“Nobody’s going to study them up close, Bob,” he replied. “My jacket will cover the shirt.”
Bob nodded his head; his eyes were bugged, and his face was greasy with perspiration.
“Remember, I might need you to vouch for me as a new-hire in case your district supervisor makes a surprise appearance—”
“Oh fuck you, Pine! I told you a dozen times by now he ain’t coming. We always get a tip ahead of time when that prick’s about to show up.”
“Bob, take a drink. Just one. Then rinse your mouth out.”
Bob looked at him as if Pine had just asked him to tango.
“You want me to drink?”
“It’ll calm you,” he said.
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom... right now!”
Bob bolted from the table. A few seconds later he heard Bob’s bowels evacuating in a noisy torrent. A few minutes later, it was followed by the sound of vomiting.
Bob returned, his face ashen.
“Calling the Irishman?”
“Huh? What Irishman? What the fuck—”
Pine imitated a vomiting sound as he pronounced the name O’Rourke.
“You’re so fucking funny, you ought to do one of those comedy acts,” Bob said. But he was calmer, his color better.
“Sit down, Bob.” The smell of the bathroom had followed Bob back to the tiny kitchen. He’d done so much jail time, with its shit smells and body odor of unwashed men, that it was nothing. Bob had talked all day long as the hours got closer. Just nerve-shot chattering before a job by a rookie. “Monkey mouth,” they called it in the joint. He finally quieted down.
“Time to go, Bob,” he said.
“I just can’t...”
He hoisted Bob to his feet and shoved him ahead out the door. He tucked black garbage bags and the fish billy under one armpit. It alarmed Bob when he first noticed it. “What’s that for?”
“Oh, you know,” Pine told him, “for those everyday occasions when you need to tap someone to sleep.”
The sawed-off Remington twelve-gauge was secured in a sling sewn into the jacket under the other armpit. Bob didn’t know about the Glock in Pine’s ankle holster.
“What’s that?” Bob asked before getting inside his car.
“It’s my lucky saint’s medal,” Pine said. He stopped to put it around his neck. He had worn it since his fourth-grade confirmation ceremony back in Providence. He thought that when he spoke the words “renouncing the devil” he would be entering a new, better life and that the sordid catastrophe of his home would be cleansed when he returned. He kept the medal anyway.
“Drive the speed limit,” he told him. Bob’s eyes through the window were moist. He guessed Bob had been sneaking in a few nips.
Pine took his own car and stayed on Bob’s tail from the 77 turnoff to East Broadway all the way to the turn at the 28th Street lot where the armored company’s depot was located. The MoA was the busiest hub station in Minnesota and was linked to Minneapolis by both bus and rail. The lower level of the eastern parking lot was patrolled by security to keep commuters from parking there and connecting to the St. Paul International Airport or Target Field where the Twins played.
They joined a cluster of uniformed guards chatting to one another as they headed for the single entrance. Several of them greeted Bob and gave him a curt once-over. His jacket covered the wad of nylon zip cuffs tucked into the back of his belt.
They took the long walk down the drug tunnel, their name for the single unfinished corridor lit in patches by overhead fluorescent lighting. This led to the first security door. Management’s heightened concerns over acts of lone-wolf terrorism had relaxed security at the main depot because new policy dictated more staff had to be shifted from collection points.
An older, white-haired guard was checking badges ahead. Pine and Bob were last in line and waited until the others were out of sight when they approached. Bob held his badge up just as he reached the turnstile and accidentally brushed the guard’s arm in passing. When the old man turned back to check Pine’s badge — a fake like everything else — he hit him on the top of the head with the fish billy. The old guard sank to the floor like he’d stepped into a pit full of quicksand.
“What the fuck,” Bob hissed. “You weren’t s’posed to hit him!”
“Keep watch,” Pine ordered.
He had the old man hoisted up under the arms and was dragging him to the utility closet. He opened it with one hand and put the old man face-first on the floor. He had the nylon cuffs on him and a strip of duct tape across his mouth in seconds.
“Pine, what are you doing?”
“Shut up. Just a tiny variation in the plan.”
He couldn’t take a chance on Bob’s terrified, shining face giving everything away right up front. He’d decided earlier that he was going to put the old man on the floor rather than try to fool him with his half-assed ID.
He knew exactly where they were going thanks to the cartoon-like sketches Bob had scratched out with his box of Crayolas. There would be four people to deal with, including the supervisor. Shift change should allow for a window of opportunity large enough for Pine to remain undisturbed in the deposit room before the real guards came trooping in with their collection bags.
The canvas sacks were stored in rows on metal shelves inside a big steel cage. Bob preceded Pine through the door again. The motion of his shotgun and the shouted command to “Hit the floor!” worked the first time. No heroes here. Nylon zip ties secured hands behind backs; he left feet untied. Pine had practiced on a prone and squirming Bob in his living room so many times by then he could have done it in his sleep. He let the cold metal barrel of the shotgun rest against the nape of each one’s neck to make his point about not resisting. The sole woman guard lay between the two men. Bob, acting his part, was the first one to hit the floor, already cuffed en route; he twisted his head to look up at him. He took the woman’s key ring and let himself inside the locked metal cage. Once inside he began shoveling the canvas money bags into the garbage bags.
He was thinking how much more there was still on the shelves but weight considerations — and Pine’s own age — made leaving it necessary. Sprinting a couple hundred yards across a parking lot with fifty pounds of money in each hand was all he reckoned he could accomplish in the time allotted.
A sixth sense, the kind most cons develop if they do enough time, alerted him to something out of the corner of his eye. He was reaching down for a better grip on the second garbage bag when he saw a gun barrel coming around the corner of the supervisor’s office.
In one even movement, Pine scooped the shotgun off the shelf and fired from the open cage door just as she squeezed off a round at him. Her slug made a ferocious ricocheting sound off the metal walls, missing him, but his blast blew her head into a red mist. That was how his mind recorded it. He went practically deaf from the boom.
She must have been behind the door when he passed leading Bob as his hostage. The woman on the floor was not the supervisor; he had failed to read the desperate look in Bob’s eyes on the floor.
His hearing came back. The men on the floor were thrashing around like fish on a deck and begging for mercy or help. He drew his Glock and stepped behind the first guard and put a slug into his head. The second guard, the same, the woman last. He wasn’t sure why he did the men first. She raised herself up, like a supplicant before a throne, made a hunching movement like a caterpillar crawling, when the round tore through the top of her head and gouged a chunk of concrete from the floor. Bob’s neck craned to follow him as he stepped calmly behind him. A string of popping noises, loud farts, and then a hideous banshee wail from Bob as the strip of tape across his mouth came loose. The bullet churned through the back of his head, pulped his brain, and bounced around in his skull. No exit.