“I wouldn’t,” O’Hara said. “If it came to that — and I say if it came to that — you know Caliato would handle it. That sort of thing doesn’t bother him, he’s done it before.”
“I don’t like it,” Dunstan said, stubbornly. “I don’t want to be in on it.”
O’Hara gave him a quick look, then glared out at the road again. “You want to come down sick? Call in, tell them you’re throwing up, I have to take you home.”
Dunstan frowned. “I don’t know what to do,” he said.
“Go home.”
“I’d still know about it. Joe, maybe what we ought to do is call in and tell the truth. We can say he circled back, we just saw him going into the park now.”
“What good does that do us?”
“Maybe there’s a reward. If there’s a lot of money, then there probably is a reward.”
O’Hara grimaced, facing straight ahead. “I can see Caliato standing still for that,” he said. “Do we split this great reward with him? ‘Here, Caliato, here’s twenty bucks for your trouble, thanks for watching the pigeon while we drove around the countryside.’” He shook his head. “Sometimes, Paul, you don’t make much sense.”
Dunstan didn’t have anything else to say, so he just sat there and chewed on a knuckle and watched the road unreel in front of the windshield. The siren kept howling, but you got used to that pretty soon, you no longer really noticed it. After running with the siren for a while, sometimes you’d turn it off and all of a sudden the air would be humming, you’d feel almost dizzy, as though now there was a noise and before there’d been silence.
What was he going to do? He knew he could follow O’Hara’s suggestion, he could claim sickness, nobody would question it, he had a good attendance record. He could call in now, O’Hara would drop him off at home, and he’d be out of it, from there on, it wouldn’t concern him at all.
But it would. He’d be home there all right, but he’d know about it. By his very silence he’d be a part of it. If something went wrong, now or at sometime in the future, and they caught up with O’Hara for his part in it, they’d have Paul Dunstan too, they’d snap him up in the same net, and his silence alone would convict him. That he had known where the robber was, that he had known what O’Hara and the others were going to do, and that he had not communicated that information to his superiors. That’s all it would need. If the thing went wrong somehow, having been at home wouldn’t help Dunstan at all.
He wished it hadn’t ever happened, that’s what he wished, because no matter which way he looked, it was still a mess. If he went home now he’d not only still be culpable, he wouldn’t share in the take, which meant he’d be running the risk without any chance at the profit, which was in some ways the worst option open to him. Besides the fact that O’Hara would never let him forget it. O’Hara and Caliato and Caliato’s friends would all be convinced from now on that Paul Dunstan was a coward, they’d treat him with indifference and contempt, O’Hara would probably make life impossible for him.
But to go there meant taking part in murder. Murder One. He knew that, the knowledge scraped over his nerves like steel wool, he couldn’t ignore it or turn his back on it like O’Hara. Whatever their main motivation, whatever their main goal, what they were all planning to do today was murder a fellow human being. Shoot him down while he was defenseless, and hide behind the protection of their uniforms to do it.
It was a bind, a rotten stinking bind, and no matter which way he turned he saw no way out of it. He couldn’t blow the whistle, O’Hara would really make life hell on him then. Not to mention Caliato. He had no idea what Caliato might do to him if he spoiled their chance at this robber. That wasn’t one of his options at all.
He only had the two options. He could either be sick and go home to avoid being actually present for it, thus eliminating his share of the money but keeping his share of the blame, or he could go along, thus actually being involved in the murder but also being involved in the split.
He sat there and thought about things for about five minutes, until O’Hara finally slowed the patrol car and switched off the siren, saying, “That’s far enough. We just lost him.” He glanced at Dunstan. “You want to call in sick?”
Dunstan reluctantly shook his head. “I’m in it,” he said. “I guess I have to stay in it.”
“Good man,” O’Hara said, and Dunstan had the strange feeling O’Hara was relieved, as though he’d been troubled at the thought of going on with it without Dunstan. The impression had to be wrong, but for a few seconds Dunstan was baffled by it, as though a door had suddenly opened in an invisible wall of the world, giving him a quick glimpse of an entirely different world on the other side. Different colors, different shapes, different everything. The impression faded almost immediately, like a ghost on a television screen, and left Dunstan only vaguely uneasy. He assumed he felt that way because of the decision he’d just made.
O’Hara pulled the patrol car off the road and came to a stop. He called in, announcing their position and saying they’d lost the bandit in his second car, he must have turned off somewhere along the way. They were told to hold on there a minute, and during the wait O’Hara told Dunstan, “You can’t say for sure how this thing is going to work. Maybe there’ll be a nice simple way to handle it without anybody getting hurt.”
“How?” Dunstan asked.
“How do I know?” O’Hara was impatient and irritable. “How do I know till we get there and we’re actually in the situation? It’s possible, that’s all, it’s just possible things will work out. You don’t always have to take if for granted the worst is going to happen.”
The dispatcher came back on and told them to go join a roadblock being set up over on Western Avenue. Then he said, “You want me to notify anybody?”
O’Hara said, “Of what?”
“You boys are due to get off at six.”
Dunstan looked up.
O’Hara said, “So what?” Guarded, as though already knowing what was coming.
“It ain’t gonna happen,” the dispatcher said. “Not unless somebody grabs that guy by then. The way it looks, you boys can look forward to a long night. You want me to notify anybody?”
“God damn ill”
