The bastard abused her even in sleep, Eddie thought, tiptoeing across to his own door. Inside, he pulled off his jacket and shirt and flung them over a chair and sat down on the bed to unlace his shoes. They were tennis sneakers and quite shabby; the laces had knots in them and Eddie had to pluck with his nails until they loosened enough for him to shuck off the shoes.

The money in Stolz’s room would buy a hell of a lot of shoes. A million other things besides, too. Eddie threw the tennis sneakers under the chair and sat thinking of what he would buy with his share of the loot when they pulled off the job. There would be a tremendous amount of cash. Enough for dozens of suits, shirts, sharp new shoes, a car. An operation for his mother, removing the ugly balloon at the base of her throat. Clothes for her, all kinds of silk dresses, a fur coat, new furniture for the house if she wanted it. And all this, dazzling as it was, would only scratch the surface.

An odd uneasiness stirred in his mind.

It was hard to conceive of all the possibilities wrapped up in the bundle of money in Stolz’s wardrobe. When you were used to a dollar or two, even a hundred seemed more than you could count. A thousand was fabulous. With five thousand you’d feel like doing something silly, maybe, just to be spending, something crazy like buying a gold-plated switch blade . . . or taking dancing lessons so you could do fancy steps better than anybody . . . or buying all silk shirts with monograms . . . His imagination sought for other images, roamed in a dazzle of overwhelming splendor.

Under the dazzle the uneasiness increased. Eddie put his finger on it. The natural, crazy things you did with a lot of money were the things he and Skip had to be careful not to do.

They needed a plan. He hunted around through the cloud of dissatisfaction and apprehension in his mind and decided that what worried him was Skip’s apparently deliberate lack of planning. Skip was either unable or unwilling to choose a course of action and stick to it. He wanted to improvise, to make his decisions when the time came for them; and even Eddie could see the danger in it.

Eddie roused himself, shed his pants, snapped off the light, and crawled under the thin covers. He stretched his body on the bed. To hell with worrying. This job was Skip’s baby. Let Skip do the worrying.