The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (77 page)

“But Amos isn’t giving up. He gets loose, dresses and goes down the fire escape. He can’t be sure when you’re going to open the door and look in on him, so he puts on just enough clothes to keep from being pinched for indecent exposure. That’s why he wasn’t wearing socks, and why his clothes were mismatched.

“But by the time he’s going down the fire escape, you look in. No Amos, and the window is open. You look out, spot him running away without topcoat or hat, and out you go after him. Tackling him on the street wouldn’t do at all; your only hope is to nail him in some lonely spot and knock him off. How does it sound so far, neighbor?”

“Like a lot of words,” Monroe growled.

“Words,” I said, “are man’s best friend. They get you fed, married, buried. Shall I tell you some more about words?”

“Go to hell.”

I put down the gun and lit a cigarette and smiled. “Like I told you,” I said, “you’ve got a simple mind. But I was telling you a story. I wouldn’t want to stop now, so let’s get back to Amos. You see, Amos had a big problem at this stage of the game. He couldn’t go to the boys in blue and tell them about you and Cora, here. Doing that could bring out the business about the stamps and get him nailed for receiving stolen property. He had to get the two of you thrown out of his apartment before the envelope showed up.

“How to do it? Hire a strong-arm boy who won’t ask questions. Where do you find a strong-arm boy on a moment’s notice? The phone book’s got half a column of them. Private detectives. Not the big agencies; they might ask too many questions. But one of the smaller outfits might need the business bad enough to do it Amos’s way. At least it’s worth trying.

“So Amos gets my address out of the phone book, the nearest one to him, and comes up to hire me. He has no idea you’re following him which means he’s not too careful about keeping out in the open where nothing can happen to him. He comes up to my office and I’m not in yet. He sits down to wait. You walk in and leave a switch knife in him. But that’s only part of your job. You’ve got to fix it so there’ll be a delay in identifying him – enough of a delay, at least to keep the cops away from here until the mailman comes and goes. Lifting his papers may slow things down, but you want more than that. Being a crook, you make a habit of carrying around phony identification cards. You substitute these for his own, lift whatever cash Amos had on him, slip out quick and come back here. Right so far?”

The fear had gone out of Monroe’s eyes and there was the first faint sign of a smirk to his thin bloodless lips. He said airily, “If this is your idea of a way to kill a rainy afternoon, don’t let me stop you. Mind if I sit down?”

“I don’t care if you fall down,” I said. “There’s a little more and then we can all sit around and discuss the election until the cops arrive. A little more, like Cora knowing my name the first time I was here this afternoon. I hadn’t told her my name, you see; just that I was a private dick. But to Cora there was only one private detective – the one whose office you’d killed Amos Spain in.”

Behind me a quiet voice said, “Raise your hands.”

I froze. Cora Monroe’s .32 was on the couch arm, no more than six inches from my hand. I could have grabbed for it – and I could get buried for grabbing. I didn’t grab.

A slender stoop-shouldered man in his early forties came padding on stocking feet in front of me. He had bushy graying hair, a long intelligent face and a capable-looking hand containing a nickel-plated Banker’s Special revolver. The quiet voice belonged to him and he used it again, saying, “I won’t tell you again. Put up your hands.”

I put them up.

He went on pointing the gun at me while knocking the .32 off the couch with a single sweep of his other hand. It bounced along the carpet and hit the wall. He said gently, “I’ll take those stamps.”

“You will indeed,” I said. My tongue felt as stiff as Murphy, the night he fell off the streetcar. “I guess I should have looked in the bedroom after all. I guess I thought two people should be able to lift three little stamps.”

“The stamps, Mr Pine.” The voice wasn’t as gentle this time.

“Sure,” I said. I put my hand in my coat and took out the envelope. I did it nice and slow, showing him I was eager to please. I held it out as he reached for it and I slammed my shoe down on his stocking foot with every pound I could spare.

He screamed like a woman and the gun went off. Behind me a lamp base came apart. I threw a punch, hard, and the gray-haired man threw his hands one way and the gun the other and melted into the rug without a sound.

Monroe was crouched near the side wall, the girl’s .32 in his hand and madness in his eyes. While he was still bringing up the gun I jerked the Police Special from under the band of my trousers and fired.

He took a week to fall down. He put his hands together high on his chest and coughed a broken cough and took three wavering steps before he hit the floor with his face and died.

Cora Monroe hadn’t moved from the leather chair. She sat stiff as an ice floe off Greenland, her face blank with shock, her nails sunk in her palms. I felt a little sorry for her. I bent down and picked the envelope off the floor and shoved it deep into a side pocket. I said, “How much were they worth, Cora?”

Only the rain answered.

I found the telephone and said what had to be said. Then I came back and sat down to wait.

It was ten minutes before I heard the first wail of distant sirens.

The caper went off without a hitch except that Wally Garden got plugged.

There were five of us. My idea had been that three would be enough, figuring the less there were the bigger the cut for each. But Oscar Trotter made the decisions.

Looking at Oscar, you might take him for a college professor – one of those lean, rangy characters with amused, intelligent eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. He sounded like one, too, when he didn’t feel like sounding like somebody else. Maybe he’d been one once, among all the other things he’d ever been.

But there was no question of what he was now. He could give the toughest hood the jitters by smiling at him a certain way, and he could organize and carry out a caper better than any man I knew.

He spent a couple of weeks casing this job and then said five men would be needed, no more and no less. So there were four of us going in soon after the payroll arrived on a Friday afternoon. The fifth, Wally Garden, was cruising outside in a stolen heap.

Wally was far and away the youngest of us, around twenty-three, and he wasn’t a regular. I didn’t know where Oscar had picked him up; somebody had recommended him, he’d said. It must have been somebody Oscar had a lot of confidence in because Oscar was a mighty careful guy. Wally was supposed to be very good with a car, but I think what made Oscar pick him was that he was moon-faced and clear-eyed and looked like he was always helping old ladies across streets.

Protective coloration, Oscar called it. Have one appearance during the job and another while making the getaway.

So there was the kid, and Oscar Trotter who could pass for a professor, and Georgie Ross who had a wife and two children and made like a respectable citizen except for a few days a year, and Tiny who was an old-time Chicago gorilla but could have been your kindly gray-haired Uncle Tim.

As for me, I’d been around a long, long time in thirty-four years of living. I’d almost been a lawyer, once. I’d almost married a decent woman, once. I’d almost . . .

Never mind. I was thirty-four years old and had all my features in the right places, and whenever Oscar Trotter had a job I was there at his side.

Wally Garden’s part was to swipe a car early in the afternoon and pick us up on a country road and drop us off at the factory and drive slowly for five hundred feet and make a U-turn and drive slowly back. He picked out a nice car – a shiny big Buick.

The factory manufactured plastic pipe. It was in New Jersey, on the outskirts of Coast City where real estate was cheap. The office of the large, low, sprawling plant was in a wing off by itself. From that wing a side door opened directly out to a two-lane blacktop road that had little traffic. There was an armed guard who arrived with the payroll and stayed until it was distributed, but he was an old man who was given that job because he couldn’t work at anything else.

Oscar decided it would be a cinch. And it was.

We were in and out in seventy seconds – five seconds under the schedule Oscar had worked out. We barged in wearing caps and T-shirts and denim work pants, and we had Halloween masks on our faces and guns in our hands. Tiny had the guard’s gun before the sluggish old man knew what was up. Seven or eight others were in the office, men and women, but they were too scared to cause trouble. Which was just as well. We weren’t after hurting anybody if we could help it. We were after dough, and there it was on a long table in an adjoining room, in several hundred little yellow envelopes.

Seventy seconds – and we were coming out through the side door with two satchels holding the payroll, pulling off our masks and sticking away our guns before we stepped into the open air, then striding to the Buick Wally Garden was rolling over to us.

Some hero in the office got hold of a gun and started to fire it.

The newspapers next day said it was a bookkeeper who had it in his desk. One thing was sure – he didn’t know a lot about how to use it. He stood at a window and let fly wildly.

None of the slugs came near us. Anyway, not at the four of us out in the open he was firing at. But he got Wally, who was still a good twenty feet away. Got him through the car window as if he’d been an innocent bystander.

The car jerked as his foot slipped off the throttle and it stalled and stopped after rolling a few more feet. Through the windshield we saw Wally slump over the wheel.

Oscar yelled something to me, but I knew what to do. Sometimes I could think for myself. I ran around to the left front door.

The shooting had stopped. No more bullets, I supposed.

Wally turned a pale, agonized face to me as I yanked open the car door. “I’m hit,” he moaned.

“Shove over,” I said.

He remained bowed over the wheel. I pushed him. Oscar got into the car through the opposite door and pulled him. Groaning, Wally slid along the seat. Georgie and Tiny were piling into the back seat with the satchels. There was plenty of screaming now in the office, but nobody was coming out, not even the hero. I took Wally’s place and got the stalled engine started and away we went.

Sagging between Oscar and me on the front seat, Wally started to cough, shaking all over.

“Where’s it hurt, son?” Oscar asked gently.

Wally pushed his face against Oscar’s shoulder, the way a frightened child would against his mother’s bosom.

He gasped, “I feel . . . it stabs . . . my insides . . . bleeding.”

He was the only one of us wearing a jacket. Oscar unbuttoned it and pulled it back. I glanced sideways and saw blood soaking a jagged splotch on the right side of his shirt. It looked bad.

Nobody said anything.

Tiny sat twisted around on the back seat watching through the rear window. It wasn’t what was behind us we had to worry about as much as what was ahead. Pretty soon there would be roadblocks.

We traveled three and two-tenths miles on that road, according to plan. Then I swung the Buick left, off blacktop and onto an oiled country road running through fields and woods.

It was a bright spring afternoon, the kind of day on which you took deep breaths and felt it was good to be alive. Beside me Wally Garden started to claw at his right side. Oscar had to hold his hand to keep him from making the wound worse than it was.

Again I made a left turn. This time there was no road to turn onto but only an open field. Wally screamed between clenched teeth as the rough ground jounced the car.

Beyond the field were woods – big stuff, mostly, oaks and maples, with a fringe of high shrubs. Two cars, a Ford and a Nash, were where we’d left them this morning behind the shrubs. I rolled the hot car, the Buick, quite a way in among the trees.

It was dim in there, and cool and quiet. Wally’s eyes were closed; he’d stopped squirming in agony. He would have toppled over if Oscar hadn’t been holding him.

“Passed out?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” Oscar said.

Getting out of the car, he eased Wally’s head and shoulder down on the seat. Wally lay on his side twitching and moaning and unconscious.

The Buick was going to be left right here – after, of course, we’d wiped off all our prints. The way we planned it, we’d hang around for two–three hours before starting back to New York in the two other cars. Until then we had plenty of time on our hands. We used some of it to make a quick count of the loot in the two satchels.

When Oscar Trotter had cased the job, he’d estimated that the take would be between forty and fifty grand. Actually it was around twenty-two grand.

What the hell! After a while you get to be part realist and part cynic, if the two aren’t the same thing in this rotten racket. Nothing is ever as good as you plan or hope or dream. You’re doing all right if you get fifty percent, and don’t lose your life or freedom while doing it.

Every now and then I’d leave the others to go over for a look at Wally. The third time I did his eyes were open.

“How d’you feel, kid?”

He had trouble speaking. He managed to let me know he was thirsty.

There wasn’t any water, but Georgie had a pint of rye. Wally, lying cramped on that car seat, gulped and coughed and gulped and pushed the bottle away. I thought it probably did him more harm than good.

“I’m burning up,” he moaned.

I felt his brow. He sure was.

I went over to where Oscar and Georgie and Tiny were changing their clothes beside the Nash. This would be an important part of our protective coloration – completely different and respectable clothes.

The alarm was out for five men in a Buick, at least four of whom had been seen wearing caps and T-shirts and denim pants. I felt kind of sorry for anybody within a hundred miles who would be in T-shirts and denim pants. But we wouldn’t be. We’d be wearing conservative business suits and shirts and neckties, and we’d be driving two in a Ford Georgie owned legally and three in a Nash Oscar owned legally, and why would any cop at a roadblock or toll gate waste time on such honest-looking citizens?