How to Rob an Armored Car (3 page)

“I know, sweetie,” Linda said. “I never thought you did.”

Her voice was warm and friendly, revealing a side of her Doug had never noticed before, and she suddenly struck him as a person, a woman, a different entity from Kevin, with whom Doug had always associated her. It was always Kevin and Linda. For four years, he had seen her come and go and occasionally spoken to her, but she hadn’t existed for him except as Kevin’s accessory, much like his car or his sunglasses. He liked being called
sweetie
too.

“Why does he think I did it? I mean, after all this time, I’d admit it if it had ever happened. Does he really think I’d turn him in? Dude, you know what they do to you for dealing? It’s like a slap on the wrist. I wouldn’t ruin his life for a slap on the wrist, you know.”

Linda looked at him thoughtfully. “You know, honestly, I always thought of you as a waste case,” she said. “You’re really a nice guy. I can see why Kevin likes you.”

“I always thought of you as a nag.”

There was a moment of silence, and then they both laughed. Linda leaned across the table and said with a conspiratorial grin, “Hey, you don’t have any smoke with you, do you?”

“Yeah, I do,” Doug said. “Do you have any . . . like, uh . . . fuckin’ double-A batteries?”

KEVIN WAS WALKING a pit bull in the rain. The pit bull was named Jeffrey, and he belonged to a shifty doctor who lived alone in a million-dollar house in Westlake. Kevin figured the dog had not been bought for companionship, but because the doctor was too cheap to install a security system. Or maybe not too cheap. Maybe he liked the idea that, instead of hearing an impotent alarm go off, a burglar should be torn to shreds. Having been banished to the yard, even during the harsh winters, Jeffrey was usually in a state of physical neglect and starved of human contact, and was always so happy to see Kevin on his daily half-hour visits that it was often difficult to get his leash on for all the joyful bouncing around. Eyeing the sores on the poor dog’s back as the rain grew heavier, Kevin wondered if the alarm system wouldn’t have been a better decision for all involved.

Kevin had started his dog-walking business two years ago, purely by chance. Fresh from a ninety-day stint in jail and convinced that no one would ever hire him, he had been moping around the house when Linda had mentioned that if he wasn’t going to do anything all day, he could at least walk Nicky Taylor’s dog around lunchtime. Nicky Taylor was a rich divorcée who owned the dress shop where Linda worked, and she was constantly leaving Linda alone in the busy store so she could drive home and let her golden retriever out. He had done it one day, just to shut Linda up, and then the next day, then the next. Then within a week he found himself actually looking forward to it. The dog-walking provided an anchor to days which had become aimless and empty, and he found himself getting attached to the dog. Max, the retriever, was marvelously uncomplicated, had no needs that couldn’t be easily met, and expressed nothing but the most sincere appreciation. After seven years of a deteriorating marriage, this was exactly the type of relationship Kevin was looking for.

Nicky had then, without asking, compiled a list of all her wealthy friends who also needed their dogs walked, and had come up with a pay scale and a schedule for him. At first, Kevin had been annoyed, picturing the two women sitting around the dress shop planning every detail of his life.

Linda couldn’t just leave him alone, give him time to get things figured out, get his life back together. But then he realized that the work entailed no boss and noticed that the pay scale Nicky had arranged was well in excess of anything he himself would have asked for, and he couldn’t believe that he could earn a hundred dollars a day just for showing up at five or six houses and taking a dog out to shit. It kept Linda quiet and got him out of the house, and it brought money in. Soon he found the postprison depression had lifted, and he was printing up business cards and actively pursuing clients.

The rain was turning into a downpour, which Kevin liked. He was getting drenched and it gave him a feeling of working, of earning money by battling the elements. Anyone could walk dogs in the sunshine. When the sound of the water hitting the immaculate sidewalks of Westlake became a dull roar, Jeffrey turned around and looked at him, as if he expected the walk to be cut short. Kevin nodded at him to keep moving. The dog responded with a jump of enthusiasm. Rain, shit. It wasn’t so bad. They both knew it was better than going home.

When the rain let up, his worn jacket and pants soaked through, Kevin’s mind wandered back to football. Specifically, he was trying to pinpoint the moment in his own football career when his life had completely changed tracks without him being aware of it. Perhaps it was the day he had started pretending that a slight bruise on his right knee was a crippling injury, or the week he had blown off football practice three times with a doctor’s note so he could go over to Linda’s house while her parents were out of town.

After having spent most of his childhood and early adult years imagining a superstar NFL career, and having been encouraged in this by every coach and player he had met in the high school system, it had taken only a year of playing at Western College to realize that he was, in fact, headed for the scrap heap of broken bones and also-rans. After less than a semester, the joy had gone out of it, and he had begun to notice that he was more likely to wind up as the limping assistant coach at some coal-town high school than as the guy doing shoe commercials and holding up the Vince Lombardi trophy on national television.

All the guys at Western thought they were going to the big time. They were all ex–high school stars. After practice one day, he had been looking at them, listening to their endless chatter of self-promoting shit, and he had thought of them as deluded. Then, in a moment of painful self-awareness, he had seen that he fit right in. He wasn’t going to the pros, no matter what. Western College athletes wound up as gym teachers. Ohio State sent guys to the pros, and they had never called him back.

After this epiphany, things went downhill quickly. He developed a thousand-yard stare during the pregame prayer and was often daydreaming when the coach called him off the sidelines for a play. Despite his versatility as a player (he could play tight end or cornerback equally well), he found his name called less and less frequently. Finally, during a midseason practice, after being slow to respond to an order to get on the field, he heard one of the coaches say to another, “Never mind. He doesn’t care.” Then they quickly called a different play which didn’t include him.

At the next game, when he showed up to strap on pads and tape and cleats and rub his hands with Stickum, he realized he didn’t care that much if Western College won or lost. He also didn’t care if he watched from the sidelines or played. The rah-rah sessions before the games, which featured offensive linemen screaming “WESTEEEEEEERN!” with a red-faced mania as they banged their helmets against lockers, and the episodes on the team bus, when assistant coaches would try to get the players fired up with primal screams, made Kevin feel less like he had accepted a college scholarship and more like he had joined a cult. After the games, when all the players would go to the Easytown Buffet to load up on platefuls of fried chicken and celebrate a victory or reflect on a loss, Kevin would grab a book and head down to the local diner and eat by himself.

Which was where he met Linda. And then he dropped out of college and worked at a quarry so he could spend more time with her. And now here he was, twenty-eight years old, walking dogs in the rain. Why had that happened? Why couldn’t he care about winning some football games for a college that had given him a scholarship? Why did he have to be an
individual
all the time? Maybe it was because he had been lonely at college, and Linda had been the cure for it. Maybe that was how everyone made decisions that affected the rest of their lives, by trying to solve the problem right in front of them. And before you knew it, life was slipping away and you were obsessing with all your immediate problems and . . .

Stop it. Stop thinking so much. The rain had left a fresh, crisp scent in the air which gave Kevin some energy. He turned Jeffrey around to go back home, and the dog looked at him with understanding. Jeffrey seemed to understand everything, and bore it all with a grace Kevin knew he lacked. Back to sit in the doghouse, a literal doghouse, not the metaphorical one to which Kevin felt consigned. It was one of the things he liked about walking dogs, that it put everything into perspective. He got to spend time with creatures more fucked than him.

2

CHAPTER

M
ITCH WAS STARING at a case of auto air fresheners. Really staring at them. He was having some deep thoughts, wondering who came up with the idea of freshening the interior of a car. Mitch’s own car smelled like gas and pot smoke and mold, which was fair enough, because the roof leaked and the carpet was always damp, and he hotboxed a joint out there every day during his lunch break, and the car ran on gas. That was what an old car should smell like. He knew if he put an air freshener in it, it would smell like gas and pot smoke and mold and a chemical approximation of a pine tree, which wouldn’t really be better, just different.

He and Charles had gone out at lunch and fired up a joint and Charles had told him that he had nine brothers and sisters back in Lagos, Nigeria, and two of them had been killed by the secret police. Mitch hadn’t known what to say. In a way he envied Charles for having had a life so shitty that working at Accu-mart was a slice of heaven. He wished he had stories about having come from somewhere merciless and tragic. Instead, he had stories about living with a distant father while attending public school in Queens, and by comparison those stories shrieked of insignificance. Even he found them dull, and because of this, working at Accu-mart was even duller, a mind-numbing slow torture that was turning his brain into lifeless putty. Work, cable TV, smoke a bowl, sleep. Try to hide from suffering in all its many forms and wind up envying people whose families were getting killed by the secret police.

“Are you memorizing the bar codes?” It was Bob Sutherland, again. He must have crept up behind him while he was staring at the case of air fresheners. “Because when I started, I used to do that. Memorize the stock numbers.”

“Yeah,” Mitch said, his heart pounding from being startled. Bob-Fucking-Sutherland needed to wear a cowbell. He was going to give Mitch a heart attack.

“I noticed a pattern,” Sutherland said. “Sometimes you can tell which distributor it is just by the bar code. Back when I was a department manager, you could read me the bar digits off any piece of inventory in electronics and I could tell you what it was.” Sutherland beamed with pride at the memory.

“Yeah, I’ve noticed patterns,” Mitch said, hoping he wasn’t going to have to cite one. Who the fuck studied bar codes? Isn’t that why you had bar codes, so you could
not
memorize them? Could this man be any less interesting?

“Hey, Mitch, your eyes are really red. Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Mitch said. “Just a little tired.”

“You don’t have pinkeye, do you? A new hire in house-wares had pinkeye. We had to let her go.”

“I don’t have pinkeye,” said Mitch.

Sutherland leaned in and stared into Mitch’s eyes, close enough to be inhaling pot fumes. Mitch could smell Sutherland’s cologne. He stifled an urge to giggle while Sutherland studied his eyes.

“You and Charles always have red eyes,” he said finally. “Do you think you guys might be allergic to something back here?”

“Maybe the air fresheners,” said Mitch, relieved to have an excuse provided for him. “I’ve been wondering about that. They’ve been making me . . . you know . . . stuffed up.”

“Do you know anything about computers?” Sutherland asked.

Cool. This was it. He was going to get transferred to the coveted computer department, where he could earn commission and work in a clean environment, and not get oil stains and dust all over him. He could talk to the pretty secretaries who asked questions about software, instead of a bunch of gruff middle-aged grease monkeys with clogged fuel filters. All because of his allergy to air fresheners.

“Sure,” Mitch said. “I know a ton about computers. I’ve got a Dell at home with a 200 gig—”

“Why don’t you help Karl with the inventory sheets then? He’s got a whole stack of them he needs to punch into the computer.” Sutherland walked off, calling over his shoulder, “Charles’ll take care of things around here.” Sutherland stopped, stared at a display of air filters, adjusted one slightly, looked happy with himself, and turned the corner, missing Mitch giving him the finger while scratching his face.

“Hey, Karl,” Mitch said. “I hear you need help with the inventory.” Karl was the electronics department manager, a techno-geek who could reel off specs about hard drives and operating systems and one of the few souls at Accu-mart who seemed genuinely happy, which was part of why Mitch avoided him. Mitch also avoided him because he was deeply religious and had his own marketing business, so any conversation with Karl eventually turned to how Mitch should either go to Karl’s church or buy Excel-Tone housecleaning products.

“Great, great, thanks for coming by,” said Karl, as if it had been Mitch’s idea. “I have a stack right here. Just punch the inventory numbers into the fields with a red asterisk.”

He handed Mitch a five-inch-thick stack of inventory forms, and Mitch heard angels singing. They were for the audio-visual electronics, not the computer electronics. The stock control numbers for the forty-two-inch plasma TVs were on the top of the pile.

Karl stood up and looked at his watch. “I have to be at a meeting in about five minutes. You don’t mind doing this for a few hours, do you?” He sounded genuinely concerned.

Karl went to meetings, usually with the store brass. It was a sure sign he was on his way up the company ladder. Mitch had never been invited to the store meetings, probably because he spent his free time smoking pot with the hourly employees in hiding places, rather than devoting himself to the more useful practice of memorizing stock numbers. He was cannon fodder to the top management, he knew, and probably had been since day one. He was trusted with brake pads, but not with anything valuable, except accidentally. Like today.

“Sure, dude, go ahead. It gets me away from the parts department for a little while. I’ve got some serious allergies to the air fresheners.”

“Allergies? Oh, no. Perhaps you could transfer over to work with me . . .”

“They need me back there,” Mitch said, and the unspoken words hung heavy in the air. They’d never let me transfer. They need me to do the grunt work. Karl nodded.

“It’s important work back there. You know, the parts department turned the third largest net profit last quarter,” Karl said cheerfully, then remembered that this was the type of information discussed at the meetings with the store brass, to which Mitch was never invited. Karl quickly looked at his watch. “Thanks again. Thanks so much.”

“No problem.”

Karl looked at Mitch as if he was a hopeless case. “You know, we’re having a church picnic on Sunday morning. There’ll be some nice girls there . . .”

Nice
girls. What good were they? “I’m scheduled Sundays, but thanks.”

Karl left, after thanking him again. Mitch turned back to the computer. He flipped through the inventory sheets for the plasma TVs. There were fourteen of them. He punched in twelve and slipped the last two into his pocket.

“HERE’S WHAT YOU do,” Mitch said. He let out a stream of pot smoke and passed the bong to Kevin. “You pull up to the loading dock, hand them that piece of paper, and they’ll put a forty-two-inch plasma TV in your truck.”

Kevin looked dubious. “I’m still on parole, man. I don’t know about this.”

“Dude, it’s no-risk. You’re not really doing anything wrong. Worst comes to worst, just say I gave you the slip to pick up the TV. If you don’t want to do it, just let us borrow your truck. We can’t use my car, because the loading dock guys know my car.” Mitch shrugged. “Doug’ll do it.”

Doug nodded. “I’ll do it. But I’d like to have Kevin with me.”

“Just keep him company,” said Mitch.

Kevin still looked dubious.

“Dude, it’ll be over in, like, five minutes. The only thing is, you have to park in the parking lot first and switch license plates. I’ll get you a fake plate. I’ve got one in the basement, an old Nevada plate, like from the seventies or something. You just have to put that on the car, for the loading dock security cam. Hand ’em the paper, and you’ve got a seventeen-hundred-dollar TV.”

“And then what?”

“Well, you keep it in the basement here for a few days. We can watch a playoff game on it next Sunday. Then I’ll have to give it to my landlord.”

Since adjusting the inventory sheets a few hours earlier, Mitch had developed a complex plan with his roommate, Doug. Originally they had wanted to keep the TV, but they had decided that would be too risky. Then, out of the blue, their landlord had dropped by and asked Mitch, with a wink, if he could get any “discounts” from Accu-mart, and a fence operation was born. In exchange for two months’ free rent, at $500 a month, he would take the TV.

Kevin stared into the bong. “What do I get out of this?”

Doug and Mitch looked at each other. They were discussing practical issues now. It was becoming a possibility. “Two hundred,” Mitch said, and Doug nodded.

“You guys get a thousand, and I only get one fifth? That’s bullshit. It’s my truck.”

They looked at each other again and shrugged. “OK, one third. Three thirty,” said Mitch.

“Three thirty-
three,
” corrected Kevin. “And thirty-three cents. Point three repeating.”

“Hell,” said Mitch. “You know what? You can have three thirty-
four.

”

“Three thirty-five, even,” Doug said. “But you have to keep me company.”

They heard Linda come home, heard footsteps in the kitchen above them. She walked down the first few basement stairs and stared at the three of them, high on the couches, suddenly quiet.

“Hi, Doug,” she said, then retreated back into the kitchen.

Doug waved.

Kevin looked at Doug. “Why the hell did she say hi to
you?
”

Doug shrugged.

Mitch, who also thought it was odd, quickly turned the conversation back to the issue at hand. “OK then, we do this next Monday. I’ll get you the license plate tomorrow morning.”

“Let’s do it Friday,” Kevin said. “Then we can watch the Steelers game over the weekend.”

“We can’t. I dated the stock slip for Monday.” Mitch was glad to hear Kevin push the date ahead, because he felt that Kevin was either reluctant or only half-listening, not as involved as he and Doug. “If you give them a stock slip dated three days ahead, they might notice.”

“They’ll notice that we’re TV buyers from the future,” Doug said into the bong, and giggled at his own joke.

Mitch felt the battle plan might degenerate into giggling and joking, so he quickly added, “We have to wait until it gets dark. Like six o’clock or so. Sound good?”

Kevin was baked, staring at his own TV, which was on but muted. He was smiling, which could have been in appreciation of Mitch’s excellent plan or from seven bong hits of White Widow. Mitch was watching his expression carefully. “Shit,” Kevin said, and shook his head, chuckled. “Nevada license plate. You’re funny, Mitch.”

ON THE WAY back to their apartment, Doug and Mitch stopped at the All Night Fillerup for cigarettes and so Doug could stare lovingly at his Mexican girl. There was a girl who worked behind the counter whom Doug obsessed about, but in a year of buying cigarettes from her he had never spoken to her. He was biding his time, he explained. Didn’t want to rush things. Months ago, Mitch and Kevin had made fun of him, told him she would be married with grandchildren by the time he struck up a conversation. Kevin, who despite being married, had a better way with women than either of the other two, had even offered to talk to her for him, which had sent Doug into a panic. Mitch and Kevin had just looked at each other and shook their heads, convinced it was never going anywhere, just another one of Doug’s fantasies.

“Just wait,” Doug had said.

“We have waited. Are you going to do something about this or not?”

“When the time is right.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, seriously. Just wait.”

Mitch was getting concerned for Doug, who was showing more and more of a tendency to live in his head. After getting what he felt was an unnecessary speeding ticket a few weeks ago, Doug had talked incessantly about all the things he was going to say to the judge. He was going to put the whole traffic system on trial. If he was going to pay $150, he was going to have his say, about how speed traps were just an unfair form of taxation, how the only people who benefited were the insurance companies and the tax collectors, how working people were getting victimized by an unfair power structure which could charge whatever it wanted. One hundred fifty? Why not five thousand? He had rehearsed his speech over and over at every one of their smoke-out sessions for weeks until Mitch and Kevin were rolling their eyes. Then he had gone to court on his date and quietly paid the ticket. “I just wanted to get out of there,” he had explained. “The place was, like, uh, crawling with cops.”