into the cab, Kelp carrying the tool kit, and Dortmunder made one last check
before trotting around and swinging up into the cab on the right side. “Set,” he
said.
“I’m not gonna start slow,” Murch said. “We’re gonna have to jerk it loose
and then go like hell. So hold on.”
“Any time,” Kelp said.
“Now,” Murch said, threw it in first, and jumped on the accelerator with both
feet.
The cab lunged forward like a dog that had backed into a hot stove. There
was a grinding noise that none of them heard over the engine roar, and the bank
snapped its moorings-these being the water pipe in and the sewage pipe out of
the bathroom. As water spurted up from the broken city water pipe like Old
Faithful geyser, the bank slid away leftward over its concrete wall, like a name
card being slipped out of a slot in a door. Murch, not wanting to turn before the
bank’s rear wheels had cleared the concrete blocks, tore straight ahead across
the side street, began to spin the steering wheel only as his front tires thumped
up over the curb on the other side, and as Kelp and Dortmunder both yelled and
waved their arms he angled the cab leftward so it just missed the bakery
windows on the corner, drove catty-corner across the sidewalk at the
intersection, thumped down off the curb again on the other side, shot out across
the main street at a long angle, straightened out at last on the wrong side of the
street, and took off.
Behind them, the left rear wheel of the bank had just nicked the edge of the
concrete block wall, but aside from an extra jounce it caused no obvious
damage, though it did loosen a couple of the screws holding the rear wheels to
the bottom of the trailer. The bank followed the cab, thumping and bumping up
and down over curbs, missing the bakery windows by even less than the cab
because it was so much wider, and shuddered and rocked from side to side as it
swept on away down the street in the cab’s wake. An automatic cutoff valve
had already shut down the water from the main line into this spur, and the geyser
had stopped.
Murch had planned his route with the greatest care. He knew which
secondary streets were wide enough to allow the bank passage, which major
streets could be traveled for brief periods without the likelihood of running into
traffic. He made left turns and right turns with a minimum use of brakes or lower
gears, and behind him the bank rocked and reeled and occasionally took
corners on two wheels but never did go over. The greatest weight in the thing
was the safe, which was at the back, which gave it more stability the faster
Murch drove.
Kelp and Dortmunder and the tool kit, meanwhile, were all over each other.
Dortmunder surfaced at last to shout, “Are they on our tail?”
Murch gave a quick look to the outside mirror. “Nobody back there at all,”
he said, and took a left turn so hard it popped the glove-compartment door
open and a package of No-Doz dropped into Kelp’s lap. Kelp picked it up in
trembling fingers and said, “Never did I need you less.”
“Then slow down!” Dortmunder yelled.
“Nothing to worry about,” Murch said. His headlights showed a pair of cars
parked up ahead, opposite each other, both too far out from the curb, leaving a
space that was under the circumstances very small. “Everything under control,”
Murch said, jiggled the wheel as he went through, and simply amputated the
outside mirror from the car on the right.
“Uh,” said Kelp. He dropped the No-Doz on the floor and shut the glove
compartment.
Dortmunder looked past Kelp at Murch’s profile, saw how absorbed it was,
and understood there was no way right now to attract Murch’s attention without
actually setting up a roadblock ahead of him. And that might not do it, either. “I
trust you,” Dortmunder said, since he had no choice, and sat back in the corner
to brace himself and to watch the night thunder at their windshield.
They drove for twenty minutes, mostly heading north, sometimes heading east.
Generally speaking, the south shore of Long Island, which faces the Atlantic
Ocean, is less prestigious than the north shore, which faces Long Island Sound,
a mostly enclosed body of water protected by the island on one side and
Connecticut on the other. In taking the bank from the south-shore community it
had serviced so well, arid in heading north with it, Murch and Dortmunder and
Kelp were moving by gradual stages from smaller older houses on narrower
plots of land to larger newer houses on broader plots of land. Similarly,
westward, toward New York City, the houses were poorer and closer together,
but eastward they were richer and farther apart. In going both east and north,
Murch was giving this branch of the C&I Trust a literal kind of upward mobility.
They were also moving into an area where there was still undeveloped land
between the towns, rather than the undifferentiated sweep of suburb that
characterized the section where they’d started. After twenty minutes, they had
crossed a county line and were on a deserted bit of cracked and bumpy two-lane road, with a farmer’s field on the right and a stand of trees on the left. “This
is close enough,” Murch said, and began tapping the brake. “God damn it,” he
said.
Dortmunder sat up. “What’s the matter? Brakes no good?”
“Brakes are fine,” Murch said through clenched teeth, and tapped them some
more. “Goddam bank wants to jackknife,” he said.
Dortmunder and Kelp twisted around to look through the small rear window
at the bank. Every time Murch touched the brakes, the trailer began to slue
around, the rear of it moving leftward like a car in a skid on ice. Kelp said, “It
looks like it wants to pass us.”
“It does,” Murch said. He kept tapping, and very gradually they slowed, and
when they got below twenty miles an hour Murch could apply the brakes more
normally and bring them to a stop. “Son of a bitch,” he said. His hands were still
clawed around the wheel, and sweat was running down his cheeks from his
forehead.
Kelp said, “Were we really in trouble, Stan?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Murch said, breathing slowly but heavily. “I just kept
wishing Christopher was still a saint.”
“Let’s go take a look at things,” Dortmunder said. What he meant was that he
wanted to go stand on the ground for a minute.
So did the others. All three got out and wasted several seconds just stomping
their feet on the cracked pavement. Then Dortmunder took a revolver from his
jacket pocket and said, “Let’s see how it worked out.”
“Right,” Kelp said, and from his own pocket took a key ring containing a
dozen keys. Herman had assured him that one of those keys would definitely
open the bank door. “At least one,” he’d said. “Maybe even more than one.”
But Kelp had said, “One will do.”
So it did. It was the fifth key he tried, while Murch stood back a few feet with
a flashlight, and then the door swung outward. Kelp stayed behind it, because
they weren’t sure about the guards inside, whether the carbon-monoxide truck
exhaust had knocked them out or not. They had made careful calculations on
how much of the cubic-foot capacity the gas would fill after x minutes and x + y
minutes, and were certain they were well within safety limits. So Dortmunder
called, “Come out with your hands up.”
Kelp said, “The robbers aren’t supposed to say that to the cops. The cops
are supposed to say it to the robbers.”
Dortmunder ignored him. “Come out,” he called again. “Don’t make us drill
you.”
There was no response.
“Flashlight,” Dortmunder said quietly, like a doctor asking for a scalpel, and
Murch handed it to him. Dortmunder moved cautiously forward, pressed himself
against the wall of the trailer, and slowly looked around the edge of the door
frame. Both his hands were in front of himself, pointing the gun and the flashlight
at the same spot.
There was no one in sight. Furniture lay scattered all over the place, and the
floor was littered with credit-card applications, small change and playing cards.
Dortmunder waggled the flashlight around, continued to see no one, and said,
“That’s funny.”
Kelp said, “What’s funny?”
“There’s nobody there.”
“You mean we stole an empty bank?”
“The question is,” Dortmunder said, “did we steal an empty safe.”
“Oh oh,” Kelp said.
“I should have known,” Dortmunder said, “the first second I saw you. And if
not you, when I saw your nephew.”
“Let’s at least look it over,” Kelp said.
“Sure. Give me a boost.”
All three of them climbed up into the bank and began to look around, and it