Doug took a deep, slow hit and leaned back on the couch. “Man,” he said. “If we get shot during the robbery, I hope the car doesn’t blow up and burn us beyond recognition and shit. I’d hate for someone to have to identify me by my dental records.”
“Not again,” said Mitch. He took a long hit himself and lay on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. “Man, the ceiling’s gray,” he said. “We gotta paint this place.”
“Not again,” said Doug.
They both chuckled. “We need a change,” Mitch said. There was silence and the comment hung heavy in the air because they both sensed that change was coming.
THE NEXT WEEK was a one of busy preparation. Doug used his free time to get the Impala running better, which required a fuel filter change and some new sparkplugs. He was going to give it a tune-up, but as they intended to drive it two miles and then push it into a ravine, he decided to save the money it would have cost to buy a timing light and instead invested it in a car stereo that he bought from a junkie who lived behind the Dumpster at the convenience store. Then, instead of getting the sparkplugs to fire in perfect order, he spent the day installing the stereo so they could listen to tunes while waiting for the armored car to show up.
Kevin and Mitch devoted time between dog walks to finding a ravine in a forest near the Westlake branch of the First Susquehanna Savings Bank. There was plenty of forest. There was even a great dirt road that led back into the forest not a mile from the bank, but the road was flat all the way back, no ravines on either side. There was a small drainage ditch at the very end of the road, but it would scarcely conceal the Impala and might well cause water drainage problems for the farmer who lived there, who would most likely be out to investigate after the first rainfall. So no good.
“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.”