Before he had finished, Mitch ran out to their cluttered back porch to grab as many tools as he could find. He brought back two wrenches, a razor knife, a pair of pliers, and a hammer and threw them onto the living room floor. Then he began stabbing and smashing everything that seemed to be keeping the bags closed. As he was doing this, he thought, What if we can never get these bags open? After all this, the Ferrari, the pill-selling, the planning, and the robbery, what if we end up just sitting here forever with god knows how much money on the floor, still in its indestructible bags? Maybe they would get busted and be national laughingstocks, a twenty-second-long bit on CNN about the three guys who robbed an armored car and couldn’t figure out how to get the GODDAMNED MONEY OUT OF THE BAGS!
A lock snapped off in his hand.
“Thank you!” he cried in relief. He dumped the money all over the floor, and they looked at each other in surprise. There was a lot of it.
No one spoke. It was if they couldn’t believe they had actually done this, accomplished their goal of successfully robbing an armored car. Until they saw the money, none of it had been real. In complete defiance of all logic, all three of them had been expecting something other than stacks of bills to fall out of the bag-promissory notes or letters of credit or rare coins-half convinced that today would be just another day that they got fucked by circumstance. But here it was. Money. Spendable American money.
“Shit,” said Kevin, breaking the silence. “Look at that.”
“Count it,” said Mitch. “I’m gonna work on the other one.” He grabbed the tools and began savagely beating the lock on the second bag. By this point he was bleeding pretty severely, soaking the blue plastic in streaks of red. By the time he heard a crunching of metal indicating the second lock might be giving way, the bag looked like someone had slaughtered a pig on it.
“Jesus, dude, go wrap that,” Doug said. He limped over from the couch as Mitch dumped the second bag onto the floor. More money. He stood up and regarded his living room floor, covered in bills of various denominations, Kevin studiously counting them and setting them in neat piles. Blood dripped from his hand onto the gray, matted carpet. He was panting.
“Go wrap your hand, man,” said Doug again.
Kevin, sitting on the floor, counting to himself, said, “Get a calculator too.”
MITCH WENT UPSTAIRS and looked in the medicine cabinet for some gauze or Band-Aids and saw himself in the mirror. Except for the blood, he looked exactly the same. It surprised him. He had expected a fearsome monster to be staring back at him. He was a criminal now and he had imagined that his appearance would have changed accordingly, that his new status would be more obvious to the world.
The sink was turning red with his blood. The only thing in the medicine cabinet was a bag of hundreds of pain pills. He shrugged and took two, then winced, remembering the itching he had experienced last time. The hand didn’t really hurt that much. He just wanted something to calm him down.
Looking at himself in the mirror, he was suddenly overcome with a feeling of dread. This couldn’t keep going as well as it was going. Nothing in his life had ever gone this well. It was going to fall apart, and soon. He had to tell the others.
He wrapped his hand in toilet paper, which was turning red and soaking through before he could even finish, so he unwrapped it, held his hand up high like he remembered being taught in his first-aid class in the army, and did it again. It worked. By the time he had a decent bandage wrapped, the bathroom also looked like he had slaughtered a pig in it. He went back downstairs, the feeling of dread still with him.
“Did you bring a calculator?” asked Kevin. He was surrounded by money which had been organized into piles, perhaps six or seven of them.
Mitch shook his head. “Use your cell phone,” he said. “Doesn’t it have a calculator?”
Kevin nodded. “Good idea.”
“What’s with the piles?”
“Each one is twenty grand,” Kevin said, going back to counting.
“Shit,” Mitch marveled. Each little pile could buy a better car than he had even owned, or pay rent for two years, or… or anything. The possibilities were endless. He looked at Doug, who was sitting on the couch, similarly awed by the piles of cash.
“You still want a job at Chicken Buckets?”
“I’m thinking, maybe, like, fuck Chicken Buckets,” said Doug cheerfully.
Despite himself, Mitch laughed, and sat down on the couch next to him. “I’m thinking about leaving town,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’ve just got a bad feeling.”
Doug said nothing. Then the news started, and Doug turned the sound up.
“Tonight, our top stories. The Pittsburgh Zoo might be getting a panda. And a daring daylight robbery in Westlake leaves an elderly man fighting for his life. Those stories and more, when we return.”
“Fighting for his what?” Kevin had stood up and was staring at the TV.
“Dude,” said Doug. “Fighting for his life? What, do you think he had, like, a heart attack or something?”
“And they’re blaming it on us,” said Kevin.
Mitch shook his head, disgusted but, unlike the others, not surprised. “I told you I had a bad feeling.”
CHAPTER 13
“FUCK THE PANDA! Fuck the goddamned panda!” Kevin was screaming as he paced back and forth, staring, enraged, at the television. They had sat through five minutes of panda news and he couldn’t take it anymore. They knew more about pandas than they had ever wanted to. There had even been a special segment on their mating rituals and several slow camera pans of baby pandas being bottle-fed. “OK, I get it. Pandas are cute. Can we have some fucking news now?”
Mitch was sitting with his head in his hands, Doug silent, his injured ankle still propped on the coffee table. Kevin grabbed the remote and began flipping to the other news stations, which, incredibly, were also showing panda clips.
“I’m gonna strangle a fucking panda,” said Mitch softly to himself.
“Dude, I just wanted to go to Chicken Buckets,” Doug was saying to himself. “And now I’m wanted for attempted murder. Or maybe murder. Or-”
“Dude, shut up.”
“And now, a daring robbery in Westlake leaves an elderly security guard fighting for his life.” They shushed each other and cranked up the volume some more, so as not to miss a word.
“Finally,” said Kevin.
“A daring daylight robbery in Westlake resulted in the shooting of Ames Security guard Francis Delahunt,” the news anchor read. They watched the whole piece. At no point did the report actually say that it was the daring robbers who shot him, merely that the robbery resulted in his being shot. Then the news program cut to a detective standing outside the bank.
“This was clearly the work of professionals,” he said as snow fell in his hair. The detective seemed uncomfortable with the microphone being held in his face. He had the look of a man who would rather get back to work. “They created a distraction and then hit the van.” More babbling, then it cut to a cereal commercial.
“We’re professionals,” said Doug, flushing with pride. “I don’t think I’ve ever been called a professional before.” Then he remembered that he had just been implicitly accused of shooting someone and he fell silent.
“That was fucking smart,” said Kevin, “jumping in front of the SUV like that. Did you guys just think that up on the spot?”
Mitch and Doug looked at each other. “Yeah,” Mitch said after a second.
“They know we didn’t shoot that guy,” Kevin said, scoffing at the report, but with worry still evident on his face. “They never actually said we shot the guy.”
“Do you think somebody watching that report is going to figure that out?” Mitch snapped. “They deliberately tried to give the impression that we shot the guy. I mean, if someone gets shot during a robbery, it’s pretty much a given that it was the robbers who shot him, don’t you think?”
“This is fucked up,” said Kevin. “I mean, we even decided
“I think it’s bullshit,” said Mitch. “They’re just saying he got shot so people will turn us in.”
“I heard a shot,” said Doug. “Didn’t you guys hear a shot?”
“And a scream,” Kevin agreed.
“I saw the fat dude with a gun,” Mitch said, thinking hard and talking slowly. “He was the only guy there with a gun… and he fired it… and…”
“Fuck!” Doug yelled, his head in his hands. “I could have gone to Chicken Buckets this morning.”
“Dudes,” Mitch said, as if uncovering the Holy Grail, as if a ray of clear and brilliant light were shining on him, the light of logic. “If there was only one gun and one guy firing it… and one guy got shot, it must have been the guy with the gun.”
“The guard,” said Kevin.
“The fat guard shot the old guard.”
Their thoughts began racing and they started finishing each other’s sentences as they pieced the situation together. “And then he said-”
“It was us who shot the old guard-”
“Because he didn’t want to get blamed for it-”
