The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  A voice called out from somewhere: “You the guy?”

  He was too far from the streetlights or the bar’s neon to see who it was. He swiveled his head around until he spotted the glowing tip of a cigarette trace an arc in the blackness. He followed it to the source.

  “You Tom’s man?” he asked.

  “I don’t know a Tom,” he said.

  “My mistake.”

  He took a few slow steps.

  “Wait up,” called the voice.

  He turned around. He still couldn’t see him well. The man looked average-sized, clean-shaved, wore a windbreaker. Nothing too redneck about him. An ordinary Joe.

  “I might be, at that,” he said.

  Another step and he’d be close enough to chest-bump, like back in the yard when you wanted to see if a guy had the balls to fight.

  “Prove it,” he said.

  He did it with three words: “Mall of America.”

  Bob turned out to be one of those kinds of men the FBI profilers liked to call “angry loners” on their wanted posters. He hated his job, he hated his ex-wife, he hated his neighbor’s dog for barking when he had to work the swing shift, and he hated anybody who couldn’t see he wasn’t just some nobody like everybody else.

  After a couple days of going over the plan, Bob grew to dislike Steve Pine, the name given by the man from the parking lot. Bob thought of him much like he did his ex.

  Bob was no criminal, the man calling himself Steve Pine thought, that much was clear. What he had going for him was a grudge against the world the size of Australia. Maybe, he thought, that’ll be good enough this time. Pulling into Bob’s driveway at dawn and there he was, waiting in his car at the curb.

  “Fuck me, you. I knew you’d be here early,” Bob complained. “Look, I’m dead tired, man. They had us doing inventory and emergency drills all night long.”

  Too much whining as they headed to his front door. Bob walked like an old man with bent shoulders as he pawed at his pants pockets for his house key. There was booze on Bob’s breath.

  “I don’t think your neighbors across the street caught all of that,” Pine said to Bob, steadying his arm. “Why don’t you repeat it a little louder?”

  “You’re real hilarious, Pine,” Bob said. He was still fumble-fucking with keys on a ring trying to unlock his front door. “That ain’t even your real name, I’ll bet.”

  “Don’t bet,” Pine said to him and gripped his upper arm tighter. “You’ll lose.”

  As soon as they were inside, Pine punched him—once, very hard, in the gut. Bob dropped to the floor as if somebody had handed him a basketball-sized lump of uranium. He gagged and started bucking sideways. The solar plexus was a quick way to get someone’s attention. Pack wolves held a misbehaving pup’s snout into the dirt; cons used their fists in their cells to settle friendly differences.

  He waited for Bob to recover. A foul reek filled the tiny foyer where he stood looking down. A ropy string of yellow bile had come up last.

  “Stupid motherfucker,” he said quietly. “We’re two days from something that’s either going to make us wealthy men or put us in prison for twenty years and you’re dicking around.”

  Bob said nothing, didn’t even try to stand up. He lay on the floor and whimpered. He was tempted to double him up again with a kick to the same place.

  A jolt for aggravated first-degree armed robbery in Minnesota was twenty years. That was what Bob faced. He faced LWOP, life without parole. He surprised himself when he realized his fist was still balled and cocked.

  He brought Bob a glass of water and helped him drink; then he raised him to his feet, gently, like a mother with a just-walking child.

  “Let’s go over it again, Bob.”

  Bob slapped the glass out of his hand. It flew across the room and landed unbroken in his La-Z-Boy, the one article of furniture in Bob’s living room besides the hi-def TV.

  “Feeling better?”

  “Fuck you, Pine.”

  He watched him stomp off to his room and slam the door. Robbing was like playing poker, Tom used to say. You don’t play the cards as much as the people sitting across from you. But with partners, it was more like pinochle, and he wasn’t sure Bob could go through with it. Bob swiped copies of paperwork from the place, loading schedules, and staff shifts. He xeroxed them when he was alone. He said the supervisor left them lying around on her desk.

  “Lazy bitch leaves her door wide open,” Bob bragged, sounding like a TV bad guy.

  He didn’t mention to Bob the copier was counting every duplicate while he was on closed-circuit TV no matter where he was in that vast complex of stores. Tom had called Bob Captain Obvious when he first mentioned his inside man to him.

  Bob was a gold-star employee of five years, ten years, and then fifteen years. His “dedicated service” certificates were computer-signed by the company’s CEO, who had probably never heard of his dedicated employee. They were lined up on the wall encased in glass photo frames. He found the letter denying Bob’s application for promotion shoved in a drawer, ripped in two, and then taped together. Bob heaped abuse on the female supervisor every chance he got, calling her “a stupid hatchet wound,” and accusing her of “sucking her way to the top.” The whole thing nearly came crashing down during a final rehearsal when Bob decided to surprise him with a dozen photos he’d taken with his cell phone. “So you’ll know your way around better,” he said.

  “I didn’t . . . tell you . . . to do that,” he said. The words were fishbones in his throat; he could barely suppress the rage pounding in his veins. You stupid, stupid fuck, he thought.

  “Relax, Pine. Nobody saw me take them,” Bob said.

  He had to go into the bathroom, shut the door, and douse himself with water before he felt it safe to come out again.

  It was too late to back out, though. The following night would either be payday or doomsday. He let Bob drink himself shit-faced that night. He’d kept him away from the Triangle for fear he’d say something stupid. Prisons were jammed with braggarts from bars. It was always in the back of his mind that he’d already talked in that bar anyway. How many guys had he drunkenly approached before he met the real deal in Tom? In the joint, they loved those crime shows where one spouse murders the other and the narrator reveals how many barflies and snitches they’d buttonholed looking for a hit man. The killer never had a chance.

  It didn’t surprise him that Bob never once tumbled to his final role as the tethered goat. The tiger would spring once he was gone with the swag and all the arrows of guilt were pointing straight at dumbfuck Bob. Without a second man, there wouldn’t be four hands stuffing cash into garbage bags, only his two. Half the take, but if Bob’s numbers were accurate, there would still be plenty to retire on even after allowing for Tom’s cut. That was understood, too, once Tom had got himself jammed up. Don’t trust anybody not to sell you down the river. Better to keep everyone happy. Except for the dumbasses, the clueless assholes that couldn’t hurt you.

  The next day was another fall day with leaves in bright colors, gold and red all over town, not the soggy, all-day drizzle Bloomington of the past week. Bob’s sour mood was abetted by the hangover.

  “Just be yourself,” he had told Bob all day long. “Act your part. Everybody will be on the floor with you when I come into the room. Look scared.”

  “I am scared,” Bob said.

  Bob never understood that it was too risky to meet up right away to split the cash. He grudgingly accepted his explanation, but Pine didn’t want to shine too bright a light into Bob’s dim-bulb of a brain. He needed some time before the company figured with certainty the robbery had been an inside job. Bob had to be prepared for an FBI interrogation, he reminded him.

  “I don’t know If I can go in tonight,” Bob moaned. “My stomach is all messed up. Maybe tomorrow is better—”

  “Just pre-fight jitters, Bob,” Pine told him soothingly.

  They were dressed in matching security guard uniforms sitt
ing at the Formica kitchen table. Bob’s one foot was rabbit-thumping the floor, beating a nonstop tattoo of fear.

  “Those patches you made,” Bob erupted suddenly, “they look like shit. They look like fuckin’ Frankenstein stitches.”

  “Nobody’s going to study them up close, Bob,” he replied. “My jacket will cover the shirt.”

  Bob nodded his head; his eyes were bugged, and his face was greasy with perspiration.

  “Remember, I might need you to vouch for me as a new-hire in case your district supervisor makes a surprise appearance—”

  “Oh fuck you, Pine! I told you a dozen times by now he ain’t coming. We always get a tip ahead of time when that prick’s about to show up.”

  “Bob, take a drink. Just one. Then rinse your mouth out.”

  Bob looked at him as if Pine had just asked him to tango.

  “You want me to drink?”

  “It’ll calm you,” he said.

  “I’ve got to go to the bathroom . . . right now!”

  Bob bolted from the table. A few seconds later he heard Bob’s bowels evacuating in a noisy torrent. A few minutes later, it was followed by the sound of vomiting.

  Bob returned, his face ashen.

  “Calling the Irishman?”

  “Huh? What Irishman? What the fuck—”

  Pine imitated a vomiting sound as he pronounced the name O’Rourke.

  “You’re so fucking funny, you ought to do one of those comedy acts,” Bob said. But he was calmer, his color better.

  “Sit down, Bob.” The smell of the bathroom had followed Bob back to the tiny kitchen. He’d done so much jail time, with its shit smells and body odor of unwashed men, that it was nothing. Bob had talked all day long as the hours got closer. Just nerve-shot chattering before a job by a rookie. “Monkey mouth,” they called it in the joint. He finally quieted down.

  “Time to go, Bob,” he said.

  “I just can’t . . .”

  He hoisted Bob to his feet and shoved him ahead out the door. He tucked black garbage bags and the fish billy under one armpit. It alarmed Bob when he first noticed it. “What’s that for?”

  “Oh, you know,” Pine told him, “for those everyday occasions when you need to tap someone to sleep.”

  The sawed-off Remington twelve-gauge was secured in a sling sewn into the jacket under the other armpit. Bob didn’t know about the Glock in Pine’s ankle holster.

  “What’s that?” Bob asked before getting inside his car.

  “It’s my lucky saint’s medal,” Pine said. He stopped to put it around his neck. He had worn it since his fourth-grade confirmation ceremony back in Providence. He thought that when he spoke the words “renouncing the devil” he would be entering a new, better life and that the sordid catastrophe of his home would be cleansed when he returned. He kept the medal anyway.

  “Drive the speed limit,” he told him. Bob’s eyes through the window were moist. He guessed Bob had been sneaking in a few nips.

  Pine took his own car and stayed on Bob’s tail from the 77 turnoff to East Broadway all the way to the turn at the 28th Street lot where the armored company’s depot was located. The MoA was the busiest hub station in Minnesota and was linked to Minneapolis by both bus and rail. The lower level of the eastern parking lot was patrolled by security to keep commuters from parking there and connecting to the St. Paul International Airport or Target Field where the Twins played.

  They joined a cluster of uniformed guards chatting to one another as they headed for the single entrance. Several of them greeted Bob and gave him a curt once-over. His jacket covered the wad of nylon zip cuffs tucked into the back of his belt.

  They took the long walk down the drug tunnel, their name for the single unfinished corridor lit in patches by overhead fluorescent lighting. This led to the first security door. Management’s heightened concerns over acts of lone-wolf terrorism had relaxed security at the main depot because new policy dictated more staff had to be shifted from collection points.

  An older, white-haired guard was checking badges ahead. Pine and Bob were last in line and waited until the others were out of sight when they approached. Bob held his badge up just as he reached the turnstile and accidentally brushed the guard’s arm in passing. When the old man turned back to check Pine’s badge—a fake like everything else—he hit him on the top of the head with the fish billy. The old guard sank to the floor like he’d stepped into a pit full of quicksand.

  “What the fuck,” Bob hissed. “You weren’t s’posed to hit him!”

  “Keep watch,” Pine ordered.

  He had the old man hoisted up under the arms and was dragging him to the utility closet. He opened it with one hand and put the old man face-first on the floor. He had the nylon cuffs on him and a strip of duct tape across his mouth in seconds.

  “Pine, what are you doing?”

  “Shut up. Just a tiny variation in the plan.”

  He couldn’t take a chance on Bob’s terrified, shining face giving everything away right up front. He’d decided earlier that he was going to put the old man on the floor rather than try to fool him with his half-assed ID.

  He knew exactly where they were going thanks to the cartoon-like sketches Bob had scratched out with his box of Crayolas. There would be four people to deal with, including the supervisor. Shift change should allow for a window of opportunity large enough for Pine to remain undisturbed in the deposit room before the real guards came trooping in with their collection bags.

  The canvas sacks were stored in rows on metal shelves inside a big steel cage. Bob preceded Pine through the door again. The motion of his shotgun and the shouted command to “Hit the floor!” worked the first time. No heroes here. Nylon zip ties secured hands behind backs; he left feet untied. Pine had practiced on a prone and squirming Bob in his living room so many times by then he could have done it in his sleep. He let the cold metal barrel of the shotgun rest against the nape of each one’s neck to make his point about not resisting. The sole woman guard lay between the two men. Bob, acting his part, was the first one to hit the floor, already cuffed en route; he twisted his head to look up at him. He took the woman’s key ring and let himself inside the locked metal cage. Once inside he began shoveling the canvas money bags into the garbage bags.

  He was thinking how much more there was still on the shelves but weight considerations—and Pine’s own age—made leaving it necessary. Sprinting a couple hundred yards across a parking lot with fifty pounds of money in each hand was all he reckoned he could accomplish in the time allotted.

  A sixth sense, the kind most cons develop if they do enough time, alerted him to something out of the corner of his eye. He was reaching down for a better grip on the second garbage bag when he saw a gun barrel coming around the corner of the supervisor’s office.

  In one even movement, Pine scooped the shotgun off the shelf and fired from the open cage door just as she squeezed off a round at him. Her slug made a ferocious ricocheting sound off the metal walls, missing him, but his blast blew her head into a red mist. That was how his mind recorded it. He went practically deaf from the boom.

  She must have been behind the door when he passed leading Bob as his hostage. The woman on the floor was not the supervisor; he had failed to read the desperate look in Bob’s eyes on the floor.

  His hearing came back. The men on the floor were thrashing around like fish on a deck and begging for mercy or help. He drew his Glock and stepped behind the first guard and put a slug into his head. The second guard, the same, the woman last. He wasn’t sure why he did the men first. She raised herself up, like a supplicant before a throne, made a hunching movement like a caterpillar crawling, when the round tore through the top of her head and gouged a chunk of concrete from the floor. Bob’s neck craned to follow him as he stepped calmly behind him. A string of popping noises, loud farts, and then a hideous banshee wail from Bob as the strip of tape across his mouth came loose. The bullet churned through the back of his head, pulpe
d his brain, and bounced around in his skull. No exit.

  The smoke, blood, and smell of shit was overpowering. He gripped the bags and hustled in a fast scissor-walk back the way he had come. The long corridor seemed to stretch out in front of him like in that nightmare he’d had with the wolves. He made it outside. He was sweating, his knuckles turned white gripping the heavy garbage bags. He heaved one, then the other into the trunk, tore off his jacket and shirt, and replaced his outerwear with a Vikings jersey and ball cap. A chorus of sirens erupted from the nearby interstate. His timing was nearly perfect.

  He didn’t count the money until he had put three states between himself and Minnesota. It was less than he had hoped—$184,000—but a good haul nonetheless.

  Lying on a bed in a Valdosta motel that night, he wondered about himself and the distance he had come since childhood. Why had he never used his spatial gift to make something of himself—say, as an architect or a designer? Why crime? He had never killed anyone on a job before this. Murder was unforgivable, it provoked God’s wrath. An act of contrition on his deathbed could still save him from damnation. He just wanted out, to be safe now from SWAT crashing through his door at dawn. The money would give him that. He felt calmer than he had since he’d left Minnesota. His only worry was Tom expecting too big a share now that he was national news.

  His reverie broke just as a movie came on. The screen flashed a warning for parents: “Intense Sequences of Violence, Gore, a Scene of Sexuality, and Cigarette Smoking.” Sounded like his house when he was a boy.

  His fate was linked to his saint’s medal in some serpentine way he did not fully understand. They had cheated him too. St. Christopher had been booted out of the community of sainthood. It wasn’t for his early years of dissipation, drinking and brawling in taverns, it was because church investigators had recently deemed his miracles had not been true ones—at least, they said they could not be verified by modern methods. The Vatican had revoked his canonization and knocked him down a peg to the “blessed” category where he would remain for the rest of eternity.