Mike Dunn was older than the others, and had actually qualified as a schoolteacher. He got unqualified in a hurry when he was caught in bed with one of his students. It was a long ways from pedophilia — he was only twenty-six himself at the time, and the girl was almost sixteen and almost as experienced sexually as he was — but that was the end of his teaching career. He drifted some, and the Walkers used him as a lookout in a drugstore break-in, and found out they liked working with him. He had a good mind, and he wound up doing a lot of the planning. When he wasn’t working he was pretty much a loner, living in a rented house on the edge of town, and having affairs with unavailable women — generally the wives or daughters of other men.
The Walkers and their associates had a lot of different ways to make money, together or separately. George and Alan always had some money on the street, loans to people whose only collateral was fear. Louis Creamer did their collection work, and provided security at the card and dice games Eddie O’Day ran. George Walker owned a bar and grill, and sold more booze there than he bought from the wholesalers; he bought from bootleggers and hijacked the occasional truck to make up the difference. We knew a lot of what they were doing, but knowing and making a case aren’t necessarily the same thing. We arrested all of them at one time or another, for one thing or another, but we could never make anything stick. That’s not all that unusual, you know. They say crime doesn’t pay, but they’re wrong. Of course it pays. If it didn’t pay, the pros would do something else.
And the Walkers were pros. They weren’t getting rich, but they were making what you could call a decent living, but for the fact that there was nothing decent about it. They always had food on the table and money under the mattress (if not in the bank), and they didn’t have to work too hard or too often. That was what they’d had in mind when they chose a life of crime. So they stayed with it, and why not? It suited them fine. They weren’t respectable, but neither was their father, or his father before him. The hell with being respectable. They were doing okay.
The years went by and they kept on doing what they were doing, and doing well at it. Jack Walker drank himself to death, and after the funeral George put his arm around his brother and said, “Well, the old bastard’s in the ground. He wasn’t much good, but he wasn’t so bad, you know?”
“When I was a kid,” Alan said, “I wanted to kill him.”
“Oh, so did I,” George said. “Many’s the time I thought about it. But, you know, you grow older and you get over it.” And they were indeed growing older, settling into a reasonably comfortable middle age. George was thicker around the middle, while Alan’s hair was showing a little gray. They both liked a drink, but it didn’t have the hold on them it had had on their father and grandfather. It settled George down, fueled Alan, and didn’t seem to do either of them any harm.
And this wouldn’t be much of a story, except for the fact that one day they set out to steal some money, and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
It was a robbery, and the details have largely faded from memory, but I don’t suppose they’re terribly important. The tip came from an employee of the targeted firm, whose wife was the sister of a woman Mike Dunn was sleeping with; for a cut of the proceeds, he’d provide details of when to hit the place, along with the security codes and keys that would get them in. Their expectations were considerable. Mike Dunn, who brought in the deal, thought they ought to walk off with a minimum of a hundred thousand dollars. Their tipster was in for a ten percent share, and they’d split the residue in five equal shares, as they always did on jobs of this nature. “Even splits,” George Walker had said early on. “You hear about different ways of doing it, something off the top for the guy who brings it in, so much extra for whoever bankrolls the operation. All that does is make it complicated, and give everybody a reason to come up with a resentment. The minute you’re getting a dollar more than me, I’m pissed off. And the funny thing is you’re pissed off, too, because whatever you’re getting isn’t enough. Make the splits even and nobody’s got cause to complain. You put out more than I do on the one job, well, it evens out later on, when I put out more’n you do. Meantime, every dollar comes in, each one of us gets twenty cents of it.” So they stood to bring in eighteen thousand dollars apiece for a few hours work, which, inflation notwithstanding, was a healthy cut above minimum wage, and better than anybody was paying in the fields and factories. Was it a fortune? No. Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice? Hardly that. But all five of the principals would agree that it was a good night’s work.
The job was planned and rehearsed, the schedule fine-tuned. When push came to shove, the pushing and shoving went like clockwork. Everything happened just as it was supposed to, and our five masked heroes wound up in a room with five of the firm’s employees, one of them the inside man, the brother-in-law of Mike Dunn’s paramour. And it strikes me that we need a name for him, although we won’t need it for long. But let’s call him Alfie. No need for a last name. Just Alfie will do fine.
Like the others, Alfie was tied up tight, a piece of duct tape across his mouth. Mike Dunn had given him a wink when he tied him, and made sure his bonds weren’t tight enough to hurt. He sat there and watched as the five men hauled sacks of money out of the vault.
It was Eddie O’Day who found the bearer bonds.
By then they already knew that it was going to be a much bigger payday than they’d anticipated. A hundred thousand? The cash looked as though it would come to at least three and maybe four or five times that. Half a million? A hundred thousand apiece?
The bearer bonds, all by themselves, totaled two million dollars. They were like cash, but better than cash because, relatively speaking, they didn’t weigh anything or take up any space. Pieces of paper, two hundred of them, each worth ten thousand dollars. And they weren’t registered to an owner, and were as anonymous as a crumpled dollar bill.
In every man’s mind, the numbers changed. The night was going to be worth two and a half million dollars, or half a million apiece. Why, Alfie’s share as an informant would come to a quarter of a million dollars all by itself, which was not bad compensation for letting yourself be tied up and gagged for a few hours.
Of course, there was another way of looking at it. Alfie was taking fifty thousand dollars from each of them. He was costing them, right off the top, almost three times as much money as they’d expected to net in the first place.
The little son of a bitch... Alan Walker went over to Alfie and hunkered down next to him. “You did good,” he said. “There’s lots more money than anybody thought, plus all of these bonds.” Alfie struggled with his bonds, and his eyes rolled wildly. Alan asked him if something was the matter, and Mike Dunn came over and took the tape from Alfie’s mouth.
“Them,” Alfie said.
“Them?”
He rolled his eyes toward his fellow employees. “They’ll think I’m involved,” he said.
“Well, hell, Alfie,” Eddie O’Day said, “you are involved, aren’tcha? You’re in for what, ten percent?” Alfie just stared.
“Listen,” George Walker told him, “don’t worry about those guys. What are they gonna say?”