Dad had ordered them for me. Like I said: to the point.
So I’ve been sitting here, sipping my drinks and recording these memories on a series of napkins, which are really too small for this kind of undertaking. But, you make do with what you’ve got. Like these Manhattans, for instance. Something about the rye is off to my palate; leave it to Dad to ask for a rail brand. However, it is getting the job done all the sam
[End of a manuscript discovered on a series of napkins at Vienna International Airport]
Robb T. White
Inside Man
from Down & Out
He told his cellie and other cons in his pod he believed in the redistribution of wealth and that was why he’d always stolen for a living. Though it was a medium-security institution, he had earned some respect because of his stories of the many scores in his past. His age gave him an air and a gravitas the younger men couldn’t touch. He’d taken his lawyer’s advice and accepted the Alford plea they offered for the jewelry store heist in Sheboygan, the legal thing that let him plead guilty without admitting he’d done the crime. Shit like that drove him crazy but it added to the stories he could tell, just like the one about how he should have gotten away, but his partner on the job traded him in for less time. His partner’s treachery didn’t bother him anymore. He would have done the same thing. Most criminals would shove their own grandmother off a dime if she was standing on it.
He had always thought of himself as special, not an ordinary criminal, until a young black guy confronted him in the chow line. All the mean-mugging he’d seen in his jail life, he knew there were better actors in prisons than in Hollywood. But this guy wasn’t buying into his status and he chest-bumped and cursed him before turning back to the serving line. A small thing but he’d backed down and it was seen and word in any Graybar Hotel got around fast. A few weeks later, his own cellie took over some space on the table they used to share.
At forty-one, he thought, I’ve become the toothless wolf in the pack. That night he woke with a nightmare: he had stolen a Ryder van full of gold and silver bars. A laughing circle of young gangbangers tore the metal door loose and stole every bar inside while he pleaded with them to leave him a few. Pathetic. His scars and stories meant nothing now.
Tommy called from Minneapolis when he got out. A huge score lined up at MoA, he said, the Mall of America. He told Tommy he was out of his fucking mind. They had security up the ass what with all this crazy terrorist shit and brainless gangbangers gunpointing shoppers.
“So what?” Tom said. “I’ve got Bob.”
Who the fuck was Bob?
“Give me a disgruntled employee over the best cutting torch on the market.” Tom laughed.
He used to steal in the summer, play in the winter — another of his prison mottos the young cons used to lap up. His last lawyer had taken the cash a sister in Coeur d’Alene was holding for him. Minneapolis in October might not be Duluth, but it’s cold enough to coat the lawns and cars with frost most mornings. Tommy’s score, if it panned out, meant Key West — maybe even retirement. It had to come sometime. Back before ATM machines, when banks kept real cash on the premises, he would have booked for the Maldives by now. It’s easier than ever to get the cash in the drawers from the tellers — they’re ordered to give it up — but banks in small towns don’t keep much around. He hadn’t seen a major haul in years. The FBI had a long memory too, and that was another reason to go for it now.
He had developed ulcerated colitis three years ago, and he was told he had to be careful what he ate. He once spent three days holed up in a Motel 6 in Casper, Wyoming, instead of casing a bank because of his goddamned irritated bowels. On the road, he was forced to watch how much coffee and junk food he consumed. Sometimes he had no choice. All of it was adding up to one word in blinking, neon green: Retirement.
He had met Tom in a bar.
“Ain’t you drinking, bro?” Tom asked.
“I got a fuckin’ beer in front of me, don’t I?”
“Have a real drink, chickenshit.”
“I’ll stick with the beer.”
Hard liquor on his stomach was the same as gulping from a can of Drano. He turned to Tommy, who looked no different from the last time he’d seen him, maybe more bulked, leaner in the belly.
“Tell me about your guy,” he said.
It always seemed to start in a bar, the way a lot of good and bad things did in his life. His parents were alcoholics and he learned early on what booze could do. Still, they tried to instill the values of their faith in their kids even if they didn’t have much luck. His sister in Idaho was the only one of his siblings who escaped unscathed. One brother was a suicide, another doing life in Walla Walla. Two other sisters were alcohol and opioid addicts. Their parents had died young, the father of bleeding ulcers. He still remembered the grim trail of rust-brown feces that leaked from him down the carpet stairs as the paramedics came for him the very last time.
The Triangle was Tom’s kind of bar, a shitkicker dive, your basic country-western with way too much steel guitar; whiny notes poured from the speakers, the same raggedy-assed-looking crowd packed tight on the same stools. Some tattooed trailer-trash taking a break from popping out babies with violent boyfriends gyrated in an orange bikini onstage and gave hump-sex to a shiny pole slimed with sweat and even more bacteria. His eyes boxed the room. Tom sat at the bar a distance from two rednecks in greasy ball caps chattering about their trucks and some pussy they’d just made up.
He shared a cell in Brushy Mountain with Tom years ago, and they kept in contact the way cons do. Tom said his inside contact worked for the Mall of America. The guy would get them inside where the money bags were loaded into the armored cars.
Then “Big Tom” Youtsey got himself violated on a domestic abuse charge before he could introduce him to the inside man. Tommy was in county, but he had no way of contacting him what with all calls being recorded. The only thing he remembered was Tom telling him his man drank nights at this shitty rathole.
For three straight nights from six in the evening until midnight, he nursed a beer, scanned the crowd, and kept the bartender happy with a couple drinks on him. But no one jumped out. He had no idea what the guy looked like. Plenty of truckers, some cheating spouses, he guessed, mostly guys; a bunch of working-class yahoos and a few singles, bikers drifting in from the road like windblown tumbleweeds. But nobody showed up wearing a security guard’s uniform or looked to him like a county clerk wanting to take a walk on the wild side. He tipped the bartender a ten on the third night for allowing him space all week on the bar stool.
Heading for his car across the stone parking lot, his thoughts were grim, mainly about spending the coming winter pinching pennies in some squalid trailer park with a bunch of inbred white trash and their squalling brats.
A voice called out from somewhere: “You the guy?”
He was too far from the streetlights or the bar’s neon to see who it was. He swiveled his head around until he spotted the glowing tip of a cigarette trace an arc in the blackness. He followed it to the source.
“You Tom’s man?” he asked.
“I don’t know a Tom,” he said.
“My mistake.”
He took a few slow steps.
“Wait up,” called the voice.
He turned around. He still couldn’t see him well. The man looked average-sized, clean-shaved, wore a windbreaker. Nothing too redneck about him. An ordinary Joe.