Дональд Уэстлейк - Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

“There’s only four banks in town,” Jerry told me. With a little grin he added, “Joe wanted to hit all four.”

“We still could,” Joe said, as taut and intense as ever. “We blow up City Hall for a diversion, knock out all four banks at once. There’s eight of us, we could do it easy.”

Eight of us. Including me.

“Logistically,” Eddie Troyn said, “it’s quite a challenge. But not impossible, no, not impossible.” And he did his smile again.

Phil said, “But we’ll settle for two. You’re lucky, Harry, you got here just in time to climb on the gravy train.”

“Yeah,” I said. I smiled or something.

He said, “You can see why I couldn’t tell you before you were definitely in.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Certainly.”

“We’ve got three weeks,” Joe said.

I said, “Three weeks?” Fortunately, one of the things a practical joker learns early in life is how to hide his reactions. I don’t believe I jumped more than half an inch off the chair, and I covered that movement by pretending to shift to a new position.

Joe was explaining the timetable. “We got Christmas coming,” he said. “That’s when people spend money. We not only got paychecks getting cashed, we also got Christmas clubs, and we got people taking money out of savings accounts.”

Phil said, “There’ll be more cash than ever, the middle of December.”

“So that’s when we do it,” Joe said.

Phil gave me a big grin. “Some Christmas present, huh, Harry?”

The next night, I went out by myself to do a little sting.

I had thought it would only be possible to get out during the daytime, but it seemed I was wrong. The gym was open every evening, for basketball and calisthenics and so on, which meant one or more prisoners had to be on duty during that time in the supply area. Activities in the gym, particularly inter-block league basketball games, frequently ran as late as ten-thirty or eleven o’clock, and some early member of the tunnel brigade had talked the prison authorities into believing it could take two hours or more to finish the clean-up after everyone else had left. So bunks were put into the supply area, and the night-workers were simply locked into the gym after everybody else had left.

It all meshed very well. Since men on work assignment were only subject to two headcounts a day, at breakfast and at dinner, this meant we tunnel people could spend all day or all night on the outside. It would be possible to leave around nine in the morning and return by five-thirty, or to leave at about eight in the evening and not come back until six-thirty the next morning. The only limitations were that somebody had to be in the gym at all times to mind the store, but other than that the prison could be more or less reduced to a diner at which one ate two meals a day.

All of which was lovely. But items like stings and bank robberies were less nice. So it was with mixed emotions that I went crawling out through the tunnel alone at eleven that night, to do my first sting.

They’d all given me advice. “Don’t hit anything too close to the prison,” Bob Dombey had told me; but it was his wife Alice who lived in the house at the end of the tunnel, so I believe he was thinking more in terms of his neighborhood than the prison. Joe Maslocki said, “Swipe a car, use it to pull your job, then leave it right back where you got it. These hicks won’t even know it was gone.” “Don’t hit the Shell station out by the highway entrance,” Max Nolan told me. “The night guy there’s a cowboy. He packs a gun, he’s just crazy enough to blow your head off.”

I thanked everybody, assured Max I wouldn’t hit the Shell station, and went crawling slowly away through the tunnel. There was a great temptation just to lie down on the carpeting midway and not worry about anything anymore, but I kept moving ahead, and eventually emerged in the dim light of the Dombey basement. Bob was spending the night at home tonight, and I could hear the sound of television from upstairs; Bob and Alice, spending a cozy evening before the tube.

I left the house and walked aimlessly away, following the same route I’d taken with Phil yesterday, strolling along, trying to figure out what to do. I had so many problems I couldn’t make up my mind which one to think about first.

There was the robbery, of course, coming up in less than three weeks; Tuesday, December 14th was the target date. And there was the more immediate problem of this alleged sting I was on.

I was going to have to show something for my night’s work; but what? I owed Phil four dollars, Jerry seven, and Max three-fifty. I didn’t have a penny to my name, and no way to get anything. And I certainly wouldn’t actually commit any robberies, no matter what cute slang names they went by.

The problem with money was that the prison authorities didn’t permit anybody to have cash. If a friend or relative sent a few dollars to an inmate, that money was impounded and the inmate was given an equivalent credit at the small store in Cell-block D which was the only legitimate place where money could be spent. Stationery and stamps, razor blades, chewing gum, paperback books, things like that. The idea of running things that way was to cut down on thievery inside the prison and also to cut down on contraband (drugs, homemade alcohol, pornographic pictures) by keeping the prisoners too stony broke to be able to buy anything on the banned list. There was some cash around the place, of course, despite the injunction against it, but I hadn’t as yet found a way to get hold of any of it.

My own money, about three thousand dollars in savings now that I’d paid the twenty-three hundred for my share of the Dombey house, was all in a bank in Rye. There was no way on earth to get at it now, at eleven o’clock at night, five hundred miles to the south. And even if there were a way for my mother to get hold of it, how could she send it to me? Send it to the prison and it would be impounded, and I had no address on the outside. Letters sent to General Delivery can only be claimed by people showing proper identification, and that was something else I didn’t have.

Besides which, come to think of it, I couldn’t call my mother in the first place. True I could make the call collect, but first I’d have to have a dime so I could reach the operator.

My wandering had taken me to the business street where I’d been yesterday with Phil. A few cars drove by, but I saw no pedestrians. Looking around, trudging along in the cold air, I saw again those two banks next door to one another across the street. “A couple banks you could knock over with a softball,” Joe had called them. The gray stone Greek temple facade of Western National looked more solid and forbidding than ever at night, particularly with the pair of gold-colored metal doors ten feet high filling the space between the two middle pillars where the main entrance was by day. It didn’t look like a building you could hurt very much with a softball.

Fiduciary Federal next door was a different story. Although closed and empty, it was as bright as day inside. Through the wide windows the canary yellow walls could be seen in the glare of huge fluorescent ceiling fixtures. From across the street I could make out the pens chained to the desks. A softball might conceivably get us into that place, but it would be like breaking into a goldfish bowl.

The whole idea was impossible, that was obvious on the face of it. Breaking into either of those banks was absurd; breaking into them both simultaneously was lunatic.

The question was, whether or not my new comrades would go ahead and try it anyway. And if they did, would I be with them when they were caught.

A virus, I thought. I’ll catch a virus two days before the robbery, I’ll be bedridden but noble. “That’s all right,” I’ll say. “Go on without me. Split up my share among the rest of you, I don’t mind.”