—one post office to another. We can’t mail it all at one place. Some goes by boat, some by plane. All wrapped differently. No return address, see? Just in care of Mrs. Franz Swartzer, then we can’t possibly lose any of it. Not possibly.”

  “Suppose they want to check a package at a post office?”

  ‘They won’t. I already tried one the other day. They just ask what’s in it. Some’ll be labeled books and stamped. Others, we’ll take to the window.”

  I pounded my head with my fist. “Is there anything I forgot?

  Anything?”

  “Honey,” she said. “You’ve been so thorough, it drives me crazy, just thinking of it.”

  “Got to be. Hasn’t taken long, but it’s taken a lot out of me.

  I’ll tell you.”

  “We’ll put it all back. Your little Spanish bitch will fix you up.”

  Well, I didn’t even smile. I took a long side road cut-off midway between Riverport and Bridgedale, drove into the country. I dragged Bliss out of the car, into some deep brush, and loosened the chains on his feet. I locked them so he could take about a two and a half foot stride. Then I took the bandages off his eyes, and talked loudly, next to his ear.

  “Now,” I said. “You’re free. You’re not far from a road. Somehow, you’ll get out of here, I know. You’ll never see me again, Bliss. And I’ll be glad of that. Good luck. Maybe next time you’ll stay the hell out of people’s business.”

  He grunted and moaned and lurched and tried to take a step and fell down. I stood by to see if he could get on his feet all right, without help. He could. He stood up.

  “So long, Bliss.”

  I hurried back through the brush to the car and we drove off. He couldn’t see the car.

  “Makes me shiver to think of him there all alone,” she said.

  “Yeah, well that’s how it’s got to be.”

  I didn’t want to think about him. I was glad to get rid of him. But I knew the world must appear one hell of a lousy place from where he stood.

  Out there in the middle of nowhere.

  We parked behind the bank by the rear door, down a way from the door, turned the lights off and sat there a long moment. I saw no one on the street. Finally, we got out and walked around the block.

  We came by the curb, near the front door.

  “He’s there,” she whispered. “I see him.”

  “Ready?”

  “Yes, Jim—look. You can see the vault. It’s open.”

  We walked to the bank door. There wasn’t a soul nearby. The Happytime liquor Store was booming with business. I got the key out.

  “Listen,” I said quickly. “The minute we’re through the door, you give me the gun. I’ll lock the door and calm George down. Got it straight? And keep out of line of the front door, and in the shadows. Got that?”

  “You told me a million times.”

  The key went in as if the lock were butter.

  The door opened like a heavy breath.

  We slid inside.

  George Anderson was at his desk behind a low railing. He didn’t even look up. The door was locked, wasn’t it?

  I closed the door gently and locked it with my key from the inside. I was proud of that key, right then.

  I took the gun as she handed it to me, and he looked up, just as she spoke.

  “George, honey? I’m back.”

  We moved fast past a gate and behind some desks. He stood up like a shot and stared. It was her hair, probably.

  Then he came to.

  “Felice.”

  He saw the gun and his hand moved and I knew he reached for the alarm that would mean the end.

  “You do,” I said. “And you’re dead. Right there.” He turned to very hard stone.

  Twenty-Three…

  I didn’t take my eyes off him.

  “Felice,” I said. “Get to the back door. Get the suitcases, all four. And that kit of mine.”

  “All right.”

  “And be careful.”

  She went, skimming down through the shadows toward the far rear of the bank building. I heard a light snick of metal.

  George Anderson still hadn’t moved. I felt like a rock, myself.

  “Now, you, George. Go around by the wall, over to your right. Slow. Past those desks, in back of the cages, and over to the cash vault.”

  “No.”

  “You want to die?”

  “You can’t get away with this.”

  “Be more original. Sure. Only we can.”

  “You’ve got Doll. My Doll.”

  I was close to him now. The gun in my hand looked crazy. It made me feel crazy. I must have looked as crazy as the gun, because he stared at me as if I were from Mars.

  “Move, Anderson.”

  A whisper came from back there.

  “I got two in.”

  George Anderson put both hands over his face and gave a sob. It was a hell of a sound. He had on a pair of black trousers and a white shirt, and he’d been working. The jacket to his suit hung over the chair by the desk. He had his collar and tie unfastened. The tie was blue. His shirtsleeves were rolled to above his wrists and he still held a pen in his hand, and when he put his hands on his face the pen-point left ink on his forehead.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You think you’re brave enough?” I suddenly knew for certain he wasn’t. “All you have to do is press the alarm button. Then you’ll be dead.

  We won’t get the money, will we? No. Which is more important? You, or the bank. Big decision. Make it.”

  He took his hands down. He couldn’t do it. It gave me a funny feeling, let me tell you.

  “Now, move.”

  He began to move. He went over by the right wall, and down behind the cages in the dark shadows. I heard the door snick down there. Then she tiptoed over behind me.

  “I got them.”

  “Good.”

  “You bitch!” George said. “You awful bitch.” He said it like he was crying. “You terrible bitch! You bitch!”

  He kept moving, and said this, walking, without turning.

  She laughed softly. That’s what Jim’s always called me. I love it Maybe if you’d called me that, long ago, all this wouldn’t’ve happened.”

  “Oh, you bitch.”

  “I guess it would’ve happened, anyway,” she said. “On you it sounds different.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “It’s so easy. You see, now?”

  “Yeah.”

  My voice, even the whisper, echoed slightly in the enormous, vaulted bank. It was kind of like a cathedral.

  We reached the cash vault. It looked very large, and it was round in front, and it gleamed. The door stood almost halfway open.

  “Inside,” I said to George. “In the vault?” He went inside.

  “You bring the suitcases,” I said to her. “And the tool kit.”

  She went away and came back with two suitcases and the tool kit and set them down. She straightened and looked at George. Then she went away again, on tip-toe.

  Where we stood, we couldn’t be seen from the front door. I went into the vault with George, and we stood there looking at each other. At the back of the vault about fifteen feet from the door, were the rows of tellers’ vaults. The cash vault itself was about ten feet wide by eight and a half feet high.

  “Nobody ever gets away, robbing a bank,” he said.

  “Except for now.”

  He looked as if he’d been shot in the face. He looked old and desperate, only not desperate enough. I kept thinking the one thing. He had to die.

  He would look at the gun. Then at me. Then at the gun.

  “All the time,” he said. “You two, planning this.”

  “Yeah.”

  She returned. “Yes,” she whispered, looking into the door of the vault. “And we’ve been screwing like wildcats, too!” He didn’t even look at her.

  “Come on. Bring in the tool kit and the suitcases, hurry up.”

  She did that. I handed her the gun, walked past George. “Get over against that wall,” I said.

  He did.

  “And quit stewing,” I said. “The money’s insured. That’s all you’re worrying about isn’t it?”

  “I’ve worked here all my life.”

  She laughed quietly. I checked the tellers’ vaults. She’d been partly right. Even I could see they shouldn’t be too difficult to open.

  “Make it fast, Jim,” she said. “Fast as you can. He’s supposed to be out of here by nine.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Didn’t want to worry you. They always check, around nine.”

  I got to work, fast I took the sledge, and knocked off a combination. It snapped right off.

  She laughed again, and that’s when she began to lay into him. I didn’t want to hear any of it, the things she said. But I couldn’t plug my ears. I worked hard and fast.

  “You’re stupid, George,” she said. “I’ve been planning this for over a year. I had to find the right person, somebody who would really help me… somebody who cared about me—me— me, see? Not just a damned bank.”

  “Doll.”

  “Doll, my back.” “Go to hell,” he said.

  She laughed. “You’re rich, honey. Really, you are.” Then she began to whale away at him in earnest She called him everything in the book, and then some.

  I got the first safe open. She stopped then.

  It was like a box, a tray, and it was loaded. I got a suitcase, and began packing the currency in it

  “Don’t look at it, now,” I said. “Save it for later.”

  “You’re right, darling.”

  My heart socked like a trip-hammer, and perspiration dripped off me onto the money. I tried not to think. I just worked like a robot. Every now and then I’d look at her, standing there, but nothing meant anything. It all sort of blanked out, and there was just that money and the haze I worked in.

  “How much you got in here tonight?” she asked him.

  He didn’t answer. He was scheming.

  Then he said, “You going to leave me in the vault all night?” “Yes, hon. That’s right,” she said.

  I had another safe open. Time was running short. You had to really use that jimmy, then the heavier bar. But they weren’t so much to open. You needed weight, was all.

  Money.

  I worked and worked in this haze. I was knocked out. I

  didn’t think. You never saw so much money. I filled one suitcase level, then another, and then another. Three of them. And there was still more.

  All the time, she kept cursing him. She seemed to really enjoy it. And he stood there. Then he began to tremble, then shake, and a tear ran down his cheek. I didn’t want to look at him, but I did. Fat tears welled and trickled down his cheeks. He would lick his lips, licking the tears. His shoulders shook, just faintly.

  “Look at him,” Felice said. “Just look at my great big husband.”

  “Cut it out,” I said. I was getting sick of it

  “Where you going?” George said, between soundless sobs.

  “What are you going to do?”

  She told him everything. And there went my last hope. It was tough. Like a swift right to the gut. Because I realized then that I’d still hoped we wouldn’t have to kill him. But she told him everything. “And then we go and we pick up the money, see? In Switzerland—a million dollars.”

  “Doll. Doll.”

  I was done. There were three big suitcases loaded to the brim, and so heavy they’d be a mess, getting them out The fourth was about half full.

  “How much you think there is, Jim?” she said.

  George said, “There’s well over a million dollars, there.” “We’ve got to move,” I said. “And fast It’s getting late.” It was quiet for a long moment.

  “I’m going to do this, Jim,” she said. “Do you mind, awfully?” “No,”

  I didn’t look at him.

  “Do what?” he said.

  “Kill you,” she said.

  He screamed. I turned. She shot him. The gun went blat!… blat!… blat! with the home-made silencer, and three red splotches appeared on George Anderson’s shirt front. He said, “Hell,” clearly, and fell down dead.

  She was a picture. That tight black dress, her legs apart, her hips pivoted forward a bit and her breasts stuck out, and that Buck Rogers gun.

  The gun hadn’t made much noise, but I wanted to get out of there, fast.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Wait. Jim.”

  “No. We’ve got to go. Now We’ve got everything.”

  “I haven’t quite got everything, Jim.”

  I looked at her and she began to laugh. I’d never seen her face look that way, except for the time she beat in Sy Krueger’s head with the hammer.

  “Don’t you see, Jim?”

  Her mouth was a slash of red, and you could see the nipples on her breasts were hard under the thin cloth of the black dress.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t see.”

  “Well, I don’t need you, either, Jim. Isn’t that the way it goes?”

  I looked at the gun.

  “You’ve been swell,” she said. “I love the way you rip my clothes off. But I have to have variety, too—that’s the part I didn’t tell you about. Jack Solengren, he used to rip them off for me. Lots of guys ripped them off and raped me good. But it has to be different guys, all the time—see? That’s right, Jim. Now, I can buy them—I can buy the best. You planned this wonderfully, and you make a swell rape job, but—” She shrugged.

  “Felice.”

  “Good-by, Jim.”

  I went at her. She shot me. The gun moved in her hand. I stopped in mid-stride. I saw the flashes and heard the sounds and saw her face—the eyes like jet, the red lips drawn back across the teeth….

  Twenty-Four…

  Silence.

  Darkness.

  Not even memory for a long time.

  The absolute dead silence of nowhere.

  Then I remembered and finished a scream I’d begun a long time before.

  “Felice!”

  She didn’t answer.

  How could she. I was alone, inside a bank vault.

  There was pain all through me. I was lost in the complete darkness of the vault. I lay without moving, and tried hard to remember. I knew I’d been shot three times. I could recall every impact. One of those shots had been in the head. The last. The other two had hit me in the body. I was one mass of pain. My guts were on fire.

  I felt my head.

  It was my left ear.

  It was gone. All that was left was a sticky mass of torn flesh. I knew that’s what had knocked me out.

  But I wasn’t dead. And somehow I knew I wouldn’t die.

  I lay there. The air was bad.

  I began to remember in snatches. A strange thing. It didn’t come all at once. Just Felice, standing there, and that look on her face. Then the gun moving in her hand.

  She’d shot me. She thought she’d killed me.

  She was gone.

  I tried to move, painfully. Then I lay still again. I felt of myself carefully, down my sides. My ear was gone, but that wasn’t bleeding badly. I felt weak, dizzy and blind. Probably lost a lot of blood.

  Maybe I would die.

  Where was the blood coming from? The pain was everywhere.

  Absolute darkness was something I’d never experienced.

  I was bleeding from the left side. A slug had torn through the flesh. Blood slowly seeped out. Also, my left thigh. The bullet apparently had passed straight through the inside of the thigh, without striking anything too vulnerable. I was alive, wasn’t I?

  I lay back and laughed. I quit that, fast.

  The pain in my side doubled me up, gasping.

  I had to be careful. I’d lost a lot of blood. It seemed to be all over the floor in a sticky puddle, no matter where I felt.

  I lay back and tried to think.

  Then I remembered George Anderson. The slug had done something to my head. I knew that now. In the darkness, the utter stillness, you weren’t at first conscious of things. You had to dwell on them.

  I rolled over and came to my knees and struck something. It dug sharply into my head and pain spiked down through me. I collapsed and lay there.

  The edge of a door to one of the tellers’ safes.

  I got on my knees, and moved in the direction where I thought George Anderson was.

  I was wrong. I hit steel.

  I turned and crawled the other way, and found George Anderson. He was stiffening already. I obviously had been in the vault a long time, out cold. He was very dead and I

  panted, one hand resting in coagulated blood.

  It all came back in a monstrous rush of light.

  I fell on the cold, sticky floor of the vault and couldn’t stop laughing. It hurt like hell. But I couldn’t stop. I felt drunk. It was the violent black laughter of release. It vomited up out of me, and I laughed and wept, and bled, and maybe even went insane there for a time.

  Because… all that planning. All those endless details upon details—the hours and days and endless days of checking off item after item, erasing every flaw, searching for and finding every little loophole—the tireless planning—knocking myself out, going straight down the line like a horse with blinders… it had all paid off., every last drop of energy… right to the very last.

  And here I was.

  Felice had the money.

  I roared with it. It was like laughing in a whale’s belly. There was no echo. Just the black coughing laughter surging around my head in the darkness. Maybe I was mad. Maybe I was blind.

  I could see her. The gun moving in her hand as she shot George. And then me.

  And then—then what?

  Jesus. Dragging each one of those goddamned suitcases weighing nearly as much as she did, out of the bank to the car. One at a time. Out the back door, across the sidewalk, and into the car.

  They were heavy. She would have had to drag them.

  I could see her in my mind’s eye, trying to get them into the car. All four of them. Boosting them with her knee.

  Maybe some poor son of a bitch had come along, and she’d asked him to help her.

  I’d been good for a rape job. For ripping her clothes off. I was fine for planning the robbery of a bank.

 

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