This was in the mid-nineties. Pelón was in his late fifties then, but he still filled a shirt, wore a hoop earring, and kept the handlebar mustache dyed black. He said, “You ladies gonna wet you pantaletas when you see the money on this one.” He looked around our circle. “The only thing, since this is more money, is gonna be a little complicated. We gonna disarm one guy.”
Beto snorted a line of coke.
I shook my head. “Complicated, Pelón? You lose your marbles. Remember the stash house?”
Pelón’s skin was dark brown, yet he clearly reddened. “Eduardo, I told you never to speak of this.”
“We don’t need any more bodies, Pelón.”
Pelón looked at Tony and pointed at me. “Oye pero, mira este.” He gestured around the loft. “You doing real good from all the business I send you. Maybe before you preach, you go to church and give the money back, eh?” He looked at Beto. “And you, GQ? You ready to give back the jewelry and the BMW?”
“Fuck that.”
Pelón slapped Beto five. “Fuck that in the fondillo.”
Tony said, “Pelón, don’t be such a hard-on. Eddie’s only sayin’ we can’t be offing people just for kicks, that’s all.”
“That’s right. And we can’t be risking that kind of time, Pelón. It ain’t proper. And the money ain’t worth it.”
Pelón squinted. He leaned back. “Maybe what you say is true.”
Nobody else said anything for about half a minute.
Tony said, “So what’s this new gig, Pelón?”
Pelón sat up straight. “An armored car.”
Tony and Beto looked at each other, then at me.
I turned my nose up. “The fuck you talkin’ about, Pelón?”
“They deliver money to banks and check-cashing places.”
Tony grabbed the rolled hundred from Beto. “They look like tanks. Ain’t those things stuffed with Benjamins, like this one right here?” Tony snorted a line using the hundred-dollar bill. In a higher-pitched voice, he said, “Armored cars are like a fuckin’. . .” Tony searched for the words. “Like a money buffet, ain’t they, Pelón?”
Beto laughed.
Pelón grinned. “Eso sí. Dinero para los pobres.”
I said, “Bullshit, Pelón. Armored cars ain’t nothin’ but a party for anybody with a death wish. The name itself says it all. They got trained marksmen who’ll blast you just for dreaming about it.”
“No,” said Pelón. “They train those guards to let the money go. Insurance pays for it. The company gets more headaches if they hurt somebody, ’cause then they get sued.”
“The fuck you know about any of this?”
“Is true.”
Beto sneezed and wiped his runny nose. “But, Pelón, where you gettin’ your info?”
Pelón combed his handlebar mustache in mock humility. “I got a jevita on the inside. She a cashier at this check-cashing place. She watch them come and go, every week, every month. They come in, holding big bags of money. The best day is the day before the welfare checks. They stock up on cash. This spot we taking is the first stop of the day.” Pelón rubbed his fingers together and worked his accent. “The bags gonna be fluffy and eh-stuffy.”
Tony said, “Your girlfriend’s gonna just give up the scoop?”
Pelón grinned. “I already got that from her. I don’t even need her anymore.”
I crushed a cigarette in the ashtray. “What happens when the cops grill her and she gives you up, Pelón? No offense, but our names’ll be dripping from your lips the minute you see dicks in the showers.”
Pelón slammed his fist on the table. “Freaking watch you tongue when you talk about me, Santiago! I never rat on nobody! You hear me? I eat time in Pontiac when you was busy sucking you momma’s titty and sticking a finger up you own culo.”
The guys held their place. Pelón came down several notches. He took a folded handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his bald head.
“Listen. That girl’s not gonna say a goddamn thing about me. She don’t know me. She never see where I live. She don’t even know my real name. I never let her see me in the same car twice. She nothin’ but a little pendejita with a nose problem. I don’t even fuck her, she just suck my bicho. After the job she ain’t never gonna hear from me again.”
Tony and Beto looked at me.
Tony said, “I don’t know, Eddie. What if this broad’s got good info?”
“What if she don’t?”
Pelón screwed his eyes up. “This is simple. Two guards in one truck. They double-park in front of the store. The passenger gets out, goes to a door on the side. He open it, get the bags, and carries them into the store. That’s it. The driver, he stay inside. He can’t leave the steering wheel. This way nobody drives off with the truck.”
Tony raised an eyebrow. “How the fuck’re we gonna deal with their guns, though?”
Pelón waved him off. “When you sneak up behind a man and put a cañón in his ear, tell him you gonna spray the sidewalk with his brains? He let you take the gun, the money, the keys to his car, his girlfriend’s toto, whatever you want. It ain’t his money.”
Beto cut coke on a mirror. “What about the driver?”
“I told you. He no gonna make a move. He’s protected inside the truck and he cannot leave that steering wheel. Company rules.”
I said, “What if he doesn’t follow the rules?”
“That’s why there’s gonna be four of us. Number one, Antonio, he gonna cover the driver with a big gun so he don’t get no ideas. Once he see that barrel pointing at his face? And he already behind bulletproof glass? Even if he Chuck Norris, he not gonna open that door. Me and Eddie, we take the other guard’s gun, put him on the floor; then all three of us take bags and jump in the car. Beto gonna drive again.”
I said, “What happened to your policy of never letting us carry weapons?”
Pelón bit the tip of his cigar and spit. “On this one we need guns for them to take us serious.” He popped the cigar in his mouth and slapped Beto on the shoulder. “Everybody gotta graduate sometime.”
Tony and Beto each had their fingers laced, waiting for my response. Their lust for money had been tweaked by the waves generated by that first stolen kilo we put on the street. We had grown that business over time and were all doing pretty well. We did carry guns sometimes when we made major deals or transported weight from one locale to another, but we had an agreement, a code, I guess, that the guns were just for self-defense. After Tony and I shot those kids in the projects, I never again wanted to be the first one to shoot. I led my crew in that same way. But Pelón’s vision of money bags that we could just sneak up on and take with a simple show of force was impossible to ignore.
I took the rolled hundred from Tony and snorted a line. A hundred bedbugs marched, one by one, up my nasal passages and down my throat, into my ear canal, along the grooves inside my brain.
I looked up at the wooden beams that held up the loft’s ceiling and fixated on a cobweb that I had not noticed before. “If we’re gonna do this, Pelón, you gotta let me take the lead.” I looked around the circle. “Beto, you’re gonna be inside this time, on the set, with me and Tony. Pelón, you drive.”
Pelón’s handlebar mustache drooped. “¿Qué-qué?”
“That’s it,” I said. “No arguments. I don’t want you anywhere near the action, Pelón. I don’t want you near people. You are not to handle any weapons, especially not a gun.”
“Oye, ¿pero quién carajo dijo que tú eres el que manda?”
“That’s the bottom line, Pelón. It ain’t a negotiation. We do this how I say, or not at all.”
Pelón looked at Tony, then at Beto.
Beto said, “We’re all in it together, Pelón. What does it matter who does what? Whyn’t you hear Eddie out at least?”
Pelón looked at Tony, who just shrugged. He looked at me. “Fine. Tell me your great ideas, then, jefe.”
I got up, grabbed paper and pen, asked Pelón a few f
actual questions, and sketched out the first draft of the plan.
I cased the check-cashing place on the days Pelón said. It was a few doors from an intersection. There was a diner on the corner and I sat there and ate a pepper-and-egg sandwich and watched the armored car as it came and went, per the schedule that the girl had given Pelón. I did this several times.
The uniformed guards’ routine was the same each time. As Pelón said, the driver, always the same, a young black man, double-parked, threw on the hazards, and waited. The passenger guard, always the same, a large white woman, dismounted, opened a side door, unloaded a dolly, loaded the dolly with a couple small boxes of coins, then stacked packed bags of paper money on top. She would angle the dolly and walk the money into the check-cashing place, then walk out with the dolly empty. In and out, the whole thing never took more than three or four minutes.
The last time I cased the routine, I brought Tony along.
I said, “See that? We let the lady guard unload the cash. While her hands are occupied tipping back the dolly, you sneak up behind her, Tone, let her feel the barrel in her temple to freeze her. I’ll come from the front of her, and once I see you connect with her, I whip out my piece to emphasize the point. I’ll remove her gun from the holster and toss it. We’ll have GQ cover the driver from the front, demand that he keep his hands visible, let the driver see the gun so he knows jumping out of the truck is pointless. Meantime, you put the lady guard facedown on the pavement. I’ll jump into the truck with my piece trained on the driver—”
Tony said, “Won’t the driver start shooting once you try to climb inside?”
“We won’t give him a chance. GQ’ll keep his eyes on him from outside, and the driver’ll have his hands up, he’ll be totally focused on G. I’ll surprise the driver by hopping in through the side door with my gun out—remember, Tony, that side door’s behind him. He won’t have time to try anything.”
“You’re that confident?”
“In myself right now? Yeah. Anyway, I disarm the driver, then make him toss every bag down out of that truck. Pelón pulls up the van, Beto starts loading. Once the armored truck is empty, we get the woman up in there. I cover both guards, you help Beto finish loading, and when we’re done, we jump in the van and drive off to the warehouse for the drop. Simple, right?”
Tony ping-ponged his head like, Maybe. Maybe not. “We gotta be quick, calm, cool, and collected.”
I sipped my coffee. “Aren’t we always?”
Tony said, “What if some cop drives by?”
“I already thought of that. When the operation starts, we can have Pelón park across the street there. From that position, because of that empty lot, he can watch the whole thing go down. He can monitor all directions, especially north/south, since we basically got east/west covered. If he sees blue lights on a roof, he signals with the car horn. We’ll hustle inside the truck until they ride by. In that scenario, same thing, if I haven’t been in the truck yet and disarmed the driver, we do it then. Beto keeps an eye on him, I jump in, you follow with the lady guard. Beto goes in last.”
Tony mopped syrup with a big piece of French toast. “What about if the cops don’t come until Pelón moves to the loading position? He won’t be in the same position, so he won’t have the same view. He won’t see cops coming either north or south until it’s too late.”
“Well, he’s not going to move those—what is that, you figure—thirty feet? He’s not gonna move those thirty feet from that first position unless he sees that the coast is clear, right? Once he pulls up next to us, it’s gonna be bam, bam, bam, ten seconds, fifteen seconds, the bags are tossed in the van and we’re ridin’. Like you said, we just have to be quick and collected.”
Tony mopped more syrup. “Sounds reasonable.”
I looked sideways at Tony. “I have one concern.”
“Shoot.”
“Beto. You really think he can handle this kind of drama? This ain’t pedal-to-the-metal shit. This is looking a man in the eye, communicating, ‘I’ll blast you,’ even if you don’t mean it.”
“GQ’ll be a’wight.”
“And you, Tone?”
Tony shoved in a whole wedge, with syrup and butter dripping down his chin. He chewed and spoke with his mouth full. “You know me, brother. Just take me to where the action is.”
We set up exactly as imagined. It was a crude plan, but we weren’t knocking over Fort Knox. We had stolen a car two days prior, changed the plate, and parked it strategically on the same side of the street as the check-cashing place, two spaces behind where the truck usually made its stop. Fifteen minutes before the truck was scheduled to arrive, GQ popped the hood, and he and I stuck our heads under it and pretended to work on the engine. Tony was on a pay phone next to the door of the check-cashing place, shielding his face with the phone’s box and pretending to have a conversation. Pelón sat in a stolen van, a fast one, with forged plates and the engine running at the intersection, facing south as a lookout.
The armored car came down the street headed east, right on schedule. As always, it double-parked right in front of the check-cashing joint. GQ and I watched the hazards come on, our faces shielded by the raised hood. The lady guard stepped down, went to the side door, opened it, took down the dolly, and began to stack. She had a red ponytail hanging out of the back of her uniform baseball cap.
GQ and I checked for rolling cops and bystanders, saw nothing, and pulled the nylons down over our heads. Tony hung up the phone, pulled his nylon down over his face, and made his move. Beto and I stepped quickly toward the truck. There was a second where the lady guard was oblivious to us descending upon her, and that was all that we needed.
Tony was behind her in a flash. He put a .44 Magnum to her temple and she froze. Beto jumped in front of the armored car, covered the driver, and shouted, “Freeze! Keep your hands where I can see them!” I pointed my Glock between the lady guard’s eyes and said, “Don’t move, sweetheart.”
The woman gulped and let me remove her revolver from its holster and throw it under a parked car.
“I have three kids,” she said.
“So kiss the earth then, lady, and keep your mouth shut.”
She hesitated. Not like defiance. More like she was paralyzed by fear. Her face contorted like she was about to cry.
I said, “C’mon, lady,” and without another word to her, Tony smacked the woman over the head with the gun butt, hard enough that her eyes rolled up and she just dropped to the ground, collapsing into the dolly, keeling the thing over. The money bags thudded to the pavement next to her.
“Great.”
Right then, Pelón honked the horn in the signal that meant cops in his rearview.
“Fuck, fuck!” I poked the woman. “Get up, lady! Inside!”
She was woozy from Tony’s hammer shot. Pelón rehonked the signal.
GQ was getting antsy in front of the vehicle. “C’mon, fellas, let’s move!”
I said, “Motherfucker! Tony! Let’s toss these bags inside and grab her under the armpits!”
We quickly tossed the money bags into the open door of the truck, but had to tuck our guns and each use both hands to lift the heavy woman from the asphalt and shovel her through the door. We got her up high enough that she spilled herself inside.
Pelón honked again, real quick, like the cops must be right up his ass. I grabbed my gun again and was about to hop up through the door and cover and disarm the driver, like we planned, but GQ was flaky, after all. He couldn’t wait any longer, so instead of keeping the driver in his sights until I had him, like we had gone over a hundred times, GQ spun around and jumped ahead of me to be the first inside the truck. I was right behind GQ, reaching, thinking I would ream him about it later, when I heard him say, “Oh shit!” followed by a loud gunshot inside the truck that made me spring back.
GQ shouted, “¡Diablo!”
A third armed guard had been sitting inside the truck. None of us knew he was in there. None of us had ever
seen him, so none of us were prepared.
GQ jumped right off that truck without having been hit by that first shot, and it turns out that GQ’s gift for getaway driving was actually just a knack for getting away. He moved his feet so fast, it was like a scene out of Benny Hill, or a Charlie Chaplin flick, only faster. GQ was around the truck and out of my sight in the instant between my realizing that a shot had been fired and Tony shouting, “Let’s bail!”
Tony and I both bolted in the direction where Pelón idled. Pelón burned rubber toward us, but seemed not to see us the way he revved the van’s engine. I was just about to scream, “¡Para!” for Pelón to stop, when another shot spiderwebbed the van’s windshield before I even heard it pop. I glanced back and saw the guard, a white man who’d been hiding inside, now crouched in front of the armored car in a shooting stance aiming at the getaway van. I looked again at the van as it flew past and saw the driver’s-side window explode as Pelón had his right hand up to shield his face and a bullet lopped off his fingers with a spurt of blood. The guard shot at the van several more times as it flew, but Pelón just kept going.
Tony and I turned to run again, but the third guard’s next shot pinged on the sidewalk next to us and we dove behind a parked car. We didn’t know whether he had any bullets left. There was a moment’s silence, but then we heard several more shots, this time from an automatic, and heard a scream that sent an electric shock down my own spine. It sounded like you might imagine a crazed chimpanzee or baboon’s wail might sound, only wilder.
Tony and I had to look. We peered over the hood and saw Beto standing with the automatic in his hand, watching the white guard writhe on the pavement, hold himself, and howl from his wounds. I noticed then that the armored truck driver had indeed remained behind the wheel as Pelón had said, and figured he must now be on a radio calling backup, the police, whoever.
I shouted to Beto, “Run!” and he snapped out of it and took off down a gangway. Tony and I flipped around the corner, jackrabbited between parked cars, cut down an alley, jumped over a wooden fence, and we were gone.
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