he had no place to go? Greg checked his watch — the date, this time. It was only the tenth, and his rent was paid through to the end of the month. Plus he could stay with Hilary, in a pinch. Couldn’t he? The hornets vacated Greg’s brain. He took that crucial first step towards the door.