All the sideswiping, and all the struggling to get his car under control, were slowing him down. He did it a third time, over on the left again, and this time his front bumper or fender or something must have got hooked for a second on a truck cab, because all at once the Buick swerved around and jolted to a stop crossways in the street, the front bumper inches from the side of one truck and rear bumper inches from a truck across the way. The driver’s side was toward us, and I could see his white face in there in my headlights.
I stood on the brakes myself the second I saw what the Buick was doing, and the squad car dug its nose in and screamed, me fighting a skid to the left every inch of the way.
The passenger door of the Buick, the one on the far side, had popped open the second the Buick came to a stop, and somebody jumped out and laid what looked like a black stick across the roof of the car, pointing at us. That is, it looked like a black stick until the end of it blew up in red and yellow, and the windshield got peppered with a dozen sudden new holes.
Lou yelled, “What the fuck is that?”
“Shotgun!” I was still fighting that leftward skid, the squad car was still in motion, I was still praying for it to quit so I could get my head down out of the way of that shotgun. And finally we did shudder to a stop, no more than twenty feet from the Buick.
I hit the switch that turned off the siren, and shoved my door open. The driver’s face was no longer showing in the window of the Buick, and the black stick was no longer pointing at us over the top of the car. I leaned my head out to the side, and heard them running into the darkness in the opposite direction.
As I was getting out of the car, I saw Lou jumping out on his side and making a dash for the Buick. “Hey!” I yelled. “Where the hell are you going?”
He looked back and saw me standing behind the open door, which would give me some protection if they opened up with that goddam shotgun again. He stopped running forward and crouched there, pistol pointing straight ahead but head still turned around facing me. Looking baffled, he said, “After them. Don’t we—?”
I said, “In that darkness? With a shotgun? They’ll blow your ass off.”
He straightened out of his crouch, all momentum gone, but he still didn’t come back. “But we’ll lose them,” he said.
“We lost them,” I told him. I would never have had to explain that to Paul. “Get back here,” I said, “and call in.”
The footsteps had faded away. Those two were gone for good, and just as well. I came out from behind the door and walked around to look at the front of the car. Very little of the shotgun blast had reached the windshield, so where had the rest of it gone?
Into the radiator, as I’d thought. Red cooling fluid was oozing out of a thousand holes. The headlights had also been smashed. A little higher, I thought, and my face would look like that.
It was in that instant that I knew Tom had to stop fucking around on this Vigano deal. He had to call him, we had to make the arrangements and get the money, and we had to do it and get it over with. I was still willing to hang around the six months before I’d pack up my family and go off to Saskatchewan, but God damn it, I wanted to see what I’d accomplished. I wanted that money in my hand, where I could touch it.
Lou was walking by me, heading for his side of the car. I told him, “They shot the shit out of our radiator. When you call in, tell them we need wheels.”
“Okay,” he said.
I stood there looking at the radiator, thinking about what I was going to say to Tom.
And another thing. After this, they’d have to give us a new car.
15
It was a hot day. It would be really muggy and bad in the city, but fortunately they both had the day off and they could sit around on lawn chairs in Tom’s backyard, near the barbecue, and drink beer and work on their tans and watch the ballgame on the Sony portable Mary had given Tom for last Christmas.
Tom hadn’t been thinking about anything, except how hot it was and how glad he was he wasn’t working and how maybe he’d cut out the beer and start losing weight when the hot weather broke, but Joe had been thinking for the last few days, ever since the shotgun incident, how to approach Tom on this Vigano question, and he was beginning to think the only way to do it was straight out, no beating around the bush, dead ahead.
It was a very dull game. Cincinnati had got six runs in the first inning, and nobody had done a damn thing since. In the bottom of the fourth, with a deliberate walk coming up, Joe said, “Tom, listen.”
Tom gave him a half-awake look. “What?”
“When do we call your Mafia man?”
Tom looked back at the deliberate walk. “Pretty soon,” he said.
“It’s been two weeks,” Joe told him. “We’ve already passed pretty soon, we’re catching up on later, and I see never dead ahead.”
Tom frowned, staring at the television set, and didn’t say anything.
Joe said, “What’s the story, Tom?”
Tom made a face, shook his head, frowned, shrugged, gestured with his beer can; did everything but talk, or meet Joe’s eye.
Joe said, “Come on. We’re in this together, remember? What’s the problem, what’s the delay?”
Tom turned his head and frowned at the barbecue grill. He looked as though he had a toothache. He said in a low voice Joe could barely hear, “Day before yesterday I went into a phone booth.”
“Fantastic,” Joe said. “Three days from now you drop the dime?”
Tom grinned, despite himself. He looked at Joe, and he surprised himself by being relieved that he was getting this off his chest. He said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
Joe said, “So what’s the matter?”
“I don’t know, it’s like—” Tom clenched his teeth, trying to find the way to put it into words. He said, “It’s like we already got away with it, you know? Like we shouldn’t push our luck.”
“Got away with what? So far all we got is air.”
Tom shook his head violently back and forth. He was angry at himself, and he let it show. “The goddam truth is,” he said, “I’m afraid of that son of a bitch Vigano.”
Joe said, “Tom, I was afraid of the robbery. I was scared shitless when we went in there to do that thing, but we did it. It worked, just like we thought it would.”
“Vigano’s tougher.”
Joe lifted an eyebrow. “Than us?”
“Than a stock brokerage. Joe, we’re talking about beating them out of two million dollars. You think it’s going to be easy with those people?”
“No, I don’t,” Joe said. “But the other part wasn’t easy either. I say we can do it.”
“I don’t have a way,” Tom said. “It’s as simple as that. It’s easy to say we’ll work out a system where they have to bring the money and show it to us and all that stuff, but when it comes right down to it, where the hell’s the system?”
“There is one,” Joe said. “There has to be. Look; did we steal ten million dollars? We aren’t stupid. If we can figure that we can figure this.”
“How?”
Joe frowned, trying to think. He looked at the television set and the inning was over, and some actor made up to look like a cowboy was peddling razor blades. Joe shrugged and said, “Disguised as cops.”
“We already did that.”
Joe grinned at him. “We can’t do it again? Treat it the same way, use the equipment and everything just like last time.”
“Like how? Doing what?”
Joe nodded, feeling very pleased with himself. “We’ll think of it,” he said. “I know we will. If we just keep talking about it, we’ll work it out.”
And a little later that afternoon, they did.