"So you sell three cars, and now you"re going to tell me how to run the place?"
"I don"t care what you do with it," I said, and walked out of the office. I had to relax. At this rate I"d blow my top before noon. A Negro boy came in and stood around with his hands in his pockets looking at the cars the way they always do. You get the impression they"re waiting for some thing, but you don"t know what-maybe for prices to come down or cotton to go up.
Suppose I lost my head? I thought.
I went over and gave him sales talk you"d use on an oil man looking for Cadillacs for three of his girl friends. Or at least I think it was all right. He seemed to like it. I didn"t hear a word I was saying.
You can take care of everything except chance. Chance can kill you.
"How much the down payment?" he asked. That was all they ever wanted to know. You could sell Fords for eight thousand dollars if you"d let them go for five dollars down.
Somehow ten o"clock came and went. I walked over to the restaurant and had a cup of coffee. It was hard to sit still now, or stand still, or think straight about anything. At 11:45 Gulick went to get his lunch. Suppose he didn"t get back in time? Harshaw would leave anyway. It would look funny if I ran off and left the place completely unattended. I prowled around the lot, trying not to look at my watch. At 12:20 he came back and Harshaw left. Then it was 12:25.1 stood behind a car, looking at the watch, waiting. It was 12:30.
And nothing happened. There was no noise, no siren, nothing. The streets were as quiet as any weekday noon. It was 12:35, 12:40. It hadn"t gone off. Somebody had found it. The whole thing had failed. And I couldn"t try it again, if somebody had found that one. Was I glad, now that the pressure was off? I didn"t know.
Then it came. The siren tore its way up through the noonday hush, growing louder and higher, screaming. The firehouse was only two blocks away, and in a minute or so the fire engine came lumbering past the lot, headed down Main, with the cars beginning to fall in behind it. Gulick and I ran to the sidewalk, both of us looking wildly around for the smoke.
"It"s down there, in front of the bank somewhere!" he said, pointing. People afoot were running now, and cars were beginning to jam up down at the other end of the street.
"Stick around, and I"ll go take a look," I said. Before he could answer I jumped in the car and shot out into the street. Most of the traffic and the people afoot were at least a block ahead of me. People were pouring out of stores and the restaurant, yelling at each other and running. And in the midst of all the uproar I discovered I was cold as ice and clear-headed, without any panic at all. A block before I got to the bank I turned left and pulled the car to the curb near the mouth of the alley in the side street. Two or three other cars were parked along here, so it didn"t look conspicuous. Two people went past, running, not even seeing me.
The side street was empty now. A few people still ran by on Main, but they looked straight ahead, their eyes on the smoke. I reached into the back seat. The blanket and piece of line were carefully folded up inside the coat to the seersucker suit I had put on this morning. I picked it all up, put the coat over my arm, and went down the alley, running fast. When I got to the end of it I slowed a little. A man came running past, but didn"t see me, and went on up past the side door of the bank. There was n.o.body else in sight except the stragglers going by on Main. I went up alongside the bank building to the side door, stopped, and looked in. This was where it had to be right.
It was just the way I"d figured it. The only person in the place was the old man, and he was standing in the front door with his back to me, watching the black column of smoke boiling into the sky two blocks away. I eased inside the door, turned, and started back to the washroom, watching him with quick glances over my shoulder. The rubber-soled shoes I had on made no sound at all, and he was intent on the uproar down the street.
I made it, and slipped inside the little room, praying the door didn"t squeak. I pushed it carefully until it was nearly closed, and I was out of sight. I took a deep breath. There was a half part.i.tion, presumably with a toilet behind it, and on this side were the usual wash-basin and mirror. The mirror didn"t face the door. I"d already checked on that.
I put the plug in the wash-basin and turned on the water, then stepped back against the wall where I would be behind the door as he pushed it open. I hung the coat on a hook, held the blanket in my hands, and waited, hardly breathing now. It was deathly quiet. The basin filled, then started spilling over on to the floor. Suppose he was hard of hearing and didn"t notice it? I cursed myself. I was doing too much supposing. A minute dragged by, and then another. Water was beginning to run out into the bank now. I turned my head and looked out the crack at the back of the door. I could see the front of the bank, only a narrow strip between here and there. He was nowhere in sight.
Then suddenly I heard the faint scuff of a shoe, just outside. He had already pa.s.sed the area I was watching, was almost to the door. I wheeled around just as he stepped inside the washroom, pushing the door back towards me. He was clear of it and starting to bend over the wash-basin to turn the water off.
I hit the door with my elbow and slammed it shut at the same time I threw the blanket over him. He straightened, tried to turn, and screamed. There was no chance he had seen me. He fought the blanket wildly, trying to get his arms up. I pulled them down, took two turns around him with the line, and tied it off, then pulled his feet from under him and set him on the floor and threw two half-hitches around his ankles. He was still yelling, the sound m.u.f.fled inside the blanket.
I had the knife out. I pulled the blanket away from his lower face and quickly cut a hole in it around his mouth. Grabbing a paper towel out of the container on the wall, I rolled it into a tight ball and the next time he opened his mouth to scream I shoved it inside, hard, and plastered a strip of adhesive tape across it. I straightened, and wiped the sweat off my face. It had taken a month.
He could breathe all right, but he couldn"t yell. It was a lot of trouble, but if I"d tried slugging him I might have killed him. He was too old.
I opened the door a crack and peered out. It was clear. No one was in sight anywhere. I grabbed the coat and stepped out and closed the door. I was in plain sight of the street now. It was like being naked in a dream. I made it to the gate in the railing, and then I was in the vault.
Maybe I"d expected it to be full of currency stacked everywhere on the floor like cordwood. It threw me for a second. I didn"t see anything except ledgers, papers, filing cabinets, and drawers. I started yanking the drawers open. Some of them were locked. I got one open at last that was full of currency in bundles, fastened with paper bands. I didn"t look at the denominations. Time was running; I could feel it going past me like the tide. I jerked the undershirt out of my coat pocket; it had been tied off with a cord to form a bag, and I started cramming in the bundles.
I came out of the vault and ran up in back of the tellers" cages, bent over and hidden from the street by the ground gla.s.s screen and the counter. In another thirty seconds I"d be out of here. It was beginning to get me now. I cleaned out the first one, and moved to the other. It was just a few seconds now. Then I stopped dead still and listened, feeling the pulse jump in my throat. There was somebody on the sidewalk outside.
I dropped, squatting below the counter, trying to listen above the roaring of blood in my ears. The footsteps were going on past. Would whoever it was look inside and wonder why no one was in sight? Then I froze. I could feel the icy wind blowing right up my spine. The shuffling footsteps hadn"t gone past. They had come in. Somebody was inside the bank, right on the other side of the counter.
I tried to stop the sound of my breathing. And then, in an agonizing flashback of memory, I thought of the thing I had done that day when I hadn"t seen anybody here. I had looked down inside the cages.
He hadn"t said anything. Why didn"t something happen? I fought desperately to hold myself still, not give way to the awful compulsion to break and run for it. Then he moved again. And now I began to get it. There was another sound beside the sc.r.a.pe of his shoes. It was the tap, tap, tap of a cane.
"Mister Julian? You theah, Mr. Julian? Wheahbouts the fiah?"
I could feel myself weaken all over and the sigh coming up out of my lungs like a balloon collapsing. I throttled it and tried to hold my breath as I came slowly to my feet.
It was awful. It could break your nerve. We were facing each other across the counter and I was looking right into the dark gla.s.ses three feet in front of my eyes. I was robbing a bank with a witness standing there so near he could reach out and touch me, a witness who could send me to the penitentiary for practically the rest of my life except for the fact that he was blind.
"That you, Mister Julian?" he asked.
How did he know somebody was here? Did he know it? I didn"t dare move. And I couldn"t speak. That was the way he identified people, by their voices. And I couldn"t stand there forever. He was reaching out an arm, groping for me. I leaned back, not moving my feet, and the fingers pa.s.sed an inch away from my tie.
"Ain"t like you, Mister Julian, makin" fun of ol" Mort." I had to get out. I couldn"t stand it. I moved one foot back, picking it up and lowering it carefully and utterly without sound, crepe rubber against tile. Then I moved the other one. I repeated it. I was out of the cage. I held the bag out from my legs so I wouldn"t brush against it. I was past the other cage now, in the railed-off area where the desk was.
I looked at him, and that was when I began to go to pieces. It wasn"t human. He had moved. He had walked along the front of the counter and now he had stopped beside the railing, and he was tracking me. He couldn"t see me, and no pair of ears on earth could have detected any sound, but he was following me as unerringly as radar. I moved, and the gaunt black face and sightless eyes moved with me. "You got no business in heah!" he said. I ran.
8
The street was clear, and there was no one in the alley. I got the trunk of the car open, threw in the bag, tossed the coat on the back seat, and made a U turn, throwing gravel, and shot across Main Street. This way I"d come in behind the Taylor building. They"d have the other street blocked by now, and I had to get into the thick of it without anyone"s seeing me drive up. I slammed ahead two blocks and turned left.
Smoke was pouring into the sky. I hit a jam of abandoned cars, pulled over to the curb, and got out. The crowds were all ahead of me in the street and beginning to push on to the vacant lots around the rear of the building. The fire engine was around in front, in the middle of the worse jam. I circled, keeping to the rear of the crowd. n.o.body paid any attention to me. The whole second floor of the building was roaring now, throwing flames into the air. I shoved my way into the knot of people pressed around the fire engine. They had a hose run out, playing a stream on the roof on the other side, and now they were trying to get one on this side. Everybody was yelling and getting in the way. I saw the chance I was looking for and latched on to the hose, up near the nozzle, as they fought to get it strung out through the crowd.
They gave us the pressure before we got set. The hose stiffened, bucked, and threw the man who was carrying the nozzle. The man next in line went for it, got his hands on it, but he was too light and it slapped him off. Two more lunged for it. I piled into them.
"Look out!" I yelled. "Let me at the d.a.m.ned thing!"
I collided with one of the men, knocked him off his feet, and then fell over him on to the hose. I was soaked, drowned, covered with churned-up mud. It was perfect. It was just what I wanted. I got both hands on the nozzle, dug my feet in, and got up. I held it, and started going forward. I could hear the crowd yell.
We had two streams on the fire now, but we might as well have been squirting a burning oil well with water pistols. The whole thing was going up like a Roman candle. A big section of the roof caved in and sparks and embers went exploding upwards in the smoke. The crowd was pushing in across the vacant lot all around us. I swung my head and through all the confusion I could see the deputy sheriff and two more men running along the line trying to force them back. I jerked my head at the two men behind me.
"Slide up here and take this!" I yelled. They clamped their hands on it and I let go, ducked back, and made for the deputy. I got him by the arm and yelled in his ear.
"That wall"s coming down any minute! We got to get "em out of here."
"What you think I"m trying to do?" he roared back.
"Look! Go tell "em to cut the water on this hose. Then get as many men on it as you can. Pick it up. We"ll shove "em back."
He got what I meant, and ran towards the fire engine. I turned and plowed my way back to the nozzle. Just as I got my hands on it the hose went limp. I started running, dragging it, down alongside the wall and out into the vacant lot at the rear, as far as it would reach. Men were falling in behind me now, picking it up. I started swinging it out and away, like hauling a fish seine. The deputy was yelling and motioning backwards with his arms. They began to back up, and every time they gave a step we dragged the hose against them. In a couple of minutes we had the whole crowd shoved back across the street.
The wall didn"t fall outwards after all. It sagged a little and went on burning. But I had accomplished the thing I wanted. That deputy, and at least a half dozen others, would remember me all right. My clothes were a mess; I looked as if I"d been fighting fire for a week. There wasn"t much to do now except to keep it from spreading to the houses along the street. We put out fires in the weeds and sprayed water on some of the nearer shacks. And all the time I was waiting. It would break any minute now.
Then I heard a siren, pitched low and merely growling. Another highway patrol car was inching its way through the crowd jammed in the street. The driver got out and waved his arm towards the deputy sheriff. The deputy went over, while people pressed around them. Then I saw some of them break away and start running towards Main.
I shoved into the knot of men. The word was traveling faster than another fire. "What"s up?" I yelled at a man squeezing his way out.
"Bunch of men held up the bank! While everybody was over here at the fire they stuck it up and got away with ten thousand dollars!"
"Did they catch "em?" I tried to grab his arm.
"Not yet. They got away in a car." He was gone past me.
By the time I got back to the lot it had grown to four men with sub-machine guns and thirty thousand dollars, and the car was a black sedan. I didn"t pay much attention to it. This was the kind of rumor you"d expect; the men who were working from facts, over there at the bank, wouldn"t be saying what they"d found out. It was just a matter of time till they got the hunch the fire was rigged and start at it from that angle. As far as I could see it had come off without a hitch; I hadn"t left a track.
The letdown began to catch up with me. I told them I was going over to the room to change clothes. What I really needed was a drink. As soon as I got out of the shower I dug the bottle out of the suitcase, poured a stiff slug in a gla.s.s, and collapsed on the side of the bed. It had been rough. I had lost all track of time. I took a jolt of the whisky, felt it explode inside me, and wondered how much money there was out there in the trunk of the car. I couldn"t even guess.
I went back to the lot. The whole town was in an uproar. It was the biggest thing since V-J Day. The Sheriff and two more deputies had just arrived from the county seat twenty miles away. Highways were being blockaded in all adjoining counties. The story was already spreading across town that the fire had been a decoy. The next rumor was that two experts from the insurance company were already on their way up from Houston. Well, they"d have a hard time proving it, and if they did they wouldn"t be much better off except that it"d point a little more to somebody here in town.
It was hard on the nerves, thinking of that money still in the trunk of the car, but the only thing I could do was ride it out until after dark. I went up and mixed with the crowd gawking round the bank. Julian was all right, they said. He hadn"t been hurt, just a little shaken up and scared. He was inside there now, with the police. But he couldn"t give any description of the man, or men; all he"d seen was a blanket flopping down over his head. He hadn"t heard any voices, though; which might mean there"d been only one man. Old Mort, the Negro, was a sensation. He"d been so close to one of the robbers he could hear him breathing. He was that close, he said, measuring with his hands. He could of reached out and touched him.
I sweated out the afternoon some way, and after it was dark I eased out of town, driving south on the highway. n.o.body stopped me, or even seemed to notice. Before I turned off on to the dirt road I looked back for lights. There was n.o.body behind me. The moon wasn"t up yet, and it was partly overcast and very dark. Just before I got to the abandoned farm up on the sandhill among the pines, I pulled off and cut my lights. I wasn"t being followed. When my eyes were accustomed to the darkness I pulled back into the road and went on. At the gate I turned sharply left and went on around behind the old sagging barn and stopped the car where it would be out of sight of anyone going past out in front.
Fighting the impatience, I waited a few minutes to be sure. Nuts, I thought; there"s n.o.body within miles. I got out, opened the trunk, and carried the bag inside the barn before I switched on the flashlight. My hands were beginning to tremble a little and I was conscious of a wild excitement. I went inside the corn crib and closed the door. I didn"t notice the heat now, or the sweat on my face. I upended the bag and let the bundles and loose bills cascade on to the floor. It was wonderful.
I didn"t try to count all of it. Most of the bundles were fifties, twenties, and tens. Without any of the loose bills or the ones it came to $12,300. I whistled softly. A wild impatience began to get hold of me. I wanted to get going, to put it back in the car and run.
Run where? I thought.
The world wouldn"t hold me, and I knew it. It wouldn"t take them an hour to figure it out if I disappeared now. They could add too. I couldn"t leave. The only way I could beat them was the one I"d known from the first, and that was to keep my head down and wait it out. After a month or so, when the heat began to die down... I gathered the bag up and went out the door of the crib.
Picking a spot near the rear wall of the crib, inside one of the stalls, I sc.r.a.ped the old manure out of the way with a piece of shingle, and started to dig. The ground was sand, and easy to gouge up with the shingle. I was careful to place all the loose dirt in one pile. When I was down about eighteen inches, I rolled the bag of money into as tight a ball as I could make it, and shoved it into the hole. Then, just before I started scooping the dirt back in, I thought of something. I lifted it out and began looking over the undershirt. There was a laundry mark on it, all right. Taking out my knife, I sawed out the piece of cloth and stuck a match to it, then ground the ashes into the bottom of the hole. If anybody did happen to stumble on to it I"d lose the money, but they"d never tie it to me.
I put it back in the hole and began filling it, tamping the dirt down with my fist until it was as firm as the rest of the ground. The little which was left over I spread evenly around, then raked the dried manure and old straw back over the whole area.
Snapping off the light, I went back to the door. The old house was just a faintly darker shadow in the night, off there to the left, and as I looked towards it I thought for the hundredth time of that other day and what Sutton had said to her and the way she detested and feared him. There was something insane about it. You could keep trying for years to add it up and you"d never come out with an answer that made sense. She wouldn"t even know Sutton. The h.e.l.l she didn"t-!
I shook them off angrily. What business was it of mine? But, as always, when I gathered her up and threw her out of my mind there was a little of her left over, the way there is in a room a girl has just walked through.
I went out and got in the car, but instead of heading right back to town I drove on down to the river and went swimming by the bridge. When I did go back I stopped in at the restaurant to get a cup of coffee. The waitress looked at my head and smiled.
"What"s the matter?" I asked. "Did I forget to put on my hair?"
She grinned. "No. But it looks like you left it out in the rain."
"I been swimming," I said. "They caught the bank robbers yet?"
"No. But they got enough cops around here to catch Dillinger."
"You don"t even remember Dillinger," I said. "You were just a kid in a three-cornered Bikini."
She laughed, tickled about it. I went back to the rooming house, took another drink, and lay down on the bed, feeling the tension go out of me. I was in. The money was buried, and I hadn"t left a track behind me.
The next day was Sat.u.r.day, but there wasn"t much business transacted. They might as well have closed the whole town except that there wouldn"t have been any places for people to congregate and rehash the robbery. The place was full of cops. The white-haired Sheriff from the county seat was in town with two of his deputies besides the one who lived here, and there were some more with plain-clothes cop written all over them, probably from the detective agency or insurance company. Everybody was wild to get at the remains of the fire and start pawing through it for evidence, but a lot of it was still smoldering and too hot. Special deputies had been sworn in to keep people away from the place. I had a hunch the Sheriff and the detectives had already junked the out-of-town gang idea and were playing it cagey, going through the motions of looking for the getaway car while they waited for somebody to stick his head up or make a slip. That much money would be burning somebody"s pockets and he"d have to start throwing it around. All right, I thought; go ahead. I know about that one too.
All I had to do was keep playing it down the middle. I stuck around the lot and talked robbery with anybody who drifted in. And then Harshaw pulled a funny one on me. Around noon he called me into the office. He was chewing a cold cigar and oiling a big salt-water reel on his desk.
"Sit down," he said. "I want to talk to you."
I perched on the side of a desk, wondering what was coming. "What"s up?" I asked, as casually as I could.
"I want you to take charge here for a while. My wife and I are going to Galveston for a week."
"What"s the matter with Gulick?" I asked.
"There"s nothing the matter with Gulick," he said impatiently. "Except that he"s a little slow and he won"t take responsibility. You can use your own judgment about trades. Do you want it, or don"t you?"
"O.K. with me," I said. For once I couldn"t start an argument.
"You can run an ad if you want to," he said. "The paper comes out early in the week."
"What"ll I use for money? My own?"
He sighed and shook his head. "You"re a tough nut to get along with, Madox. Why in h.e.l.l would I ask you to pay for the ad out of your pocket? They can send the bill to Miss Harper. Or tell her to give it to you out of petty cash."
"O.K.," I said. At least he was taking that over-ripe bundle of s.e.x with him this time.
He finished cleaning the reel and put it in a flannel bag with a drawstring. "Well, if you can"t think of anything else to b.i.t.c.h about, I"ll leave it with you," he said, starting out the door.
"What are you going after?" I asked. "Tarpon?"
"No. Hammerhead sharks. They got some big ones around the jetties down there."
After I came back from lunch I went out on the lot and picked out about a half-dozen cars that would make good leaders in an ad, made some notes, and started writing it up. At first I was just doing it to kill time, but the thing began to grow on me as I went along and after the second or third draft I had some pretty good stuff whipped into shape, slicing the down payments as low as they would go and playing up all the accessories. I took it up the street to the newspaper office, paid for it and got a receipt, intending to go by the loan office and collect from Gloria Harper.
I had started back to the office before I remembered it was Sat.u.r.day and they closed at noon. Well, I could collect on Monday; it didn"t matter. But I was conscious of a vague disappointment, and knew the money was only part of it; what I"d really wanted was an excuse to go in and talk to her.
I was angling across the street towards the lot when I happened to glance around towards the loan office and saw her through the window. She was sitting at a desk behind a pile of paper work. I turned abruptly and started back, and just as I did I noticed that Gulick had company on the lot. Two of the deputy sheriffs were talking to him.
Well, it wasn"t anything. They were talking to everybody in town. There was nothing unusual about it. But still I wished I hadn"t turned right there in the middle of the street; it might look as if I had turned back to avoid them. But there wasn"t anything I could do about it now. If I kept switching back and forth in the middle of the street I would attract attention.
The door was open and there was a big electric fan blowing across the office. She nodded as I came in, but the smile itself was a little forced and there was something very tired about her face. I wondered why she was working overtime.
She got up and came over to the counter with tall unhurried grace.
"It was terrible about the bank, wasn"t it?" she said. "And the fire."
"Yes," I said. I wasn"t even thinking about the bank. And then I remembered what I had come in for. "Harshaw said to take it out of petty cash," I said, shoving the receipt across the counter and explaining what it was for.
She wrote out a slip and got the money out of the safe. "Thanks," I said, putting it into my wallet. "Why don"t you knock off? You look tired."
"I will pretty soon."