“Awwwww,” moaned Doug.
“Come on, you big pussy,” Mitch said. They grabbed the bags and loaded them into the truck, under the tarp, then pulled the tarp tight to prevent anything from falling out. Mitch peeked into one of the bags, but all he could see was another bag.
“Don’t look now,” Kevin said. “Later, later.”
They got into Kevin’s truck, with Mitch helping Doug, who was noticeably limping. Kevin cleaned the snow off the windshield. He fired up the truck.
“Ski masks off,” Kevin said. “Make sure you’ve got your ski masks off.”
Mitch was still wearing his. He pulled it off and nodded to Kevin. Doug had never had his on.
They sat for a second in the truck, listening to the country radio station to which Kevin left it permanently tuned.
“Dudes,” Kevin said, before putting the truck in gear. “We did it.”
THEY WERE SITTING in Doug and Mitch’s living room, high on the adrenaline from the robbery. Doug’s ankle was propped up on the coffee table, wrapped in ice, though Mitch thought he was exaggerating the pain as an excuse to eat more pain pills. The swelling didn’t look that bad and Doug had never exactly been John Wayne when it came to minor injuries.
Mitch turned the TV on to wait for the five o’clock news as Kevin dumped the bags out onto the living room floor. Inside the bags were smaller, blue bags, made out of seemingly impenetrable plastic, with locks on them. They regarded the locks, then the bags, wondering which would be easier to cut through.
“We need bolt cutters for the locks,” Kevin said.
“I bet I can get through the plastic with a steak knife,” Mitch said. Then he tried doing exactly that until, after three attempts at stabbing the bag, he cut himself. “Fuck!”
“I have bolt cutters at home,” Kevin said.
Nobody wanted to wait for him to drive home and back. They shook the idea off.
“This is like the shit they make bulletproof vests out of,” said Mitch.
“Kevlar,” said Doug helpfully.
Mitch stabbed the bag again. The knife just bounced off, cutting him again and spattering him with his own blood. “Fuck!”
“Dude, I bet you can rip that lock off with a wrench,” Doug suggested. “Or two wrenches. I’ll hold it, and you…”
Before he had finished, Mitch ran out to their cluttered back porch to grab as many tools as he could find. He brought back two wrenches, a razor knife, a pair of pliers, and a hammer and threw them onto the living room floor. Then he began stabbing and smashing everything that seemed to be keeping the bags closed. As he was doing this, he thought, What if we can never get these bags open? After all this, the Ferrari, the pill-selling, the planning, and the robbery, what if we end up just sitting here forever with god knows how much money on the floor, still in its indestructible bags? Maybe they would get busted and be national laughingstocks, a twenty-second-long bit on CNN about the three guys who robbed an armored car and couldn’t figure out how to get the GODDAMNED MONEY OUT OF THE BAGS!
A lock snapped off in his hand.
“Thank you!” he cried in relief. He dumped the money all over the floor, and they looked at each other in surprise. There was a lot of it.
No one spoke. It was if they couldn’t believe they had actually done this, accomplished their goal of successfully robbing an armored car. Until they saw the money, none of it had been real. In complete defiance of all logic, all three of them had been expecting something other than stacks of bills to fall out of the bag-promissory notes or letters of credit or rare coins-half convinced that today would be just another day that they got fucked by circumstance. But here it was. Money. Spendable American money.
“Shit,” said Kevin, breaking the silence. “Look at that.”
“Count it,” said Mitch. “I’m gonna work on the other one.” He grabbed the tools and began savagely beating the lock on the second bag. By this point he was bleeding pretty severely, soaking the blue plastic in streaks of red. By the time he heard a crunching of metal indicating the second lock might be giving way, the bag looked like someone had slaughtered a pig on it.
“Jesus, dude, go wrap that,” Doug said. He limped over from the couch as Mitch dumped the second bag onto the floor. More money. He stood up and regarded his living room floor, covered in bills of various denominations, Kevin studiously counting them and setting them in neat piles. Blood dripped from his hand onto the gray, matted carpet. He was panting.
“Go wrap your hand, man,” said Doug again.
Kevin, sitting on the floor, counting to himself, said, “Get a calculator too.”
MITCH WENT UPSTAIRS and looked in the medicine cabinet for some gauze or Band-Aids and saw himself in the mirror. Except for the blood, he looked exactly the same. It surprised him. He had expected a fearsome monster to be staring back at him. He was a criminal now and he had imagined that his appearance would have changed accordingly, that his new status would be more obvious to the world.
The sink was turning red with his blood. The only thing in the medicine cabinet was a bag of hundreds of pain pills. He shrugged and took two, then winced, remembering the itching he had experienced last time. The hand didn’t really hurt that much. He just wanted something to calm him down.
Looking at himself in the mirror, he was suddenly overcome with a feeling of dread. This couldn’t keep going as well as it was going. Nothing in his life had ever gone this well. It was going to fall apart, and soon. He had to tell the others.
He wrapped his hand in toilet paper, which was turning red and soaking through before he could even finish, so he unwrapped it, held his hand up high like he remembered being taught in his first-aid class in the army, and did it again. It worked. By the time he had a decent bandage wrapped, the bathroom also looked like he had slaughtered a pig in it. He went back downstairs, the feeling of dread still with him.
“Did you bring a calculator?” asked Kevin. He was surrounded by money which had been organized into piles, perhaps six or seven of them.
Mitch shook his head. “Use your cell phone,” he said. “Doesn’t it have a calculator?”
Kevin nodded. “Good idea.”
“What’s with the piles?”
“Each one is twenty grand,” Kevin said, going back to counting.
“Shit,” Mitch marveled. Each little pile could buy a better car than he had even owned, or pay rent for two years, or… or anything. The possibilities were endless. He looked at Doug, who was sitting on the couch, similarly awed by the piles of cash.
“You still want a job at Chicken Buckets?”
“I’m thinking, maybe, like, fuck Chicken Buckets,” said Doug cheerfully.
Despite himself, Mitch laughed, and sat down on the couch next to him. “I’m thinking about leaving town,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’ve just got a bad feeling.”
Doug said nothing. Then the news started, and Doug turned the sound up.
“Tonight, our top stories. The Pittsburgh Zoo might be getting a panda. And a daring daylight robbery in Westlake leaves an elderly man fighting for his life. Those stories and more, when we return.”
“Fighting for his what?” Kevin had stood up and was staring at the TV.
“Dude,” said Doug. “Fighting for his life? What, do you think he had, like, a heart attack or something?”
“And they’re blaming it on us,” said Kevin.
Mitch shook his head, disgusted but, unlike the others, not surprised. “I told you I had a bad feeling.”
CHAPTER 13
“FUCK THE PANDA! Fuck the goddamned panda!” Kevin was screaming as he paced back and forth, staring, enraged, at the television. They had sat through five minutes of panda news and he couldn’t take it anymore. They knew more about pandas than they had ever wanted to. There had even been a special segment on their mating rituals and several slow camera pans of baby pandas being bottle-fed. “OK, I get it. Pandas are cute. Can we have some fucking news now?”