Donald Westlake - Bank Shot

“Let’s take a look,” Kelp said. He and Victor walked out to the end of the pier and stared down into the rain-spattered water. “I don’t see it,” Kelp said.

“Here it is. See it?”

Kelp looked where Victor was pointing. “Right,” he said, catching a glimpse of the thing, like a blue-and-white whale down there in the water. Then he frowned, peering at it, and said, “Hey, it’s moving.”

“It is?”

The two of them squinted in silence for ten seconds or so, and then Victor said, “You’re right. It’s the undertow, taking it away.”

“I don’t believe it,” Kelp said.

Victor looked back toward shore. “Here comes the rest of them,” he said.

Kelp reluctantly turned and saw the other five getting out of the horse van. They came trailing out onto the pier, Dortmunder in the lead. Kelp put a sickly smile on his face and waited.

Dortmunder came up and looked into the water. “I don’t suppose you two are out here for a tan,” he said.

“No,” said Kelp.

Dortmunder nodded at the water. “It went in there, right?”

“That’s right,” Kelp said. “You can see it…” He pointed, then frowned. “No, you can’t any more.”

Victor said, “It’s moving.”

“Moving,” Dortmunder echoed.

“Coming down the hill,” Victor said, “the wind shut the doors again. I don’t suppose it’s completely airtight, but it is closed up pretty good, and it must have just enough air in it to make it buoyant enough not to be stuck in the mud or the sand on the bottom. So the undertow’s moving it.”

The others had come up by now. May said, “You mean it’s going away?”

“That’s right,” Victor said.

Kelp felt Dortmunder looking at him but wouldn’t acknowledge it. He kept staring into the water instead.

Murch’s Mom said, “Where’s it going to?”

“France,” Dortmunder said.

Herman said, “You mean it’s gone for good? After all that work?”

“Well, we got some of the money anyway,” Kelp said and looked around with the sickly smile on his face again. But Dortmunder was already walking away along the pier toward the shore. One by one, the others followed him, and the rain rained down all around.

“Twenty-three thousand, eight hundred twenty dollars,” Dortmunder said and sneezed.

They were all in the apartment, his and May’s. Everybody had changed clothes, with May and Murch’s Mom both in clothing belonging to May, and all five men in Dortmunder’s clothes. They were also all sneezing, and May had brewed up a lot of tea with whiskey in it.

“Twenty-three, almost twenty-four thousand,” Kelp said brightly. “It could have been worse.”

“Yes,” Dortmunder said. “It could have been Confederate money.”

Murch sneezed and said, “How much is that apiece?”

Dortmunder said, “First we pay off the financier. That’s eight thousand, leaving fifteen thousand, eight hundred twenty. Divided by seven, that’s two thousand, two hundred sixty bucks apiece.”

Murch made a face as though something smelled bad. “Two thousand dollars? That’s all?”

Herman and Murch’s Mom sneezed simultaneously.

“We’ll spend more than that in medical bills,” Dortmunder said.

Victor said, “Still, we did the job, you have to admit that. You can’t call it a failure.”

“I can if I want to,” Dortmunder said.

“Have some more tea,” said May.

Kelp sneezed.

“Two thousand dollars,” Herman said, and blew his nose. “I spill that much.”

They were all in the living room, sitting around the money, the charred bills and wet bills and good bills all stacked in different piles on the coffee table. The apartment was warm and dry, but the smell of wet clothes and disaster filled the air from the bedroom.

Murch’s Mom sighed. “I’ll have to start wearing that brace again,” she said.

“You lost it,” her son told her accusingly. “You left it in the bank.”

“So we’ll buy a new one.”

“Another expense.”

“Well,” Kelp said, “I guess we might as well divvy the loot and go on home.”

“Divvy the loot,” Dortmunder echoed and looked at the paper on the coffee table. “You got an eye dropper?”

“It isn’t that bad,” Kelp said. “We didn’t come out of it empty-handed.”

Victor got to his feet and stretched and said, “I suppose this would be more like a celebration if we’d gotten the rest of the money.”

Dortmunder nodded. “You could say that.”

They split up the cash and departed, everybody promising to send back the borrowed clothes and reclaim their own. Left to themselves, Dortmunder and May sat on the sofa and looked at the four thousand, five hundred twenty dollars left on the coffee table. They sighed. Dortmunder said, “Well, it did give me something to think about, I have to admit it.”

“The worst thing about a cold,” May said, “is the way it makes the cigarettes taste.” She plucked the ember from the corner of her mouth and flipped it into an ashtray but didn’t light a new one. “You want some more tea?”

“I still got some.” He sipped at the tea and frowned. “What’s the percentage of tea and whiskey in this thing?”

“About half and half.”

He drank a little more. The warm steam curled around his nostrils. “You better brew up another pot,” he said.

She nodded, starting to smile. “Right,” she said.

“It’s on the Island,” Captain Deemer said. “It’s somewhere on this goddam Island.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Hepplewhite said, but faintly.

“And I’m going to find it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The two of them were alone in the unmarked patrol car, a black Ford, radio-equipped. The captain was driving, and the lieutenant was beside him. The captain hunched over the wheel, his eyes constantly moving as he drove back and forth and up and down and all over Long Island.

Beside him, the lieutenant’s eyes were unfocused. He wasn’t looking for or at anything, but was practicing once more the speech that he would never make to the captain. In its latest form it went: “Captain, it’s been three weeks. You’re letting the precinct go to hell, you’ve become obsessed with this missing bank, all you do is spend all the daylight hours, seven days a week, driving around looking for that bank. It’s gone, Captain, that bank is gone and we are never going to find it.

“But, Captain, even if you are obsessed and can’t get out of your obsession, I’m not. You pulled me off night duty, and I loved night duty, I loved being the man behind the desk at night in the precinct. But you put that idiot Schlumgard in there in my place, and Schlumgard doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, and morale is going to hell. If I ever do get my job back, Schlumgard will have undone everything I’ve tried to do.

“But the point is, Captain, it has been three weeks. The New York City police stopped cooperating after four days, which means the bank could have been taken out of our jurisdiction anytime in the last two and a half weeks, which means it could be anywhere in the world by now. I know your theory, Captain, that the bank was hidden sometime that first night, that the crooks emptied the safe in the first day or two and went away and just left it there, but even if you’re right, what good does it do? If they hid it so well we couldn’t find it in the first few days, when we had search parties combing the entire Island, two of us are not going to find it by driving around in a car three weeks later.

“Which is why, Captain, I feel I must tell you that I have come to a decision. If you want to go on looking for the bank, that’s up to you. But either you let me go back to my regular duties, or I’ll just have to talk to the Commissioner. Now, Captain, I’ve gone along with you on every —”