by Jake Hinkson
"Yes, it is."
"I wonder how come she told you about it."
I shrugged. "Maybe she likes me." When he smirked at that, I said, "I know that might be hard for you to believe, but it is the truth."
"The truth," Stan mused. "Well now, maybe it is, and maybe it ain't. But I like things that make sense."
"And you don't think Felicia having feelings for me makes sense."
"Well," Stan answered, "Felicia's feelings don't always come together to form a unified whole, if you catch my meaning. There are two or three different people running around in that girl's head."
I let that go, and Stan just stared at me for a moment—thinking and figuring and weighing the possibilities. I knew one of those possibilities probably involved blowing my brains out in the bathtub. But Stan wasn't stupid like DB and Quiet Tom. He thought about it for a while. Finally he said, "Let's go talk to your blushing beauty. We'll see what she says." He pushed himself off the counter and nodded toward the dining room.
Neither Felicia nor the brothers had moved.
Stan stood beside me. He asked Felicia, "What's the deal with this guy?"
Felicia said, "I met him at the hospital. We hit it off."
"You hit it off. That's nice. But why is he here?"
She regarded me with genuine wonder. "I don't know. DB told him to get lost, but he wouldn't. He wanted to stay with me."
Stan shook his head. "No, no. I mean, why is he here? Why did you bring him in on this thing in the first place?"
Felicia pointed at DB. "I didn't. This dumb fucking cop here was tailing me, watching me—"
"I don't trust you," DB said.
"You think I trust you?"
She turned back to Stan. "Elliot and I were going to get drinks. That's all. But DB was following me and pulled us over on the street and practically dragged us out of the car. He was the one who tipped Elliot to the fact that there was something going down."
"You picked a strange time to get drinks with a stranger you just met at the hospital," Stan said. "On the day we're going to pull a two million dollar job."
Felicia ran her fingers through her damp hair. "I was taking him for drinks." Avoiding my eyes, she said, "And, yes, I was going to ask him, eventually, if he might be interested in the job."
"Without consulting me about it?" Stan asked.
"You said the job could use another guy."
"I said the job could use another guy. I didn't tell you to go recruiting for help at the fucking hospital. For all you know, I could have already lined up another guy."
"But you didn't, did you?"
"No."
"Well, now you have one."
Stan stood with his hands in the pockets of his slacks, shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other. He cocked his head and regarded first Felicia, then me.
He took a hand from his pocket and scratched his pointed chin. Finally he said, "Here's the deal, Elliot. Since Felicia brought you in on this thing, she's the one who'll have to take care of you. You want a cut of the cash, she's the one you talk to. Understand?"
"Yes."
DB stepped toward Stan. "You sure about that? We don't know this guy."
"She vouches for him," Stan said jerking his thumb in Felicia's general direction.
"You trust her?"
Stan admired the white linen of his jacket. "We're trusting her with the details of the job, ain't we? She's the one set this deal up in the first place, ain't she?"
"Yes," DB admitted.
"Well then, we can let her bring in a guy if she wants. We could use an extra hand on this deal, and he's not going to touch the cut. You got any objections?"
DB murmured, "I guess not," but he threw me a look as hard as a punch. I did not foresee a friendship forming.
Surveying all of us, though, Stan seemed pleased. It wasn't possible to tell how he was reading the situation, or what benefit he saw in having me around, but his face curled into a smile as he said, "That's settled then. Elliot is with us."
-CHAPTER SEVEN-
The Truck Job
Over the next hour or so, we sat in Felicia's sitting room and discussed details of the plan. Stan explained everything in his disconcertingly amiable way while Felicia listened quietly and the twins synchronized their twitches. I kept my mouth shut. Then, as the last dying rays of sunlight filled the room with a golden glow, Stan stood up and said, "Let's go for a ride."
"Ride?" DB said. "Where?"
"No, you boys stay here," he said. "I'm taking Felicia and Elliot here on a little field trip. Scope out the job and make sure Elliot is clear on the details."
Quiet Tom waited for his brother's response. DB held his tongue.
To break the silence I said, "Okay."
Stan smiled. "Nothing I like better than agreeable bidness associates."
Felicia's hair had dried and now jutted out at all angles like little punk-black thorns. She rubbed her bare arms and said, "I'm going to throw on something with sleeves."
Stan watched her get up and walk to her bedroom. "Get your keys," he called after her.
"Okay," she called back.
I stood up.
DB asked, "How long will you be?"
Stan's face stayed turned toward Felicia's room. "Few minutes," he said. "No more."
Felicia came back in. She wore a loose blue button-up with rolled up sleeves over her black tank top.
I followed her as Stan led us outside. The burning hell that is August in Arkansas had reached its peak hours before. As the exhausted day limped off into night, heat still clung to the air as a bad reminder of the brutal sun. I started sweating immediately.
Stan pointed at her car. "Felicia," he said, "you can drive. Elliot, you ride shotgun."
I walked to the passenger door. Felicia went to the driver's side and unlocked the car with a button on her keychain, but as she did Stan swooped in behind her and pinned her to her car.
"The fuck—" she grunted, dropping her keys.
In my moment of hesitation Stan said, "Elliot, stay put."
He pulled some kind of undersized revolver from the small of Felicia's back.
Keeping her pressed against the door with his body, he half-whispered into her ear, "What's this?"
"What's it look like?"
"It looks like you went to your room and got a gun and didn't tell me about it."
She grunted, "I gotta tell you every move I make? You tell me every move you make?"
"Why the gun?"
"Why not?"
He pressed even closer to her, so that his bony face mashed against her cheek when he spoke, "Where'd you get the gun?"
"It belonged to my dad."
Stan's eyes lifted to take me in.
"How you doing over there, Elliot?"
"She told you where it came from," I said. "She the only one here with a gun?"
He smiled. "She's the only one hiding one."
"I wasn't hiding it," she protested.
"Of course, you were. Why lie about it?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I want you to say that you went and got the piece because you're afraid of me. You didn't know what I was going to do to you and Elliot, so you went and dug out your daddy's old .22 and stuck it in the back of your pants like they do in the movies."
"All that's true," she said.
"I know it is, darlin', but why do I got to be the one to say it?"
He stepped back and Felicia took a breath and slowly turned around to face him. He held out her gun.
She took it.
"Be careful with that," he said. "Guns don't kill people. People do."
He opened the back door and got inside.
* * *
Stan directed Felicia to show us the layout of the job.
She drove down Cedar Street and turned into the UAMS campus. We all stayed silent, though I didn't get the feeling that Stan was nervous. He seemed to just be sitting in the back, quietly taking in the sight
s. Felicia navigated through the complex of buildings and turned onto Elm Street.
"Slow down," Stan said.
As we passed by the Rockefeller Cancer Institute, Stan said, "Right here past the patient loading area, you see that little alley at the end of the building?"
"Yes," I said.
"That's it. Truck'll pull in there, do a series of turns inside the lot, and back up to the dock. We hide down the alley behind the cancer building, wait for the driver to pass us and make his turns and back up to the dock, and then we take him. But we don't grab him until he's completed his turns. We want a straight shot out of here."
"Seems like a good plan."
Felicia drove up Elm and turned onto another street.
Stan said, "Go over it for me one time if you would, Elliot."
"Felicia is the lookout at the entrance to Elm Street. She's in her car, keeping an eye out for the hospital police force and tipping us off when the truck arrives. DB is at the exit, monitoring the cops and what they know and when they know it, and providing interference for us if we need it. Quiet Tom drives us and drops us off in the parking lot of the Cancer Institute and sticks around as a getaway driver in case something goes wrong. When he drops us off, we hoof it over the alley, wait for the truck to show up and get into position, and then we rush it. You do all the talking. I hood and handcuff the driver. You drive. We meet at the rendezvous point."
I turned around. Stan smiled.
"We'll make a hijacker out of you yet, Elliot." He leaned back in his seat. "Felicia, we're done. Let's head back."
Night had settled, but no stars had come out. Above the illumination of the hospital lights, the sky hung low and black. I closed my eyes and listened to the tires on the pavement. My past life felt so distant at that point it seemed to have happened to someone else entirely.
That warm, numbing feeling didn't last long, though, because from the backseat, Stan said, "Tell me more about yourself, Elliot."
"What do you mean?"
Felicia glanced at me. She didn't have to say anything. We both knew Stan wasn't making idle conversation. Stan had probably never made idle conversation in his life.
"What do you do for a living?"
"I'm between things."
"What was the last thing?"
"I worked at a tobacco store."
"Which one?"
"Smokey's. In North Little Rock."
As casually as a smoker wipes an ash off his sleeve, I realized that I had not actually tendered my resignation at Smokey's Cigarette Emporium. I'd been at work there just a few days before. So much for that.
Stan said, "You seem overly educated to be peddling cigarettes for minimum wage."
I shrugged.
"What'd you do before that?" he asked.
We paused at a stop sign.
"I was a preacher," I said.
After a car passed through the intersection, Felicia drove us back up the hill she and I had taken just a few hours before.
Stan said, "A preacher."
"Yeah."
"What manner of preacher? What denomination?"
"Free-Will Baptist."
"I'll be doggone. You were out saving souls."
I looked over my shoulder at him. As we passed beneath street lights, he flickered in and out of darkness.
"I guess so," I said.
"And now you're here with me." He smiled and leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. "That's beautiful."
* * *
When the time came, everyone seemed nervous, even Stan, though he didn't show it like everyone else. I sat on the sofa in the sitting room, tapping my foot incessantly. DB babbled about the details of the job to anyone who would listen while Quiet Tom nodded excessively at everything he said. Felicia paced the dining room, rubbing her hands together, expressing wonderment every few minutes about how moist her palms were. "I never sweat in the ER," she said no less than three times.
Stan stood at the window, staring outside. There was nothing for him to watch out there except the stillness of Felicia's driveway, but he stared at it anyway. The thing that marked him as nervous was his silence. He hadn't spoken a word—hadn't communicated with anyone in fact, since we'd returned to the house.
When the time came, he just said, "Let's go."
My own feeling of nervous expectation reminded me, oddly enough, of Sunday mornings. Getting dressed, making sure I had my bible and notes, preparing to be my public self. As I stood up to follow Stan, I took a deep breath—the first breath, it struck me, of Elliot Stilling, Professional Criminal.
DB left first. He went out to his patrol car without a word to anyone, including his brother, and drove away.
Felicia was next. She came over to me before she left.
"Good luck," I said.
"You'll do fine. Just follow Stan's lead and do what he says."
"I will."
She reached over and squeezed my hand and sent an erotic charge through me that I hadn't felt in years.
She walked out to her car, started it up, and backed down the driveway. As I watched her taillights disappear down the hill, I felt suddenly vulnerable, as if she'd taken my shelter in this new world with her.
Quiet Tom stared at me, his distrust and dislike mute but palpable.
Stan clapped him on the back. "What do you think, Thomas?"
Quiet Tom nodded.
Stan grinned. "Couldn't have said it better myself. Elliot?"
"Let's go," I said.
We went out to Tom's Armada, which he'd pulled up the driveway while we were gone. We loaded in with Tom driving, Stan up front, and me in the back.
We road in silence. No small talk. No jokes. Stan was focused.
I was scared but less so than I could have ever predicted I would be. When the markers of one life have all fallen away, whatever rises to take their place becomes the new reality. I was scared of these men, scared of things going badly, scared of not seeing Felicia again, but I wasn't scared to be breaking the law. The morality by which I'd lived my whole life before that night seemed as trivial as the rules to some old board game. As we pulled into the hospital parking lot, I realized for the first time how little I'd actually believed in most of the laws which had governed my life up to that point.
We turned into the hospital campus and wound our way slowly to Elm Street, stopping twice to let patients and their families cross in front of us. Both times, the people gave Tom a polite wave of thanks. He waved back a You're welcome.
"Good," Stan said. "We're in no hurry here. Just three guys going to see a buddy in the hospital."
The parking lot adjacent to the Rockefeller Cancer Institute was about half full, with most of the cars parked in spaces closest to the doors. Tom stopped just beyond the patient unloading area, and Stan and I jumped out.
Tom turned right to pull into the parking lot. Stan and I ducked down the alley.
For twenty yards or more we crept through the dark. Just before the end of the alley the lights from the loading area slashed through the shadows, but before we reached the edge of the light, Stan pulled me into the short walkway of an emergency exit.
We pressed our backs to the building. The only thing I could hear, beyond the distant sound of tires on pavement, was my own breathing. I panted as if we'd just run.
Stan didn't seem to notice. I tried to watch for the truck, but Stan was more attuned to the loading dock.
The lot where the truck would pull past us and turn around was formed by the intersection of the backsides of three different buildings. As such, it was a rather small, misshapen triangle. We stood at the tip of the triangle by the entrance to the alley.
The unloading dock itself sat twenty-five yards away from us across the triangle. It was about five feet off the ground and thirty feet across. Wooden pallets sat stacked beside a sliding industrial door about ten feet wide. Stan watched that door intently but without my nervousness. In his left hand, he held a small disposable cell phone.
Af
ter a few minutes, the cell phone buzzed. A text popped up on the cheap blue screen: HERE.
He slid the phone in his pants pocket with his left hand and pulled a gun from his jacket with his right. It was an automatic of some kind with a silencer on the end that almost touched his knee when he held it by his side.
Adrenaline shot through me. Everything became real. I could smell grass and brick and mortar. Beads of sweat trickled down my chest. With that gun next to me in the dark, a terrible fear came over me. What if he killed the truck driver?
That thought seized me. What if Stan killed him? Just a man driving a truck for a living. A human being sitting in a truck right now with no idea that in a couple of minutes he would be killed ...
I whispered, "You won't hurt the driver, right?"
"Shut up."
We heard the truck break near the entrance to the alley, heard it swing wide to turn in, saw high bright lights splash across the walls. Illumination barreled down the alleyway and lit up everything including us. Suddenly the eighteen-wheeler shot by in a whoosh of air and light and hulking mass.
Stan didn't tense up, didn't flinch. He must have known that in such a tight space the light from the truck would essentially light up the whole loading area. I hadn't known that, though, and I let out a gasp.
In the loading area, the driver swung hard to the right, jackknifed his trailer and expertly eased it back until it lined up perfectly with the dock. He did it without moving his elbow from his open window.
Stan ran.
I followed.
His gun disappeared. He darted low around the high, hot grill of the truck, swung up to the driver's side door, pushed a can of mace through the window and sprayed the man in the eyes. The driver was pale and pudgy, in his mid-thirties with shaggy brown hair and an unkempt goatee. Startled, he put his hands up. "What? No—o"
Stan opened the door and pushed himself inside.
I ran to the passenger side and fumbled up the steps to the door. It was locked—or at least, I couldn't open it—but Stan opened it and swung it wide. I had to jump out of the way to avoid being smashed in the face by the door.
The driver yelled and began to jerk.
I grabbed one of his hands as Stan had instructed me earlier and clapped a handcuff on his wrist. He fought me.
