The Name of the Game is Death by Dan Marlowe Page A

blaster of the old dynamite and nitro school, when they still carried the nitro in flasks. He wasn't afraid to admit the world had passed him by. Forget the gangs, he told me. Forget the big, involved jobs that get hung up on the first weak link. Two good men is all it takes, he insisted. When you move, smash them. Never let up on the pressure. Never take a backward step once you're committed.
    I listened, and I learned. While I was up in the lumber camp getting the smell of the FBI blown off me, I worked it all out down to the last few decimal places. I divorced myself for all time from the vault-blowing jobs and the armored-truck jobs. That was the hard way. A fast, clean operation: that's what I wanted. Hit-and-run. Smash-and-grab. Give them a look for a hundred-fifty seconds, average, with the disadvantage of surprise.
    When I left the West Coast I drove to Atlantic City and looked up Bosco Sheerin. Bosco liked the sound of what I had to say. I was younger than he was, but he was a happy-go-lucky type, and he made no objection to my calling the plays. We had a run that was peaches-and cream until one night in Philadelphia the husband of Bosco's blonde girl friend came home early. Bosco wound up on a morgue slab with foreign matter in his gizzard, and I needed a new partner.
    I picked up someone whenever I needed a man. I'm no big liver. I had a shack in Colorado at timberline on the road up to Pike's Peak. In June it would snow half the mornings, and in August there were still drifts in the backyard. I had another place near the Vermont-New Hampshire border on the Connecticut River. If I was there in August, I'd drive over to Saratoga and make the race meeting. Usually I spent part of every winter in New Orleans.
    I went a year without turning a trick after Ed Morris was killed in a drunken argument in a bucket of blood in Santa Fe. I didn't need money. Then one night I met Bunny in a tavern in Newark. I watched him for a month, and I liked what I saw. He could handle himself, and he had the big advantage that he could pass as a deaf mute. He even knew the finger language. He'd been small-time before I picked him up, but he did as he was told. He had complete confidence in me after our first job. Bunny—
    It was a damn shame.
    I couldn't escape the feeling that I-was going to need another new partner.
    I entered the Iatched-back doors of the Suncoast Trust Company and approached a gray-haired woman near the railing which enclosed the executive desks. "I'd like to see Mr. Craig," I said, handing her a Chet Arnold business card. "He won't know me. If he's busy, I'll wait."
    "Will you have a seat, please, Mr. Arnold?" She rose and walked to the desk of a big man in a dark suit. She placed my card in front of him and said a few words. I gave him a Hash of the double-bitted ax in its straps on the side of the tool-kit when Craig looked up at me, and his glance lingered momentarily before he returned to the work on his desk. I sat down to wait.
    The exterior of the bank was old-fashioned but the interior showed signs of a recent facelift. The indirect fluorescent lighting was bright without being harsh. The tellers' cages were behind head-high glass panels. The only bars visible were in the rear around the vault with its huge door gaping open.
    A safe prediction nowadays is that a cosmetic job on a bank's interior will result in the appearance of a lot more glass at the expense of a lot less steel. They've made it a little too easy. The pendulum's got to swing the other way. People shoving notes through tellers' windows and walking out with paper bags full of cash are beginning to get under the skin of bank architects, to say nothing of the bonding companies.
    Not too long ago knocking off a bank on a smash-and-grab was tough tissue. I believe it will be again. It goes in cycles. Now the thinking is positively no violence inside the bank. Whatever the bank robber wants, give it to him. Most likely it will be recovered, and if