Bank Shot

“Well, thanks anyway,” said the lieutenant. Gertrude said, “Come around when we’re open. We’ll give you coffee and Danish on the house.”

“I’ll do that,” said the lieutenant and slogged back through the puddles to report, saying, “They don’t have any electricity, Captain. They’re not set up for anything yet.”

“We can’t even pick a hilltop right,” the captain said. To the radio man he said, “You!”

“Sir?”

“Find out if there’s any patrol cars around here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We want coffees and Danish.”

“Yes, sir. How do you like your coffee?”

“Light, three sugars.”

The radio man looked ill. “Yes, sir. Lieutenant?”

“Black, one Sweet ’n’ Low.”

“Yes, sir.”

While the radio man took the driver’s order, the captain turned to the lieutenant and said, “One sweet and what?”

“It’s a sugar substitute, sir. For people on diets.”

“You’re on a diet.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I weigh about twice as much as you, Lieutenant, but I’m not on a diet.”

The lieutenant opened his mouth, but once again no response seemed exactly right, and he didn’t say anything.

But silence, this time, was also a mistake. The captain’s brows beetled, and he said, “Just what do you mean by that, Lieutenant?”

The radio man said, “I put in the order, sir.”

It was a timely distraction. The captain thanked him and subsided again and brooded out the window for the next ten minutes, until another patrol car arrived, delivering the coffee and Danish. The captain cheered up at that, until the second patrol car arrived two minutes after the first, bringing more coffee and Danish. “I should have guessed,” the captain said.

When the third and fourth patrol cars with shipments of coffee and Danish arrived simultaneously, the captain roared at the radio man, “Tell them enough! Tell them to stop, tell them it’s enough, tell them I’m near the breaking point!”

“Yes, sir,” said the radio man and got to work on the phone.

Nevertheless, two more patrol cars arrived with coffee and Danish in the next five minutes. It was the captain’s belief that discipline was best maintained by never letting the ranks know when things louse up, so they had to accept and pay for and say thank you for each and every shipment, and gradually the mobile headquarters was filling up with plastic cups of coffee and brown paper bags full of Danish. The smell of the lieutenant’s wet uniform combined with the steam of diner coffee was becoming very strong and fogging up the windows.

The lieutenant pushed several wooden stirrers off his lap and said, “Captain, I have an idea.”

“God protect me,” said the captain.

“The people working in that diner don’t have any electricity or heat, sir. Frankly, they strike me as born losers. Why don’t we give them some of our extra coffee and Danish?”

The Captain considered. “I suppose,” he said judiciously, “it’s better than me getting out of the car and stamping all this stuff into the gravel. Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The lieutenant gathered up one carton — four coffees, four Danish — and carried them from the car over to the diner. He knocked on the door, and it was opened immediately by Gertrude, who still had a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth. The lieutenant said, “We got more food delivered than we wanted. I thought maybe you could use some of —”

“We sure could,” Gertrude said. “That’s really sweet of you.”

The lieutenant handed up the carton. “If you need any more,” he said, “we’ve got plenty.”

Gertrude looked hesitant. “Well, uh …”

“Are there more than four of you? I mean it, we’re loaded down with the stuff.”

Gertrude seemed reluctant to say how many of them were in the diner — probably because she didn’t want to strain the lieutenant’s generosity. But finally she said, “There’s, uh, there’s seven of us.”

“Seven! Wow, you must really be working in there.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “We really are.”

“You must be in a hurry to open up.”

“We really want to open it up,” Gertrude said, nodding, the cigarette waggling in the corner of her mouth. “You couldn’t be more right about that.”

“I’ll get you some more,” the lieutenant said. “Be right back.”

“You’re really very kind,” she said.

The lieutenant went back to the patrol car and opened the rear door. “They can use some more,” he said and assembled two more cartons.

The captain gave him a cynical look. He said, “You’re delivering coffee and Danish to a diner, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir, I know.”

“It doesn’t strike you as strange?”

The lieutenant paused in his shuffling of coffee containers.

“Sir,” he said, “my basic feeling about this whole business is that I’m actually in a hospital somewhere, undergoing major surgery, and this day is a dream I’m having while under the anesthetic.”

The captain looked interested. “I imagine that’s a very comforting thought,” he said.

“It is, sir.”

“Hmmmmm,” said the captain.

The lieutenant carried more coffee and Danish to the diner, and Gertrude met him at the door. “How much do we owe you?”

“Oh, forget it,” the lieutenant said. “I’ll take a free cheeseburger some time when you’re doing business.”

“If only all police officers were like you,” Gertrude said, “the world would be a far better place.”

The lieutenant had often thought the same thing himself. He gave a modest smile and scuffed his foot in a puddle and said, “Oh, well, I just try to do my best.”

“I’m sure you do. Bless you.”

The lieutenant carried his happy smile back to the patrol car, where he found the captain in a sour mood again, beetle-browed and grumpy. “Something go wrong, sir?”

“I tried that anesthetic thing of yours.”

“You did, sir?”

“I keep worrying how the operation’s going to come out.”

“I make it appendicitis, sir. There’s really no danger in that.”

The captain shook his head. “It’s just not my style, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’m a man who faces reality.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I tell you this, Lieutenant. This day will end. It can’t go on forever. This day will come to an end. Some day it will.”

“Yes, sir.”

Conversation lagged for a while after that. Even with the twelve coffees and Danish the Lieutenant had given away, there had still been three sets for each man in the mobile headquarters. They hadn’t drunk all the coffee, but they’d eaten all the Danish and were now feeling somnolent and sluggish. The driver fell into a deep sleep, the captain napped, and the lieutenant kept dropping off and then waking up again with a start. The radio man never quite lost consciousness, though he did take his shoes off and rest his head against the window and hold his microphone slackly in his lap.

The morning passed slowly, with undiminished rain and no positive news in any of the infrequent crackling radio contacts from headquarters. Noontime came and went, and the afternoon began heavily to row past, and by two o’clock they were all feeling restless and cramped and irritable and uncomfortable. Their mouths tasted bad, their feet had swollen, their underwear chafed, and it had been hours since any of them had relieved themselves.

Finally, at ten past two, the captain grunted and shifted position and said, “Enough is enough.”

The other three tried to look alert.

“We’re not accomplishing anything out here,” the captain said. “We’re not mobile, we’re not in contact with anybody, we’re not getting anywhere. Driver, take us back to headquarters.”

“Yes, sir!”

As the car started forward, the lieutenant looked out at the diner one last time and wondered if the thing would actually stay in business long enough for him to get that free cheeseburger. He was sorry for the people trying to run the place, but somehow he doubted it.