Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (29 page)

 
          
Joe
was driving one-handed, waving the other hand at the oncoming traffic, yelling
at them under the siren, while Tom pressed against the seatback and braced the
heels of his hands against the dashboard, and just stared.

 
          
Cabs and cars and trucks down there veered left and right as though
an atomic bomb had just gone off in
Central Park
.
Cars climbed the sidewalks, they
practically climbed each other’s shoulders, they went tearing away down
side-streets, and hid behind parked buses, and jaywalkers ran for their lives.
A lane opened up down the middle of the street, and the patrol car went down it
like a bullet through a rifle barrel. Open-mouthed drivers flashed by in cars
on both sides. Joe wriggled and squig- gled the wheel and tight-roped past taxi
bumpers and the jutting tails of trucks.

 
          
Elation
suddenly grabbed Tom and lifted
him
up into the sky. Still bracing
himself with one hand, he pounded his other fist on top of the dashboard and
yelled, “Yeah!! Yeah!
Yeah!”

 
          
Joe
was grinning so hard he looked as though he was imitating all those automobile
grilles out front. He was practically lying on top of the steering wheel,
hunched around it so tight he was driving as much with his shoulders as with
his hands. He was concentrating like a pinball player on & streak, goosing
the ball past all the dangers toward the big winner.

           
Three blocks, four blocks, and they
were out of that swarm, with the next bunch half a dozen blocks ahead, coming
up with the next traffic-light sequence.
“Siren and light
off!”
Joe yelled. He couldn’t be heard, so he pounded Tom’s leg, and
jammed a finger toward the switches, simultaneously making a screaming
two-wheel left turn onto
West 54th Street
.

 
          
Tom
hit the switches as they shot around the turn, and then braced
himself
again, because Joe was standing on the brake with
both feet. He brought them down to about twenty, and they rolled the rest of
the way to the traffic waiting for the light at Fifth Avenue, and came to a
gentle stop behind a garment delivery truck.

 
          
They
grinned at one another. They were both shaking like a leaf. Tom said, with both
admiration and terror, “You’re a madman. You’re a complete madman.”

 
          
“And
that,” Joe said, “is how you don’t get followed.”

 
          
They
both had day shift, so they were with the rush-hour traffic again on the Long
Island Expressway, heading toward the city. Joe was driving, and Tom was beside
him, reading the
News.

 
          
This
was about a week after the business in the park. When they’d gotten the picnic
basket home that night, they’d found it had the full two million dollars in it,
to the penny. They’d split it down the middle, and each of them had taken his
share for safekeeping. Tom put his in a canvas bag he’d once kept gym equipment
in, and locked it away in a cabinet behind the bar in his basement. Joe put his
in the blue plastic laundry bag they’d used during the bond robbery, moved his
pool filter (which was on the fritz once more), dug a hole under it, put the
bag in the hole, filled it up again, and put the filter back on top.

 
          
The
main result of the activity in the park was a notice on the bulletin boards in
all the
Manhattan
precinct houses, a couple days later,
urging caution if anybody ever had to travel the wrong way on a one-way street.
The Department surely would have liked to find out who had done that stuntman
number on
Sixth Avenue
, but there was no way they were going to do it, and they probably
didn’t even try.

 
          
They’d
been sitting there in Joe’s
Plymouth
in silence for a pretty long while, inching along in stop-and-go
traffic, when Tom suddenly sat up and said, “Hey, look at this.”

 
          
Joe
glanced at him. “What?”

 
          
Tom
was staring at the newspaper. “Vigano’s dead,” he said.

 
          
Joe
glanced at him. “What?”

 
          
Tom
was staring at the newspaper. “Vigano’s dead,” he said.

 
          
“No
shit.” Joe faced front again, and moved the
Plymouth
forward a little bit. “Read it to me.”

 
          
“Uhh.
Crime kingpin Anthony Vigano, long reputed to be an
important member of the Joseph Scaracci Mafia family in
New Jersey
, was shot to death at
ten forty-five
yesterday evening as he emerged from
Jimmy’s Home Italian Restaurant in
Bayonne
. The killing, which Bayonne police say
bears all the earmarks of a gang-type slaying, was done by an unidentified man
who stepped from an automobile parked in front of the restaurant, shot Vigano
twice in the head, and left in the automobile. Police are also seeking the two
men who had been with Vigano in the restaurant and who left with him but who
had disappeared before police reached the scene. Vigano, who was still alive
when the first police officers responded to a call from the restaurant owner,
Salvatore “Jimmy” Iacocca, died in the ambulance en route to
Bayonne
Memorial
Hospital
. Vigano, fifty-seven, first attracted the
attention of the police in nineteen—uhh, the rest is all biography.”

 
          
“Is
there a picture?”

 
          
“Just of the restaurant.
A white X where he got it.”

 
          
Joe
nodded. A small smile of satisfaction was on his face. “You know what that
means,
don’t you?”

 
          
“He
lost the mob’s two million dollars,” Tom said, “and they didn’t like it.”

 
          
“Besides that.”

 
          
“What
else?”

 
          
“They
can’t find us,” Joe said. “They’ve tried, and they can’t do it, and they gave
up.”

 
          
“The
mob doesn’t give up,” Tom said.

           
“Bullshit. Everybody gives up, if
there’s nothing left to do. If they thought they could still find us and get
the money back, they wouldn’t kill Vigano. They’d let him keep looking.” Joe
gave Tom a big smile and said, “We’re free and clear, buddy, that’s what that
thing in the paper means.”

 
          
Tom
frowned at the newspaper report, thinking it over, and gradually he too began
to smile. “I guess so,” he said. “I guess we are.”

 
          
“Fucking
A well told,” said Joe.

 
          
They
rode along in silence again for a while, both of them thinking about the
future. A little later, Joe glanced toward Tom, and beyond him he saw the next
car over, stopped like they were, and it was a gray Jaguar sedan, one of the
big ones. The windows were rolled up, and the middle-aged guy inside was neat
and cool in his suit and tie. As Joe looked at him, the guy in the Jaguar
turned his own head, met Joe’s eye, and gave him that quick meaningless smile
that people invariably flash when they cross glances with somebody in another
car. Then he faced front again.

 
          
Joe
smiled back at him, but with something savage in it. “That’s right, you
bastard, smile,” he said to the Jaguar driver’s profile. “Six months from now
you’re going to be six months closer to your coronary, and I’m going to be in
Saskatchewan
.”

 
          
Tom
looked at Joe while he was talking, puzzled; then turned and saw the Jaguar
driver and understood. The surf on a beach in
Trinidad
crashed lazily in his mind, and he smiled.

 
          
It
was going to be a hot day. They sat there in the car, their elbows out the open
windows, reaching for a little breeze. Endless stalled traffic stretched away
into the hazy distance, and far away they could just make out the scum-covered
smoky
island
of
Manhattan
, squatting there like that portion of Hell
zoned industrial.

 
          
The
car in front of them moved a little.

 
          
©

 
          
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