Bank Shot

“Cigarettes,” Herman said. “About half full of cigarettes.”

Kelp said, “True?”

“Swear to God.”

“What brand?”

“L and M.”

“No,” Kelp said. “I’m not mature enough for them.”

“Wait, there’s some others. Uhhh, Salem.”

“No. I feel like a dirty old man when I try to smoke a Salem. Springtime fresh and all, girls in covered bridges.”

“Virginia Slims.”

“What?”

“Sorry.”

“That’s May’s brand,” Dortmunder said. “I’ll take some of them with me.”

Kelp said, “I thought May got them free at the store.”

“That’s right, she does.”

“Ow,” Herman said, and the match went out. “Burned my finger.”

“You better sit down,” Dortmunder told him. “You’re choppin’ up your hands pretty good for somebody’s go

“Right,” Herman said.

They rode along in silence awhile, and then Herman said, “You know, it really stinks in here.”

Kelp said, “Everything happens to me. I looked at this truck, it said ‘paper’ on the side, I figured it would be nice and clean and neat.”

“It really smells bad,” Herman said.

“I wish Murch wouldn’t jounce so much,” Victor said. He sounded small and distant.

Dortmunder said, “How come?”

“I think I’m go

“Wait,” Dortmunder urged him. “It’s only a little farther.”

“It’s the smell,” Victor said miserably. “And the jouncing.”

“I’m begi

Now that the idea had been suggested, Dortmunder too was starting to feel queasy. “Herman,” he said, “maybe you ought to rap on the front wall, signal Murch to stop a minute.”

“I don’t think I can get up,” Herman said. He too was sounding very unhappy.

Dortmunder swallowed. Then he swallowed again. “Just a little longer,” he said in a strangled voice and kept on swallowing.

Up front, Murch drove along in blissful ignorance. He was the one who’d found this place, and he’d worked out the fastest and smoothest route to reach it. Now he saw it, up ahead, the tall green fence around the yard, surmounted by the sign reading, “Lafferty’s Mobile Homes — New, Used, Rebuilt, Repaired.” He slowed to a stop in the darkness just beyond the main entrance, got out of the truck, walked around to the back, opened the doors, and they shot out of there like they’d been locked in with a lion.

Murch said, “Wha …” but there wasn’t anybody to ask; they’d all run across the road to the fields on the other side, and though he couldn’t see them, the sounds they were making reminded him of clambakes. The endings of clambakes.

Puzzled, he looked into the interior of the truck, but it was too dark to see anything in there. “What the hell,” he said, making it a statement because there was nobody around to ask a question of, and walked back up to the cab. In his usual check of the glove compartment he’d seen a flashlight, which he now got and carried back to the rear of the truck. When Dortmunder came stumbling across the road again, Murch was playing the light around the empty inside of the truck and saying, “I don’t get it.” He looked at Dortmunder. “I give up,” he said.

“So do I,” said Dortmunder. He looked disgusted. “If I ever tie up with Kelp again, may I be put away. I swear to God.”

Now the others were coming back. Herman was saying, “Boy, when you go out to steal a truck, you pick a real wi

“Is it my fault? Can I help it? Read the truck for yourself.”

“I don’t want to read the truck,” Herman said. “I never want to see the truck again.”

“Read it,” Kelp insisted. He went over and banged the side. “It says paper! That’s what it says!”

“You’re go

“It says paper,” Kelp whispered.

Murch said to Dortmunder quietly, “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me about this.”

“Ask me tomorrow,” Dortmunder said.

Victor came back last, rubbing his face and mouth with a handkerchief. “Wow,” he said. “Wow. That was worse than tear gas.” He wasn’t smiling at all.

Murch shone the flashlight around the inside of the truck one last time, and then shook his head and said, “I don’t care. I don’t even want to know.” Still, on the way back up to the cab, he did pause to read the side of the truck, and Kelp had been absolutely right; it said “paper.” Murch, looking put-upon, got into the cab again and shut the door behind him. “Don’t tell me,” he muttered.

Meanwhile the other four, also looking put-upon, were getting their gear from inside the truck; they’d traveled light the first time out of it. Herman had a black bag similar to the kind doctors used to carry, back when they made house calls. Dortmunder got his leather jacket and Kelp got his shopping bag.

They all went from the truck over to the fence, where Kelp, looking pained, reached into the shopping bag and pulled out half a dozen cheap steaks, one at a time, and threw them over the fence. The others all faced the other way, and Kelp’s nose wrinkled at the smell of food, but he didn’t complain. Very quickly after he started throwing the steaks over, they heard the Doberman pinschers arrive on the other side and start snarling among themselves as they gobbled the meat. Murch had counted four of them in his daytime visit here; the other two steaks were just in case he’d missed a couple.

Now Herman carried his black bag over to the broad wooden gate in the fence, hunkered down over the several different locks, opened the bag and went to work. For quite a while, the only sound in the darkness was the tiny clink of Herman’s tools.

The idea was, this operation must not exist. The people who worked at Lafferty’s Mobile Homes were not to realize tomorrow morning that they’d been burgled tonight. This meant that Dortmunder and the others couldn’t just bust through the locks but had to open them in such a way that they would still be usable afterward.

While Herman worked, Dortmunder and Kelp and Victor sat on the ground nearby, their backs against the green wooden fence. Gradually their breathing grew more regular and they got some flesh tone back in their faces. None of them spoke, though once or twice Kelp looked on the verge of a declamation. However, he didn’t deliver it.

This part of Long Island, quite a distance out from the city, was semi-rural between the patches of housing developments. The private estates were on the north side; down here, junkyards, car dealers, small assembly plants and Little League baseball diamonds were interspersed amid weedy fields and off-brand gas stations. There were housing developments within a mile of here in three different directions, but no residences in this particular area at all.

“All right,” Herman said quietly.

Dortmunder looked along the fence. The gate was hanging slightly open, and Herman was putting his tools away in his black bag. “Okay,” Dortmunder said, and he and the others got to their feet. They all went inside and pushed the gate closed behind them.

Murch had made the right count on the dogs; all four of them were sound asleep, and two of them were snoring. They would wake up in an hour or so with a splitting headache, but the Lafferty’s people wouldn’t be likely to notice anything tomorrow morning, since dogs like this never do have much by way of a sweet disposition.

The interior of Lafferty’s looked like an abandoned city on the moon. If it hadn’t been for the big boxes of the mobile homes spaced here and there, it would have been an ordinary junkyard, with its piles of used parts, some mounds of chrome reflecting the dim light and other mounds of grimy dark machinery parts like a wrecked spaceship a thousand years after the crash. But the mobile homes looked almost like houses, with their high walls and their narrow windows and doors, and the way they were canted and leaning here and there around the lot made it look as though this city had been abandoned after an earthquake.