Donald Westlake: Bank Shot

Dortmunder spent a few seconds studying that front door, and the pillars, and the sidewalk, and the storefronts on both sides, and then the front door opened and two men in work clothes and construction-crew helmets came out, carrying a tall wooden writing stand, the pens at the end of their chains dangling like remnants of fringe. “We’re too late,” Dortmunder said.

“Not that bank,” Kelp said. “That bank.”

Dortmunder turned his head again, looking at Kelp past Victor’s smile. Kelp motioned across the street, and Dortmunder ducked his head a little bit — for one awful second he thought Victor was going to kiss him on the cheek, but he didn’t — and looked across the way at the other bank.

At first he didn’t see it at all. Blue and white and chrome, something wide and low — that’s all he could make out. But then he saw the sign, spread in a banner across the front of the thing:

TEMPORARY HEADQUARTERS

Capitalists’ & Immigrants’ Trust

Just Watch Us GROW!

“What the hell is it?” Dortmunder said.

“It’s a trailer,” Kelp said. “What they call a mobile home. Didn’t you ever see that kind of thing before?”

“But what the hell is it?”

“It’s the bank,” Kelp said.

Smiling, Victor said, “They’re tearing down the old building, Mr. Dortmunder, and they’re going to put the new one up in the same place. So in the meantime they’re running the bank from over there in that mobile home.”

“In the trailer,” Dortmunder said.

“They do that kind of thing all the time,” Kelp said. “Didn’t you ever notice?”

“I guess so.” Dortmunder frowned past their two faces and through the side window and past the traffic and across the opposite sidewalk and tried to make some sense out of what he was looking at, but it was difficult. Particularly with Victor smiling right next to his left ear. “I can’t see anything,” Dortmunder said. “I’ll be right back. You two wait here.”

He got out of the Toronado and walked down the block, glancing into the old bank building on the way by. It was nearly five o’clock by now, but the interior was full of men with construction helmets on, ripping things apart in the glare of the work lights. The bank must be in a hell of a hurry to get the old building down and the new one up if they were willing to pay that kind of overtime. Probably nervous about being in the trailer.

At the corner, Dortmunder turned left, waited for the light, and then crossed the street. Turning left again, he strolled along the sidewalk toward the trailer.

It was at the end of the block, in the only vacant lot on the street. It was one of the biggest mobile home units Dortmunder had ever seen, being a good fifty feet long and twelve feet wide. Set back a yard or so from the regular building line, it filled the width of the lot, one end flush against the side of a Kresge five-and-dime and the other end almost reaching the sidewalk on the cross street. The surface of the lot was crushed brick rubble, showing that some other building had also recently been torn down; the bank had probably timed its own reconstruction to the availability of a lot nearby.

There were two entry doors along the front of the trailer, each with a heavy set of temporary wooden steps leading up to it, and the “Temporary Headquarters” sign strung between them. Concrete blocks made a gray foundation wall from the ground up to the bottom edge of the blue and white metal shell, and all the letter-slot-style windows were covered on the inside by venetian blinds. The bank was closed now, but lights could be seen through slits in the blinds.

Dortmunder looked up as he strolled by. A thick sweep of wires connected the trailer to telephone and power poles both on the main avenue and the cross street, as though the trailer were a rectangular dirigible, moored there by all those lines.

There was nothing more to see, and Dortmunder had reached the corner. He waited on the curb for the light again, then crossed the street and went back to the Toronado, shaking his head as he glanced at the rear of the car. He got in and said, “Can’t tell much from the outside. You thinking about a day operation or a night operation?”

“Night,” Kelp said.

“They leave cash in there overnight?”

“Only on Thursdays.” It was Victor who told him that.

Reluctantly, Dortmunder focused on Victor. “How come on Thursdays?”

“Thursday night the stores are open,” Victor said. “The bank closes at three, but then opens again at six and stays open till eight-thirty. At that hour of night, there’s no simple direct way to get the cash to some other bank. So they lay on more guards and keep the money in the bank overnight.”

“How many more guards?”

“A total of seven,” Victor said.

“Seven guards.” Dortmunder nodded. “What kind of safe?”

“A Mosler. I believe they have it on lease, along with the trailer. It isn’t much of a safe.”

“We can get into it fast?”

Victor smiled. “Well,” he said, “time really isn’t a problem.”

Dortmunder glanced across the street. “Some of those wires,” he said, “are alarms. I figure they’re tied into the local precinct.”

Victor’s smile broadened. Nodding as though Dortmunder had just displayed great brilliance, he said, “That’s just what they are. Anything that happens in there after banking hours is recorded down at the police station.”

“Which is where?”

Victor pointed straight ahead. “Seven blocks down that way.”

“But time isn’t a problem,” Dortmunder said. “We’re going in against seven guards, the precinct is seven blocks away, and time isn’t a problem.”

Kelp was grinning by now almost as widely as Victor. “That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “That’s the stroke of genius Victor’s come up with.”

“Tell me,” Dortmunder said.

“We steal the bank,” Victor said.

Dortmunder looked at him.

Kelp said, “Isn’t that a beauty? We don’t break into the bank, we take the bank away with us. We back up a truck, hook onto the bank, and drive it away.”

When May got home from Bohack’s, Dortmunder wasn’t there yet. She stood just inside the front door and yelled, “Hey!” twice, and when there wasn’t any answer she shrugged and slopped on through the apartment to the kitchen, carrying the two shopping bags of groceries. Being an employee at the supermarket, she in the first place got a cut rate on some items and in the second place could lift other items with no static, so the shopping bags were pretty full. As she once told her friend Betty at the store, another cashier, “I eat all this stuff and it ought to make me fat, but I have to carry it all home, and that keeps me thin.”

“You ought to make your husband come get it,” Betty had said.

Everybody made the same mistake about Dortmunder being May’s husband. She’d never said he was, but on the other hand she never corrected the mistake either. “I like to be thin,” she’d said that time and let it go at that.

Putting the two shopping bags down on the kitchen counter now, she became aware of the fact that the corner of her mouth was warm. She was a chain smoker and kept the current cigarette always propped in the left corner of her mouth; when that area got warm, she knew it was time to start a new cigarette.

There was a small callus on the tip of her left thumb, caused by plucking cigarette embers from her lips, but for some reason her fingertips never callused at all. She flipped the half-inch butt from her mouth into the kitchen sink with one practiced wrist movement, and while it sizzled she took the crumpled pack of Virginia Slims from the waist pocket of her green sweater, shook one up, folded the corner of her mouth around the end and went looking for matches. Unlike most chain smokers, she never lit the new one from the old, because the old one was never big enough to hold onto; this meant a continuing problem with matches, similar to the continuing problem of water in some Arab countries.