by Iain Levison
In the world of academia, Cornelius White Jr had found the perfect place for his talents. His God-given ability to slither around unnoticed was rewarded each year with a fatter paycheck and a slimmer workload, until, after forty years of teaching, he found himself collecting nearly $100,000 for teaching one class a semester. But in 1992, an auditor finally did what so many others had failed to do. He noticed Cornelius White. But at that point, there was little to do but ask him to retire, which White did with a pension nearly half his salary and no workload at all.
The only other person to notice White was his wife, Janet, and she only briefly. Impressed more by his résumé than his personality, which was near non-existent, Janet Korda was a secretary at Tiburn College whose goal in life was to marry either a war hero or a professor. Cornelius’ battalion had been issued a unit citation after the Battle of the Bulge, and his ingratiating manner with the heads of the college was all but guaranteeing him a professorship, meaning that Janet could kill two birds with one stone. By the time she began to suspect that Cornelius had never seen combat and was a dunce, she had a twelve-year-old son, Elias, the result of two weeks’ worth of sexual abandon at the beginning of the marriage. She carried on with her loveless and sexless marriage until one day deciding she wanted to become an actress, at which point she set off for Hollywood without warning or discussion. A letter was left on the table, which Elias found one afternoon on his return home from junior high school. The Whites never heard from her until the LAPD mailed her personal effects back home a year later, with a newspaper article about a hotel room slaying.
It was at his father’s funeral in 1995 that Elias White looked around and decided to make some changes in his family history. The event was attended by hundreds of people from Tiburn, a tribute to the remarkable power of familiarity, to the warm feelings that people have for the predictable and uninteresting. It occurred to none of these people, Elias knew, that in a lifetime of supposed accomplishment, his father had accomplished nothing but an act of sustained fraud on the entire world. And as they draped an American flag over his casket while a Vietnam veteran from the local VFW played Taps, as Cornelius White Jr’s casket was dropped into the dirt where it belonged, Elias determined that come hell or high water, he was going to be noticed. The New Hampshire Whites were not going to shuffle past any longer. They were going to stride. He was going to make a mark on the world.
“Go! Go! Go!” Chico yelled as he slid open the side door of the van and leapt out. Dixon jumped out the back, followed by two Mexican kids waving shotguns like they were tennis rackets.
Immediately, Dixon knew they had a problem. The van had pulled up over thirty feet from the front door of the bank. Thirty feet! The two seconds it would take for masked men with rifles to run that distance to the door would be about one and three-quarter seconds longer than needed for a teller to hit a silent alarm, perhaps even an automatic door lock. The alarm would go off before the robbery even started. What the fuck were they thinking?
Chico walked into the bank and fired a twelve-gauge shotgun into the ceiling tile.
“Awright, you fuckers, listen up! We just want the money! Give us the money and no one gets hurt!”
There was silence. There always was. In the movies people screamed, but in real life, they just stood there, petrified, horrified by the idea that they might be noticed. They were deer in headlights. Ceiling dust and gun smoke wafted around the room.
Chico was shouting instructions about staying on the floor and Dixon could hear him as he pushed against the teller’s door leading behind the counter. It was open. It always was. The tellers never locked their own door, their final failsafe, except for a few weeks after a robbery. Then they got lax again. Dixon walked back behind the tellers, who were standing at attention while one of Chico’s Mexicans ran in behind him and began looting their drawers. He was even taking the coins.
He was taking the coins. That was what happened when you robbed a bank with maniacs. It was impossible to find a good partner these days. The Mexican was pointing a pistol in the face of the teller, enjoying her terror. “Get on the floor,” he was shouting. She was already in a kneeling position.
In a small office with a window out to the tellers’ station Dixon could see a manager standing, looking out, arms at his sides, helpless. Dixon pushed open the manager’s door, looked out, closed it behind him.
“Where’s the back door?” he asked, his pistol pointed at the manager.
“We . . . we don’t have a back door.”
“All buildings have more than one door. That’s one, where’s the other one?”
“You mean the employee entrance?”
“Hey now, do you think that’s the fucking door I’m talking about? Where is it?”
The manager started to motion. “You take a right, out this door . . .”
“Show me, don’t tell me. And if you move your hands away from your sides again you’re a dead man.”
“I . . . I . . . Don’t shoot me!”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Dixon watched him for the expected and immediate effect, of silence and complete obedience. It worked. It always did. “Show me where this door is.”
Dixon could hear Chico intimidating the tellers and customers. His words had exactly the same lilt and manner as the block warden’s spiel at Falstaff Correctional Center when the new inmates got the intro speech in that drone of unquestionable authority. “Any man caught masturbating in a public area will lose a point. Any man caught fighting will lose a point. Any man caught stealing food from the mess will lose a point. And believe me, you don’t want to lose three points.”
“Any one of you that slows us up will be shot,” Chico was droning as he paced back and forth with the shotgun held high in one hand. “Any one of you that looks up or looks around will be shot.” The lilt of his voice was a perfect impression of the block warden. Chico had The Power. He was the man in charge.
The bank manager was leading him to the back door, past the vault. Dixon grabbed the man’s shirt.
“Wait here.”
He positioned the bank manager directly outside the vault door and pulled the door open. It was unlocked. It always was. Look around, what do you see? Three trays piled high with hundreds. Dixon pulled a black laundry bag out of his pocket and with one smooth movement swept the stacks of hundreds into the bag. Dozens of them spilled onto the floor and he left them there, twisted the laundry bag shut. He turned to the bank manager. “Let’s go.”
The Mexicans were still pulling money out of the cash drawer and terrorizing the tellers. Dixon actually heard a handful of quarters spill onto the floor and, as he turned the corner with the bank manager, out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the guys scrambling for the coins. When were these guys ever planning to go for the vault? He had left plenty in there for them. Were they going to have coffee first?
The manager walked him down a carpeted hall, took a left, opened a door and there was a back door. A big, beautiful back door.
“That’s alarmed,” said the manager, pointing to the door. “The second you open it an alarm will go off. It’s real loud, too.”
“Turn the alarm off.”
“It’s timed. If I try to turn it off before 11:30, it’ll go off.”
Dixon didn’t have time to ask why. He took out his hammer and chisel and started whacking away at the alarm box. Sparks flew. The metal began to change shape, and he took the chisel, jammed it between the door and the box and jerked it halfway off the door. The alarm began to go off, a feeble gurgling. Dixon pushed the door open.
“Gimme your car keys.”
They heard gunshots. The manager stiffened and turned pale. “What was that?”
“Cops are here. Gimme your car keys.”
“Cops?” The man looked mystified, dazed. Dixon knew the trick. It was a delaying tactic, because he didn’t want to give up his car keys. This man was trying to act dumb.
“Gimme your fucking car keys or your brains’ll be
all over the floor in three seconds. Three two . . .”
“Gaaaagh!” He was flipping backwards as if standing on an electric fence, body jerking, trying so hard to get the keys out of his pocket that he was almost going into convulsions. He pulled out a ring of keys. Dixon easily spotted the car key.
“What color is the car?”
“Blue. A blue Nissan Maxima.”
The guy had balls. It was black, Dixon knew. He’d watched the manager getting into it every night for the last week. It was a black Nissan Maxima. He parked it in the same place every day, a few yards from the employee door. “Lie down on the floor and count to fifty.”
The manager lay down cautiously amid all the broken metal while Dixon unzipped his coveralls and revealed his business suit, tie slightly crumpled. He pulled off his boots and tossed them in the corner of the stairwell. There were a few more gunshots. He heard the van pulling off, gunshots and screeching tires. The van. His ride. He was glad he hadn’t depended on it. He pulled the bank manager’s shoes off, nice black loafers, and slipped them on his own feet, and threw the coveralls next to the boots.
“See ya,” he said to the manager.
“Bye,” said the manager reflexively, another thing that always amazed Dixon. How unwilling people were, despite the circumstances, to drop formalities. Dixon hopped out the door, looked around the corner, and saw the manager’s black Maxima there. He pressed the keyless entry, threw the bag of money into the passenger seat, fired up the car and drove back behind the Wendy’s next door. He looked in the rear-view mirror as he drove across the strip-mall parking lot, and he saw three cop cars parked outside the bank. A fourth was just now going back behind the bank to the employee entrance. The white van was on its side at the other end of the parking lot, having crashed head-on with a fire hydrant, which was spraying a fountain of water up into the air. As he pulled out the parking lot exit into traffic, he turned the radio on to drown out the noise of gunshots. The first station he came to was country, just what he was looking for. He drove carefully and quietly, and he was listening to the Dixie Chicks’ latest as he pulled out onto Northbound Route 26.
2
Elias saw Melissa Covington on his porch when he pulled into his driveway. Dammit. Probably locked herself out again, he figured. He had been looking forward to opening a bottle of wine and kicking back in front of the television, another hard week of work under his belt. Now he was going to have to entertain Melissa until one of her parents came home. Sometimes they didn’t come home until eight or nine.
“Hey, Melissa,” he called to her as he grabbed his briefcase from the back seat. “How’re you?”
“Hi, Mr White,” she called back. “I locked myself the fuck out again.” She was sitting on his porch couch, and appeared to be filing her nails. A bright, pretty eleventh-grader with rosy cheeks and short blond hair, she appeared the quintessential fifties’ prom queen, and Elias was always surprised by the filth that came out of her mouth.
“Doesn’t your Mom ever say anything to you about you saying fuck all the time?” Elias asked as he opened the door. Melissa, uninvited, got up and followed him into the kitchen.
“I don’t say ‘fuck’ in front of my Mom. I only say it in front of people I feel comfortable with.”
“I’m flattered.” He tossed his briefcase and keys on the kitchen table and looked at his mail. Electricity bill. Supermarket coupons. Something addressed to “single occupant”, from a dating service. I’m single, Elias thought? Maybe the mailman knows something I don’t. Nothing from Ann. Again.
“Fuck yeah, you should be.” She walked by him and grabbed a glass out of his kitchen cabinet and poured herself a glass of water from his chilled bottle in the fridge. “Mind if I watch MTV?”
She leaned back against the wall while she said it, slowly sipping her water, looking at him over the top of the glass. With her other hand she was fidgeting with the tie on her loose blue lacrosse shorts. Suddenly irritated, she put the glass on the kitchen table and began to unlace the tie, as if she were going to undress. She played with the tie for a second longer, then huffed, and came over to Elias and stood right next to him, holding her shorts – which were slipping down – by the tie, revealing powder blue panties.
“Could you help me with this?” she asked.
“What’s the problem,” said Elias, professional and competent, pretending not to notice where his attention was being drawn. She brushed lightly up against him and she held open her shorts, giving him a clear view.
“I can’t get them tight enough. It was bothering me all during lacrosse practice.” She looked up at him, their faces only inches apart, and Elias could smell the fresh sweat on her. “Could you tie it?”
“Hmmmm,” said Elias, suddenly at a loss for words. He had been looking in the cabinet, wondering which bottle of wine he should open, and had been caught off guard by Melissa’s sudden flirtation. Was it flirtation, or did she just need her shorts tied? Who couldn’t tie their own shorts, for God’s sake? She had been over three or four times before, waiting for her parents to come home, but had always just sat watching TV. She had never really attempted conversation before, except for a few questions about Ann’s whereabouts. Elias took the tie of her shorts and began to tie a bow quickly, hoping to disguise the sudden trembling of his fingers. The result was a joke, and unraveled almost as soon as he let go.
“The string’s frayed,” he said, as if his statement of the obvious would clear the problem up.
“Yeah, I know,” Melissa said, with a clear ring of disappointment in his competence. She walked back over to the table, picked up her water, and walked out of the kitchen, throwing him a look of bored distraction as she entered the living room, which Elias knew was actually to see if he was watching her. He was.
He reached into the cabinet, and with fumbling hands pulled out the first bottle of wine he touched. A Chilean Pinot Noir “blend”. What did blend mean, he wondered? That they just threw in any old grape from the vineyard, probably. Why had he bought this wine? He looked at the bottle for a clue. He was usually a savvy consumer at the Wineseller, not apt to try something Chilean. Then he saw the price label: $3.99. Discount rack. He remembered thinking that even if it was vinegar, it wouldn’t be a bad buy. He uncorked it and poured it, and wondered what to do now. Stay in the kitchen? Read and re-read his mail? Go up to the bedroom and start reviewing the term paper outlines his students had handed in today? He grabbed an empty glass and went into the living room, sat down on the couch next to Melissa.
“Want a glass of wine?”
Now it was all about distance and time.
A bank robbery in which people had been shot would make a splash, but the splash would have a distance limit and a time limit. The robbery had occurred in a fairly small town in southern New Jersey thirty miles from Philadelphia. It might get coverage on the Philadelphia TV stations, but New York and Baltimore would never hear about it. So heading into Philly was out.
That left two options: the route south, over the New Jersey Turnpike Bridge into Delaware, or the route north to New York. Delaware was small and unpopulated and the bridge traffic was just too easy to watch. Besides, the ultimate plan was to end up in Quebec, Canada, via Fort Kent, Maine, so there was no point driving south. The plan was to get himself lost amid the confusion on one of the most heavily trafficked roads in the world, the New Jersey Turnpike heading into New York. The dangerous part was the first hour of driving through small southern New Jersey towns, where the robbery would be top priority. Once he was out amid the crush of northbound traffic, and the turnpike opened into twelve lanes, he would be home free.
Then there was time. In the small towns, the robbery would remain the focus of police attention for up to forty-eight hours. As he approached New York, this number would decrease dramatically. By the time he reached Rahway, they’d be dealing with overturned trailer trucks and robberies of their own, and he would be just a mention on a list of things the police had to deal with
. And in New York City, he’d be a face in the crowd.
By now, forty-six minutes after the robbery, the shooting was over and the bank manager had talked to the police. He had given the specifics of his car, and an APB had been put out. Every cop on the road was looking for a black Maxima. This would last until something else happened. Dixon was hoping for something big, a warehouse fire or another robbery. Odds were against it, but you never knew. Sometimes dumb luck came to your rescue.
His mind was whirring, the residue of the adrenaline rush from the robbery still keeping him jittery, alert and elated. It was late Friday morning. Great time to get lost in the traffic. Roads were getting clogged. Good. No, great. Great. Drive the speed limit. Signal when you change lanes. Drive close to big trucks, they conceal you. Almost out of gas.
Shit.
Almost out of gas. The bastard hadn’t filled his tank. He would have to STOP! In New Jersey. Where you couldn’t fill your own tank. New Jersey law required letting an attendant pump your gas. And all he had was hundred-dollar bills. So he would have to stop, and interact with another human being, the two things you never wanted to do when on the run. Why couldn’t the damned gas tank be full? He could just drive and drive, to New York City, to Connecticut, to Rhode Island, Canada. To the farm he was going to buy in Alberta. But now he had to pull over. If only the bank manager had stopped for gas this morning, then all Dixon’s carefully made plans would actually work for once.