“That’s what I tried to point out, there at the lake,” I said. “It isn’t like we were turning into pathological criminals. We just do this one thing. We keep right on about our business until the furor over the robbery dies down. Then I tell Mr. Harper one day that I’ve got an offer of a job in California. We get married. Our friends give us a going-away party. We promise to write, but somehow we never do. You know how those things go.
“A few years from now, we won’t even remember what this grubby mill town looks like. Instead, we’ll have bought a business of our own, worked hard, and retired by the time we’re thirty-five. Then we swim in Miami Beach, or play golf in Pasadena.
“I sure don’t intend to squander the money, Judy. Just a break, the opportunity to get started, to make it for ourselves while we’re young, that’s all I was thinking about. It’s no worse than the old financial barons who conspired to take oil lands from the Indians, or who entered political deals to use public domain for railroad right of way. ” I peeped at her without turning my head, and sighed. “’Course, I guess it was wishful thinking, like we all do at times, and I’m sorry I brought it up. ”
“It would be nice,” Judy said. “Yes, it really would.”
“If we had a kid or two, we could give them a decent chance, too.” We rolled through the edges of town, toward Judy’s house.
Suddenly, she reached and touched my hand. “Don’t make the turn, Davie. I don’t feel like going in. Let’s go to the Jiffyburger and have a sandwich and a malt.”
“Okay,” I said.
At the drive-in, I found a spot not too close to other cars. We munched on hamburgers without saying anything for a while.
Then Judy stirred in her seat as if her muscles were cramped. “Davie—”
“Uh-huh?”
“It’s true that about seventy-five thousand dollars will be in my cage Friday, because of the Landers Mills payday and all their payroll checks.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s one thing that got me thinking.”
“Well, I’m certainly not taken with your thieving ideas, Dave Hartshell! But…just making believe…how would you get the money out of the bank without the guard arresting you before you reached the front door?”
I slouched in the seat and took a big pull at my malt straw. “Oh, I’d pull the heist in pianissimo.”
“In what?”
“Pianissimo, Judy. That’s a music term. It means very softly. I’d take the money so softly the guard would smile as he held the door for me to leave the bank. ”
She pulled upright, leaned over to have a closer look at me.
“Davie, how would you go about keeping a bank robbery pian-whatever-it-is.”
“I’d prepare the Friday morning deposit from the store a little earlier than usual,” I said “I’d bring it over to the bank just like always, in the leather and canvas money satchel.
“I’d pass the deposit over to you, Judy, like any other morning. Only when you got all through, I’d stroll out of the bank with the satchel crammed with the biggest denomination bills in your cage.”
She jerked erect, bumping her head on the top of my jalopy. “Of all the nerve, Davie! Asking me to risk my reputation, everything…”
“You wouldn’t risk a thing, honey,” I said. “All the tune’s in harmony, like in pianissimo. We fix up a note in advance, printed with crayon on a sheet of dime store paper, which we’re careful not to get any fingerprints on. Except yours. You’ll have to handle it. ”
“Davie, I do believe you’ve taken to secret drinking!”
“Just an occasional beer,” I said. “This note, which you’ll carry into the bank with you Friday morning, says, ‘Hand over the money or I’ll kill you on the spot’
“After I’m out of the bank a half hour or so and the place starts getting crowded, you let the note flutter to the floor. Then you keel over in a real bad faint.”
She was to the point now where she stared at me like she was helpless to move her eyes.
“I faint” she said finally.
“And right at first when you come around,” I said, “you’re kind of vague. Then it begins to come back to you. You get excited, and scared, and darn near hysterical. Since I’m young, slender, and dark, you ask them if they caught the middle-age, medium-built, ruddy man. Then they have found the note on the floor of your cage, and they say, ‘Which man?’ And you say, ‘He slipped his coat open to show me a gun he was carrying. I put the money in a sack he handed to me. He slipped it under his coat. I tried to raise the alarm, but a terrible, empty blackness was rolling over me.’”
“A terrible, empty blackness,” Judy said.
“You’re the one girl I know who can really cool it, Judy. Then you leave it lay at that point Not too complicated. Not too much description.”
“There’s just one thing wrong with it, Davie. You remember the bank robbery a few months ago over in Conover?”
“Sure, That’s what gave me the idea of…”
“The teller had to take a lie detector test, Davie. It’s routine. They’ve anticipated the kind of thing you’re planning.”
“And I have anticipated them, doll,” I said, feeling pretty good at the moment.
“Have you really?” Her voice was cool, and just a little pitying.
I didn’t let the womanish attitude nettle me. Merely patted her small, sweet hand. “That’s where Mr. Eggleston comes in,” I said. “Eggleston?”
“An old gentleman I met in the Wee Barrel.”
“Davie! I’ve practically begged you to stay out of that tavern on your way home from work!”
“This Eggleston is quite a guy,” I said, warming to the subject. “Neat, unobtrusive man, with impeccable clothes. Never see him with a gray hair out of place. ”
“Well, I don’t care to know any of the hangers-on in the Wee Barrel.” Judy stuck her
