How to Rob an Armored Car (20 page)

“I bet I can get through the plastic with a steak knife,” Mitch said. Then he tried doing exactly that until, after three attempts at stabbing the bag, he cut himself. “Fuck!”

“I have bolt cutters at home,” Kevin said.

Nobody wanted to wait for him to drive home and back. They shook the idea off.

“This is like the shit they make bulletproof vests out of,” said Mitch.

“Kevlar,” said Doug helpfully.

Mitch stabbed the bag again. The knife just bounced off, cutting him again and spattering him with his own blood. “Fuck!”

“Dude, I bet you can rip that lock off with a wrench,” Doug suggested. “Or two wrenches. I’ll hold it, and you . . .”

Before he had finished, Mitch ran out to their cluttered back porch to grab as many tools as he could find. He brought back two wrenches, a razor knife, a pair of pliers, and a hammer and threw them onto the living room floor. Then he began stabbing and smashing everything that seemed to be keeping the bags closed. As he was doing this, he thought, What if we can never get these bags open? After all this, the Ferrari, the pill-selling, the planning, and the robbery, what if we end up just sitting here forever with god knows how much money on the floor, still in its indestructible bags? Maybe they would get busted and be national laughingstocks, a twenty-second-long bit on CNN about the three guys who robbed an armored car and couldn’t figure out how to get the GODDAMNED MONEY OUT OF THE BAGS!

A lock snapped off in his hand.

“Thank you!” he cried in relief. He dumped the money all over the floor, and they looked at each other in surprise. There was a lot of it.

No one spoke. It was if they couldn’t believe they had actually done this, accomplished their goal of successfully robbing an armored car. Until they saw the money, none of it had been real. In complete defiance of all logic, all three of them had been expecting something other than stacks of bills to fall out of the bag—promissory notes or letters of credit or rare coins—half convinced that today would be just another day that they got fucked by circumstance. But here it was. Money. Spendable American money.

“Shit,” said Kevin, breaking the silence. “Look at that.”

“Count it,” said Mitch. “I’m gonna work on the other one.” He grabbed the tools and began savagely beating the lock on the second bag. By this point he was bleeding pretty severely, soaking the blue plastic in streaks of red. By the time he heard a crunching of metal indicating the second lock might be giving way, the bag looked like someone had slaughtered a pig on it.

“Jesus, dude, go wrap that,” Doug said. He limped over from the couch as Mitch dumped the second bag onto the floor. More money. He stood up and regarded his living room floor, covered in bills of various denominations, Kevin studiously counting them and setting them in neat piles. Blood dripped from his hand onto the gray, matted carpet. He was panting.

“Go wrap your hand, man,” said Doug again.

Kevin, sitting on the floor, counting to himself, said, “Get a calculator too.”

MITCH WENT UPSTAIRS and looked in the medicine cabinet for some gauze or Band-Aids and saw himself in the mirror. Except for the blood, he looked exactly the same. It surprised him. He had expected a fearsome monster to be staring back at him. He was a criminal now and he had imagined that his appearance would have changed accordingly, that his new status would be more obvious to the world.

The sink was turning red with his blood. The only thing in the medicine cabinet was a bag of hundreds of pain pills. He shrugged and took two, then winced, remembering the itching he had experienced last time. The hand didn’t really hurt that much. He just wanted something to calm him down.

Looking at himself in the mirror, he was suddenly overcome with a feeling of dread. This couldn’t keep going as well as it was going. Nothing in his life had ever gone this well. It was going to fall apart, and soon. He had to tell the others.

He wrapped his hand in toilet paper, which was turning red and soaking through before he could even finish, so he unwrapped it, held his hand up high like he remembered being taught in his first-aid class in the army, and did it again. It worked. By the time he had a decent bandage wrapped, the bathroom also looked like he had slaughtered a pig in it. He went back downstairs, the feeling of dread still with him.

“Did you bring a calculator?” asked Kevin. He was surrounded by money which had been organized into piles, perhaps six or seven of them.

Mitch shook his head. “Use your cell phone,” he said. “Doesn’t it have a calculator?”

Kevin nodded. “Good idea.”

“What’s with the piles?”

“Each one is twenty grand,” Kevin said, going back to counting.

“Shit,” Mitch marveled. Each little pile could buy a better car than he had even owned, or pay rent for two years, or . . . or anything. The possibilities were endless. He looked at Doug, who was sitting on the couch, similarly awed by the piles of cash.

“You still want a job at Chicken Buckets?”

“I’m thinking, maybe, like, fuck Chicken Buckets,” said Doug cheerfully.

Despite himself, Mitch laughed, and sat down on the couch next to him. “I’m thinking about leaving town,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’ve just got a bad feeling.”

Doug said nothing. Then the news started, and Doug turned the sound up.

“Tonight, our top stories. The Pittsburgh Zoo might be getting a panda. And a daring daylight robbery in Westlake leaves an elderly man fighting for his life. Those stories and more, when we return.”

“Fighting for his what?” Kevin had stood up and was staring at the TV.

“Dude,” said Doug. “Fighting for his life? What, do you think he had, like, a heart attack or something?”

“And they’re blaming it on us,” said Kevin.

Mitch shook his head, disgusted but, unlike the others, not surprised. “I told you I had a bad feeling.”

13

CHAPTER

“F
UCK THE PANDA! Fuck the goddamned panda!” Kevin was screaming as he paced back and forth, staring, enraged, at the television. They had sat through five minutes of panda news and he couldn’t take it anymore. They knew more about pandas than they had ever wanted to. There had even been a special segment on their mating rituals and several slow camera pans of baby pandas being bottle-fed. “OK, I get it. Pandas are cute. Can we have some fucking news now?”

Mitch was sitting with his head in his hands, Doug silent, his injured ankle still propped on the coffee table. Kevin grabbed the remote and began flipping to the other news stations, which, incredibly, were also showing panda clips.

“I’m gonna strangle a fucking panda,” said Mitch softly to himself.

“Dude, I just wanted to go to Chicken Buckets,” Doug was saying to himself. “And now I’m wanted for attempted murder. Or maybe murder. Or—”

“Dude, shut up.”

“And now, a daring robbery in Westlake leaves an elderly security guard fighting for his life.” They shushed each other and cranked up the volume some more, so as not to miss a word.

“Finally,” said Kevin.

“A daring daylight robbery in Westlake resulted in the shooting of Ames Security guard Francis Delahunt,” the news anchor read. They watched the whole piece. At no point did the report actually say that it was the daring robbers who shot him, merely that the robbery resulted in his being shot. Then the news program cut to a detective standing outside the bank.

“This was clearly the work of professionals,” he said as snow fell in his hair. The detective seemed uncomfortable with the microphone being held in his face. He had the look of a man who would rather get back to work. “They created a distraction and then hit the van.” More babbling, then it cut to a cereal commercial.

“We’re professionals,” said Doug, flushing with pride. “I don’t think I’ve ever been called a professional before.”

Then he remembered that he had just been implicitly accused of shooting someone and he fell silent.

“That was fucking smart,” said Kevin, “jumping in front of the SUV like that. Did you guys just think that up on the spot?”

Mitch and Doug looked at each other. “Yeah,” Mitch said after a second.

“They know we didn’t shoot that guy,” Kevin said, scoffing at the report, but with worry still evident on his face.

“They never actually said we shot the guy.”

“Do you think somebody watching that report is going to figure that out?” Mitch snapped. “They deliberately tried to give the impression that we shot the guy. I mean, if someone gets shot during a robbery, it’s pretty much a given that it was the robbers who shot him, don’t you think?”

“This is fucked up,” said Kevin. “I mean, we even decided
not
to bring Tasers. Tasers! Let alone guns.”

“I think it’s bullshit,” said Mitch. “They’re just saying he got shot so people will turn us in.”

“I heard a shot,” said Doug. “Didn’t you guys hear a shot?”

“And a scream,” Kevin agreed.

“I saw the fat dude with a gun,” Mitch said, thinking hard and talking slowly. “He was the only guy there with a gun . . . and he fired it . . . and . . .”

“Fuck!” Doug yelled, his head in his hands. “I could have gone to Chicken Buckets this morning.”

“Dudes,” Mitch said, as if uncovering the Holy Grail, as if a ray of clear and brilliant light were shining on him, the light of logic. “If there was only one gun and one guy firing it . . . and one guy got shot, it must have been the guy with the gun.”

“The guard,” said Kevin.

“The fat guard shot the old guard.”

Their thoughts began racing and they started finishing each other’s sentences as they pieced the situation together. “And then he said—”

“It was us who shot the old guard—”

“Because he didn’t want to get blamed for it—”

“But there’s no fucking way. . . . They must know. . . .”

“They can do things with bullets, like ballistics tests and shit. . . .”

They stopped and stared at each other.

“I’m leaving town,” said Mitch.

“Dude,” Kevin said. “You can’t leave town. We agreed we’d just sit tight for six months.”

Mitch shook his head and sighed. “I know, but this shit changes everything.”

“No it doesn’t. Just calm down. Smoke a bowl, man.

Everything will be OK. They’ve got no way to connect us with anything.”

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” Mitch said again.

Kevin stood up and looked at the piles of money on the floor. “Does this give you a bad feeling? Look at this.” He looked at his cell phone. “There’s sixty-six thousand, two hundred and forty-one dollars, each.”

Mitch let the amount sink in for a second. Three years work at Accu-mart, just lying on the floor.

“We bury it, like we agreed,” Kevin said. “For six months.”

Mitch shook his head. “I’ve got a bad feeling,” he said. “You guys bury yours. I’m keeping mine in a duffel bag.”

“If he wants to keep his in a duffel bag,” Doug said, “why isn’t that cool?”

“Because if they search the house, they’ll find it.”

“Dude, if they’re searching the house, it means we’re fucked anyway.”

Kevin sat back down on the couch, shaking his head. “I don’t want to hear any more about your fucking bad feeling,” he said. “We got away with it. We did something right.”

Mitch looked at Kevin, the TV still blaring in the background. He was clearly unconvinced. “We need to make plans,” he said. “Contingency plans.”

“Contingency plans,” Doug agreed. Mitch wasn’t sure Doug knew what
contingency plans
meant, but he liked that Doug was backing him up.

“OK,” Kevin said. “We’ll make contingency plans.”

DETECTIVE ROBERT SCOTT was wondering whether it was an act of genius to rob an armored car just as a snowstorm was starting, or a complete fluke. A lot of what these guys had done seemed like a fluke and he wasn’t even sure if the supposed diversion the robbers had created, leaping out in the path of a car, had been intentional. How would that work, unless the mother, who had been teaching her daughter to parallel park, had been in on it? And clearly, she hadn’t been.

And you couldn’t arrange a snow storm.

Still, when he had spoken to the reporter, he had acted as if he were dealing with a group of criminal masterminds. It was always best that way. The more threatened the public felt, the greater the likelihood of someone turning the perpetrators in. That was why he had intentionally failed to mention that the idiot security guard had shot his own partner. As usual, the reporter just took down everything he said without asking any relevant questions and rushed to say it, word for word, in front of the camera.

The security guard hadn’t wanted to admit he had shot his own partner. He had tried for at least thirty seconds to suggest that these guys had been armed, but that had fallen apart quickly when both the mother and daughter said they hadn’t seen any of the robbers with a gun. The fact that the injured guard, getting loaded into an ambulance, had been repeatedly screaming “You stupid fucking moron!” at his partner, who had been trying, red-faced and pathetic, to keep his composure, also served to discredit the fat guard’s claim.

A uniformed officer came up behind Scott, his feet crunching in the snow. “No tracks from the other vehicle, because of the snow,” the officer said. “No prints in the Impala. No info on the plate. Nevada DMV says, a thirty-year-old plate like that, we’ll have to wait until Monday morning to get the info from Carson City. The government offices are already closed.”

Scott gritted his teeth and shook his head. He hated when things happened at the end of the day on Fridays. Of course, most criminals knew this would slow down an investigation, which was why Friday afternoons were a particularly busy time.

“We could call the mayor of Carson City and get authorization,” the officer suggested. “We can do that now. The new antiterrorism laws . . .”

Scott shook his head. “This really doesn’t qualify. What about the VIN number?”

“The last time this vehicle was registered was in 1988. To a Reginald Wright, lives in Newcastle.”

“Let’s go talk to him.”

The officer, a young man whom Scott only knew in passing, usually worked traffic detail and had almost finished his shift when the bank got robbed. He had already been kept past his end time for the three hours since they had found and printed the Impala, and Scott noticed a look of reluctance pass across his face.

“How about those guys over there?” Scott said, pointing to a few officers milling around the Impala. “Did any of those guys just come on shift?”

The officer nodded eagerly. “Peskey did.”

“Send him over here. You go home.”

“Yessir.”

THE CONTINGENCY PLAN was not complicated. Doug and Kevin were going to take five thousand out for emergencies and bury the rest of their money where they had agreed: in the exact same place they had parked the Ferrari.

Mitch would take his money and stuff it in a duffel bag. He also made himself an emergency escape kit with all the things he needed to hit the road in a hurry: a few changes of clothes, his favorite bowl (a glass-blown piece of art he had bought off eBay), and something to fill it with. Everything else he owned he figured he could kiss goodbye, and it didn’t amount to much.

Getting their story straight was another thing. They all agreed on that. Since Kevin had been the driver and had been wearing his ski mask, his name should never come up. In the event that Doug or Mitch, who might have been identified, got questioned, they would just say that the third guy was a mysterious stranger who ran off with all the money. Kevin didn’t seem enthusiastic about being protected, but he did acknowledge that, as he had a wife and child and a criminal record, it might be best.

So the only one with a plan was Doug.

“We should both take off, man,” Mitch said. “You gotta come with me.”

But Doug knew he couldn’t. It was all coming full circle, like some beautifully laid cosmic plan. He would be the one who would convince the cops Kevin wasn’t involved. If he took off too, Kevin would get arrested.

Now he saw how he could make things up to Kevin. Not by selling pills, because that had mostly been for him anyway. The only way he could make things right with Kevin, without telling him anything, was by going to jail for him.

Of course, that would only happen if the cops figured anything out. And as Kevin kept repeating over and over, and Mitch kept contradicting, that was never going to happen.

After The Contingency Plan had been made, they settled back on the couch and packed a bowl. Kevin called Linda and told her he was going to be late. He had dogs to walk.

“If Mitch leaves town,” Doug asked, “can I walk dogs for you? I’d rather do that than work at Chicken Buckets.”

“Sure,” Kevin said. “But Mitch isn’t going to leave town.”

“Are you going to leave town, Mitch?”

Mitch said nothing.

“MR. WRIGHT? MR. Wright?” Detective Scott hammered on the decaying screen door again. The noise echoed back into the trees, shattering the peace of the gently hissing snowfall. Scott could hear a television inside and figured the guy was old or just nearly deaf. Judging by the look of the yard, which contained only things that had been bought before 1980, he guessed old.