Dog Day Afternoon (15 page)

W
atching the various squad cars wheel into place, Littlejoe began to realize he would be lucky to get out of this alive. Never mind the fifty grand tomorrow morning. Forget the five grand they already had. Forget Sam, because in a showdown he’d start shooting. Forget Eddie, the driver, because he wasn’t part of the team anyway. But me, Joe told himself, my own ass. Finished.

He had been standing back from the smallish picture window of the bank as various uniformed police moved in and out of doorways across the street, brandishing walkie-talkies and guns. Big deal. But effective.

The sight of all that blue was getting to him, no question about it. What had once been a simple question of “Do we score big or small?” now became the kind of question that produces a sour churning at the pit of the stomach, “Do I live or die?”

Do I, Littlejoe thought. Is that a proper thing for Littlejoe to be thinking about? What the fuck is death to me?

He turned, to find that most of the people inside the bank were watching him. Littlejoe the leader. Power out of the muzzle of a gun. Shit, yes.

“All right,” he growled, more to give them a taste of power than to have something done. “Marge, move those titties out of view. Get your ass back behind that lobby sign where Sam can keep a bead on you.”

“Mr. Planner,” Marge snapped back.

“Move it, baby.”

“You’re going to get us all killed,” she countered. “Making things up as you go along. How in God’s name did you ever have the gall to rob a bank?”

“Out of sight, cunt!”

“And the language,” she said. “A cheap mind with a cheap mouth.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” Joe burst out at the top of his lungs. “This is a gun, Marge. One more word out of you and the slug gets you right in the left tit. What the fuck is the world coming to? I hold a gun on this broad and she badmouths me to my face? What is that?”

“I’m just saying what we’re all thinking,” Marge spoke up.

Littlejoe moved in on her, the .38 Police Positive pressing against her navel. “You want it there?” He prodded her lower. “Or there?” He lifted the gun and worked the cold blue muzzle in and out of her mouth. “You want it like that?”

The utter silence in the bank told Littlejoe he’d made his point. He backed away from Marge. “Whatever way you want it, you get it. Just keep laying that mouth on me and you go.” He snapped his fingers once. Marge blinked. “Like that.”

He’d finally gotten to her. He’d gotten to all of them, probably. Good. What the hell was it if holding a gun on somebody didn’t give you the power of life and death over them? Guys who heisted a plane, now, nobody dared to give them a hard time. One shot and you could depressurize the whole cabin. Hijackers had it easy.

Littlejoe moved sideways out of the window area and sat down in a chair. “You want a plan?” he asked Marge sarcastically. “I got plans I haven’t even used yet, baby. Plans that’d dazzle you. Right, Sam?”

Sam’s dark eyes shifted uneasily. Joe could see that Marge’s words had gotten to Sam, as had her first defiance of the gun. “Right, Littlejoe.” His response sounded mechanical.

In the silence that followed, Joe leaned back and relaxed for a moment in the chair. The trick was not to get uptight. The cops were trying to psych him into panicking. Give up. No chance. Well, maybe they were right, but Littlejoe hadn’t earned his rep getting so uptight he couldn’t think straight any more.

“Hey,” Eddie said from the rear of the bank. “The street is crawling with ’em. Jesus, Littlejoe, I didn’t buy nothing like this when Mick told me t—”

“Shut up!” Joe shouted. “You got an asshole for a mouth. The second the going gets jumpy, you shit green through it. You want to leave? Go ahead. Walk out. They’ll cut you in slices like pastrami.”

“Let me chill him,” Sam said then.

The quiet suggestion, made without the tiniest edge of feeling, made everyone turn to look at Sam. He had swung the .45 Colt toward Eddie, a few feet away from him. “Okay, Littlejoe?”

Joe got up out of the chair. “I’d love it, Sam,” he said in a calm, businesslike way, as if discussing ordering some sandwiches, “but if the pig outside hears a shot, there’s no telling what they’ll do. Maybe storm the joint.”

“You mean he lives?” Sam said. There was the faintest downturn of disappointment.

“No other way for now, baby. Sorry.”

“Maybe later?”

Littlejoe watched the sweat break out across Eddie’s pasty forehead. His small eyes had widened like manholes. He looked ready to faint flat on his face. The bigger they are . . .

“Maybe,” Joe said, almost grudgingly. “We’ll see.”

If they were, indeed, riding a sinking ship, Joe thought now, dumping Eddie wouldn’t hurt their position that much. He was like ballast you threw overboard from a balloon, so it could rise higher and fly free.

Like a plane. In a plane the gun was respected. Airlines coughed up millions. Governments allowed free escape. Special conditions. Prisoners released from jails. Hijacking a plane, you could ask for anything.

And get it.

13

M
oretti was ready to turn the whole mess over to Baker and walk away in disgrace. None of this showed in his face, of course, nor in his voice. He had been a cop too long to let anything—even the major failure of his life—show to the outside world. But the defeat was clear enough to him, and soon it would be just as clear to the rest of the law-enforcement people there.

To begin with, they had stopped answering the telephone in the bank. This had happened after two more calls, during which Moretti had tried to reason with the man in the chino pants and been hung up on.

This meant that Moretti’s plan of easing the bandits out by reassuring them, soft-talking them into the open, had no chance to move ahead, no chance to succeed.

Secondly, a tremendous amount of attention was now focused on this particular event. It was almost as if, on a broiling hot day in August, when everyone should have been under the shower or at an air-cooled movie, they had nothing better to do than devote all their attention to what was, so far, a rather minor bank job.

This had the effect of magnifying every wrong move Moretti made, of amplifying each weakness, each hesitation. He knew he’d made plenty of mistakes so far, but the knowledge that all of New York could see him goofing up only exaggerated his all-too-human tendency to guess wrong.

Not only had more police been summoned, but several more carloads of Feebies were on hand. In addition, Holmes Protection people were clamoring to get in on the act, because their alarm system was supposed to protect the bank. Two insurance-company investigators were flashing their meaningless badges. The whole thing had taken on the proportions of a bad dream.

Overhead, helicopters hovered like man-eating bugs, ready to pounce. The street was full of officious police with bullhorns yelling at the several hundred bystanders who had gathered behind police barricades at each end of the block. Angry store-owners, losing an afternoon and evening of business, were crying for fast action.

Moretti’s own captain was threatening to take charge of the case and dump Moretti unceremoniously on his ass if he didn’t show results fast. Television vans had pulled up behind the crowds at both ends of the block, and photographers with the portable creepy-peepie cameras were moving into the combat area on the strength of passes and ten-dollar bills slipped to cops supposedly guarding the barriers.

Reporters from television, the newspapers, and the wire services were swarming in and out of storefronts along both sides of the street, trying to stake out telephones, into which they poured a steady stream of non-reportage, none of it meaning much, because nothing, actually, was happening.

Therein lay Moretti’s defeat. By now something should have happened. Otherwise this was nothing more than a dry-run rehearsal for remote camera crews, crowd-control squads, and human-interest reporters, getting their adjectives oiled up and ready to pour.

The whole thing, so far, had been for everyone else but him, Moretti noted. It hadn’t even been for the luckless bastards in the bank, either the suspects or the hostages.

He winced as he thought of the word
hostages,
because that was the shape the case was taking. He knew enough about the criminal mind—which was so damned little different from the normal mind—to know that even the stupidest of bandits would eventually realize that his only salvation lay in trading the lives of the bank employees for his own freedom.

That it was taking the man in the chinos longer than necessary to realize this only indicated to Moretti that (a) he was stupid or (b) he was still hoping to score big somehow.

In an earlier conversation with Boyle, before the phones had stopped being answered, Moretti had finally learned the truth of the heist, that it had netted only five grand and the suspects were planning to wait all night for a cash delivery by Wells Fargo. They’d even brought their driver inside. It had been that prospect that had caused Boyle to bring Moretti into the open at once. Boyle distrusted the ability of the three bandits to remain cool all night and leave without killing some, if not all, of them.

So it came back to hostages, Moretti thought. He dialed the bank number again, on the off chance that the ringing would stir some action. After twenty rings he gave up.

“Let’s stop playing games,” Baker said then.

His flat, dull, uninflected voice startled Moretti. “What games?”

“Let’s turn off their power. In this heat that bank will be a sweatbox inside of fifteen minutes.”

“You got great ideas for keeping a felon cool.”

“Yours isn’t any better. But if you veto it, let me suggest that my men get on the roof and flush tear gas into the ventilation system. We’ll have every one of them out on the street in no time.”

“Except for the corpses inside.”

“You’re letting some two-bit punks spook you, Moretti.”

“I’ve been watching them. My lip-reader guy has been giving me snatches of their talk. One of them I can count on, the monkey in chino slacks. He’s sane. There’s also a big dummy hiding in back. No problem. But the dude in the white suit is whacko bananas. Three times, my guy says, he’s offered to kill anybody the other guy names. He’s itching to spill blood. In such a spot, you want to gas them?”

Baker was silent for a while. “Moretti,” he said then, “why is it all you ever do is find reasons for doing nothing?”

“Because at this point, the moves are up to them.”

“That’s defeatist thinking. I don’t like no-win players on my team.”

Moretti chuckled. “Since when is it your team, coach?”

“Any minute now, the way you’re going.”

“I got one thing I haven’t tried.” Moretti stood silently, eyeing the bank across the street. His man, Krachmal, was surveying the scene with a telescope partly hidden behind the drapery.

“What one thing?” Baker asked in the tone an adult uses to humor a wayward child.

“My business, Baker.”

Moretti removed his hat and sponged his forehead dry. He replaced the hat and gave it a firm tug to set it in place. Then he stepped out the front entrance into the blast of August heat.

A faint cheer went up from the nearest crowd. To Moretti’s ears it sounded faintly sarcastic. He saw the three television cameras at that end swivel toward him. At the other end of the street, a camera with a giant telephoto lens moved ponderously toward him like the turret gun of a warship. A man nearby lifted his camera on its shoulder brace and twisted the lens to focus.

Good, Moretti thought. Carefully, he stepped off the curb and removed his jacket. He dropped it on the sidewalk and stood there in his striped shirt, shoulder holster and straps clearly outlined. He waited until the people in the bank had noticed him. Then moving very slowly, he unbuckled the harness and shrugged out of the holster. He laid it, with its snub-nosed Colt Cobra, on the baking sidewalk. In the same stooping movement he picked up his jacket and put it on. Then he put his hands out to his sides, a foot away from his hips, and started across the boiling asphalt. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a cop pick up his holster and gun and put them inside a squad car. The smell of fresh bread filled the moist air.

He had the undivided attention of the man in the chinos. Good, he also could sense, with his peripheral vision, that the cameras were following him closely, the red lights under their lenses bright and clear.

“Hey, looka!” someone shouted. “It’s Wyatt Earp!”

Moretti forced his face to remain unmoved. Typical New York smart-ass bystander. Everything was a joke. Well, wasn’t it?

“Go get ’em, Sheriff!” another civilian yelled.

“This town ain’t big enough for both of yez!”

Goddamned half-wit jokers, Moretti thought. Where everything’s a joke, nothing’s serious. Well, wasn’t it? What was so serious about a twenty-year cop with a wife and three kids risking his ass to get three dumbbell bandits off a hook their own greed had hung them on? Was that serious? Shit, it was to laugh.

He could see the man in the chinos move toward the door. The revolver in his belt looked like a .38 cop gun, probably lifted off the bank guard. But where the hell had he gotten that carbine? What the hell kind of arsenal did he have in there?