Life Deluxe (29 page)

No wheel loader.

No fucking wheel loader.

Jorge was screaming. Spraying saliva. Swearing salaciously.

Sergio was staring at him. Jorge kept on raging.

“Mierda! Joder! Hostias ya! Me cago en mi puta mala suerte! Le manda conjones! Me cago en su puta madre!”

He fell silent. Couldn’t come up with enough swear words. Just stood there. Staring at the half-empty parking lot.

Nada
. Zero wheel loader.

He called Tom again. “Where the fuck is wheel loader?”

Tom responded after thirty seconds. “Jimmy and Robert parked it there last night. They have no idea.”

Jorge hung up. Looked down.

Vomit on the pavement. On the side of one of the parked cars. On his pants, his kicks.

His head was throbbing. His hands shaking. His pulse: like a shitty techno beat.

His stomach rumbled. Even though everything was already right there on the ground, stinking up the whole parking lot.

What the fuck were they gonna do now?

What the fuck was
he
gonna do now?

The wheel loader was the basis of the entire hit. It: a must.

They’d contemplated, ruminated. Finally: come up with the solution. The fucking wheel loader was gonna crush the sliding gate so they could bust through into Tomteboda’s holiest of holy places. Force the gates to the loading docks, where they would unload the bags of valuables. Where the guards would be less cautious.

Open the door to the CIT heist of the decade.

And now it wasn’t there.

They were supposed to strike in exactly four minutes—that was
the plan. While the police were barricaded into their garages and the entrances and exits to downtown Stockholm were peppered with caltrops and burning cars.

The thoughts lurched through his mind.

His brain was screaming:
Abort—be smart about this! Don’t take any risks!

His heart was howling:
Crash the gate with the van instead! It’s now or never!

Get rich or die trying
.

He refused to abort this thing—this was his retirement package. His dream. But they couldn’t drive through the gates with the Benz van. It wouldn’t be able to handle the impact. The gateposts were definitely too massive. Plus: it was indispensable—if it broke down, they were screwed.

They couldn’t boost any of the other cars in the parking lot—the immobilizers used these days made it so that basically no one except Julian Assange hackers could boost newer buckets. And: they wouldn’t be able to handle the gates either.

Jorge tried to concentrate. Covered his face with his hands.

Again: in his head:
J-boy, give up. Abort mission. Be smart now
.

Blow it off
.

BLOW IT OFF
.

He stared into his palms. Couldn’t handle going back to the van. Heard talking in the background. Sergio, Mahmud. Rapid, stressed voices. Someone took the walkie-talkie from him. He heard Tom’s voice through it. Buzz about cars. Sizes. Gates.

Jorge drifted off. Images pulsed past. Him and Paola on their way to school. They were walking by themselves. The last thing Mom always said before they left home was
“Caminar cogidos de la mano
.” Hold hands. Mom was always thinking of them—when Rodriguez didn’t interfere, that is.

The underpasses under Malmvägen’s residential area were completely covered in graffiti. The sun shone in through filthy windows. He looked out. Rhododendron bushes without any buds in the courtyards—the little punks’d destroyed them to use the buds for warfare: made good artillery. Junior high school kids playing hooky and broken park benches with gang names carved into them. Paola was stressed out. Pulling him along. She always wanted to be on time. Jorge never wanted to be on time.

Paola stopped. She took her backpack off. It was a nice backpack. She opened it and screamed.

Jorge looked at her, “What’s wrong?”

“I forgot my homework at home!”

“Should we run home and get it?”

“No, no. We’ll never make it on time.”

He saw what was going to happen. Paola’s face began to twitch. She squeezed her eyes shut. She screamed the same words over and over again.

“We’ll never make it. We’ll never make it.”

And then came the tears.

No, he had to go back now. Back to Haga Södra, the parking lot. Back to shitty reality.

He looked up. Was gonna explain to the guys that it was time to lay down their arms. Abort this thing. Maybe they could try the same hit next week.

But before he could open his mouth to speak, Mahmud said, “Bro, we’ve got a suggestion.”

Jorge couldn’t handle any bullshit right now. “Not now,” he said.

Mahmud placed a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, Babak’s got the Range Rover. It’s parked in Solna. It’ll take three minutes to get it here. He’s not the one registered on it anyway, and he said he’d consider loaning it out if he gets bills for his trouble. We can use it to bust through the gates. It should be able to handle it.”

Jorge looked at Mahmud. Hard to break the negative thought circuit right now. “It can’t take those gates,” he said.

“It can. Babak thinks it can. And Tom thinks it can. You’ve driven it—it’s the biggest Range Rover they make. Weighs over two and a half tons, V8 motor, four-wheel drive, body of steel, a grill that eats all other SUVs for breakfast.”

“I know. But who’s going to drive it here?”

“Babak—he’s finished his shit by the pig station. He’s on his way home now, he’ll be there in two minutes.”

“We won’t make it.”

“Come on, we might be max five minutes late total. It’ll work anyway.
Walla
.”

“But what’ll we do with it after?”

Mahmud grabbed Jorge’s shoulder with his other hand too. “Come on, man.”

Jorge looked up. Met Mahmud’s eyes. No sad half-moon eyes anymore. Now: a gleam, a glowing ember. A gangsta gaze. His buddy believed in this.

Jorge swallowed, hard. His mouth still tasted like vomit.

Mahmud: his best
compadre
.

Mahmud: a real bro.

Mahmud: a guy he trusted.

Also: the Arab had some kind of gut feeling.

Jorge swallowed again. “Okay, we’ll rock. He’s gotta cover up the plates, and when we’re done, we’ve gotta destroy the car. Does he understand that?”

Mahmud smiled, reacted right away. Switched on the talkie. “He says we roll.”

Tom’s voice on the other end. A new energy.

Jorge heard him talk with the others over their phones. Gushing orders, guidelines, the new plan.

Keeping rolling, that’s all there was to it.

Range Rover Vogue versus Tomteboda’s gates.

Six minutes and twenty seconds later. Jorge and Mahmud in the van. Babak and Sergio in the Range Rover in front of them. Less than three minutes behind schedule.

The Iranian’d stuck duct tape over the license plates. The postal terminal’s gates were a hundred yards away. The time: eleven oh-five. The voices on the police radio that they’d put in the backseat: agitated. The city was burning. A state of war. Suspected bombs everywhere. The entire Essinge highway before the Eugenia Tunnel was backed up. Thirty-odd cars with ruined tires. Spike strips or caltrops. The cops were still clueless. Jimmy’d rigged the massive congestion like a hero—Jorge almost forgot the wheel loader clusterfuck. The road along Klarastrand was also a mess, total chaos. The traffic was moving slower than a kid crawling on all fours. Javier’d done his bit, same story there. But the northern exit out of Stockholm was clear. Open like a racetrack. Without police choppers in the air.

Also: the five-ohs’ stressed-out radio calls, countywide orders, response preparations. Sabotage against the Stockholm police. J-boy heard it all. Tough luck,
pacos
. The orders were loud and clear: heightened alertness. It may be a question of a planned attack at a different location.
It may be political activists. It may be a terrorist attack. Block all entrances and exits into the city. The cops’d been through this before: CIT veterans tended to create confusion and chaos. But never on this scale.

Jorge felt better. Actually: pumped. Turned to Mahmud, “
Loco
, let’s blow this thing up. You want some?”

He held up a Red Line Baggie with some pills in it. “Roofies.”

Mahmud grinned. “I already sampled my own stash.”

Jorge nodded.

They waited.

The pills tasted bitter on his tongue, but better than the vomit taste.

The gate was closed. There were guards in the control booth next to it.

The gate was opened for an exiting yellow mail truck. Babak stepped on the gas in the Range Rover. Jorge heard the car rev. In first gear. They wouldn’t make it through before the gate closed, he knew that. But according to both Tom and the Finn’s calculations, the gate’s mechanism was weaker when it wasn’t completely closed. A wheel loader would definitely’ve made it. The question: Could Babak’s car take the gate?

The Range Rover accelerated with a roar. Jorge waited to release the clutch, wanted to see how things went for the huge SUV in front of him first.

Thirty yards farther up: the gate. It was closing quickly. Still: in this moment, it felt slow. The Range Rover rammed into it with full force. A loud crash.

The Range Rover skidded.

He saw the gate sway on its hinges.

Realized: the Range Rover’d paved the way. Plowed through the gate. Cleared free passage.

There was a God.

Now: J-boy was back in the game.

He floored it.

Thirty yards farther up. Jorge drove through the busted gate.

He slowed down. Mahmud opened the side door. Tossed out a bag with text clearly printed on it: BOMB. They didn’t want some idiot playing the hero trying to block their exit.

They had max three minutes now, and they were already late.

They drove straight ahead. Postal workers were screaming all around.

The summer sun’s sweaty strength. Like J-boy. Strong. Sweaty. About to fry these clowns to a crisp.

He could do anything. Dared everything.

Loading docks number twenty-one and twenty-two had extra fencing around them. Sergio in the Range Rover—knew the way. Had watched Jorge’s video footage at least five hundred times.

Jorge slowed the car down. Pulled the ski mask over his face. Grabbed the AK-47 and a duffel bag from the backseat.

Mahmud did the same. The Arab: like a real CIT pro—gray overalls, thick gloves, black balaclava. A fat Kalashnikov in his hands.

They climbed out of the car. Knew: no film in the surveillance cameras.
Verdad:
the insider was priceless.

Sergio rushed over. Wearing the same clothes as Jorge and Mahmud. In his hands: DeWalt’s fattest model—the angle grinder from hell. Attacked the extra fencing that separated them from the loading docks. They couldn’t drive the SUV through here, and they probably couldn’t have driven the wheel loader through either—the concrete blocks in the bottom section of the fence were made to survive a small war.

Jorge saw a van parked on the other side, outside loading dock number twenty-two. Twenty-odd feet away. Completely black, no text or logo on it. It was the cash-in-transit vehicle. It was parked with its back to the loading dock. The gate was raised to the top. Two guards were opening a metal door but froze when they heard the screaming.

The insider’s info was spot on.

Jorge looked over at the Range Rover: the front was severely buckled. The windshield was shattered. But none of the airbags’d been deployed. The Iranian was smart—he’d turned them off.

Jorge and Mahmud aimed their weapons through the fence. Held any potential mini-heroes at bay who thought they were gonna fuck with this hit. Kept the guards in sight who otherwise would’ve tried to bail. Babak was still sitting in the Range Rover—they hadn’t had a balaclava for him. The Iranian hid his face as much as he could behind a hoodie he’d pulled up.

Twenty seconds. Sergio was through. Kicked the fence. A square piece fell out like an opening.

J-boy—rushed through, forward. Toward the metal door through
which the guards’d disappeared. A wave through his body. Gangsta groove.

The door was unlocked from the inside. Again: the insider had delivered.

He saw a hallway. He knew his way around like it was his own bathroom.

Concrete walls. Bad lighting. A door at the other end. He opened it.

The reloading room: white walls. Guards. Carts with bags on them.

Now: he raised his weapon. Screamed in his best English: “This is a robbery! Open the door!”

Sergio was right behind him. A Walther in hand. Aimed at the guards too.

The door out toward the loading dock opened. The guards both inside and outside began to carry bags. Jorge tried to count: it might be as many as sixteen of them.

Outside: Mahmud was moving jerkily. Pointed with his gun. “Put the cases in the car.”

The guards picked up one bag at a time. Climbed through the hole in the fence.

Meanwhile: Jorge spotted the other metal door. The door to the vault.

Mahmud took over outside. Waving the AK-47 around. Egged on the guards. Made them move.

Jorge set his bag down on the floor.

The big news: they’d solved the vault issue the day before yesterday.

Jorge’d been in touch with a guy: Mischa Bladman, JW’s partner. A trickster with a face like a moon landscape—the dude’s acne problems must’ve been worse than Freddy Krueger’s when he was young.

Bladman said there were secure ways to reach JW. Jorge sent a message through Bladman. Jorge received an answer two days later. Yes, JW could get hold of people who could get hold of people who could get hold of classified blueprints from the City Planning Office. It was just a matter of price. Jorge offered a hundred thousand through JW’s channel. Five days later: Bladman delivered the blueprints—JW was a God. Jorge drove them over to Gabbe’s Pizzeria in Södertälje himself. The Finn let some explosives expert study the paperwork. He gave thumbs up.

So, now: Jorge pulled out an explosive cutting frame from the duffel.

The Finn’d been brief: “Firemen actually use these to bust through
walls and stuff to save people. My guy’s upped the explosive force ten times over.”