“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.