Mitch was sitting with his head in his hands, Doug silent, his injured ankle still propped on the coffee table. Kevin grabbed the remote and began flipping to the other news stations, which, incredibly, were also showing panda clips.
“I’m gonna strangle a fucking panda,” said Mitch softly to himself.
“Dude, I just wanted to go to Chicken Buckets,” Doug was saying to himself. “And now I’m wanted for attempted murder. Or maybe murder. Or-”
“Dude, shut up.”
“And now, a daring robbery in Westlake leaves an elderly security guard fighting for his life.” They shushed each other and cranked up the volume some more, so as not to miss a word.
“Finally,” said Kevin.
“A daring daylight robbery in Westlake resulted in the shooting of Ames Security guard Francis Delahunt,” the news anchor read. They watched the whole piece. At no point did the report actually say that it was the daring robbers who shot him, merely that the robbery resulted in his being shot. Then the news program cut to a detective standing outside the bank.
“This was clearly the work of professionals,” he said as snow fell in his hair. The detective seemed uncomfortable with the microphone being held in his face. He had the look of a man who would rather get back to work. “They created a distraction and then hit the van.” More babbling, then it cut to a cereal commercial.
“We’re professionals,” said Doug, flushing with pride. “I don’t think I’ve ever been called a professional before.” Then he remembered that he had just been implicitly accused of shooting someone and he fell silent.
“That was fucking smart,” said Kevin, “jumping in front of the SUV like that. Did you guys just think that up on the spot?”
Mitch and Doug looked at each other. “Yeah,” Mitch said after a second.
“They know we didn’t shoot that guy,” Kevin said, scoffing at the report, but with worry still evident on his face. “They never actually said we shot the guy.”
“Do you think somebody watching that report is going to figure that out?” Mitch snapped. “They deliberately tried to give the impression that we shot the guy. I mean, if someone gets shot during a robbery, it’s pretty much a given that it was the robbers who shot him, don’t you think?”
“This is fucked up,” said Kevin. “I mean, we even decided not to bring Tasers. Tasers! Let alone guns.”
“I think it’s bullshit,” said Mitch. “They’re just saying he got shot so people will turn us in.”
“I heard a shot,” said Doug. “Didn’t you guys hear a shot?”
“And a scream,” Kevin agreed.
“I saw the fat dude with a gun,” Mitch said, thinking hard and talking slowly. “He was the only guy there with a gun… and he fired it… and…”
“Fuck!” Doug yelled, his head in his hands. “I could have gone to Chicken Buckets this morning.”
“Dudes,” Mitch said, as if uncovering the Holy Grail, as if a ray of clear and brilliant light were shining on him, the light of logic. “If there was only one gun and one guy firing it… and one guy got shot, it must have been the guy with the gun.”
“The guard,” said Kevin.
“The fat guard shot the old guard.”
Their thoughts began racing and they started finishing each other’s sentences as they pieced the situation together. “And then he said-”
“It was us who shot the old guard-”
“Because he didn’t want to get blamed for it-”
“But there’s no fucking way… They must know…”
“They can do things with bullets, like ballistics tests and shit…”
They stopped and stared at each other.
“I’m leaving town,” said Mitch.
“Dude,” Kevin said. “You can’t leave town. We agreed we’d just sit tight for six months.”
Mitch shook his head and sighed. “I know, but this shit changes everything.”
“No it doesn’t. Just calm down. Smoke a bowl, man. Everything will be OK. They’ve got no way to connect us with anything.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling,” Mitch said again.
Kevin stood up and looked at the piles of money on the floor. “Does this give you a bad feeling? Look at this.” He looked at his cell phone. “There’s sixty-six thousand, two hundred and forty-one dollars, each.”
Mitch let the amount sink in for a second. Three years work at Accu-mart, just lying on the floor.
“We bury it, like we agreed,” Kevin said. “For six months.”
Mitch shook his head. “I’ve got a bad feeling,” he said. “You guys bury yours. I’m keeping mine in a duffel bag.”
“If he wants to keep his in a duffel bag,” Doug said, “why isn’t that cool?”
“Because if they search the house, they’ll find it.”
“Dude, if they’re searching the house, it means we’re fucked anyway.”
Kevin sat back down on the couch, shaking his head. “I don’t want to hear any more about your fucking bad feeling,” he said. “We got away with it. We did something right.”
Mitch looked at Kevin, the TV still blaring in the background. He was clearly unconvinced. “We need to make plans,” he said. “Contingency plans.”
“Contingency plans,” Doug agreed. Mitch wasn’t sure Doug knew what contingency plans meant, but he liked that Doug was backing him up.
“OK,” Kevin said. “We’ll make contingency plans.”
DETECTIVE ROBERT SCOTT was wondering whether it was an act of genius to rob an armored car just as a snowstorm was starting, or a complete fluke. A lot of what these guys had done seemed like a fluke and he wasn’t even sure if the supposed diversion the robbers had created, leaping out in the path of a car, had been intentional. How would that work, unless the mother, who had been teaching her daughter to parallel park, had been in on it? And clearly, she hadn’t been.
And you couldn’t arrange a snow storm.
Still, when he had spoken to the reporter, he had acted as if he were dealing with a group of criminal masterminds. It was always best that way. The more threatened the public felt, the greater the likelihood of someone turning the perpetrators in. That was why he had intentionally failed to mention that the idiot security guard had shot his own partner. As usual, the reporter just took down everything he said without asking any relevant questions and rushed to say it, word for word, in front of the camera.
The security guard hadn’t wanted to admit he had shot his own partner. He had tried for at least thirty seconds to suggest that these guys had been armed, but that had fallen apart quickly when both the mother and daughter said they hadn’t seen any of the robbers with a gun. The fact that the injured guard, getting loaded into an ambulance, had been repeatedly screaming “You stupid fucking moron!” at his partner, who had been trying, red-faced and pathetic, to keep his composure, also served to discredit the fat guard’s claim.
A uniformed officer came up behind Scott, his feet crunching in the snow. “No tracks from the other vehicle, because of the snow,” the officer said. “No prints in the Impala. No info on the plate. Nevada DMV says, a thirty-year-old plate like that, we’ll have to wait until Monday morning to get the info from Carson City. The government offices are already closed.”
Scott gritted his teeth and shook his head. He hated when things happened at the end of the day on Fridays. Of course, most criminals knew this would slow down an investigation, which was why Friday afternoons were a particularly busy time.
“We could call the mayor of Carson City and get authorization,” the officer suggested. “We can do that now. The new antiterrorism laws…”