“What we need is a rock quarry we can push the car into,” Mitch told Kevin.
“Man, all the quarries are twenty miles over on the other side of town.”
“We can’t drive this thing twenty miles.”
“No way. Lucky if we can get five miles out of it at a reasonable speed.”
“Goddammit. Everywhere you look around here there’s a ravine. Then, when you actually need one-”
“How about burning it?”
“No way, dude. That’s all we need, a giant tower of smoke over Westlake. Then if…” Mitch was going to say “if we get caught” but searched for a different phrase, not out of any sense of superstition, but because successful people did not entertain ideas of failure. “If… if… We want to avoid the possibility of an arson charge. That’s serious shit.”
“I think all of it is pretty serious shit,” Kevin said.
It was, indeed, serious shit, but starting a forest fire after you robbed an armored car was the type of thing that could make news from here to Pittsburgh. “No fire. What else?”
Kevin nodded. “Drive it into a creek?”
“Nearest creek is six or seven miles away.”
They stood looking over the drainage ditch. Damn, it would be so perfect, if only it were a ravine.
“How about parking it back behind those trees over there?” Kevin said.
“Someone’ll find it. Hunters, kids, all kinds of people come back here.”
“How about burying it?”
“What, digging a hole big enough for that thing? Fuck that. We’d need a fucking backhoe to make a hole that size.”
They laughed.
“Shit,” Kevin said, lighting a joint and handing it to Mitch. ‘How about burning it?’
“Dude, we just talked about that.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Tell you what,” Mitch said after a moment. “We park it back behind the trees and leave it there. It might be a day or two until anyone finds it. Then they trace it back to that old guy. Shit, he doesn’t know anything about us. He didn’t even ask our names.”
“We have to wipe our prints off everything,” Kevin said.
“Everything. We don’t even go into that car without gloves on.”
“We should tell Doug. He’s working on the engine. He’ll leave prints on the fuel filter.”
“We’ll tell him.”
Kevin looked dubious. “I think we should find a ravine.”
“Dude, there aren’t any ravines around here.”
“We need to keep looking.”
They continued to stare into the drainage ditch.
“Linda’s talking about a divorce,” said Kevin. “She said she’s going to file papers.”
“Dude, that sucks,” Mitch said, handing back the joint. “I’m sorry.”
Kevin shrugged. “Dude, do you think things’ll change after we get the money?” He had a forlorn expression Mitch hadn’t seen on him before, an utter hopelessness, as if he just wanted to sink to his knees and sob.
“Yeah, man, everything’ll change,” Mitch said, putting some brightness into his voice for Kevin’s sake. “Whose life doesn’t change when they suddenly become millionaires?”
“Man, it’s weird,” Kevin said. “I think Linda knows about the Ferrari. I mean, I have no idea how she found out. But you know what she said to me yesterday?”
“What?”
“She said that she won’t come visit me in jail. Because she knows that I’ll tell her that I did whatever I did for her and Ellie and she doesn’t want to hear that.”
“You’re not going to jail,” Mitch said.
“But don’t you think it’s weird that she knows so much?”
“She’s your wife,” said Mitch. “No, it isn’t weird,”
“How about covering the car with brush? You know, like camouflage.”
“Dude, let’s just wipe it down, no prints, and we’ll be fine. That old dude’ll never be able to find us. He didn’t even want to transfer the title over to us. He just gave us a car for cash. We’ll be fine.”
Kevin nodded thoughtfully, the despair of a moment before now replaced by an energetic interest in his work. “OK, then. That’s what we’ll do. No prints.”
“No prints.”
“I’ll park my truck right here,” he said, pointing to a cleared piece of solid ground. “That’s only four and a half minutes’ drive from the bank. The cop cars, when they come, will probably come up Westlake Avenue, behind us, from the other direction. So we’re good. We’ll be in that old junkbucket for as little as five minutes.”
“We need a tarp in the back of your pickup so we can throw the money bags under it,” Mitch said. “Those things are pretty big, and there’s not a lot of room in the cab.”
“Tarp,” Kevin said. “I’ll take care of that. I’ll throw some work equipment in the back too, maybe a leaf blower and some rakes or something. So we look like landscapers. Did Doug get the ski masks?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, he needs to get ’em,” Kevin said. “What does he do all day?”
“He sells pills for you,” Mitch said pleasantly, trying to avoid any more confrontation.
“Right,” Kevin said, getting the message that picking on Doug’s unemployed inactivity was off-limits, at least until the mission was carried out. “Man, I think we should try to find a ravine.”
“There are no ravines,” said Mitch, walking back to the pickup. “This is the best we can do.”
“What is a ravine, exactly, anyway?”
“It’s like, a big hole in the ground you can push a car into.” Mitch flicked the joint into the drainage ditch. “And there aren’t any around here.”
Kevin watched the joint land in a little puddle of water and circle around. “Are we really gonna do this?” The question hung in the air for a few seconds and Mitch figured it was a genuine invitation to discuss backing out of the whole thing. He also figured that Kevin was worried about going back to jail. Of the three of them, he was the only one who knew what the worst-case scenario actually entailed.
“You’re not going back to jail, man.”
“You think everything will be fine?”
“You won’t go back to jail. I guarantee you.”
Kevin started the pickup’s engine. “Come on. Let’s get outta here.”
CHAPTER 11
THE NEXT DAY, Mitch went down to the Wilton Mall and looked around in the bookstore for books on leadership. There were dozens of them but most of them were full of advice for middle-management professionals. Dressing professionally was a common theme. Red ties were encouraged. So was drinking water, lots and lots of it, while constantly showing a positive attitude. Great leaders must smile and pee a lot, Mitch figured, as he put the last of the books back on the shelf. He decided to try looking for something more practical, but nothing offered advice on robbery.
That was the problem with crime: there was very little helpful literature on it. A simple manual would have been invaluable, written, say, by a guy who had pulled off an armored car robbery. But obviously, anyone who had successfully done that would be trying to lay low and would not want to attract the attention of the publishing industry. The only place you could find people willing to discuss such matters was in jail, where one would be able to find an authority on every aspect of robbery except how not to get caught, which was the most important part.
So he tried to rent a movie about robbing an armored car. After a half hour in the video store, the only film he could come up with was Heat, which he had seen in the theater when it first came out. The guys in that movie just made Mitch feel inadequate. They had thousands of dollars worth of equipment: radios, complex codes, night vision goggles, and M16s. The Robert DeNiro character lived in a beach house. Mitch wondered why people who could afford all that shit didn’t just invest the money rather than rob an armored car. If he had his own beach house, he and Doug would just toke on the deck all day; screw all this robbery crap. Why risk freedom when freedom was great? Mitch estimated it would take him about a year to save up for an M16, let alone all the drills, pistols, duffel bags, and binoculars. He put Heat back on the shelf.