How to Rob an Armored Car (7 page)

“36-L-18-R-22-L-9-R-5,” Mitch recited. “This isn’t just letters and numbers. It’s a safe combination.”

Kevin stopped walking around the kitchen filling the dog’s bowls. “It’s a what?”

“A safe combination. Does this guy have a safe?”

“Shit, I don’t know. I’ve never been anywhere in the house except the kitchen.” Kevin walked over and looked at the paper. “OK, even if this is a safe combination, so what? It doesn’t concern us.” He tossed the slip of paper back in the trash can.

Mitch immediately picked it back up and put it in his pocket. Kevin was staring at him.

“What?” Mitch asked.

“Dude, do me a favor, OK? Don’t go wandering around this guy’s house looking for his safe.”

“I promise not to.”

“Really?”

“This week.”

“Dammit, look—”

“Kevin, man, listen. Why do you think this was in the garbage? Huh? Answer me that.”

“I don’t know. What difference does it make? I’ve been doing this shit for a year and I don’t usually go through my client’s garbage.”

“‘Client’? What are you, a lawyer?”

“That’s what I call them. They’re my clients.”

Mitch sighed. “Anyway, I figure it was in the garbage because he just had the safe installed. Has there been anyone working in the house in the last couple of days?”

Kevin thought for a second. “There was a locksmith here yesterday. He was doing some work back there in the den, or the living room, or whatever it is.” Kevin pointed to one of the opulently decorated, paneled rooms off the kitchen.

Mitch nodded. “What do you suppose he was doing back there?” There was silence for a second while Kevin looked concerned, then curious, then concerned again.

“Let’s at least have a look.”

Kevin finished filling Jeffrey’s bowl. “Do what you want,” he said, resigned. “But take your shoes off.”

Mitch took his shoes off and stepped over the dog gate into the den. There was a huge cherrywood desk in front of a brick fireplace, and Mitch was struck by the grandeur of the room. Persian rug, leather bound books on inlaid shelves— rich people had some really nice shit. He wondered if they ever appreciated it or if it was just meant to impress, or intimidate, the dog walkers, the maids, the locksmiths, and the plumbers. Perhaps spending gobs of money on opulent rubbish was a way of giving a straight-up middle finger to all the people like him who couldn’t afford things like wrought-iron fireplace pokers and Waterford crystal. He picked up the fireplace poker and looked at it. Probably cost hundreds, he thought. No Accu-mart crap in this house.

Most of all, though, he noticed the smell of freshly cut wood, and there were some splotches of sawdust to the right of the Persian rug. Someone had cut a wall stud right near there. He looked at the walls and saw no marks. Then he touched the gilded frame of a painting and it swung outward. He laughed. Could this shit be any more James Bond?

He was looking at the pristine stainless-steel knob of a safe. Behind him, he saw Kevin standing in the doorway of the den in his stockinged feet.

“You’re a menace,” Kevin said, but Mitch heard grudging respect in his voice.

Mitch gently pushed the painting back against the wall, aware that his heart was pounding. “Let’s go walk some more dogs,” he said.

THEY WERE IN line behind two other cars at the Accu-mart loading dock, and Doug was getting nervous.

“Dude, I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said. Kevin knew Doug thought that because he had been repeating it like a mantra since they had switched the license plate on the truck an hour earlier. The nonstop doubtful mumbling had only made Kevin want to bring him along even more, both because of a sadistic impulse to make Doug face his fears and a genuine desire not to steal the TV alone.

“Good idea or not, man, we’re doing it, OK? We’re in line.”

“It’s not too late to just pull out of the line and go back,” Doug said.

Kevin put the pickup in park. “Look,” he said, holding the invoice up in Doug’s face. “In two minutes, I’m going to hand this piece of paper to the guy on the loading dock, and we’re going to get a TV. And when I do it, the whole thing is gonna go a lot easier if the guy sitting next to me in the passenger seat isn’t covered in sweat and freaking out. OK?”

“OK,” said Doug, softly.

“Just be cool.”

“OK, I’m cool.” He seemed cool for a second, then he said, “But you’re on parole.”

“What the fuck are you bringing that up for? Besides, I’m not on parole anymore. I got released on Wednesday.” The loading dock workers waved the next car up, so that Kevin and Doug were next.

“Hey, congratulations, man. That’s cool.”

“Thank you. That’s more than Linda had to say about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bitch couldn’t even congratulate me, you know?”

Doug felt a flush of anger at hearing Linda called a bitch but stopped himself from saying something in her defense. For reasons that were not available to him, he didn’t want Kevin to know he and Linda had gone to the mall the other day, or that they had ever even spoken without Kevin around.

“Mitch congratulated me,” Kevin said.

“Mitch is crazy,” said Doug, in an effort to change the topic by bringing it to a subject they agreed upon.

“Damn, man, we were at one of my clients’ houses the other day, and—”

“Client?”

“Yeah, that’s what I call them. The people whose dogs I walk. Anyway, Mitch wanted to break into this guy’s safe.”

“Mitch can crack safes?”

“No, dumbass, Mitch can’t crack safes. He found the friggin’ combination in the trash can. The guy had just had the safe installed and he was memorizing the combination. You believe that shit?”

Doug laughed, glad to have his mind taken off what they were doing. “It’s probably less risky than this,” he said cheerfully, which was, of course, the wrong thing to say, as it reminded them they were in line to steal an $1,800 television.

It was quiet in the car. And it was their turn. The car in front of them drove off and the loading dock workers waved Mitch and Doug forward.

“Keep cool,” said Kevin, not looking at Doug. He rolled down the window and pulled up next to a well-built man in sunglasses and an Accu-mart T-shirt.

“Hi,” he said, handing the man the invoice.

“Hey. Thanks.” The man took the invoice and went up on the dock and disappeared from view.

“Shit, where’d he go?” asked Doug.

“Settle down.”

“I’m glad we’ve got that fake license plate on,” said Doug.

They were silent for a few seconds as they listened to the loading dock workers call out to each other. Then one called, “Forty-two-inch flat screen. Got it.”

Kevin and Doug looked at each other. “That’s us,” Kevin said.

Two huge doors burst open and a man wheeled a giant white box up to the edge of the loading dock. Two other muscular men hopped off the dock and put the box in the bed of Kevin’s truck. One of the men came around the side.

“It’s a big load. I don’t know if you want to tie it down or what,” he said to Kevin.

“Hey, how you doing?” Doug said, trying to be friendly and not suspicious. The dock worker gave him a strange look and then a perfunctory nod.

Kevin stifled a wince, then said to the dock worker, “I’ll fix it over there in the parking lot, thanks.”

“Sure. I just need you to sign something,” the guy said and disappeared from view again.

“Shit,” said Doug. “Where’s he gone now?”

“Dude, will you stop acting weird?”

“I’m not acting weird. Hey, don’t sign your real name.”

“I’m not an idiot. I’m not gonna sign my real name.”

“That’s how they caught the Boston Strangler. I think.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? Are you telling me the Boston Strangler signed documents after he was done strangling people?”

“Maybe it was Ted Bundy. I dunno.” Doug was babbling nervously and it was starting to make Kevin nervous. He should have come alone. But then he’d be alone.

The guy rounded the corner bearing a clipboard, and Kevin tried to act like he wasn’t in a hurry to take it and sign and drive off.

“That sucker’s a real work of art,” the loading dock guy said, handing Kevin the clipboard. “It’s really not that heavy either. Those thin screens, they’re like eighty pounds now.

A few years ago the lightest high-def was minimum two fifty. The sound quality on it is awesome and if you hook it up to a Cerwin-Vega subwoofer you can get—”

“Hey, we gotta go,” said Doug, who was now visibly sweating. “Thanks a lot.”

The loading guy gave Doug another odd look while Kevin pretended he didn’t know he had a passenger.

“Yeah, I got a Cerwin-Vega subwoofer at home,” Kevin said, handing the dock worker the paperwork.

The guy started to ramble about subwoofers for a few more seconds, then he turned and waved to the next car behind them. “You guys have a great night.” He slapped the side of the pickup and Kevin gave the gas pedal a gentle nudge.

“Holy shit, dude, we did it.”

“We did it,” said Kevin, driving off through the parking lot. It was getting dark, just the time that Mitch had said would be best. The loading dock was busiest at around six P.M. Mitch had been right about everything. It had been so easy.

When they pulled out onto the street, Doug was becoming almost manic. “We did it! Holy shit, man, we did it!”

They high-fived and began talking excitedly. They recounted each second of the experience they had just shared and laughed about Doug’s mention of the Boston Strangler. When they pulled into the driveway, Mitch was waiting for them, businesslike.

“Oh, man, it was so easy,” Doug yelled as he got out of the truck. It had just occurred to him that, as rent would be paid with this TV, there was no reason to pick up the dreaded Sunday brunch shift now to compensate for his buying the green shirt.

“Keep your voice down,” said Mitch. He bent down and began unscrewing the Nevada license plate which, fortunately, hadn’t gotten them pulled over. Mitch slapped Kevin’s real plate back on.

They took the TV into the cramped living room, wrestled it out of its packaging, and Doug and Kevin connected the cable. Then they all sat down and stared as the forty-two-inch screen came to life.

“Man,” Kevin said, reclining on the worn sofa in Doug and Mitch’s ratty wood-paneled apartment, with its stained, once-white carpet and its walls gray with pot smoke, “this is the life.”

“For another two days,” Doug said. “Then we gotta give it to the landlord.”

“Let’s just pretend it’s ours for forty-eight hours.”

“Cool.”

They settled back and stared at the screen.

THE NEXT MORNING, winter arrived. It was Mitch’s first full day of dog-walking by himself, and he found that the job he had imagined was hilariously easy could, if done in a blizzard, be as much of a nightmare as inventory day at Accu-mart.

His first dog of the day was a St. Bernard named Duffy who considered the blizzard a gift rather than an irritation. Two hundred pounds of playfulness, he bounced around on the icy sidewalks, chased snowflakes, and pulled Mitch into a gutter, nearly spraining his ankle. At that point, Mitch decided that, as Duffy seemed reasonably obedient, it would be safer for all concerned if he was just let off the leash and allowed to run a little by himself. Mistake number one.

The second Mitch unsnapped the leash, Duffy, who was familiar with the sound, motored off around a corner and was gone, leaving Mitch standing in the snow-covered road, leash in his hand, listening to the gentle hiss of the snowfall.

Feet crunching in the snow, Mitch walked to the corner and looked in the direction the dog had disappeared. At the far end of the block, nearly disappearing in the light fog, he could see a St. Bernard’s ass bouncing up and down as it grew steadily smaller.

Dammit! What did a dog walker do in this situation? Go home and wait for the dog to return on his own? Kevin, who had left strict instructions never to let the dogs off their leashes, might not be the best person to ask. Surely Kevin would understand if Mitch told him about nearly spraining his ankle in the gutter, right? Mitch tried to imagine Kevin’s reaction to the gutter story and decided that empathy might not be Kevin’s strong suit. He began jogging after Duffy. Mistake number two.