To have his own conviction of the impregnability of the C&I International vault confirmed by Judson Blint — out of the mouths of babes, as it were — merely put the rat poison on the cake. It was all over, in the immortal words of Charles Willeford, except the paperwork.The others around the table didn’t want to believe it. “There’s always a way to do anything,” Stan insisted.“And if there isn’t,” Kelp said, “you make one up.”“Exactly.”“So make one up,” Tiny suggested.The silence that ensued was brief but telling, before Stan said, “Well, you can’t do a bomb scare.”“Nobody,” Tiny pointed out, “said you could.”“The idea with a bomb scare,” Stan went on, “is they evacuate the building, then you can do what you gotta do, but it doesn’t work that way. You try a bomb scare around this town, the building doesn’t evacuate, it fills up to the brim, with cops, firemen, insurance adjusters, short con artists, farmers’ markets, and documentary filmmakers.
