Under normal circumstances it was best he not be armed, that’s one of the reasons he carried Benniggio with him wherever he went, but this time was maybe special. “As a matter of fact, yes,” he said, and took the gun from Chaka and put it in his overcoat pocket. He took his other hand off the old man’s shoulder and said, “We’ll go back to the gate. We’ll wait there.”
“Right.”
They went out, shutting off the light and closing the door, and walked back to where the Volkswagen’s lights still gleamed. Caliato told Abadandi to turn off the VW lights, and Abadandi did, and darkness settled down on them. It had been a cloudy day and now it was a cloudy night, no stars, no moon. There were widely spaced streetlights out on Brower Road, one of them casting feeble light past the gates, enough to make out shapes in the darkness, nothing more.
Benniggio said, “What now, Gal?”
“Now we wait again,” Caliato said. “We stand here in the open air and we wait.”
Ten
‘TEN-FIFTEEN. O’Hara hunched over the wheel of the prowl car as it tore along Brower Road toward Fun Island. He didn’t dare use the siren, it might cause another patrol to investigate, but there was very little traffic along Brower Road at night anyway, and what there was got out of the way of a police squad car with or without its siren going.
He’d gotten back to the roadblock ten minutes ago, after his last phone call to Caliato from a booth outside a closed nearby gas station, to discover he’d just wasted five minutes of free time. They’d been relieved as often o’clock. Dunstan gave him the news, pulling a long face, as though what he’d really wanted was to stay on roadblock duty all night long.
Which was maybe true. Dunstan was a coward, O’Hara knew that, and afraid of this business about the armored-car loot. He hadn’t tried to argue against it since that one time right at the beginning this afternoon, but he hadn’t been enthusiastic either. He hadn’t shared any of O’Hara’s impatience and frustration as hour after hour went by and still they had to stick around at a roadblock set up to capture a figment of O’Hara’s own imagination.
Which might have even made things worse, actually; knowing that Dunstan wasn’t really sharing his own feelings, it had forced him in a way to be nervous and frustrated for both of them.
Well, the frustration was over now, the impatience and nervousness were almost done with. They were finally on their way to Fun Island. And Caliato was still there, and hadn’t gone after the money.
Rationally, O’Hara knew it made more sense for Caliato to split with him and Dunstan. It gave him protection for afterwards, and it gave him a safe front for when they went in to get the guy with the money. He understood that, and he believed it, but at the same time he knew that Caliato was a hood, and hoods couldn’t be trusted, and seventy-three thousand dollars was a lot of money, and lucky breaks like this don’t happen without something going wrong, and the easiest thing to go wrong would be for the hood to get greedy for all the money and therefore double-cross O’Hara.
It wouldn’t happen, it wasn’t going to happen, but the fear was there. He couldn’t help it, the fear was there. And it didn’t help matters when he tried to think about what he’d do if it did happen, and realized there was nothing he could do, not a damn thing. Blow the whistle on Caliato? How could he do that without blowing the whistle on himself? Or how about complaining to Caliato’s boss, Lozini? He could see himself doing that, going to one hood to complain about how he’d been treated by another hood, he could just feature himself doing something like that.
But it wasn’t necessary. They’d gotten off duty at goddam last, Caliato was still there, the guy with the money was still there, everything was still going to work out.
One quarter of seventy-three thousand is eighteen thousand, two hundred fifty. Eighteen thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars.
How much was eighteen thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars? In understandable terms, how much was it? It was his salary for two years and three weeks, with sixty bucks left over. Two years and three weeks. Standing around at the roadblock this evening, he’d thought back two years and three weeks, he’d tried to work it out exactly where he’d been and what he’d been doing two years and three weeks ago today, and he realized that was a hell of a long time. Two years ago was forever.
All those paychecks, sitting there in one lump sum in a suitcase he’d seen thrown over a fence. To think of it.
The last stretch of Brower Road had no traffic at all. O’Hara stood on the accelerator and they leaped down the roadway, till Dunstan said, nervousness in his voice, “There’s still icy spots, Joe. Take it easy a little.” He could be heard trying to grin through his words as he added, “We want to live to spend the money, don’t we?”
That was true. In any case, they were just about there. O’Hara eased his foot off the accelerator, and the fences unreeling on both sides — gray board around the park on his left, chain link around the parking lotion his right — gradually slowed down. Ahead his lights picked out the tollbooth building and, across the way, the main gates to the park. He tapped the brakes, and noticed a second car beside Caliato’s Lincoln, a pale green Dodge station wagon. He frowned at it. What was that for?
Dunstan said, “There’s somebody else here, Joe.”
“I see that.” O’Hara slowed the car almost to a stop, angled it off the road, came to a stop blocking both other cars.
Dunstan was looking at the wagon. “Who do you suppose it is?”
“We’ll find out,” O’Hara said.
They got out of the car, O’Hara tugging his black gloves to a firmer fit on his hands, and he saw Caliato coming toward him from the Fun Island entrance. He stood waiting, unsure of himself and therefore putting on a swaggering front. As Caliato got closer, O’Hara jerked his head toward the Dodge and said, “I see we got company.”
“Extra soldiers,” Caliato said. “If we need them.”
“We’re spreading the pot around a little thin, aren’t we?”
Caliato grinned. “They’re on salary,” he said. “Three of them, at a hundred bucks a man.”
