rubber, Tucker looked out at the rolling sea and the endless sky, and he had to agree. 'It sure is,' he said.
They crabbed down the slopes to the beach and turned south through the soft yellow-white sand. In less than five minutes they came to a paved beach-access road. Above them now, overhanging the beach, were expensive glass, chrome, and redwood houses that glinted in the early-morning sunlight.
'We'll need a car,' Tucker said. He turned to Meyers. 'Think you can find one up there?'
'Sure.'
'Take your time.'
'Five minutes.'
'Take your time,' Tucker repeated. 'We don't want to blow it all now, not after what we've been through.'
Tucker sat down on the money sacks. He put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and he watched Meyers walk away up the curving access lane and out of sight around a hillock of sand and yellow beach grass.
Edgar put down his satchel and went out to the edge of the sea to splash water on his face. He was whistling again.
Twenty minutes later, at 6:45, Frank Meyers drove down to them in a new Jaguar 2+2, a sleek black machine that purred much more softly than did its namesake.
They put the sacks in the trunk. Edgar climbed into the back seat with his bag of tools, and Tucker sat in the front passenger's bucket next to Meyers.
'How do you like this baby?' Meyers asked, grinning and patting the wooden steering wheel.
'Did you have to take the flashiest thing you could find?' Tucker asked. 'We don't want to turn heads, you know. We just want to slip back into the city like three ordinary guys on their way to work.'
'I like it,' Bates said from the back seat.
'There were maybe half a dozen others I could have gotten,' Meyers said, 'but they weren't so convenient. There was a lot less risk for me with this baby. The engine was cold, but the keys were in the ignition.' He laughed. 'Didn't have to jump wires. This guy must have had a late night, come home stoned, and won't be up for hours yet. Look, we'll just be like three stinking rich ordinary guys on their way to work.'
'And in a way,' Edgar Bates said, 'that's what we are.'
Tucker smiled, relaxed, leaned back in the genuine leather upholstery. 'Except that we're not going to work-we're coming home from it.' He pulled his seat belt across and buckled it. 'Let's get out of here.'
Sitting in his squad car across the highway from Oceanview Plaza, Lieutenant Norman Kluger watched the sun come up. Inexorably, as the night gave way to warm morning light, Kluger's self-confidence gave way to anger, irritation, confusion, and finally despair. No one had come out of the mall. Had anyone been in there to begin with? He wished he could wind the sun back down across the sky, turn it half way around the world, and tackle this case again, from the beginning.
Well after sunrise, when the traffic began to pick up, he reluctantly decided to call it quits. He buckled his seat belt, started the engine, and drove away from there. All the way back to the station, he functioned under a veil of emotional narcosis.
He delivered the car to the division garage man and went inside the low stucco building to fill out his duty roster. His eyes felt grainy, his mouth dry and stale. All he wanted now was to get home and fall into bed.
At the dispatchers' table, there was considerable excitement. He ignored that and went to his own desk in the large main room, where he filled out a skeleton report and filed it. His first failure
As he was leaving, one of the off-duty officers who was in the crowd around the dispatchers stopped him. 'Hey, weren't you on that Oceanview robbery last night?'
Kluger winced. 'Yeah.' He yawned.
'What do you think of this?'
'Of what?' Kluger was suddenly alert.
'The day shift of Oceanview's security guard came on this morning, just a couple of minutes ago. They found the watchmen tied up again. Looks like the place was robbed twice last night.'
Kluger just stood there. He was looking at the other man, but he was seeing the police chief's chair in which he would never sit by the time he was forty years old.
They parked six blocks from the hotel in downtown Los Angeles, and Bates went to get his rented car to ferry them the last half mile. At the hotel they went to their rooms, showered and shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and checked out at half-hour intervals. Then Bates drove them out to Van Nuys where they took two rooms at the Carriage Inn, a motel where they could have complete privacy. Exhausted, they slept all afternoon.
At seven o'clock that evening Meyers and Bates came to Tucker's room with a banquet of take-out orders from Saul's, a first-class Jewish restaurant-delicatessen on Ventura. They ate, drank cold bottles of Coors, and talked about everything but the job they had worked on only that morning.
When they had finished supper and cleaned up the debris, Tucker opened the two waterproof yellow sacks and then the bank bags, and they separated the cash from the jewels. For an hour they counted money, then cross-checked one another's figures. The total take from Countryside Savings and Loan Company was $212,210, no change. After Tucker peeled off a thousand to cover the expense of the Skorpions, they each had $70,400. It looked very nice.
'What'll we do with the extra ten?' Meyers asked, pointing at the last bill left alone on the center of the bedspread.
'Leave it for the room maid,' Tucker said, placing it in the center of the blotter on the desk.
'Now what about the jewels?' Edgar asked, lifting two handfuls of them and letting them trickle out between his fingers. 'You're the one who knows the fence. You going to take these back to New York?'
'They'd make for a damned heavy suitcase,' Tucker said. 'Besides, certain models of airport metal detectors will pick up on diamonds.'
'What, then?'
'In the morning,' Tucker said, 'I'll get three or four one-pound cans of pipe tobacco. I'll empty the tobacco out, fill the tins with the stones, pack the tins in a box, and mail it all to myself.'
Meyers frowned. 'Is that safe?'
'I might insure it,' Tucker said, 'for a thousand bucks.'
They looked at him, open-mouthed, then caught on and laughed.
'If the post office loses them,' Meyers said, 'I'll expect my three hundred and thirty-three dollars.'
They drank a few more bottles of Coors, talked about other people in the business, and broke up shortly past midnight.
At the door of Tucker's room Meyers said, 'You leaving first thing tomorrow?'
'I've got reservations for the two o'clock flight,' Tucker said.
'I'll probably stay over a few days. Just through the weekend. I'll be at the same apartment when I come back to New York. At least I will be for a few weeks. When you get yours from the fence, you know where to reach me.'
'Okay,' Tucker said.
'It's been a pleasure.'
Tucker nodded.
'Maybe we'll do it again soon.'
'Maybe,' Tucker said, though he knew that he would never get involved in another job with Frank Meyers.
Early Friday evening, Tucker walked into his Park Avenue apartment, closed the door, and called for Elise. When he found that she was not home, he opened the front closet, stepped inside, and worked the combination dial of the wall safe. His Tucker wallet full of Tucker papers went into the safe, and his real wallet full of his real papers came out. He unlatched the smallest of the two suitcases, the one he had bought in Los Angeles, and he transferred the seventy thousand dollars to the small vault.
In the kitchen he found the accumulated mail from the last four days laid out for him on the table, and he looked through it. There were several bills, advertisements, a bookclub selection, magazines, nothing really important.
