The Green Eagle Score (6 page)

Stan took a shot of the vault, peeled the print out of the back of the camera, saw it had come out as well as the rest, and strolled on back to his desk. He tucked the photo into the envelope in his center drawer with the rest, put the camera back in the side drawer, and was typing away like sixty when Lieutenant Wormley came back in from the head.

“Don’t work so hard,” Wormley said on his way by. “It’s only Saturday.”

“Yes, sir,” said Stan. Wormley was a fuzzy-faced chinless wonder, an ROTC second lieutenant two years younger than Stan. He continued on down the rows of desks now, went into his own glass-enclosed cubicle next to Major Creighton’s office, and buried his face again in
Scientific American.
Stan had taken all his pictures except the vault shot while Wormley was lost strayed or stolen inside that magazine.

Sergeant Novato had been tougher to work around. A tough, compact little man who’d never expected assignment anywhere that required brainwork, he took the tasks of this office a hell of a lot more seriously than anybody else, and on the Saturdays when he was on duty he got more accomplished than most people did in a full eight-hour weekday. But it was his very busyness that had helped Stan to shoot around him. When Novato was bouncing around the files, in and out of one drawer after another, pulling this file, Putting that file back, Stan got his pictures of the other end of the office. And when Novato was down there, absorbed in arithmetic at his desk, Stan took his pictures in the other direction.

He’d already taken care of the exterior shots and the stair-case on the way in, and the shot of the vault through the window of Major Creighton’s office finished the pictures he wanted from here. So now all he had to do was wait for twelve o’clock—another interminable forty-five minutes away—and then drive around the base a little to get the rest of the pictures Parker wanted. He’d be home by one-thirty at the latest.

It was a good thing Lanz had gone along with the switch. Otherwise it would have been tough to get these pictures for Parker. But Lanz had been happy to switch Saturdays with Stan—just to put off his own duty day—so here he was, and the pictures were done.

Nobody seemed to know why the Saturday morning skeleton staff was required, but then nobody seemed to know why the Air Force wanted almost anything done the way they did. It was just a fact of life, that’s all; on Saturday mornings one officer, one non-com and one airman had to be on duty from eight till noon. It was less trouble on the lower ranks than on the officers and non-coms, since there were more airmen to divvy up the duty among themselves, but it was still an occasional pain in the ass.

Stan’s next duty wasn’t scheduled for another five weeks, but Jerry Lanz had agreed to switch with him, and the two other people on duty this morning had turned out, in their separate ways, to be perfect for what Stan had in mind. He’d done a small amount of typing, a large amount of picture-taking, and all in all he considered the morning, unlike most of these stinking Saturdays, well spent.

Stan was enjoying all of this, the preparation, the talk, the gathering of professionals, the gearing up methodically and matter-of-factly for the one grand profitable moment of high drama. He had felt an affinity with Marty Fusco from the first, despite the difference in their ages, and that feeling was even stronger now with Parker. Parker was a man he would follow. He had seen and understood Parker’s mistrust of him when they’d first met, and had been delighted at the gradual shift in Parker’s attitude, until now he was sure Parker’s acceptance of him was almost complete.

That he should find his place at last at the side of a man like Parker didn’t surprise Stan Devers at all. For as long as he could remember he’d been a swimmer upstream, a rebel for the sake of rebellion, anti rules and anti dullness and anti everything that plain stolid ordinary society was for. He’d been thrown out of two high schools and one college—having already, in college, been thrown out of ROTC—he’d been fired from most of the jobs he’d ever held, and that he was surviving four years of Air Force regimentation without earning himself either a Bad Conduct or Undesirable Discharge sometimes amazed him. His troubles in the past had ranged from insubordination through constant absences to the theft of one high school teacher’s car—for a joyride only—and that he had held his natural tendencies in check for three and a half military years now meant not that he’d reformed but that he’d understood at once that the Air Force was a tougher proposition than any school. Hit a teacher and the worst you could get was thrown out. Hit an officer and they’d put you in
jail
for five years.

His mother had started prophesying jail for him years ago, when he was still in high school. Everything Stan had told Parker about his mother was true; they’d never gotten along and never would. She was now either on her fourth husband or looking for her fifth, he didn’t know or care which. Although he hadn’t really ever given his grandmother—or anybody else—any money, she had truly been the only relative he’d ever had any kind of friendly relationship with, and her death last year had hit him harder than he’d thought anything like that could do. He was now a loner partly by choice and partly by chance, and his being shacked up with Ellen Fusco didn’t to his way of thinking change his loner status a bit. If Ellen thought marriage was somewhere in their future, it wasn’t because he’d ever encouraged the notion. Nor had he contradicted it; it kept her generally tractable.

Until recently, that is. Until this robbery business had come up. Ever since then she’d been a truculent bitch, grousing around like some soap-opera Cassandra, snapping his head off at the slightest pretext. If he’d ever had any idea of taking her with him when he got out of the service, the last couple of weeks had put the kibosh on that. You’d think psychoanalysis would have made her more sensible.

Stan was brooding about this so much he forgot to look at the clock, and the next thing he knew Lieutenant Wormley was coming by his desk, rolled-up magazine in his hand, grinning and saying, “Stan, you’re becoming a positive company man. If the Major could only see you now.”

“Yes, sir,” Stan said. “I’m bucking for civilian.” There was a time when it would have grated on him to call a little punk like Wormley “sir”, but by now the word was automatic. It was one of the painless little things you did to get by, you called the Wormleys “sir”. And if “sir” had one definition for the Wormleys and another definition for Stan, a private definition all his own, that was Stan’s business.

Wormley had to lock up. He stood waiting at the door while Stan and Sergeant Novato got ready. Stan put the camera and the envelope full of photos into a brown paper bag and headed for the door.

Wormley nodded at the bag. “Taking home samples, Stan?”

“You bet, sir.” You bet, you simple son of a bitch.

Stan took pictures of the office,” Ellen said.

“Oh?” Dr Godden’s voice expressed polite interest. “Why did he do that?”

“I don’t know. That man Parker wanted him to. All kinds of pictures, not just of the office.”

“What else?”

“Oh, the gate, and the outside of the building where he works, and some trucks and buses and things.”

“Well, well” said Dr Godden. “It does sound as though they’re serious, doesn’t it?”

“I knew they were.”

“It seems you were right,” said Dr Godden. “Are they hiding their plans from you?”

“No, How could they, they’re using my house! As though I
wanted
to know what they were doing.”

“Don’t you?”

“I do not,” she told the carpet. “When they start talking, I leave the room right away.”

“Why is that?”

“I hate it!” she burst out, glaring at the patterns in the carpet. “I hate the thought of it, I hate everything they’re doing.”

“Is it only because you’re afraid they’ll be caught, or that Stan will want to keep doing it until he does get caught?”

“I don’t know. How do I know?” She knew she was getting agitated, but she couldn’t help it. “I just hate them being here, doing all that—all that.”

“Well, let’s think about it,” he said. “You say you hate them being there, making their preparations in your house. Is that the point? That it’s your house?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it could be.”

“Do you feel they are violating your hospitality? Or that Stan is betraying you somehow, entering into a plan with your ex-husband?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, frowning at the carpet, trying to think, trying to see if anything Dr Godden was saying found a response inside her. He did that sometimes, offered one reason for a thing after another until they found the one she responded to, and that was usually it. Even if the response was strongly negative. In fact, if she were to say
definitely no
to something, nine times out of ten that would turn out to be what the reason was after all.

“Do you object,” he asked her now, “to your husband using your home? Or is this planning just reminiscent of the times when you were married to him, particularly the time when he did get caught?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked briefly directly at him, at those intelligent sympathetic eyes, and then away again.

“That’s it,” she said, knowing it was. “It makes me nervous, them all in the living-room, just the way it used to be. I feel, I feel trapped, as though nothing was changed, I’m not really free of Marty after all.”

“Of course,” he agreed. “The reminiscence is there, the similarity with the past. But there are differences, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You are free of your ex-husband. He is there only on your sufferance. That’s a big difference, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes I think I ought to tell them to go someplace else.”

“No!”

He said it so forcefully she was surprised into looking at him again. For just a second his expression seemed to be startled, but then it smoothed again and he said, “Ellen, you can’t run away from things. We’ve talked about that before.

“Yes,” she said, and faced front again. “I know. You’re right.”

”You should let them stay,” he said. “You should face the problem squarely, understand it, conquer it.”

“I know.”

“In fact,” he said, “you shouldn’t run away from their meetings. You should be present as much as they permit. You should listen to everything they say, you should know just as much of their plans as they do.” He paused, and said, “Do you know why?”

“To help me understand why I’m afraid?”

“That too, of course. But even more than that, you should know precisely what they plan to do, because if the plan is a good one you’ll be spared a great deal of unnecessary worry. Who knows, if you listened to what they have in mind you might find out it’s really a very good and safe plan, and then you’d have one less problem to worry about. Wouldn’t you?”

She smiled at the carpet. “I guess I would.”

“You can talk their plans over with me,” he told her. “Together we’ll try and decide if they can get away with what they intend to do.”

“What if we don’t think they can?” she asked.

“Then we’ll decide why,” he said. “We’ll discuss their ideas, and if we see things that look like flaws you can show them to Stan, either so they’ll make their plan better or so he’ll decide not to go ahead with it.”

“I don’t dare tell Stan,” she said, “that I’ve been talking about all this with you.”

“That’s understandable.”

“He wouldn’t believe I’m perfectly safe telling you anything,” she said. She looked at him, actually held his eyes this time. “Anything at all,” she said.

His smile was gentle, sympathetic. “I’m pleased you have confidence in me,” he said.

Fusco pulled the Pontiac into the cinder driveway beside the house. There was no garage, only the driveway, ending at a metal fence. The fence completely enclosed the back yard, which was perfect for Pam. The kid was out there every warm and rainless day, with the whole yard to roam in. A hell of a lot more than the chunk of Canarsie pavement Fusco had had when he was a kid.

Fusco shut the Pontiac door and walked over to the fence. There was Pam, all the way at the other end of the yard, squatting the way little kids do, digging in the dirt back there with a tablespoon Ellen had given her.

Ellen was a good mother, there was no denying it. Yeah, and she’d been a good wife, too. It was him that was off. As a husband he’d been punk, and as a father he was the kind of guy who could show up once a year with a balloon and a box of Cracker Jack and other than that have no idea what the hell he was supposed to do. It was a good thing Pam had a mother like Ellen.

The one thing Fusco couldn’t work out entirely was his feeling about Stan. It seemed to him he ought to be bugged by it one way or another. Stan shacked up with Ellen, but when he thought about it he didn’t feel bugged at all. What the hell, they weren’t married any more. And after three years in the pen, completely separated from her, he had practically no emotional involvement left for Ellen at all any more. Oh, a little, but he thought that was mostly because of the kid, because she was the one in charge of bringing up his daughter.

He liked to look at Pam. He liked to know she was there. But he shouldn’t hang around out here too long now. Without having called to the child or in any way attracted her attention, Fusco moved away from the fence, walked around the Pontiac, and went into the house by the front door.

It was a little after six, and Ellen was in the kitchen making dinner. Parker was sitting on the sofa, looking at Stan’s pictures spread out on the coffee table. Stan wasn’t around.

Parker looked up. “It work out?”

“Beautiful,” Fusco told him. “I sat at a table right next to a window, I could see everything happened at the gate. I had a book open in front of me, my notebook open, it looked like I was copying down stuff I was reading. Nobody paid me any attention at all.”

Stan came in from the bedroom then, spying, “Marty, tomorrow I get my car back. I hate that stinking bus.”

“I was going to be there longer than you,” Fusco reminded him.

“I know, I know.” Stan looked at Parker. “You want to go over his stuff now, or after dinner?”

“Whenever Fusco’s ready,” Parker said.

“Couple minutes,” Fusco said. He dropped his notebook on an end table and went into the bathroom to wash up for dinner. He didn’t know why, but sitting in that library all day had made him stiff; his back creaked when he bent over the sink to wash his face.

When he came out, Parker and Stan had moved to the kitchen table and Ellen was dishing up supper. Parker and Fusco both were taking most of their meals here, but were sleeping elsewhere, Fusco at the residence hotel over Checkers’ Bar & Grill down on Front Street, Parker at the motel in Malone, fifteen miles away. Parker had the Pontiac every night, but always brought it back in the morning in time for Stan to take it to the base. Unless, like this morning, either Parker or Fusco had a use for the car.

Fusco sat down at the table and Ellen put a plate in front of him without a word, meatloaf, green beans, boiled potato, starving, Fusco dug right in.

When Ellen sat down she said to Fusco, “How was your day?”

“Good,” he told her. “No trouble at all.”

“That’s good,” she said. In the last couple of days she’d gotten a lot better, a lot easier to get along with. She’d been all up in the air about this caper for a long time, but now all that seemed changed. Maybe she’d grown resigned to it, or maybe she’d just gotten interested in how the score was shaping up. Ever since Monday she’d been fine, listening to them talking things over, not bitching about anything. Stan had been understandably more relaxed himself as a result.

Fusco liked it when people were relaxed. He hated trouble in the air, interpersonal hang-ups. It was much better now, the four of them sitting around the kitchen table together, Stan telling funny stories about some kid second lieutenant in his office. Fusco had two helpings of everything.

Afterwards, back in the living-room, Fusco reported on his day, giving the names and times of all the commercial vehicles in and out of the South Gate, the quantity of passenger cars at different times of day, what Air Force vehicles used that gate in and out. At the end he said, “There were two trucks went out that gate but didn’t come in, at least not while I was there. One was a garbage truck, green, said S & L Sanitation Service on the side, went through at three-twenty. The other was a Pepsi-Cola truck, went through at four thirty-five. I figure they both must of come in the main gate, went through some kind of set route, and then they go out this way.”

Parker said, “What kind of check do the commercial trucks get?”

“They must have some kind of pass,” Fusco told him. “Every one of them stopped, the driver held something out for the kid on the gate to look at, and then the kid waved him through.”

“In and out both?”

“Right.”

“Nobody got waved through? Not even people going to be the same every day? The gate guards have to know some of those drivers.”

Fusco shook his head. “Everybody stopped. No exceptions.”

Stan told Parker, “There’s some chicken outfit goes around trying to crack security on Air Force bases. They hit here three or four months ago, and the story went all over the base. One of their men came in in a Coke company truck, put a red brick with ‘bomb’ stenciled on it in white in every Coke machine on the base. Then called up the Provost Marshal and told him the whole base had just blown up.”

Parker shook his head. “That’s beautiful. So now they’re bright and alert. Just to make things tougher.”

Fusco said. “We wouldn’t count on them being slack anyway. It doesn’t change anything.” He still had a small fear that Parker would suddenly decide the job was no good after all, and up and walk out. Parker was capable of something like that, if he didn’t like the set-up.

But it wasn’t going to happen now, not over the gate guards. Parker nodded agreement with what Fusco had said, and turned to Stan, saying, “What time does the payroll get to the base?”

“To the base, or to our office?”

“Both. Base first.”

“The plane lands at nine-twenty. The money gets into the finance office no later than quarter to ten.”

“When does it start getting split up?”

“Right away. Six guys work on it all day long.”

“They work after hours?”

Stan grinned. “No, they get it done by five. I know, I’m one of the six, all we want is to be done and out of there by five o’clock.”

“Where’s this happen?”

Stan picked up one of the photos on the coffee table and handed it over to Parker. “In the Major’s office there. Where the vault is. See those two long tables along the left wall? That’s where we sit.”

“And the two boxes with the money?”

“In front,” Stan said. “Next to the glass wall here.”

”Is that glass bulletproof?”

“No, it’s just regular plate glass.”

“But the windows back here are barred.”

Stan shrugged. “That’s the way the Air Force does things.”

Ellen came quietly in at that point, carrying a cup of coffee for herself, and sat unobtrusively in the chair in the corner.

Parker said, “Besides the six men working on the payroll who else is upstairs then?”

“Everybody who works up there,” Stan said. “About twenty people.”

“Anybody else in the room with the money?”

“The Major. And Lieutenant Wormley and Captain Henley. They both check out .45’s from Supply in the morning and stand around and play guard.”

“Describe them.”

“Wormley and Henley?” Stan shrugged. “Wormley’s like his name. A little creep, fresh out of ROTC. A nothing.”

“What about Henley?”

“He’s supposed to be an alcoholic,” Stan said. “I don’t know. He lives with his family in the dependent housing area, he’s got lots of kids, he’s in his forties, I hear he was passed over for major once, he likes to reminisce about when he was in Europe in the Second World War.”

“Does he know how to use a gun?”

Stan shrugged. “Beats me. All officers are supposed to be checked out on the .45. I figure Wormley just went to the firing range and shut his eyes and plugged away till they told him to stop. Maybe Henley did do some stuff in the Big War, I don’t know.”

Fusco had been listening, trying to figure out the characters of the men from Stan’s descriptions. He was pretty good at that, at working out what kind of a man somebody was and guessing what that kind of man would do in such a situation. Now he said, “That’s the one to look out for—Henley.”

Stan didn’t understand. He looked at Fusco and said, “The war was a long time ago.”

”Not for anything he learned in the war,” Fusco said. “If he‘s a passed-over captain, maybe twenty-five years in the service, got a family, drinks too much, maybe he’s out to prove himself. Maybe he’d like to be a hero and make major.”

Stan squinted, thinking about it. “Henley? You just could be right. He does get belligerent sometimes.”

Parker said, “What about the Major? Who’s he?”

“Major Creighton,” Stan said. “Kind of a nice guy, grandfather type, easygoing, got a little white mustache. The WAFs say he’s always trying to cop a feel, but all I know is he sits in his office and looks at everybody working and doesn’t seem to give much of a damn.”

Parker said, “No other guards?”

“Not during the day. They come on at five o’clock, when we quit. I think they work two shifts, they must change around midnight or something. I’m not sure how that works.”

“All right. What time does the money leave the next morning?”

“First thing. About five or ten after eight. It goes down into the armored car and that’s the end of it.”

“The question is,” said Fusco, “do we want to go after it in the daytime the day before, or wait until night?”

“We can’t decide that yet,” Parker said.

“Yes we can,” said Stan. “You’ll have to do it in the daytime. You don’t dare try to move around that base at night. Besides, in the daytime all the guards are Wormley and Henley. Whatever Henley’s like, he’s an amateur at being a guard. At night, you’ve got APs to tackle, inside and out.”

“If we do it in the daytime,” Parker told him, “and there’s static, you’ll have to play it like we aren’t on your team. And we’ll have to play it that way, too.”

‘You won’t have to gun me down,” Stan said, grinning.

“I know that. But you want to be there in uniform when we do it, with twenty witnesses around?”

“I’ll just stand there with my hands up,” Stan said, and stuck his hands into the air.

Fusco said, “Stan’s right, the daytime is our only chance. At least, that’s what I think.”

Parker seemed to be considering it. He picked up a couple of the photos, looked at them, put them down. “A daylight haul is tougher,” he said. “Let’s let it ride for a while. We’ll figure either way, day or night, we’re going to need three more men, including a driver. That’s six men, equal shares. You say there’s four hundred grand in the kitty?”

Stan said, “About that. A little more, a little less, it changes every payday.”

“About sixty-five thousand each,” Fusco said.

“We can build up an A string for that,” Parker said. He looked at Fusco. “You got any ideas?”

Fusco had. “There was a guy I met on the inside,” he said. “He was only in because he was finked on. He’d be out by now. He looked solid and dependable, and he knew a lot of the same guys we do.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jake Kengle.”

Parker shook his head. “I don’t know him. You know how to get in touch with him?”

“He gave me an address before I got out.”

“Give him a try. You know Philly Webb?”

“Sure,” said Fusco. “He drove for me once in Norfolk, he’s a good man.”

“I’ll contact him,” Parker said.

Fusco said, “What about that foreign guy? Salsa. He still around?”

“Dead,” Parker said, “Couple of years ago.” From her corner, Ellen surprisingly said, “Bill Stockton’s always good.”

“That’s right,” Fusco said. To Parker he said, “You remember Stockton, don’t you? Tall, skinny as a flagpole, black hair straight up on top of his head. Sharpshooter.”

“I remember him,” Parker said. “You want to contact him, or should I?”

“I’ll do it,” Fusco said. “You see about financing.”

Stan said, “Financing? What’s that?”

Fusco explained to him: “We’ll have expenses beforehand. Guns maybe. A car, other things. We get financing from somebody outside, he gets back double if the caper works.”

“Why don’t we finance ourselves?”

Parker said, “If the money man is involved it tends to make for trouble. He starts acting like he’s got extra votes. It’s better to have it done on the outside.”

Fusco said, “The reason I thought you ought to handle that, Parker, money men tend to shy away from somebody been on the inside. Superstitious or something.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Parker said. To Stan he said, “How can we mount a night watch on the South Gate, same as what Fusco just did?”

“That’s easy,” Stan said. “I just sit there in a car. Nobody’ll bother about me.”

“We’ll need it from eleven-thirty tonight till about four tomorrow morning,” Parker said.

“Tonight?” Stan’s grin turned pained. “I forgot,” he said, “about never volunteering.”

Fusco said, “I’ll come long if you want, Stan, help keep you company.”

Stan pointed a finger at him. “You just volunteered, pal,” he said.

Parker said, “One of you can drive me back to the motel first, and come pick me up in the morning.”

Ellen said, “You could stay here tonight.” There was nothing suggestive in her voice, or in her face when Fusco looked at her, nothing but a flat statement and an expressionless face, but Fusco felt the shock go through the room, felt Stan tensing, felt himself going taut, and he was amazed at how relieved he was when Parker answered, just as flatly, “I’d rather stick to the routine.”