How to rob an armored car

back to that old guy. Shit, he doesn’t know anything about us. He didn’t even ask our names.”

“We have to wipe our prints off everything,” Kevin said.

“Everything. We don’t even go into that car without gloves on.”

“We should tell Doug. He’s working on the engine. He’ll leave prints on the fuel filter.”

“We’ll tell him.”

Kevin looked dubious. “I think we should find a ravine.”

“Dude, there aren’t any ravines around here.”

“We need to keep looking.”

They continued to stare into the drainage ditch.

“Linda’s talking about a divorce,” said Kevin. “She said she’s going to file papers.”

“Dude, that sucks,” Mitch said, handing back the joint. “I’m sorry.”

Kevin shrugged. “Dude, do you think things’ll change after we get the money?” He had a forlorn expression Mitch hadn’t seen on him before, an utter hopelessness, as if he just wanted to sink to his knees and sob.

“Yeah, man, everything’ll change,” Mitch said, putting some brightness into his voice for Kevin’s sake. “Whose life doesn’t change when they suddenly become millionaires?”

“Man, it’s weird,” Kevin said. “I think Linda knows about the Ferrari. I mean, I have no idea how she found out. But you know what she said to me yesterday?”

“What?”

“She said that she won’t come visit me in jail. Because she knows that I’ll tell her that I did whatever I did for her and Ellie and she doesn’t want to hear that.”

“You’re not going to jail,” Mitch said.

“But don’t you think it’s weird that she knows so much?”

“She’s your wife,” said Mitch. “No, it isn’t weird,”

“How about covering the car with brush? You know, like camouflage.”

“Dude, let’s just wipe it down, no prints, and we’ll be fine. That old dude’ll never be able to find us. He didn’t even want to transfer the title over to us. He just gave us a car for cash. We’ll be fine.”

Kevin nodded thoughtfully, the despair of a moment before now replaced by an energetic interest in his work. “OK, then. That’s what we’ll do. No prints.”

“No prints.”

“I’ll park my truck right here,” he said, pointing to a cleared piece of solid ground. “That’s only four and a half minutes’ drive from the bank. The cop cars, when they come, will probably come up Westlake Avenue, behind us, from the other direction. So we’re good. We’ll be in that old junkbucket for as little as five minutes.”

“We need a tarp in the back of your pickup so we can throw the money bags under it,” Mitch said. “Those things are pretty big, and there’s not a lot of room in the cab.”

“Tarp,” Kevin said. “I’ll take care of that. I’ll throw some work equipment in the back too, maybe a leaf blower and some rakes or something. So we look like landscapers. Did Doug get the ski masks?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, he needs to get ’em,” Kevin said. “What does he do all day?”

“He sells pills for you,” Mitch said pleasantly, trying to avoid any more confrontation.

“Right,” Kevin said, getting the message that picking on Doug’s unemployed inactivity was off-limits, at least until the mission was carried out. “Man, I think we should try to find a ravine.”

“There are no ravines,” said Mitch, walking back to the pickup. “This is the best we can do.”

“What is a ravine, exactly, anyway?”

“It’s like, a big hole in the ground you can push a car into.” Mitch flicked the joint into the drainage ditch. “And there aren’t any around here.”

Kevin watched the joint land in a little puddle of water and circle around. “Are we really gonna do this?” The question hung in the air for a few seconds and Mitch figured it was a genuine invitation to discuss backing out of the whole thing. He also figured that Kevin was worried about going back to jail. Of the three of them, he was the only one who knew what the worst-case scenario actually entailed.

“You’re not going back to jail, man.”

“You think everything will be fine?”

“You won’t go back to jail. I guarantee you.”

Kevin started the pickup’s engine. “Come on. Let’s get outta here.”

CHAPTER 11

THE NEXT DAY, Mitch went down to the Wilton Mall and looked around in the bookstore for books on leadership. There were dozens of them but most of them were full of advice for middle-management professionals. Dressing professionally was a common theme. Red ties were encouraged. So was drinking water, lots and lots of it, while constantly showing a positive attitude. Great leaders must smile and pee a lot, Mitch figured, as he put the last of the books back on the shelf. He decided to try looking for something more practical, but nothing offered advice on robbery.

That was the problem with crime: there was very little helpful literature on it. A simple manual would have been invaluable, written, say, by a guy who had pulled off an armored car robbery. But obviously, anyone who had successfully done that would be trying to lay low and would not want to attract the attention of the publishing industry. The only place you could find people willing to discuss such matters was in jail, where one would be able to find an authority on every aspect of robbery except how not to get caught, which was the most important part.

So he tried to rent a movie about robbing an armored car. After a half hour in the video store, the only film he could come up with was Heat, which he had seen in the theater when it first came out. The guys in that movie just made Mitch feel inadequate. They had thousands of dollars worth of equipment: radios, complex codes, night vision goggles, and M16s. The Robert DeNiro character lived in a beach house. Mitch wondered why people who could afford all that shit didn’t just invest the money rather than rob an armored car. If he had his own beach house, he and Doug would just toke on the deck all day; screw all this robbery crap. Why risk freedom when freedom was great? Mitch estimated it would take him about a year to save up for an M16, let alone all the drills, pistols, duffel bags, and binoculars. He put Heat back on the shelf.

When Mitch got home, bookless and movieless, Doug was sitting at the kitchen table looking at a toothbrush in a clear plastic container.

“What’re you doing, man?”

“I just applied for a job at Chicken Buckets,” he said.

He sounded forlorn. Mitch felt that it was his job as unrespected gang leader to keep everybody chipper, but he was confused as to why Doug would try to find employment just a few days before they were going to rob an armored car. Robbing an armored car involved a great deal of uncertainty, but the one thing you could be certain of was that, whether things went really well or really badly, you damned sure wouldn’t need a job at Chicken Buckets afterward.

“Why?”

Doug shrugged. “I dunno, man. I’ve, like, always had a job. Sitting around all day drives me nuts.”

“What’s with the toothbrush?”

“It’s for a drug test,” he said. “I filled out an application and they gave me this toothbrush to swab my mouth with. You don’t even have to do it there. It’s a take- home drug test. I guess they figured that if you made the guys do it on the spot, they’d never be able to hire anyone.”

Mitch picked up the toothbrush. Instead of bristles, it had a little absorbent sponge.

“Cool, huh? They can test your saliva now,” Doug said, taking the brush back. “The thing is, I don’t even know anyone whose saliva I can use. They give me a take-home drug test, man, they’re basically just asking me to cheat on it, and I’m still not gonna be able to pass it.”

Mitch opened the fridge and cracked open a beer, then sat down at the kitchen table next to Doug and thought about it. Linda? No, she smoked occasionally. The landlord? You didn’t want to ask your landlord to help you pass a drug test. Besides, he seemed a little freaky sometimes, wired up; maybe he dabbled in meth or coke. That would be all Doug needed-to get busted on a drug test for one of the few drugs he didn’t use. “How about Ellie?”

“Kevin’s daughter?”

Mitch shrugged. “It’s human saliva, right? That’s all they need.”

They stared at each other. Mitch burst out laughing but Doug remained serious. He pushed the toothbrush, still wrapped in plastic, toward Mitch. “When you see Kevin tomorrow, can you ask him to have Ellie stick that in her mouth?”

Mitch was still laughing, snorting beer out of his nose. He nodded. He got up and went into the living room to watch TV. Maybe that was what leaders did. They solved other people’s problems.

FEELING UNCHARACTERISTICALLY CONNECTED to the world, Mitch decided to watch the news. There was something about the idea of robbing an armored car that, rather than making him feel removed from society, made him feel accepted by it. While he walked dogs, he was devoting an unusual amount of his time to