Donald Westlake: Cops and Robbers

Elation suddenly grabbed Tom and lifted him up into the sky. Still bracing himself with one hand, he pounded his other fist on top of the dashboard and yelled, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”

Joe was grinning so hard he looked as though he was imitating all those automobile grilles out front. He was practically lying on top of the steering wheel, hunched around it so tight he was driving as much with his shoulders as with his hands. He was concentrating like a pinball player on a streak, goosing the ball past all the dangers toward the big winner.

Three blocks, four blocks, and they were out of that swarm, with the next bunch half a dozen blocks ahead, coming up with the next traffic-light sequence. “Siren and light off!” Joe yelled. He couldn’t be heard, so he pounded Tom’s leg, and jammed a finger toward the switches, simultaneously making a screaming two-wheel left turn onto West 54th Street.

Tom hit the switches as they shot around the turn, and then braced himself again, because Joe was standing on the brake with both feet. He brought them down to about twenty, and they rolled the rest of the way to the traffic waiting for the light at Fifth Avenue, and came to a gentle stop behind a garment delivery truck.

They grinned at one another. They were both shaking like a leaf. Tom said, with both admiration and terror, “You’re a madman. You’re a complete madman.”

“And that,” Joe said, “is how you don’t get followed.”

They both had day shift, so they were with the rush-hour traffic again on the Long Island Expressway, heading toward the city. Joe was driving, and Tom was beside him, reading the News.

This was about a week after the business in the park. When they’d gotten the picnic basket home that night, they’d found it had the full two million dollars in it, to the penny. They’d split it down the middle, and each of them had taken his share for safekeeping. Tom put his in a canvas bag he’d once kept gym equipment in, and locked it away in a cabinet behind the bar in his basement. Joe put his in the blue plastic laundry bag they’d used during the bond robbery, moved his pool filter (which was on the fritz once more), dug a hole under it, put the bag in the hole, filled it up again, and put the filter back on top.

The main result of the activity in the park was a notice on the bulletin boards in all the Manhattan precinct houses, a couple days later, urging caution if anybody ever had to travel the wrong way on a one-way street. The Department surely would have liked to find out who had done that stuntman number on Sixth Avenue, but there was no way they were going to do it, and they probably didn’t even try.

They’d been sitting there in Joe’s Plymouth in silence for a pretty long while, inching along in stop-and-go traffic, when Tom suddenly sat up and said, “Hey, look at this.”

Joe glanced at him. “What?”

Tom was staring at the newspaper. “Vigano’s dead,” he said.

Joe glanced at him. “What?”

Tom was staring at the newspaper. “Vigano’s dead,” he said.

“No shit.” Joe faced front again, and moved the Plymouth forward a little bit. “Read it to me.”

“Uhh. Crime kingpin Anthony Vigano, long reputed to be an important member of the Joseph Scaracci Mafia family in New Jersey, was shot to death at ten forty-five yesterday evening as he emerged from Jimmy’s Home Italian Restaurant in Bayonne. The killing, which Bayonne police say bears all the earmarks of a gang-type slaying was done by an unidentified man who stepped from an automobile parked in front of the restaurant, shot Vigano twice in the head, and left in the automobile. Police are also seeking the two men who had been with Vigano in the restaurant and who left with him but who had disappeared before police reached the scene. Vigano, who was still alive when the first police officers responded to a call from the restaurant owner, Salvatore “Jimmy” Iacocca, died in the ambulance en route to Bayonne Memorial Hospital. Vigano, fifty-seven, first attracted the attention of the police in nineteen — uhh, the rest is all biography.”

“Is there a picture?”

“Just of the restaurant. A white X where he got it.”

Joe nodded. A small smile of satisfaction was on his face. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

“He lost the mob’s two million dollars,” Tom said, “and they didn’t like it.”

“Besides that.”

“What else?”

“They can’t find us,” Joe said. “They’ve tried, and they can’t do it, and they gave up.”

“The mob doesn’t give up,” Tom said.

“Bullshit. Everybody gives up, if there’s nothing left to do. If they thought they could still find us and get the money back, they wouldn’t kill Vigano. They’d let him keep looking.” Joe gave Tom a big smile and said, “We’re free and clear, buddy, that’s what that thing in the paper means.”

Tom frowned at the newspaper report, thinking it over, and gradually he too began to smile. “I guess so,” he said. “I guess we are.”

“Fucking A well told,” said Joe.

They rode along in silence again for a while, both of them thinking about the future. A little later, Joe glanced toward Tom, and beyond him he saw the next car over, stopped like they were, and it was a gray Jaguar sedan, one of the big ones. The windows were rolled up, and the middle-aged guy inside there was neat and cool in his suit and tie. As Joe looked at him, the guy in the Jaguar turned his own head, met Joe’s eye, and gave him that quick meaningless smile that people invariably flash when they cross glances with somebody in another car. Then he faced front again.

Joe smiled back at him, but with something savage in it. “That’s right, you bastard, smile,” he said to the Jaguar driver’s profile. “Six months from now you’re going to be six months closer to your coronary, and I’m going to be in Saskatchewan.”

Tom looked at Joe while he was talking, puzzled; then turned and saw the Jaguar driver and understood. The surf on a beach in Trinidad crashed lazily in his mind, and he smiled.

It was going to be a hot day. They sat there in the car, their elbows out the open windows, reaching for a little breeze. Endless stalled traffic stretched away into the hazy distance, and far away they could just make out the scum-covered smoky island of Manhattan, squatting there like that portion of Hell zoned industrial.

The car in front of them moved a little.