Ed McBain
Guns
This is for
DICK and BARBARA COATS
One
The night of the liquor-store job, you could fry eggs on the sidewalk. It was seven o’clock already, and outside it was still an oven. Colley was all for calling off the job. Even there inside the cafeteria, with the air conditioner going, he was sweating.
“No,” Jocko said. “I think we’re primed for it, we should go ahead.”
“Because when it’s this hot,” Colley said, “things could go wrong.”
“Nothin’ll go wrong, don’t worry.”
“Guys lose their temper, guys take stupid chances,” Colley said.
“Only one guy in the store,” Jocko said, “and he won’t take no chances, don’t worry.”
“Or lose his temper or something, this heat,” Colley said.
“Only heat he’s gonna know is the gun I stick in his face,” Jocko said. “I’ll tell him up front he opens his mouth, his brains are on the wall.”
“Same as always,” Teddy said, and shrugged.
Colley looked at him. Teddy shrugged again. He was their driver, what the hell did he care if something happened inside the store? If something started in there, he’d throw her in gear and ride off into the sunset, the hell with the two dopes inside with guns in their hands. With heat like this, you never knew what was going to happen. When you got a guy on a cold winter day, he’d open the register without a peep. But on a day like today, when his underwear was creeping up his behind, or he maybe had an argument with a delivery man, who knew what might happen? When it was hot like this, you told him to open the register, he was liable to take a swing at you. So then you’d have to use the gun.
“Look,” Colley said, “have I ever backed off a job before?”
“No,” Jocko said. “What’s right is right.”
“I just got a thing about heat.”
“I can understand that,” Jocko said. “But there’s nothing to worry about here.”
“People act unpredictable when it’s hot,” Colley said. “I myself, I find myself getting irritated sitting here with you guys and trying to convince you to call this job off.”
“It ain’t hot in here,” Teddy said.
“It’s nice and cool in here,” Jocko said.
“To me it’s hot, and to me I’m getting irritated. This heat’s been building here in the city for the past five days. We’re gonna get a storm soon, I say we do the job after the storm. When everybody’s cooled off, then we go in there and show the pieces and the old man does just what we tell him to do without no fuss.”
“How you know when this heat’s gonna break?” Jocko asked.
“They said any day now.”
“Who’s they?”
“The guy on television. What the hell’s his name? The one used to do the weather for Con Ed.”
“I don’t know his name,” Jocko said.
“Him. He said the heat’ll break soon.”
“The one with the mustache?” Teddy said.
“Yeah, him.”
“We postpone the job, we have to wait another week,” Jocko said. “Cause that’s when there’s the biggest take in there. We have to wait till next Saturday night.”
“So what’s so bad about that?”
“Okay, suppose we postpone, okay? And it rains. And then by next Saturday it’s hot again. This is New York, this is August, it rains, it gets hot, it’s up and down all the time. Also, how do we know that old fart ain’t planning to go on vacation or something? We go back next Saturday, we find grilles up all over the place, the guy went to the mountains for a week. Here’s what I say, Colley...”
“Yeah, I know what you say.”
“I say you plan a job, then you go through with it for when it’s planned.”
“That’s right,” Teddy said.
“Otherwise, it’s amateur night in Dixie.”
“I’m saying you got to bend with the wind,” Colley said.
“There ain’t no wind,” Teddy said, and laughed. “That’s exactly your beef, ain’t it, Nicholas?”
“Lay off the Nicholas shit,” Colley said, and gave him a look that was supposed to be full of menace and threat. Teddy only shrugged again. They knew each other too long, that was it. The three of them had done twelve jobs together in the past eight months, that was a long time for guys to be together.
The funny thing was they hadn’t known each other from a hole in the wall before Christmas, when Colley met Jocko in a bar on Eighth Avenue. Jocko had his hand under this black hooker’s skirt. They struck up a conversation across the hooker. She was sitting in the middle, Jocko on one side, Colley on the other, they started talking across her about various cops they had known. The hooker had her legs spread on the stool there, Jocko was exploring under her skirt, and meanwhile telling Colley about the Texas Rangers and what sons of bitches they were. Colley’d never been to Texas in his life. He was born and raised in New York, he’d never been further west than New Jersey, went there to see the burlesque in Union City; that was when he was only seventeen, before the whole city opened up with skin flicks and body-rub joints and topless dancers and whatever the hell you wanted. If you couldn’t find what you wanted in New York City, then, man, you just weren’t looking. Jocko was telling him the Texas Rangers just enjoyed being mean sons of bitches. Not only to niggers. To white guys like you and me, Colley. Is that your name? Colley?
The black girl was looking at Jocko because he used the word nigger in her presence. He had his hand halfway to Yugoslavia, but that didn’t upset her. What did upset her was he said nigger. She kept looking at him. Jocko didn’t even know he’d said anything to upset her. He kept going on about the Texas Rangers. By that time the hooker was beginning to realize she didn’t have a true john here, all she had was a honky telling Texas Ranger stories and feeling her up freebies. So she got up off the stool and wandered over to where a live nine-to-fiver was sitting there nursing a beer, and she started pitching at him— Good riddance, Jocko said.
That’s when they got down to straight talking.
It turned out Jocko had been in it a long time, done his first robbery when he was eighteen, well, almost nineteen. That was in Waco, Texas, held up a supermarket down there, came away with close to a thousand in cash. He was Texan by birth, six feet two inches tall, weighing two hundred and twenty pounds, hair as red as fire, pale-blue eyes, freckles all over his face. He had a baby face, Jocko, but he was built like a gorilla and there was a mean streak running through him that showed in the slight curl of his lip and the cold, flat look in his eyes. Colley was a little scared of him; big men like that always scared him. He himself was five-ten, which wasn’t short, but he was built narrow and the idea that Jocko could pick him up and throw him against the wall if he wanted to... well, that scared him a little. He told Jocko he’d done a few things in his life, too; he didn’t want to tell him too much, he hardly knew the guy.
They sat there drinking, and before you knew it Jocko was sounding him about a job he’d been casing for a couple of weeks. Pawnshop on Lenox and a Hun’ Twelfth, up in nigger Harlem. Jocko had himself a wheel man, but he still needed a fall partner to go in there with him, keep the place pure while he was cleaning out the register. Colley said he might be interested, depended on who the driver was, and also on whether or not he could get himself a gun. He had to tell Jocko, then, that he’d only been out of jail a little more than a month, that he’d taken a fall for armed robbery four years ago, and just got out after doing three and a bit more. That was why he didn’t have a piece yet; he was on parole, he wasn’t organized yet. Well, Jocko said, what you need to do is meet some people who’ll help you get organized, that’s all.