Then Murdock was leaping down from the back of the truck, emptying his big automatic into the guard. Giordano felt hands lifting him, carrying him to the truck. Blood welled from his thigh. He put the palm of his hand over the wound and pressed directly on it. His brain reeled, he couldn’t concentrate.
“The girl,” he managed. “Knows me.”
Patricia was still standing stiffly in place. The braver ones were pushing their way out of the bank, staring at her, at the dead guard. Murdock raised his pistol.
“Don’t shoot her. Knows me. Helped me. Bring her.”
Murdock hesitated only for an instant. Then he darted across the sidewalk and grabbed the girl by the arm. If she had offered the slightest resistance, he would have killed her with a rabbit punch, but she let him haul her to the truck and help her in back with Giordano and the sacks of cash. Then Murdock, too, was up in the truck and they were pulling away from the curb, the tires squealing.
Giordano went blank, lost some of it.
Then he was conscious of her hand on his forehead, her voice in his ear. “You’ll be all right, Jordan. You’ll be all right”
Giordano opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“Don’t try to talk.”
His eyes went blurry, then came into focus again. He looked at her, looked over her shoulder at Murdock, who seemed faintly amused. He opened his mouth again.
“Don’t try to talk, Jordan, darling.”
“We fucked it up,” he said, and passed out.
Twenty-five
Dehn’s car was stashed on Front Street, and Simmons drove to it first. The hassle on the sidewalk had knocked everything slightly out of kilter. According to plan, Dehn and Giordano were to be dropped in the open after stripping themselves of guns and gloves. Then they would find their own way back to their stashed cars and take separate routes to Tarrytown. Now Giordano had a bullet in his leg and there was a girl along to complicate things, and the shooting made the brown truck hotter than a stove.
Simmons said, “We make it up as we go along. Frank, grab that rag, wipe the outside of the door. Take it right down to the underpaint.”
He checked the rearview. There was nobody on them, and the only sirens he could hear were blocks away.
“We drop the bread in your trunk, Frank.”
“Check.”
“And Lou, I figure.”
“And the girl?”
“No other way.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Makes your car hot as three stoves. That’s your own car, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, damn it.”
“Your own plates on it?”
“The whole bit.”
“I wouldn’t use my own car on a job—”
“Well, I didn’t figure to be driving money or tellers or people with bullets in them, Howard.”
“True. You better not run any red lights.”
“Very funny.”
“And count on shooting any cop who stops you.”
“That certainly is wonderful.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Howard? That girl is gonna be a problem. Who is she? The teller Lou was banging?”
“Right. I thought Ben would shoot her.”
“Should of.”
“Never should have started banging her in the first place. Same as Eddie never should have gone inside. You know what we did? We got too fucking cute with this one. A nice easy touch and we had to go and make it complicated.”
“You said the other day you didn’t like it.”
“But I didn’t know why. Now I know. It was too cute.”
“Uh-huh. Say, you want to take Ben, too?”
“In the car?”
“Yeah. Want to?”
“The way we tore it all, I guess I might as well.”
The transfer went smoothly. In a matter of seconds Dehn and Murdock transferred the money sacks to the trunk of Dehn’s car. There was barely room beside the golf clubs. Murdock strapped the still-unconscious Giordano in the front passenger seat, then got in back with the girl. Simmons hopped down and finished cleaning the tempera paints off both the doors. He was back behind the wheel by the time Dehn had the car in gear.
Simmons waited while the rest of them drove off. The roadblocks would be up by now, he knew, but they wouldn’t make much difference. The area was just too dense a web of suburban sprawl with overlapping jurisdictions, infinite roads, and alternate access routes, and it would take several hours to seal an area effectively. The colonel had mapped out the money route, a safe passage which would be followed by whoever wound up carrying the boodle. Simmons had planned to go back that way himself, but now he had to find another way.
Which meant getting another car.
Murdock’s, he remembered, was in the Rolling Acres development at Alder and Summerwood. He drove there and saw the Dodge wagon in place at the curb. The house was vacant, the lot overgrown, and this inspired Simmons to park in the driveway. The garage door was unlocked. He opened it, parked the truck inside, and closed it. He quickly shucked off the overalls, balled them up, dropped them into an empty trash can, and emerged from the garage in suit and tie.
Across the street a woman stood in the doorway staring. Simmons looked at her for a moment in puzzlement before he got the message. He smothered a laugh, then walked quickly across the lawn. He had to give the FOR SALE sign a couple of kicks to loosen it. He pulled it from the ground, carried it around back, and left it with the trash.
When he came back, the woman was gone. On the phone already, he decided. But not to call the police. Right now she’d be calling her husband, and then the neighbors, and after that she’d be on the phone to her friendly neighborhood realtor. With any luck at all, half the houses on the block would be offered for sale within the next two days.
And of course the people in them would sell them to Negroes. They wouldn’t think twice, since a Negro had already bought one of the houses.
Simmons got into the Dodge. He connected the jumper wire and the engine caught immediately.
He started to laugh.
All he had really wanted to do was get rid of a hot truck. And what he had done was integrate the goddamned neighborhood.
Patricia Novak huddled in the back seat. She hugged her arms against her chest and tried to keep from shivering. It was warm in the car, but she couldn’t seem to stop shivering.
At first she had tried talking. She didn’t remember what she had said, something about Jordan, but before she had her sentence half finished, the huge hillbilly beside her set his gun on his knee and smiled broadly, and told her that what she ought to do was sit very still and kindly keep her mouth shut tight or he would have no choice but to kill her deader than hell.
She had not said a word since then.
But she couldn’t shut out the thinking. It seemed indisputable that Jordan Lewis, whom she had abruptly realized she was in love with, was not actually an advertising salesman for a chain of country-and-western radio stations after all.
He was, it seemed, a bank robber.
A knot formed in her throat. All those casual questions about her work — for the first time she realized why he had asked them. And then, on the heels of that realization, it came to her why he had gotten interested in her in the first place. It was not, she knew, a case of his getting interested in robbing the bank because he had met her. It worked the other way around.
He only asked her out because she worked at the bank.
He only slept with her to learn what she could tell him.
She felt her face reddening and lowered her eyes, staring dully at the floorboards. What a fool she was! Obviously his name wasn’t even Jordan. And how he must have been laughing at her behind her back!
But.
But, she thought, he had kept the hillbilly from killing her. The hillbilly had pointed that huge pistol at her, and Jordan had said something that made him change his mind. And of course it would have been easier for Jordan to have let the man kill her. Alive, she was a problem to them, a loose end.