"How to rob an armored car" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levison Iain)CHAPTER 4“HOW COME YOU don’t have a girlfriend?” Linda asked. “You’re such a nice guy.” Doug wasn’t sure he was comfortable with the question. They were driving home after a shopping trip to the mall, during which Linda had insisted he buy a shirt that he knew he would never wear despite her enthusiasm about it being “so in-style.” It was a dark green, striped monstrosity that Doug thought made him look like either an attention-seeking hipster or a Hispanic drug dealer, neither of which was a look he was going for. In fact, in his clothing choices, he wasn’t going for anything except affordable, which this wasn’t. He had laid out forty-two dollars for the shirt, mostly because he hadn’t wanted to hurt Linda’s feelings, but also because she had hinted, obtusely, that it would increase his chances of becoming sexually active again. But at $9.50 an hour, which is what he made at the restaurant, he calculated that, with taxes, he would have to pick up five extra hours this week to compensate for the damned thing, which would have to be on Sunday morning, the brunch shift, the only shift any of the other line cooks would willingly surrender. So on their ride back home, he had been secretly fuming that because of their little shopping trip he was now going to have to work Sunday morning, and then Linda, whom he had only recently decided was a decent human being, was suddenly asking him a personal question that he didn’t want to answer, or think about. “Uh… dunno,” he said. Linda was regarding him with amusement. “Is there anyone you like?” Doug was staring out the window, watching the town go by. On days like this, wintry and wet, Wilton looked dirty and the snow that everyone said looked so beautiful when it was falling had been shoveled into exhaust-blackened piles at the edge of every parking lot. All the supposedly beautiful snow ever did was showcase all the environmental damage caused by everyday events like driving, and the cold and moisture made the diesel fumes from buses and trucks hang heavy in the air, giving Doug the feeling that the town wasn’t dying as much as it was being killed. “I don’t want to date anyone here,” he said. “In Wilton?” “Yeah.” “Why not?” Doug grunted and pointed out the window as if to say, Look at this. Don’t you want to escape? Linda just laughed, seeing it as an attempt to change the topic, and asked again. “I’ve been thinking about moving out West,” Doug said finally. “I thought you were going to be a chopper pilot.” “Yeah. Out West.” Linda rolled her eyes. “You need a girlfriend.” “Why?” The conversation was making Doug defensive and he was starting to see why Kevin was always complaining that Linda was a nag. She seemed to have a need to constantly improve everyone around her. “So she can get your shit together.” “My shit is together.” Linda laughed again and Doug smiled. He figured that she had improve-yourself conversations with Kevin all the time, that she did it instinctively, and it was nice for her to have one with nothing at stake. It was like a cat practicing its predatory skills by playing with a toy. “What about that girl at the convenience store?” “Awww, man. Kevin has a big mouth.” “What? He shouldn’t have told me about that?” Doug grunted. “Are you blushing?” “No.” She regarded Doug cheerfully for a second as she pulled onto his street. “I think you should go into the convenience store and ask her out. Wearing that shirt.” Doug was playing with the door handle, indicating a desire to escape the vehicle. “I gotta go to work,” he said. Linda pulled up outside his apartment and, to Doug’s surprise, shut the engine off, giving him the impression he was supposed to ask her to come in. He didn’t think it would be a good idea as Mitch’s car was in the driveway and Mitch never had a good thing to say about Linda, and, besides, he had to be at work in an hour. “Mitch is home,” Doug said, hoping she would get the hint. “Yeah, I know.” Linda was looking at him again, more intensely than he liked, the fact that he found her pretty all of a sudden just adding to his discomfiture. He had noticed that at the mall the salespeople they had spoken to had considered them a couple, and he had realized that he missed that feeling, the feeling of being seen as part of a unit. How long had it been since he’d had a girlfriend? Coming up on two years now, he thought. His last girlfriend had been a waitress at the restaurant, a seemingly shy hippie girl who had inexplicably turned into an obsessive and domineering motormouthed bitch after just a few months, and her subsequent decision to move to New York City and not invite him to come had sent him into a black hole of emotional devastation which had lasted for over a year. Even thinking about her now, or hearing her name, Annalisa, sent him into a funk. Mitch, noticing this, had eventually dubbed her The One We Don’t Speak Of. It was an attempt at a joke, but Doug found the terminology strangely helpful, as if it was the actual mention of her name which caused pain. “Honestly, I never really liked The One We Don’t Speak Of,” Mitch had offered one day while they were getting high in a field outside Wilton, looking at the smokestacks of the metal-refinishing plant belching soot into the sky. “Her name’s Annalisa,” Doug had said, and knew that it was over, that he might still care but that he had survived because saying the name didn’t cause a stab of misery anymore. The misery had been experienced and it had left. There was no sense of victory, just relief. Not the pure type of relief that causes happiness but the type of relief you might feel if you had driven off the road, crashed through a guardrail, plummeted into a ravine full of alligators, and then realized that, physically, you were OK. You still had problems, but things could be worse. And here was Linda, suggesting he plummet back down into the ravine. “I have to pick up Ellie,” Linda said, her voice suddenly heavy. Doug thought she was sad, that she wanted to say something else, and he was going to ask her if she was OK but then she added, “I want you to promise me something.” “OK.” “Promise me you’ll wear that shirt. Just once.” Doug was strangely touched by the request. She must have known he hadn’t intended to. “OK,” he said. “I promise.” “Promise me you’ll put it on and go ask out that girl at the convenience store.” “Awww, fuck.” He looked at her and laughed, then noticed she was about to cry, and he didn’t have any idea why. “OK, OK,” he said. “I swear.” She gave him a sad smile. “Call me,” she said. “OK.” “No, really.” “I will.” He had no idea why she wanted to spend time with him but she seemed so serious about it that it made Doug feel cheerful by contrast. He wanted to make a joke to lighten the mood but nothing funny came to mind. “I have to go pick up Ellie,” she repeated suddenly. “Oh… OK.” She’d seemed so needy a second ago and now she was throwing him out of the car. He stepped onto the sidewalk. “I’ll call you.” “OK,” she said, as if it was his idea. She started the car again, looking out her window into the street to check if it was safe to pull back out into the street. “Bye,” she said as he shut the door and she peeled off. Doug watched her car fly down the street. “WHY DON’T YOU come work with me?” Kevin asked as he packed the bong. They were sitting in Doug and Mitch’s living room. Night was falling and Mitch was lying on the couch with his shoes off, staring at the ceiling. Doug had just left for work. He had ignored Kevin when he had come over, which both Mitch and Kevin had found strange. For Mitch, the energy from the emotional turmoil of being fired had worn off and had been replaced by a vague sense of relief that he would never have to look at Bob Sutherland again. Then it had been replaced by a fear that he wouldn’t be able to come up with rent or money for the bills or gas or car insurance, that the few things he had were about to be taken away. Between bouts of relief at not having to get up and go to work the next morning, he was envisioning himself homeless, begging for change, producing a rollercoaster of emotion that he figured only a good blast of kind bud smoke could alleviate. “Walking dogs?” “Yeah, man. I need help. If I had help, I could expand the business. Linda’s always all over my ass to expand the business.” Mitch thought about walking dogs for a living. He liked dogs. He liked Kevin. He sat up. “OK, I’m in.” Kevin looked at him quizzically. “You thought this through in two seconds?” Mitch shrugged. “Yeah. What’s to think about?” “Well, for starters, it’s like the mail. Rain or shine or snow or hundred-degree heat. No calling out. You call out, the dog’ll piss and shit all over the floor and the people won’t want you back.” “I don’t call out. I never called out at Fuckyoumart.” “All right then. Why don’t you come walk a few dogs with me tomorrow morning at seven.” “Dude, I just got fired. Gimme a day off to relax.” “Pussy,” said Kevin. “You want to walk dogs or not?” “Damn, you’d think a guy who just got fired might get to sleep in one fucking day.” Kevin laughed and drew a big, gurgling hit out of the bong. “All right, man,” he said, eyes suddenly red and heavy, his speech slowed, a permagrin stuck to his face as he handed Mitch the bong. “We’ll give you a day off. Seven thirty Thursday.” THURSDAY MORNING, KEVIN took Mitch around to each house he would be assigned, introducing him to the dog and giving him the instructions for walking and feeding and tips about the dog’s behavior. Mitch committed it all to memory: Don’t let the immaculately groomed Shih Tzu in Gatesville out through the kitchen door or he’ll crap on a $10,000 rug. Make sure Hans the dachshund get his Cosequin tablets. Don’t play with Rex the Rottweiler, because they’re trying to train him to be more obedient. Kevin had prepared papers with each dog’s name, address, and instructions, showing an instinct for organization Mitch would never have suspected he possessed. When they got to the house with Jeffrey the pit bull, Kevin said, “This guy’s a jerk. He leaves his dog outside in all kinds of weather, and I don’t think he feeds him regularly.” Kevin opened the gate, and Jeffrey came bounding up to him, then noticed Mitch and stopped short. Mitch looked at the dog’s powerful build and massive head, an evolutionary development that had only one purpose-to crush bone. He felt a strong urge to step back behind the gate and slam it shut, but he stood his ground and was rewarded immediately with a tail-wagging frenzy. “He likes you,” Kevin said. Mitch wondered what criteria the dog had used to come to that decision. It was, he thought, a system of evaluation completely different from Bob Sutherland’s, who was always looking to find fault, always studying you as if to figure out your angle. This dog just saw him with Kevin and that was it. He had passed the interview. Oh, you know Kevin? Great, you’re in the club. They walked Jeffrey, then went inside the house to get him a bowl of food. The house was one of those old, stone mansions with a kitchen the size of Mitch’s apartment. Mitch walked around the kitchen, admiring the granite counters, the butcher-block island, and the copper-finished pots hanging from the racks above it. So this is what a rich person’s house looks like, he thought. “Dude, are you listening?” asked Kevin. “Yeah. Something about water.” “Dude, you have to take this seriously. You have to fill his water bowl before you go and he keeps the food in this closet here.” “I’m taking it seriously,” said Mitch, and he was. Then he stepped on the lever of the garbage can to pop the lid, meaning to throw a used Kleenex away, and noticed a small piece of paper sitting atop the pile of trash. Kevin continued talking as Mitch extracted the paper from the pile and held it up, still dripping what looked like orange juice. “What the hell are you doing?” Kevin asked. “Dude, do you know what this is?” Kevin came over and peered at it. “It’s a piece of paper with some letters and numbers on it. And it’s not yours. Could you stop going through this guy’s trash and listen to me for a second?” “36-L-18-R-22-L-9-R- 5,” Mitch recited. “This isn’t just letters and numbers. It’s a safe combination.” Kevin stopped walking around the kitchen filling the dog’s bowls. “It’s a what?” “A safe combination. Does this guy have a safe?” “Shit, I don’t know. I’ve never been anywhere in the house except the kitchen.” Kevin walked over and looked at the paper. “OK, even if this is a safe combination, so what? It doesn’t concern us.” He tossed the slip of paper back in the trash can. Mitch immediately picked it back up and put it in his pocket. Kevin was staring at him. “What?” Mitch asked. “Dude, do me a favor, OK? Don’t go wandering around this guy’s house looking for his safe.” “I promise not to.” “Really?” “This week.” “Dammit, look-” “Kevin, man, listen. Why do you think this was in the garbage? Huh? Answer me that.” “I don’t know. What difference does it make? I’ve been doing this shit for a year and I don’t usually go through my client’s garbage.” “‘Client’? What are you, a lawyer?” “That’s what I call them. They’re my clients.” Mitch sighed. “Anyway, I figure it was in the garbage because he just had the safe installed. Has there been anyone working in the house in the last couple of days?” Kevin thought for a second. “There was a locksmith here yesterday. He was doing some work back there in the den, or the living room, or whatever it is.” Kevin pointed to one of the opulently decorated, paneled rooms off the kitchen. Mitch nodded. “What do you suppose he was doing back there?” There was silence for a second while Kevin looked concerned, then curious, then concerned again. “Let’s at least have a look.” Kevin finished filling Jeffrey’s bowl. “Do what you want,” he said, resigned. “But take your shoes off.” Mitch took his shoes off and stepped over the dog gate into the den. There was a huge cherrywood desk in front of a brick fireplace, and Mitch was struck by the grandeur of the room. Persian rug, leather bound books on inlaid shelves-rich people had some really nice shit. He wondered if they ever appreciated it or if it was just meant to impress, or intimidate, the dog walkers, the maids, the locksmiths, and the plumbers. Perhaps spending gobs of money on opulent rubbish was a way of giving a straight-up middle finger to all the people like him who couldn’t afford things like wrought-iron fireplace pokers and Waterford crystal. He picked up the fireplace poker and looked at it. Probably cost hundreds, he thought. No Accu-mart crap in this house. Most of all, though, he noticed the smell of freshly cut wood, and there were some splotches of sawdust to the right of the Persian rug. Someone had cut a wall stud right near there. He looked at the walls and saw no marks. Then he touched the gilded frame of a painting and it swung outward. He laughed. Could this shit be any more James Bond? He was looking at the pristine stainless-steel knob of a safe. Behind him, he saw Kevin standing in the doorway of the den in his stockinged feet. “You’re a menace,” Kevin said, but Mitch heard grudging respect in his voice. Mitch gently pushed the painting back against the wall, aware that his heart was pounding. “Let’s go walk some more dogs,” he said. THEY WERE IN line behind two other cars at the Accu-mart loading dock, and Doug was getting nervous. “Dude, I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said. Kevin knew Doug thought that because he had been repeating it like a mantra since they had switched the license plate on the truck an hour earlier. The nonstop doubtful mumbling had only made Kevin want to bring him along even more, both because of a sadistic impulse to make Doug face his fears and a genuine desire not to steal the TV alone. “Good idea or not, man, we’re doing it, OK? We’re in line.” “It’s not too late to just pull out of the line and go back,” Doug said. Kevin put the pickup in park. “Look,” he said, holding the invoice up in Doug’s face. “In two minutes, I’m going to hand this piece of paper to the guy on the loading dock, and we’re going to get a TV. And when I do it, the whole thing is gonna go a lot easier if the guy sitting next to me in the passenger seat isn’t covered in sweat and freaking out. OK?” “OK,” said Doug, softly. “Just be cool.” “OK, I’m cool.” He seemed cool for a second, then he said, “But you’re on parole.” “What the fuck are you bringing that up for? Besides, I’m not on parole anymore. I got released on Wednesday.” The loading dock workers waved the next car up, so that Kevin and Doug were next. “Hey, congratulations, man. That’s cool.” “Thank you. That’s more than Linda had to say about it.” “What do you mean?” “Bitch couldn’t even congratulate me, you know?” Doug felt a flush of anger at hearing Linda called a bitch but stopped himself from saying something in her defense. For reasons that were not available to him, he didn’t want Kevin to know he and Linda had gone to the mall the other day, or that they had ever even spoken without Kevin around. “Mitch congratulated me,” Kevin said. “Mitch is crazy,” said Doug, in an effort to change the topic by bringing it to a subject they agreed upon. “Damn, man, we were at one of my clients’ houses the other day, and-” “Client?” “Yeah, that’s what I call them. The people whose dogs I walk. Anyway, Mitch wanted to break into this guy’s safe.” “Mitch can crack safes?” “No, dumbass, Mitch can’t crack safes. He found the friggin’ combination in the trash can. The guy had just had the safe installed and he was memorizing the combination. You believe that shit?” Doug laughed, glad to have his mind taken off what they were doing. “It’s probably less risky than this,” he said cheerfully, which was, of course, the wrong thing to say, as it reminded them they were in line to steal an $1,800 television. It was quiet in the car. And it was their turn. The car in front of them drove off and the loading dock workers waved Mitch and Doug forward. “Keep cool,” said Kevin, not looking at Doug. He rolled down the window and pulled up next to a well-built man in sunglasses and an Accu-mart T-shirt. “Hi,” he said, handing the man the invoice. “Hey. Thanks.” The man took the invoice and went up on the dock and disappeared from view. “Shit, where’d he go?” asked Doug. “Settle down.” “I’m glad we’ve got that fake license plate on,” said Doug. They were silent for a few seconds as they listened to the loading dock workers call out to each other. Then one called, “Forty-two-inch flat screen. Got it.” Kevin and Doug looked at each other. “That’s us,” Kevin said. Two huge doors burst open and a man wheeled a giant white box up to the edge of the loading dock. Two other muscular men hopped off the dock and put the box in the bed of Kevin’s truck. One of the men came around the side. “It’s a big load. I don’t know if you want to tie it down or what,” he said to Kevin. “Hey, how you doing?” Doug said, trying to be friendly and not suspicious. The dock worker gave him a strange look and then a perfunctory nod. Kevin stifled a wince, then said to the dock worker, “I’ll fix it over there in the parking lot, thanks.” “Sure. I just need you to sign something,” the guy said and disappeared from view again. “Shit,” said Doug. “Where’s he gone now?” “Dude, will you stop acting weird?” “I’m not acting weird. Hey, don’t sign your real name.” “I’m not an idiot. I’m not gonna sign my real name.” “That’s how they caught the Boston Strangler. I think.” “What the fuck are you talking about? Are you telling me the Boston Strangler signed documents after he was done strangling people?” “Maybe it was Ted Bundy. I dunno.” Doug was babbling nervously and it was starting to make Kevin nervous. He should have come alone. But then he’d be alone. The guy rounded the corner bearing a clipboard, and Kevin tried to act like he wasn’t in a hurry to take it and sign and drive off. “That sucker’s a real work of art,” the loading dock guy said, handing Kevin the clipboard. “It’s really not that heavy either. Those thin screens, they’re like eighty pounds now. A few years ago the lightest high-def was minimum two fifty. The sound quality on it is awesome and if you hook it up to a Cerwin-Vega subwoofer you can get-” “Hey, we gotta go,” said Doug, who was now visibly sweating. “Thanks a lot.” The loading guy gave Doug another odd look while Kevin pretended he didn’t know he had a passenger. “Yeah, I got a Cerwin-Vega subwoofer at home,” Kevin said, handing the dock worker the paperwork. The guy started to ramble about subwoofers for a few more seconds, then he turned and waved to the next car behind them. “You guys have a great night.” He slapped the side of the pickup and Kevin gave the gas pedal a gentle nudge. “Holy shit, dude, we did it.” “We did it,” said Kevin, driving off through the parking lot. It was getting dark, just the time that Mitch had said would be best. The loading dock was busiest at around six P.M. Mitch had been right about everything. It had been so easy. When they pulled out onto the street, Doug was becoming almost manic. “We did it! Holy shit, man, we did it!” They high-fived and began talking excitedly. They recounted each second of the experience they had just shared and laughed about Doug’s mention of the Boston Strangler. When they pulled into the driveway, Mitch was waiting for them, businesslike. “Oh, man, it was so easy,” Doug yelled as he got out of the truck. It had just occurred to him that, as rent would be paid with this TV, there was no reason to pick up the dreaded Sunday brunch shift now to compensate for his buying the green shirt. “Keep your voice down,” said Mitch. He bent down and began unscrewing the Nevada license plate which, fortunately, hadn’t gotten them pulled over. Mitch slapped Kevin’s real plate back on. They took the TV into the cramped living room, wrestled it out of its packaging, and Doug and Kevin connected the cable. Then they all sat down and stared as the forty-two-inch screen came to life. “Man,” Kevin said, reclining on the worn sofa in Doug and Mitch’s ratty wood-paneled apartment, with its stained, once-white carpet and its walls gray with pot smoke, “this is the life.” “For another two days,” Doug said. “Then we gotta give it to the landlord.” “Let’s just pretend it’s ours for forty-eight hours.” “Cool.” They settled back and stared at the screen. THE NEXT MORNING, winter arrived. It was Mitch’s first full day of dog-walking by himself, and he found that the job he had imagined was hilariously easy could, if done in a blizzard, be as much of a nightmare as inventory day at Accu-mart. His first dog of the day was a St. Bernard named Duffy who considered the blizzard a gift rather than an irritation. Two hundred pounds of playfulness, he bounced around on the icy sidewalks, chased snowflakes, and pulled Mitch into a gutter, nearly spraining his ankle. At that point, Mitch decided that, as Duffy seemed reasonably obedient, it would be safer for all concerned if he was just let off the leash and allowed to run a little by himself. Mistake number one. The second Mitch unsnapped the leash, Duffy, who was familiar with the sound, motored off around a corner and was gone, leaving Mitch standing in the snow-covered road, leash in his hand, listening to the gentle hiss of the snowfall. Feet crunching in the snow, Mitch walked to the corner and looked in the direction the dog had disappeared. At the far end of the block, nearly disappearing in the light fog, he could see a St. Bernard’s ass bouncing up and down as it grew steadily smaller. Dammit! What did a dog walker do in this situation? Go home and wait for the dog to return on his own? Kevin, who had left strict instructions never to let the dogs off their leashes, might not be the best person to ask. Surely Kevin would understand if Mitch told him about nearly spraining his ankle in the gutter, right? Mitch tried to imagine Kevin’s reaction to the gutter story and decided that empathy might not be Kevin’s strong suit. He began jogging after Duffy. Mistake number two. He almost immediately slipped and fell on the ice. Powdery snow covered his face. “Shit!” Mitch screamed. He got up and was angrily shaking himself off when his cell phone rang. It was Kevin. “Shit,” he said again, and decided not to mention Duffy’s disappearance. “Dude, check this out,” said Kevin. “I opened the safe.” “The safe at Jeffrey’s?” Mitch was flush with relief that Kevin hadn’t called to check that everything was going well. “What’s in it?” “Pills, man. Boxes and boxes of pills. He’s got, like, everything. Hydrocodone, OxyContin, morphine. Shit, I’ve never seen so many pills. The guy must be a drug dealer.” “Isn’t he a doctor? Maybe all that shit is legal.” “Damn, man. You gotta see this safe. It sure as hell ain’t legal.” Mitch wondered why Kevin had called about this. The other day he had seemed freaked out by the idea of even looking for the safe and here he was opening it and talking excitedly about its contents. Was he planning to become a drug dealer the week he got released from parole? For his part, Mitch didn’t really want anything to do with pills. “Any weed in there?” he asked. “Nah, it’s all pharmies. Nothing good.” “Doug’ll like it. Doug likes pharmies. Give him an early birthday present.” “I’m not going to turn him into a pill head. Besides, I’m not taking them. I just looked inside.” Kevin had sounded almost hurt by the suggestion that he might steal the pills, but Mitch had noticed that ever since they had stolen the TV, he seemed to have developed a fascination with criminal behavior. They had gone for a ride to the store to get beer and along the way Kevin had pointed out houses that might be easy to break into, doors that didn’t look secure, mailboxes that might be full of information that could be used to steal identities or credit cards. He had even pointed out a bank and said that it was situated perfectly for a robbery, as there were streets and alleys weaving off in every direction. He had actually sounded like he knew what he was talking about and it made Mitch think that perhaps his time in prison had not been a total waste. “Well, I’m gonna finish up here,” Mitch said. He was aware that his lack of interest was disappointing Kevin, but he was worried about how far away Duffy might be getting. “Just thought you’d like to know,” said Kevin. Mitch heard a thundering in the snow behind him and turned around to see that Duffy had returned and was bounding toward him. The dog jumped right into Mitch’s midsection and knocked him sprawling into the gutter, sending the cell phone sailing off into the snow. “Goddammit!” Mitch screamed. But he’d had the presence of mind to grab the dog’s collar on his way down, so although he was lying in the snow with a minor head wound, he at least had Duffy back. Duffy thought they were playing a game and nudged Mitch back into the gutter, which was filled with icy water, every time he tried to rise, until Mitch finally started screaming straight into the dog’s friendly slobbering face. Then Duffy shook the snow off himself, his head flying back and forth, and the gobs of drool that had been dangling from his jowls went splattering into Mitch’s eyes and mouth. The phone, which had hung up on Kevin when Duffy knocked it out of his hands, rang again. It was Doug. “Wassup, dude?” said Mitch. “I thought you were at work?” “Dude, I got fired.” “What?” Doug had worked at the restaurant for four years and despite his continual claims of having goals (like becoming a chopper pilot) Mitch had thought it was Doug’s fate to work there forever. He imagined Doug at age fifty, the head grill cook at last, his pay bloated to twelve or thirteen dollars an hour, making him the highest-paid grill cook in town. Mitch pictured him wandering back and forth behind the line in late middle age, saying things like, “I’m thinking about starting night school to become a welder,” or “Soon I’ll fill out an application to learn massage therapy at the community college.” “Well, not fired exactly, but the restaurant closed. I guess you could say ‘laid off.’” “It closed? It’s been there for, like, twenty years.” “I know. I just went in and it was padlocked.” “Shit,” Mitch said in amazement. “Dude, that sucks.” “Well, listen. I was wondering if you could ask Kevin if he had any jobs walking dogs.” Doug had been out of work half an hour and he was already panicking. Mitch knew the feeling. The dog-walking job was taking up half as much time as Accu-mart had and was likely to earn him half as much money, too, so Mitch had problems of his own without his friend asking for half the work. If being mauled by a fun-loving St. Bernard was the best thing he had going, maybe Kevin’s enthusiasm for the safe-opening might not be a bad thing, he thought. The three of them needed to get together and talk. “Let’s all talk tonight. At our place.” “Sounds good,” Doug said, thinking he was being offered a dog-walking job, not a safe-cracking and drug-selling job. “And hey, man, thanks.” “Sure.” Mistake number three. Doug hung up the phone in a panic. He had been panicking for close to ten minutes, ever since he had pulled up outside work and seen the waiters milling around outside the chained doors. The general consensus among them had been that it was fucked up. “This is fucked up,” one of them said. “It’s There was a note on the door saying that the restaurant would reopen in a few months and thanking customers for their business. There had been an employee meeting a few weeks earlier and none of the managers had bothered mentioning the fact that the restaurant was going to close, which was the most fucked up thing of all. “I can’t believe they didn’t give us any warning,” one waiter said. “Man, that’s fucked up.” Doug hadn’t heard the words He got back in his car and watched his breath steam up the windshield for a few moments, then called Mitch, who had sounded vague and out of breath. He wasn’t sure Mitch appreciated the gravity of the situation but at least he had promised to talk about it later. He started the car up and pulled back out onto the snow-covered road and hadn’t gone more than fifty yards before a cop car pulled up behind him. “You know your tags have expired,” the cop said. Doug’s view of expired tags was that the little numbers in the corner of his license plate didn’t affect how well the car drove, so the tag renewal money had gone to repairing a fuel pump. Besides, the money for insurance, which the car had to have before you could get your tags renewed anyway, had gone toward new brakes, so the car could pass inspection, that is, if the inspection money hadn’t gone to repairing a cracked window so he didn’t get pulled over for driving with a cracked window. How could Doug respond? He could say, “Yes, I know,” and get a lecture on personal responsibility, or “No, I didn’t know,” and get a lecture on vehicle awareness. It wasn’t as if the negative answer would instantly solve the problem. The cop wasn’t going to slap his hand to his head and say, “Oh, you didn’t know? That’s OK then. Glad I could bring it to your attention so you can get it taken care of sometime soon.” No, Doug knew a hefty fine was coming his way. He handed the cop his license and said nothing. “Your inspection has expired and your insurance has expired,” the cop said after sitting in his car for ten minutes. He handed Doug a stack of paperwork and explained each document while Doug stared blankly, suppressing the desire to scream, which would only have made things worse. “This is for no inspection; this is for no registration; this is for no insurance.” Doug saw the numbers on the tickets and saw they added up to over $400, which was exactly the amount he had almost saved up to take care of all the problems the cop was ticketing him for. “I can’t let you drive this vehicle,” the cop finished. “Why not?” “It’s not legal.” “How am I supposed to get home?” The cop shrugged. “I can’t let you drive this vehicle.” He walked back to his car, his feet crunching in the snow, and then sat in it, idling the cruiser as if daring him to drive away. Doug sat and stared at him in the rearview mirror. He looked down at his cell phone and thought about calling Mitch. Mitch would come and pick him up, but he doubted that Mitch had taken care of his inspection and registration, either, so calling him would be like luring him into a trap. How long was this asshole going to sit behind him? How bad could this day get? He’d had no idea when he went to work that within an hour he would have no car and no job. Then he remembered Linda. He needed a ride but he realized that he also really wanted to talk to her. It was almost as if he had missed her the last few days, which was weird, because he had known her for years. He picked his cell phone up off the seat and dialed her number.
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