How to rob an armored car

CHAPTER 3

VERY CAREFULLY, KEVIN filled the eyedropper with bleach and slipped it into his right front pocket so that the nozzle pointed out through a tiny hole he had cut. Now, with a little bit of pressure applied on his thigh, he could spray bleach out with his urine stream, right into the cup he was expected to piss into. A few drops of bleach would ruin any chance of a positive result on the drug test, but you had to be careful not to spray in too much or the urine would reek of bleach. To insure against that, he had eaten asparagus for the last two days, so the urine would definitely have some kind of weird odor, and the addition of bleach would just make the smell even odder. The more factors you could throw in, the better. Hopefully, the lab people wouldn’t know what to make of it. There goes Kevin, the guy with the weirdest smelling piss you ever encountered. Does he smoke pot? Hard to say.

For the first six months after he had been released from jail, Kevin had actually been pot-free, but then resentment rather than craving had taken over. Who were these people to tell him what he could and couldn’t do when he was alone and off of work? They had taken nearly all his money and locked him up for the whole summer, for indoor gardening. Why wasn’t that enough? Five grand for the lawyer, $2,500 for fines, $600 for court counseling. He’d even had to pay administrative fees for getting released from prison. The discharge paperwork had cost him $120, which must have meant it was either typed up by someone with a doctorate in office work, or it had been printed with solid-gold toner. But who would say no to that expense if it was all that stood between you and freedom? While paying his debt to society, he had managed to accumulate a significant debt to his credit card company.

It was, he figured, all about money. The counseling for which he paid the $600 was group therapy, in which he had been made to sit in a room with three junkies and a bored psychologist, listening to the junkies’ tales of child abuse. Whenever it was his turn to speak, Kevin would offer, “I just got busted for growing pot in my basement. I’ve never been abused.” Until, of course, the local police got their hands on him, but a mention of that would have resulted in more counseling-and more fees.

Kevin had realized fairly quickly that a game needed to be played. He didn’t just need to pay fines and serve time; he needed to be grateful for their help. At the end of each session, he would thank the psychologist profusely, perhaps even ask him for advice that he didn’t want. Sure enough, the psychologist pronounced him cured after only five sessions, instead of the ten the judge had assigned, though, of course, half the money was not returned.

Kevin screwed the cap back on the bleach bottle and got out of his car, dropped some quarters into the parking meter, and went into the municipal court building. Through the metal detector, past the row of young black men in orange jumpsuits chained to a bench, up the cinder block- motif stairwell, through the heavy steel door marked PAROLE AND PROBATION. The office staff was behind a window lined with chicken wire, in case any of the parolees got rowdy, though the atmosphere was never one of typical government chaos. It was subdued, polite, and quiet. These were people who had gotten out and weren’t going to jeopardize their freedom with unsightly displays of emotion before a court clerk.

Aware of the intimidation factor, the clerks were brutal. They never made eye contact with the parolees and barked orders at them through the wired glass. A heavyset, middle-aged woman with glasses and stiff black hair didn’t even look up at Kevin as she snapped, “Name?”

“Kevin Gurdy. I’m here to see-”

“Have a seat.”

Kevin sat down on the black vinyl bench with two young black men, who were staring straight ahead. After a moment, the woman lifted her head and said, “ Jackson.”

Kevin and the two men looked at each other.

“ Jackson,” she repeated, her voice rising with irritation at this delay. “Who’s Jackson?”

“I think he went out to go look for a water fountain,” one of the men said.

“Well, go get him. If he isn’t here in thirty seconds, I’m marking him down as absent.”

The man got up and went out into the hall to look for Jackson, returning with him inside a minute. Jackson, another young black man, who had clearly just been to the restroom, was still buckling his pants.

“Mr. Jackson,” she hissed. “‘Have a seat’ means have a seat. It doesn’t mean go wandering around the court-house.”

“I just had to-”

“Officer Deakins is ready for you,” she interrupted, her voice high with anger, as she shoved a piece of paper through a slot in the chicken-wire window. She turned her back to Jackson as he retrieved the paper, then buzzed the door leading into the back office, which Jackson opened.

“Hunt?” she snapped.

Again no one responded. “All right,” she said, and began to fill out paperwork, dooming Mr. Hunt to a return to jail.

“Gurdy?”

Kevin stood up quickly, and she looked at him for the first time, her attitude almost imperceptibly changing as she noticed that he was white. In his months of coming to parole appointments, Kevin had detected a definite pattern of racism from the office staff. The white women were often slightly less horrible to the white parolees. The black women were equally horrible to everyone, except for the younger ones, who were sometimes civil to the young black men. They would grow out of it.

“Yes, that’s me,” said Kevin. The woman shoved a slip of paper under the glass and buzzed the door.

“Officer Poacher,” she said, as if Kevin didn’t know. He walked back through the parole office, past cubicle after cubicle of young black men sitting in rickety institutional chairs, explaining their lives to bureaucrats who were sitting, bored, behind tiny desks. Corrections Officer Poacher was one of the senior parole officers, and he had an actual office all the way in the back, a cramped mess of scattered paperwork and half-open file cabinets, forms spilling out of every drawer.

“Have a seat, Gurdy,” Poacher said when he saw Kevin. He turned to a file cabinet behind him and pulled out Kevin’s file. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine,” Kevin said. He wondered if he was supposed to ask the question back, as one would do in any other social situation, or if it was an official question to determine Kevin’s state of mind. One had to be very careful what one said in a parole interview. To give a hint of any negativity might start the officer asking questions. If Kevin sighed and said, “OK, I guess,” Poacher would start digging around about why life wasn’t perfect and whether this meant that Kevin was going to return to his life of crime because of the stress. In a parole interview, you couldn’t have problems. As far as Poacher was concerned, Kevin’s marriage was wonderful, his dog walking business was about to get him on the cover of Money magazine, and the thought of growing or smoking marijuana was so repulsive as to make him want to vomit.

“How’re things at home?” Poacher asked, without looking up from the file.

“Great, great,” said Kevin, nodding, trying to force a smile. “My daughter just got picked for the lead in the school play.” Kevin had made that up on the spot, because he had learned that it was always good to mention Ellie. Sometimes it triggered Poacher to talk about his son, who was fourteen, and then the interview became an unfocused mess of two parents babbling about their kids for a half hour, which was what Kevin wanted. Stay away from topics like drugs, crime, and prison, have a court-mandated chat, and get the hell out of there.

“Really?” said Poacher, so brusquely that Kevin knew it wasn’t going to work this time. Actually, it hadn’t worked in over a year. Poacher had become more reluctant to discuss his son as time had passed, and Kevin had pieced together that Poacher was going through a bitter divorce and may have lost custody. In fact, Poacher’s general aura had deteriorated significantly since Kevin had been assigned to him.

Poacher flipped the file shut. “You staying off drugs?” he asked.

Kevin nodded. “Yes, absolutely.”

“Honestly?” Poacher stared into Kevin’s eyes, and it unnerved him. Did the man know something? Had he been peering through Kevin’s basement window? Was this the time to confess or to act unsure? Gut instinct told him to lie.

“Absolutely,” said Kevin. “No drugs.” He was going to add something else, but then remembered that he had recently heard on the Discovery Channel that interrogators often noticed people were lying because they overexplained. Brief answers were best. There was a silence between them, during which Kevin repeatedly stifled the urge to do just that-start babbling and overexplaining. The Discovery Channel knew its shit.

Poacher reached in a drawer, and Kevin felt certain he was going to produce one of the little clear plastic pee cups for the drug test, but instead he pulled out a form.

“I’m a busy man,” Poacher said. “I’ve got fifty-six parolees assigned just to me.”

Kevin crossed his legs, a gesture of comfort and relief at the conversation going off on this tangent.

And then it happened.

The rubber bubble at the top of the eyedropper in his pocket compressed as a result of the action, squirting bleach through the hole in Kevin’s pocket and all over his balls.

Kevin knew what had happened right away. He felt the liquid trickling through his pubic hairs, like little insects running around down there. He kept his expression frozen and remained still. For the first second, the liquid was cool. Then it began to feel warm.

“So what I’m going to do,” Poacher said, “is wrap up your parole. You seem like a good guy, a family man. I don’t really see a reason to keep making you come back in here for your monthly visits. You’ve come up clean every time we’ve tested you and…”

Poacher kept talking. The warmth had turned to heat, then burning. It felt like someone was holding a lit cigarette to his nut sack. Kevin tried to beam with glee at what Poacher was saying, but instead felt his face freeze in a death grimace as sweat broke out on his forehead. Then the powerful odor of bleach hit him. He and Poacher were only a few feet apart, and Kevin was sure Poacher was about to sniff the air and wonder what the smell was.

Oh god, MY NUTS ARE ON FIRE. Kevin gritted his teeth. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he grabbed his balls and tried to shift them around, his eyes watering as a great rush of air came out of him, his mouth wide open as if he were singing a silent opera.

It was amazing. Poacher didn’t even seem to notice. He was still babbling about what a stand-up guy Kevin was and how it was a waste of resources to keep making him come in, how he had obviously learned his lesson. Kevin tried nodding in agreement. How could he end this? Could he claim a bout of diarrhea and run to the bathroom? Mercifully, the phone rang. As Poacher answered it, Kevin quickly signaled that he was going to the restroom, and Poacher nodded.

Reeking of bleach and grunting in pain, Kevin tried not to run past the desk staff, tried not to slam the buzzing metal door behind, doing his best to act like a guy who had decided to hit the men’s room on his way out. Once out in the corridor, he broke into a full sprint, and once inside the men’s room he ran to a sink, unzipped his jeans, and splashed handfuls of water from the running faucet over his burning nuts.

Relief. With each handful of water, the pain lessened. He became conscious of his surroundings again, suddenly aware that his jeans were now absolutely soaked, as were his shoes and socks. He didn’t care. He would just have to tell Poacher he had slipped and fell, or something. The pain had stopped.

Then he became aware of someone else in the men’s room, and looked up to see a young black man, maybe eighteen, at the next sink, staring at him.

The kid turned and took a paper towel out of the dispenser, and without looking back at Kevin, he said, “Man, you all fucked up.”

“HOW WAS YOUR parole visit?” asked Linda when he returned home. Sometimes Kevin thought she was hopeful that he would be carted off back to jail, and the house would be all hers again. There had been so many changes in the decorating scheme when he had returned from his ninety-day stint that he was unsure if he had been welcome back in his own home. Linda was sitting at her desk and going over bills, a pose in which Kevin had learned conversation was unwelcome unless she initiated it, and even then it should be kept brief.

“Fine. I don’t have to go back. I’m cured.” He kicked off his shoes, pulled off his soaked jeans and underwear, and took a towel from the hall closet. Standing naked from the waist down, he began toweling himself vigorously, careful not to rub his raw, burned scrotum.

“What happened to you?” Linda asked. The shock in her voice made Kevin look down and he noticed that his pubic hair had turned white.

“Oh Christ,” he mumbled. He stepped into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

Linda burst out laughing. It was a sound he hadn’t heard in a long time. He set the water to cold and stood under the stream, shivering at first. Then the coolness of the water began to soothe his steaming crotch, and he gasped in relief.

Linda banged on the door, still laughing. “What the hell is going on with you? Why are you all white?”

“I’ll be out in a minute,” he yelled, irritated at the interruption.

There was silence. Ten minutes later, when Kevin emerged from the bathroom, Linda was back at her desk, looking at the bills. He felt better now, physically and mentally, and he watched her as she wrote a check, hoping she was still as lighthearted as she had been a few moments earlier. It had been a long time since he had seen her amused. It had been a long time since he had been free from the court system, too, and he felt like it would be a good day to go out and celebrate.

“I’m free,” he said to her back. “They let me off parole today.”

“Yeah, I heard you,” Linda said, not looking up. “Am I supposed to say congratulations?”

“Shit,” he said, annoyed. “I thought maybe we could go out and celebrate tonight, but I guess not.”

“Celebrate?” She sounded incredulous.

“Yeah, celebrate. But fuck it.”

“Celebrate.” She shook her head in awe and laughed coarsely, not happily, the way she had been laughing earlier. “What should we tell the waiter when he asks what we’re celebrating?”

“Is that what bothers you? How it looks to the waiter?”

“Where would we even get a sitter this late? And we can’t afford to go out, not this month. Have you looked at the bills lately? Do you even live on the same planet I’m on?” She turned back to the paperwork dismissively.

Kevin put on clean underwear and some loose-fitting shorts, in a hurry to leave. He had thought from her reaction to his bleaching that she might be in a lighter mood today, that he could share a moment with her. Clearly, it wasn’t the case, and now he just wanted to get away as fast as possible. He had a round of dogs to walk at four thirty, and even though it was barely three o’ clock, he grabbed his keys and headed for the stairs.

“I’m not the one who told you to grow pot in the basement, Kevin,” she called after him. Kevin wasn’t able to slam the door before she finished the sentence.

“BOB SUTHERLAND WANTS to see you in his office,” said Melissa, the office manager. She sounded mad, and Mitch knew right away he was in trouble. It was odd, the way secretaries adopted their boss’s anger as if it were their own. What the fuck had he done now? Mislabeled a display of lug nuts, perhaps? Permitted Charles to work seven minutes of overtime? Melissa was gone before he could even acknowledge her and he figured it was bad. Oh, shit, maybe they had found the missing invoices for the high-def TVs.

“Ooooh, that no sound good,” said Charles.

Mitch stood up and stretched. He and Charles had just finished an entire load of inventory. They had lifted, sorted, and stacked a tractor trailer’s worth of Accu-mart’s crap, and Mitch was in the mood for a break, not an interrogation. He sighed and handed Charles the clipboard.

“I might not see you again,” he said, suddenly aware that being fired was a possibility. He waved a hand at the dirty, oil-stained warehouse with candy and potato chip wrappers scattered across the vast floor. “Maybe tomorrow, all this will be yours.”

Charles looked concerned. “Why? What you do, man?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Mitch said, practicing his excuse. “I might have made some inventory mistakes.”

Charles said nothing and Mitch realized he would have to do better. Inventory mistakes? Didn’t sound right; too political, too guilty. It was something a congressman would have come up with. I have no idea what happened to those invoices… I never saw them. Better. That would be his lie, and he would stick to it, then throw the invoices out when he got home and bag the whole stupid TV-stealing idea, and maybe this thing would blow over.

Melissa was in Bob Sutherland’s office when Mitch got there, with a tape recorder and a microphone, which Mitch found odd. She was staring right into the microphone, not making eye contact with Mitch. Sutherland was reading a file, pretending not to notice Mitch had entered the room. This was not going to be a happy-smiley type of meeting.

Melissa, a stiff-haired and efficient woman in her fifties who in the past had bonded with Mitch over their only earthly connection, a nicotine addiction, and who was now pretending not to know him, turned to Bob and said, “OK, it’s ready.” She hit a button on the tape recorder.

“You’re being taped,” said Bob Sutherland.

“I’m being taped?”

Mitch turned to close the door, and Sutherland said, “No, leave it open.” Mitch saw rage and hurt and offense in his face and put on the mystified expression which he had decided would be his best defense. That and, of course, continually repeating that he was not good with detail-oriented tasks and he maybe might have made a mistake.

“You’re a real piece of work aren’t you, Mitch?” Sutherland said.

How did one answer that? Neither denial nor admission really moved things along. Mitch just stared.

“Can you explain this?” Sutherland asked. He handed Mitch a sheet of paper with thousands of tiny numbers written on it. About halfway down, one ten-digit number was highlighted, and Mitch immediately recognized it as the telephone number of Dave Rice, the guy he had called about pretending to be the Webmaster general. He tried to piece together how Sutherland had started with this and somehow wound up with knowledge of the stolen TV invoices. How did this incriminate him? Best to just act ignorant.

“What is it? It looks like a sheet with phone numbers on it.”

“Quit playing around, Mitch,” Sutherland snapped. “You know what it is.” Sutherland leaned back in his chair, and Mitch noticed Melissa was staring at him with what appeared to be hate. He smiled at her and her expression did not change. He might still be able to save his job if he gave the right answers.

“There’s a number highlighted,” Mitch said, trying to sound helpful. His brain was firing in every direction, trying to figure how Sutherland, the world’s stupidest man, had been able to find the missing invoices from Mitch’s conversation with Dave Rice. What was going on?

“Why don’t you tell me about that?”

“About this number?” Mitch stalled.

“Yes. About that number.” Sutherland leaned farther back and glared at Mitch malevolently. It was intimidating, all the hate in the room. “About how that number got called from Karl’s office, on his day off.”

Sutherland was enraged but he was also enjoying himself. Was a demotion coming? Could Mitch possibly be demoted any lower? Was there a cleaning closet he could be made to work out of or a hidden department of the Accu-mart more dirty and mind-numbing than auto accessories to manage?

“I… think it’s the number of a friend of mine,” Mitch said and for a second he imagined that they might just be mad because it was a long distance phone call, and he could offer to pay for it, and the matter would be behind them. Then he imagined something else: that Dave Rice had called and pretended to be the Webmaster general, as they had agreed he would and Sutherland had not been amused. Other more severe scenarios presented themselves: Dave Rice using the word asshole, as he had been prone to do when he’d worked at Accu-mart; Dave Rice telling Sutherland he was stupid. Also prone to that. Now that Mitch thought about it, having Dave Rice play a joke on Sutherland might not have been the most excellent idea.

“So this number is the number of a friend of yours?”

“Uh… yeah.”

Mitch was aware of a person in the hall outside the opened door; his main thought was embarrassment that they would overhear this conversation. He had an impulse to get up and close the door but when he turned his head to look, he saw it was one of the store security guys. It struck him that Sutherland had arranged to have a store security guard outside the door to escort him off the property after their “discussion,” which gave Mitch the sudden confidence of a man with nothing to lose.

“Mitch,” Sutherland began, toying with him, Mitch now knew. “We’ve put a lot of time and energy into developing you-”

“You’re the stupidest fucking douche bag I’ve ever worked for,” said Mitch quickly, aware that his time was running out. He said it pleasantly but Sutherland was on his feet in a flash as if he had been expecting it, his face flushed. “Jesus Christ, Webmaster general? Seriously, are you retarded?” This last sentence was lost under the high-volume screeching of Sutherland screaming at Mitch to get out, which drew an instant response from the security guard, who rushed into the office as if Mitch were wielding a gun. The security guy was about a hundred pounds overweight and in his midfifties, and the excitement of the moment had him red in the face.

Mitch looked up at him. “What are you going to do, have a heart attack and fall on me?”

“Let’s go, NOW,” the security guy said in his roughest voice. Mitch had never had a problem with the guy, who was, Mitch suspected, borderline retarded and spent most of his time in the electronics department watching TV. He didn’t want his last act as an Accu-mart employee to be an assault on a man who was most likely handicapped, so he rose gracefully and slowly, careful not to show any signs of hostility. Maybe the security guy had overheard his retard comment to Sutherland and had taken it personally, or maybe he was trying to impress Sutherland and Melissa with his brute efficiency, because he grabbed Mitch’s shoulder unnecessarily and pushed him toward the door.

“Easy, you fucker,” Mitch snapped.

“GET HIM OUT OF HERE!” bellowed Sutherland.

Customers and store employees were now being drawn to the scene and when Mitch walked out of the office, everyone was looking at him. Denise, his pretty high school hire, who had come in to pick up her paycheck, stared at him, shocked. Despite the situation, a huge grin broke out on his face. He turned back to show it to Sutherland.

“See ya,” he said pleasantly.

The security guard pushed him in the back, and Mitch turned to him. “If you touch me again…” he said, the grin disappearing as he felt a surge of raw fury and the man backed off. Now that they were outside the room, without anyone to impress, the guard was meek again.

“You have to leave,” he pleaded, red-faced and sweating.

“I’m leaving.”

And he did. When the doors opened in front of him and a wave of cold air enveloped him, it was the refreshing air of freedom.

“Thank you for shopping at Accu-mart,” said the automatic recording.

“Go fuck yourself,” said Mitch, and he stared with loathing at the small speaker over the door. A middle-aged woman, who had clearly heard him cursing at the speaker, stared at him with disapproval as she walked into the store.

“Thank you for shopping at Accu-mart,” the speaker said pleasantly.

“Eat shit and die,” Mitch said to the speaker

Another woman entered.

“Thank you for shopping at Accu-mart.”

Mitch turned and walked to his car.