How to rob an armored car

CHAPTER 8

“WHERE DOES KEVIN keep going? I figured I’d ask you,” Linda said cheerfully. She had picked him up that morning to take him to meet a restaurant manager who was looking for a sous-chef trainee, a contact she had made at the dress shop. Doug sensed she had made solving his unemployment problem a personal project, which was good, because his work search so far had involved daydreaming over the classifieds and listening to Kevin pitch a job selling pills. Which, to be honest, sounded better than working as a sous-chef, whatever that was. Despite having worked for four years as a corporate restaurant grill cook, Doug couldn’t really cook and didn’t have much interest in learning how. But Linda had obviously put some thought into his situation and he was touched by her concern. Too touched to mention that opening prepackaged bags of sauce and throwing meat on a grill and then removing it when it was done were the only culinary skills he had ever wanted to develop.

“I dunno,” he said. Not only was he being driven to a job interview to apply for a job he didn’t want, but he was also being grilled for information on the way. He had come along on this venture partly because he wanted a chance to talk to Linda, to confirm with her that what they had done was a terrible mistake and that it would never happen again. But Linda’s mood was unconcerned, even breezy. It was as if she knew he was tortured and was enjoying it, and torturing Doug even more was the realization that she seemed to be suffering no remorse herself.

“The other night he said he was going to walk dogs, but when I was talking to you on the phone he was over at your place,” she said. She had a bright smile while she was talking but Doug knew the smile was a feminine trick, belying the seriousness of the subject matter. Annalisa had pulled this one on him a number of times, beginning conversations about their future with an incongruous grin that caused him to let his guard down, to be equally lighthearted in his response. Women, Doug figured, instinctively understood that warning a male of an upcoming serious conversation would result in hearing a generic, prepared statement as a response, and generations of evolution had taught them all a disingenuous breeziness to avoid this.

“Yeah, he was there,” Doug said. “We were going out to look for a Ferrari.”

“A Ferrari? Really?” Linda nodded sagely and Doug hoped the conversation was over, but he knew it wasn’t. His answer had opened up a host of other questions and he had not taken the time to prepare for them. He stared out the window hopelessly, resting his head against the cool glass as they drove down the main street of Wilton.

“Kevin likes Ferraris,” he said.

“Yeah,” Linda said, nodding thoughtfully, as if she were trying to solve a puzzle and had been handed information that was clearly irrelevant to the solution. “But why would he tell me he was walking dogs and then go over to your house and talk about Ferraris?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Doug snapped, taking himself by surprise. “I mean, what’s with this? You act like you want to help me out, taking me to a job interview, and then you start grilling me for information. That’s bullshit.”

“I’m not grilling you for-”

“Just let me out,” Doug said. “Just pull over and let me out right here. You know what? Fuck that guy, this chef or whatever he is. Maybe you could have asked me first, you know? Like, have I ever said I wanted to be a chef?”

Linda pulled the car over to the side of the road. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice soft and reasonable. “I was just trying to help. I just thought…”

Doug got out, slammed the door, and stepped in a puddle of freezing water which came up past his ankles. “Goddamit,” he yelled in shock as the water flooded through the holes in his worn tennis shoes. Then, turning around, he saw his reflection in the car window. He looked pathetic, lost. He opened the car door and got back in.

“What are you doing?” Linda asked.

“Let’s just go,” he said. “Let’s go to the interview.”

“I don’t want to waste your majesty’s time,” Linda said, the gentleness gone from her voice. She pulled the car out into traffic and made a U-turn in the middle of the road to take him back home. “I wouldn’t want you to miss your afternoon bong hit. I’m sure there are so many other useful things you could be doing right now if only I wasn’t forcing you to try to get a job.”

“You’re not forcing me,” he said. “It… it was nice of you-”

“Fuck you.” Linda began driving faster, speeding up to blast through a light that had just turned yellow. “Why don’t I just drop you off and you can get together with Kevin and that jerkoff roommate of yours and smoke pot all goddamned day for all I care. And if you see Kevin, you can tell him to go and fuck whoever he wants and not to bother coming home because I don’t need his sulking, moaning, bitching, lying ass around the goddamned house anymore.”

Wow. Linda was usually so soft-spoken and cheerful. Doug was trying to absorb everything she had just said to determine which of the many points she had just brought up needed to be refuted first. Did she really just call Mitch a jerkoff? Did she really think Kevin was fucking someone else? Wasn’t it a little hypocritical to attack him for that, all things considered? Perhaps that would be the point he brought up last.

“How come you think Mitch is a jerkoff?”

“I have had it with you guys,” she continued, ignoring him, her face filled with rage, an emotion Doug had never seen on her before. “What do you think I am, some kind of fucking…” She trailed off and Doug thought the anger was subsiding, but it turned out she was just searching for the right word. “… middle-aged goddamned English teacher trying to get you to sit up straight and not chew gum in class? I just don’t want to see all the people I care about flush their fucking lives down the toilet, but oh, no, I guess that’s just not cool, is it? No, anyone with a sliver of common sense is just a boring old nag.”

Doug was about to tell her she wasn’t old or boring, but fortunately for his sake, he never got the chance because she started up again. “You know what I’d like to do? I mean, I’m sure nobody gives a fuck, but you know what would really make me happy right now? If I could take Ellie and go back to my mother’s and get away from this… everyone in this… in this… goddamned…”

She appeared to have run out of steam and Doug felt the nicest thing he could say was to finish her sentence for her. “Town?” he ventured.

“Shut up,” Linda snarled at him. She was still driving fast, whipping around curves, and they were almost back at Doug’s apartment. She continued her rant without even looking at him. “You know why I don’t? Because I don’t want Ellie to have to start up in a new elementary school. Despite everything, with the pot and everything, I…”

And then she stopped talking, a bit too suddenly. Doug merely noticed that she’d fallen silent at first but after a few seconds the fact that she had stopped talking began to seem curious, so he reviewed the last things she had said. Ellie, new elementary school, pot. What did Ellie have to do with pot? The abruptness with which she had finished her rant seemed to indicate some kind of secret link which she had accidentally revealed before stopping herself.

“What are you talking about?” Doug asked, not really sure if he was imagining it, or if Linda’s demeanor had changed. She seemed suddenly defensive.

“Ellie.” Linda snapped. “I have a daughter. We, Kevin and I, have a daughter. Though you wouldn’t know he’s a father from the way he behaves.” This last bit she said almost by rote, as if she had said it before, and she probably had, Doug thought, to the women she worked with at the dress shop. The rage was gone; the rant was over. She was phoning it in.

“Yeah, I know you have a daughter,” Doug said. “But what does that have to do with pot?”

Linda took one hand off the steering wheel and waved it frantically, as if fanning herself. “Nothing,” she said. “Just ignore me.” Her voice was softer now but Doug thought she looked stressed, not cleansed by the catharsis of rage as he would expect.

“No, no, no,” Doug said, leaning forward in his seat with the look of a TV detective who had stumbled upon a clue. “You mentioned Ellie and then you started talking about pot. What does Ellie have to do with pot?”

Linda pulled up outside his apartment and stopped the car but left the motor running. She stared out the window and sighed. Doug wasn’t sure if this was his cue to get out of the car, as if his question didn’t deserve a response. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he was just being even more of an asshole than she already thought he was. He fumbled for the latch on his door but just as he was about to open it, Linda said, as if she was clearing her throat to start a long speech, “OK.”

“OK what?”

“There are some things I didn’t tell you.”

Doug nodded. “Like, uh, what?”

Linda sighed again. “OK,” she repeated. “Don’t be mad.”

Despite himself, Doug chuckled. “What would I be mad about?”

“Well, um, you know how Kevin is always… um, thinking that you might have turned him into the police?”

“Yeah,” Doug said slowly, his brow furrowing now.

“Well, I know you didn’t.”

“Yeah. I know. We talked about that.”

“No, I mean I actually know you didn’t. I don’t just know it because you’re a cool person, or whatever, and I have good instincts. I mean, I know why Kevin got busted.”

“Really.” Doug was trying to piece things together. If she knew why Kevin got busted, why didn’t Kevin know why he got busted? Why did Kevin always have it at the back of his mind that Doug had something to do with it? Why hadn’t Linda just provided him with this tiny, yet extremely important, piece of information? “Why did he get busted?”

“Because Ellie brought some pot leaves into school for show-and-tell,” Linda said, and started giggling. “She thought they were pretty. She went down into his grow room and picked some leaves and told everyone in her class that her daddy grew these in her basement.”

Doug started laughing too. “Why didn’t you just tell Kevin this?”

Linda stopped laughing. “Because Ellie asked me not to. She was very upset.”

Doug nodded. “So, wait. My friend has been walking around thinking I turned him into the cops for a year because you didn’t want to upset a six year old?” He wasn’t laughing now either.

“It’s worse than that.” She sighed heavily and continued. “I didn’t want Kevin hanging out with you guys. I knew he was suspicious of you after he got arrested, and I thought, maybe he’ll start acting like a responsible adult now. So, I just let him go on thinking that.”

Doug let that sink in for a second. “So you think we’re a bad influence?”

Linda said nothing, confirming it.

“You know what I think? I think Kevin’s a bad influence.”

Linda looked quizzical. “What do you mean by that?”

“You know what we’ve been doing for the last two weeks? He’s not having an affair. We were stealing a Ferrari and it was his idea.”

“WHAT?”

Doug had hoped to see relief in Linda’s eyes now that he had confirmed that her husband wasn’t an adulterer, but instead was confronted with what appeared to be shock and rage. Exhausted by the seriousness of the conversation and his inability to control it, he burst out laughing and was glad when Linda started laughing too.

Doug told her the story, slowly, so as to prevent further outbursts of surprise. When he got to the LoJack detail and the Ferrari being dumped on a truck ramp, Linda had her head in her hands but her mood had perceptibly improved. She was laughing at her husband’s idiocy and Doug’s own idiocy for accompanying him, but laughter was better than screaming, Doug figured. He felt some sense of accomplishment for having calmed her down.

“So that’s Kevin the good influence,” Doug finished.

Linda was quiet for a moment as they listened to the car idling. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Doug lit a cigarette. “Whatever. It’s water under the bridge.”

“What are you gonna do? For work?”

Doug was on the verge of telling her about Kevin’s pill-selling scheme, but decided that he had confessed enough for Kevin for one day. “I dunno. We’ll see. I don’t think cooking is really in my blood right now.”

She leaned over and kissed him, not passionately but affectionately and accompanied with a little head rub intended to denote frustration. He squeezed her hand. In that second, Doug had the thought that the reason she was upset at Kevin for stealing the Ferrari was not that it was a felony and it risked their livelihood, but because she had not been included. Linda felt left out. Or maybe not. You could never tell anything with women.

“I’ll call you,” he said as he got out.

“Stay out of trouble, will you?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean it.”

“I…” He didn’t want to make any promises he couldn’t keep. “I’ll do my best.”

MITCH WAS WALKING an excitable German shepherd named Ramone and thinking about the business of dog-walking. Kevin had just given him his first paycheck, and it was slightly under $400. He had worked two weeks but had clocked less than forty hours. He couldn’t pay his bills with an income of $800 a month, and his car insurance would be the first bill to not be paid, because, let’s face it, life wouldn’t really change that much if he didn’t have car insurance. It would change if his electricity or heat got cut off and it would certainly change if he stopped eating or smoking pot, but car insurance? Nah. There were times when a kind of financial triage became necessary, when things like car insurance and unkeefed Canadian kind buds, once considered a necessity, suddenly became luxuries, and one of those times was fast approaching.

However, this meant that if he got pulled over while driving from one dog to another, his car would be impounded and then he’d be making zero a month. So, much though he loved dogs and enjoyed walking them and enjoyed working with Kevin and enjoyed being able to go to work high and see into the dog’s true nature and not have to put up with Bob Sutherland staring into his eyes asking if he had allergies, this job wasn’t going to last unless something changed. He needed more dogs.

He would bring this up with Kevin later, but he knew that Kevin was already giving him all the business he could afford to give. Which meant maybe he should get a part-time job of some kind. But it was the nature of dog-walking that you could have no other real commitments, because dogs needed to be walked at all different hours of the day, depending on the client’s needs. So if he got a part-time job, he would be of no use to Kevin, and just having a part-time job would do him no good. He already had a part-time job walking dogs. Argh. Out of one shit situation, into another.

Besides the dogs, one of the things Mitch liked about the job was spending time in rich, quiet neighborhoods. The apartment he shared with Doug was just a mile from the metal-refinishing plant, where the rents were cheapest and the roads and houses were covered with soot and grime. Tractor trailers roared by at any time of the day or night. Mitch had never noticed how unpleasant the noise was until he had begun spending his days experiencing the total silence of the exurbs. Rich people, unable to spot his incongruity because he was, after all, walking a dog, were actually friendly to him. Who but a local would walk a dog in their neighborhood? Back at home, people shuffling to and from the convenience store never made eye contact, unless it was to bum a cigarette or some change.

He turned the corner onto Westlake Avenue and began walking Ramone up to the Westlake shopping district, a quaint row of completely useless stores which gave any passerby a quick hint as to the local property values. There were two antique shops, a store that sold delicious-looking pies covered with glazed strawberries for thirty dollars (Mitch had asked the price once when the munchies were kicking in and had wound up buying Twinkies at a convenience store a few moments later), and another store that sold futuristic furniture for so much money Mitch just looked and laughed. A three-thousand-dollar chair that looked like it had been designed for George Jetson-that would go smashingly in their living room, Mitch thought, next to the broken vacuum cleaner that had not been put away in so long that it had actually become their centerpiece. And finally there was a health food store-slash-flower shop-slash-art gallery, a combination of three businesses for which Mitch had no use at all.

And across the quiet street, there was a bank.

Mitch had noticed the bank the week before, when he had seen an armored car pull up out front and watched the guards, one ancient and one obese, struggle with two huge sacks of money. To Mitch’s eyes, these were the worst-protected sacks of money he could possibly imagine, but he had not really thought about it at the time because the Ferrari mission was occupying the criminal portion of his brain. Now that that had ended in disaster, he was free to imagine new schemes and this little bank with its poorly protected delivery looked like a promising prospect indeed.

The downside of walking through the business district was that Ramone couldn’t really pee on things. It was one thing to walk him up the tree-lined streets, where plants and shrubs and mailbox posts covered in the scents of other dogs provided an abundance of urinary possibilities, but quite another to have the dog pissing on parking meters and ornamental shrubs, spraying the ankles of matronly passersby. Despite the fact that a sign said dogs were welcome in the shopping district, Mitch had enough sense to know the purpose of the sign was really to allow the matrons to take their Lhasa Apsos and Shih Tzus into the antique stores, rather than to welcome a monster like Ramone to splash a quart of urine all over the Lillington Daisy display. So Mitch had to time his reconnaissance of the armored car precisely, because there was no way to linger without drawing attention.

The armored car pulled up in front of the bank at exactly the same time it had the previous week, which excited Mitch. Despite his career arc, he had a great respect for punctuality. He watched the old guy, tall and white-haired and bony, get out of the passenger side, noticing the caution with which he moved. Mitch thought he could almost hear the man’s bones rubbing together. The obese guard remained in the driver’s seat doing paperwork while the ancient one slowly opened the back door of the armored car.

The heavily armored door creaked like a castle gate as the guard swung it open. From where he was standing, Mitch couldn’t see into the back of the vehicle, but he figured if he crossed the street quickly, he could get a look inside, making sure not to get too close to the guards, where they would notice him and possibly reach for their guns. His fears turned out to be unfounded, however, because as he approached the old guard, the man noticed Ramone.

“Ah, he’s a big boy, isn’t he?” the guard said cheerfully, seeming to forget about the bags of money behind him. “I used to have a shepherd. Long time ago.”

Ramone, sensing he was being discussed, began to wag his tail and moved toward the guard with a burst of energy. Mitch had to hold the leash tight to prevent him from leaping up and putting his giant paws on the old man’s shoulders, which would probably have knocked him down. As Mitch restrained the dog and the guard bent down to pet him, he got a clear view over the man’s shoulder. The inside of the armored car was empty but for four large canvas sacks of what Mitch could only assume was money.

The obese guard came around the side of the truck, wheezing and red-faced, apparently from the effort of climbing out of the driver’s seat. He nodded curtly to Mitch, then opened the doors wider and grabbed one sack, and pushed another toward the older man. From this action, Mitch got a glimpse into the relationship between the two. The fat guy was businesslike and unfriendly, most likely the boss of the two. The older guy, whose mind seemed somewhere else, perhaps on the retirement he could not afford, was the affable one. Mitch imagined that the fat guy often complained to his supervisor about having to work with the older guard, and the supervisor told him to just play the hand that was dealt him.

Mitch also noticed they both had guns on their belts. And Tasers. For two unathletic fellows, they could do some damage.

“You guys have a good day,” he said, pulling Ramone away from the old guard, who was ready to turn his attention back to the heavy bags. As Mitch walked off, he overheard the fat guy talking roughly to the old man. Fat prick, he thought.

Ramone had forgotten about them already and was sniffing an ornamental shrub outside the bakery, while the staff and customers gazed at him, critically, Mitch felt. Then Ramone lifted his leg and, with at least five people watching, unleashed a pulsating torrent of urine all over the sidewalk. It was unending. By the time he was done, the sidewalk was thoroughly drenched, as if it had been washed with a hose. Mitch saw the owner of the bakery approaching the door to talk to him. Through the glass, he gave her a quick friendly wave and dashed off, pulling Ramone behind him. The dog soon overtook him. He enjoyed any opportunity for a run.

WHEN HE GOT home, a downpour had started. The winter downpours always reminded Mitch of the opening scene in Taxi Driver, where Travis Bickel talked about the rain washing the scum off the streets. From his battered back porch, piled high with broken and disused plumbing equipment, Mitch could watch it doing exactly that. The thin layer of filth that accumulated on everything, courtesy of the metal-refinishing plant, actually created a black sheen on the water puddling in the yard.

He cracked a beer and didn’t look up when the door opened and Doug came out onto the porch. Were it not for the cloud of pot smoke still around his head, Mitch would have sworn he had just gotten up.

“Hey dude,” Doug said, sitting heavily on a wooden bench and rubbing his eyes, which were as red as a bunny’s. “While you were out, I got ahold of some reefer.”

“So I smell.”

“I picked up an eighth for you too.”

“Thanks. How much was it?”

“Fifty.”

“Cool. I’ll pay you in a minute.”

“Whenever.” Doug sat there for a moment more, perhaps just stoned, but Mitch sensed he was tense or upset.

“You all right?”

“Man, I just don’t know what I’m gonna do about a job. I really don’t want to work at a fast food place.”

Mitch watched the rain cascading off the porch roof so hard he was getting a little bit of spray in the face. Now would be the time to bring this up, he figured. “I know how we can make a million dollars in forty-five minutes.”

Doug laughed. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do with my life,” he said.

“I’m serious.”

Doug looked at him and realized he was. “A million dollars?”

“Maybe.”

“What’s maybe? A million dollars or not?”

“Four bags of money.”

Doug sat up straight. “I’m listening.”

Mitch was pleased to see Doug’s reaction, having expected the same moaning and groaning that had accompanied the Ferrari mission. Maybe a few weeks without any paychecks at all coming in had reshaped his attitude, given him a whole new respect for crime. Rather than considering the Ferrari fiasco proof of the stupidity of criminal behavior, perhaps Doug was considering it hands-on experience, which Mitch figured was a much more effective way of looking at things.

“Where are these four bags of money?” Doug prodded.

Mitch explained everything, making sure to stress the age and obesity of the guards. Doug was nodding thoughtfully. The Ferrari mission had been good tactical experience, Mitch decided as he was talking. They had learned a lot. For instance, it was important to dress for the weather. When they took down the armored car, there wasn’t going to be any business-suit bullshit. And they had learned to consider the possibility of radio tracking devices, or more relevantly, to expect the unexpected.

When he was finished explaining, Doug nodded. “Shit,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Kevin’s coming over in a few minutes to bring me a box of pills to sell. Let’s ask him what he thinks.”

“Sounds good.”

“When opportunity knocks, make lemonade,” Doug said.

“I don’t think that’s the expression. I think it’s when-”

Doug laughed, as he often did when he said something stupid, leaving Mitch unsure as to whether he had said it for laughs or if he genuinely didn’t know the expression. Mitch knew that most people underestimated Doug’s intelligence when they first met him, partly because Doug would make comments like that one, subtly encouraging them to. “Let’s just rob an armored car,” Doug said.

Mitch nodded approvingly at the new, aggressive Doug. “All right then. One robbed armored car, coming right up.”

OVER TIME, THE pot smoked in the house had begun to stain the walls up near the ceiling, but it was only noticeable if you lay on the couch and looked up, which was the first thing Mitch usually did after smoking pot in the house. So whenever he took a few quality bong hits, the first topic he introduced was how they should immediately buy some paint and freshen up the living room to avoid losing their security deposit.

“Dude, you say that every time you get high,” said Doug.

“Stoner,” said Kevin.

They were splayed out across the living room, a thick gray cloud of pot smoke in the air, the type you didn’t notice if you were in the room when it was created. Sometimes they would be sitting and watching TV and smoking away, and a newcomer to the room, such as a pizza delivery guy, would comment on the cloud, reminding them that it was there, which would trigger more stressed mumbling from Mitch about the security deposit.

They had been discussing the Great Plan all afternoon, but eventually the marijuana had overtaken the conversation and turned it into a silent reverie. Yet the Great Plan, as it had developed in a haze of smoke, seemed surprisingly solid. They were to acquire a car for parts from the classifieds and somehow get it running. That way they could have a getaway vehicle which was unregistered and uninsured.

One of Doug’s three superpowers, in addition to being able to identify and recite the effects of any pill and being able to name the performer of any rock song from the 70s to the 90s, was an ability to tinker with things and get them running. Once they got the car running, they would slap the old Nevada license plate on it and park it in the street across from the bank and wait, hoping that no cops showed an interest in the plate. There was, they decided, no other way but to take that small chance. It was Mitch’s job, each time he walked Ramone, to monitor the police activity in the neighborhood, to make sure that the chance that some cops would drive by and notice their illegal plate was minimal.

When the armored car showed up, Mitch and Doug would simply push the old guard aside, grab the money, leap into the getaway car, and drive a mile and quarter to an old access road. There, Kevin’s truck would be parked. They would remove the old Nevada plate, roll the junker car into a ravine, and drive back to Wilton with the money.

As the Great Plan would take place in broad daylight, it depended on the element of surprise. There would be witnesses, so ski masks were a must, but as long as there were no police, everything would go smoothly. They would buy a Taser, they decided, so they could “subdue” the guards if any problems arose. But definitely only as a last resort. Mitch liked the word subdue.

It had been discussed as much as their pot-soaked brains could handle, and finally the energy the subject inspired had petered out, and they had stretched out on the sofas and begun discussing the décor.

“Man, every time someone moves out of an apartment, they paint the place,” said Kevin. “The security deposit is just for shit like holes in the wall or destroyed carpet.”

“I’m just saying,” Mitch said. “We should keep the place looking decent. I mean, look up there.” He pointed lazily to a gray patch next to the light fixture, and Doug and Kevin dutifully looked but said nothing, frustrating him more.

Despite having neither a great respect for authority nor much interest in paying his bills, Mitch had a genuine respect for landlords which went beyond fear of eviction. His father had, during a slow season in the Smoke-Eeter selling business, tried his hand at property management, and Mitch remembered his tales of horror about how badly people treated rental property. He would come home and relate how some tenants had ground dog shit into a carpet rather than clean it up, because they knew they were moving out soon, or just bailed out on their tenancy and left a refrigerator full of rotting food. So in his efforts to be the perfect tenant, Mitch demonstrated a passive obedience to his landlord, an agreeableness he showed to no one else. And he took abuse for it.

“I think Mitch has a crush on the landlord,” Doug said.

“Are you gay for the landlord, Mitch?” Kevin asked.

“I think that’s why we stole the TV for him from Accu-mart. Because Mitch wants some landlord dick.”

“Will you guys shut the fuck up? Seriously. I mean look at these walls, man. They were white when we moved in.”

“Mitch wants the landlord,” Doug sang merrily.

“Fine,” Mitch snapped. “Let’s just leave the place a mess. Hey, why don’t we just…” He paused as the marijuana temporarily interrupted his thought processes, then finished a moment later without any of the intensity. “Burn the place down,” he said and yawned.

Time passed. How much was hard to say because everyone was stoned, but long after Mitch thought the subject was forgotten, Doug finally said, “I think you’re right. We should paint the place. After we rob the armored car.”

“It’ll look a lot nicer,” Mitch said. “You’ll appreciate it.”

“And we can get some new furniture,” Doug added.

“What’re you guys, interior decorators? I thought we agreed not to spend any of the money on anything but necessities for sixth months.” Kevin sat up straight and looked at them both. “That’s the plan, right? We have to stick to that. We just sit on the money for six months.”

“Yeah, man,” Doug said, nodding to placate him. “It’s cool. I meant six months after we rob the armored car.”

“No you didn’t. We gotta be serious about this.”

“We’re serious, man.”

“Because everyone in town is going to be looking for three guys who are suddenly acting like millionaires,” Kevin said. He, too, began to lose intensity and he slumped back down on the couch.

“It’s cool,” said Mitch. “No spending money on anything but necessities for six months. That’s the deal.”

“That’s the deal,” Doug said.

“Bullshit,” Kevin sighed. “I’m gonna come over a week after the robbery, and there’ll be, like, a construction company putting a swimming pool in the backyard, and there’ll be two Ferraris in the driveway. I know you guys, man.”

“Definitely not a Ferrari,” Mitch said. Then he adopted a British accent and added, “Frankly Douglas, I wasn’t that impressed with the Ferrari, were you?”

“Decidedly not, Mitchell. I do think perhaps a Rolls-Royce though. That would be splendid.”

“And a butler. We must hire a butler.”

“Oh, we just must.”

“You two are fuckheads,” said Kevin, standing up, shaking his head slightly to get the cobwebs of dope and relaxation off his brain. “I gotta get home. Linda’s gonna be wondering where I am.”

“Later,” Doug said. “I’ll see if I can drum up some interest in those pills.”

“Hey,” Kevin said. “I have an idea.” Then he paused for long enough that Mitch and Doug both figured the idea had disappeared into the marijuana wasteland and he would just turn to leave. But he continued. “You guys do that British accent thing pretty well.”

“Yeah. So? What’s the idea?”said Mitch.

“Well, when we rob the armored car, man, we should all wear ski masks and talk with British accents. You know, like… uh… the guys in Reservoir Dogs. Remember, they were all calling each other Mr. Pink and Mr. Green? Well, we’ll talk with British accents.” “Cool,” said Doug.

“Splendid,” agreed Mitch.

“All right, I’m outta here,” Kevin said, turning to go.

“Cheerio, then,” said Mitch.

“Ta-ta,” said Doug.