the cowardice that weighed those factors and opted for cooperation. He was calling it cowardice now, in his mind, but what it was was intelligence.
Webb took the carbine from him, and Parker prodded him to move on down the aisle into the bus. His uniform was stripped off him, and Devers put it on, took the carbine from Webb, and got out of the bus.
“Thanks, buddy,” Webb called, and shut the bus door, and started away.
Devers began to march up and down in front of the building. He looked bulkier than the other AP because, although he was about the other man’s size, he was wearing another complete set of clothing under the borrowed uniform, complete to a snub-nosed .32 revolver in the hip pocket of the trousers. But to anyone passing by, or to either of the APs inside the building upstairs who might decide to look out a window, he would pass.
Webb drove straight for a block and a half, turned right for one block, turned right again, and parked. Meanwhile the AP had been put down in the aisle in his underwear and tied and gagged.
Stockton, wearing his hood and carrying his Sten gun, got out of the bus and moved away in the darkness like a long thin shadow. Three strides from the bus he was out of sight, these side streets being lit only by overflow from the lights at the intersections with the main avenues.
There was a second guard on duty behind the building, and this was who Stockton had gone after.
He brought him back three minutes later, a young scared boy, his face almost as white as his helmet. Stockton held the Sten gun in his right hand, butt braced against his hip bone, with the boy’s carbine hanging loose in his left hand.
They tied and gagged number two, left him in the bus with the first one, and they all moved off except Webb, who was to stay with the bus, move it if it seemed necessary and keep an eye on the two APs.
Parker led the way through the darkness. The sky was clear and full of stars, but they were only three days from the new moon, so that only a thin curved sliver, like a fingernail clipping in light, showed to mark where the moon would be a few nights from now.
They came at the finance office building from the rear, moved around it on the side between it and the other building on that block, and at the front corner waited, the others strung behind Parker, who watched Devers marching back and forth out there with the same stoop-shouldered fatalistic tread as the boy he was replacing.
Parker stepped around the corner, stood against the front of the building. He showed there as a dark man- shaped shadow against the stucco wall. His hood was on, the only pale thing about him were the rubber gloves on his hands. He moved these back and forth in front of himself, fingers splayed, until Devers saw the motion. Then he stopped marching, yawned, stretched, and walked over to the building entrance in the middle of the long front wall. He stood there and lit a cigarette, the signal that it was all right to come on.
Parker had Devers’ bootleg keys in his hand when he reached the door. He unlocked it and stepped through, stood just inside holding the door, and felt the other three slide in behind him. Devers, who had said nothing and who had looked ashen-faced beneath the helmet, field-stripped his cigarette and went back out to march up and down on the sidewalk some more.
Devers had given them complete maps of the building. Parker and the others moved without hesitation through the darkness to the stairs and up, their shoes silent on the metal stairs.
The door to the left at the head of the stairs had glass in the upper half. Through it, Parker could see two overhead globes lit, both down at the far end of the finance office; the one inside Major Creighton’s office and the first one on the right on this side of the Major’s office. The two APs on guard here were sitting at a desk under this second light, playing cards. They were about twenty-five feet from the door where Parker was standing, and the area between was lined with two rows of desks up to a chest-high counter which stretched across the room about six feet in from the door. To the left of the door was a bench for people who had to wait.
Parker used another key, opened the door with a faint click timed to happen when one of the APs was shuffling the cards, and, as down there under the light a new gin rummy hand was dealt out, Parker and the other three slid through the slightly open door and moved at a half-crouch to the counter. They straightened slowly and stood spread out there, Kengle and Stockton at the ends with the Sten guns resting on the countertop, Parker and Fusco in the middle with their revolvers in their hands. Ahead of them, the APs continued to be absorbed in their game.
A cord was hanging down over Parker’s head. He reached up with his free hand and pulled it, and the globe up there came on, flooding their end of the room with light.
The APs looked over, startled.
“Freeze,” Parker said.
One of them would have, but the other was a cowboy. He made a lunge for where his carbine was leaning against another desk, and Kengle’s Sten gun rattled briefly. The AP half-turned in midair, slid over the desk, and crumpled like used cardboard on the other side.
The shots shook the other one, who had frozen the way Parker told him to. He abruptly dropped out of sight behind the desk.
Parker said, “Don’t be stupid, son. You don’t want to die.” Nothing happened.
Parker nodded at Stockton, who was nearest the flap in the counter. He pushed it up, left it up, and went on through. Moving fast and silent, he went down along the rear wall, where he wouldn’t be seen by anybody passing in the street, and when he got to where the second AP had disappeared he waved to the others that it was all right.
When they walked down to him, they saw that AP number two hadn’t ducked, he’d fainted. AP number one wasn’t dead, but his breathing was shallow and his color bad. He had one hit in the left side, just above the waist, and one that had gone in his left shoulder and out his back above the shoulder blade. Fusco used some of the boy’s clothing to make simple bandages to stop the bleeding; they weren’t in a hurry for a murder rap. The law might think it looks as hard for every kind of felon, but it doesn’t. Just as the cop killer is tracked with more savagery and singlemindedness than is the ordinary killer, the ordinary killer in his turn is hunted more fiercely than is the robber.
Stockton used the rope and handkerchief he’d brought to tie AP number two, and even though AP number one looked to be out for it for the rest of the night, Fusco did the same for him. Meantime Parker helped Kengle out of the small knapsack he’d put on just before leaving the bus.
