Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  But the eight additional inches began cluttering Marvin's mind. Neither the Subway nor the pizza joint had opened. If he got stranded here, he would starve. He couldn't go two hours straight without putting something in his mouth, and there was a chance he could get stuck here a lot longer than that.

  He closed down the computer and donned the goofy, hoodless red, white and blue striped L.L. Bean jacket his mother had foisted on him. Going out front, he began to arm the security system, when his eyes drifted beyond the touchpad to the parking lot.

  A car was sitting in front of the store. A beat-up old something-or-other, maybe a Firebird from before he was born. Definitely not the kind of vehicle someone shopping for pricey jewelry would be driving. He thought he could see two faces behind the sweeping windshield wipers.

  Two men got out. One was small and had a face like chewed gum. He had a lit cigarette dangling between his lips, the smoke indistinguishable from his steaming breath. The other guy was large, quite large. Beyond that, Marvin could not describe them. He was more intent on the pistol in the large man's hand and the shotgun cradled by the small man.

  They were making no attempt to hide their intention. As Marvin raced back behind the Tecno display, the large man jerked at the glass door. Marvin breathed hard, making sure his hand was nowhere near the door release button. Instead, he did the inconceivable. He reached down for the Heckler & Koch in the nook next to the cash register.

  Safety, safety, safety...he knew he had to do something before he could fire. He glanced down frantically at the gun. He saw no special button or lever. He looked up.

  To his astonishment, the big man was motioning him to unlock the door. Was he crazy? Well yeah, he had to be crazy to come marching up to the shop with gun drawn. Marvin wanted to shout at him, Are you nuts? You can't rob a jewelry store just like that! We're a regular fortress here. You'd better watch out!

  The large man shrugged and nodded at the small man, who recovered from a coughing fit long enough to raise his shotgun and point it at the door.

  "Jesus!"

  Marvin crouched behind the main display. He shook so hard he could barely see the gun in his hand, let alone any subtle safety mechanism. And then he remembered something Vernon had said while terrorizing his employee with the weapon's very presence.

  Squeeze cocker.

  All someone had to do was to hold the gun in the proper grip and it was ready to fire. Even a dummy could do it. But what was the proper—

  There was an explosion. A double-fist-sized hole appeared in glass that sagged at the edges. The big man reached through and pushed on the door lever. The door swung in.

  "This is a stick-up!" he shouted. It sounded like...almost like laughter. "You didn't want to make this easy?"

  The big man's voice had a naturally aggressive quality, each word like gravel flung in your face. But Marvin decided the smaller man was more dangerous. He had the shotgun. And the shotgun was...well, bigger.

  He stood and aimed. There was a fleeting impression of two startled faces, one compressed by a wheezy cough. He squeezed and fired.

  It was like letting a firecracker go off in his hand. The shock almost caused him to drop the gun. The small man staggered back. The shotgun clattered on the floor.

  "Son of a bitch!" the big man yelled. He was trapped between the two front displays, with no sideways room for maneuver. He had to go either forward or backward. Instead, he stood his ground and raised his gun.

  Marvin didn't know he had closed his eyes. To him, the sight of his assailants was burned onto his mental retina, as clear to him as if he was staring down their throats. It was this image he was firing at when he squeezed off another round, then another.

  And then he was clobbered, dead center, electrifying pain. His eyes flew open. To his surprise, he found himself on the floor, doubled like a closed carjack, his knees touching the sliding panels of the display, his back against the wall. How had this happened? He started to pull himself up. More pain shot out from his chest and dragged him back down. He lowered his chin and saw blood.

  "Ah! Ah!"

  He heard footsteps. The gun! Where was it? Not on the floor in front of him. He tried to look behind him but pain jammed him like a doorstop. Had he dropped it on the display counter? He lifted his eyes and saw a dark, angular object through the glass top. There was no way...

  His eye fell on the beige panic button halfway down the gun nook. How stupid...how stupid... Fighting the pain, he reached up and pressed the alarm. There were no bells or whistles. The silent alarm was connected to the phone, which signaled Richmond Alarm Company's central station. Within a minute or two the police would be contacted. But even if it worked like it was supposed to, how long would it take for help to arrive in this blizzard?

  And then he heard the crunch of someone walking on glass.

  Raising himself on his elbow, he peered through the display glass at the front of the store. The big man had checked on the status of his partner. He leaned back, muttering, then looked towards the back. He began to approach the counter.

  Fear replaced pain, at least enough to generate movement. Pulling his legs back from the base of the counter, Marvin began crawling sideways. He knew he was going the wrong direction, away from the safety of the back office and its lockable door. But he couldn't move fast enough. There was no time to turn around.

  He had made it to the end of the display when the robber turned the corner at the opposite end of the counter and looked down the aisle at him.

  "Where is he?" the big man said.

  "Oh...oh..." Marvin gasped. Not only had the pain returned with a vengeance, but he now saw the trail of blood he had left behind as he crawled.

  "That sounds bad, mighty bad." The man nodded at the top of the counter. "And you left your gun behind."

  "Please...p...p—"

  The man stepped over to the office and disappeared through the door.

  "Fuck!" he shouted a moment later from inside.

  Marvin tried to crawl some more. But a numbness had overcome his limbs. He was finished with trying to escape. He was at the robber's mercy.

  When the big man came out, he noted the bloody smear on the panic button and grunted.

  "Stop crying," he said. "You'll get help soon enough."

  "I'm not—" Marvin gasped, then stopped when he realized he was.

  "You're the only one here," the man stated flatly.

  "Y—y—"

  "Aw shut up."

  But he had asked, the jerk. Marvin's head fell back onto the rolling footstool used to access some of the higher displays. Turning his head slightly, he could see the front of the store. The door, so far away. The stool rolled a little and his neck slid down. He was again facing the robber. His eyes widened when he saw the dark slick on the front of the man's jacket.

  "You've—"

  "I see it," the man answered lowly. Grimacing, he pulled down the zipper. "Looks like you got me, partner. Two for one. Not bad shooting."

  He took a step forward, began to fall, then braced himself up on the counter. "You fucking little twerp," he murmured, shaking his head. "After all that..." And now he seemed to be talking to himself, analyzing a past and limited future. "...a fucking little twerp."

  The young man's eyes fluttered. He knew he, Marvin Hemmings, was leaving conscious reality. The question was, would he be back?

  And then a sharp bang brought him back. The big man had raised his gun. No, Marvin would not be back. The robber would finish him off. He wanted to explain that there was no need to eliminate him as a witness. Everything that had just happened had been recorded for posterity, the images stored safely at a remote location. But when he blinked out the mist in his eyes, Marvin saw the man aiming not at him, but towards the front.

  The robber fired again. Marvin heard glass exploding. He rocked his head to the side and saw two concentric fractures in the display window. It seemed reasonable enough. In the condition he was in, nothing was particularly irratio
nal. It even made sense, of a kind, when there was another shot and one of the musical wine glasses disintegrated. The bullet finished up in the window, creating a third fracture. The robber was shooting out the glasses, one by one. Well, that made sense, too. Sort of. But in spite of his pain and fading consciousness, Marvin acknowledged something weird about it.

  There was a loud thud. The shooting stopped. Marvin guessed the robber had collapsed. He could not confirm this. He could no longer turn his head to look.

  In fact, the last thing Marvin saw were the shards of Reidel & Schott Zwiesel crystal scattered across the floor.

  CHAPTER 1

  To make a long story short…

  Aw, forget it.

  I'm not going to tell you anything about myself that I don't want you to know. All those idiots who spill their emotional entrails across the daytime talk shows are worthless souls. Anyone with anything worthwhile inside him keeps it a secret. Am I about to tell you that I have a malodorous sex life? That I'm in love with rectal thermometers? That I pick my nose regularly and wipe the abundant cream off on my trousers? Am I going to commit an oil spill of the spirit?

  But when things go bad, you can't help a little leakage. That I'm telling you this story at all shows you how bad things really were. I guess to make this interesting I have to let you catch a glimpse of the real me here and there, but not enough to piece me together. I won't allow that to happen. Just to set the record straight, my first confession above is more or less true. The rest I made up. Or not. You decide.

  One of my good qualities, personality-wise, is that I have a chronic inability to recognize losers. This is a good thing, or else I wouldn't have survived my childhood. Take my father, such a royal screw-up that he managed to get himself and his partner killed trying to rob a jewelry store. My father caught a 9mm slug just close enough to his heart to give him five minutes of added life. You can see the whole thing online, a whole section dedicated to surveillance videos of diamond store robberies, successful and otherwise—my father's being the otherwise. I'm not geek enough to know how that shitwork got posted. I don't own a computer and have to watch YouTube courtesy of the public access terminals at the City Library.

  If you care to watch, you'll see Skunk McPherson (whom we mockingly referred to as "Dad") and Winny Marteen getting out of an '83 Impala that looked like an unrepaired stunt car from old episodes of the Rockford Files. Those first images were caught by the Dominos camera next door to the jewelry shop. I don't know if the proprietor had it there to watch for robbers or to catch his delivery people scarfing down unauthorized dough tiles. Whatever it was designed for, it caught clear enough the casual, almost bored expressions worn by Winny and my father, marching up like another day at the office.

  If I was planning a grand-scale assault, I would pick a softer target. Real jewelry stores—as opposed to plastic bead and artificial ruby clump-dumps—are by law required to have a certain amount of security. Most retailers boost that with their own devices. They're places to take by stealth, if you take them at all. Snatch and run kinds of places. Judging by all those videos on YouTube, my father wasn't the only dummy to think the best way to make a heist was head-on. But to saunter across the snowy lot like that, guns drawn like credit cards at a gas pump, suggested a huge deficit in the intelligence department. It was hard to jibe with the Skunk I knew. After all, the cops are still looking for his share in the famous Wal-Mart/Brinks job. To keep $850,000 hidden for nearly two decades was quite a feat. The family agreed that the Assistant U.S. Attorney arranged his early release from the Lee BOP in Jonesville only because he thought Skunk would eventually lead the feds to the cache.

  Skunk always denied he made a cent out of what came to be known as the "greeter" job, because the robbers had worn blue Wal-Mart uniforms and greeted the armored car when it had stopped at the main entrance. All that could be seen on the surveillance tapes was a smiling store employee slapping a guard on the back, while another went around to chat with the driver. One of the guards delivered cash on a small collapsible trolley, then returned with the day's proceeds—bearing a gazillion unregistered 8-digit serial numbers

  Then something happened that none of the customers swooping in and out of the busy center noticed: the guard at the rear of the truck turned and got back inside—followed by the first greeter. Next thing, the greeter up front was being invited inside the cab. And then the armored car pulled away. It turned out the greeter disguise was ideal, since most customers (and potential witnesses) go out of their way to avoid them.

  The cops soon gave up trying to pin the crime on the Brinks employees. They were convinced there had to be inside work, but in the end the guards’ stories held. When the greeter in the back of the truck threatened to blow the brains out of the two guards unless he opened the cab, the driver did the decent thing and invited the second greeter inside.

  Butch and Baptist Congreve—those were the two Dad claimed took the risk and gained the reward: twenty years for robbery, five for conspiracy, and life for possession of a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence. Dad, an accessory after the fact (so his lawyer successfully claimed), got ten.

  It was Butch who held a gun on the men in the back. It was Baptist who talked the driver into taking the armored car to a small road off Midlothian, cinching the matter with a Tech-9 aimed at his head.

  Skunk was waiting for them in a Chevy Astro. He kept lookout and also helped disencumber the armored car while Butch and Baptist zip-tied the guards. No one considered popping them. Once they were safely locked up in the back and the heavy doors closed, Butch and Baptist removed their wigs and moustaches.

  An hour later they pulled up at Arrowhead Lake near Cumberland. It was little more than a dead, oversized pond, but you still needed a license to fish there. Experienced anglers knew the place was pointless, and it was too desolate for lovers or sightseers. Odds were very few had visited the lake earlier in the day, and the hikers that passed through were unlikely to take notice of the Congreve brothers' pickup.

  This is where the story hit the gray wall of uncertainty. It was a tremendous haul. Cash from ATMs, church collection proceeds, a nearby Food Lion and another southside Wal-Mart. Around $832,000 smackers, according to the news reports. Butch and Baptist claimed they didn't want to spend too much time at the lake counting their loot. The area was only fitfully patrolled by park rangers from nearby Bear Creek Lake, but their luck could suddenly turn. They told the prosecutors that they had trusted Skunk to stash the money somewhere safe until they could link up and divvy their shares.

  Their story made no sense. From a lifetime of experience I knew my father couldn't be trusted. An objective observer from outside the family circle would take one look at his crusty, shrewd face and undoubtedly think the same. You wouldn't trust this guy with a dime or a broomstick—especially not a broomstick. To place over two-thirds of a million dollars in his care would have been the height of folly, truly.

  The prosecutors were inclined to agree with me. When the Congreve brothers were DUI'd in Boketown, Tennessee (blood alcohol level .39, the idiots), the sheriff, who seemed under-informed regarding the niceties of the law, found wads of twenties amounting to $6,000 in the cab. Sure, the search and seizure was unconstitutional, but since Butch had seen fit to stop in the middle of the road, the sheriff had no choice but to move the pickup out of the way. And when the tow truck driver got inside the cab to release the clutch, and bumped up against the rolls...well, there it was. The sheriff reviewed his bulletins and guessed the connection between the robbery and the evidence.

  "You fellers were looking at up to 11 months for a first DUI offense. But guess what...?"

  The sheriff was a funny guy. And right. The brothers faced life.

  Extradited to the Commonwealth, they wasted no time ratting on my father. It did them no good, because Skunk claimed the brothers had driven off with all the money in the back of their pickup. In fact, he told the Assistant D.A. you could have knocked him over wi
th a feather when the Congreves showed up with that armored car. They had told him they just needed a lift.

  He acquiesced to a lie detector test. It was inconclusive. Dad might have looked like a born liar, but it was almost impossible to pin him down.

  Limp-wristed polygraph notwithstanding, the authorities staked their hope on Skunk. One look at how he towered over the Congreve brothers, and that mad dog face of his, told them where the power of intimidation lay. Butch and Baptist refused to look him in the eye at the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Courthouse. In fact, they suddenly became curiously reticent and forgetful when they talked to the investigators.

  "Mr. and Mr. Congreve," the prosecutor had declaimed, linking the brothers in a queerly incestuous criminal marriage, "seem to have a vested interest in keeping Mr. McPherson out of jail."

  Indeed they did. It had dawned on the slowits that Skunk might land in the same federal bed and breakfast (and lunch and dinner and snack-time) where they themselves were headed. He might not prove pleasant company, now that he knew they had fingered him. But their loss of memory didn't help them. The judge looked Skunk up and down and decided he'd best be incarcerated, if only to prevent him from biting someone.

  I was eight years old when this all came down. Barbara was seven. Jeremy...I always had trouble with his age.

  By the time the Assistant D.A. arranged a new hearing (behind the scenes—that was our theory), and Dad won an early release, we were practically tweenies. Mom did a poor job of preparing us for the storm that was about to hit home.

  "Oh shit, they're letting him out." She shifted various piles of dirty linen from one side of the house to the other, all the while muttering. It was the end of us, we might as well get it over with and slit our throats. How was she to support another mouth to feed, an ex-jailbird whose unemployability was guaranteed? Even if Skunk successfully hid his record, he had edged past forty, the time when age discrimination kicks in.