“Easy,” said Hobbs. But that just inflamed Hurlocker all the more. He had stomped out of the house and wandered off to the beach, there to vent his fury on the indifferent waves and the impossible-to-catch ghost crabs.
Alan had looked at Hobbs and smiled. Hobbs, for once, smiled back. They sat on the porch of the house, an old cinder-block beach bungalow, built in a time before only rich people could afford houses on the coast.
After a while Alan broke the silence with, “It’s the waiting, isn’t it? The waiting is what makes or breaks you.” And that’s when Hobbs knew he finally understood.
“He’s steady enough,” Hobbs said, nodding after Hurlocker. “He’s just throwing a fit because he doesn’t have anything better to do. He’s bored.”
“He shouldn’t make so much fun of computer games, then,” said Alan.
In the past weeks, Alan had really come along. He had calmed down and stopped being so much of a punk. He listened. He asked questions that weren’t stupid. He’d learned to scuba dive and work a cutting torch.
Over the years Hobbs had seen a lot of guys leave the straight world behind. It wasn’t an easy transition. With most of them, you could tell right away they wouldn’t make it. The heavy heist was a rough trade, and perhaps a dying game as well. It was harder and harder to get away with. Fucking cameras and fucking computers dragging the world closer and closer together. Cops dressed like storm troopers now and were armed to the teeth.
Hobbs was a bad man, sure, but even he saw something wrong with this. The balance had tipped too far in favor of authority, and it was harder and harder for a red-blooded man to make any move on his own. Everybody was on the fear ladder. The cops, the criminals. Everybody answered to another higher-up all the way up the line, until you got to the rarefied air at the top of the org chart that was too thin for any kind of responsibility to survive.
Hobbs hadn’t been born with wealth, but he didn’t want to live his life knuckling under for anyone. If it took courage and discipline and violence to tear a life for himself out of society, well, fine. He’d paid the cost, and he’d go on paying—as long and as much as it took to stay free.
As much as it surprised him, the kid gave him hope. He hadn’t seen anybody like this come along in a while. Maybe it was that the times were too soft. The lure of an easy job was seductive. After all, if you had intelligence and discipline, why not go domestic? Sell out. Suck the corporate teat. Mostly the stupid and the broken turned to crime. Didn’t take long before those kinds went to jail. For them prison had a revolving door.
But Alan was different. He was smart. He understood computers and how to make them work for him. Maybe the heist wasn’t a dying game. Maybe it was just that the times had passed Hobbs by. Sure, a job would always call for a strong arm and a steady mind, but maybe that wasn’t enough anymore.
They sat in the truck and watched the bridge through thick, sweltering air. They ran the engine so the air-conditioning would blow cool. If they had done this job twenty-five years ago, they’d both be sitting in pools of sweat right now.
Shitty music blared from Alan’s earbuds, and he bopped along in time with the endless drone of the trancelike electronic music. The kid kept the strange time of the music by beating his thumbs on the steering wheel.
For the thousandth time today, Hobbs sighted between the two carefully placed vertical strips of painter’s tape on the wind-shield. He checked the radar gun on a passing seagull. It was flying at thirteen miles an hour.
On the open glove compartment lid the LED on the remote trigger still glowed green, showing a good connection with the device. In all the time they had sat there, that light hadn’t flickered even once. It shouldn’t have, given what they had paid for it. And each of the three weeks they had tried to take the truck, Hobbs had cleaned all the connections and replaced all the batteries before every attempt.
Once they had set up the job, they’d had little else to do but wait. He and Hurlocker had tried to teach the kid poker, but it didn’t take. Alan had made a ritual out of making fun of how early Hobbs got up to run and do push-ups. Three days ago Alan had tried to keep up with Hobbs and failed miserably. The teasing had stopped after that. Sometimes the weight of Hobbs’s years was something he could bludgeon somebody with.
Hobbs sighted through the strips and checked the gun again. The bridge wasn’t moving, at zero miles per hour.
The song pumping through Alan’s earbuds changed, and Hobbs frowned, deep lines cutting deeper into his face. It was loud enough that he could hear the inane lyrics repeated over and over again.
“Turn down for what? Whatever. Just turn it the fuck down already.” But he knew he was just cranky from waiting. He got grumpy the same way the kid cranked up his music and drummed the steering wheel. Still, being grumpy was something to do.
“You should turn it down,” Hobbs said.
Alan looked over at him with a quizzical look on his face. He hooked a finger and yanked the earbud out of his right ear. “Huh?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Hobbs.
Alan gave a nod that was all upward jerk and screwed the bud back in tight. He should be paying more attention, thought Hobbs. He should be more patient. That was just more nerves. Hobbs was patient enough for the both of them.
The radio crackled to life. Hurlocker’s voice from the ether. “Coming, in the clear.”
Beside him Alan popped both earbuds out of his head with a sharp jerk. “Is this it? I mean, is it going to happen this time?”
“Steady,” said Hobbs, to both the kid and himself. “Forty seconds, maybe less.” Hobbs picked up the remote trigger. He flipped the safety off, thinking of all those Cold War scenes he’d seen in movies where they flipped the fail-safe off. His thumb hovered over the switch. The LED on the side still glowed green.
“C’mon. C’mon,” Alan muttered. The shitty music squealed through the earbuds. Hobbs wanted to tell him to turn it off, but he didn’t want to lose focus. Still, that music was so terrible.
It was a good play. If it came off, there’d be no snatch, no getaway, no chance of a gunfight. Just more waiting. The waiting could be harder on the nerves than action, but it was safer.
“There it is.”
On the other side of the river, they saw the Moonis-Brainerd truck round the long curve toward the bridge footing. On the far side of the road the swamp gave way to a lake filled with white lily pads and their blossoms. The lake, such as it was, emptied into the channel and flowed under the bridge as if it had all the time in the world, which it did.
Hobbs hit the truck with the radar gun. Fifty-three miles an hour. They were taking their time today. Sixty miles an hour would be a tenth of a mile every six seconds. They were slower, Hobbs would just have to feel it. Shouldn’t matter much. Hobbs sighted between the two pieces of tape on the windshield until the surveyor’s pole appeared like the front sight on a rifle between them.
“One Miss-is-sippi, Two Miss—is-sippi,” Hobbs said deliberately.
“C’mon,” said Alan, “Do it!”
“Three Miss-is-sippi. Four Miss—”
Hobbs pressed the button. Alan held his breath.
TWO
“Yeah, but the thing is, with a sailboat, you can go anywhere. I mean anywhere you want. Just think about it.”
“Put your seat belt on, Ray. It’s company policy.”
“What are you? An old woman? You want me to wear a helmet too?”
“Ray…”
“I’ll put my seat belt on if you just think about it.”
“Think about it? You are trapped inside this armored can with me every working day, endless fucking miles in this truck, and you tell me that when you retire, you want to trade this small room in for another one? You just don’t make no kinda sense, Ray.”
Ray looked out through the thick bulletproof-glass wind-shield and gestured to the glorious sky and verdant wetlands sliding by on either side of the truck. “But all this beauty. With no place to be, the
wind on your face.”
“The rain,” said Pete, his hands resting lightly on the wheel. “You do realize it rains out there? And then you’re trapped in a little wooden box, probably at sea in the middle of a storm. You’re gonna drown, Ray. They won’t even let you drive the truck, and you think you can captain a boat?”
Ray was undaunted. “I don’t need anybody to clear me to drive my own boat. And they won’t clear me because they don’t want to have to pay me a dollar fifty an hour more.”
Pete knew the reason they wouldn’t clear him was that they had found out he had had a DUI a ways back. Now they wouldn’t even have hired him, but as he had been an otherwise good employee, they had grandfathered him in. Pete kept his mouth shut because he didn’t want to have to hear Ray whine about it for the next ten thousand miles they rode together. Fucking guy talked too much as it was.
“But all the fresh air and the beautiful views,” Ray droned on.
“Fresh air? Lemme ask you a question. You’re all battened down—that’s what they call it, right—all your hatches are battened down for the night. And the wind and the rain are howling outside, right? Where do you go to the bathroom?”
“Well, the boat has a toilet.”
“You mean like a regular crapper?”
“They call it a head,” Ray said, proud of himself for using a nautical term, “a marine toilet.”
“It’s a port-a-potty. A chemical toilet. It’s worse than riding in this truck. Not only are you going to be trapped in a small box, you’re gonna be trapped in a small box with a pot of your own shit and piss. Ray, that ain’t retirement. That’s my idea of hell.”
“But the fresh sea air…,” Ray added weakly. Trailing off into silence and whatever thoughts he could muster.
Pete was grateful to hear the rumble of the engine and the roar of the run-flat tires for a change. The wind cried a little around the corners of the cab as the brutishly nonaerodynamic armored truck hammered through it. There wasn’t a curve to be found on these things. And in all the time he had been driving these beasts, there never had been. It was as if some designer somewhere had said, “Make ’em angry and square. People just won’t think they’re safe if they ain’t square.”
In the silence Pete almost found himself enjoying the view. But it was no good. He had driven it too many times. Inside the air-conditioning it seemed beautiful. But he knew it was like walking into a moist cotton diaper. Full of alligators and mosquitos and not much else. For some goddamned reason, this is where Ponce de León had thought the Fountain of Youth was. Traipsed all over this godforsaken swamp looking for it. They even had a town farther back named for it. Panacea—cure-all. This swamp was cure for nothing, except maybe health and excitement.
As he passed a surveyor standing next to his truck in the heat he felt grateful that he didn’t have that poor bastard’s job. Jesus Christ, standing around in that heat, measuring things that nobody cared about. He wondered how many times they had to run away from alligators in ditches, or water moccasins. Or how many of them had been killed by falling asleep at the wheel in the middle of all this emptiness and running off the road.
It had to have happened. It seemed as if those surveyors were always out here. For the last month or so, he had passed those guys and their sticks and tripods. Probably some make-work contract awarded by the state. The man who owned the company sending his guys out to sweat and taking a fat markup off it. Using some of that cash to buy drinks and hookers for some committee man or minor official who had awarded the job in the first place. Pete knew how the world worked. There was a club. He wasn’t in it.
What would they get out of a survey anyway? “Yeah, Bob, it’s swampy and nasty. Once again, we’ve confirmed that you don’t want to build anything here.” Pete snickered a little, and the sound brought Ray back to life.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“No, really, Ray, what is it?”
“Put your seat belt on.”
They came around a bend, and ahead of them he saw the bridge, as straight and narrow as the barrel of a rifle. Pete wondered if, if he drove it fast enough, he’d be able to launch himself out of this shitty job for good. But as the truck eased up on the bridge, he kept her speed steady. They had trackers on these trucks. Sure, to protect the money, but also to chap his ass if he went too fast or too slow. They said it was for fuel economy, but Pete thought it was just so the bean crunchers could have another thing to chap his ass about.
There was a violent bump. Then the truck left the pavement. Ray sawed at the wheel, but nothing happened. The engine raced. He saw blue sky through the window as the weight of the rear armored compartment pulled the truck down ass-first.
There was a jolt as the rear of the truck hit the ground. The front wheels slammed toward the earth, and everything was thrown violently around the cab. Pete bounced off the steering wheel and heard a cracking sound.
He felt the vehicle list backward and to the right. Then he saw the water bubble up around the edge of the windshield. They hadn’t hit the ground. They were in the river! The engine coughed, sucked water, and drowned.
Pete hit the panic button on the side of the steering column again and again, but nothing happened. All the electronics were dead.
“Ray? Ray!” Pete said. As if in answer, Ray slumped over on him. “Get off of me,” Pete snapped, not realizing his co-driver was dead. As the water rose higher and higher on the windshield, Pete fought against the panic. He heard the water gurgling in through the vents, filling the compartment.
Not even anchors sank this fast.
The truck hit bottom, settling on its tires, and Ray’s body tumbled off the side window and splashed into Pete. “Jesus, Ray!” Then he realized Ray was dead.
Thrashing wildly, on the ragged edge of losing it, Pete pushed Ray’s corpse away from him. The water was up to Pete’s chest. He chanted, “Could be worse, could be worse, could be worse.” Worst mantra ever.
Pete waited until the water was all the way up to the ceiling before he tried to open the heavily armored door. But it wouldn’t budge. He took another breath in the rapidly dwindling air space, then tried again. Nothing. He tried the other door, but it wouldn’t open. He went up for air and there was nothing.
He died fighting to get the passenger side door open.
THREE
“Whooooooooo!” In the seat next to Hobbs, Alan beat on the steering wheel in triumph. “Gooooooooooooooooooooooooal!”
“Enough,” said Hobbs, but happiness leaked through his gruff demeanor. Alan threw the door open and ran around outside the car yelling, “—ooooooooooooooooooooooooal!” like an Argentinian who’d just scored in the final of the World Cup.
“Get back in the car, you jackass,” Hobbs called, laughing, “unless you want me to drive.”
“Aw, come on,” he said from the other side of Hobbs’s window. “Did you see that? It was like a movie, man. Like a movie. Better than a movie. In a movie the bad guys don’t get away with it.”
“We haven’t gotten away with it yet,” said Hobbs grimly. It was the hard-won knowledge of a career that had lasted longer than this kid had been alive—there were a million ways a job could go wrong and only one it could go right. Just a matter of the odds. Still, he had to smile at the kid’s euphoria. It had been a thing of beauty.
When Hobbs had pressed the button, two high-pressure ram jacks had lifted a piece of the metal bridge decking. The left side had risen a full eight inches higher than the right. The result was that the surface of the road had, almost instantly, become a ramp. As the fifty-five-thousand-pound truck hit it at fifty-three miles per hour, it was lifted sharply into the air and drifted over the guardrail. It seemed impossible that something that heavy could fly that far, but fly it had. Nearly thirty feet out into the center of the freshly dredged channel, before it hit the water.
The rear bumper splashed first, and then the front end of the cab. The sudden upward shock of the ramp a
nd then the whipping action of the cab hitting the water caused Hobbs to wonder if the guys inside had been wearing their seat belts. Would be better for them if they hadn’t, he thought grimly.
Hobbs didn’t like killing people. His dislike wasn’t unprofessional, because killing people just brought more heat. But this was the cleanest way, the only way, he could figure how to do the job. Hobbs didn’t waste time feeling sorry for himself. He couldn’t see why he should feel sorry for somebody else.
As he watched $23 million sink into the murky water of the Ochlockonee River, Hobbs said, “And for my next trick…”
It was all hell getting the kid to drive slowly back to the house.
FOUR
And then, more waiting.
All good heists are magic tricks. You take a thing in such a way that the audience doesn’t know where it was taken and doesn’t even know how to find it. Misdirection for ill-gotten gain.
Everybody professional knows that the best way to make a getaway is not to get away at all, but to stay put until the search radius has spread out, then leave slowly and quietly. You don’t have to get ahead of the pursuit when it’s far in front of you, or it’s been called off.
But what Hobbs had just pulled off was even better. It really was stealing something without taking it. For the rest of it, they’d just be three guys on a fishing trip. All but impossible to prove otherwise. They’d let all that money soak, and when the soak was done, they would pull it up from the bottom of the channel and drive away like any other right citizen, but with a trunkful of damp cash.
Sure, none of the three of them was going to let either of the others out of his sight until the split, because there was always that danger of somebody going for the cross on any job. But this one was safer. Fewer people. And it wasn’t as if there were a ready bag of cash anybody could grab and go. They had to dredge it up.
Nope, nothing to do for at least a week but fish and tell each other lies.
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