Dog Day Afternoon by Patrick Mann

Author:Patrick Mann [Mann, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Thriller
Publisher: Dell Books
Published: 1975-07-09T07:00:00+00:00

13

Moretti was ready to turn the whole mess over to Baker and walk away in disgrace. None of this showed in his face, of course, nor in his voice. He had been a cop too long to let anything—even the major failure of his life—show to the outside world. But the defeat was clear enough to him, and soon it would be just as clear to the rest of the law-enforcement people there.

To begin with, they had stopped answering the telephone in the bank. This had happened after two more calls, during which Moretti had tried to reason with the man in the chino pants and been hung up on.

This meant that Moretti’s plan of easing the bandits out by reassuring them, soft-talking them into the open, had no chance to move ahead, no chance to succeed.

Secondly, a tremendous amount of attention was now focused on this particular event. It was almost as if, on a broiling hot day in August, when everyone should have been under the shower or at an air-cooled movie, they had nothing better to do than devote all their attention to what was, so far, a rather minor bank job.

This had the effect of magnifying every wrong move Moretti made, of amplifying each weakness, each hesitation. He knew he’d made plenty of mistakes so far, but the knowledge that all of New York could see him goofing up only exaggerated his all-too-human tendency to guess wrong.

Not only had more police been summoned, but several more carloads of Feebies were on hand. In addition, Holmes Protection people were clamoring to get in on the act, because their alarm system was supposed to protect the bank. Two insurance-company investigators were flashing their meaningless badges. The whole thing had taken on the proportions of a bad dream.

Overhead, helicopters hovered like man-eating bugs, ready to pounce. The street was full of officious police with bullhorns yelling at the several hundred bystanders who had gathered behind police barricades at each end of the block. Angry store-owners, losing an afternoon and evening of business, were crying for fast action.

Moretti’s own captain was threatening to take charge of the case and dump Moretti unceremoniously on his ass if he didn’t show results fast. Television vans had pulled up behind the crowds at both ends of the block, and photographers with the portable creepy-peepie cameras were moving into the combat area on the strength of passes and ten-dollar bills slipped to cops supposedly guarding the barriers.

Reporters from television, the newspapers, and the wire services were swarming in and out of storefronts along both sides of the street, trying to stake out telephones, into which they poured a steady stream of non-reportage, none of it meaning much, because nothing, actually, was happening.

Therein lay Moretti’s defeat. By now something should have happened. Otherwise this was nothing more than a dry-run rehearsal for remote camera crews, crowd-control squads, and human-interest reporters, getting their adjectives oiled up and ready to pour.

The whole thing, so far, had been for everyone else but him, Moretti noted.

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