The White Van

by Patrick Hoffman

  “I thought y’all were supposed to be friends,” Emily murmured to the redhead.

  “Okay,” the redhead said into the phone.

  “Emily, walk with her.”

  The redhead got up. Emily got up.

  “Can you hear me?” Emily asked.

  “Yes,” came the woman’s voice from the earpiece.

  “What the fuck?” asked Emily.

  “Shut up,” said the woman. “Walk with her—simple.”

  “You’re really fuckin’ me up,” said Emily.

  “The point is to act normal.”

  The redhead was walking sideways in front of Emily like she didn’t want to turn her back on her. She was staring at Emily’s chest. Emily looked down: in the middle of her torso, hanging flat from the gold chain, was what looked like a small camera. She stopped walking and turned the camera up toward her own face.

  “Emily, please,” came the voice in her ear.

  She let the camera fall back flat against her chest and looked up. The redhead was standing a few feet from her with both of her hands up as though she were holding a newspaper. Tears were streaming down her face; her eye makeup was smearing. Emily reached out to console her and the redhead flinched backward.

  “Emily, please, walk with her.”

  The redhead continued her crab-walk toward the bulletproof-windowed section of the bank. She punched in a code and opened the section’s outermost door. Emily followed her through it.

  The three female bank tellers turned and stared at Emily with bored, questioning looks. The customers continued waiting and filling out forms. The redhead gestured for the tellers to look away by waving her hand once in a downward swipe and just like that, the three tellers’ heads swung forward in unison.

  The Russian sat in the driver’s seat of the van and waited. Cars and buses drove past in slow motion. People walked east and west on Geary.

  The woman sat behind the Russian and spoke into her phone, but the Russian couldn’t understand the words anymore. He had stopped listening. His mouth was so dry. He wanted to smoke crack. He wanted to run away.

  He looked across the street. Georgy was parked on the other side of Geary. He was wearing sunglasses but he appeared to be staring directly back at him. As ugly as a chort, thought the Russian.

  A police car rolled past. A car horn blared continuously. The woman wouldn’t stop talking. Life was unbearable.

  The redhead was gesturing for Emily to follow her. A young, dough-faced man wearing a tie had materialized from somewhere and now walked within touching distance of Emily. He seemed scared. “Problem at the bank,” Emily mumbled to him. She was so thirsty. The room had suddenly grown loud. Emily couldn’t tell what was happening, but nobody seemed to be panicking. The redhead was standing in front of a large circular vault door in the back of the room. The vault was already open, but there was a jail-bar door locked shut within it. The redhead fumbled with an electronic keypad and opened the inner door.

  “Stay close to her.”

  Emily walked into the vault. Her ears were humming. “I’m in,” she said. She turned to the redhead, who was lifting a tan canvas bag that looked like a mailman’s sack. Emily reached out for it and almost fell down from the weight.

  “Lift it and walk with her.”

  “Leave now!” said the redhead.

  The redhead helped put the strap over Emily’s shoulder. Emily let her do this.

  “Keep walking, please don’t do anything,” said the redhead. Foreigner, thought Emily.

  The three tellers turned again, staring. There was an older woman customer who was looking at them, as well. She held her head at an angle like a dog, her mouth gaped open.

  The redhead’s hand was on Emily’s back, forcing her out of the banker’s room and into the main lobby. The fluorescent lights were making all the faces look strange. The weight of the bag on Emily’s shoulder, combined with the awkwardness of the one cuffed to her arm, was almost too much. Emily glanced at a TV monitor and saw herself—wearing the wig and glasses—on the screen.

  She could smell the redhead’s perfume, and feel the woman’s hand hot on her back. The old Chinese guard was watching them with a shy, confused smile. He held the door open for Emily.

  A gust of cool air met her as she stepped back out onto Geary Boulevard.

  She looked across the street at a construction site and stood there with the bag over her shoulder like someone waiting to be picked up at the airport. She nearly nodded off then; her eyes closed for a moment. The van inched up in front of her.

  The side door of the van coughed and slid open. The woman beckoned for her to come in. Emily stood frozen. The Russian was looking at her. Inside Emily’s head, unthinkable thoughts were forming: They want to kill me. It became clear. They wanted to kill her and take the money.

  Emily stepped backward, stumbled toward the bank, leaned into the door, and went back in. The redhead was standing at her desk with a phone in her hand. She looked terrified. The customers shrank away from Emily toward the back.

  Emily stepped to the security guard, who was still near the door. He had an angry look on his face. His gun was already in his hand, and he rattled it at her. Emily lifted the doctor’s bag toward him.

  “Give me the gun!” Emily yelled.

  “Give her the gun!” yelled the redhead.

  “Come back out,” said the woman in the earpiece. Emily brushed the thing off her ear like she would an insect and stepped on it. She took the phone from her sweater pocket and threw it to the ground. The bank tellers were cowering behind the windows with their hands over their mouths.

  “Give her the gun!” yelled the redhead, and then, more calmly, in her thick accent, she said, “Daniel, please, give her your gun, I beg you.”

  The guard, ten feet from Emily, slowly lowered his gun, put it on the floor, and with his foot, sent it sliding over to her. Then he stood there with his knees bent and his arms raised. Emily wobbled over to the gun and lifted it. She was desperately tired and high. She struggled to get the big bag off her shoulder and set it down on the ground.

  “You, go!” she said to the guard, waving him out with the gun. She turned toward the customers and they fell back farther. The camera on her neck caught her attention; she pulled it over her wig and dropped it to the ground. Her wig needed fixing. Her glasses were crooked. The tiredness was all she could feel. She wanted to lie down on the bank floor and sleep. With her left hand, the one cuffed to the doctor’s bag, she pinched her neck as hard as she could. She didn’t make herself bleed, but it hurt enough to wake her.

  The street. The van was still sitting there. She waited and the van waited. The police were on their way.

  “You,” she said to the guard again. He was still standing by the door. “Go out there.”

  “Please, I don’t want trouble,” he said.

  “Go!” She held the gun on him.

  Crouching down, with his hands in the air, he shook his head at her. “My family,” he said.

  Emily raised the gun at him again. It felt as heavy as a sledgehammer. He grabbed the front door, swung it open, and stepped out.

  The van’s engine roared, its tires squealed, and it took off down Geary. The guard ran in the opposite direction.

  Emily turned and lifted the bag onto her shoulder, stumbling a few steps to her right. She nearly fell over. She looked at the redhead, the tellers, and the customers; all of them were staring at her, panicked. “Fuck you all, and don’t follow me,” she said, and stumbled back out onto the street.

  The bag felt so heavy she had to drag it. Looking over her shoulder, she headed west toward Palm Avenue; at some point she pulled off the black wig and stuffed it into the bag with the bomb. The glasses and gun she put on top. Fuck you, bomb. She tried again to empty the bag of the bomb by shaking it, but only the gun fell out, clanking down on the sidewalk. Fuck you. The sound of sirens was growing in the distance. She stuffed the gun back into the bag.

  She crosse
d Geary. Six lanes of endless traffic.

  The white van, apparently, had circled the block; now it was coming back down Geary. She stood behind a car looking dumbly at it. It raced past her, turned left against traffic, and was gone again.

  Two police cars blared to a stop twenty feet from the bank. Four cops jumped out, then hid behind their cars with guns pointed at the front door. Emily watched from a block down. All of this was being filtered through her drugged mind. Her mind was a tunnel.

  Her face felt epileptic. She got to Arguello Boulevard, where a crowd of people waited for the bus. The sound of sirens and traffic was everywhere. People were stepping around Emily to try to see what the commotion was at the bank. They jostled her. She could smell food on them.

  A bus pulled up, and she joined a river of people moving toward the door. Her head hurt, like her brain was being crushed in a vise. She was sweating; her stomach burned. The MUNI driver stared at her as she climbed onto the bus.

  “Can I have a ride?” Emily drawled.

  The driver turned away from her. She walked a few rows down as the bus pulled back into traffic.

  She fell into a seat somewhere in the middle, put the bag from the bank on her lap, and put the smaller bag with the gun and bomb on top of that. She dropped her head on top of it all and lost consciousness.

  “Wake up, lady. Hello? Lady?”

  Emily woke to see a Chinese man in a brown uniform standing over her. The bus lights were on; it was pitch black outside, and Emily was utterly confused about where she was. The lights made it seem like she was in jail, or a hospital. It was a bus, she could see that now, but what bus? What city? Where was she?

  Her mouth was dry, her tongue swollen. Her eyes were not working properly. There were no other passengers on board.

  “Come on, lady. End of the line.”

  She pushed herself up to her feet. Her legs and back felt like she had slept in a box. She held the big bag to her chest, not even knowing what was inside, but instinctively protecting her property. The bag with the bomb hung from her left hand, and she weakly tried to shake it loose. What are these bags?

  “Come on, ma’am.”

  “Argh you mmm,” said Emily, dragging herself toward the front. She grabbed the handrail at the exit and lowered herself backward like an old woman. She felt grossly hungover. What had she done?

  The driver pulled off a transfer and held it out to her, but she didn’t understand the meaning of the gesture. “Out din it,” said Emily, trying to thank him.

  She didn’t know it, but she was outside the VA hospital in the Richmond District, near Ocean Beach. There were three empty buses there, and no people.

  Her ability to distinguish things was limited to light versus dark. She needed dark. There was an area of shade about fifty yards from the bus.

  A park with trees. A dark park with trees and dirt and no light. She staggered that way and fell to the ground.

  2

  “Where we going?” asked Trammell. Normally, they drove their unmarked police car straight up Sixth Street to the Tenderloin and then over to the Fillmore, but today, Elias steered them onto the Harrison Street on-ramp and up over the city, above the fray, toward the Octavia Street exit.

  “Gotta take a look at that bank real quick.”

  “What bank?”

  “The one that got robbed.”

  “Oh, you trying to get all extra credit now,” said Trammell. “I see.” He rested his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes. He knew better than to question Elias.

  They pulled up to the bank and parked in the exact spot where the white van had waited for Emily. Trammell sank lower into his seat and stared straight ahead.

  Elias cut the engine and sat there tapping on the steering wheel, trying to think of something to say, but there was nothing. He wanted to make some kind of joke about stopping here, he wanted to volley something back at Trammell’s suggestion of extra credit, but nothing was coming to him.

  “Do what you gotta do,” said Trammell, yawning.

  Elias got out and walked to the door of the bank, the arches of his feet aching as he went. He shaded the sunlight at the window so he could look in. The door was unlocked, the bank was open, people were inside. He just wanted to see it. He wanted to match an image to his imagination, and here it was. His partner Trammell watched him from the car.

  Elias turned around and looked up and down Geary. He closed his eyes and smelled at the air with his nose. How could she just walk in and walk out like that? A 38 Geary bus drove by on the opposite side of the street.

  The kids in the Fillmore had given Elias the name “Plastic Face.” They called him that because he had a way of setting his face into a mask of fake toughness. He hated the name. The name had spread from the Fillmore. Even his fellow cops were calling him Plastic Face.

  Elias was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, a black Giants hat, some blue jeans, and a pair of skateboard shoes that shouldn’t have been worn by a man in his forties. His trapezius muscles, overdeveloped by hours in the gym, gave his body a hunched look. He walked with his arms held out to the side.

  Elias stared at the bank and wondered where his life had veered off track. When did he start feeling so desperate? He stared at the bank and wondered how a woman could get up the nerve to rob it.

  “You ready?” called out Trammell through the window.

  Elias, startled, turned. “Yep, ready,” he said, and walked back to the car. Ready, ready, ready.

  Earlier that morning Elias had received a letter from his bank: final notice on foreclosure. He hadn’t told his wife, Julie, about the foreclosure. He had hidden every notice they received. He knew that the trickle of hate that had been dripping in her would turn into an outright flood if she found out. Julie had wanted her mother to move in with them. If Elias lost the house it would affect not just him, but their entire family. It had been his idea to move from their cheaper house in Hayward to this new one in San Mateo. He had insisted on it. He had also insisted, without her permission or knowledge, on investing all eighty-five thousand dollars of their savings into an absolute sure thing, a restaurant near the ballpark, which went belly-up within months. Julie, finding out that she was pregnant, had decided she wanted to quit her job. Now—because he had been attempting to plug the holes in his sinking ship by moving money and credit around, even sinking so low that he had begun to bet (and lose) on football games—the mortgage had gone unpaid, the broker had been ignored, and they were about to lose their house.

  Elias had met Julie eleven years ago. They’d met through an online dating site. Julie, having moved to California from Ohio, at first found Elias, and the fact of him being a cop, kind of exciting. The excitement had faded. Elias had watched it fade, and now he was convinced that the only thing that had kept her from breaking up with him had been a steady string of promises: first the engagement, then marriage, then home purchases, and now a baby.

  Elias was born in Daly City, but his family—his parents and two older sisters—had moved to San Mateo when he was eight years old. His father, a man physically defined by the bags under his eyes, had worked as an engineer for Pacific Gas and Electric; Elias traced back some of his desire to become a policeman to the love of his father’s blue uniform. His mother had been an accountant. Elias, had he been pressed to think of her defining physical feature, would have thought of her skinniness, and her legs, and how they were always bruised. His mother was Irish, and Elias took more after her than he did his Portuguese-American father. Elias’s two older sisters got the dark genes; they looked Mexican. They had large breasts, they were grumpy, and with their grumpiness they’d dominated Elias’s childhood home.

  One of Elias’s only girlfriends, a girl named Sonya (the one that got away), had a brother who worked as a cop in Oakland, and it was this man—with his plain clothes, his strutting, his gun and his badge—who had truly made Elias want to become a police officer. Still, it wasn’t until four years after having been dumped by
Sonya that he finally got around to joining the SFPD. The truth of the matter was, he would have never joined had it not been for a friend of his who signed them both up. That friend, a man named Gerraldo Costello, a man he worked with at Sam Goody’s, a loud friend, prone to making loud speeches, had twisted his ankle the very first week of the academy and never returned. Elias was twenty-six years old when he joined.

  Now, fifteen years later, he was a member of the SFPD Gang Task Force.

  That morning, at roll call, Sergeant Fleming had given an initial briefing to the men about the bank robbery. “So, beat the bushes on the Asian gangs,” said the sergeant. “You never know.”

  The news of the robbery had made the top of Elias’s ears burn. It made his stomach hurt. He was hit with a wave of envy. He became lost in a reverie thinking about it until he was interrupted by the sound of the other cops clapping and laughing about something the sergeant had said.

  After the morning briefing Elias had walked straight down the hall from the Gang Task Force’s office to the Robbery Division. “Hello?” he called out at the abandoned front desk, his voice sounding weaker than he wanted it to. A low-grade dread began simmering in his gut. Much later, after everything had happened, he would wonder why he had ever even gone there, and he would mark this moment as the beginning of the end.

  “There he is!” said a short and stocky inspector named Delarosa, stepping to the desk with his arms crossed in front of him. “Officer Plastic Face in the flesh.” This was exactly the kind of interaction Elias didn’t want to have.

  “Fuck you,” said Elias, searching for a comeback and not finding one. He muttered “Delarosa” under his breath. Delarosa. Delarosa.

  “Jesus, Leo, I’m just playing with you. But seriously, why’s your face all red?”

  Elias ignored him. He could feel the color spreading. He did what he always did in this kind of situation, bull forward: “Fleming was just telling us about that Richmond bank job,” he said, scratching at the space above his lip, his forehead tilted forward. He gave the desk a little two-handed thump in an effort to project casualness.