You know what we stole from Parker, Tobin, Eastpoole & Company? The idea of ten million dollars. And that’s what we figured to sell Vigano. His newspaper and television set would tell him we did the job. He’d have no reason to think we didn’t have the bonds anymore. So when the time for the switch came around, they’d have to have real cash, and all we’d have to have was a good plan and a lot of luck.
But the point is, we’d be needing that anyway. Double-crossing them on the bonds wouldn’t make any difference, they were going to try to cheat us and kill us whether we showed up with ten million dollars’ worth of bonds or two dollars’ worth of ripped-up newspapers. It made no difference whether we conned them or not. And in pulling the robbery, it had been easier not to carry the bonds away with us, to destroy them. So that’s what we did.
You see, I understand the argument and I agree with it. But that still didn’t change the fact I would have liked something in my hand afterward to show me I’d accomplished something. And not having anything meant I was spending my time in a really lousy mood.
For instance. When I was on duty now, I was becoming a real hard-ass with the tickets. I was giving them out left and right, citing store owners for dirty sidewalks, hitting delivery trucks for driving down streets where commercial traffic was prohibited, even going after jaywalkers. I’m telling you, I was mean.
Paul was out of the hospital now, so that was good, but he wasn’t back on duty yet. He’d have a couple months at home for rest and recuperation, the lucky bastard. In the meantime, I still had Lou to contend with.
He wasn’t bad, but his attitude needed work. He was over-eager, that was his problem. For instance, Paul would have known how to calm me down when I was out there ticketing the entire population of the Upper West Side, but so far as Lou was concerned I was tough but good. It got so he was becoming pretty nearly as mean as I was, though nobody is ever going to top the time I ticketed the pregnant woman for obstructing the sidewalk with her baby carriage. That’s one of those records where you retire the trophy.
As an example, though, of where Lou’s attitude went overboard, there was the night about a week and a half after the robbery when we really did lose our car for repairs. Which I already considered ironic.
What happened, late at night we caught sight of these two guys coming out of a jewelry store on Broadway. We yelled at them to stop, and they jumped into a four-door Buick parked in front of the shop and took off southbound. I was driving, and I could keep on their tail but I couldn’t catch up with them, not with the piece of crap I was driving. I’d been putting in requests for a new car for eight months, and never even got a response.
Meanwhile, Lou was on the radio. But shit, that time of night, everybody’s either already got problems of their own or they’re off someplace cooping. You know, having a doze.
The Buick headed straight down Broadway, with me a full block back. I had the siren and flasher going, mostly to make other traffic stop up ahead and keep the clown in the Buick from killing somebody while running a red light. Of course, at that time of night, nearly four in the morning, there’s practically never any traffic anyway.
He was a good driver, I’ll say that much for him. His brake lights didn’t go on until less than half a block before he made his right turn onto a cross-street in the Fifties. His inside wheels left the ground as he shot around the corner, but he made it without losing control, and by the time I came screeching around the intersection after him he’d leveled himself out and was tear-assing away, the other side of Eighth Avenue already, heading due west along a narrow side street with cars parked along both curbs and just barely room for two cars next to one another in the middle.
“Jesus!” Lou yelled. “We’re losing him!”
Boy, are you hot to trot, I thought, but I was too busy driving to say anything out loud.
The light was with us both on Ninth Avenue, though it wouldn’t have made any difference. We both shot through, him not getting away but me not gaining any ground. What we needed was another car in front of us, to head him off before somebody got hurt.
The block between Ninth and Tenth is mostly red-brick tenement buildings, half of them with shops in the ground floor, but the block between Tenth and Eleventh is warehouses, and there’s trucks parked along both sides instead of passenger vehicles. The same thing is true between Eleventh and Twelfth, and after that you can’t go any farther west without a boat. That’s the Hudson River out there, and you have to turn either north or south.
He wasn’t quite as sure as I was on this narrow street, with the parked cars crowding in on both sides, and that was doubly true after we crossed Tenth and he was traveling down between two walls of trucks. The trucks take up more room than cars do, leaving less space down the middle for driving, and I could tell the guy in the Buick didn’t care for that. Given another two or three miles of the same kind of street and I probably could have caught up with him. But what actually happened was, he almost creamed a cab on Eleventh Avenue.
The light was red down there. Big-sided trucks were parked along both curbs right down to the corner, restricting everybody’s vision, making a kind of tunnel out of the street. The trucks and the warehouses also probably contained my siren too much, so that it couldn’t be heard by somebody out on Eleventh Avenue.
And there was somebody out there; a cab, going north, traveling empty. He was probably on his way to check in at one of the garages farther uptown on the West Side, having been out for eight or ten hours hacking around the city. In other words, tired. And alone in the area, so far as he knew. And with the light in his favor.
Well, he entered the intersection just as the Buick did. And he was damn lucky God had given him fast reflexes because he just about stood on his brake with both feet and threw an anchor out back besides. The Buick swerved to its right, just nicked the front bumper of the cab on the way by, swerved to the left again, and kept going toward Twelfth Avenue.
And here was I, half a block away. The cabby had to figure the first guy through was a nut, but with me he could see the flashing red light even if he had all his windows closed and maybe air-conditioning on and couldn’t hear the siren. So he had to know I was a cop. And twice in a row he did exactly the right thing.
Because he hadn’t managed to completely stop before the Buick went by. In fact, the nose of the cab was still down like a pig looking for truffles, and the vehicle was still in motion. Which put it right directly in front of me.
“Stop!” yelled Lou. As though I could have stopped by then, any more than the cab could. It takes a long distance to stop, hundreds and hundreds of feet — the only time you can stop on a dime is when you’re walking.
Besides, the cabby was doing his second right thing in a row. The instant the Buick was past him, he hauled in that anchor, switched both feet away from the brake and over to the accelerator, tromped down hard, and yanked that yellow mother out of the intersection.
I had to swerve left to miss his ass, just as the Buick had had to swerve right to miss his nose. But I did miss, and I never took my foot off the accelerator, and I entered the next block in fine shape.
In a lot better shape than the Buick. The near miss with the cab had loused him up for good. He shot into that next block angled wrong, coming in from the right because of having gone around the cab, and didn’t get straightened out in time. He sideswiped a truck on his left, scraping along the body, and then careened off that and headed down the block at an angle to the right, and damn if he didn’t hit another truck over on that side. He was like a drunk running down a hallway, bouncing from one wall to the other.