Free Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 by Cops (and) Robbers (missing pg 22-23) (v1.1)

workday, I
don’t even like to look in that direction. But what am I going to do? You get
married, you have kids, you commit yourself to a mortgage on a house, payments
on the car and the furniture; all of a sudden there aren’t any more decisions
you can make. I couldn’t decide tomorrow morning to stop being a New York City cop. Give up my seniority, my civil-service
status? Give up my years toward the pension? And where would I find another job
at the same pay? And would it be any better?
                 You
go along and go along, and it seems as though you’re running your own life, and
it never occurs to you that your life has gradually closed around you like a
Venus flytrap and it’s running you.
                 During
this whole period of time, while the idea of the robbery was still theoretical,
I found myself remembering over and over what that hippie pusher had said,
about all of us having started out different from this. It’s true. I'd find
myself sometimes doing things, or saying things, or just thinking things, and Fd suddenly look around at myself and not believe it was me.
If I could have looked ahead when I was ten years old to the man I was going to
turn out to be, would I have been pleased?
                 And
I just have this vague feeling that it isn’t necessary, that this isn’t who I
have to be. Joe and me both, my partner Ed, all of us, we’ve narrowed ourselves down, we’ve made ourselves blunt and tough because
that’s the only way to survive. But what if we were in a different kind of
setting? Even that hippie was a ten-year-old kid once. But we all of us get
together in that city like hungry animals jammed in together in a pit, and we
beat on each other because that’s all we know how to do, and after a while all
of us have turned ourselves into people you don’t want to bring your kids up
among.
                 So
you sit in the car on the way to work, and you fantasize a million-dollar
robbery, life in a Caribbean island, out and away from all this lousy
stuff. They make movies about robberies, and people go to them and love them.
Or watch them when they show up on television. And every once
in a while somebody tries it in real life.
                 A
flashlight was coming down the drive from the house. I tensed up, seeing it
come. I could still turn around and walk away from this, let it stay in the
land of fantasy. I think it was only the idea of facing Joe that kept me from
doing it.
                 There
were several people behind the flashlight, I couldn’t
be sure how many. The flashlight didn’t point at me at all now; first it
pointed at the ground, and then it pointed at the gate as it was being
unlocked. A voice said “Come in.” It wasn’t the gravel voice from before, but a
different one, smoother, oilier.
                 I
stepped in, and they shut the gate behind me. I was frisked, fast and expert,
and then hands held my arms just above the elbows and I was walked up to the
house.
                 I
didn’t get to use the front entrance. They took me around the side and into an
entrance with snow shovels and overcoats and overshoes in the small room
inside. We went through that into an empty kitchen, and they frisked me again,
more thoroughly, going through all my pockets. There were three of them, and
two searched me while the other stood off a ways behind me. They were dressed
in suits and ties, but they were unmistakably hoods.
                 When
they finished with the second search, one of the friskers went out of the room The other two and I waited. I looked around the kitchen,
which was like the kind you see in a fairly small restaurant. Big
chopping-block table in the middle, with copper pans hanging from racks over
it. Stainless-steel ovens and grill and sinks. Apparently Mr. Vigano did a lot of entertaining.
                 It
had occurred to me there was a