Authors: Patrick Mann
Marge frowned. “I told you, I have young girls back here.”
“Fuck!” Joe yapped. “Shit! Piss!” He drew a breath and tried to hang cool. “What am I arguing with you for? You’re not even people any more. You’re hostages. You’re our ticket to freedom. Right, Sam?”
“Right on, baby.” Sam’s eyes were bright. Littlejoe couldn’t tell if it was the prospect of splitting a million dollars or of killing a few hostages. He had thought he knew what made Sam tick, but now he suspected the kid had mysteries inside him that no one had seen.
The telephone began to ring again. Joe turned to see if Moretti was out in the hot street, broiling under the afternoon sun, but the street was empty. The dumb cop was probably trying to get at him again by phone. And now was no time to talk to cops. He’d said his say. He’d thrown down the ultimatum. There was nothing more to talk about.
Ring. Ring.
But there was a lot to think about, a lot to plan, soft spots in the thing that had to be protected. For instance, the walk from the bank to the cars that would take them to the airport. For instance, getting into the plane. Food on the plane? A real crew, not some FBI killers? Christ, a million details to try to expect, to out-think, to plan ahead for. Littlejoe vs. The Universe!
Ring!
Littlejoe snatched up the phone. “I warned you, shitface,” he rasped, “keep bugging me and you start getting dead ones thrown out the door.”
There was a pause at the other end. “I . . . uh, I just called,” a man’s voice began, “to ask Ellen what time she’s getting off today.”
“What?”
“Is Ellen there?”
“Who wants to know?”
“This is her husband.”
Joe closed his eyes for a second. He didn’t need this kind of distraction. And how did he know the guy was legit? But what the hell could he do over the phone with the crying broad anyway? So let him talk.
“Hey, Ellen,” Littlejoe called. “Your hubby on the pipe. Happy-happy!”
She made her way so slowly and with such diffidence toward him that Joe realized she had been almost permanently scared out of her wits, mostly by Sam. Those eyes of his could do the job all by themselves, even without the heavy, menacing .45.
“Hey, fella,” Joe told the caller, “you got your TV on?”
“No, not yet.”
“Turn it on, man. You’ll get a hell of a surprise.” He handed the phone to Ellen. “Tell him when you’re getting home, baby. And try not to get the fucking phone wet, will you?”
Joe walked back to the street windows. The mob had quieted down a bit, but that was probably because it was so damned hot out there. Another ice-cream truck had pulled up. Now both ends of the street were being serviced with soft drinks, cones with and without sprinkles, candy, and possibly popcorn. Any minute some fucking pizza wagon would show up. There was something for everybody in these things, Joe reflected. He was creating plenty of extra income for people, wasn’t he?
“Sir,” he heard Ellen call.
Nobody had ever called him
sir
before. He turned slowly, almost majestically. “My husband wants to know when you think you’ll be through.” She held up the telephone as if to prove that it, not she, was the source of this idiocy.
“Through?” Littlejoe considered the question thoroughly, despite its lunatic coloration. “I figure if the cops play ball, we should be on our way in three, four hours. But you’re going to the airport, baby. And you’re gonna take a plane trip. Don’t tell him that. Just say a few hours.”
“He says a few more hours, Dennis.”
She listened silently, her eyes on Joe as the authority, the source of all knowledge. “He wants to know should he start dinner.” Her eyes had gone so wide that Joe for a moment thought she had been struck blind. He realized that she was rigid with fear, and wondered how anybody could get that frightened. She stood there like a board on which two eyes had been painted.
He took the phone from her. “Listen, fella, I think you ought to start dinner.”
“It’s a roast,” the man said. “I never made a roast. It’s expensive and I might ruin it. And then, what do I feed the baby?”
Joe turned to Ellen and tried to keep his voice soft. “What should he feed the baby?”
Her lips moved several times, framing and reframing answers. Then, stiffly: “A jar of prunes and a jar of baby chicken. They’re in the fridge. He has to warm them on the stove.”
Joe transmitted the information and added: “Leave the roast alone, fella. Just send out for some Colonel Sanders, okay? It’s gonna be a long, hard night.”
“Can I say good-bye to Ellen?”
Joe handed her the phone and watched her moisten her dry lips. “Hello, Dennis. What? Yes, they have guns.” She glanced hastily at Joe to see if she’d said too much. “I will, Dennis. I have to get off the phone now. What?” Her eyes were fixed now on the middle distance, unseeing. “Well . . . there are a lot of people around and . . . uh . . . kiss the baby for me.” She paused. “I love you too.” She hung up the phone and walked slowly, in that same rigid posture, to join the other two tellers.
Joe glanced at everyone’s face. The bank people looked somber, down. The real seriousness of the situation had hit them with the last words Ellen had told her husband. Only Sam was unchanged. He winked at Joe. “A million, huh?”
Joe nodded. “If we play it smart.”
“I just wanna say one thing, Littlejoe,” Sam began gravely. “I just wanna say that if you think the cops don’t give you credit out there for being strong . . . you know.” He paused and regrouped his thoughts. “I just wanna say if you want one of these people wasted, I can do it right now and throw them out the front door. I’ll be glad to do it, Littlejoe. You know that. Just say the word and . . .” His thought slowly died away.
Joe watched the effect of this on the rest of them. It was possibly the longest speech he’d ever heard from Sam’s lips, and he knew it wasn’t what it sounded like. It was supposed to be an offer of total cooperation from a buddy, right down the line, everything I have is yours. But Littlejoe could hear the inner message, and it frightened him. Inside the big speech was a small one that said: “I have to kill. Let me do it now. Right now.”
He knew Sam to be strange, but this glimpse inside the kid was too hairy for comfort. Somebody who has to kill ends up not too choosy about a victim. Even a buddy will do.
Littlejoe decided to make the best use of Sam’s offer he could. He turned to Boyle and tried to use words the manager would understand without their offending Sam. “You see,” he asked Boyle. “You see the mess we’re in?”
Boyle nodded slowly, heavily, his Irish face as grave with trouble as Sam’s had been. “We know you guys aren’t kidding,” Boyle managed to say. It was noncommittal, but it told Littlejoe he had got the real message, which was along the lines of “For Christ’s sake, don’t stir up Sam.”
“Good,” Joe said, trying to sound hearty and confident. “No problems, people. Everybody cooperates and everything works out.”
“You know,” Boyle began slowly, “there’s no way they can get a million in cash at this hour.”
“Shit there ain’t.” Joe glanced at the wall clock, and was shocked to find that it was only four in the afternoon. Barely an hour had elapsed. “Banks close their doors at three, but the cops can tap them any time up till five or six at night.” He eyed the manager. “What the hell do you care, anyway, Boyle? Your bank insurance covers you.”
“I’m worried about the ransom money. If they don’t get it, we’re left here with you.”
“All night, if it takes all night,” Joe agreed cheerfully. “Don’t tell me they can’t locate the rest of the cash by morning.”
“It’s just—” Boyle stopped, He sat down on the edge of the desk. His face had gone blank for a moment. “I just want to see my wife and kids again, that’s all.” He glanced at Joe. “It isn’t as if we haven’t cooperated with you.”
Something odd twisted inside Littlejoe. It wasn’t the animal that slept there. He hadn’t felt that shift beneath his lungs for some time now. Being on top, owning people, controlling everything they did, gave him a sense of power that pleased the beast and kept it comfortably asleep. No, this was something else, some strange little twist that Boyle’s fat mick face did to him, talking about seeing his kids and cooperating.
“I know,” Joe heard himself saying. “You people have been great. I got no complaint there. It’s just . . .” He gestured aimlessly, as if trying to shape the air into a convincing excuse. “It’s just that things happen.”
“You happened,” Marge told him darkly.
“Okay,” Joe admitted. “But tomorrow you’re crossing the street and a truck with busted brakes happens. You don’t have no guarantees in this life, Marge.”
She nodded glumly. “Harry,” she said to Boyle, “have you got a cigarette?”
“You don’t smoke.”
“I want a cigarette.”
“Marge,” Boyle pleaded, “I’ve never even seen you touch a cigarette.”
“Right. Now I want a cigarette.”
“It’s a long night, Marge. Try and hold off.”
“For some of you,” Joe put in, just to keep things stirred up, “it’ll mean a mystery trip to maybe Algeria.”
Boyle’s head shook quickly from side to side. He handed Marge a cigarette and lighted it for her. Smoke came out of the burning end of the cigarette. “Puff,” he told her quietly. She touched his hand, and, in return, so quickly Littlejoe almost missed seeing it, he took her hand and squeezed it once.
“Maybe you two would like to be the lucky passengers?” he pounced.
“What?”
“Second honeymoon in Algeria? Don’t tell me there’s nothing going on.” Joe smiled slightly, coldly, trying to cut down whatever was between them to the size of a piece of dirt. “I know what happens in banks. Everybody’s so moral, right? So high-minded. But it’s no different than any other meat rack. You sniff it all day and if you like it, you try some at night.”
The two of them, Boyle and Marge, looked at him for a long moment. When he finally replied, the manager moved off on a tangent that confused Joe at first. “You don’t have to do that,” Boyle was saying. “You don’t need to take hostages aboard the plane, Joe.” It was the first time he’d used his name. “I’ve been thinking. Once you’re on board, the crew are your hostages. See my point?”
“That’s how much you know about life, Boyle. Why couldn’t the crew be FBI guys? I need a real hostage to protect us from them too.”
“Then that’s me,” Boyle said. “I’m the manager. It’s what I’m paid for.”
“Nah. You’re no good as a hostage.”
“Why not?”
“That slob Eddie, our driver, he’s as good to me as you are. Neither one of you is worth shit as a hostage.”
In the silence, Littlejoe heard Eddie shifting his weight around, shuffling his feet. “Listen,” he said across the bank lobby, “what’s that supposed to mean, Littlejoe? I’m gonna be with you on the plane anyway, right?”
“Wrong.” Joe turned away from him to face Boyle again. “Neither of you two big, strong men.” He grinned evilly.
“Not Ellen,” Boyle said. “She’s got a kid. So has Maria. Besides, they’re just working here. But for me, it’s a career. So it makes sense to . . .” He stopped talking.
“Want a Mediterranean cruise, huh?”
“I don’t have any illusion you’ll really make it,” Boyle said then. “Do you?”
Littlejoe sat down on the desk next to him. His legs dangled just off the floor. “As our ace-in-the-hole hostage, you won’t do, Boyle.”
“Why not? The Chase would be more interested in saving a manager.”
“Stop kidding yourself.”
“They’ve invested a lot of money and time in me,” Boyle insisted. “They have to protect their investment.”
“Dream on.”
“It’s also a matter of loyalty. I’ve given them fifteen years of loyalty and they owe me.”
“They owe you nothing.” Littlejoe shook his head in amazement. “It freaks me out the way grown-up guys with families still don’t know the fucking facts of life.”
“And you do.”
“You bet your ass I do,” Joe told him. “The ace-in-the-hole hostage ain’t gonna be no middle-aged bank hack. When the crunch comes, on the landing strip or in the plane, the FBI will chop you up like so much hamburger, Boyle. You’re meat to them, same as Sam and me. You’re expendable. You’re a calculated risk. Shit, do I have to teach you this kindergarten stuff? You read the papers. But when I have a young chick who’s a mother, it’s different. The publicity’s bad if they chill a mother. That they only do in Nam. There they waste mothers by the carload, and babies too. Slopes don’t count. This fine upstanding crying broad Ellen, for instance, she counts. Her they’d kind of hesitate to ice. They still might do it, but they’d hesitate.”
“If I felt that way about law officers, I’d—”
“Shut up, Boyle,” Joe interrupted, trying not to sound unpleasant. “You just don’t know your ass from your elbow about life. Take the Chase. What do they owe you, man? For fifteen years you been dumb enough to give them loyalty and honesty. That’s so much gravy to them.
“They’re laughing up their sleeve at you, man,” he went on. “They had your ass for fifteen years and they don’t owe you a fart. Not a fart in the wind. To Chase you’re just meat. Buy it, sell it. What did they buy you for all these years? Are you even making fourteen grand a year now? Sixteen? I don’t think so. And for a chickenshit salary you put out something that money can’t even buy, loyalty. What a sucker play, Boyle.
“The first time Chase profits dip below a certain point they won’t hesitate to chop you off like any other bad investment. Cut losses. It isn’t even something another human being decides, Boyle. They feed the problem into their computer and, clickety-click, out comes a name. Your name. Get rid of Boyle at fourteen thousand a year. Let some young black or Puerto Rican run the joint at half Boyle’s salary.”
Littlejoe paused. He saw that Marge was listening to him so intently that she hadn’t puffed even once on her lighted cigarette.
“Sure he’ll steal you blind, because he isn’t a dumdum like Boyle. But what he steals is a business cost that’s already been passed on to the poor, stupid customer anyway. So who cares? Insurance covers it, and the insurance costs are part of what the customer pays for. Fuck everybody, but start with the poor, loyal Boyles of the world.”