No one got out. Ten minutes passed, then twenty. I left the camera aimed at the Dumpster but kept my eyes moving back and forth between it and the green Ford. Another thirty minutes passed. Then, suddenly, a woman’s voice yelled out angrily in Spanish. A Hispanic girl, nineteen or twenty, clambered out of the Ford, furiously tugging at her skirt. She spun back to the open door, screamed something else, and stomped off, hips swinging, across the lot. I watched the Dumpster through the telephoto lens, my index finger resting lightly on the shutter button. Nothing moved. A couple of minutes later, the engine of the old Ford startedup. I spun the camera on the tripod and tried to change the focus to the car, but the Ford had disappeared into the dark at the end of the alley before I could snap a picture.
Nothing happened for the next three hours. Everywhere else, people made love, argued, slept, worked night shifts, as the planet turned. But in my little part of the universe, a rotting garage across a parking lot from a Dumpster, time stood still. Nothing moved. I’m sure of it.
At least until sometime past two in the morning, when I got the nods.
No honest person who does surveillance will say it doesn’t happen. It does, and often. Surveillance is grinding monotony. For someone like me, who doesn’t sleep well at night anyway, it’s impossible to stay awake for extended hours.
That night, in that molding garage, I fought it. I sat tilted on the back legs of the chair I’d brought, my best old trick, knowing that when I nodded off, the chair would start to move and that would wake me.
I remember I looked at my watch at two fifteen. At two eighteen, I checked the view of the Dumpster through the telephoto lens. I checked it again at two thirty. Then I leaned back on the rear legs of the chair, steadying myself with the back of my head against the garage wall. It wasn’t comfortable, but I didn’t want it comfortable.
The big diesel engine boomed off the brick walls of the entry alley, jolting me awake. My chair crashed down on its front legs as the headlights swept the parking lot. The garbage truck turned and rumbled to a stop next to the Dumpster. I pushed out of the chair, my neck throbbing from being jammed against the wall, and hobbled on stiff legs into a contorted run across the broken garage floor. I ran out the service door, pulled at the chain-link gate, then sprinted across the empty parking lot, my legs loose now, shouting at the man in coveralls standing by the open lid of the Dumpster.
He stopped, surprised.
“I put something in the garbage by mistake,” I yelled out, slowing to a walk.
The driver must have heard the commotion, because he had shut off the engine and was coming around the side of the truck. I pulled out a twenty and handed it to the tailgate man standing by the Dumpster.
“It’ll only take me a minute.”
The driver and the tailgate man looked at each other and shrugged. The tailgate man stuffed the twenty into his overalls and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. The driver climbed back in the truck cab.
I looked in the Dumpster. And lost the air in my lungs.
Three white bags, lumpy with food garbage, lay at the top. I pulled them out, threw them on the ground. But the bags underneath were white, too.
The black bag of money was gone.
I ripped open the top bag in the Dumpster. Pork chop bones, dinner rolls, half heads of rotting lettuce embedded in strands of blood red spaghetti, glistening and exposed in the glare of the back-door light like the viscera of a corpse. I tore at the second bag. More garbage, just as wet. Frantic, my heart banging, I bent in and tore at the rest of the bags in the Dumpster. Every one was filled with decomposing food. I dropped to the asphalt and pulled at the tops of the bags I’d thrown on the ground, ripping at them like a crazy man. It was no use. There was nothing there but food waste.
I rocked back on my heels. Something bright glinted high, to my right, above the rooftop. The sun. I stared up at it, uncomprehending. Until, disbelieving, I thought to look at my watch. It was five fifty-eight in the morning. I’d been asleep for over three hours.
And the five hundred thousand dollars was gone.
Eight
I drove out of Ann Sather’s alley fast, and angry, with the windows down. I needed the fresh air to force away the stench of damp-rot garage, spoiled food, and failure. I’d slept right through the one opportunity to stop the bombings at Gateville.
I got to the health center at seven, put a quarter for a towel on the counter next to the greasy head of the sleeping attendant, and headed for the showers. I wanted a long soak to draw the disaster out of my pores. I turned the water on hot and reran the night.
A couple of kids bouncing a basketball, Stanley Novak, an angry Hispanic girl, two men in a garbage truck-and a Dumpster bathed in white light the whole time. Everything had been in plain sight, and that’s what nagged. He had to know someone would be watching. Sure, he could have come at the Dumpster from the back of the restaurant, moving low to stay hidden from anyone at the fringes of the parking lot, the garages, or the four-flats beyond, but why take the risk at all? It had been a lousy place to pick up extortion money, too well lit for someone who’d been as cautious as a church mouse with his delays and his careful, ruler-printed letters.
I toweled off and got dressed. None of that mattered anyway. I’d fallen asleep. I still stank of failure.
At the turret, I made a cup of weak coffee and called the Bohemian because he would have been suspicious if I hadn’t.
“How did Stanley do with the drop?”
The Bohemian sounded ebullient. “He called me from his van about ten thirty last night. Everything went smoothly.”
“Now what?”
“Now we pray the matter is over.”
“It might take more than prayer.”
“Vlodek, Vlodek.” He paused. “You don’t sound like your usual chipper self. Been getting enough sleep?”
If it was a veiled inference that he knew I’d been watching the Dumpster, it was either daring or astute. I let it go because I was too tired to think. I mumbled something about staying in touch and clicked off before he could pick up on anything else.
I went upstairs to the cot and dreamed of nothing at all.
Loud banging woke me at one thirty. I threw on a T-shirt, paint-splattered Levi’s, and Nikes, and clanged down the metal stairs to open the door. Leo stood outside in the bright sunshine, wearing an enormous purple shirt and khaki shorts. In the glare of the midday sun, the purple made his white skin look translucent, like he’d been bled out in a medical experiment gone wrong. He hurt my eyes-but he had hot dogs from Kutz’s. I grabbed sunglasses, and we walked down to the bench by the river.
“I brought back your Jeep to save you the trip,” he said as we sat down. “But I really came to find out how the surveillance went.” He handed me a hot dog and pointed at the smaller of the two soft drinks on the bench.
“I think I slept through the pickup.”
He set down the hot dog he was unwrapping and stared at me. “Jeez, you must feel stupid.”
“Thank you, Leo, for the salt for my wounds. I was worried I might not have enough of my own.” I took a bite of hot dog. Stupid people need to eat, too.
“What happened?”
I chewed for a minute before I spoke. There was no good way to put it. “I don’t know. Stanley showed up behind the restaurant a little before ten and put a black garbage bag full of money into the Dumpster. He did everything nice and slow under the light. Then he drove away.”
“And then you fell asleep?”
“No.” I told him about the couple in the beater Ford. “My guess is the guy dipped a little too deep, the girl took off on foot, and the car pulled away a few minutes later.”
Leo chewed through two more hot dogs, looking at the river. “You’re thinking the girl was a diversion, to draw your attention while somebody else made a move on the Dumpster?”