by Jack Bunker
Hurlocker split off to pick up a few more things and said that he would meet them in a week. As he said good-bye to Hobbs he asked, “Is there anything more beautiful than the love between an older man and a young boy?”
“Fuck you.”
Hurlocker, serious, said, “Watch yourself.”
EIGHTEEN
Three hours into the drive, Hobbs gave Alan the gun back. He asked him, “You know what kind of gun it is?”
Alan shook his head.
“Charter Arms Bulldog, .44 Special. Good gun to hit somebody with. Doesn’t shoot so good. Where’d you get it?”
“My uncle.”
“You know what he did with it? Before you got it?”
“Left it in my mother’s bedroom.”
Hobbs drove for a while, saying nothing. Then he said, “So he could have killed some guy with it. You get caught with it, that’s on you.”
“My uncle isn’t the kind of guy who kills people.”
“You think he’s a nice guy or something?”
“No, I know he’s a bad man. But he’s the kind of guy who hires somebody else to do it. At least now he is.”
Hobbs nodded, taking in a new fact. Then he said, “Next bridge we come to, you throw that out the window and into the water. We already got all the hardware we need for this job.”
“But it’s my gun.”
“I never met your uncle, but I can tell you something about him right now. He’s got a small dick.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” said Alan, impassively looking out the window into the night. “But my mom would.”
“I feel sorry for your mom.”
“Don’t feel sorry for my mother,” Alan said. “She deserves what she gets.”
“What she’s gettin’ ain’t much,” Hobbs said. That one got to Alan. Hobbs saw the hurt and anger flash across Alan’s face. Hobbs said, “That gun is almost the right idea, small, reliable, but unless you are going to mug an elk, nobody needs that much gun. Thirty-eight is plenty if you know how to shoot. But shooting is almost always a mistake. You shouldn’t need to use a gun at all if you do everything right.”
“Have you ever needed to use a gun?”
“They scare civilians. Mostly I’ve just hit people with them.”
“Have you ever shot anybody?”
Hobbs took a while before he answered, “Only people who tried to cross me.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Were,” said Hobbs. “How many of them were there.”
They drove over six bridges, big and small, before they got to where they were going. Alan kept the gun in his pocket. As they went over one of the bridges, Alan asked, “How do I know you’re not gonna cross me?”
Hobbs smiled and said, “You don’t.”
And that was the last they spoke of the gun.
PART THREE
FROM VICTORY, DEFEAT
ONE
Five minutes before
Five weeks later Hobbs and Alan sat in a pickup truck with magnetic signs on the door panels that read, “Johnson Civil Surveyors.” The truck was parked atop a small hill, looking down on an empty bridge, forty-five minutes south of Tallahassee on US Route 319. Ten feet in front of the truck a pole was stuck in the ground, the kind that surveyors would sight with theodolite.
The bridge was a little over a half a mile long, and had recently been rebuilt because the powers that be had seen fit to dredge out this swampy tributary of the Ochlockonee River in order to make it, of all things, more accessible for fishermen.
There was not a fisherman in sight. And all the times that they had been here, scouting, setting up, rehearsing, and covering their tracks, neither Hobbs nor Hurlocker nor Alan had even seen a boat, much less a fisherman. But Florida had a long tradition of not being able to leave natural waterways alone. That, and spending matching federal funds to generate as much kickback as possible.
Ten minutes before, they had blocked off this end of the bridge with a barrier and a sign that read, “Bridge Repair, Temporary Delay.” On the other side of the bridge, Hurlocker was waiting with a similar sign, around the bend. When the armored truck passed, he would close the bridge from that end. As long as the truck was alone, the plan would work. But last Wednesday—it was always a Wednesday, for payday was always a Friday—a sad-faced old woman had been tailgating the truck and they hadn’t been able to peel her off. So they had scrubbed it for a week.
Hobbs had thought they would never hear the end of it from Hurlocker. “What kind of moon-faced, gas-huffing, inbred, white-trash, roadkill-poachin’—?”
“Redneck,” offered Alan with a shrug.
“Don’t you talk about my people that way!” Hurlocker had bellowed, needing to vent his anger no matter the logic or reason.
“Easy,” said Hobbs. But that just inflamed Hurlocker all the more. He had stomped out of the house and wandered off to the beach, there to vent his fury on the indifferent waves and the impossible-to-catch ghost crabs.
Alan had looked at Hobbs and smiled. Hobbs, for once, smiled back. They sat on the porch of the house, an old cinder-block beach bungalow, built in a time before only rich people could afford houses on the coast.
After a while Alan broke the silence with, “It’s the waiting, isn’t it? The waiting is what makes or breaks you.” And that’s when Hobbs knew he finally understood.
“He’s steady enough,” Hobbs said, nodding after Hurlocker. “He’s just throwing a fit because he doesn’t have anything better to do. He’s bored.”
“He shouldn’t make so much fun of computer games, then,” said Alan.
In the past weeks, Alan had really come along. He had calmed down and stopped being so much of a punk. He listened. He asked questions that weren’t stupid. He’d learned to scuba dive and work a cutting torch.
Over the years Hobbs had seen a lot of guys leave the straight world behind. It wasn’t an easy transition. With most of them, you could tell right away they wouldn’t make it. The heavy heist was a rough trade, and perhaps a dying game as well. It was harder and harder to get away with. Fucking cameras and fucking computers dragging the world closer and closer together. Cops dressed like storm troopers now and were armed to the teeth.
Hobbs was a bad man, sure, but even he saw something wrong with this. The balance had tipped too far in favor of authority, and it was harder and harder for a red-blooded man to make any move on his own. Everybody was on the fear ladder. The cops, the criminals. Everybody answered to another higher-up all the way up the line, until you got to the rarefied air at the top of the org chart that was too thin for any kind of responsibility to survive.
Hobbs hadn’t been born with wealth, but he didn’t want to live his life knuckling under for anyone. If it took courage and discipline and violence to tear a life for himself out of society, well, fine. He’d paid the cost, and he’d go on paying—as long and as much as it took to stay free.
As much as it surprised him, the kid gave him hope. He hadn’t seen anybody like this come along in a while. Maybe it was that the times were too soft. The lure of an easy job was seductive. After all, if you had intelligence and discipline, why not go domestic? Sell out. Suck the corporate teat. Mostly the stupid and the broken turned to crime. Didn’t take long before those kinds went to jail. For them prison had a revolving door.
But Alan was different. He was smart. He understood computers and how to make them work for him. Maybe the heist wasn’t a dying game. Maybe it was just that the times had passed Hobbs by. Sure, a job would always call for a strong arm and a steady mind, but maybe that wasn’t enough anymore.
They sat in the truck and watched the bridge through thick, sweltering air. They ran the engine so the air-conditioning would blow cool. If they had done this job twenty-five years ago, they’d both be sitting in pools of sweat right now.
Shitty music blared from Alan’s earbuds, and he bopped along in time with the endless drone of the trancelike electronic music. Th
e kid kept the strange time of the music by beating his thumbs on the steering wheel.
For the thousandth time today, Hobbs sighted between the two carefully placed vertical strips of painter’s tape on the wind-shield. He checked the radar gun on a passing seagull. It was flying at thirteen miles an hour.
On the open glove compartment lid the LED on the remote trigger still glowed green, showing a good connection with the device. In all the time they had sat there, that light hadn’t flickered even once. It shouldn’t have, given what they had paid for it. And each of the three weeks they had tried to take the truck, Hobbs had cleaned all the connections and replaced all the batteries before every attempt.
Once they had set up the job, they’d had little else to do but wait. He and Hurlocker had tried to teach the kid poker, but it didn’t take. Alan had made a ritual out of making fun of how early Hobbs got up to run and do push-ups. Three days ago Alan had tried to keep up with Hobbs and failed miserably. The teasing had stopped after that. Sometimes the weight of Hobbs’s years was something he could bludgeon somebody with.
Hobbs sighted through the strips and checked the gun again. The bridge wasn’t moving, at zero miles per hour.
The song pumping through Alan’s earbuds changed, and Hobbs frowned, deep lines cutting deeper into his face. It was loud enough that he could hear the inane lyrics repeated over and over again.
“Turn down for what? Whatever. Just turn it the fuck down already.” But he knew he was just cranky from waiting. He got grumpy the same way the kid cranked up his music and drummed the steering wheel. Still, being grumpy was something to do.
“You should turn it down,” Hobbs said.
Alan looked over at him with a quizzical look on his face. He hooked a finger and yanked the earbud out of his right ear. “Huh?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Hobbs.
Alan gave a nod that was all upward jerk and screwed the bud back in tight. He should be paying more attention, thought Hobbs. He should be more patient. That was just more nerves. Hobbs was patient enough for the both of them.
The radio crackled to life. Hurlocker’s voice from the ether. “Coming, in the clear.”
Beside him Alan popped both earbuds out of his head with a sharp jerk. “Is this it? I mean, is it going to happen this time?”
“Steady,” said Hobbs, to both the kid and himself. “Forty seconds, maybe less.” Hobbs picked up the remote trigger. He flipped the safety off, thinking of all those Cold War scenes he’d seen in movies where they flipped the fail-safe off. His thumb hovered over the switch. The LED on the side still glowed green.
“C’mon. C’mon,” Alan muttered. The shitty music squealed through the earbuds. Hobbs wanted to tell him to turn it off, but he didn’t want to lose focus. Still, that music was so terrible.
It was a good play. If it came off, there’d be no snatch, no getaway, no chance of a gunfight. Just more waiting. The waiting could be harder on the nerves than action, but it was safer.
“There it is.”
On the other side of the river, they saw the Moonis-Brainerd truck round the long curve toward the bridge footing. On the far side of the road the swamp gave way to a lake filled with white lily pads and their blossoms. The lake, such as it was, emptied into the channel and flowed under the bridge as if it had all the time in the world, which it did.
Hobbs hit the truck with the radar gun. Fifty-three miles an hour. They were taking their time today. Sixty miles an hour would be a tenth of a mile every six seconds. They were slower, Hobbs would just have to feel it. Shouldn’t matter much. Hobbs sighted between the two pieces of tape on the windshield until the surveyor’s pole appeared like the front sight on a rifle between them.
“One Miss-is-sippi, Two Miss—is-sippi,” Hobbs said deliberately.
“C’mon,” said Alan, “Do it!”
“Three Miss-is-sippi. Four Miss—”
Hobbs pressed the button. Alan held his breath.
TWO
“Yeah, but the thing is, with a sailboat, you can go anywhere. I mean anywhere you want. Just think about it.”
“Put your seat belt on, Ray. It’s company policy.”
“What are you? An old woman? You want me to wear a helmet too?”
“Ray…”
“I’ll put my seat belt on if you just think about it.”
“Think about it? You are trapped inside this armored can with me every working day, endless fucking miles in this truck, and you tell me that when you retire, you want to trade this small room in for another one? You just don’t make no kinda sense, Ray.”
Ray looked out through the thick bulletproof-glass wind-shield and gestured to the glorious sky and verdant wetlands sliding by on either side of the truck. “But all this beauty. With no place to be, the wind on your face.”
“The rain,” said Pete, his hands resting lightly on the wheel. “You do realize it rains out there? And then you’re trapped in a little wooden box, probably at sea in the middle of a storm. You’re gonna drown, Ray. They won’t even let you drive the truck, and you think you can captain a boat?”
Ray was undaunted. “I don’t need anybody to clear me to drive my own boat. And they won’t clear me because they don’t want to have to pay me a dollar fifty an hour more.”
Pete knew the reason they wouldn’t clear him was that they had found out he had had a DUI a ways back. Now they wouldn’t even have hired him, but as he had been an otherwise good employee, they had grandfathered him in. Pete kept his mouth shut because he didn’t want to have to hear Ray whine about it for the next ten thousand miles they rode together. Fucking guy talked too much as it was.
“But all the fresh air and the beautiful views,” Ray droned on.
“Fresh air? Lemme ask you a question. You’re all battened down—that’s what they call it, right—all your hatches are battened down for the night. And the wind and the rain are howling outside, right? Where do you go to the bathroom?”
“Well, the boat has a toilet.”
“You mean like a regular crapper?”
“They call it a head,” Ray said, proud of himself for using a nautical term, “a marine toilet.”
“It’s a port-a-potty. A chemical toilet. It’s worse than riding in this truck. Not only are you going to be trapped in a small box, you’re gonna be trapped in a small box with a pot of your own shit and piss. Ray, that ain’t retirement. That’s my idea of hell.”
“But the fresh sea air…,” Ray added weakly. Trailing off into silence and whatever thoughts he could muster.
Pete was grateful to hear the rumble of the engine and the roar of the run-flat tires for a change. The wind cried a little around the corners of the cab as the brutishly nonaerodynamic armored truck hammered through it. There wasn’t a curve to be found on these things. And in all the time he had been driving these beasts, there never had been. It was as if some designer somewhere had said, “Make ’em angry and square. People just won’t think they’re safe if they ain’t square.”
In the silence Pete almost found himself enjoying the view. But it was no good. He had driven it too many times. Inside the air-conditioning it seemed beautiful. But he knew it was like walking into a moist cotton diaper. Full of alligators and mosquitos and not much else. For some goddamned reason, this is where Ponce de León had thought the Fountain of Youth was. Traipsed all over this godforsaken swamp looking for it. They even had a town farther back named for it. Panacea—cure-all. This swamp was cure for nothing, except maybe health and excitement.
As he passed a surveyor standing next to his truck in the heat he felt grateful that he didn’t have that poor bastard’s job. Jesus Christ, standing around in that heat, measuring things that nobody cared about. He wondered how many times they had to run away from alligators in ditches, or water moccasins. Or how many of them had been killed by falling asleep at the wheel in the middle of all this emptiness and running off the road.
It had to have happened. It seemed as if those
surveyors were always out here. For the last month or so, he had passed those guys and their sticks and tripods. Probably some make-work contract awarded by the state. The man who owned the company sending his guys out to sweat and taking a fat markup off it. Using some of that cash to buy drinks and hookers for some committee man or minor official who had awarded the job in the first place. Pete knew how the world worked. There was a club. He wasn’t in it.
What would they get out of a survey anyway? “Yeah, Bob, it’s swampy and nasty. Once again, we’ve confirmed that you don’t want to build anything here.” Pete snickered a little, and the sound brought Ray back to life.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“No, really, Ray, what is it?”
“Put your seat belt on.”
They came around a bend, and ahead of them he saw the bridge, as straight and narrow as the barrel of a rifle. Pete wondered if, if he drove it fast enough, he’d be able to launch himself out of this shitty job for good. But as the truck eased up on the bridge, he kept her speed steady. They had trackers on these trucks. Sure, to protect the money, but also to chap his ass if he went too fast or too slow. They said it was for fuel economy, but Pete thought it was just so the bean crunchers could have another thing to chap his ass about.
There was a violent bump. Then the truck left the pavement. Ray sawed at the wheel, but nothing happened. The engine raced. He saw blue sky through the window as the weight of the rear armored compartment pulled the truck down ass-first.
There was a jolt as the rear of the truck hit the ground. The front wheels slammed toward the earth, and everything was thrown violently around the cab. Pete bounced off the steering wheel and heard a cracking sound.
He felt the vehicle list backward and to the right. Then he saw the water bubble up around the edge of the windshield. They hadn’t hit the ground. They were in the river! The engine coughed, sucked water, and drowned.
Pete hit the panic button on the side of the steering column again and again, but nothing happened. All the electronics were dead.