I needn't have worried. The shades were drawn, the windows and door were closed. With no ventilation, the thermometer inside that cabin must have been reaching for 105, and that only made me more curious. What could be so important that a man would take precautions like that?
I stood there behind the carport for maybe three or four minutes before anything began to make sense, and then I heard Sheldon saying:
“It sounds too good. That's the trouble. I don't like jobs that look like pushovers, because there isn't any such thing.”
“Just the same,” the other man said, “this one is a pushover. I tell you I would have done it myself, all alone, if it hadn't been for that safe.”
“Prisons are full of men who thought a job was a pushover. Well, let me see that sketch again.”
Then, after a few seconds of silence, “Look. From this first-floor window to the front office, how far is it?”
“I don't know. Forty, fifty feet, I guess.”
“I want to know exactly how far it is, right down to the last inch,” Sheldon said. “It's going to be dark and we're not going to have a guide to lead us by the hand. I want every piece of furniture listed, in the storeroom as well as in the office, and I want all the electrical wiring checked. That's very important. How about burglar alarms?”
The other man laughed. “Not a chance.”
“I know a hundred men who said the same thing,” Sheldon said dryly. “They're in cells now.”
“Cripes, I can't go in there with a yardstick and measure the place off for you. I'm takin' a big chance as it is.”
“All right,” Sheldon said flatly, “we'll forget the whole thing. The deal's off. I told you how I work, and that's the way it's got to be.”
For several minutes they just haggled, Sheldon saying the deal was off and the other man trying to change his mind. I stood there thinking: Well, I'll be damned! It didn't take a mindreader to figure out what they were planning. They were planning to rob somebody! That realization stunned me for a moment, and I guess a kind of panic took hold of me. This was a hell of a thing. The only thing I could think of was getting to a telephone and calling the Creston County sheriff.
But that would be foolish. What could I tell him? I didn't know who they were planning to rob, or how, or when, or anything else. The only thing to do was wait and see if I could learn something else.
So I waited. They were still haggling about how it ought to be done. After a while I stopped listening to what they were saying and began concentrating on the man Sheldon was arguing with. The voice sounded vaguely familiar. I couldn't pin it down exactly, but there was one thing I would bet on: He was a native of Creston. The thing that puzzled me was how a native of Creston ever got to know a man like Sheldon.
“Now, wait a minute. Maybe a hundred and fifty people work at this factory. They draw between fifty and a hundred and fifty a week, so what does that make a two-week payroll? Close to thirty thousand dollars, the way I figure it. Think of it! Are you sayin' we should forget thirty grand?”
“I'm saying the job will be done my way or not at all.”
“All right, all right! I'll get the information you want. I don't know how I'll do it, but I'll do it. Now is everything all right?”
“Everything is just fine,” Sheldon said pleasantly. “Now let's have another look at that sketch. Did you notice what kind of safe it is?” .
“All I know is that it's big and looks plenty rugged.”
“Get me the make and model and it won't be so rugged. Now tell me about this factory again; I want to hear everything there is to know about it.”
I already knew what factory it was, because there was only one factory in Creston, and that was the one that made boxes. It was owned by a tough old Bohunk named Max Provo, and I had worked there one summer after getting out of the Army. I had sweated off fourteen pounds in the place for a lousy fifty bucks a week. I'd never thought of it before now, but it was a wonder the place hadn't been robbed long ago, considering how it was run.
Old Provo was the kind of penny-pinching gaffer who never put out a dollar if he didn't absolutely have to. Long ago he had figured out that writing checks cost money. A hundred pay checks, costing about ten cents each, meant that he would have to pay out ten dollars every two weeks for nothing. Twenty dollars every month, two hundred and forty every year. Not for a man like Provo. He paid in cash.
And did he have the cash brought out in an armored car? Not Provo; that kind of foolishness cost money. He picked up the cash himself and made the bank furnish armed guards, free of charge. And he picked the cash up the day before payday and made the office force come in an hour early the next morning in order to get the payroll ready by noon. That was Provo's idea of good business, squeezing that extra hour's work out of the office force.
Well, by God! I thought. At that moment I was remembering the long hours and low wages and bad working conditions, and I was almost ready to go back to my cabin and forget that I had heard anything. Let them take the cheap bastard. Let them take him good; it was none of my business, anyway.
I don't know—if I had walked off right then, maybe that's just the way it would have happened.
But I didn't walk off. I heard Sheldon saying: “Now about the watchman; what kind of routine does he follow?”
The other man laughed shortly. “His routine is to sit in the garage arid read Western magazines. He's about sixty years old, he's got a gimpy leg, and on top of that he's half deaf. You could probably blow the safe with him right there in the garage, and he'd never even know about it.”
I got the unpleasant feeling that Sheldon was not amused. “He'll have to be taken care of,” he said flatly, “but that shouldn't be any trouble. Now look. Here's a list of things I want you to do. Today's the seventh, isn't it? Yes, the seventh. Paula and I will leave this place first thing in the morning, and we'll come back on the fourteenth. I'll pick up the things I need and we'll take care of that safe the night of the fourteenth. That's right, isn't it?”
The other man must have nodded. “All right,” Sheldon said, “that's all there is to it. We'll come back to this same place. It's a lousy place, but there's one thing about it—it isn't crowded with tourists who might recognize me. The farmer that runs the place is too stupid to guess anything. He'll think we're just returning from our vacation.”
The other man sounded amused. “It's funny, in a way. Joe Hooper used to work at this factory.”
“Who's Joe Hooper?”
“The guy that owns this fly trap you're stayin' in.”
The meeting was about to break up. Paula Sheldon began complaining about the heat and somebody opened the window, but not until I was well back in the shadows.
Stupid farmer! I thought. Well, by God, we'll see about that! You're going to look pretty silly, Sheldon, when you tackle that safe with a roomful of deputy sheriffs looking on!
I got back to my cabin just in time. I saw the lights go out in Number 2, then the door opened and a man came down the steps. He came right in front of my cabin, whistling softly through his teeth, and suddenly I had him pegged. His name was Bunt Manley. He was a thickset bull of a man, wearing a flapping sport shirt and a wide-brimmed straw sombrero. He walked around the far side of the station, and after a while I heard a car pull off toward Creston.
Well, I thought, the picture is beginning to fall in place. I didn't know Bunt Manley very well, but I knew that he had recently served a year and a day in Leavenworth for some dealings in moonshine whisky, and that was probably where he had met Sheldon.