How to Rob an Armored Car (14 page)

He folded himself into the couch, turned the TV on, and stared at it blankly.

8

CHAPTER

“W
HERE DOES KEVIN keep going? I figured I’d ask you,” Linda said cheerfully. She had picked him up that morning to take him to meet a restaurant manager who was looking for a sous-chef trainee, a contact she had made at the dress shop. Doug sensed she had made solving his unemployment problem a personal project, which was good, because his work search so far had involved daydreaming over the classifieds and listening to Kevin pitch a job selling pills. Which, to be honest, sounded better than working as a sous-chef, whatever that was. Despite having worked for four years as a corporate restaurant grill cook, Doug couldn’t really cook and didn’t have much interest in learning how. But Linda had obviously put some thought into his situation and he was touched by her concern. Too touched to mention that opening prepackaged bags of sauce and throwing meat on a grill and then removing it when it was done were the only culinary skills he had ever wanted to develop.

“I dunno,” he said. Not only was he being driven to a job interview to apply for a job he didn’t want, but he was also being grilled for information on the way. He had come along on this venture partly because he wanted a chance to talk to Linda, to confirm with her that what they had done was a terrible mistake and that it would never happen again. But Linda’s mood was unconcerned, even breezy. It was as if she knew he was tortured and was enjoying it, and torturing Doug even more was the realization that she seemed to be suffering no remorse herself.

“The other night he said he was going to walk dogs, but when I was talking to you on the phone he was over at your place,” she said. She had a bright smile while she was talking but Doug knew the smile was a feminine trick, belying the seriousness of the subject matter. Annalisa had pulled this one on him a number of times, beginning conversations about their future with an incongruous grin that caused him to let his guard down, to be equally lighthearted in his response. Women, Doug figured, instinctively understood that warning a male of an upcoming serious conversation would result in hearing a generic, prepared statement as a response, and generations of evolution had taught them all a disingenuous breeziness to avoid this.

“Yeah, he was there,” Doug said. “We were going out to look for a Ferrari.”

“A Ferrari? Really?” Linda nodded sagely and Doug hoped the conversation was over, but he knew it wasn’t. His answer had opened up a host of other questions and he had not taken the time to prepare for them. He stared out the window hopelessly, resting his head against the cool glass as they drove down the main street of Wilton.

“Kevin likes Ferraris,” he said.

“Yeah,” Linda said, nodding thoughtfully, as if she were trying to solve a puzzle and had been handed information that was clearly irrelevant to the solution. “But why would he tell me he was walking dogs and then go over to your house and talk about Ferraris?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Doug snapped, taking himself by surprise. “I mean, what’s with this? You act like you want to help me out, taking me to a job interview, and then you start grilling me for information. That’s bullshit.”

“I’m not grilling you for—”

“Just let me out,” Doug said. “Just pull over and let me out right here. You know what? Fuck that guy, this chef or whatever he is. Maybe you could have asked me first, you know? Like, have I ever said I wanted to be a chef?”

Linda pulled the car over to the side of the road. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice soft and reasonable. “I was just trying to help. I just thought . . .”

Doug got out, slammed the door, and stepped in a puddle of freezing water which came up past his ankles. “God-damit,” he yelled in shock as the water flooded through the holes in his worn tennis shoes. Then, turning around, he saw his reflection in the car window. He looked pathetic, lost. He opened the car door and got back in.

“What are you doing?” Linda asked.

“Let’s just go,” he said. “Let’s go to the interview.”

“I don’t want to waste your majesty’s time,” Linda said, the gentleness gone from her voice. She pulled the car out into traffic and made a U-turn in the middle of the road to take him back home. “I wouldn’t want you to miss your afternoon bong hit. I’m sure there are so many other useful things you could be doing right now if only I wasn’t forcing you to try to get a job.”

“You’re not forcing me,” he said. “It . . . it was nice of you—”

“Fuck you.” Linda began driving faster, speeding up to blast through a light that had just turned yellow. “Why don’t I just drop you off and you can get together with Kevin and that jerkoff roommate of yours and smoke pot all goddamned day for all I care. And if you see Kevin, you can tell him to go and fuck whoever he wants and not to bother coming home because I don’t need his sulking, moaning, bitching, lying ass around the goddamned house anymore.”

Wow. Linda was usually so soft-spoken and cheerful. Doug was trying to absorb everything she had just said to determine which of the many points she had just brought up needed to be refuted first. Did she really just call Mitch a jerkoff? Did she really think Kevin was fucking someone else? Wasn’t it a little hypocritical to attack him for that, all things considered? Perhaps that would be the point he brought up last.

“How come you think Mitch is a jerkoff?”

“I have had it with you guys,” she continued, ignoring him, her face filled with rage, an emotion Doug had never seen on her before. “What do you think I am, some kind of fucking . . .” She trailed off and Doug thought the anger was subsiding, but it turned out she was just searching for the right word. “ . . . middle-aged goddamned English teacher trying to get you to sit up straight and not chew gum in class? I just don’t want to see all the people I care about flush their fucking lives down the toilet, but oh, no, I guess that’s just not cool, is it? No, anyone with a sliver of common sense is just a boring old nag.”

Doug was about to tell her she wasn’t old or boring, but fortunately for his sake, he never got the chance because she started up again. “You know what I’d like to do? I mean, I’m sure nobody gives a fuck, but you know what would really make me happy right now? If I could take Ellie and go back to my mother’s and get away from this . . . everyone in this . . . in this . . . goddamned . . .”

She appeared to have run out of steam and Doug felt the nicest thing he could say was to finish her sentence for her.

“Town?” he ventured.

“Shut up,” Linda snarled at him. She was still driving fast, whipping around curves, and they were almost back at Doug’s apartment. She continued her rant without even looking at him. “You know why I don’t? Because I don’t want Ellie to have to start up in a new elementary school. Despite everything, with the pot and everything, I . . .”

And then she stopped talking, a bit too suddenly. Doug merely noticed that she’d fallen silent at first but after a few seconds the fact that she had stopped talking began to seem curious, so he reviewed the last things she had said. Ellie, new elementary school, pot. What did Ellie have to do with pot? The abruptness with which she had finished her rant seemed to indicate some kind of secret link which she had accidentally revealed before stopping herself.

“What are you talking about?” Doug asked, not really sure if he was imagining it, or if Linda’s demeanor had changed. She seemed suddenly defensive.

“Ellie.” Linda snapped. “I have a daughter. We, Kevin and I, have a daughter. Though you wouldn’t know he’s a father from the way he behaves.” This last bit she said almost by rote, as if she had said it before, and she probably had, Doug thought, to the women she worked with at the dress shop.

The rage was gone; the rant was over. She was phoning it in.

“Yeah, I know you have a daughter,” Doug said. “But what does that have to do with pot?”

Linda took one hand off the steering wheel and waved it frantically, as if fanning herself. “Nothing,” she said. “Just ignore me.” Her voice was softer now but Doug thought she looked stressed, not cleansed by the catharsis of rage as he would expect.

“No, no, no,” Doug said, leaning forward in his seat with the look of a TV detective who had stumbled upon a clue.

“You mentioned Ellie and then you started talking about pot. What does Ellie have to do with pot?”

Linda pulled up outside his apartment and stopped the car but left the motor running. She stared out the window and sighed. Doug wasn’t sure if this was his cue to get out of the car, as if his question didn’t deserve a response. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he was just being even more of an asshole than she already thought he was. He fumbled for the latch on his door but just as he was about to open it, Linda said, as if she was clearing her throat to start a long speech, “OK.”

“OK what?”

“There are some things I didn’t tell you.”

Doug nodded. “Like, uh, what?”

Linda sighed again. “OK,” she repeated. “Don’t be mad.”

Despite himself, Doug chuckled. “What would I be mad about?”

“Well, um, you know how Kevin is always . . . um, thinking that you might have turned him into the police?”

“Yeah,” Doug said slowly, his brow furrowing now.

“Well, I know you didn’t.”

“Yeah. I know. We talked about that.”

“No, I mean I actually know you didn’t. I don’t just know it because you’re a cool person, or whatever, and I have good instincts. I mean, I know why Kevin got busted.”

“Really.” Doug was trying to piece things together. If she knew why Kevin got busted, why didn’t Kevin know why he got busted? Why did Kevin always have it at the back of his mind that Doug had something to do with it? Why hadn’t Linda just provided him with this tiny, yet extremely important, piece of information? “Why did he get busted?”

“Because Ellie brought some pot leaves into school for show-and-tell,” Linda said, and started giggling. “She thought they were pretty. She went down into his grow room and picked some leaves and told everyone in her class that her daddy grew these in her basement.”

Doug started laughing too. “Why didn’t you just tell Kevin this?”

Linda stopped laughing. “Because Ellie asked me not to. She was very upset.”

Doug nodded. “So, wait. My friend has been walking around thinking I turned him into the cops for a year because you didn’t want to upset a six year old?” He wasn’t laughing now either.

“It’s worse than that.” She sighed heavily and continued. “I didn’t want Kevin hanging out with you guys. I knew he was suspicious of you after he got arrested, and I thought, maybe he’ll start acting like a responsible adult now. So, I just let him go on thinking that.”

Doug let that sink in for a second. “So you think we’re a bad influence?”

Linda said nothing, confirming it.

“You know what I think? I think Kevin’s a bad influence.”

Linda looked quizzical. “What do you mean by that?”

“You know what we’ve been doing for the last two weeks? He’s not having an affair. We were stealing a Ferrari and it was his idea.”

“WHAT?”

Doug had hoped to see relief in Linda’s eyes now that he had confirmed that her husband wasn’t an adulterer, but instead was confronted with what appeared to be shock and rage. Exhausted by the seriousness of the conversation and his inability to control it, he burst out laughing and was glad when Linda started laughing too.

Doug told her the story, slowly, so as to prevent further outbursts of surprise. When he got to the LoJack detail and the Ferrari being dumped on a truck ramp, Linda had her head in her hands but her mood had perceptibly improved. She was laughing at her husband’s idiocy and Doug’s own idiocy for accompanying him, but laughter was better than screaming, Doug figured. He felt some sense of accomplishment for having calmed her down.

“So that’s Kevin the good influence,” Doug finished.

Linda was quiet for a moment as they listened to the car idling. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Doug lit a cigarette. “Whatever. It’s water under the bridge.”

“What are you gonna do? For work?”

Doug was on the verge of telling her about Kevin’s pill-selling scheme, but decided that he had confessed enough for Kevin for one day. “I dunno. We’ll see. I don’t think cooking is really in my blood right now.”

She leaned over and kissed him, not passionately but affectionately and accompanied with a little head rub intended to denote frustration. He squeezed her hand. In that second, Doug had the thought that the reason she was upset at Kevin for stealing the Ferrari was not that it was a felony and it risked their livelihood, but because she had not been included. Linda felt left out. Or maybe not. You could never tell anything with women.

“I’ll call you,” he said as he got out.

“Stay out of trouble, will you?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean it.”

“I . . .” He didn’t want to make any promises he couldn’t keep. “I’ll do my best.”

MITCH WAS WALKING an excitable German shepherd named Ramone and thinking about the business of dog-walking. Kevin had just given him his first paycheck, and it was slightly under $400. He had worked two weeks but had clocked less than forty hours. He couldn’t pay his bills with an income of $800 a month, and his car insurance would be the first bill to not be paid, because, let’s face it, life wouldn’t really change that much if he didn’t have car insurance. It
would
change if his electricity or heat got cut off and it would certainly change if he stopped eating or smoking pot, but car insurance? Nah. There were times when a kind of financial triage became necessary, when things like car insurance and unkeefed Canadian kind buds, once considered a necessity, suddenly became luxuries, and one of those times was fast approaching.