The Soak

by Patrick E. McLean

  This floor had been a workshop of some kind. High ceilings, exposed timbers. In the corner was an office constructed of lath and plaster. At one time a foreman would have worked there, or maybe the plant manager. The door was closed, but the sound was definitely coming from in there. They picked their way through empty beer cans and spray paint, through trash, and over the grease marks and bolt holes where large machines had once been mounted to the floor.

  They set up on either side of the door. Hurlocker held up three fingers and raised his eyebrows. Hobbs shook his head no. He tried the knob and the door swung easily. Hurlocker leaned around the jamb, fanned the room with the pistol, and leaned back. Relief flashed across his face, quickly replaced by disgust.

  Hobbs looked for himself. Alan was asleep underneath a table. On top of the table were his laptop and some scattered gear.

  Hobbs walked through the door and yelled, “Rise and shine!” Instead of jerking up and hitting his head as Hobbs had hoped, Alan rolled over and said, “Oh, hey.” Hurlocker stayed on the other side of the door.

  “Well, you’re fired.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sleeping on the job. Leaving your post. Fuck did you think was gonna happen?”

  “I got it all,” said Alan, rubbing his eyes, still not quite awake.

  “You got it all my ass. You got nothing. The notebook is blank. You fail, kid.”

  “Notes? By hand? Are you shitting me? I took pictures.”

  “Pictures?” Hobbs said, turning around. “Best of luck, kid. Maybe you can get a job doing data entry on punch cards or something.”

  “Hey!” Alan yelled. He scampered up from the floor and blocked Hobbs’s path, putting a pale, weak finger on Hobbs’s chest. Behind him Hurlocker lifted his pistol and mimed bringing it down on the back of the kid’s head. Hobbs shook his head no. He didn’t mind the kid showing some grit. Even if this one was an idiot, it left some hope for future generations.

  Alan said, “You’re the asshole that wanted an audition, right? So let me show you what I can do.”

  “You showed me. You were asleep. I need guys I can count on.”

  “Job’s done, jackass. Job’s been done. And this? This is bullshit. This is a shitload of busywork just to show you what I’m capable of. But you’re the jackass that wanted an audition. So let me audition.”

  Hobbs stared him down. Shitty music crackling away in the background, some kid yelling about bitches over a beat. It was a sound that should have been riding on twenty-two-inch rims rattling a trunk lid somewhere, rather than coming out of laptop speakers. Hobbs said, “Turn off that shitty music and show me what you’ve got.”

  Alan turned around and went right to the laptop. Next to the binoculars was a fancy digital camera with a long lens on it. Alan tapped some keys and a screenful of photos came up. They were a little grainy, but they didn’t look as if they had been taken at night. They looked as if they could have been taken on a cloudy afternoon.

  “I didn’t take notes, you’re right. I took pictures.”

  “Yeah, but what time did all that happen?” Hobbs asked as he watched the entire night play out in photos. Second shift going home. Third shift coming on. The doors opening to let the fresh summer night air in. A truck being finished and moved to the side lot.

  “I’ve got time stamps on all of them.” He fiddled with the computer and all the photos were displayed in a timeline. When he rolled over them, they zoomed to fill the top third of the screen.

  Hurlocker was impressed in spite of himself. “That’s one fancy notebook.”

  Alan held up a finger. “Just wait, my grim friend.”

  “I ain’t your friend,” said Hurlocker.

  “Do you even have friends? Or is it just farm animals that can’t outrun you anymore?”

  Hobbs snickered and wished he hadn’t.

  “Boy, I got a gun.”

  “And a love for old, slow-moving sheep. Now watch this. See this guy right here?” He zoomed in on one picture of a man standing in the doorway, taking a break at about two forty-five. “This is Timothy Grahl, ASE-certified master mechanic. I picked him out using facial recognition technology and cross-referencing it with Facebook.” He clicked and another window popped up, displaying a map. “This is where he lives.”

  “Wait, you’re telling me this ol’ boy has a Facebook page?” said Hurlocker.

  “No, but his daughter does. Anyway, this is the complete list of everybody who was on shift last night,” he said, clicking with a flourish. “Here’s the complete employment records from the Missouri Department of Labor, Unemployment Security Division—I had to pay a guy to get these, so you’re going to have to reimburse me.”

  “How much?” asked Hobbs.

  “One bitcoin.”

  “What’s a bitcoin?”

  “Right now about two hundred and sixty-two US dollars, but that’s not important. ’Cause after that, I really got to work. I couldn’t hack into their security cameras for a real-time feed—that shit is for the movies—but I did get in through their router, and their cameras all transmit images via Wi-Fi. So I grabbed some from each camera…”

  Views of the shop floor scrolled across the screen. “And I noticed something interesting.”

  He stopped on one image of a workbench and a wall. There was a time clock, and some fat guy was holding a strut and gas shock in the air, looking at the joint.

  “What?” asked Hobbs.

  “You don’t see it? How about you, animal lover?” he asked with a smile, looking to Hurlocker. He shook his head no. “Ah come on, it’s right there! I mean for a couple of hardened criminals like yourselves.”

  “Get on with it,” said Hurlocker.

  “You’re no fun at all.” Alan zoomed in. Next to the time clock was a lockbox with a keypad on it. “Bingo, key to every vehicle in the place, including the boss’s new Benz. Not really my style, but the nicest car I’ve seen since I hit this shithole town.”

  “So?” asked Hurlocker.

  “So then I wrote a little script to run a track on it. Pull a capture every half second. The combination is 75309.” He looked over his shoulder at both of them. “So after that, I was tired. So I went to sleep. Oh wait, wait.” He hit another key. “This is their project accounting software. It also handles shipping and receiving. So we don’t even need to steal an armored car. You just tell me where you want it delivered and I’ll have a bonded, third-party transport company drop it off. I just mark it as paid in their system and the fuck does the guy on the floor care?”

  “Huh,” said Hobbs. “Good job.”

  “Sure, you’re tough in the real world, but I kick ass on the data layer, bitches,” said Alan.

  “Bitches?” Hobbs asked Hurlocker. Hurlocker’s expression didn’t change.

  Alan said, “Now if you two Luddites will excuse me, I’m gonna go back to the hotel, shower the smell of this place off me, and get some sleep.”

  As Alan packed up his gear, Hobbs said to Hurlocker, “I hate to say it, but it’s a good job.”

  Hurlocker nodded. “I still don’t like him.”

  Hobbs said, “You’re not the trusting kind.”

  Hurlocker shrugged. It could have meant Sue me. It could have meant I don’t give a fuck. It could have meant anything.

  Alan turned at the door. “Listen, if you guys just like hanging out in old buildings like a couple of crackhead hobos, that’s fine with me. But when you’re done, you just tell me where you want the truck delivered.”

  “It’s not that easy, you still gotta steal it,” said Hobbs.

  “What are you talkin’ about? I don’t…I just told you! We can have it delivered like a fucking pizza. There’s no need.”

  “We need the truck,” said Hurlocker. “But we need to know you can handle yourself more.”

  “Oh, fuck you guys! Why you always gotta do things the hard way?”

  “Not us,” said Hurlocker, finally smiling. “You.”


  FOURTEEN

  Hobbs drank coffee and watched Alan tear into a muffin like an animal. He was short on table manners, but Hobbs had stopped thinking he should have pushed him off that roller coaster. He wasn’t a bad kid, just young and green and looking to prove something, most of all to himself. Those days were so far gone for Hobbs he could barely remember them.

  The kid tried to make some small talk, but Hobbs touched a finger to his lips. “This isn’t the part where you talk. This is the part where we be quiet.” Alan shrugged and said, “OK, this is the part where I go sleep,” and left. Hobbs watched him go. He wondered what it would have been like to have a kid of his own, a son. He tried to shake it off, but it wouldn’t go.

  It was Grace. She was the reason for every thought that tied him down. She held his life together in ways that he hadn’t even known were possible. He had been some wild thing before he met her. He had been married, but that broad hadn’t been any damn good. She’d had a bad loyalty gland and had killed herself from the guilt of betraying him. He had never figured out how a person could lack loyalty, but still feel guilt about it.

  Hobbs was loyal to work. To the job. He was honest on the job, because that was the best way to get the job done.

  After his wife was out of the picture, he had chopped his way through twenty jobs and twice as many women. He had been a shark. Swim, eat. Swim, fuck. Swim, eat. Swim, fuck. But always swimming. Always moving on.

  Then came Grace. She had been on the arm of an idiot who had fingered a precious metals robbery. It had gone wrong, but when the dust had settled, she’d still been there. That first time, they’d coupled brutishly, with the reckless abandon of people freshly paroled by death. But for some reason she’d lasted where others had not.

  She grounded him. She helped him square away his finances. Launder money. Invest it. He was a sail, she was a keel. And so they had passed through the years. It had been good and he hadn’t thought much about it.

  She didn’t like what he did, and she never wanted to talk about it. She had never asked him to stop. Not with any force anyway. She had suggested, once, that things might have been different if they had had children. He refused to talk about such things, but he had never been able to get it out of his head.

  Hobbs wondered what kind of father he would make. What was that job anyway? Raise a good citizen? He couldn’t square that. Help a kid along his way? Maybe he could do that. But maybe not. Nobody had helped him, at least not any more than he’d helped them. Nobody except Grace.

  And Alan? He was smart, could use computers. Why was he doing this? Hobbs knew. Not exactly why, but he knew that the kid had a hole in him, the kind that might never be filled. He wanted respect—all young men did—but beneath that he wanted freedom. He didn’t want to live under somebody else’s thumb—be a part of some corporate machine, work his way toward a shitty pension that they would jerk out from underneath him at the last minute.

  Hobbs was old enough to know that some holes were just empty, sucking spaces that would never be filled. Someday he might be old enough to stop trying to fill his. But he doubted it. It would have happened by now.

  FIFTEEN

  Thirteen hours later Hobbs and Alan sat in a car that was parked on a cross street a block from Regent Armored. The windows were down and the early summer air, still hot from the day, blew through the compartment. It was just warm enough to be relaxing. It was the kind of breeze that brought with it images of sunburned children, exhausted from running and laughing, being tucked between clean white sheets by loving mothers with the promise that tomorrow would be exactly the same. That summer would never end. That school would never start again.

  Like all good things, thought Hobbs, it was a lie. But what to say to this kid and how to put words to this feeling that overcame him? Hobbs shook his head, trying to rid himself of this strange wave of emotion. What the fuck, was he going through menopause?

  There was nothing he could say to the kid. You can tell people only what they already know—especially in this rough trade. But maybe. Maybe. Then he realized what was bothering him.

  “Gimme the gun,” said Hobbs.

  “What?” asked Alan, shocked and confused.

  “I said gimme the gun. It’s not going to help with what you have to do.”

  “What gun?” asked Alan, trying to sell it.

  “I know you’ve got a piece. Young punks like you always do.”

  “Is this like that scene in Star Wars,” he asked, “when Luke Skywalker goes into the cave on Dagobah, and Yoda tells him not to take the lightsaber with him?”

  “Star Wars?” asked Hobbs.

  “You know, the movie,” Alan said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’ve never seen Star Wars?”

  “No,” said Hobbs, not taking his eyes off Alan. Carefully noting the positions of his hands.

  “OK, well, there’s this Jedi master…”

  “Kid.”

  “…and there’s Luke, right, who’s gonna be a badass later, but he’s just learning—like I’m learning from you, right?” he said, laying it on a little thick.

  “Kid.”

  “And never mind that he’s like a million years old, almost as old as you—”

  Hobbs slapped him across the face, hard. Alan looked back at him in shock. He clapped a hand to his cheek.

  Perfectly calm, Hobbs asked, “You done?”

  Alan nodded.

  “This isn’t a movie. Not any kind. You’re not the good guy, or the bad guy. You’re a guy who’s going to steal a truck. They’re the guys who are going to stop you. That’s it. Now gimme the gun.”

  “What if I get in trouble?”

  “If you get in trouble, the best thing to do is pretend that you are drunk and stumbled in looking for a place to piss. But you get caught with a piece, or worse, you pull it and use it, you’re just fucked.” Hobbs triggered the mic on his wrist. “We good?”

  They both heard Hurlocker’s drawl fill their earpieces: “Five by five.”

  “What does five by five mean?” asked Alan, stalling.

  “Gimme the gun.”

  “N-n-n-no. I’m not giving up my piece. It makes me feel better.”

  Hobbs shook his head. “Listen, do what you want, but if you shoot anybody—if you fuck this up in any way—Hurlocker and I are going to disappear and you are on your own.”

  “Just like Casper the Friendly Ghost?”

  “No,” said Hobbs, “like Caspar the professional fucking thief.”

  Alan nodded. Then he got out of the car. He crossed the street, turned the corner, and was gone. Hobbs was suddenly very glad he didn’t have any kids.

  In the earpiece Hurlocker said, “You’re clear to the door.”

  Hobbs hated that he couldn’t see the action from where he was parked. He had a part to play, and it would work only if he appeared to come out of nowhere.

  Hurlocker said, “Shit, boy, what are you doing? That’s the wrong way. Ah, Christ, he’s chickening out.”

  Alan rounded the corner and walked quickly back to the car. Hobbs thought about hitting the ignition and driving away. What else was there left to say? He’d failed the audition.

  Alan opened the door and handed the pistol to Hobbs butt-first. “You’re right.”

  Hobbs said, “I been doing this awhile.”

  “I’ll be back with a truck.”

  “Wait,” said Hobbs, “take this.” He handed Alan a piece of lead wrapped in worn black leather. Hobbs pointed to his temple and the back of his head and the base of his skull. “Here, here, or here. Puts ’em right out.”

  Alan looked at the slapjack, and fear flickered across his face.

  “Don’t be too eager to use it.”

  Alan patted the slapjack against the heel of his hand. Then he turned and walked back into the night.

  Hobbs said into the mic, “Don’t tell anybody I said this, but I think that kid might just be all right.”

  Alan’s voice
came through the earpiece: “I won’t say a word. Now shut the fuck up, I have to concentrate.”

  Hurlocker said, “Clear to the door.”

  Hobbs drummed on the steering wheel.

  “Guy coming out for a smoke,” said Hurlocker.

  “Got him,” answered Alan.

  “Don’t…,” said Hurlocker. It was quickly followed by, “OK, door is clear, drag him insi—Shit. He left a guy unconscious on the sidewalk.”

  “It’s not gonna take me long enough for him to wake up,” said Alan.

  “Don’t get cocky, kid,” snapped Hobbs.

  “You sure you’ve never seen Star Wars?”

  “Hunker down behind that truck, one of the techs is looking your way,” Hurlocker snapped.

  “Is this one good?”

  “No, it just got dropped off today,” said Hurlocker.

  “What do we care, we’re not driving it to spring break,” said Alan. Hobbs sighed. In the radio Alan chuckled quietly and said, “I’m just fucking with you.”

  “Clear,” said Hurlocker. There was silence on the radio for a moment, then Hurlocker said, “Hold.”

  “It’s open space between me and the office.”

  “Hold,” said Hurlocker. Then, “Move to the right side of the truck.” Damn it, thought Hobbs. He knew they needed him in the chase car, but he couldn’t stand not seeing what was going on. He started the car. It was early, but it wouldn’t matter much one way or the other. Just a tiny lapse due to nerves. He didn’t stop in his worrying to worry about why he had nerves.

  SIXTEEN

  Alan opened the door to the office and stepped in as calm as could be. Not thirty feet away, three guys were lowering a massively armored body onto a chassis. As it hung from the caged-in lift crane, two guys were hammering on a bolt and swearing while a third guy held the tons of armor and three-and-a-half-inch bulletproof glass in place with his fingertips.

  Earlier, Hobbs had told Alan, “Don’t try to be sneaky. Don’t rush. When they aren’t looking, walk calmly to where you are going like you belong there. Do all that and don’t look at them, then they won’t look at you.”

  He did it and nobody noticed. He was amazed it worked. He was feeling good about himself, the job and life. But when he closed the door, he realized the office wasn’t empty. A man looked up from the desk on the far side of the room and said, “Who are you?” He was an older man, maybe sixty, with dignified gray hair, running to respectable, moneyed fat. He looked at Alan over the top of reading glasses. His hand, holding up a strip of adding machine tape, was frozen in place as he awaited a response.