by J. A. Dauber
An armored-car robbery is harder than it looks in the movies. Mayhem had the hardware to get through the armor—I mean, I had missiles—but we would run the risk of blowing up the money and the people driving it, and I had made a commitment not to hurt anyone. Ever again.
Promises are easy to make.
I didn’t tell Mr. Jones about my decision, though. We were talking more—getting more comfortable with each other, I think, or, at least, I was getting more comfortable around him. Telling him about Rebecca, about Caroline (although not about my decision to let her in on Mayhem…I wasn’t that much of an idiot), about my mom…. And he was this patient, listening voice in my ear. I mean, sometimes a little preachy, but overall, patient, very patient, and even understanding. There could be a bunch of time between practice maneuvers, either setting up or getting to the next mock target destination, and so we kept talking.
Well, I talked. He said things, and they were the right things, but when you boiled them down they didn’t tell very much. Certainly not about himself. But even about my dad.
For example, I asked him again and again, as we were going over my routes, to tell me exactly what he was going to do with the money if I was able to pull this off. How it was going to help him. How it helped us figure out where my dad was. And each time he would say the same thing, not frustrated, not angry, just with the same infuriating calm. “Let’s get the money first. Then we’ll talk about it.”
I knew a we’ll see when I heard it. And we’ll see was close enough to no to convince me I was doing the right thing, going behind his back to find out what I needed to know.
Back to the armored car. Other downsides to the idea: It’s not like banks make announcements about what time the cars are going to show up. And I didn’t have the accomplices to create one of those choreographed multi-car barriers you see in the movies.
Those were the minuses. The big plus was the extremely powerful flying armored suit with world-class radar and tracking mechanisms.
Most armored-car robberies happen right around the bank, which is both good and stupid. The stupid part is that there are lots of things that can go wrong near the bank—there are pedestrians, police stopping by, your getaway car getting stuck in traffic…. The good reason for doing it right there, though, is that it’s very hard to stop a bulletproof car once it’s speeding up to eighty miles an hour on the highway. And if you somehow manage to accomplish it, it’s next to impossible to get off the highway with the cash and to your hiding place without being picked up by a dozen surveillance cameras.
Again, though, flying armored suit.
And so one bright Tuesday, at approximately 1:42 in the afternoon, I became a supercriminal.
I’d been lurking at five thousand feet above the bank on and off over the past few days, watching for the armored car through the spyscopes, waiting for it to pull up to the curb. Once I spotted it, I locked on to its particular engine signature—the specific chemical composition of its exhaust since no two vehicles’ exhaust is the same, another fact I learned from Mr. Jones—then put the suit on autopilot to track it out of the city so I didn’t accidentally lose it in traffic or something.
I’d practiced a lot more with the autopilot feature. After Jimmy Anderson.
* * *
Later, I heard the interview with the armored car’s driver. He said he was driving on the highway, thirty or forty minutes out from the bank, when there was a sudden bump. He thought he’d run over a deer or something, but he was finishing a fourteen-hour shift, so he kept driving. Next time he looked out the window, he was ten feet off the ground. And then he was jerking and twisting around, and then he knocked his head against the door and passed out. He had been sure he was going to die, but when he woke up, he was safe on the ground, and the truck had had its doors torn off and all the money was gone. The police investigated whether it was an inside job, if he’d been involved somehow, but dropped that pretty quickly. Because the security video from the highway—it was a private toll road, it turned out, with cameras stationed every few thousand feet—corroborated his story. Because it showed me.
That was his story. Here’s mine.
I turned off the autopilot and swooped down toward the road, ready to do one of those Superman things where you pick the truck up from underneath. Then I was going to fly it to somewhere else, let the driver flee in terror, and ransack the truck. That’s what I’d told Mr. Jones I was going to do, and he seemed fine with it.
It all went sideways as soon as I grabbed the rear bumper, which immediately broke off—the bump the driver felt.
I stopped dead in the middle of the highway. Just floating there, about five feet off the ground, staring at the bumper in my hands, watching the car drive away.
I ground my teeth and threw away the bumper. My plan had been to gently toss it onto the side of the road, but I guess I was frustrated and not paying attention, and so I missed. It ended up sticking out of the asphalt right in the middle of one of the opposite lanes, like a fork in a piece of pie.
And I didn’t want to cause any traffic accidents or hurt anybody, so I had to go over there and dig it out….
The point is, by the time I finished cleaning up that mess, the armored car was a mile away.
Of course, that wasn’t much of a problem. I caught up within a minute—a minute I used to figure out how to get a better grip. It involved lifting and getting underneath.
But it turns out holding a truck which has a lot of momentum is hard. It tends to want to get away from you—especially when you didn’t get the best hold to begin with. It wobbled—thankfully the driver was wearing his seat belt—and there was a terrifying moment when I thought I was going to drop it from thirty feet up. I didn’t know whether the thing would squish or burst into flames or both.
It ended up okay. Because it was an armored truck, it didn’t break apart, although I did a lot of nasty stuff to its underside as I tried to get a better grip. I was able to hold on until I got it about a quarter mile off to the side of the road.
And then I heard the noises coming from inside the truck.
Not from the driver’s seat—that guy was out like a light. From inside the truck itself.
With a sick thud in my stomach, I realized I’d never noticed, during all my scouting runs, that there were guards inside the truck itself, right next to the money. This I could handle, though. I punched a small hole in the car and tossed in a gas grenade. Waited a few seconds, avoiding the bullet fire coming through the hole, and, when the pistol wobbled and fell back in, waited another ten seconds, then ripped off the back door. Two guards, out cold.
And then another problem I hadn’t thought through: carrying the money. I’d figured the cash would be in one large container, but it was in a bunch of canvas sacks. I couldn’t carry more than my armored hands could hold.
After quickly searching the armored car for something, I had an idea. I took the belts off the unconscious security guards and rigged a strap to hold a few extra bags around my waist. It wasn’t a perfect solution, since one of the bags slipped in midair. I guess it got recovered, but I don’t know that for sure. Maybe there’s some guy living off the interstate with dye stains on his hands and a new Maserati. Who knows.
I had realized—that is, Mr. Jones had told me—that the armored car would be equipped with an alarm system to send a signal to the police as soon as the car left its planned path. I heard the sirens, but they weren’t close enough to be anything for me to worry about. Not by a long shot.
I’d committed my first federal crime. And, although there was room for improvement, I’d pretty much gotten away with it.
* * *
Mr. Jones met me to pick up the cash himself that first time.
He’d arranged a rendezvous point; nothing flashy, nothing dramatic. The opposite, in fact. It was about a quarter mile from a landfill, one so big I imagined I could smell it through the
suit. (I couldn’t, really. The suit filters out everything and recirculates air through some process that—like almost everything else about the suit—I don’t completely understand.)
I’d snagged an empty recycling bin in my neighborhood big enough to hold the money the day before. He looked inside it, now filled with all those fifties and hundreds, and he whistled, and he laughed, and I stood there, in my giant supervillain armor, and felt pleased and proud. He was happy. I had done a good job. At that moment, it was pure and simple.
Amazing what having a dad gone for seven years and a mom checked out for most of that time will do to you, huh?
But then, all of a sudden, his face changed. Well, not his face, which I couldn’t see through the Mickey Mouse mask he was wearing, but his posture. It looked angry. Suspicious.
“This is light,” he said. “You’re missing sixty thousand dollars. At least.”
Even then, I think, I wondered how he knew. I flushed—which, of course, he couldn’t see—and launched into an explanation about the bag slipping in midair.
He listened to me, I held my breath, and then he shrugged, the ears of his mask flapping back and forth as he did. “Bailey,” he said. “It’s not that I’m mad. It’s just that every dollar you bring in gets us that much closer to finding your dad. It’s that simple.”
I was beginning to think that maybe it wasn’t that simple.
I’d been pretty sure Mr. Jones wasn’t going to let me keep any of the money I stole. Whether he was going to scare me by saying it was for my own good, or guilt me by saying he needed it for my dad, the money was all going to go to him. And who knew what would happen to it after that.
I didn’t know what Mr. Jones was after, but I was positive there was something else going on. Maybe he was doing something different with the money besides using it to find my dad. And I needed to find out what.
Like I said before, I thought I could skim some off the top without his noticing. But just in case he did notice—and if he did, it meant maybe things were skeevier than I’d thought—I’d better have a cover story.
The story I just told you. Pretty convincing, right?
Caroline had certainly thought so. When we came up with it.
NOW. FRIDAY. 9:47 P.M.
Hold on. I think my foot might be on fire.
Nope. Good.
Maybe I can take my mind off things by shifting some more rubble and seeing if I die.
Still here. I got most of the rubble away from my face, which is a plus, but I did it by shifting it onto my legs, so I’m still stuck. But my head and arms are free, which is good because that’s where most of the weaponry is. I can be ready when the army comes for me.
Don’t think like that. This isn’t a last will and testament.
Isn’t it?
ALSO A MONTH AGO
(BUT BEFORE THE ARMORED-CAR ROBBERY)
“I knew it!” Caroline said.
Although, of course, she hadn’t had a clue.
How could she? How could anybody?
Pretty soon we established that it had just seemed like the right thing to say, under the circumstances. She wanted to give me the impression she was on my side, no matter what. But she hadn’t had a clue about what had been making me act so strange.
Actually, she had thought—and this was close to the mark, when you think about it—that I had found out my dad was in prison. And that my mom had been lying about it to protect me.
“Well,” I said, “he’s a prisoner—so I guess it’s true.”
I know how ridiculous this sounds. But it didn’t feel that way. Especially since our conversation was taking place in the May-cave, which is what Caroline called the lab. And which was just perfect.
Of course, it took her a while to process. Especially since I started the whole thing by calling her in the middle of the night, as soon as I got back from the Mr.-Jones-told-me-I-had-to-start-committing-felonies meeting. I asked her to skip school the next day and come to my house. Will explain everything here, I said. Promise.
She texted back that she’d come as soon as school was over, which was no good—the window between her getting here and my mom coming back from work was just too tight. Trust me, I said. It’ll be worth it.
Trust me. That’s what I told her. To trust me. And she did.
Anyway.
She did it—skipped school—which was a big thing for her. This was not normal Caroline behavior, to put it mildly. But she showed up, and said that this had better be worth it, and I told her that I was pretty sure she would think it was.
I could have tried something else. I could have tried cutting her off, kicking her out, letting the chips fall where they may. I could have tried half a dozen other things. But I didn’t. Maybe it was just the easiest way out. But maybe—I’ve wondered this, and I know I’ll never know, not for sure—maybe I just wanted to share my secret with someone who wasn’t a homicidal-genius nutcase.
By the time we got down the ladder to the May-cave she was speechless. Ironically, the thing that was the least impressive was the Mayhem suit itself: it was dearmorized, so at first she didn’t realize what it was.
And then, after a minute, she did.
“That’s…that’s it?” she said. “It looks so…wrinkly.”
I started to try to explain about the armorizing process, but she was lost in thought. And then she said, “Are you, like…like, his henchman, or something?”
I couldn’t help myself, it was too much. I laughed. Which got her offended, and confused, and finally, I just took a deep breath and went ahead. “I’m not Mayhem’s henchman,” I said. “I’m Mayhem. And, uh, also his son.”
And then I got into the suit. And bench-pressed one of the lab tables, for show.
She stood there for a minute. “Wow,” she said. “I mean, wow. Mayhem. It’s really, you know—it’s really Mayhem.” And then, small and quiet: “Why did you hurt Jimmy Anderson like that?”
And that was it, I mean, that just let something loose in me, and I started crying—not just about Jimmy Anderson, but about my dad, my life, everything. Caroline sat there for a second, and then she said, “Is there a box of tissues in your secret supervillain hideout?” and I snorted through the tears. Clearly, everything was going to be okay.
Shows what I knew. But I told her everything, from beginning to end. Explained about Jimmy Anderson—to which she responded, grim and serious, “You’re an idiot, Bailey,” and I couldn’t disagree—and that my dad was the original Mayhem, and how his disappearance was actually a kidnapping. About trying to get him back from the Bloody Front. Even about Mr. Jones, and how he wanted me to rob banks to help him find my dad. I said that I thought something was fishy with him, to which she said, “Fishy? You think a grown-up who wears a rubber Halloween mask to meet with a kid is fishy? I guess that’s one way of putting it,” which made me feel better, too.
She walked over to the Mayhem suit and stroked it. “It’s like a sweatshirt,” she said. “Unbelievable.” Then she came back over to me and gave me a big hug. “I’m so, so, sorry, Bailey,” she said. “All of this—and no one else knows, no one to talk to.”
I couldn’t respond, so I just nodded.
And then she said it.
“Can I help?”
* * *
She sure could. Because I needed a plan to find out more about him, and for that, I needed money.
And so the planning sessions in the sky with Mr. Jones were matched by Caroline conversations on the ground. During free periods, in whispers, and in coded notes passed in class. Paper only, as Caroline pointed out that Mr. Jones could be monitoring my phone. Which made me realize I wasn’t nearly as clever about any of this as I had thought I was.
We came up with a plan. Well, we came up with two dozen plans, but most of them were stupid, or unworkable, or would have put my dad in more danger
, or had one of a thousand other problems.
The plan we came up with was straightforward. In fact, it was identical to the one I had made with Mr. Jones, with one crucial difference.
I was very, very, very careful to make sure not a single bag of cash slipped out of my hands. Not one.
Which was why there was $62,350 hidden under scrub brush in the ravine about ten miles from my house.
* * *
I don’t know if Mr. Jones could tell I was holding my breath after I lied to him—I was inside the suit, after all. Had he seen through our plan? Was he going to call me on it? Yell at me for being careless?
What he did was change the subject. “Asked out Rebecca yet?”
Which, as he well knew, I had not. God knows I had talked about it enough with him. Both because I always had things to say about her, and because it helped steer the subject away from any other friends in my life. I was afraid if we talked about Caroline I’d give myself—ourselves—away.
But I still hadn’t thought of the right way to get myself into Rebecca’s good graces. Part of it was the spectacular, traumatizing failure of my last attempt. But it was more than that…it was the knowledge that it needed to be something special. Something grand. And something fast: winter formal was a few weeks away, and I thought that was a good go-big-or-go-home moment.
It was ridiculous, of course. A fantasy. I mean, Rebecca had a boyfriend. Yes, maybe they were hitting a rough patch. Maybe she was even dreading going to winter formal with him. I mean—I know this is cruel, but it’s true—he couldn’t dance. But they were still together. And Rebecca wasn’t going to dump him because of an injury. That wasn’t who she was.
Maybe I wouldn’t have dared to even try, before the robbery. But ripping open the doors of an armored car does tend to change your perspective.
I muttered something, and while I was looking for the right words, he turned around and started wheeling the recycling bin into the middle of the forest, looking—I swear, this is what I thought—like Mom the night before trash day.
