Дональд Уэстлейк - Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

Finally, though, the bank guard’s arrangements for the evening had been thoroughly rearranged and he left the phone and came over to stand with the woman in the tweed skirt and the man with the red tie and the man with the sideburns, all of whom had guns pointed at them by Joe and me, while Phil sat near the phone in case of problems, Eddie stayed up front doing his bank guard imitation, and Jerry and Billy took the laser into the vault to go to work.

All of this was what was happening on the surface. What was happening inside me was:

EEEEEE!!!

For those who have never tried it, let me say right now that bank robbery is a very boring occupation. So boring, in fact, that by six-thirty, a scant hour into the job, I had been bored completely out of terror, moral qualms and legal considerations, and dulled down into a torpid state of acceptability. So we were robbing a bank; what else was new?

The phone calling and other pre-arrangements had taken about half an hour, so it was just after six when Billy and Jerry started to work with the laser. Phil remained seated at the desk by the phone, the gun lying handy to his hand. Joe and I sat in swivel chairs, our guns resting in our laps as we continued to watch our four prisoners, who were sitting on the floor against a side wall. Eddie stayed up front, moving around like any bank guard.

Whenever any of our prisoners had to go to the toilet, it was my job to escort them, and to wait outside the door, once it had been established that neither bathroom had any windows large enough to permit an escape. And whenever one of them had to go, it was usually the guard. That man had kidneys every bit as bad as his nerves. Up and down, up and down; he punctuated my boredom with intervals of irritation.

Still, I suppose it would have been even worse just to sit there hour after hour, with no excuse at all for getting to my feet. What I really minded about all those trips to the men’s room, I must admit, was the weight of the gun. I was toting one of the Colt .45 automatics Eddie and I had stolen from the Army, and it was amazing just how much that gun weighed. Or maybe it wasn’t; the thing was, after all, made out of solid metal. Still, in movies people ran around with guns in their hands as though the things weigh no more than a soft drink straw. This automatic was the first handgun it had ever been my misfortune to hold, and it was heavy . Particularly because I didn’t feel it was psychologically proper to let it hang straight down from the end of my arm, not with the prisoners watching. So whenever I walked around at all, following the bank guard or whoever on a potty run, I always made sure to keep the gun pointing fiercely at the person I was guarding. The strain on my wrist and thumb was really grinding after a while.

Then there was the mask. I don’t mean it itched or anything as specific as that, but it was foreign, it was not a natural part of me. It pressed on the bridge of my nose, the eye-holes weren’t absolutely aligned with my eyes, and every time I fussed with it the elastic band around the back of my head shifted around and started pulling hairs out. That can hurt.

All in all it was a very discomforting business, robbing banks, and I was looking forward to it being over just as rapidly as possible.

Which wasn’t going to be all that rapid. Billy and Jerry were taking turns with the laser, spending five minutes on and five off, and they were evidently having slow going. They’d started at six, and by six-thirty they’d both stripped down to their jockey shorts. It was apparently getting very hot in there, in a fairly confined and mostly metal space, running a laser which was in essence melting a hole through the metal.

Through a lot of metal. A line of locked storage boxes, all containing stock certificates, covered the rear wall of the vault. First the doors of several of these had to be burned off and the smoking metal remnants carried out to cool in the anteroom. Then the partitions had to be burned away in further smoking chunks — enough partitions to make it possible for a man to move through there. After that the wall itself had to be burned through, leading to the wall of the Western National vault, plus God alone knew what further cabinets or other obstructions we’d find on the other side of that second wall.

Originally the idea had been to cut completely through into the second vault before assembling any of the money, but when the storage box doors were all burned away the leading edges of the exposed partitions were all too hot to touch. The air-conditioning system in the vault was working full blast, but not making much headway, and it was impossible for either Billy or Jerry to reach in among the partitions to do the work with the laser. So, while waiting for the metal to cool off, they began to fill the empty liquor store cartons that Joe and I brought in from the typewriter truck. Jerry and Billy, standing there in their masks and underpants, sweating like a metal bucket on a hot day and beginning to look a bit red, not unlike lobsters, held our guns pointed at the man in the red tie and the man with the sideburns and the bank guard with the kidneys and the woman in the tweed suit while Joe and I went out to the truck and got the cartons. Six of them that first time, three apiece. Eddie held the door for us, exactly like a real bank guard.

This happened a little after seven. Jerry and Billy loaded stacks of bills into the cartons until seven-thirty, and then went back to work with the laser again, cutting away the partitions.

That took until nearly eleven. Before that, around nine o’clock, the man with the sideburns said to me, “May I speak?” Until then, except for murmured conversation among themselves, the prisoners had all been very quiet, none of them talking to us at all. Not even to tell us we wouldn’t get away with it, or any of the stock lines in this situation that they all surely must have heard enough times on television to be letter perfect in them.

But now one of them had spoken to one of us — the man in the sideburns to me, requesting permission to speak. “Sure,” I said, though I did glance sidelong at Joe, sitting near me. I thought of myself as merely an apprentice in this operation after all, maybe an auxiliary; the real pros should do any of the talking required.

But it was me the man in the sideburns had chosen to talk to; perhaps the portions of my face not covered by the mask looked less intimidating than the portions of Joe’s face not covered by his mask. “As you know,” he said to me, “none of us has been permitted to go home for dinner. I don’t know about my companions, but I’m getting hungry. Would it be all right for us to have something to eat?”

How the hell did I know? I said, “Do you have any food here?”

“No, but we could send out,” he said.

Send out? In the middle of a bank robbery? Helplessly, I said, “I don’t think—”

“It’s a fairly common practice,” he assured me. “I suppose you’ve cased the joint — that is what you say, isn’t it?”

I’d never said any such thing in my life. “That’s what we say,” I agreed.

“Then you know,” he said, “that whenever we’re going to be working here, we do order out for food.” Then Joe said, “I’m getting a little hungry myself.” He turned to Phil. “What about you?”

“Good idea,” Phil said. “We’ll order from the luncheonette.”

The man with the sideburns said, “The place across the street? That’s terrible. Durkey’s is better, around the corner on Massena Street.”

“Okay,” Phil said. “You got the number?”

“I believe it’s on the Rolodex on that desk there,” the man with the sideburns said.

“Right.” Phil found the Rolodex, twirled it, and apparently found the number. “Right,” he said again, and pointed at me. (We weren’t using names with one another.) “Take everybody’s order,” he said.