by Johnny Shaw
“Yeah, Kurt,” Axel said. “It does.”
“I feel bad that you don’t have a date for the heist,” Gretchen said.
“Still time to run an ad on Craigslist,” Stephanie said.
“I’m going to be single for a while,” Axel said. “I have some things to think about romance-wise. Axel needs to work on Axel.”
“Is part of that process talking about yourself in the third person?” Gretchen asked.
“Axel thought Axel would try it out,” Axel said. “Axel now realizes that Axel sounds like a douchebag.”
“You should go to Esalen,” Stephanie said. “It’s like being inside a TED Talk. But with hot springs and nudity. There’s a workshop called ‘Romance 2.0: A Soul Initiation’ that would be great for you.”
“I don’t know if you’re joking,” Axel said. “If you aren’t, send me the info.”
“Bring it in,” Kurt said, stepping into the empty space between them. Axel and Gretchen joined him, and the three of them held one another for a long moment. Stephanie and Louder looked at each other, shook their heads, and stayed back.
“The last time we held each other like this was when Mom died,” Kurt said.
“Then this one is for Dad,” Gretchen said. “Let’s take back what got took.”
“And then some,” Axel said.
“See you all when it’s over,” Kurt said.
The Little Grass Shack hadn’t changed in the months since Axel had last seen it. A nondescript facade with a green neon cross above the door and the word “Cannabis” frosted in big, loopy letters on the window, a small marijuana leaf dotting the i.
Across the street, Axel dropped more change in the meter and got back into the car he had boosted from the Del Mar racetrack lot that morning. The last thing he needed was a meter maid to run the plates. With his luck, the stolen car had fifteen unpaid parking tickets on it.
Gretchen and Kurt were in position. While Mother might have made alterations to his original plan, Axel was confident that the basic concept would be maintained. He had made them go over the most probable variations enough times to create contingencies. He had tried to think of everything but knew he couldn’t have.
Because the armored truck had a GPS signal broadcasting back to the security company’s headquarters, it limited any thief’s options. If the car deviated from the assigned route or spent too long in one location, it could raise concerns. Which was why Stanley and Steven were so crucial to the plan. They gave Mother considerably more latitude. The duo had never been on time and often made unnecessary stops. It had become their normal. They weren’t just facilitating the robbery, but they had unknowingly established necessary inconsistencies through their incompetence, too.
“The hipsters are heading to the haberdasher,” Kurt’s voice barked from the long-range walkie-talkie they had dug out of storage. The ones they had played with as desert kids. “Repeat. The hygienically challenged are on the road to Burning Man. Over.”
“We don’t need elaborate codes,” Axel replied.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Kurt said. “Moving to the second location.”
Axel waited. His heart rate doubled, and his hair itched. Not his scalp, his hair. Nerves were strange things.
Two minutes later, the armored car pulled to the curb. If Axel had any doubt that the heist was happening today, it had vanished the moment he saw Stanley and Steven. They had gone from loose slack to wire taut, visibly nervous and sweating through their shirts. Stanley’s head darted in every direction, and he did a full John Belushi 360 pirouette on the sidewalk. Steven moved self-consciously, his arms swinging in strange time to his legs, as if he had recently relearned how to walk.
Axel dipped low in the rental car, then popped back up, realizing how suspicious an action that was. He might as well have had a newspaper with two eyeholes cut out of it. They didn’t know him. Mother didn’t know he was there. He started the car and drove a block ahead, keeping an eye on the armored car in his rearview. Stanley and Steven came out with the cash a few minutes later. Heavy canvas bags, as usual. They stowed them and got back into the armored car. It was the most efficient Axel had ever seen them.
The armored car drove past him. He waited a count of fifteen and pulled into traffic. He wasn’t following a yellow cab in New York. It was the only armored car on the road. He could easily keep a distance. Besides, he knew where the truck was headed. He knew their route by heart. He wasn’t tailing them as much as monitoring for deviation.
Hitting a red light, Axel stopped and waited. His nerves had settled. A glance at the empty passenger seat made him jealous that both Kurt and Gretchen had a Bonnie to their Clyde, or a Bonnie to Gretchen’s Bonnie, or a Thelma to her Louise, or whatever.
A car pulled up next to him. Mother Ucker sat in the driver’s seat of a black SUV. She hadn’t looked over, her eyes on the armored car, as well. Axel faced the other way, pretending to fiddle with his stereo.
“Can’t risk it,” Axel said to himself. He took a right turn on the red. He grabbed his walkie. “Mother is here. Black Ford Explorer. About a half minute behind the car. Be extra careful. She sees any of us, we’re blown.”
“We should have worn disguises,” Kurt said.
“Don’t worry,” Gretchen said. “I’m wearing a Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman costume. She’ll never recognize me.”
“Why do I bother?” Axel said.
“Jokes don’t change things,” Kurt said. “Just because we make a funny doesn’t mean we don’t take a thing seriously.”
Axel didn’t see Mother’s SUV when he reached Johnnie’s Diner. To be on the safe side, he stayed two blocks back and found some cover behind a camper that people were obviously living inside. It was that kind of neighborhood, mostly industrial with no pedestrian traffic. No prying eyes. Mostly trucks and motor homes on the street. Lots of trash on the sidewalk.
He couldn’t see it, but the armored truck would be in the diner’s small parking lot, in the back and not visible from the street. This stop was usually quick. Johnnie didn’t like to waste time.
Johnnie’s Diner was a legendary greasy spoon that had been there for fifty-three years with the same owner-operator, Johnnie Correia. Axel had never eaten at Johnnie’s, but even he knew Johnnie’s reputation. His regulars were treated like royalty. Yelpers, tie wearers, and tourists didn’t get nearly the same quality of service. Newcomers thought Johnnie’s orneriness was an act. It wasn’t. He loved their money just slightly more than he hated them, so he took it while insulting them. He threw people out on a regular basis for small infractions to his unspoken and ever-changing rules.
Johnnie’s Diner only accepted cash. In a write-up in the San Diego Union, Johnnie had said that he would never take credit cards, because “those rat bastards are nothing more than usurers. The Bible is clear about moneylenders being scum that take advantage of people. Hellbound sons of bitches all.”
The breakfast-and-lunch-only restaurant had daily lines out the door, which meant there was a lot of cash at the end of the day. That amount of money had tempted plenty of thieves in the past. Not so much anymore. Johnnie’s used to get robbed a lot—or rather, people tried to rob it. Johnnie had shot no fewer than five would-be stickup men in the last decade. While that kind of record never stopped an ambitious person from trying, it had definitely reduced the number of attempts.
Johnnie had used the armored car service for the last two years. He claimed he got tired of shooting people, but he was not willing to admit that his trigger finger may have been slower at eighty-one than it had been at twenty-eight.
Mother had no way of knowing that Johnnie was currently sitting inside his restaurant all alone with a loaded shotgun across his lap. At the end of the day, he sent his employees away to grab beers before they did a final cleanup. He sat alone with Betsy Mae, waiting for Stanley and Steven to arrive.
Axel hadn’t included any information about the diner in his plan, as he had dismissed the diner as a po
ssible extraction location. Without that small chunk of intel about Johnnie’s brand of Western justice, the off-street parking lot would be too much of a temptation for Mother to resist. This is where Mother would deviate from Axel’s plan. Axel would put money on it. And Gretchen was going to have a bird’s-eye view of the action.
“What do you see?” Axel said into the walkie.
“Everything,” Gretchen said. “It’s on like Donkey Kong.”
CHAPTER 36
After the family meeting in Warm Springs, Gretchen and Stephanie had driven to Gretchen’s place to gear up. Leaving her hometown for what she expected to be the last time, Gretchen only felt hopefulness, not loss. Warm Springs was the past. Stephanie and a lucrative life of crime represented her future. Whenever a door closed, there was always a window that could be jimmied open.
Gretchen was nervous. Not about her part in the plan, but about her apartment, vis-à-vis her housecleaning abilities. She had put Stephanie off from coming over to her place for months. Before she opened the door, she turned to Stephanie. “This is kind of a big deal for me. I don’t usually let anyone over.”
“I’m pretty protective of my space, too,” Stephanie said.
“It’s not that. I’m a slob. My place is a disaster.”
Stephanie laughed. “I don’t care.”
“You say that now,” Gretchen said. “The weird thing about being a messy person is that there’s something wrong with our brains. We don’t care enough to clean, but we’re still self-conscious about it. Lose-lose.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“I’ve been so busy with the whole—”
“Shut up and open the door.”
Gretchen let Stephanie into her studio apartment. One big room with a kitchen nook to one side and a bathroom to the other. A futon sat on the floor. Only a few other furnishings: a TV on a milk crate, a weight bench, and a folding table with two folding chairs. Clothes, DVDs, comic books, a laptop, and free weights lay scattered on various surfaces. Locks, doorknobs, and a small safe sat with a number of tools on the dining room table. Everything smelled like WD-40.
“Were you born in a barn?” Stephanie said.
“I thought you didn’t—”
“A joke,” Stephanie said. “Let’s get the stuff we need and go. Whatever’s growing in that pizza box might attack at any moment.”
“I told you I was self-conscious.”
“Sorry,” Stephanie said. “I’m done with the jokes.”
Gretchen tossed some clothes aside and found a big duffel bag. “Why are you doing this? Helping me and my family?”
“It’s what people do for people they care about.”
“I know that you care about me and blah, blah, blah, but I mean specifically tonight. This is a one-person job with all the glamour of taking a late afternoon dump in a carnival porta potty.”
“The poetry that comes out of your mouth.”
“It’s a nothing gig,” Gretchen said. “I’m recon.”
“That’s why I’m coming,” Stephanie said. “This job is more dangerous than any of you seem to think. All crimes are. People don’t like when you take their stuff. Mother wouldn’t still be around if she wasn’t ruthless. You’ve seen only a fraction of what she’s capable of. Trust me on that. I’m going to be there to protect you.”
“What makes you think I need protecting?”
“The state of this room, for one thing.”
Gretchen parked in the darkness between two streetlights three blocks from Johnnie’s Diner. The industrial neighborhood showed only glimpses of life, mostly in the loading docks of the warehouse down the street. Panel trucks and semis drove past every five minutes. The flashing blue light of a TV shined in one of the campers.
“It looks dead enough,” Gretchen said.
A cat walked out of an alley, stopped in the street, licked its genitals, and continued on its way.
“And you said nothing interesting would happen,” Stephanie said. “Dinner and a show.”
“Let’s go,” Gretchen said, reaching for the door handle. But Stephanie grabbed her arm. She pointed out the window at an approaching figure in a hoodie.
They waited for the graffiti artist to tag the rolling door of the linen supply company next to Johnnie’s and move on down the street.
“Does that say ‘Quinoa’?” Stephanie said.
“Sadly, it does.”
Gretchen and Stephanie got out of the car, grabbed their gear from the back seat, and, keeping to the shadows, walked toward Johnnie’s.
The narrow driveway that led to the small parking lot was in complete darkness. A dumpster and stacks of flattened cardboard boxes sat against the diner.
Gretchen climbed onto the dumpster, got a foot on top of a window frame, and pushed up enough to get a hand on the edge of the roof. She did a pull-up and rocked until she got her leg over the edge.
“Not exactly Mission: Impossible, is it?” Stephanie said.
“You can hum the theme if you want to make it more dramatic,” Gretchen said.
Stephanie tossed the two duffel bags onto the dumpster. Gretchen dropped down a rope ladder. Stephanie climbed onto the dumpster, handed the bags up to Gretchen, and in less than a minute, both of them were on the roof of Johnnie’s Diner.
The roof was flat, with a small amount of water pooling in one corner. A two-foot wall ran along the entire roof edge—an aesthetic choice, as it served no discernible function. There was no access to the interior from the roof, but they had a good view of the neighborhood and, more specifically, the parking lot.
Stephanie unzipped one of the bags and pulled out a blanket and a bottle of wine. “Find a spot with the least amount of birdshit.”
“Wine?” Gretchen said. “Which one of us isn’t taking this seriously enough?”
“Wine makes it more serious,” Stephanie said. “The chocolate and brie are in the other bag.”
The produce trucks woke Gretchen up at four thirty in the morning. Still dark. Gretchen stared up at the night sky and counted the stars. In the distance, men shouted at each other in Spanish. Gretchen turned and watched Stephanie sleep. She pictured the two of them traveling through Europe, stealing jewels from heiresses’ bedrooms and running elaborate schemes on people with titles, bilking dukes and earls—maybe even the duke of Earl—out of priceless artworks and treasures.
“Are you staring at me?” Stephanie whispered, her eyes still closed.
“You scare me sometimes,” Gretchen said. “Coffee?”
Stephanie opened her eyes and nodded.
Gretchen reached into the bag nearest her and found the thermos. She poured coffee into two plastic mugs. “How’d you sleep?”
“This isn’t my first roof snooze,” Stephanie said. “I can sleep anywhere. Other than the gravel pattern that is embedded into half my body, I’m good.”
“What do you want to do while we wait?”
Stephanie bobbed her eyebrows up and down.
“We would have to be really quiet.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” Stephanie said. “I brought backgammon.”
Criminal activity was similar to Space Mountain at Disneyland. It consisted of long periods of waiting and boredom and nothing and anticipation and stress, followed by three minutes of intense activity, eventually ending in excitement, unease, and a bit of a letdown. Until it started all over again with more waiting and anticipation and stress.
When the armored truck pulled into the parking lot, Gretchen had been drifting off. On her stomach at the edge of the roof, she had a perfect bird’s-eye view of the lot from a narrow gap between the roof wall and an old sign. Stephanie took a post on the other side of the roof. Between them they had a 360-degree view.
She hadn’t tracked the cars that went in and out of the lot during business hours, but when the armored truck arrived, the parking lot wasn’t empty. A silver car that could have been about ten different makes and models—one of those cars th
at looked like every other car—sat alone in the corner. If pressed, Gretchen would have guessed a mid-1990s Saturn. Johnnie was the only person left in the place, but it wasn’t his car. Johnnie drove the hugest-ass car ever made, a 1977 Oldsmobile Delta 88 that would never have made the turn into the driveway. You’d have to airlift that boat in. He always parked right in front.
“What do you see?” Axel’s voice in her single earbud made her jump.
“Everything,” Gretchen said softly. “It’s on like Donkey Kong.”
Stanley and Steven got out of the armored car, business as usual. The most noticeable difference from their regular routine was that Fritzy got out of the silver car. He must have been sitting in that car for hours.
Without a word between them, Stanley left the back door open. He and Steven walked into Johnnie’s while Uncle Fritzy loaded bag after bag into the trunk of his car.
“That’s it?” Gretchen said. “That’s the plan?”
Gretchen wrote down the plate number of Fritzy’s car and texted it and the description to Axel and Kurt. The car was the money. If they lost that car, they would never see the money or Mother ever again.
After two minutes, Stanley and Steven exited the back of the diner. Not even pretending anymore, they dumped the money from Johnnie’s directly into the trunk of Fritzy’s car.
“Oh shit,” Gretchen said. “This is bad.”
Johnnie—who must have developed a sixth sense when it came to robberies—stepped out the back door with his shotgun at his shoulder. “You sons of bitches. You dirty sons of bitches. That money is my money.”
Stanley lifted his hands straight in the air. Steven lifted his as high as his overdeveloped lats would allow.
“They have my family hostage,” Stanley said. “Please go along with it, or they’ll kill my children.”
Which was an interesting thing to say, Gretchen thought, considering that Stanley didn’t have any children.
“You over there!” Johnnie shouted toward Fritzy. “Move away from the car where I can see you.”