Call in the Feds. Gordon Landsborough
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want every man recalled to duty. Tell him every man stays on his feet until we know we’ve got Pretty Boy—or lost him. Tell him I want a cordon thrown right round the city—every road out must have a block. Call out the Vigilantes to help—they can watch across the fields and back roads. Keep a watch out at the airport. Tell him the station’s covered and a car’s down at the pier head. Tell him if Pretty Boy’s in Freshwater, he won’t get out!”
Jeter’s voice jumped into harsh, staccato repetition, and the orders were radioed through to the chief. As they came into the back road leading to the police HQ, a flurry of motorcycle cops came leaning crazily round the corners, heads down, tyres biting a precarious hold at that speed, sirens shrieking. Lanny saw them tear north along the Boston highway, and then they were in the yard and he was out and up the stairs three at a time.
The chief was on his feet as he crashed into the room. He was shouting, “Here’s something else for you, Lanny. It’s your busy day.”
Lanny grabbed the message form and skimmed it through. Then he said, “Jesus sneezes!” and the newspaper dropped forgotten from his hand as he raced back down the stairs.
The chief gazed down. A handsome face looked up at him from the newspaper. Pretty Boy’s. And bold type shouted out a headline consisting of two words—
MANIAC MURDERER
CHAPTER TWO
TIME-LOCK
He was Alan Ladd again. He stood in the warm sunshine, with his back against the wall of the bank. The brim of his hat was low across his eyes, and his hands were thrust deep inside his belted gabardine.
Inside the car Gino Lucci, stick-up man, said, “Fer Crissakes, he don’t have to look like he’s gonna rob a bank, does he?”
Eddy Eitel growled, “The dope.... It’s them movies he lives in.” He moved impatiently. These last three minutes were going slower’n hell, though the other two didn’t seem to be affected by the waiting.
There was Bright, back of the car. He had another name, but Bright suited him because he wasn’t more than half-bright. He was a cretin, with high cheekbones and hair-tufted warts and eyes that looked uncertainly two ways at once. Just now, as always, his thin-lipped gash of a mouth was twitching back from broken teeth, baring them into a crazy, half-witted grin.
But Bright could use a gun if only someone was at hand to tell him when to shoot. And that kind of loon is useful in a stick-up gang.
The driver, Maxie Christman, just sat behind the wheel, a huddled, silent, brooding question mark, his eyes apathetically looking along the main shopping street of this suburb of Freshwater.
The tall, lean man in the gabardine moved slightly now. His eyes almost hidden between narrowed lids, he was looking into the bank. He could see the bank janitor, close by the door—a clock that gave less than a minute to closing time. And the clerks and customers beyond.
And today there weren’t many customers. There never were on Fridays, for some reason, a fact which Gino had soon noticed when he’d started to watch this bank. No more than six or eight in there right now, and that wasn’t too many to handle.
The spotter stiffened as the janitor looked up at the bank clock and then started to cross to the door. He had a big bunch of keys in his hands. At once the man in the gabardine turned and walked into the bank.
Gino got out of the car and crossed the sidewalk. He got in the way of the janitor and held him up for a second, and that gave Eddy Eitel and the cretin Bright time to get out and follow him.
The janitor was surprised at the last-minute flood of customers—and they were strangers. He looked at the clock again and opened his mouth to say something about the time, but Bright, his face grinning like a dog’s drooling with distemper, slammed something hard into his ribs and that shut him up.
Eddy grabbed the keys, quickly pushed the door to and locked it. A heavy, middle-aged man with an unhealthy face saw it happen. He had a handful of greenbacks of small denomination. He called, uncertainly, “Hey, what’s the idea?” scenting something was wrong.
Four guns came out at that.
Gino and the man in the gabardine were already at the grill. Gino shoved his gun through and snapped, “That alarm button on the floor. I know it’s there. But just try usin’ it. Go on, try it!”
But none of the bank employees did. They looked at the guns, they looked at each other, then they silently put their hands above their heads. Gino said, “You guys got brains. Cover ’em an’ if they move, blow them brains out for ’em, Alan Ladd!”
The man in the gabardine crouched behind his gun, a figure tense and menacing. The clerks stood, taut and staring. They knew that here was a man who would use his gun...might even be wanting an opportunity to use it. And they didn’t intend to give him an excuse.
The handful of bank customers stood rigid close against the heavy, polished counter. They were all middle-aged, unprepossessing, tradesman types. And by the way they looked, they all knew what a gun could do.
Bright was covering them from by the door, Eddy Eitel having gone forward; and Bright was disconcerting, because his eyes seemed able to watch up and down the room simultaneously.
Gino went round the counter. He didn’t hurry. There was no need to. He had watched this bank so long he was pretty sure he’d got it thoroughly cased by now. It was bank closing time, and with that door locked behind them they were safe from unexpected interruption.
He pulled off the wires leading to the two alarm devices, then prodded his gun into the side of one of the clerks. The man gasped as it took the wind out of him. Gino liked the sound and prodded again.
“Over to that safe,” he ordered. “You others follow.” When they were inside the safe—so big, in reality it was a strong room—he said, “We want all the bills up to a hundred dollars. The rest you can have for yourselves. Now, stick ’em into this sack here.”
Eddy Eitel went swiftly over the customers and removed the cash they had just drawn from the bank. It didn’t amount to much, and he muttered “Pikers,” contemptuously, and then started to shove them round the counter. The unhealthy-looking bank client looked bad and was breathing labouredly through lips that were going blue.
Gino looked round when he found the mob of middle-aged tradesmen treading on his heels. He wagged his gun and growled, “Hold it, punks. I ain’t ready for you—yet.” The tradesmen didn’t like the way he came out with the last word.
For that matter they didn’t like Gino. He looked what he was—scum. Something out of Italy, formless with soft fat—greasy-skinned, large-pored, a fat, flat, sallow face with a smear of moustache across it. He was a dandy with his rings and the silk scarf tucked into his shirt collar, though he hadn’t got round to shaving that day. That was like Gino—lazy. That was why he had taken to crime—working seemed tedious to the Italian immigrant.
He and Eddy Eitel were running this gang between them, though neither had brains amounting to anything. They were just a pair of crude guns able to organise a stick-up....
Bright came shoving his drooling, grinning, half-witted face round the corner. “I ain’t killed nobody so far. Ain’t nobody gonna be killed on this job?” he mouthed. Bright had killed a few men in his time, so he’d told them. He had been vague about the details, so they weren’t sure. Gino had picked him up recently because they’d lost a fellow when a mechanic in a filling station they were sticking up unexpectedly came at them with a gun. For a bank robbery it was safer to have four guns and a driver.
Some of the tradesmen thought he was kidding, because it seemed too crude, that speech about killing someone. Then the loon fanned them with bad breath from between grinning, broken teeth and they saw the wildness in his wandering eyes and they weren’t so sure.
Gino just grunted and said, “I got it all.” He took hold of the sack that had been stuffed with notes.
Eddy said, quickly, “How