“Shep,” Rigley said, emotionlessly, “there is a man at my house holding a gun to my wife’s head. There’s a man with a gun outside, waiting. And, of course, there’s this man. They want the money in the vault. They came to my house this morning and brought me here; one of them stayed behind to hold my wife hostage. I will be leaving with them. I’m a hostage, too.”
“Oh, my God,” Jackson said, touching his cheek.
“Take it easy, Shep,” Rigley said. “I’ve been robbed before. The bank has. My experience is that if we follow instructions, no harm’ll come to anyone. They want the money, and that’s all. But if we don’t follow their instructions, my wife will be killed, and quite possibly so will I.”
Nolan was pleased with Rigley’s words, but not with his performance. There was a mechanical quality to it, a coldness, like a bad actor reading off cue cards. Fortunately, Jackson seemed too unnerved to notice.
“At eight-thirty, Shep, you’ll open and conduct business as usual. This man is going to take all of the money in the vault safe, but will leave the tellers’ money alone. So you should be able to carry on as if all was normal. Sometime around midmorning, they intend to release my wife and me, they say, and you’ll be contacted. I will contact you. And at that time you can call the authorities. But until then any effort to do otherwise, I have been assured, will result in my wife’s death and my own. So please keep everyone away from the alarms. Now. I think the time lock should be open and you can give this man what he’s after.”
Jackson nodded nervously and said, “Uh, people will be coming pretty soon, George. How should we... I... handle that?”
“I’m going up to stand by the front door now, to explain the situation to anyone who might come in early. This will be over, though, before very many, if anyone, shows up. So it’s going to be up to you to gather everyone in the back conference room and explain what is happening.”
Jackson nodded again and walked gingerly toward the vault. He walked inside the vault and crouched to open the safe, then turned to Nolan and said, “All right, it’s open,” And Nolan held out the laundry bag to him, making him come for it, not entering the vault itself where Jackson would have him in a confined area that might lend itself to idiotic heroism.
It took less than three minutes to empty the safe, to make the laundry bag bulge with the packets of money.
Jackson pulled the bag by its neck, out of the vault, and turned it over to Nolan. Nolan slung it over his shoulder, Santa-style.
Rigley, who was standing up front, by the side lobby door, saw that Nolan and Jackson were done, and rejoined them. He had a blank look on his face. It disturbed Nolan somehow that Rigley had taken this in such easy stride, that Rigley’s tic under the comer of his right eye hadn’t been here today.
Nolan motioned with his gun for Jackson to lead them through the back room that led to the bolted back door. The room was lined with filing cabinets and had a Xerox machine and a counter for a coffee pot and a table; a coin- wrapping machine and a couple of other machines Nolan didn’t recognize were grouped around the massive metal back door, which was bolted three times. Bag over his shoulder, gun trained on Jackson, Nolan peered out the magnifying peephole in the door and saw Jon sitting behind the wheel of the red van. No one else was in the parking lot. The alley was empty too.
Nolan motioned to Jackson to unbolt the door.
Jackson did.
Rigley said, “If you haven’t heard from me by eleven, you can call the police.” Rigley turned his blank face to Nolan and asked, “Is that right?”
Nolan nodded.
Jackson said, “If I haven’t heard anything by eleven, call the police. Otherwise business as usual.”
Rigley nodded and said, “Don’t let me down, Shep. It’s not just me, it’s...”
And here was the damnedest thing: Rigley’s voice cracked, as if there was some genuine emotion going on behind that blank mask.
“... It’s Cora’s life too.”
And Rigley turned to the massive door and opened it
Jackson, who seemed pretty calm by now, said to Nolan, “You... you don’t say much, do you? You’re not your everyday Santa Claus, are you?”
Nolan tapped Jackson’s shoulder with the gun, in a not unfriendly way, and said, “It’s better to give than receive,” and went out.
They’d been inside seven minutes.
15
Rigley, feeling as though he were moving through a strange but amazingly real-seeming dream, crawled inside the Toys for Tikes van. The laundry bag of money was tossed in after him. The doors, slammed shut. It was dark inside the van; Rigley sat and looked at the rear doors and saw nothing but darkness. His back was to the kid, Jon, who was getting the engine going, and he heard the door slam as Nolan (who Rigley knew as Logan) got in on the rider’s side. And then the van was moving. Backing out, into the alley.
Nolan said, “Cops over at the cafe, like Rigley said they’d be.”
They ate breakfast there every morning.
Jon said, “You can see their backs if you look through the window there. Sitting at the counter, see? Never even looked over here once.”
“Well let’s not wait till they do. Go.”
And they were driving down the alley, and Rigley bounced in the darkness, wondering if dying was like this, darkness and an empty feeling — as if you were starving to death but felt no hunger. Next to Rigley, the bag of money bounced too.
At the end of the alley, on the right, was a filling station, behind which was a self-service car wash, four stalls, two of which you could enter from the alley. Rigley felt the van swing into one of the stalls, and the van wasn’t yet fully stopped when Nolan was out and pulling down the garage-type door on the stall.
It was a totally private cubicle. Though the filling station adjacent was open, there were no attendants at the car wash — strictly self-serve. It was simply a garagelike stall you drove into, a gray cement cubicle where you deposited fifty cents for five minutes’ use of a long-nosed gun affair attached to a hose, which shot a steaming-hot spray of soap and water; to switch from soapy water to rinse, you just squeezed the trigger again.
The van doors opened.
Nolan was still in the Santa Claus suit, but the whiskers were in his hand now. He said to Rigley, “Shake it.”
Rigley got out.
Nolan joined Jon inside the van, where they began getting out of the Santa Claus suits, under which they wore street clothes. Rigley pushed the doors shut, but not all the way, leaving them slightly ajar so Nolan and Jon could move if they had to. Rigley got out two quarters.
He deposited the coins in the slot and squeezed the trigger on the long-barreled rifle, which immediately spurted hot, soapy water onto the van.
The red van began turning white. The “TOYS FOR TIKES” lettering dissolved. The red color streamed away, melting off the van under the blast of the water rifle, finally being swallowed noisily by the drain beneath the vehicle. It was an easy job. Only the roof was hard.
It seemed absurd to be standing here, hosing down the van, down the block from the bank they had just robbed — his bank. And as the air turned cloudy with steam in the cubicle, Rigley felt more and more that this was a dream, that none of it was happening.
He squeezed the trigger on the water rifle and began the rinse. Red gurgled down the drain, leaving whiteness behind.
This morning, forty-five minutes before Nolan and Jon had come by to pick him up, he had gone into his wife’s room. She was sleeping. Her hair was in curlers; her face was pale, her mouth open. She was snoring, quietly. She did not look pretty. But she didn’t look ugly. She was just Cora, sleeping, snoring, in curlers, in a cream-color nightgown with the covers down around her waist and the plumpness of her bosom reminding him of better times. There was an empty bottle of Scotch on her dresser to remind him of the current state of their marriage.