Donald Westlake - Cops and Robbers

Fifteen minutes. I went back over to the park, passed by Tom again, and he still had the newspaper in his lap.

This time, I didn’t like it. I was still nervous, I still had cold feet, but my reaction when I’m scared of something is that I want to get it done and over with. No stalling around, building it up, making myself even more nervous than I was already.

Come on, Vigano. Make your play, let’s do something.

Because of my nerves, my driving was getting bad. A couple times, if I’d been in a civilian car I would have racked it up for sure; but people pay more attention to police cars, so they saw me in time to get out of the way. But that’s all I needed, was to be involved in some fender-bumping argument over on Columbus Avenue while Tom was making contact in the park; so after the second trip past him I didn’t do much driving at all, just pulled in next to a hydrant on 86th to wait the fifteen minutes out.

I had the radio on, listening to the dispatcher, though I don’t know why. I sure wasn’t going to respond to any squeals, not now. Maybe I was listening for something to tell me the whole thing was off, we’d blown it and could go home and forget the whole thing.

In the back seat, directly behind me, was the picnic basket. It was half full of old copies of the Daily News. On top we’d scattered some fake diplomas and gag stock certificates we’d picked up in a novelty shop on Times Square. They ought to look good enough for a fast peek, which is all we meant to give the other side before we made our play. If things worked out right.

Fifteen minutes. I pulled away from the hydrant, made a loop around, and passed Tom again, and he didn’t have the newspaper on his lap anymore.

All of a sudden I had a balled-up wet wool overcoat in my stomach. I was blinking like a hophead, I could barely make out the numbers and the hands on my watch when I raised my arm in front of my face to check the time. Three thirty-five. All right. All right.

I drove up to 96th Street, the next entrance to the Drive. I stopped with the nose of the car against one of the sawhorses blocking the road, and stumbled and almost fell on my face getting out from behind the wheel. I walked around to the front of the car, lifted one end of the sawhorse, and swung it out of the way. Then I drove through, put the sawhorse back, and angled the car slowly down the entrance road to the Drive.

I was in the only kind of vehicle that could come into the park on a Tuesday afternoon. That was the edge we had; we could drive, and the mob had to walk.

I stopped by the Drive and checked my watch again, and I had three minutes before I should start to move. Tom needed time to make contact.

Bicycles streamed by me, heading south, the same direction I would go. There’s no law about it, but most people who ride bicycles in the park treat the Drive as a counter-clockwise one-way street, the way it is the rest of the week for cars. Every once in a while somebody would come up in the other direction like a salmon going upstream — usually it was a teen-ager — but most of the traffic was south-bound. Even the women pushing baby carriages were all heading south.

I didn’t want any shooting in here today. Aside from what would happen to Tom and me, they could really rack up a score on women and children.

Time. I shifted into drive and joined the stream of bicycles and matched their pace on down toward Tom.

They had rehearsed this, they’d gone through it over and over again, they both knew their parts; and still, when Tom looked up from the picnic basket and saw the police car threading its way toward him through the bicycles, he was amazed at the relief he felt. Now that Joe was actually here, Tom could admit to himself the fear he’d been carrying in the back of his mind that for one reason or another Joe would fail to show up.

Joe hadn’t had that worry about Tom. The only unacknowledged fear he’d been ignoring was that Tom would already be dead before the patrol car got there. Seeing Tom alive relieved Joe’s mind a little, but not much; they were still just at the beginning of this ride.

Joe eased the car to a stop near the picnickers. Tom had half a dozen bills from the basket clenched in his right fist, taken from the top and the middle and the bottom — they didn’t want the fakery with old newspapers done right back at them — and now he said to the picnickers, “Take it easy. I’ll be right back.”

They didn’t like it. They were looking at the patrol car and at each other and up the hill toward their friends. They obviously hadn’t figured on the patrol car, and it was making them upset. The first man, with his hand still inside his jacket, said, “You better move very slow.”

“Oh, I will,” Tom said. “And when your hand comes out from under there, it better move slow, too. My friend sometimes gets nervous.”

“He’s got reason,” the picnicker said.

Tom got to his feet and walked slowly over to the patrol car, coming up to it on the right side. The passenger window was open. He bent to put his elbows on the sill, hands and forearms inside the car. A nervous grin flickering on his face, he said, “Welcome to the party.”

Joe was looking past him at the picnickers, watching their tense faces. He looked tense himself, the muscles bunched like a lumpy mattress along the sides of his jaw. He said, “How we doing?”

Tom dropped the handful of bills onto the seat. “I spotted five guys so far,” he said. “There’s probably more.”

Reaching for the microphone, Joe said, “They really don’t want us to get paid.”

“If there’s enough of them,” Tom said, “we’re fucked.”

Into the microphone Joe said, “Six six.” To Tom he said, “That’s the chance we took. We worked it out.”

“I know,” Tom said. He rubbed perspiration from his forehead onto the back of his hand, and from there to his trouser leg. Half-turning, staying bent, keeping one elbow on the windowsill, he looked around at the sunny day and said, “Christ, I wish it was over.”

“Me, too.” Joe was blinking again, having trouble seeing things. Into the microphone, he said, “Six six.”

The radio suddenly said, “Yeah, six six, go ahead.”

Picking up the money from the seat, Joe said, “I got some bills for you to check out.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

Joe held one of the bills close to his face, and squinted so he could read the serial number. “This one’s a twenty,” he said. “B-five-five-eight-seven-five-three-five-A.”

The radio read the number back again.

“Check,” Joe said. “Another twenty.” He read off the number, listened to it repeated, and then did the same thing with a third bill, a fifty.

“Give me a minute,” the radio said.

Tom muttered, “If we have a minute.”

Joe put the microphone away under the dashboard and held one of the bills up by the open window to study it with the light behind it. Squinting at it, focusing with difficulty, he said, “Looks okay to me. What do you think?”

The grin twitched on Tom’s face again. “I was too nervous to look,” he said, and reached into the car to pick up one of the bills from the seat. He studied it, felt the paper between thumb and first finger, tried to remember the signs of a phony bill. Over on his side of the car, Joe was checking another of the bills, seeing this one a little more easily; he was beginning to settle down, now that something was happening.

“I guess it’s all right,” Tom said. Irritably he tossed the bill back on the seat. “What’s taking him so long?”

Joe dropped the bill and rubbed his eyes, then said, “Go talk to the people.”

Tom frowned at him. “Are you really as cool as all that, or is it bullshit?”