How to rob an armored car

CHAPTER 5

WILTON, WHILE NEVER beautiful, could be at least photogenic after a snowfall. The three gray brick smokestacks of the metal-refinishing plant with the snow-covered mountains as a backdrop made a decent photograph for a freshman arts major trying to capture man’s inhumanity to nature. Over time, this had become Wilton ’s purpose. Flocks of Penn State students would come down every spring to catch a black-and-white image of a strip-mined valley or a withered ex-coal miner dying of black lung disease on his disintegrating porch. From the gutted earth of the quarries just outside the town to the abandoned coal mines, some of which were permanently on fire, Wilton was a picturesque icon of poverty and environmental rape.

The citizens of Wilton had done their best to act their part as poor environmental rapists. For decades, they had lived large off the environment, until, in the late seventies, Mother Nature had run out of resources for them to plunder and given the town a big middle finger. The mines closed; the quarries filled with rainwater; and only the metal plant remained. Within a decade the town had shrunk by half and most of the downtown buildings were empty shells, giving politicians who wanted a job a chance to make some bullshit pledges about “revitalization” of Wilton ’s center. Of course, these promises never amounted to anything, because nobody wanted to pour money into a half-dead coal town whose glory days were long gone and whose tax base was primarily welfare recipients, but the citizens fell for it time after time. Denial of their own hopelessness was the only bond that the community had left.

Doug remembered the excitement that had gripped the town when the Accu-mart had opened. Here it was, at last, the Great Revitalization! Other businesses were sure to follow-Best Buy, Circuit City. Soon there would be a tech-retail corridor right outside the town, drawing people from as far away as Lake Erie, the papers guessed. In fact, the only other business that had followed the Accu-mart had been a Kentucky Fried Chicken, which had been knocked down after three months of existence by a tractor trailer loaded with scrap metal sliding off an icy road. The KFC Corporation had decided not to rebuild; the Great Revitalization had officially stalled.

“I think the best thing to do is leave,” Doug said, looking out at the smokestacks from Avery Hill, where Linda had driven after she had picked him up. The vantage point was an odd choice, because Avery Hill had a reputation as a lovers’ lane, but when she had produced sandwiches and sodas and mentioned that she came out here all the time, Doug had relaxed.

Linda was eating a chicken salad sandwich on rye bread and staring through the windshield at the smokestacks and the lightly falling snow. She wordlessly offered Doug the other half of her sandwich.

“I don’t like rye. But thanks.” Doug sighed. “It’s not like this everywhere.”

“Where would you go?”

“ Aspen.”

“ Aspen? You mean Colorado? What would you do there?”

“Cook. They have lots of restaurants there. Or be an environmentalist.”

“An environmentalist? I thought you wanted to be a chopper pilot.”

Doug was annoyed that Linda had brought the chopper pilot idea up, because it made him seem flighty. He did want to be a chopper pilot, dammit, but how could you get people to understand that you could be more than one thing? You could be an environmentalist and a chopper pilot and a cook if you had enough money and time for training, and he was already a cook, so that was one out of three.

“The thing is,” Doug said, “that there are so many possibilities. Like, I could be a chopper pilot in Aspen, or a cook in Aspen, or a cook here, or an environmentalist in, like, Peru, or a heart surgeon. Or anything. It’s like, there are so many possibilities. If you pick one, it means you can never pick one again. You only get one shot and what if you fuck up? What if you pick heart surgeon and after three years you’re like, ‘Man, I hate hearts. I’m so sick of looking at fucking hearts,’ you know?”

“You think you could be a heart surgeon?”

“Shit, I don’t know.” He pulled a knob on the passenger seat and leaned back to see the black cloth of the SUV’s ceiling. “Why? You don’t think I’m smart enough to be a heart surgeon?”

“No, that’s not it,” Linda said so forcefully and sympathetically that Doug really believed her and really believed that she did think he was smart enough to be a heart surgeon, even though he himself knew he wasn’t. He didn’t want to be a heart surgeon anyway. But it was nice to hear her say it and he had the thought that no one else he knew would have said that to him. Mitch would have laughed at him and told him to get a job unloading trucks at the farmers’ market. Kevin would have asked him if he wanted to steal another television.

“No, it’s just that I didn’t think you ever wanted to do anything like that.” She smiled. “Don’t be so sensitive.”

Doug was warmed by the smile, which was something he didn’t see on her face very often, and was going to tell her she had a nice smile but then he thought it might sound like a come-on. By the time he had processed this thought, he realized they had been making eye contact for several seconds. The type of eye contact that happened just before a first kiss. But that wasn’t going to happen, because she was his friend’s wife and he wasn’t the type of guy who-

Linda leaned over and kissed him. He didn’t mind the chicken salad breath.

KEVIN WAS WALKING Butch Rogers at the Wilton Dog Park, a remnant of the days when Wilton had civic pride. Two decades ago, the citizens had pitched in to fund a fenced, four-acre park on the outskirts of town, which over time had become a fenced, dog shit-covered wasteland with a lone tree still standing in it. Whatever type of tree it was, Kevin thought, it must be a type that thrived on dog pee.

Butch Rogers was a spiky-haired terrier of some sort, easily terrified and desperate to please, and Kevin liked taking him to the dog park because the presence of other, bigger dogs made Butch piss himself with fear. Ostensibly, Kevin could claim to the owners that he was “conditioning” Butch, “socializing” him, or some other sort of dog psychology crap that his rich clients loved. But the truth was that Kevin found it entertaining to make the dog freak out with terror. He couldn’t help wanting to punish the dog for being a pussy. If Butch would just stand up for himself once, Kevin had decided, the nightmarish trips to the park would come to an end. He just had to stand his ground one time in the face of an Australian shepherd or a mixed breed as scrawny as he was and it would be over; Kevin would resume walking him in the peaceful neighborhood around his home. But no. Butch saw a small child playing with a Super Ball about fifty yards away and he ran and hid behind Kevin’s legs, trembling.

“Butch, you’re a pussy,” he told the dog as he leaned down to attach the leash, ready to go home. Behind him, he heard the clink of the metal gate, indicating someone new was coming into the dog park and had most likely overheard the comment. He straightened up, looked around, and saw a man he remembered from prison standing right behind him with a Doberman pinscher.

Kevin was never sure what to say to people he recognized from prison. Usually there was a mutual decision to ignore each other and go on your way. What were you going to talk about? The toilet paper shortage of July 2005 or the time one of the inmates had found an actual turd in the meatloaf in the mess hall, resulting in the dismissal of the entire kitchen staff? This time, however, the man was filling Kevin’s whole field of vision, and they were looking right at each other, so it was too late.

“Hey,” said Kevin.

“Hey,” said the guy and unsnapped the Doberman’s leash. The dog bounded over to Butch, who cowered even lower and began to tremble even more violently as the Doberman gave him a few bored sniffs before darting off.

“How’s tricks?” asked the guy, whose name Kevin couldn’t remember. He did remember what the guy had done: some kind of computer fraud. Kevin only knew that because he had heard the guy bitching in the mess hall one day about the provisions of his sentence, which included a year of counseling and a lifetime ban on using computers, which indicated to the guy that the judge had no faith in the counseling. “If I have to pay for a year’s worth of counseling, why not take away the ban when the counseling is over?” he had complained.

“Things are pretty good,” said Kevin. “I walk dogs.” He had meant to convey that he ran his own profitable dog-walking business, but instead he sounded like a retarded kid stating the obvious. It didn’t matter, because the guy clearly had something on his mind.

“Hey, weren’t you in for, like, stealing cars?”

Kevin shook his head. “Nah. I got pot possession. And manufacture.”

“Because I know a guy who’ll pay great money for a Ferrari,” the guy said. “He really wants a Ferrari and he’ll pay big bucks.”

Kevin nodded, aware that this guy wasn’t listening to anything he said, just talking. Perhaps a bit manically. Perhaps he was wired up on a chemical of some kind. Perhaps the Doberman, who was doing laps around the dog park, had gotten some into his system too, though sometimes dogs were just like that. Half curious, Kevin asked about the Ferrari deal.

“This Italian guy I know. He wants to steal a Ferrari for his girlfriend. It’s all he ever talks about. This bitch, she’s going nuts bugging him for a hot Ferrari. She’s like, if you’re such a big mobster how come you can’t get me a Ferrari on the cheap, you know? So then I saw you, and I knew you were in for boosting cars, and I thought I’d let you know about it,” the guy said.

Kevin nodded sagely. Despite having just denied being arrested for stealing cars, this guy seemed set on the idea that Kevin was an experienced car thief, so he might as well go with it. “Do you have this guy’s number?” he asked.

The guy pulled out his cell phone, and Kevin copied the number and all the information. As he was driving Butch back home, he began fantasizing about stealing a Ferrari. Twenty grand cash, the guy had said. That would pay all his bills for months and maybe he and Linda could go on vacation, get things back together, like old times. He’d get a sitter for Ellie for two weeks and they’d go down to the Caribbean. He’d put Mitch in charge of the dog-walking business and, for the first time in his adult life, actually get to relax. Prison, money worries, they’d all be behind him. Burning his balls with bleach, getting kicked off the football team, stealing TVs from Accu-mart-all of it would melt into the past. He could be a good husband and a loving father and everything would be like it was supposed to have been, before all the details of reality started fucking everything up.

HAVING SEX WITH your best friend’s wife on the weed-covered shoulder of a road overlooking a metal-refinishing plant was about as seedy as it got, Doug figured. That was it, rock bottom. You could sell smack cut with battery acid to junior high school kids and still look down your nose at a guy like him. That morning he had woken up thinking of himself as a citizen of the world and perhaps a future chopper pilot but now he was carless, unemployed, and the shittiest human being in town.

One thing was for sure-Kevin couldn’t find out about this. But Kevin had just called and said he was coming over and wanted to talk to Doug and Mitch about something, and he was going to have to sit there and listen to Kevin with the smell of his wife’s perfume still on his shirt. He suddenly pulled off his shirt as if it were covered with biting insects.

“What are you doing, dude?”

He and Mitch were sitting in the den, watching some video compilations of people injuring themselves in humorous ways or, in the case of the current video, pets injuring themselves or their owners. Mitch, who had control of the remote, was watching it as if it were some kind of career-training video, as if his new job walking dogs required that he spend a few hours a week on home study, learning about a German shepherd’s tendency to chew up a wedding dress or a cat’s fondness for slamming its head into a window while a bemused bird watched from the other side.

Sitting in the recliner shirtless, Doug shrugged. “I have to take a shower before Kevin comes over,” he said.

“You have to what?” Mitch was hardly paying attention, his eyes riveted to the screen where a playful Rottweiler pup was pushing a toddler around on a tricycle.

Doug got up to take a shower and Mitch suddenly looked away from the screen. “You’re taking a shower for Kevin? What, are you guys, like, gay now or something?”

“Man, I’m not taking a shower for Kevin. I just want to take a shower. Is that OK?” Doug slammed the door to the bathroom but he could still hear Mitch call to him:

“Hey man, if you wait a while, maybe Kevin’ll join you.”

Doug got into the shower and cranked up the heat and the pressure, as if he could wash away his sins. The only way to make this right was to do something good for Kevin. Something that involved loss or suffering for himself equal to the loss or suffering he had caused in others. He strained to remember the book on Buddhism he had read in his senior year in high school. He had liked it. The paper he had written on it had been his last A. It had been the last book he had read too.

Maybe he could buy Kevin a present. No. What the fuck was he thinking? Mitch had already made a comment about them being gay because he wanted to wash Linda’s perfume smell off himself, so if he actually bought Kevin a present, it would open the floodgates of ridicule. Not to mention the way Kevin would probably react. Given the fact that Doug had known the guy for four years and had never been moved to buy him anything before except a pack of cigarettes, suddenly showing up at Kevin’s door (which, of course, was also Linda’s door) with a lavish gift might arouse his curiosity. And what would Linda think? Shit, shit, shit. This was all wrong.

He heard Kevin come in downstairs and could hear the muffled sound of Kevin and Mitch talking. He shut off the shower, toweled himself off, and listened to their conversation. They were talking about how he and Mitch would have to go grocery shopping now that Doug could no longer bring food home from the restaurant.

Surprisingly, the sound of Kevin’s voice did not fill him with anxiety. Instead, he found it oddly reassuring, as if the idea of Kevin were more menacing than Kevin himself. Perhaps this life of deceit that he had just embarked on would not be as terrible and karma-destroying as he had first imagined. He would do something nice for Kevin but he didn’t know what yet. Not a present though. He could take his time and figure something out. He felt himself calming down and emerged from the shower to go downstairs.

“Hey, dude. That sucks about your job,” Kevin said as he saw him coming down the stairs. “Here. Maybe this’ll help.” Kevin tossed him a dime bag of weed. “It’s mostly sticks and stems, but I thought it might ease the pain of unemployment.”

Oh Christ. Kevin had bought him a present. It was supposed to be the other way around. Kevin was such a good guy and Doug was a sneaky slime-bellied snakeass of a human being who slept with other men’s wives while they worked hard for money to buy weed for him.

“I… I can’t take this,” Doug said miserably, then thought what an idiot he sounded like. This was far more suspicious than simply saying thanks and firing up, which is what pre-sex-with-Linda Doug would have done. He shook his head and was relieved when he realized that his sheepish refusal had been interpreted as depression over losing his job.

“Hey man, it’s not a big deal,” Mitch said. “You’ll find something else real soon. Don’t worry about it. The rent’s paid because of the TV deal anyway.”

“I may already have something for you,” Kevin said slyly, sitting on the sofa and putting his feet on the coffee table. When Kevin came over, he seemed to relish the lack of tidiness, the informality. He could plunk his feet on anything and Mitch and Doug didn’t care. Or at least, Mitch didn’t. Doug was frequently scraping bits of dried mud from Kevin’s boots off the coffee table but today definitely wasn’t the day to say anything. He sat down next to Kevin and began packing a bowl.

“Have something for me? You mean dog-walking?”

“No. I already got Mitch for that and I only need one other person. This is more money less work.” Doug and Mitch leaned in and Kevin paused for a moment, enjoying their curiosity. “You guys wanna steal a Ferarri?”

Doug stared at him. “Huh?”

“I wanna steal a Ferrari,” said Mitch.

“I’m serious, man. I know this guy who’ll pay, like, twenty grand cash for a Ferrari. It should be an hour’s work. At the most.”

“Sounds good,” said Mitch. “Where do I sign up?” Ever since they had stolen the television from Accu-mart, Mitch and Kevin had developed a whole new respect for theft, which disturbed Doug. The morning after the theft, Mitch had been reading the paper and happened on an article describing the arrest of a bank robber. Mitch had held forth on the idiocy of the man’s crime, concluding that he should have robbed electronics and flogged them as they had done. Based on his one experience with crime, he seemed to have appointed himself the local criminal genius. But to be fair, Doug thought Mitch might have had a flair for it.

“I don’t know anyone who has a Ferrari,” Doug said. “And they have, like, security systems and shit.”

“How do you know this guy?” Mitch asked.

“From prison.”

“Great,” said Doug. “You can’t trust those people.”

Mitch and Kevin stared at him. “I’m one of those people,” Kevin said. “I was in prison.”

Shit. He had meant to be nice to Kevin and now he had wound up insulting him. He had insulted Kevin and slept with his wife on the same day. “Sorry,” Doug said.

“I ran into this guy in the dog park,” Kevin said, ignoring him. “He seems to think I’m someone else, some dude who stole cars. Anyways, he put me in touch with this other guy who’ll pay twenty grand for a Ferrari. And at first I thought, what the fuck do I know about stealing cars? Then I remembered high school.”

“High school?” asked Doug, trying to sound interested but actually waiting for a good place in the conversation to point out that Kevin had gone insane. He would point it out nicely. Maybe that could be the nice thing he did for Kevin-save him from a five-year prison term for doing something stupid.

“Yeah, man. I went to high school about an hour from here. I worked weekends as a valet at this super high-end restaurant, parking cars. Dude, there were Ferraris in there every night. Rolls-Royces, all that shit. And you know what? We left the doors unlocked and we put the fucking keys under the mat. That was ten years ago but I bet they still do.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Mitch, as if they were discussing buying concert tickets or a pickup softball game. Doug winced. Did these guys not realize what they were talking about? This was a crime, punishable by years, not days, in prison. This was the last thing Doug needed. He began to shake his head, was about to beg out of the whole deal, when a sudden, horrible thought struck him. What if this was the nice thing he was supposed to do for Kevin? Not talk him out of it but participate enthusiastically. The laws of karma dictated that you scored more karma points for doing something you didn’t want to do, something repugnant to you but pleasing to the offended party. This certainly qualified.

“OK,” said Doug.

“Really?” said Kevin, who had obviously been anticipating resistance. “You’re in?”

“Yeah.” Doug looked into Kevin’s eyes and saw not suspicion or anger or betrayal, all the things Doug knew he should be feeling, but pleasure. Pleasure at having his friend Doug along for the ride, part of the team. This was it, though, Doug thought, the one thing. Once this was over, they were square.

Oh, and no more sleeping with Linda.

MITCH LIT A cigarette and looked at the snow falling over his backyard. Kevin had left and Doug had gone upstairs to be moody and depressed, so he was getting a chance to enjoy a moment of solitude amid the rusted tools and piles of broken PVC piping on his back porch. A year ago, in exchange for half a month’s free rent, Doug and Mitch had renovated the kitchen’s ailing plumbing, a job which had taken a day, but the cleanup process was in its thirteenth month. At the end of that day, Doug, flushed with the success of the home-repair job, had resolved to become a plumber.

So they were going to steal a Ferrari. Twenty grand for a day’s work. It was odd, but it seemed like a job to him. Only, unlike working at Accu-mart, this was something he could really get into. He would make decisions and be a part of a team, not a worker ant who constantly had to be reassured of his own importance with platitudes and falsehoods. There would be no motivational posters, no time cards, no uniforms. There would be no Bob Sutherland, no endless hours of boredom, no need for a lunchtime pot break. Just exciting and productive work, good pay, and the knowledge that he was one of a select few chosen to do the job, which were the only things he had ever wanted from his employment. Accu-mart had provided none of them.

He wondered if he would have a knack for it. He knew Kevin would be the perfect partner, smart and aggressive, but he was surprised that Doug seemed so interested. He would have imagined that Doug would have just shrugged the whole thing off and gone looking for another cooking job, leaving him and Kevin to split the money. Mitch thought that the fact that he had lost his job that day might have been a factor. Maybe Doug had wanted in on the job because he was worried about his bills. But that theory didn’t quite make sense, as Doug wasn’t one to really worry about his bills. Mitch usually had to remind him to pay them, and if he didn’t handle the rent, they both would have been evicted a long time ago.

“You have to pay your credit card bills every month,” Mitch remembered lecturing Doug once after discovering about five late notices stuffed into the couch. “If you don’t, it will ruin your credit score.”

“Why are they keeping score of how often I pay my bills?”

Mitch had begun to explain the system to him, incredulous that a twenty-six-year-old man didn’t already know about this. But, it turned out, he did. He had simply applied his own logic to the system and wanted an argument to test it.

“So they’re keeping score on me so if I get a high score I can buy a house?” Doug had asked.

“Yes,” Mitch had answered suspiciously.

“What if I don’t want a house?”

“Eventually, you’re going to want a house.”

Doug had shaken his head. “I’ll never have a house,” he’d said without regret. “Neither will you. We’ll never own houses. They just like to keep score on us. They keep score on all of us but we’ll never own houses.”

In truth, Mitch couldn’t help feeling Doug was right but he wasn’t willing to let go of the idea that he would one day own a house. He just knew he would, one day. He wasn’t sure how but just over the next hill there were good things waiting to happen. He was certain of it. Sure, the credit system was fucked, the credit score just a number that indicated how willing you were to participate in a rigged game, but that was no reason not to try.

So maybe Doug wasn’t worried about bills but for some reason he was finally taking some responsibility and joining up for the Ferrari mission. It seemed ironic that the first time in months that Mitch had felt respect for Doug was when the guy decided to commit a felony. Maybe Doug was changing, turning into a different person right in front of them. Maybe he was finally joining them on Planet Earth.

Good things were waiting to happen. Soon, with the proceeds from the Ferrari, he could clean up his credit, maybe even apply for a gold card. Then on to other good things. Maybe one day he would even get a nice suit and perhaps get a Ferrari legally and drive it up to his house, which he owned. He and Doug would both own houses and they would live near each other and go over to each other’s houses and smoke pot all day and play beer pong and not have to worry about anything because they were such efficient and excellent car thieves that they never needed to work crappy jobs. But they would, of course, occasionally help Kevin with his dog-walking business. Dogs were cool and how else would they explain all their money to the IRS?

The door opened and Doug peered out. He looked better, less moody, less beaten by life, as if he had had a good cry. “Hey man, you wanna play beer pong?”

Mitch got up from the worn couch and tossed his cigarette into the snow. “Sure, dude. I’m gonna kick your ass.”