The Soak

by Patrick E. McLean

  Hobbs held her gaze and said, “It’s just Hobbs.”

  “First name or last?” Darlene asked, toying with him.

  “Just Hobbs.”

  When she looked away, Broyles said, “Run it for me. What’s the setup? Who’s the finger? And spare no detail about the part where you will overcome the onboard telemetry, et cetera, et cetera.”

  Hobbs unfolded a Florida state map.

  “You know, they have maps on computers now. And they make very impressive presentation and sales tools,” said Broyles.

  Hobbs traced a route out of Tallahassee south to the coast, through Carrabelle, Apalachicola and Panama City. Before he could say anything, Broyles burst into laughter.

  “My God, how could I have missed it?”

  Darlene asked, “Missed what?”

  “I could have fingered this job. Isn’t that funny? I have recently been appointed to the Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government. The great State of Florida is a wondrous and many-tentacled thing, so, among other things, the subcommittee includes payments and disbursements for those less fortunate. In my district a number of those people do not have bank accounts. In fact, throughout the Florida Panhandle, many people still get paid in cash. Fishermen, oystermen, maintenance workers. It is a very rural part of the country, after all. And with the Tyndall and Eglin Air Force Bases, well, you know how young men like to spend money on vices. Can’t have a record of that, now can we?

  “So, naturally, I was very curious about these funds.” He changed his voice, to make it sound deeper and more statesman-like. “We have a fiduciary responsibility to the people of the great State of Florida to ensure that not one penny is wasted or lost due to the commission of a fraudulent act, or by omission of some act of faith and diligence it is within our power to perform.”

  Hobbs rolled his eyes.

  “He’s a natural at this,” said Darlene.

  “He’s an orator, all right,” Hobbs said. “They never get to the point.”

  “That’s how I can tell you that last week there was twenty-three million dollars in there.”

  Hobbs froze. He held his glass of bourbon halfway from the table to his lips. Darlene’s laugh rang out high and musical.

  “My dear, now I think you have his attention.”

  Broyles finished his julep, sucking at his teeth. “If you can figure out how it can be done, I’ll finance for a double share. Do you have a plan, or are you just here on what we in government call a fact-finding mission?”

  “The only person’s time and money I’m spending right now is my own. I’ve got ideas how we might take it. Lemme finish the details.”

  Hobbs realized that Darlene was staring at him in a predatory way. She was younger than Broyles by at least ten years. She dressed classy, but Hobbs could see there was spice in her. Ringlets of thick black hair framed her face, offset by brilliant red lipstick. That was about all the makeup she wore. Beneath her raised eyebrows her brown, hazel-flecked eyes glittered like stolen diamonds.

  Hobbs asked her stare, “What?”

  “So you can do it?” Just a flicker of tongue between the gap in her front teeth.

  “I want to,” said Hobbs, with a shrug. “But it’s not up to me right now. Have to see how it comes together.”

  “Don’t let him fool you, darlin’. Mr. Hobbs’s specialty is armored transport. There are countermeasures developed specifically to thwart techniques that this man invented. His innovation and audacity support a large part of the security industry. And since he declared that the game was over, ten years ago, there has not been a successful armored car robbery in the continental United States. Some may get away with the money, but they never quite get away with the crime. So if he is interested—if he says maybe—that’s as good as a yes to me.”

  “You talk a lot,” said Hobbs.

  “And the richer and more powerful I become, the more people are forced to listen,” said Broyles, handing his empty glass to Darlene.

  TEN

  Hobbs drove the route twice. Once following the truck, the next scouting all the likely places for a grab. He used an old Polaroid to take pictures of anything he thought might be useful. Any angle that might play. The film was expensive, and harder and harder to get—but the one thing you knew with a Polaroid was that the picture you held in your hand was the only one. When you burned it, it was gone forever.

  He was going to take another pass at the route, mostly just to think while driving, but that night, exhaustion got to him. When he was younger, he could go a long time without sleep while working and still stay sharp. He had spent most of his off time lazing around in the sun, like some kind of predator. But when the hunt was on, he had been tireless. Those days were long gone. In the time between those days and now, Miami had gone from a paradise to a slum, then back again. In the old days he had stayed in the finest hotels and on the finest women.

  Hobbs stopped at a supermarket in Carrabelle, then pulled into the old motor court next door. The lady behind the counter was weathered and had a face like an oyster shell. She showed him to a room in the back.

  The window unit whined and struggled against the heat of a Florida night that was never going to cool off. Hobbs pored over the map and made notes on a yellow pad. Then he went to the half fridge and got a can of beer. He held it to his head for a moment. Then he opened it, drank deeply, and sat down again.

  It was a nightmare. Hobbs remembered when armored cars had become more trouble than they were worth. A crew he knew of got sent up because of a hidden GPS tracker in the early nineties. Before that, GPS had been fifty-pound military monstrosities that couldn’t be hidden. And there had been no way to get information out of them easily. But a GPS hooked to a cell phone? The company called it and it very kindly told the company where its truck was. Poor bastards got busted at the split.

  Hobbs had gone to visit one of them in prison to get the whole story. But never mind the particulars, this business of taking things from their rightful owners had been getting harder and harder. Or maybe Hobbs was just too damn old for it anymore. Still, $23 million was a pile of cash. Used to be you could knock off an armored car with three guys. Three guys plus two shares for Broyles…4.6 million apiece. Launder it, at worst fifty cents on the dollar, 2.3 million.

  Hobbs took off his glasses. He rubbed his eyes and thought, That’s a good number to go out on. I could put up a number like that and be done, couldn’t I?

  But how to do it? These armadillos had gone high tech. Sure, it was driving through the middle of goddamned lonely nowhere, but now it would have better telemetry on it than Apollo 13. The minute something went wrong, the central office would know about it. To say nothing of the onboard cameras. Even if you took the truck, the company would be on it before you could unload the money.

  Supposedly it even had a helicopter on standby anytime the truck got too far out of civilization. That was from a Moonis-Brainerd brochure, so it was probably bullshit. Hobbs might be a thief, but thank God he wasn’t in marketing. Those were some lying bastards.

  There hadn’t been any of the gadgets and radios and devices and gizmos before. Before, phones had cords and men had courage. A strong, smart guy who was good under pressure could make a dishonest living. Or an honest one. If you knew a trade, you’d have work. Now everybody grew up dreaming of middle management.

  Hobbs saw himself as a tradesman. He’d first broken bad as a supply sergeant. Southeast Asia was a bumpy place. Lots of things fell off trucks. And the way Hobbs looked at it, the start of those police actions had been the start of the corporate wars. All the bullshit. Now you couldn’t call anything what it was. Police action, preemptive strike—hell, they even changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense. Bullshit all around. That’s when the news became obsessed with casualty stats. That’s when the bean counters took over.

  In the end Hobbs saw that everybody was in it to grab what they could for themselves. The way he saw it, that left him two
choices. Go crazy, or start grabbing. He chose to make a buck.

  But he hadn’t paid off the right people. So when he stepped on the big kids’ toes by sending a shipment of heroin back from Cambodia to the Bronx, it all came crashing down on him. Bad conduct discharge, back to the States. Luckily he was in it deep enough that they couldn’t really charge him without bringing down their own con, so he was left more or less to his own devices.

  Hobbs had taken half his stash, bought three new identities from a round guy in Seattle, and gone to work in earnest. His real name had been lost in the mists of history. He had left his original identity behind so long ago, he wasn’t entirely sure that his memories were real anymore. He didn’t have any friends from back then. He didn’t like to think about his family. No photographs, no mementos. For Hobbs, his work was everything. He was a craftsman in a rough trade, but a perfectible one.

  As he sat with the map and the pad, it felt as if he had come to the end of it. He couldn’t see a way to make this one work. Maybe the days of the heavy heist were gone for good.

  At times he would get glimpses of things that might have been his past, but he never trusted them. Not memories, exactly. More like images, sounds, smells. He really trusted only the smells.

  Once, while driving through the night, racing away from a job that had gone wrong, he had scented a copse of pine trees after a spring rain. That smell called forth an image of his grand-father shaving. A towel wrapped around the bottom of his thin and withered body. His jackal’s smile through the brush-lathered foam. “Aye, c’mere and see how it’s done. Make a man of ye, razor cuts and all.” The accent was improbably Irish. But that was the sound part. He didn’t trust it. For all Hobbs knew, that line was just a memory implanted from a late-night movie he had fallen asleep to. But with it was the smell of a cigarette burning on the edge of the sink. Even now he could see the old man close his lips around the filter, suck, and pull it away, leaving lather on the brown paper.

  He shook off the smoke of memory and got up out of the chair. Halfway to the fridge, he looked back at the pad as if it were a man who had just spit an insult at him and needed to be knocked down. There was always another problem, a knot to be unwound or cut clean through, before a job could be completed. He just couldn’t see this one, not yet. But he had to find a way. If he didn’t, then what was he?

  He opened another beer and drank from it, not taking his eyes from the papers on the table. He’d be goddamned if it didn’t feel like the end of something. Of it. Of all of it. Was he obsolete?

  Another memory. A girl he had shacked up with in the seventies. They sat naked under a blanket on the porch of a ramshackle house overlooking the port of Oakland. Klieg lights casting an unholy light across the run-down end of the city at three o’clock in the morning. Down there, in the footlights of the apocalypse, a crew labored to get a ship ready for sea. Hobbs was fresh off a job in Seattle, trying to rob that port of bullion. He had lost the bullion, but had gotten away with his life and enough to buy a train ticket south. It hadn’t taken him long to shack up with a stripper working in San Francisco but living cheap in Oakland.

  When she first asked him what he did, he said import-export. But later, in the wee small hours, sitting on the porch, he told her. She fired up a joint and said, “No shit,” in a way that meant I think you’re full of shit.

  She offered him the joint. He didn’t take it. He looked at her through the thin trail of funny-smelling smoke being carried out to sea by the land breeze.

  She said, “‘Good shutting makes no use of bolt or bar, yet no one can undo it.’” Then she asked him if he knew what that was. “It’s the Tao,” she said, before she took another hit. Her voice squeaked as she said, “Eastern wisdom, real heavy.”

  That was the exact moment Hobbs had decided to leave the West Coast for good. Between the busted job in Seattle and this ex-hippie stripper, he had had enough. Until right now, he had never thought of that girl again. How strange that he couldn’t remember her name and yet that crazy quote was still there.

  He flipped to a fresh page on the pad and wrote the words down very carefully in the middle. “Good shutting makes no use of bolt or bar…” Like a fucking riddle. What about the opposite? What was good opening? Good opening made no use of…He felt the urge to research the truck, or the company that made the telemetry system. He recognized it as the impulse of fear that it was. There’d be time enough for that later. Right now it would just be a distraction.

  The problem was clear enough. An armored truck on a lonely road along the “Forgotten Coast.” A ping—like a heartbeat letting the lords and masters know that the cash was still theirs and on course. Two to three men on board at the start of a long day scattering cash throughout the panhandle.

  Scenario after scenario ran through his mind. Even if they cracked the armadillo and got away from the site, there were too few people and too few ways out of those empty spaces on the map. The whole area was just too thin. They’d be too easily spotted. Especially if the armored car company had the helicopter support it boasted of in its glossy brochure.

  He stared at the pad, feeling blurry and weak. It sure felt like the end of it. Of him. He wanted a cigarette. He wanted to shave. He wanted to have been an electrician like his grandfather. (Had that even been true? Did it matter?)

  He inserted himself between the scratchy sheets and turned out the light. He tried to sleep. But those crazy words wouldn’t let go of him.

  Shutting. Bolt. Bar.

  Everything moved so fast now. Everything was always on, always available. Hobbs was a guy who didn’t even have a cell phone. He didn’t like carrying around a tracking device. But who needed the damn things anyway? He didn’t know how to be faster than the spin of the modern world. You can’t be faster, he told himself, you’re too old and raggedy. All he had was slow.

  Opening. Key.

  Good stealing makes no use of…yet no one can stop it.

  And then he had the answer.

  The next day he went to see Broyles and told him how much he’d need to put the job together. It was a hefty sum, but Broyles didn’t bat an eye. He went in the back. Darlene flirted with Hobbs for a while. And when Broyles came back, he handed Hobbs a suitcase filled with cash. That’s what trust got you in this business. But then, trust also got you killed.

  Broyles said, “I’d like that briefcase back, if you don’t mind.” Hobbs saw he was serious. Strange bird.

  ELEVEN

  From Tallahassee he drove north into Georgia. If he was going to pull this off he was going to need help, and equipment. Even if he took that kid from the roller coaster as ballast—and that was a big if—he’d still need somebody he could depend on. A pro. The job would also need some iron. Not much, but still. And he knew where he could find both.

  He drove through the center of Georgia, past mile after mile of pecan trees that were already withering in the early heat of spring. Hobbs wondered why anybody would feel the need to fight a war over this land. Hot, ugly, and empty. But you could say similar things about Korea, or Afghanistan.

  He paralleled the Chattahoochee River and the Georgia-Alabama border. Ahead of him, like a colossus, lay the sprawling expanse of Fort Benning, and beyond it Columbus, Georgia. Two miles short of Columbus was a town called Lumpkin. It was a small town built around a courthouse. A county seat like a thousand other dying little towns in the South. Only this one had thrived by grabbing on to the past with both hands and holding tight.

  Signs pointed toward Westville. Like Gettysburg, this was a reconstruction of a historical town. Hobbs went the opposite way on Main Street. He wasn’t interested in the past.

  On the far end of Main Street was a joint that was open only for breakfast and lunch. The ancient Pepsi sign read “Jimmy’s Bar-B-Que,” but everybody called it by the current owner’s name: Hurlocker’s.

  Hobbs pushed through the door and back about twenty years. The place had a shotgun layout, one side filled with a counter and a
short-order kitchen. On the other side, tucked underneath the stairs that went from the street to the top level, were booths of dark wood. The floor was faded red tile, set in a diamond pattern around smaller black tiles, all pleasantly slick with grease. Behind the counter one of four deep-fat fryers roared, hot oil and bubbles working their magic on some unknown piece of food. Did it matter? Even if you deep-fried shipping peanuts, they’d be delicious.

  A yell came from behind the silver swinging door with the porthole window that led to the back: “We’re closed!” Hobbs ignored it and sat at the counter. The chipped Formica top was so old it could probably remember a time when only white people were allowed to sit at it. “I ain’t heard nobody leave yet!” the voice from the back came again.

  Hobbs waited.

  The silver doors banged into the wall as a huge man wearing an apron limped into the room. Hurlocker looked like a hairy vulture. Long neck, wide arms, shoulders so broad it looked as if he had to stoop to get through a door. He never gave the appearance of being in a hurry, but Hobbs had seen him move fast enough when required. Hurlocker unfurled his long arms and put his palms on the counter. “Hobbs,” he said, naming him without any warmth.

  Without taking his eyes off Hobbs, Hurlocker reached under the counter and produced a coffee cup and pot of coffee. He filled the cup and set it in front of Hobbs.

  “Business, pleasure, or both?” asked Hurlocker.

  Hobbs asked, “Both? What’s both?”

  Hurlocker laid a finger against his beak of a nose. “Re-venge, Hobbs, re-venge.”

  Hobbs sipped the coffee and made a face. It was as bitter as regret. “Business,” he said.

  “Always business with you, eh? Leroy! Quit pullin’ your pork and git out here.”

  A wiry black man shuffled in from the back wearing an apron and holding a scrub brush.

  “You remember Leroy, don’t you, Hobbs?”

  Leroy. Full name Elroy Church. A black man with one eye on the stars and one eye off to the left. He didn’t walk right, and was plagued by tremors. To look at him, you’d think he was simple. You’d be wrong.