The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake

He dropped the thirteen with enough back spin on the cue ball to practically put it inside his shirt, and the Major said, “A truck?”

    “We’re going to need one,” Kelp said. He sighted on the nine. “And it can’t be hot, or I’d go out and get one myself.”

    “But a truck,” said the Major. “That’s an expensive item.”

    “Yes, sir. But if things work out, you’ll be able to sell it back when we’re done with it.”

    “This will take a while,” the Major said. He scanned the list. “The other things should be no problem. You’re going to scale a wall, eh?”

    “That’s what they’ve got there,” Kelp said. He hit the cue ball, which hit the nine, and everything dropped. Kelp shook his head and put up the cue.

    The Major was still frowning at the list. “This truck doesn’t have to be fast?”

    “We don’t want to outrun anybody in it, no.”

    “So it doesn’t have to be new. A used truck.”

    “With a clean registration we can show,” Kelp said.

    “What if I rent one?”

    “If you can rent a truck that it won’t get back to you if things go wrong, you go right ahead. Just remember what we’re using it for.”

    “I’ll remember,” the Major said. He glanced at the pool table. “If you’re finished with your game …”

    “Unless you’d like to try it with me.”

    “I’m sorry,” the Major said with a dead smile, “I don’t play.”

Chapter 6
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    From his cell window Alan Greenwood could see the blacktopped exercise yard and the whitewashed outer wall of Utopia Park Prison. Beyond that wall hunkered the small Long Island community of Utopia Park, a squat flat Monopoly board of housing, shopping centers, schools, churches, Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, and orthopedic shoe stores, bisected by the inevitable rails of the Long Island Railroad. Inside the wall sat and stood and scratched those adjudged to be dangerous to that Monopoly board, including the gray–garbed group of shuffling men out there in the exercise yard at the moment and Alan Greenwood, who was watching them and thinking how much they looked like people waiting for a subway. Next to the cell window someone had scratched into the cement wall the question ‘What did the White Rabbit know?’ Greenwood was yet to figure that one out.
    Utopia Park Prison was a county jug, but most of its inmates belonged to the state, the county possessing three newer jugs of its own and no longer needing this one. The overflow of various state prisons was here, plus various charged men from upstate who’d won change of venue for their trials, plus some special cases like Greenwood. No one was here for long, no one ever would be here long, so the joint lacked the usual complex society prisoners normally set up within the walls to keep themselves in practice for civilization. No pecking order, in other words.

    Greenwood was spending most of his time at the window because he liked neither his cell nor his cellmate. Both were gray, scabrous, dirty, and old. The cell merely existed, but the cellmate consumed a lot of the hours in picking at things between his toes and then smelling his fingertips. Greenwood preferred to watch the exercise yard and the wall and the sky. He had been there nearly a month now, and his patience was wearing thin.

    The door clanged. Greenwood turned around, saw his cellmate on the top bunk smelling his fingertips, and saw a guard standing in the doorway. The guard looked like the cellmate’s older brother, but at least he had his shoes on. He said, “Greenwood. Visitor.”

    “Goody.”

    Greenwood went out, the door clanged shut again, Greenwood and the guard walked down the metal corridor and down the metal spiral stairs and along the other metal corridor and through two doors, both of which had to be unlocked by people on the outside and both of which were locked again in his wake. This was followed by a plastic corridor painted green and then a room painted light brown