by Ed McBain
There was no problem unlocking the main gate, nor temporarily locking it again behind him. He crossed to the building, unlocked the one loading bay door with a faulty alarm he happened to know about, and made his way through the silent, dark, stuffy plant to the managers’ offices, where it was a simple matter to disarm the alarm systems, running now on the backup batteries. Then he retraced his steps, out to the street.
Janet had expected to be the only person driving around this area this late at night, but partway to town another car’s headlights appeared in her rearview mirror. Another night owl, she thought, and hoped he wasn’t a drunken speed demon who would try to pass her. These roads were narrow and twisty. But, no; thankfully, he kept well back. She drove on into town, turned into the Sycamore House parking lot, recognized the Honda right away, and parked next to it.
Roger had kept well back, sorry he had to use his headlights at all but not wanting to run into a deer out here, the deer population having exploded in this part of the world once all of the predator animals had been removed, unless you count hunters, and don’t. He followed the car ahead all the way into town, and when he saw the brake lights go on he thought at first she was braking for the traffic light up ahead, but then she suddenly made the left turn into the Sycamore House parking lot. Damn! He hadn’t expected that. Should he go past? Should he stop? If he tried to park along here, you just knew some damn cop would pop out of nowhere to give him both a hard time and a ticket, while Janet got away to who knows where. Guerrera, that’s where. San Cristobal, Guerrera.
He drove on by, peering in at the Sycamore House parking lot, but she’d switched her lights off and there was nothing to see. He got to the corner, and the light was against him, so he stopped, while no traffic went by in all directions. Diagonally across the street was Luigi’s, the Italian restaurant, and at the far end of it, he knew, was a small parking lot, hemmed in by the fake forest. He could leave the car there and hoof it back to Sycamore House, just as soon as this damn light changed. When would it—? Ah! At last.
He drove across the empty intersection, turned left at the small and empty parking lot, and stopped, car’s nose against pine branches. He switched off lights and engine, so now it was only by the vague streetlight glow well behind him that he saw, in his rearview mirror, the apparition rise from the floor behind the front seat, exactly like all those horror stories! He stared, convulsed with terror, and the apparition showed him a wide horrible smile, a big horrible pistol and a pair of shiny horrible handcuffs. “Didn’t that tarot deck,” it asked him, “tell you not to go out tonight?”
16
When Querk walked back into the Sycamore House parking lot, Janet’s Chrysler Cirrus was parked next to his little Honda; a bigger, more comfortable car, though not very new. She must have seen him in the rearview mirror because she popped out of her car, the brief illumination of the interior light showing the hugeness of her smile but still the dark around her left eye. Then the door closed, the light went out, and she was in his arms.
They embraced a long time, he feeling her body tremble with the release of weeks of tension. Months. But now it was over. He was off parole, a free man. She was out of that house, a free woman. Start here.
At last he released her and whispered, “Everything’s going fine. Three, four hours, it’ll be all over.”
“I know you’ll do it,” she whispered, then shook a finger at him. “Don’t let them get any ideas.”
“I won’t.”
He took his bag from the Honda and put it in the Chrysler, then kissed her one last time, got into the Honda, and drove out to the street. He turned left, ignored the red light, drove through the intersection, and stopped next to the Hess station across the street from Luigi’s. Promptly, Dortmunder stepped out of the dimness inside the phone booth there, crossed the sidewalk, and slid in next to him.
Querk looked around. “Where’s Kelp?”
“A couple things came up,” Dortmunder told him, “nothing to do with us. He’ll take care of them, then catch up with us later.”
Querk didn’t like this, didn’t like the idea that one of his partners was going to be out of sight while the job was going down. “We’re gonna need Kelp in the plant there,” he said.
“He’ll be there,” Dortmunder promised. “He’ll be right there when we get back with the truck.”
There was nothing Querk could do about this development short of to call the whole thing off, which he didn’t want to do, so he nodded reluctantly and said, “I hope nothing’s gonna get screwed up.”
“How could it? Come on, let’s go.”
The Combined Darby County Fire Department and Rescue Squad existed in an extremely fireproof brick building in the middle of nowhere. Seven local volunteer fire departments and two local volunteer ambulance services, each with its own firehouse or garage, had been combined into this organization, made necessary by the worsening shortage of volunteers, and political infighting had made it impossible to use any of the existing facilities. A local nob had donated land here in the middle of the responsibility area, and the building was erected, empty and alone unless a fundraiser dinner were being held or the volunteers’ beepers sounded off.
Querk. parked the Honda behind the building, out of sight, and used a copy of Cousin Claude’s key to unlock the right garage door. He lifted it, stepped inside, and drove out the truck, which was red like a fire engine, with high metal sides full of cubicles containing emergency equipment, a metal roof, but open at the back to show the big generator bolted to the truck body in there.
Querk waited while Dortmunder lowered the garage door and climbed up onto the seat next to him. “Pretty good machine,” he said.
“It does the job,” Querk said.
It was with relief that Querk saw Kelp actually standing there next to the NO TRESPASSING sign. Kelp waved, and Dortmunder waved back, while Querk drove down to the closed entrance gates. “They’re unlocked,” he assured Dortmunder, who climbed out to open the gates, then close them again after the truck and Kelp had both entered.
Driving slowly alongside the building toward the window he wanted, Querk saw in all his rearview mirrors, illuminated by a smallish moon, Dortmunder and Kelp walking along in his wake, talking together. Kelp must be telling Dortmunder what he’d done about whatever problem he’d gone off to fix.
Querk wondered; should he ask Kelp what the problem was? No, he shouldn’t. Dortmunder had said it was nothing to do with tonight’s job, so that meant it was none of his business. The fact that Kelp was here was all that mattered. A tight-lipped man knows when other people expect him to be tight-lipped.
17
Dortmunder was bored. There was nothing to do about it but admit it; he was bored.
Usually, in a heist, what you do is, you case the joint, then you plan and plan, and then there’s a certain amount of tension when you break into whatever the place is, and then you grab what you came for and you get out of there.
Not this time. This time, the doors are open, the alarms are off, and nobody’s around. So you just waltz in. But then you don’t grab anything, and you certainly don’t get out of there.
What you do instead, you shlep heavy cable off a wheel out of the generator truck, shove it through a window Querk has opened, and then shlep it across a concrete floor in the dark, around and sometimes into a lot of huge machines that are not the machine Querk wants, until at last you can hook the cables to both a machine and a control panel. This control panel also controls some lights, so finally you can see what you’re doing.
Meanwhile, Querk has been collecting his supplies. He needs three different inks, and two big rolls of special paper, that he brings over with his forklift. He needs one particular size of paper cutter, a wickedly sharp big rectangle criss-crossed with extremely dangerous lines of metal, that has to be slid into an opening in the side of the machine without sacrificing any fingers to it, and which will, at the appropriate moments, descend inside the machine to slice s
heets of paper into many individual siapas.
The boxes for the siapas already exist, but laid out flat, and have to be inserted into a wide slot in the back of the machine. The nasty wire bands to close the boxes—hard, springy, with extremely sharp edges—have to be inserted onto rolls and fed into the machine like feeding movie film into a projector. Having three guys for this part is a help, because it would take one guy working alone a whole lot longer just to set things up, even if he could wrestle the big paper roll into position by himself, which he probably couldn’t.
But after everything was in position, then you really needed three guys. It was a three-guy machine. Guy number one (Querk) was at the control panel, keeping an eye on the gauges that told him how the ink flow was coming along, how the paper feed was doing, how the boxes were filling up. Guy number two (Kelp) was physically all around the machine, which was a little delicate and touchy, following Querk’s orders on how to adjust the various feeds and watch the paper, which would have liked to jam up if anybody looked away for a minute.
And guy number three, Dortmunder, was the utility man. It was his job to replenish the ink supply when needed, which was rarely. It was also his job to wrestle the full boxes off the end of the chute at the back of the machine, but since in three hours there were only going to be five boxes, that didn’t take up a lot of his time. It was also his job occasionally to go out to see how the generator truck was coming along, which was fine. In addition, it was his job to keep checking on the laid-out boxes inside the machine with the money stacking up on them, and the alignment of the big papercutter, to make sure nothing was getting off kilter and to warn Querk to shut down temporarily if something did, which only happened twice. And generally it was his job to stand chicky; but if anybody were to come into the plant that they wouldn’t like to come in, it would already be too late to do anything about it.
So here he was, the gofer in a slow-motion heist, and he was bored. It was like having an actual job.
They’d started at ten after one, and it was just a few ticks after four when the last of the paper rolled into the machine and Querk started shutting its parts down, one section at a time until the fifth and final box came gliding out of the chute and Dortmunder wrestled it over onto the concrete floor with the others. Five boxes, very heavy, each containing a thousand bills compressed into the space, a thousand twenty million siapa notes per box, for a value of a hundred thousand dollars per box. In Guerrera.
Dortmunder stepped back from the final box. “Done,” he said. “At last.”
“Not exactly done,” Querk said. “Remember, this run never happened. We gotta clean up everything in here, put it all back the way it was.”
Yes; exactly like having a job.
18
Querk’s nervousness, once they’d driven the generator truck actually onto the plant property, had turned into a kind of paralysis, a cauterizing in which he couldn’t feel his feelings. He was just doing it, everything he’d been going over and over in his mind all this time, acting out the fantasy, reassuring Janet and himself that everything would work out just fine, playing it out in his head again and again so that, when the time came to finally do it, actually in the real world do it, it was as though he’d already done it and this was just remembering.
And the job went, if anything, even better than the fantasy, smooth and quick and easy. Not a single problem with the two guys he’d found to help, and that had always been one of the scarier parts of the whole thing. He couldn’t do it alone, but he couldn’t use locals, none of these birds around here had the faintest idea how to keep their mouths shut. Amateurs. He had to use pros, but he didn’t know anybody anymore.
Nevertheless, if he was going to do it, he would have to reach out, find somebody with the right resume that he could talk into the job, and boy, did he come up lucky. Dortmunder and Kelp were definitely pros, but at the same time they were surprisingly gullible. He could count on them to do the job and to keep their mouths shut, and he could also count on them to never even notice what he was really up to.
The cleaning up after the print job took another half hour. The next to the last thing they did, before switching off the lights, was forklift the five boxes of siapas out to the generator truck, where they fit nicely at the back. Then it was disconnect the cables, reel them back into the truck, and drive out of there, pausing to lock the big gates on the way by.
Still dark on the streets of Sycamore. Still no vehicles for the dutiful traffic light to oversee. Dortmunder and Kelp rode on the wide bench seat of the truck beside Querk, who drove down the street to stop in front of Seven Leagues. “I’ll just unlock the door,” he said, as he climbed down to the street.
The story he’d told them was that the travel group going down there to Guerrera contained a bunch of evangelicals, looking for converts, so Janet would ship the boxes out of the United States as missals and hymnals. Tonight, they’d leave the boxes at Seven Leagues, and in the morning she’d cover them with all the necessary tags and stickers, and the van carrying all the tour group’s luggage would come by to pick them up and take them down to JFK.
Once the boxes had been lugged into Seven Leagues and the door relocked, Querk said, “You fellas need a lift to your car?”
“No, that’s okay,” Kelp said, pointing vaguely north, out of town. “We’re parked just up there.”
Dortmunder said, “You want to get the truck back.”
“I sure do.”
Should he shake hands with them? He felt he should; it would be the more comradely thing to do. Sticking his hand out in Kelp’s direction, he said, “It’s been good working with you.”
Kelp had a sunny smile, even in the middle of the night. Pumping Querk’s hand, he said, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Shaking Dortmunder’s hand, bonier than Kelp’s but less powerful, Querk said, “We’ll be in touch.”
“You know it,” Dortmunder said.
“You know where to find me.”
“Sure do,” Dortmunder said.
Well. That was comradely enough. “I better get this truck back before sunup,” he said.
“Sure,” they said, and waved at him, and he got into the truck.
He had to make a K turn to go back the other way, cumbersome with this big vehicle. He headed toward the traffic light as Dortmunder and Kelp walked off northward, disappearing almost immediately into the darkness, there being streetlights only here in the center of town.
As he drove toward the traffic light, he passed Sycamore House on his left, and resisted the impulse to tap the horn. But Janet would see him, and a horn sounding here in the middle of the night might attract attention. Attention from Dortmunder and Kelp, in any case.
So he drove on, the traffic light graciously turning green as he reached the intersection. Behind him, Janet in the Cirrus would now have seen the truck go by twice, and would know the job had gone well. He could hardly wait to get back to her.
Querk grinned all the way to the garage, where he put the truck away, backing it in the way it had been before. Then he got into the Honda for the last time in his life and drove it back to Sycamore, not only grinning now but also humming a little and at times even whistling between his teeth. To his right, the sky was just beginning to pale; dawn was on the way.
Sycamore. Once again the traffic light gave him a green. He drove through the intersection, turned into the Sycamore House parking lot, and put the Honda next to the Cirrus. He switched off the lights and the engine and stepped out to the blacktop, leaving the keys in the car. Turning to the Cirrus, he expected Janet to either start the engine or step out to speak to him. When she did neither, he bent to look into the car, and it was empty.
What? Why? They’d agreed to meet here when the job was done, so what happened? Where was she?
Maybe she’d needed to go to the bathroom. Or maybe she started to get uncomfortable in the car, after almost four hours, and decided to go wait in the office instead. The whole pur
pose of her being here the whole time was so he’d have his own backup means of escape in case anything were to go wrong with the job. Once she’d seen the truck, she had to know the job had gone well.
So she must be up at Seven Leagues. Querk left the parking lot and walked up the street, taking the Seven Leagues key out of his pocket. When he reached the place, there were no lights on inside. That was strange.
He unlocked the door, entered, closed the door, felt around on the wall for the light switch, found it, and stared, unbelieving.
“Surprise,” Dortmunder said.
19
Between dinner and the job, in fact, Dortmunder and Kelp had found a number of things to keep them interested, if not completely surprised. Primarily, they’d wanted to know what part Janet Twilley planned to take in tonight’s exercises, if any, and so had driven out to the Twilley house a little before eleven, seeing lights still on in there. They’d visited that house last week, learning more about Roger Twilley than anybody else on Earth, and had found none of it pleasant. If Janet Twilley wanted to begin life anew with Kirby Querk, they couldn’t argue the case, not with what they knew of Roger, just so she didn’t plan to do it with their siapas.
They were parked down the block from the Twilley residence, discussing how to play this—should Kelp drive Dortmunder back to town, to keep an eye on the plant, while Kelp kept the car and maintained an observation post chez Twilley—when Roger decided their moves for them. The first thing they saw was the garage door open over there.
“The light didn’t come on,” Dortmunder said.
“I knew there was something,” Kelp said.