How to Rob an Armored Car

HOW TO

ROB AN

ARMORED

CAR

Also by Iain Levison

A Working Stiff's Manifesto

Since the Layoffs

Dog Eats Dog

Copyright © 2009 by Iain Levison

All rights reserved.

Published by Soho Press, Inc.

853 Broadway New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

p. cm.

For Samantha

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

AFTERMATH

1

CHAPTER

“Hi,” she said, her tone not friendly but brusque, as if the salutation was a military call to look alert.

Mitch turned slowly from the TV. “How can I help you?”

“Are you a manager?”

Oh, Christ. One of the employees had pissed her off. It could have been any of them; none of them gave a shit.

Any of them but Charles, the Nigerian, whom Mitch had just sent on a mission to buy an eighth of kind bud while still on the clock.

“I am.”

“I read that all your clothes are made by political prisoners in China. Is that true?”

She had an angelic smile on her face while she asked it, but she had really come looking for a fight. She was holding a candle she was going to buy, and she had to be feeling bad about coming to a superstore, a huge corporate conglomerate, to buy a cheap candle, and now she felt the need to pick a fight with a manager to make herself feel better. This way, when she told her hippie friends where she got the candle, she could also add the story of how she had argued with one of the corporate henchmen, which made her a supporter of the little guy and a friend of the environment, rather than a cheap bitch who needed a candle and was too lazy to make one herself, like the Earth child she was posing as would do.

“You’ll have to ask in Clothing,” Mitch said.

This happened once a week. Accu-mart was not a store with good media coverage. Every time one opened, there were protests. They were exploiting Third World laborers, they were building huge parking lots which caused a runoff of dirt and oil to enter the water supply, and they were underpaying their employees. That last one was true enough, Mitch knew. But people needed cheap shit, so the stores were always packed. If people really wanted Accu-mart to go away, they could just stop shopping there, a rule which applied to the candle-toting hippie bitch who was trying to pick a fight.

“Nice candle,” he added pleasantly.

She put the candle down on a TV set, as if she had never intended to buy it, had just been carrying it around in case the lights went out. “That’s how you can sell them so cheap, isn’t it? You don’t pay the people who make them for their labor.”

“Ma’am, I really have no idea. This stuff just comes in on a truck.”

“Well don’t you wonder where it came from? Who made it? Because they’re paying your salary, you know.”

“Yeah, they are,” said Mitch. These issues had been addressed in the training video, and Mitch knew what he was supposed to say. Growing global economy, market forces, people being offered jobs and earning money, as opposed to not working and earning no money, blah blah blah. The corporate response sounded hollow even to him, and he didn’t care. “If someone is making money off these people, it ain’t me.”

She stared at him.

“Lady,” he said, tired, forgetting his script. “What do you want from me? Why don’t you go over to the coffee shop and say something to them? You think coffee pickers in Colombia make any money? How about the people who make your car tires?” It was burbling forth, all the stuff he thought about while he restocked floor mats and air fresheners and added up time cards. He knew it would only be a few seconds before he started casually using the word
fuck,
which certainly hadn’t been in the training video, and then he would be back on the unemployment line and his half-assed health insurance would be gone and he would be cooking at the restaurant with his roommate, Doug. He took a deep breath, stopped himself, and stared at her blankly.

“You people,” she said, marveling at Mitch’s insensitivity.

“You know, that parking lot used to be a forest.” This was clearly a first-time argument for her, and she had retreated to the forest issue quickly. They usually put up a little more of a fight before they started rambling about woodland creatures and the purity of streams. “The runoff is going into the streams and poisoning our drinking water.” She turned to leave.

“It hasn’t been a forest since the First World War,” said Mitch, levelheaded now, reciting the videotaped speech word for word. “Before we paved it over, it was a dirt field used as a junkyard by the Mulgrave Scrap Metal Company.” But he was talking to her back now, and she was waving him off as she walked away. She turned the corner and went back toward housewares, probably to get another candle.

He turned his attention back to the TV, which was showing a commercial for an acid reducer. High definition, baby. He could see the pores in the actress’s face. It was like someone with an acidy stomach was actually
in the room
with him.
If he owned that TV, could life get any better?

MITCHELL ALDEN HAD been born with a number of gifts, but overshadowing them all was the Curse of Poor Decision Making. It was genetic. He remembered sitting in the kitchen in the house where he grew up in Queens, listening to his father talking to his business partner, who wanted to get out of the indoor air-cleaning business and invest in computers. “Dammit, I don’t know how long this computer fad is going to last,” he remembered his dad saying, trying to talk his partner into staying with selling Smoke-Eeters. “But as long as I’m alive, people will be smoking in bars in New York City.”

These words turned out to be true. Mitch’s dad died on the Long Island Expressway, six weeks before the ban on smoking in New York City bars went into effect, because of another error of judgment, this one involving a tractor trailer’s stopping distance. Mitch carried on the family tradition by joining the army and getting kicked out six weeks later for failing a drug test, then going to community college and majoring in English.

Upon graduating with an associate’s degree, Mitch was fired up to start the career for which community college had best prepared him, which was selling kind bud for a Canadian smuggler he had met while in jail for his second DUI. But the smuggler disappeared and was never heard from again, and standing in the parking lot of the Wilton Community College, the mortarboard tucked under his arm and the tenth call to the smuggler going unanswered on his cell phone, Mitch looked around and saw the sign at the college job fair:

ACCU-MART! NOW HIRING MANAGERS!

Fuck it, he thought. What else am I gonna do?

MITCH DIDN’T LOVE Accu-mart, but he didn’t hate it as much as he had expected to. He thought he’d cash the first two paychecks from the training program and then find a job bartending somewhere until he could hook up with a new pot contact, but soon realized that, despite its claims to the contrary, Accu-mart expected very little of him. The term
manager
was really just an excuse not to pay him overtime, because he was rarely required to make a decision, and when he did, it was scrutinized and double-checked by everyone at the store who outranked him. The training manual had flattered him by pointing out that he had been selected from a huge pool of available talent, (though Mitch had noticed that no one he had seen filling out an application at the community college job fair was not also present on the first day of training) and the hiring gurus had claimed that they found him to be the one of the bright lights of his generation. Then, perhaps blinded by the glow of his brilliance, they stuck him back in the car accessories department to rot. A few hours of inventory control and some restocking here and there, and the rest of the ten-hour shift consisted basically of just being on the premises.

Being blazingly high sometimes helped move the shift along. Today, Mitch had smoked his last buds on the way to work and had been dreading spending the last five hours of the shift straight and sober, when Charles had suggested he make a weed run for both of them. Mitch had forked over $50, leaving himself $27 to last three more days until payday. Now he was wondering if dreading your job so much that you paid the last of your money to avoid working it with all your mental faculties intact might be an indicator that it was time to get a different one.

“I wanna go home,” whined Denise. “I’m sick.”

Denise was Mitch’s new eighteen-year-old associate. He had won her in a poker game. The department managers had been playing cards with the new-hire lists as a way of determining who got assigned where. Mitch had cleaned house and wound up taking the two Nigerians on the list (all the Nigerians worked hard and had good weed contacts) and the only attractive girl. The downside was that Denise, who was still in high school, had only applied at Accu-mart so she could work in the clothing department and hang out with her friends and get them discounts. She now found herself stocking brake pads and steering wheel covers largely out of view of the public, so she was constantly whining.

“You can go when Charles gets back,” Mitch said.

“Nooooooo,” she whined. “You sent him to buy weed.” She looked at him saucily. Apparently, Charles couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“Did you at least finish stocking the order we got in?”

“Almost,” Denise said, now chirpy and pleasant, sensing victory, any apparent signs of illness gone. “I just left the smelly things out. I can’t stand picking up those boxes. They make your hands smell.” She made a gagging face.

“All right, thanks. You’ve done a good day’s work.”

“Thanks, bye,” said Denise, heading for the time cards.

“Your fifty-three minutes of service to the Accu-mart Corporation have been invaluable . . .” he called after her, but the swinging doors leading to the stockroom were already banging shut, and through the circular scratched green Plexiglas windows he could see her beautiful blonde head bending over the time cards. Dammit. Now he was sober, bored, and had no one to look at. Where was Charles?

“Where’s Charles?” asked Bob Sutherland, the store’s general manager, who had crept up unnoticed. Sutherland gave Mitch the creeps. He could be either bossy and demanding, constantly trying to intimidate, or jovial and overly friendly. He was also the stupidest man Mitch had ever worked for. A few months earlier at a manager’s meeting, Sutherland had pointed out how well the sporting goods department at an Accu-mart in Santa Monica had done, selling surfboards. He had recommended that the sporting goods manager order ten surfboards, not taking into account that it was late fall in Wilton, Pennsylvania, over two hundred miles from any surf. The one board that had been sold since still mystified everyone. Who was that guy who bought a surfboard in central Pennsylvania as wintertime approached? The other nine took up a block of racks in the storeroom.

“I sent him to buy drugs,” Mitch said.

Sutherland laughed. Today it was Dr. Jekyll. “When he comes back, give him these,” he said, handing Mitch two envelopes full of forms. “There seems to be some kind of problem with his paperwork at the INS.”

“Will do.”

“Seriously,” Sutherland said. “Where did he go?”

“Umm, I sent him to the Autocenter to pick up a case of wiper blades. Ours didn’t come in.”

“Well, did you call the distributor? They should just bring them over. It’s their problem, not ours.”

Fuck, now Sutherland was going to get on the phone to the distributor and bitch at them about not dropping off wiper blades that they had actually dropped off.

“It was really slow here,” said Mitch. “I figured it would give him something to do.”

“You could have had him clean the stockroom,” said Sutherland, and then Charles walked through the stockroom doors.

“Did you get the wiper blades?” Sutherland asked him. This was turning into a disaster in a hurry.

Charles nodded and smiled. “Wiper blades,” he said cheerfully, in heavily accented English, walking past both of them to resume stocking the aisles. Charles’s English was perfect, and he actually had very little accent, but he could deflect conversations with feigned idiocy when he wanted to. Cold air from the outside had blown in with him, and Mitch smelled the heavy, warm scent of freshly smoked reefer.