Get Real

15

WHEN STAN MURCH TRAVELED interborough while not in his professional role of getaway specialist, he preferred public transport. It was always possible to pick up private wheels when and where needed. Therefore, when he left the Murch manse early Monday afternoon, where he walked was to the final stop of the L subway line, being Canarsie/Rockaway Parkway, a line which, at its other extreme, a world and more than an hour away, culminated at Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. (He was a commuter! Think of that! He’d never known that before.)

While walking down Rockaway Parkway, which it was impossible not to think of as Rockaway Parkaway, Stan cell-called John at home, expecting it to take three or four rings to get an answer, since John had only the one phone in his house, which he kept in the kitchen even though he was never in the kitchen except when eating, when, of course, his mouth would be full.

Four rings. “Yar?”

“Stan here. You gonna be around in an hour?”

“Even two hours.”

“I’m on my way. I’m commuting, John.”

“Uh-huh,” John said, and when he opened his apartment door to let Stan in an hour and ten minutes later he said, “You’re pretty good at that commuting.”

“Practice makes perfect.”

As they walked toward the living room, John said, “You want a beer?”

“A little early in the day,” Stan said. “I’m trying to cut down on sodium.”

In the living room, John settled into his chair and Stan onto the sofa, where he said, “I been thinking. That’s why I’m here.”

John nodded. “I figured it was something like that.”

“What I been thinking about,” Stan said, “is this reality caper thing.”

“I guess we’re all thinking about that,” John allowed.

“So here’s what I come up with,” Stan said. “This is more complicated than it looks, because we’re tryin to come up with two heists at the same time.”

John thought about that, then nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s right. The one they see and the one they don’t see.”

“While they,” Stan said, demonstrating with arm movements, “think we’re doing something to put in front of their camera, we’re actually doing something we don’t want them to know about, because it’s stuff we’re not supposed to know about.”

“The cash in Combined Tool,” John said. “If there is cash in Combined Tool.”

“There’s something in there,” Stan said. “Something with a value on it. That high-tech door tells you that much.”

“I think,” John said, “what we gotta do is their heist first, collect our pay, and then pick up the tools.”

“Well, that’s what I was thinking about,” Stan said. “Once we do their heist, we got no more access to that building.”

“Well,” John said, “we’ve always got access.”

“Yeah, but not so easy,” Stan insisted. “If there’s an excuse for us to be around that building anyway, it gives us more elbow room, like.”

John shook his head. “We can’t do Combined Tool first,” he said. “They’ve got to know it’s us that did it. They’ll call off the other thing and they’ll call the cops.”

“So what we do,” Stan said, “we do them both at the same time.”

John frowned at that. “What, a couple of us one place, a couple another place?”

“No, that’s not the idea.” Stan spread his hands. “I know you think it’s a mistake for drivers to come up with ideas.”

“Not exactly a mistake,” John said, being diplomatic. “Just unnecessary.”

“Well, I did my thinking anyway,” Stan said, “and I’m gonna tell you what I come up with.”

“I’m listening,” John said, but couldn’t entirely hide a hint of skepticism in face and voice.

“We haven’t given Doug our target yet,” Stan pointed out, “because we didn’t pick it yet.”

“Right.”

“And Andy, sometime back, suggested to Doug we make the target one of the outfits in that corporate spaghetti they got over there. People thought maybe that was a good idea.”

“Maybe,” John said. “I don’t seem to remember Doug being really excited about it. So what do you want to do?”

“The storage place,” Stan said. “One floor up from the tool place. People put things in storage if they got no use for them right now but they’re too valuable to throw away.”

John said, “Wait a minute. What? You want to knock over Knickerbocker Storage? In the same building?”

“At the same time,” Stan said. “We’re right there already, we can get alarms shut down, we can get the electricity off if it comes to that. We can probably go right down through the floor from one of the storage units.”

“That you’re not gonna do,” John told him. “That isn’t just some little thin wood floor like a house in the suburbs. That’s a building you can drive trucks around in, every floor. Those floors are gonna be concrete, thick slabs of concrete.”

“All right, some other way,” Stan said. “Maybe there’s a fire escape in the back.”

“I don’t think so,” John said. “There’s that inside metal staircase, with the trapdoor to the roof. That’s the second exit, all you need for the fire code.”

“Then some other way,” Stan said, shrugging that off. “The point is, we’re there.”

“Yeah, we would be,” John said. “You’re right about that. The question is, would Doug go along with this?”

“We ask,” Stan said. “If you think it’s a good idea, we ask.”

“I think,” John said, “it could possibly be a good idea.”

Heady praise indeed. Grinning in relief, Stan said, “I’ll take that beer now. And what the hell, I’m not driving. Hold the salt.”