by Iain Levison
“I think all of it is pretty serious shit,” Kevin said.
It was, indeed, serious shit, but starting a forest fire after you robbed an armored car was the type of thing that could make news from here to Pittsburgh. “No fire. What else?”
Kevin nodded. “Drive it into a creek?”
“Nearest creek is six or seven miles away.”
They stood looking over the drainage ditch. Damn, it would be so perfect, if only it were a ravine.
“How about parking it back behind those trees over there?” Kevin said.
“Someone’ll find it. Hunters, kids, all kinds of people come back here.”
“How about burying it?”
“What, digging a hole big enough for that thing? Fuck that. We’d need a fucking backhoe to make a hole that size.”
They laughed.
“Shit,” Kevin said, lighting a joint and handing it to Mitch. “How about burning it?’
“Dude, we just talked about that.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Tell you what,” Mitch said after a moment. “We park it back behind the trees and leave it there. It might be a day or two until anyone finds it. Then they trace it back to that old guy. Shit, he doesn’t know anything about us. He didn’t even ask our names.”
“We have to wipe our prints off everything,” Kevin said.
“Everything. We don’t even go into that car without gloves on.”
“We should tell Doug. He’s working on the engine. He’ll leave prints on the fuel filter.”
“We’ll tell him.”
Kevin looked dubious. “I think we should find a ravine.”
“Dude, there aren’t any ravines around here.”
“We need to keep looking.”
They continued to stare into the drainage ditch.
“Linda’s talking about a divorce,” said Kevin. “She said she’s going to file papers.”
“Dude, that sucks,” Mitch said, handing back the joint. “I’m sorry.”
Kevin shrugged. “Dude, do you think things’ll change after we get the money?” He had a forlorn expression Mitch hadn’t seen on him before, an utter hopelessness, as if he just wanted to sink to his knees and sob.
“Yeah, man, everything’ll change,” Mitch said, putting some brightness into his voice for Kevin’s sake. “Whose life doesn’t change when they suddenly become millionaires?”
“Man, it’s weird,” Kevin said. “I think Linda knows about the Ferrari. I mean, I have no idea how she found out. But you know what she said to me yesterday?”
“What?”
“She said that she won’t come visit me in jail. Because she knows that I’ll tell her that I did whatever I did for her and Ellie and she doesn’t want to hear that.”
“You’re not going to jail,” Mitch said.
“But don’t you think it’s weird that she knows so much?”
“She’s your wife,” said Mitch. “No, it isn’t weird,”
“How about covering the car with brush? You know, like camouflage.”
“Dude, let’s just wipe it down, no prints, and we’ll be fine. That old dude’ll never be able to find us. He didn’t even want to transfer the title over to us. He just gave us a car for cash. We’ll be fine.”
Kevin nodded thoughtfully, the despair of a moment before now replaced by an energetic interest in his work. “OK, then. That’s what we’ll do. No prints.”
“No prints.”
“I’ll park my truck right here,” he said, pointing to a cleared piece of solid ground. “That’s only four and a half minutes’ drive from the bank. The cop cars, when they come, will probably come up Westlake Avenue, behind us, from the other direction. So we’re good. We’ll be in that old junkbucket for as little as five minutes.”
“We need a tarp in the back of your pickup so we can throw the money bags under it,” Mitch said. “Those things are pretty big, and there’s not a lot of room in the cab.”
“Tarp,” Kevin said. “I’ll take care of that. I’ll throw some work equipment in the back too, maybe a leaf blower and some rakes or something. So we look like landscapers. Did Doug get the ski masks?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, he needs to get ’em,” Kevin said. “What does he do all day?”
“He sells pills for you,” Mitch said pleasantly, trying to avoid any more confrontation.
“Right,” Kevin said, getting the message that picking on Doug’s unemployed inactivity was off-limits, at least until the mission was carried out. “Man, I think we should try to find a ravine.”
“There are no ravines,” said Mitch, walking back to the pickup. “This is the best we can do.”
“What is a ravine, exactly, anyway?”
“It’s like, a big hole in the ground you can push a car into.” Mitch flicked the joint into the drainage ditch. “And there aren’t any around here.”
Kevin watched the joint land in a little puddle of water and circle around. “Are we really gonna do this?” The question hung in the air for a few seconds and Mitch figured it was a genuine invitation to discuss backing out of the whole thing. He also figured that Kevin was worried about going back to jail. Of the three of them, he was the only one who knew what the worst-case scenario actually entailed.
“You’re not going back to jail, man.”
“You think everything will be fine?”
“You won’t go back to jail. I guarantee you.”
Kevin started the pickup’s engine. “Come on. Let’s get outta here.”
11
CHAPTER
THE NEXT DAY, Mitch went down to the Wilton Mall and looked around in the bookstore for books on leadership. There were dozens of them but most of them were full of advice for middle-management professionals. Dressing professionally was a common theme. Red ties were encouraged. So was drinking water, lots and lots of it, while constantly showing a positive attitude. Great leaders must smile and pee a lot, Mitch figured, as he put the last of the books back on the shelf. He decided to try looking for something more practical, but nothing offered advice on robbery.
That was the problem with crime: there was very little helpful literature on it. A simple manual would have been invaluable, written, say, by a guy who had pulled off an armored car robbery. But obviously, anyone who had successfully done that would be trying to lay low and would not want to attract the attention of the publishing industry. The only place you could find people willing to discuss such matters was in jail, where one would be able to find an authority on every aspect of robbery except how not to get caught, which was the most important part.
So he tried to rent a movie about robbing an armored car. After a half hour in the video store, the only film he could come up with was Heat, which he had seen in the theater when it first came out. The guys in that movie just made Mitch feel inadequate. They had thousands of dollars worth of equipment: radios, complex codes, night vision goggles, and M16s. The Robert DeNiro character lived in a beach house. Mitch wondered why people who could afford all that shit didn’t just invest the money rather than rob an armored car. If he had his own beach house, he and Doug would just toke on the deck all day; screw all this robbery crap. Why risk freedom when freedom was great? Mitch estimated it would take him about a year to save up for an M16, let alone all the drills, pistols, duffel bags, and binoculars. He put Heat back on the shelf.
When Mitch got home, bookless and movieless, Doug was sitting at the kitchen table looking at a toothbrush in a clear plastic container.
“What’re you doing, man?”
“I just applied for a job at Chicken Buckets,” he said.
He sounded forlorn. Mitch felt that it was his job as unrespected gang leader to keep everybody chipper, but he was confused as to why Doug would try to find employment just a few days before they were going to rob an armored car. Robbing an armored car involved a great deal of uncertainty, but the one thing you could be certain of was that, whether things went really well
or really badly, you damned sure wouldn’t need a job at Chicken Buckets afterward.
“Why?”
Doug shrugged. “I dunno, man. I’ve, like, always had a job. Sitting around all day drives me nuts.”
“What’s with the toothbrush?”
“It’s for a drug test,” he said. “I filled out an application and they gave me this toothbrush to swab my mouth with. You don’t even have to do it there. It’s a take-home drug test. I guess they figured that if you made the guys do it on the spot, they’d never be able to hire anyone.”
Mitch picked up the toothbrush. Instead of bristles, it had a little absorbent sponge.
“Cool, huh? They can test your saliva now,” Doug said, taking the brush back. “The thing is, I don’t even know anyone whose saliva I can use. They give me a take-home drug test, man, they’re basically just asking me to cheat on it, and I’m still not gonna be able to pass it.”
Mitch opened the fridge and cracked open a beer, then sat down at the kitchen table next to Doug and thought about it. Linda? No, she smoked occasionally. The landlord? You didn’t want to ask your landlord to help you pass a drug test. Besides, he seemed a little freaky sometimes, wired up; maybe he dabbled in meth or coke. That would be all Doug needed—to get busted on a drug test for one of the few drugs he didn’t use. “How about Ellie?”
“Kevin’s daughter?”
Mitch shrugged. “It’s human saliva, right? That’s all they need.”
They stared at each other. Mitch burst out laughing but Doug remained serious. He pushed the toothbrush, still wrapped in plastic, toward Mitch. “When you see Kevin tomorrow, can you ask him to have Ellie stick that in her mouth?”
Mitch was still laughing, snorting beer out of his nose. He nodded. He got up and went into the living room to watch TV. Maybe that was what leaders did. They solved other people’s problems.
FEELING UNCHARACTERISTICALLY CONNECTED to the world, Mitch decided to watch the news. There was something about the idea of robbing an armored car that, rather than making him feel removed from society, made him feel accepted by it. While he walked dogs, he was devoting an unusual amount of his time to daydreaming about the good times that awaited him, the beers he and Doug were going to have on the beach on a Caribbean island, the island that always appeared in films, peopled only with thong-clad young women who loved to flirt. Then, upon his return home, the move to Pittsburgh, where he would find a nice apartment downtown, furnish it elegantly with a flat-screen high-def TV and a black leather couch, and finish his education. Maybe he’d get accepted to Carnegie Mellon or Pitt and actually get a degree in something like computer science, then go on to start his own company doing something computer-science related. He’d have money and a nice apartment and plenty of time to figure things out.
The news began to sour his mood, however. They were covering campaign speeches of various political candidates and Mitch amused himself by counting the number of times he heard the candidates say the word freedom. They all said it, no matter what they were running for. The city comptroller could get applause by saying, “FREEDOM.” It was a magic word that instantly overstimulated any crowd full of gullible chumps, and what other kind of crowd went to see one of these yokels give a speech?
Freedom, Mitch thought to himself. Who would try to enslave us? We’re a military powerhouse thousands of miles from anyone. Mitch imagined most countries in the world kept their heads down and hoped the U.S. wouldn’t notice them, praying that a mineral or ore desperately needed for American creature comfort was never discovered on their soil. Freedom, my ass. The only real threats to freedom were the guys giving the speeches, even the city comptroller, who Mitch just didn’t like the look of.
Doug came in, bringing the bong with him, and sat. “Wanna hit?”
“Maybe in a little bit.”
Doug set about packing the bowl and Mitch watched him rather than the TV. Doug was careful and meticulous. The bowls he packed somehow always hit better than the ones Mitch packed for himself. Doug possessed an attention to detail that Mitch knew he would never master, some fundamental difference in brain function that probably would have been evident even in early childhood. But Doug would never have thought of, nor planned, the robbing of an armored car. Everyone had their skill set, Mitch decided. Perhaps he had been born for this very purpose, to rob armored cars. He sure as hell had never felt born for anything else he had tried.
“It’s on for Friday,” Mitch said. “We meet at two o’clock.”
“Why two o’clock? I have to hand in my drug test at Chicken Buckets at three o’clock.”
“Oh, for god’s sake,” Mitch groaned. “You’re just gonna have to be a little bit late.”
Doug shrugged. “OK.”
That was cool. Mitch had been expecting an argument, which he would have interpreted as a sign of Doug’s reluctance to join them. “Chicken Buckets,” Mitch said with a half-smile. “That place sucks.”
“Their chicken’s not bad. They have a special deep fryer that, like, pressure-cooks it.”
“Do you really want to work fast food? You’ll have to wear a paper hat.”
Doug shrugged again. “No spending money for six months, right? What the hell else am I gonna do?”
Mitch nodded, impressed that Doug was taking the plan seriously enough to have thought that far ahead. What at first he had interpreted as an unwillingness on Doug’s part to accept that things were going to change was in fact a well-thought-out extension of their plan. Doug was a team player. No need to worry.
“It’s going to be fine, man,” Mitch said.
Doug nodded, not looking up as he readied the bong for the day’s first use. “Hey man, could you change the channel? There’s gotta be something else on. The news is bullshit.”
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Kevin took over the walking of Ramone because he wanted to get a feel for the area outside the bank. Everything had to be planned down to the last second. Kevin felt a rush of excitement just standing in the spot where the robbery was going to occur.
There’s where we’ll park, he thought, looking at a place across the street from the bank. There was a recessed alcove between two buildings which would provide a small amount of cover. This is where Mitch and Doug will stand and wait for the armored car. It will park right here to unload. Kevin walked across the street, gauging the distance. It would take two, three seconds at most to run across the street with big bags full of money. Big bags full of money. He liked the sound of that. Then the Impala would fly off around the corner and onto the dirt road into the trees by the drainage ditch—a four-and-a-half-minute ride. He had timed it four times. Then into the pickup truck piled high with landscaping equipment. The big bags of money would go under the tarp. Ski masks and identifiable clothing would come off.
And away they’d go.
Speed was everything. It had to be fast. What were the variables, the factors that were out of their control? Maybe a cop would notice the old Nevada plate on the Impala. Couldn’t do anything about that. He’d take care to park with the rear of the car up against another car, so the plate wasn’t visible. What else? The time the armored car arrived. It was usually punctual, right at three, Mitch said, but it could be late. They’d have to be prepared to wait a few extra minutes. The ski masks might be a problem. Obviously, you couldn’t put them on too soon or people would start getting weird. You couldn’t stand around wearing a ski mask next to a bank. They’d have to agree on the exact moment the ski masks would go on and try to keep themselves as hidden as possible until that time.
Cold weather, or rain or snow, would really help. That would make heavy headwear less noticeable and reduce visibility. A good snowstorm might even delay the police’s arrival, but it might also delay or even cancel the armored car’s arrival, so it had to be just the right severity. There were always things out of your control that could help or hurt, Kevin thought. They’d have to be on the top of their game. Definitely no getting high before the robbery. They’d
have to make that a rule. Kevin took out the little notepad he had brought with him and wrote No getting high.
Under that, he wrote, Cold weather, rain, good.
That was it. He was done. This thing was going to happen.
“THAT’S IT?” MITCH was looking at Kevin’s notepad. “‘No getting high’? ‘Cold weather, rain, good?’” Mitch laughed as he tossed Kevin’s attempt at scientific organization onto the couch. He noticed Kevin looked annoyed, even hurt, so, using his new leadership skills, which he was developing as he went along, he said, “Prints, man. We gotta write something about wearing gloves around the car at all times.”
Kevin picked up the little notebook. Prints he wrote.
“Prints,” said Doug.
“Dude, did you get the ski masks?”
“Not yet.”
“You know it’s tomorrow,” said Kevin. “What the fuck are you waiting for? What about Tasers? Did you get them?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
“Tasers might be a bad idea,” said Mitch. “We’ve decided to go without the Tasers.”
“Why? What if—”
“If we can’t get the money without Tasers, we’re just not getting the money,” Mitch said. “I looked it up online. If you rob someone without a weapon, it’s a whole different deal. It’s, like, two years max. But if you’re even carrying a Taser, it adds like three years to it.”
Kevin thought about this for a few seconds, then said “All right.”
There was a tense silence in the room, which had never happened during their planning sessions before. Within twenty-four hours, it would be done, over. Kevin, who had recently watched a documentary about D-Day, imagined that they were the Allied generals the night before the invasion. Nothing to do now except wait for the time to be right. And, of course, get some motherfucking ski masks.
