With loans going out and interest coming in, there was always quite a bit of cash moving through Nick’s Place, but there wasn’t much to worry about. Nick subscribed to the Vigilant Protective Service, and the local police patrol car knew to keep a special eye on Nick’s Place; and anyway, who would be dumb enough to go after money that belonged to men like Ernie Dulare and Adolf Lozini?
Somebody. The bedroom light went on and Nick opened his eyes and two guys were standing there with hoods and guns. “Holy Jesus,” Nick said, and struggled to sit up. His wife Angela’s heavy arm was across his chest, pinning him to the bed, but he finally managed to shove the arm away and hunch up to a sitting position, blinking in the glare of the overhead light.
“Get up, Nick,” one of the hooded men said. “Get up and open the closet.”
“You’re out of your minds,” Nick said. Squinting, rubbing his eyes, trying to wake up enough to think, he said, “You got to be crazy. You know whose money that is?”
“Ours. Come on, Nick, we’re in a hurry.”
Angela groaned, bubbled, snored, and rolled heavily over onto her other side. One thing you could say for Angela: when she was asleep, she was asleep. Nick, with one tiny corner of his mind grateful that she wasn’t awake to yap and complain and carry on, slowly kicked his legs out from under the covers and over the side of the bed. “Christ on a crutch,” he complained. “What the hell time is it?”
“Move it, Nick.”
The floor was cold. The air-conditioner hummed in the window, making cold air move like invisible fog along the floor. Nick, sitting there in white T-shirt and blue boxer shorts, frowned at the one who was doing the talking, trying to see his face through the hood, trying to recognize the voice that was calling him by first name. He said, “Do I know you?” And then, in the process of asking the question, he suddenly came fully awake and realized he didn’t want to know the answer to it. If a guy has a hood and a gun, then neither one of you wants you to see his face.
Besides, Vigilant had to be on the way. These guys must have busted in here, so that meant Vigilant would be coming, and so would the cops. So all Nick had to do in the meantime was obey orders and be ready to drop to the floor.
Right. He got to his feet, saying, “Forget it. I don’t want to know if I know you.”
“That’s smart. Open the closet, Nick.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He wished he had his slippers. “And the safe,” he said.
“That’s right,” the gunman said.
These people knew a lot. They knew the money was in a safe, and they knew the safe was in the bedroom closet. Thinking about that, wondering how much else they knew and what was letting them be so calm about heisting mob money, Nick opened the closet door and went down on one creaking knee to slowly work the combination dial on the safe. While behind him the two guys stood waiting, guns in their hands. And Angela snored. And Nick wondered how long it would take the Vigilant people to get here.
When the buzzer and light went off in the Vigilant ready room, showing that a break-in had just occurred at Nick’s Place, Fred Ducasse switched it off and went back to the magazine article he was reading on the latest concepts of crowd control, in a trade journal called The Police Chief.
* * *
The problem was, there was only so much you could do with a pinochle deck. So long as Philly Webb had been here they could use the deck for its original purpose—pinochle—and play three-handed, Ducasse and Handy McKay and Webb. But Webb had left half an hour ago to drive for Wiss and Elkins, who were running the job with the stockbroker, Leffler, and that had been the end of it for cards. Ducasse and Handy had tried gin rummy, war, blackjack, ah hell and casino, and not a one of them was worth a damn with a pinochle deck.
So they’d finally hunted around for something to read instead, and in an inner office with a cluttered desk and paneled walls they’d found a shelf full of magazines, all of them specialized law-enforcement or security-agency trade journals. With nothing else to do, and time hanging heavy on their hands. Ducasse was reading about crowd control and Handy was reading about closed-circuit-television security systems.
About five minutes after the Nick’s Place buzzer had sounded, the phone all at once rang. Ducasse and Handy looked at one another, and Ducasse said, “Parker?”
“Maybe not. We better put our boy to work.”
The guard they’d kept out was tied and blindfolded in a chair by a desk with a phone on it. Handy went over there and rested his hand on the guard’s shoulder. “Time for you to go to work,” he said.
The guard licked his lips, but didn’t say anything. Handy could feel the muscles tensed in the man’s shoulder. Rapping the shoulder with his knuckles, gently but firmly, he said, “Remember what we talked about. You bring trouble here, you’ll get unhappy.”
“I remember.” The guard’s voice sounded rusty, like someone locked in solitary for a week. “Clear your throat.”
“I’m all right.”
The phone had rung three times by now; that was enough. “Here we go,” Handy said. He picked up the receiver and held it to the guard’s head, holding it at a slight angle so the guard could feel it against his skin yet Handy would be able to hear what the caller had to say.
There was a very slight hesitation, and then the guard said. “Vigilant.”
”Hello, is this Harry?” “Uh— No, it’s Gene.”
“Whadaya say. Gene? This is Fred Callochio, downtown. Anything shaking?”
“Not here. Not for a couple hours.”
“Nice and quiet, huh? That’s good.”
“How about you?”
“Nothing much. You know, Monday night.”
“Right. Same here.”
“So I’ll see you. Gene.”
“Right, Fred. So long.”
Handy, crouched close to the blindfolded guard so he could hear the conversation, waited for the click of the other man hanging up, then cradled the receiver and said, “What was that all about?”
“He’s a cop.” the guard said. “A desk sergeant downtown. Police Headquarters.”
Ducasse had come over. He said, “Is that normal, him calling you?”
It wasn’t; they could both see it in the guard’s hesitation. Finally he said, “Not every night. Sometimes he calls.”
Ducasse and Handy looked at one another. Handy said, “They know something’s happening. They’re looking around for where it is.”
Ducasse offered a pale grin. “Let’s hope they don’t find it.”
“They won’t,” Handy said. He squeezed the guard’s shoulder in a congratulatory way. “You did very nice,” he said. The guard had nothing to say.
Handy and Ducasse were walking back across the room toward their magazines when the alarm went off again. They both looked at it, startled, and then Ducasse checked the number on the light with the chart on the console in front of it. Then, switching the alarm off, he turned with a grin to Handy and said, “The stockbroker.”
* * *
When Andrew Leffler realized the gangsters were taking him to the brokerage, he knew there was no longer anything to worry about. They had brought along his key ring from the dresser, apparently intending simply to unlock the front door and walk in, not realizing that no one at all could enter the place at night, not even Leffler himself using a key, without setting off an alarm at the protective agency. Within minutes the police and the private protective agency’s guards would be swarming all over the place here, and surely these men were too professional to put up a dangerous kind of resistance. So it would all be over very, very soon.
When they had left their house, they had been put in the back seat of an automobile waiting in the driveway, with a third gunman at the wheel. Leffler and his wife had been ordered to get down on the floor of the car and huddle there during the entire trip; probably to keep them from seeing the faces of their captors, who took their hoods off for the drive through the city streets.