The Soak

by Patrick E. McLean

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” said Alan. In his ear Hurlocker said, “One coming out. He’s gonna find Sleepy on the sidewalk. Best hurry it along.”

  “What do you mean, I’m not supposed to be here! I’m god-damned Regent! The king,” he said, tapping the brass nameplate that had “McCaffery” spelled out on it in black letters. “I own this place. And if you work for me, I own you too. Now tell me what you need, son. Or back to work.”

  “They sent me in here to…,” Alan said, very peacefully.

  “OK,” McCaffery said, getting annoyed. “For what? What’s the matter with you? Out with it. Are you slow? Are you somebody’s nephew or kid brother?”

  “Yeah,” said Alan, because it was true.

  “OK, that’s great. You’ll excuse me, I don’t have time for some weirdo kid.” McCaffery dismissed him with a hand wave and went back to totaling figures.

  Alan tried not to blush with anger. He fought back the hot tears. He hated that word, weirdo. Always had. The kids at school had teased him because he didn’t have a dad. Because he was interested in computers. Teased him for a thousand petty things that one kid will tease another for. And the calculator made him mad too. Reading figures off the screen and pounding them into a calculator. How stupid. What a terrible way to use technology!

  He didn’t let any of his emotions show when he said, “I’ve got something for you.”

  “OK,” said McCaffery, annoyed. “Give it to me and get out.”

  Alan walked over to the desk. He pulled the slapjack out and extended it toward McCaffery. McCaffery was busy squinting at the screen. “Just leave it on the desk there.”

  Alan hit him on the temple with the slapjack. McCaffery collapsed into the monitor and knocked it over. Calm and steady, Alan caught the monitor with one hand and kept it from falling.

  McCaffery was slumped over the desk, semiconscious. The air escaped from his lungs with a strange, sighing moan. Alan thought about hitting him again. And then again. Then again. He realized he could do it. He could kill a man and get away with it, as easily as he had betrayed his clan in the Universe of Strife. Except this was real. This was power.

  He realized he was holding his breath when Hurlocker said, as calmly as if he were reporting on the weather, “One man, headed toward the office.”

  Alan went to the lockbox. He punched in the code and grabbed the keys he needed. When he turned, a shadow was silhouetted in the frosted glass of the door. There was a knock. On cat’s feet Alan dashed across the office to stand beside the door.

  Another knock. Alan lifted the sap high. The door opened and whoever it was stuck his head in and said, “Sir?”

  Alan hesitated. He could see the man’s shaved head, his dark skin. Maybe Italian, maybe Latino. There was a smear of grease on his cheek. A mechanic. He smelled of soap and cigarettes. Alan was so close he could even see acne scars beneath the man’s five o’clock shadow. Close enough to lean over and kiss him, and the man was completely unaware.

  The man looked at Alan. Alan brought the slapjack down.

  The guy fell forward into the office. Alan grabbed his arm and dragged him in completely. Had anybody seen that? The mechanic wasn’t completely out. He moaned and tried to get to his feet. Alan sapped him again, wincing at the hollow sound that was made when leather and metal bounced off skull. The mechanic stopped moving.

  Alan stepped over the unconscious man and walked out of the office. He hung a right and headed for the door to the parking lot. He walked quickly, but not in a hurry. He had to fight against the adrenaline surging through his body. But when he got to the door, he couldn’t help himself. He looked over his shoulder.

  The third-shift guys were all huddled around the guy from the sidewalk, trying to bring him around. One of them felt Alan’s gaze, looked up, and saw him.

  His eyes flicked back and forth between Alan and the guy lying unconscious on the shop floor. Then he shouted, “Hey!”

  Alan ran through the door and into the night. He found the armored car he wanted easily enough and climbed in. As he started the beast, he heard Hurlocker say, “He’s got the package, but kicked the hornets’ nest.”

  Hobbs said, “Copy.”

  Why were they so quiet? How could they not be excited? He had gotten the truck! Alan looked out the side window and saw men running toward him. They looked angry. Alan waved to them and stomped on the gas.

  As he smashed through the gate, he keyed the mic and yelled, “Yeeeeeeeehaw!” He sped off, as much as anyone can speed in a vehicle that is as heavy and unwieldy as an armored truck. As he made the first turn, Hobbs slid in behind him, doing little more than an idle and weaving erratically. He was playing the part of the drunken salesman on the way back to his hotel, just in case pursuit needed to be slowed. But there was no pursuit.

  Alan took a left and then another left. Then a third left into an alley that led to the courtyard of the building across the street. Somewhere ahead of him was a loading bay door, but all he could see was the darkness. The bay door was open, but earlier that day they had covered the entrance with tarps. Alan accelerated; in this thing he felt OK driving through a brick wall.

  A flashlight pulsed from the middle of the tarps, and Alan corrected course. As the tarps parted around the truck, he slammed on the brakes. The truck skidded, slammed down a short ramp, and lurched awkwardly to a stop in the basement of the abandoned factory across the street from Regent Armored.

  “Whoooooooo,” Alan yelled again, into the mic. On the other side of the glass he could see Hurlocker clawing his ear-piece out of his head. Alan opened the door and jumped down.

  “Whoooo!” he yelled, running toward Hurlocker. He was going in for what? A high five, a hug, a chest bump? Hurlocker turned, clipped Alan’s legs out from underneath him, and slammed him to the floor, winding the kid. “I heard you the first time,” Hurlocker said.

  Hobbs eased his car in through the tarps. Hurlocker walked over to the car, leaving Alan on the floor gasping for air.

  Hobbs said, “Nobody. I think we’re clear.”

  Hurlocker nodded, and they closed the rolling steel door and pulled the tarps down. They used the tarps to cover the car and the armored truck. Hurlocker walked past the kid saying, “C’mon, get up.”

  Hobbs helped Alan off the floor.

  SEVENTEEN

  They descended to a subbasement they had set up with cots and provisions. The plan was to stay in the warehouse long enough to spray the truck, change the plates, and let the heat die down. Alan moved seamlessly from gloating over his “accomplishment” to bitching that he couldn’t leave the building. Eventually he sulked in the corner with his laptop. Playing some game that was incomprehensible to Hobbs. Something about fighting off an alien invasion.

  Hurlocker practiced card tricks and tried to get Hobbs to play gin. When that failed, he dealt himself hand after hand of solitaire. When Alan said, “It’d be faster to play that on a computer,” Hurlocker looked at him as if he were a creature from another planet.

  “It’s supposed to take a while. That’s the whole point.”

  Hobbs was self-contained and answered all Alan’s pestering questions with grunts. Alan kept after him. “But did I do a good job?”

  “Kid, just shut up and wait like the rest of us.”

  But a little while after that, Hobbs said, “You want to help me paint the truck?” Alan lifted his head from the carnage on the screen. Hobbs was sure he was going to tell him to fuck off like a surly teenager. But to Hobbs’s surprise, the kid said yes.

  While they worked with hand sanders, grinding off the clear coat, Hobbs explained what it took to put a good paint job on a car. A clean room, meticulous attention to detail, coat after coat after coat. “The quality of a finish is time. But we don’t need quality, just disguise. And we don’t have to take it down to the metal, we just need to scratch up the old finish to let the new paint stick. A real finish, the kind of fine work you’d like on your own car, takes days and
specialized equipment. We don’t have any of that and we don’t care.”

  Alan listened and took pleasure in the task. He waited a long time, but as they were masking off the windows and the chrome, he couldn’t hold it in any longer.

  “So am I in? I mean, did I pass the audition?” He asked so nicely, he could have been a completely different person from the snot-nosed brat of the past few days.

  “Yeah, you’re in,” said Hobbs. “Go easy, kid. You’ve got a lot to learn. All of it, in fact. And it will go better if you have just a little humility.”

  “But when you’ve got mad skills, like I do,” Alan said. When Hobbs looked over at him, he could see Alan was joking.

  Hobbs smiled and said, “That was pretty slick with the security cameras.”

  “Yeah, I got lucky,” said Alan, stripping a long piece of blue painter’s tape from the roll. “Real cheeseball security. But it was pretty fucking cool, you gotta admit. I thought for sure you’d be impressed, but…”

  “Tricks with computers are one thing,” said Hobbs. “Everybody is brave at a distance, but in the middle of it, when the shit all goes wrong, that’s when you figure out what somebody is made of.”

  “Yeah, that’s why…”

  “Why what?”

  “Nah, man, you’ll think I’m silly.”

  “We gotta lotta time to kill.”

  “OK, OK, it’s like. So when you were my age, right? You know, back in the Stone Age, right? You know, wearing a leopard skin and draggin’ a club around with some Barney Rubble–lookin’ motherfucker.”

  “I’m not that old.”

  “But you’re old enough that you’ve seen the world go to hell. It’s helmets, right. Everything safe, everybody plays by the rules. So my uncle, right, he’s the man. I mean in Philly, he’s the man. All mobbed up, everybody gives him respect.

  “My dad got clipped when I was young, and he stepped in and took care of my mom and me. Which I’m grateful for, you know, absolutely. But I’m a grown man. I don’t need protecting anymore. I don’t need the training wheels. I don’t need the helmet. I gotta go out and do for me. Sure I’m gonna fall down and get fucked up, but I mean, how am I supposed to be a man if I don’t do that?”

  Hobbs nodded. “Yeah, that’s the way it works.”

  “There’s something wrong with me, Caspar, and I know it. I am the most comfortable motherfucker you have ever met in your life. People have been giving me everything I’ve ever wanted my whole life. And none of it means a thing. People respect me because of who my uncle is. I get mad respect, everywhere I go. But inside, I don’t even respect myself.”

  Hobbs nodded, not working on the truck anymore.

  “That’s why I want to do this. So I can hold my head up and know it’s not just some bullshit I’m throwing to impress some girl. Or to hide how scared I am.”

  “Nobody can give you self-respect,” said Hobbs.

  “Naw, man, you gotta take it.”

  “Steal it,” said Hobbs.

  “Can you help me? Can you help me do that?”

  Hobbs looked at him for a long time, saying nothing. Alan didn’t look away.

  “If you listen, I can help you,” said Hobbs.

  “But you will. You’ll help me figure out how to steal that?”

  Hobbs nodded. “Now let’s get this thing sprayed.” He changed the pressure setting on the compressor and hooked up two spray guns.

  “Don’t we need masks?”

  “You’re young, you’ll heal. And I’m so old I don’t think it makes a difference anymore.” When Hobbs saw the face that Alan was making, he laughed. “What, you want to live forever?”

  “Yeah, don’t you?”

  “I’ll skip the shitting-in-a-bag years at the end, if you don’t mind.” He clipped a wire to the undercarriage of the armored truck. “This runs a current, a negative charge through the truck.” He held up the sprayer. “Positive charge, so the paint is magnetically attracted to the truck.”

  “Doesn’t that blow a fuse or something? It would wreck a computer.”

  “It’s not much, but even if it was, this whole thing is what they call a Faraday cage. It’s why you can be in a car that’s hit by lightning and you and the car will be fine. Charge stays on the skin. Rubber tires keep it insulated, no problem.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah, it would be easier for us if it didn’t work that way. Just cram a Taser into the side and knock out all the people and the GPS tracker and the radios. But it doesn’t work that way.”

  “But then how are you going to knock out the tracker?”

  “I’m going to do it with style. Now c’mon, we gotta get this thing painted, you don’t have to learn everything in a day.”

  They sprayed the truck down. It was still tacky when Hobbs set out that night for Panama City, Florida. Hobbs had planned on making the drive by himself, but he asked the kid to ride shotgun.

  Hurlocker split off to pick up a few more things and said that he would meet them in a week. As he said good-bye to Hobbs he asked, “Is there anything more beautiful than the love between an older man and a young boy?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Hurlocker, serious, said, “Watch yourself.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Three hours into the drive, Hobbs gave Alan the gun back. He asked him, “You know what kind of gun it is?”

  Alan shook his head.

  “Charter Arms Bulldog, .44 Special. Good gun to hit somebody with. Doesn’t shoot so good. Where’d you get it?”

  “My uncle.”

  “You know what he did with it? Before you got it?”

  “Left it in my mother’s bedroom.”

  Hobbs drove for a while, saying nothing. Then he said, “So he could have killed some guy with it. You get caught with it, that’s on you.”

  “My uncle isn’t the kind of guy who kills people.”

  “You think he’s a nice guy or something?”

  “No, I know he’s a bad man. But he’s the kind of guy who hires somebody else to do it. At least now he is.”

  Hobbs nodded, taking in a new fact. Then he said, “Next bridge we come to, you throw that out the window and into the water. We already got all the hardware we need for this job.”

  “But it’s my gun.”

  “I never met your uncle, but I can tell you something about him right now. He’s got a small dick.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” said Alan, impassively looking out the window into the night. “But my mom would.”

  “I feel sorry for your mom.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for my mother,” Alan said. “She deserves what she gets.”

  “What she’s gettin’ ain’t much,” Hobbs said. That one got to Alan. Hobbs saw the hurt and anger flash across Alan’s face. Hobbs said, “That gun is almost the right idea, small, reliable, but unless you are going to mug an elk, nobody needs that much gun. Thirty-eight is plenty if you know how to shoot. But shooting is almost always a mistake. You shouldn’t need to use a gun at all if you do everything right.”

  “Have you ever needed to use a gun?”

  “They scare civilians. Mostly I’ve just hit people with them.”

  “Have you ever shot anybody?”

  Hobbs took a while before he answered, “Only people who tried to cross me.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Were,” said Hobbs. “How many of them were there.”

  They drove over six bridges, big and small, before they got to where they were going. Alan kept the gun in his pocket. As they went over one of the bridges, Alan asked, “How do I know you’re not gonna cross me?”

  Hobbs smiled and said, “You don’t.”

  And that was the last they spoke of the gun.

  PART THREE

  FROM VICTORY, DEFEAT

  ONE

  Five minutes before

  Five weeks later Hobbs and Alan sat in a pickup truck with magnetic signs on the door panels that read,
“Johnson Civil Surveyors.” The truck was parked atop a small hill, looking down on an empty bridge, forty-five minutes south of Tallahassee on US Route 319. Ten feet in front of the truck a pole was stuck in the ground, the kind that surveyors would sight with theodolite.

  The bridge was a little over a half a mile long, and had recently been rebuilt because the powers that be had seen fit to dredge out this swampy tributary of the Ochlockonee River in order to make it, of all things, more accessible for fishermen.

  There was not a fisherman in sight. And all the times that they had been here, scouting, setting up, rehearsing, and covering their tracks, neither Hobbs nor Hurlocker nor Alan had even seen a boat, much less a fisherman. But Florida had a long tradition of not being able to leave natural waterways alone. That, and spending matching federal funds to generate as much kickback as possible.

  Ten minutes before, they had blocked off this end of the bridge with a barrier and a sign that read, “Bridge Repair, Temporary Delay.” On the other side of the bridge, Hurlocker was waiting with a similar sign, around the bend. When the armored truck passed, he would close the bridge from that end. As long as the truck was alone, the plan would work. But last Wednesday—it was always a Wednesday, for payday was always a Friday—a sad-faced old woman had been tailgating the truck and they hadn’t been able to peel her off. So they had scrubbed it for a week.

  Hobbs had thought they would never hear the end of it from Hurlocker. “What kind of moon-faced, gas-huffing, inbred, white-trash, roadkill-poachin’—?”

  “Redneck,” offered Alan with a shrug.

  “Don’t you talk about my people that way!” Hurlocker had bellowed, needing to vent his anger no matter the logic or reason.