“Hopefully before he kills me,” JMV said, and grinned charmingly. “Well,” he said, “if there’s nothing further to discuss, perhaps we can set all these precautionary measures into motion. I’ll be happy to see your doctor, Herb, whenever you want to send him in.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll get in touch with the Bomb Squad,” the police commissioner said, rising.
“Yes, that’s probably the first thing to do,” JMV said, rising. “Gentlemen, thank you for your time and your valuable suggestions. I’m sure everything will work out fine.”
“You’ll have men here in the next two or three minutes,” the district attorney promised.
“Thank you, Stan,” the mayor said, “I certainly appreciate your concern.”
The men filed out of the mayor’s office, each of them assuring him once again that he would be amply protected. The mayor thanked each of them charmingly and individually, and then sat in the big padded leather chair behind his desk and stared at the ticking wall clock.
Outside, it was beginning to snow.
The snow was very light at first.
It drifted from the sky lazily and uncertainly, dusting the streets and the sidewalks with a thin fluffy powder. By eight P.M. that night, when Patrolman Richard Genero was discharged from Buena Vista Hospital, the snow was beginning to fall a bit more heavily, but it presented no major traffic problems as yet, especially if–like Genero’s father — one had snow tires on his automobile. Their ride home was noisy but uneventful. Genero’s mother kept urging her son to talk to the captain, and Genero’s father kept telling her to shut up. Genero himself felt healthy and strong and was anxious to get back to work, even though he’d learned he would start his tour of duty on the four-to-midnight tomorrow. He had also learned, however, that Captain Frick, in consideration for his recent wound, was not asking him to walk a beat for the next week or so. Instead, he would be riding shotgun in one of the RMP cars. Genero considered this a promotion.
Of sorts.
The snow continued to fall.
Chapter 13
Friday.
The city was a regular tundra, you never saw so much snow in your life unless you happened to have been born and raised in Alaska, and then probably not. There was snow on everything. There was snow on roofs and walls and sidewalks and streets and garbage cans and automobiles and flowerpots, and even on people. Boy, what a snowfall. It was worse than the Blizzard of ‘88, people who didn’t remember the Blizzard of ‘88 were saying. His Honor the Mayor JMV, as if he didn’t have enough headaches, had to arrange with the Sanitation Department for the hiring of 1200 additional temporary employees to shovel and load and dump the snow into the River Dix, a job estimated to cost five hundred and eight thousand four hundred dollars and to consume the better part of a full week – if it didn’t snow again.
The men began working as soon as the snow stopped. It did not stop until three-thirty P.M., fifteen minutes before Genero began riding the RMP car, an hour and a half before Willis and Carella took their posts in the rear of the tailor shop. The city had figured on working their snow people in three continuous shifts, but they hadn’t figured on the numbing cold that followed the storm and lowered the rate of efficiency, a biting frigid wave that had come down from Canada or someplace. Actually, nobody cared where it had come from, they merely wished it would continue going, preferably out to sea, or down to Bermuda, or even all the way to Florida; do it to Julia, everyone was thinking.
There was no doing it to Julia that day.
The cold gripped the city and froze it solid. Emergency snow regulations had gone into effect at noon, and by four P.M. the city seemed deserted. Most large business offices were closed, with traffic stalled to a standstill and buses running only infrequently. Alternate-side-of-the-street parking had been suspended, but stranded automobiles blocked intersections, humped with snow like igloos on an arctic plain. The temporary snowmen fought the cold and the drifted snow, huddled around coal fires built in empty gasoline drums, and then manned their shovels again while waiting dump trucks idled, exhaust pipes throwing giant white plumes into the bitter dusk. The lamppost lights came on at five P.M., casting isolated amber circles on the dead white landscape. A fierce relentless wind howled across avenue and street as the leaden sky turned dark and darker and black.
Sitting cozy and warm in the back room of John the Tailor’s shop, playing checkers with Hal Willis (and losing seven games in a row since it turned out that Willis had belonged to the checkers club in high school, an elite group calling itself. The Red and The Black), Carella wondered how he would get home after La Bresca and Calucci hit the shop.
He was beginning to doubt that they would hit at all. If there was one thing he did not understand, of course, it was the criminal mind, but he was willing to venture a guess that no self-respecting crook would brave the snow and the cold outside on a night like this. It would be different if the job involved a factor that might change in a day or so, like say ten million dollars of gold bullion to be delivered at a precise moment on a specific day, making it necessary to combine pinpoint timing with insane daring, but no such variable was involved in this penny-ante stickup. The men had cased the shop and learned that John the Tailor carried his week’s earnings home in a metal box every Friday night after closing. He had doubtless been performing this same chore every Friday night for the past seven thousand years, and would continue to do it without variation for the next thousand. So, if not this Friday night, what are you doing next Friday, John? Or, better yet, why not wait until May, when the trees are budding and the birds are singing, and a man can pull off a little felony without the attendant danger of frostbite?
But assuming they did hit tonight, Carella thought as he watched Willis double-jump two of his kings, assuming they did hit, and assuming he and Willis behaved as expected, made the capture, and then called in for a squad car with chains, how would he get home to his wife and children after La Bresca and Calucci were booked and
put away for the night? His own car had snow tires, but not chains, and he doubted if the best snow tires made would mean a damn on that glacier out there. A possibility, of course, was that Captain Frick would allow one of the RMPs to drive him home to Riverhead, but using city property for transporting city employees was a practice heavily frowned upon, especially in these days of strife when deaf people were running around killing city officials.
“King me,” Willis said.
Carella snorted and kinged him. He looked at his watch. It was seven-twenty. If La Bresca and Calucci hit as expected, there was little more than a half-hour to go.
In Pete Calucci’s rented room on North Sixteenth, he and La Bresca armed themselves. John the Tailor was seventy years old, a slight stooped man with graying hair and failing eyes, but they were not taking any chances with him that night. Calucci’s gun was a Colt Government Model .45, weighing thirty-nine ounces and having a firing capacity of seven, plus one in the chamber. La Bresca was carrying a Walther P-38, which he had bought from a fence on Dream Street, with eight slugs in the magazine and another in the chamber. Both guns were automatic. The Walther was classified as a medium-power pistol whereas the Colt, of course, was a heavy gun with greater power. Each was quite capable of leaving John the Tailor enormously dead if he gave them any trouble. Neither man owned a holster. Calucci put his pistol into the right-hand pocket of his heavy overcoat. La Bresca tucked his into the waistband of his trousers.