the night. The Food King outside Belleville, Illinois, was no exception.
Deliveries to supermarkets after closing hour on Friday are unusual but not unheard of, and so the tractor-trailor that drove into the Food King parking lot at two minutes to eleven P.M. on Friday the eleventh of April seemed perfectly ordinary and legitimate. The cab of the truck was green, the body aluminum. There was no firm name on either.
The truck drove around to the rear of the store, and the driver backed it up to the loading platform. He switched off the motor, picked up a clipboard, got out of the cab, and walked down the length of the truck to the loading platform. He wore a zippered jacket, a peaked cap, and a yellow pencil stub behind one ear; these three things, and the clipboard, made his face invisible.
There were wooden steps at the side of the loading platform. The driver went up them and pushed the button next to the corrugated metal garage-type door. He waited two minutes, and was about to ring again when the door began to slide upward. It slid about five feet and stopped. A clerk in a white shirt and a knee-length white apron, a prematurely balding man of about thirty-five, very slender, ducked and came out to the platform. Over the door a pipe came out with a conical metal reflector at the end and a fairly dim light bulb in it; the only source of light other than the truck lights, which the driver had left on.
The clerk said, 'What is it?'
'Delivery.'
'They didn't tell me about it.' He was probably more than a clerk, he was probably the assistant manager. He sounded peeved that he hadn't been told about the delivery.
The driver shrugged and said, 'Don't ask me, Mac. I just drive where they tell me to drive.' He tapped the clipboard with a knuckle.
'Nobody ever gets anything straight around here. Hold on.'
The clerk went back inside, ducking under the partly opened door, and a few seconds later the door rose the rest of the way. Inside was a high-ceilinged room with a cement floor, about the size of a one-car garage. Trash barrels lined the righthand wall. Conveyor-belt sections were stacked on the lefthand wall. There were two doors out of the room, one in the righthand corner of the far wall and one in the lefthand wall, down at the other end. The clerk was standing in the door to the left, calling, 'Tommy! Red!' He called the names twice more, then turned and came back to the loading platform. 'They'll be right here.'
'I got all night,' the driver said. He acted bored.
'Anything refrigerated on there?'
'No, not this truck.'
Two more clerks came through the lefthand door and hurried out to the loading platform. Both were around twenty years old. The tall, thin one with red hair would probably be Red, which would make the middleweight with hornrim glasses and black hair Tommy.
Tommy said, 'What've we got?'
'Nothing refrigerated,' the assistant manager-type said. 'We'll just unload it straight into the trash room here and leave it till we're done out front. Then we'll put it away in the stockroom.' He turned to the driver, who was mostly behind them all, leaning against the side of the doorway. 'Do you want to open it for us?'
'It isn't locked.'
'I got it,' Tommy said, and reached for the rear doors of the truck.
8
'Don't make a move,' Grofield said. Hooded, holding the machine gun, he stepped out of the back of the truck on to the loading platform and took a quick step to the left. Beyond the three pale stunned faces, he saw Hughes hurry into the building and on down to stand by the left-hand door, where he put the clipboard down on the floor and pulled his hood and pistol out of his jacket.
It was the older assistant manager-type who recovered first. Slowly lifting his hands, he said, 'We won't cause you any trouble. We don't have guns.'
'I should think not,' Grofield said. 'Go on into the truck, you and you.' Pointing the gun barrel at the two younger clerks.
They both hung back. The older clerk said, 'Do what they tell you to do. You can't fight guns.'
Barnes was standing in the truck doorway, holding the other machine gun. 'That's sensible,' he said, and his heavy voice seemed full of menace. 'None of us wants to kill anybody. All we're here for is money. You people cooperate, you'll live happily ever after.'
'We'll cooperate,' the older clerk said. 'Go on, Tommy. Red? Go on.'
The younger ones still hesitated, not because they had it in mind to fight back, but because they were afraid. And why not? They were facing three men wearing black hoods over their faces, two carrying machine guns. And Tebelman, deeper in the truck, was standing there with clothesline in his hands.
Grofield said, 'You're just getting a long smoke break, that's all. Nothing to worry about. Go on in.'
Red moved first, and a second later Tommy followed. While Barnes watched over them, Tebelman would have them remove their aprons and then he'd tie their hands behind them, sit them down, tie their ankles, and blindfold them. There was no need to gag them; a man who can't see won't shout.
Meantime, Grofield said to the older clerk, 'What's your name?'
'Harris.' He was frightened, but trying to deal with the situation as though it were matter-of-fact, as though the best way to handle it was to be quiet and calm and methodically obedient. Which was true.
'I mean your first name,' Grofield said. He'd learned this a few years ago, from somebody else in the business – when you have people to control during a job, find out their first names and then call them by name
