establishments. Every evening at closing time the proprietor would turn on a switch discreetly tucked away on the rear wall, and from then until the following morning the opening of any door or window would cause an electric impulse to travel through the wires to the box in the basement, through the feeder cable to the main cable in the sewer, and along the main cable to the offices of Vigilant Protective Service, Inc., where it would cause a buzzer to sound and a light to flash on a large complex wall display in the ready room. And whenever that happened, one of the men on duty would immediately phone the police station nearest the business establishment, and would also dispatch a car of Vigilant’s own, containing four armed uniformed men.
Vigilant’s offices were in a small two-story brick building on a corner a block from London Avenue. The ready room was upstairs in the back, the billing office, executive offices, and files were upstairs in the front, the downstairs front was the visitors’ waiting room and the salesmen’s cubicles, and the downstairs back was divided into rooms for the on-duty men—a dayroom with tables and easy chairs and a television set, plus two smaller rooms containing cots—and an interior garage holding two radio cars.
Monday was usually a very slow night at Vigilant, but for some reason this Monday was a night of minor annoyances. At six-fifteen, some kid—apparently it was a kid, there wasn’t anybody there when the cops and the Vigilant guards showed up—tried to get in through a back window into a local toy store. Then at ten-thirty somebody who also got away jimmied open the front door of an appliance repair shop, and not five minutes later in another part of town it was a gas station that was broken into, and yet again the perpetrator got away before anybody showed up. It wasn’t bad the way Halloween is bad, but it was a lot worse than the usual Monday night.
Particularly considering the size of the crew on duty. There were two men in the ready room, and only one crew of four men on duty downstairs. When the gas station was broken into, the ready-room man had had to radio the car at the repair shop to go on over there. Only on weekends were there two groups of on-duty men, because usually only on weekends were they needed. Besides, the police were supposed to be the first line of defense; Vigilant’s primary job was to inform the police that a felony was in progress, and what they were doing. Three break-ins so far tonight, and not a single loss to a subscriber. Damages to doors would be paid for by insurance, and in no case had there been damage to the stock or interior of the store, nor any removal of items.
Then at eleven-fifteen the fourth alarm of the night went off in the ready room, this one indicating that something had just happened at Best’s Jewelry Store, quite a ways out River Street. One of the ready-room men immediately phoned the River Street police station while the other one called downstairs to where the guards were playing a long-standing game of doubledeck pinochle. They were told the name and address of the store, and they at once dropped their cards, climbed into their Dodge Polara, and the driver pressed the button on the dashboard that electronically raised the overhead garage door. They drove out onto the dark side street, their headlights flaring as they bounced down the steep driveway and then up toward the middle of the street. They turned right, the driver pushed the button to shut the garage door behind them again, and they headed at high speed for River Street, unaware of the two men dressed in black who had been crouched to either side of the garage entrance and who had rolled into the building under the descending door.
Handy McKay and Fred Ducasse got to their feet, took their pistols from their pockets, and moved cautiously toward the open door to the dayroom. There hadn’t been much time or opportunity to case this outfit, so they weren’t sure exactly where things were inside the building, or just how many men were in here. Parker had come in the front way this morning to apply for a job, but hadn’t managed to see much. He’d also done the toy-store break- in at six-fifteen, just before meeting with everybody at the apartment, had seen the Vigilant car arrive with its Minute Man decal on the doors, had followed it back here, and had seen the electrically controlled garage door in the side of the building.
Philly Webb and Fred Ducasse had done the appliance-shop and gas-station break-ins, while Handy had watched the Vigilant headquarters. Now it seemed there was only one car’s worth of guards on duty, but how many more might be working inside the building it was impossible to say, so Handy and Ducasse moved silently and cautiously forward until they had assured themselves that the dayroom and the two rooms with cots and the salesmen’s cubicles and everything else on the first floor was empty. Then they headed for the stairs.
The Polara with the four guards in it raced out River Street, a blue light flashing on the roof. They passed a blue Buick traveling sedately in the other direction, and paid it no attention. Philly Webb glanced at the receding blue light in his rear-view mirror, grinned to himself, and stepped it up a little.
The two men in the ready room were talking about which actresses on their favorite television shows they would like to go to bed with when the door from the stairs opened and two men dressed in black, with black hoods over their faces, came in pointing pistols, moving fast, slamming the door back against the wall, one of them thumping his pistol butt on a desk top while the other one shouted, “Freeze! Freeze, dammit, one move and I blow your ass off!”
The ready-room men were both in the gray Vigilant uniform with sidearms, but the holster flaps were snapped shut, there hadn’t been any warning, and the two intruders were making a lot of distracting noise. The one who had shouted was trotting around behind them, along the wall, while the other one kept banging things: hitting the pistol butt against this and that, kicking a metal wastebasket, knocking over a chair.
The one running around behind them kept shouting too: “Goddamnit, one move out of you, one sound out of you, you dirty bastards, just give me a chance to drill you down, give me a chance, goddamnit, just make one fatal fucking move and I’ll smear you around this room like strawberry jam!”
They weren’t moving. Startled, stunned, terrified, they sat open-mouthed, paralyzed by the sudden barrage out of nowhere.
“Up!” shouted the runner. He was behind them now, and the other one in front, and they couldn’t watch both at once. “Up, you bastards, hands on your heads, get your dead asses out of those chairs, get up on your goddam feet, move—or you’re fucking dead men!”
They did it. They did everything they were told, surrounded by threats and racket, the other one still making a noisy mess of things, throwing phone books and ashtrays around and still always keeping his pistol pointed in the general direction of the two men standing there with their hands atop their heads.
The other one, mouthing threats, sounding enraged with some sort of insane personal grievance, came moving in behind them, took their automatics away, got handcuffs out of a desk drawer and cuffed their wrists behind them, forced them with shouts and prodding and threats to stumble over into a corner of the room and sit on the floor there, back to back, trembling, expecting the rage and craziness to spill over any second into bloodshed, half convinced there was no way out of this, they were dead already.
Then all at once things quieted down, and the one who had been doing all the throwing of things, all the pounding and kicking and thumping, stood in the middle of the room with his pistol held casually down at his side and started to laugh. Not crazy laughter or mean laughter, but casual amused laughter. The two ready-room men stared up at him, bewildered, and heard him say through his laughter, “Fred, that’s just beautiful.”
Now the other one chuckled too. All his rage was gone as though it had never been. “It is kind of nice, isn’t it?” he said.
