The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [30]
The garbage can box, about the size of three stacked steamer trunks, was painted dark green to blend in better with the shrubs it fronted. It had been planted parallel to the sidewalk and thus afforded the ideal hiding place for Ellis’s purpose. Settling in behind it, he half wondered why some preceding mugger hadn’t thought to leave a garden chair for convenience’s sake.
Not that he would have used it for long. Barely two minutes after taking cover, he heard a slow-moving car approaching from the direction of the firehouse and poked his head out to see an ancient rusty Toyota come to a stop at the curb before the bank. From it emerged an older man with a well-cared-for belly and a scraggly beard who took his time becoming upright. After casting glances up and down the street, apparently having considered what was just about to happen, the man extracted a swollen, zippered bank bag from the dashboard, circled the front of the car, his blue-jeaned knees flashing briefly in the headlights, and trudged toward the granite steps leading up to the bank’s front door and the night deposit box mounted into the wall beside it.
This was Ellis’s moment. Mel had told him he was the diversion, which could have meant merely stepping out into the open and asking for a light or the time of day. But one of Mel’s trademarks was to leave no witnesses, or at least none who could later identify any member of the raiding party—a lesson Ellis had taken pains to remember. It was also why he had made sure to leave no footprints behind in the soft earth of his hiding place, choosing only hard surfaces to step on.
So rather than show himself, he merely groaned loudly from where he was.
He heard the man’s heavy tread stop.
“Help,” Ellis moaned.
“Who’s there?” His voice was clearly frightened.
“I’m hurt . . . can’t move.”
Ellis could feel the older man’s fear like a cold fog filling the air. “They really hurt me,” he added for good measure, hoping to appeal to what he thought was a fireman’s natural credo.
It worked. He peeked around the lower edge of his hiding place to see not only his prey yielding to temptation but Mel’s shadow detaching itself from the bush behind him and approaching like a spirit.
Without word or warning, Mel smacked the old man across the nape of the neck with a weighted sap. His victim had barely crumpled to the ground before Mel quickly pulled a slipknotted pillowcase over his head to blind him.
Ellis was momentarily stunned. The man lay facedown on the sidewalk like a dropped walrus. Never before had Mel hit one of their targets like that. That was the whole point of the pillowcase—to render all violence unnecessary and lessen the penalty if they were ever caught. Admittedly, they’d never attempted a haul like this before, having just mugged people for wallets or stashes of dope—and then only lowlifes who wouldn’t go to the cops. But the trick with the bag was key. It made the theft almost comical, leaving their victims twirling around like errant adult partygoers, trying to snatch their blindfolds away. This brought back his earlier apprehension about Mel’s handling of the armory guard.
Ellis bolted from cover and checked for a pulse as Mel collected the money bag.
“He alive?” Mel didn’t sound particularly concerned.
Ellis nodded. Both men quickly checked for any movement up and down the block, then ran across the street to the sound of the darkened truck starting up.
Ellis hadn’t quite closed the passenger door before Nancy began rolling just slowly enough not to burn rubber.
“You didn’t kill him, did you?” she asked, echoing Ellis’s alarm. “You hit him awful hard.”
Mel was laughing, already working on the money bag’s flimsy lock with a pair of pliers. “Nah. Piece of cake. The old fuck’s had hangovers worse than that—I guarantee.”
Ellis’s eyes were on Mel’s progress with the lock, his curiosity about their haul tempering his anxiety—they hadn’t killed the guy, after all. And much as he hated to admit it,