“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.
He almost immediately slipped and fell on the ice. Powdery snow covered his face.
“Shit!” Mitch screamed. He got up and was angrily shaking himself off when his cell phone rang. It was Kevin. “Shit,” he said again, and decided not to mention Duffy’s disappearance.
“Dude, check this out,” said Kevin. “I opened the safe.”
“The safe at Jeffrey’s?” Mitch was flush with relief that Kevin hadn’t called to check that everything was going well. “What’s in it?”
“Pills, man. Boxes and boxes of pills. He’s got, like, everything. Hydrocodone, OxyContin, morphine. Shit, I’ve never seen so many pills. The guy must be a drug dealer.”
“Isn’t he a doctor? Maybe all that shit is legal.”
“Damn, man. You gotta see this safe. It sure as hell ain’t legal.”
Mitch wondered why Kevin had called about this. The other day he had seemed freaked out by the idea of even looking for the safe and here he was opening it and talking excitedly about its contents. Was he planning to become a drug dealer the week he got released from parole? For his part, Mitch didn’t really want anything to do with pills.
“Any weed in there?” he asked.
“Nah, it’s all pharmies. Nothing good.”
“Doug’ll like it. Doug likes pharmies. Give him an early birthday present.”
“I’m not going to turn him into a pill head. Besides, I’m not taking them. I just looked inside.”
Kevin had sounded almost hurt by the suggestion that he might steal the pills, but Mitch had noticed that ever since they had stolen the TV, he seemed to have developed a fascination with criminal behavior. They had gone for a ride to the store to get beer and along the way Kevin had pointed out houses that might be easy to break into, doors that didn’t look secure, mailboxes that might be full of information that could be used to steal identities or credit cards. He had even pointed out a bank and said that it was situated perfectly for a robbery, as there were streets and alleys weaving off in every direction. He had actually sounded like he knew what he was talking about and it made Mitch think that perhaps his time in prison had not been a total waste.
