Fall Down Easy

by Laurence Gough

  Ross stole a quick peek, turned away and lost his supper.

  Mendez’s eyes glittered, his teeth shone bright. He said, “You wanna congratulate him, shake his hand?”

  Ross spat, used the sleeve of his jacket to wipe clean his mouth. Mendez flicked the machete clattering into the night. “No? Well, maybe you change your mind, wanna do it later. So here, take it with you.”

  Laughing maniacally, Mendez stuffed the amputated hand into the breast pocket of the banker’s suit.

  The Ferris wheel shattered, and flew apart. Chunks of hot metal rose up in Martin Ross’s throat. In those days it had just been him and Mendez. Ten per cent and ninety. Then Samantha had found out what was going on, volunteered for a piece of the action.

  The banker knocked over his chair as he pushed to his feet. Thrusting his napkin between his teeth, he ran for the bathroom at the far end of the hall.

  Twelve

  Greg owned — although the car was registered in a dead man’s name — a late model dark blue Pontiac, a four-door model with a V-8 engine and blackwall tires, tiny no-nonsense hubcaps. The Pontiac vaguely resembled an unmarked police vehicle and so yielded him a measure of respect on the road.

  Driving was about the only thing, except for robbing banks and breaking hearts, that Greg did with any degree of caution or sense of restraint. The rest of his life was pretty spontaneous. He had been subject to whimsical behaviour ever since grade school. His mother once told him that he was like a human microscope — in and out of focus in the blink of an eye. Now that he was an adult, opportunities to indulge himself came thick and fast. For example he’d seen a picture in a magazine of a beat-up boxer, a man who’d been a punching bag all his life, and was instantly inspired.

  In his time, as well as being a failed boxer, he’d stepped into the role of busted-up rodeo rider, postman. Once he’d spent an entire day making himself up to look exactly like the famous author Norman Mailer, but since nobody’d ID’d him, the effort was wasted. He’d also been a one-armed man and a blind man, a beggar man and a man all covered in warts big as marbles. He had even dabbled in cross-dressing once or twice.

  But one thing he’d never done, he’d never walked a mile in the size thirteen shoes of a cop. So it was kind of interesting, a major power surge, when he’d discovered how easy it was to flash the badge and a smile and pass himself off as a detective. The way Samantha Ross’s eyes had lit up when he identified himself was amazing. Cops were always getting into woman trouble. No wonder.

  There was something about Samantha Ross’s behaviour that scratched at him, though. In retrospect, it seemed as if she’d told him an awful lot about herself and her daddy that he hadn’t quite gotten around to asking. And not all of it was good. It was almost as if she had it in for her father.

  Slouched behind the Pontiac’s wheel, Greg cruised the neighbourhood, let his high beams rake the shrubbery and interiors of parked cars while he peered through the windshield looking for ERT guys all dolled up in black balaclavas, stun grenades and automatic weapons. After a while he decided that if they were out there, they were buried too deep to crawl out in time to catch him, should he make an appearance. He pulled up to the curb opposite his apartment, and used his cellular to phone home. The machine invited him to leave a message. He said, “I know you’re listening, Greg. Quit fooling around and pick up, or I’m gonna come over there and beat you senseless!”

  No response, but what did he expect? He hung up and drove around until he lucked out and found a parking spot big enough to wedge the Pontiac into, locked the car and walked back to his apartment, cutting through the park across the street to save time.

  There were no cops lurking in the park, or on the boulevard.

  There were no cops in the lobby. Or loitering in the elevator or in the hall.

  Greg put his ear against his apartment door. What a kick it must be, to pull your gun and tin shield and kick in, having no idea what was on the other side. Or maybe it was just plain scary. He was tempted to trash his own door, just to see what it felt like. But if he was going to kick in someone’s door, it made more sense to save his boots for Hilary. He’d invested a lot of time in that girl’s cheating heart.

  He turned the key, pushed open the door. Marilyn chirped twice, to draw his attention, and then turned her cute little feathered rump towards him. If she was a little put out, he didn’t blame her. It couldn’t be all that much fun, trying to get a good night’s sleep with her cage uncovered and the streetlight coming in through the window. No wonder she was pissed off. He shut the door and shot the bolt, went into the kitchen nook and opened a pack of salt crackers. Marilyn saw what he was up to and trilled excitedly, forgiving all.

  Greg leaned against the kitchen counter and watched the canary burn off tension hopping from the low perch up to the high perch and back to the low perch again, and so on. As a pet, she was a long way from perfect. But he had to admit she had an impressively short attention span. He went over to the cage, ate most of the cracker while she stared at him, beady-eyed and ravenous, then stuck the last piece between his teeth, steadied the cage with both hands and pressed his face against the chrome bars.

  Marilyn immediately hopped up on the bridge of his nose, snatched at the cracker with her beak. Greg bared his teeth, snarled like a pit bull and held on tight. The bird’s tiny claws scrabbled across his nose, dug into the flesh. Her beak closed on the cracker again.

  Greg growled low in his throat, then let go.

  He checked his answering machine. Hilary wanted him to know that unless Randy got his handcuffs back he was going to break … There was a sudden silence, dead air broken only by the hiss of the tape, as if someone had clamped a hand over the phone. Break what, wondered Greg, wind? Then Randy was speaking to him, assuring Greg that their little tussle was water under the bridge but he wanted the Polaroids back, since they were kind of personal.

  Greg moved on to the next message. It was the pet food store, they were having a sale on wild bird seed and thought he might be interested.

  Next message.

  Samantha. Checking to make sure he’d really given her his home phone number. Click.

  Greg lit a cigarette, went into the kitchen and got himself a beer out of the fridge. He sipped at the beer while he peeled and sliced two large potatoes, dropped them in a stainless steel pot of lightly salted water and cranked up the heat. He watched the water until it boiled, then trimmed every last scrap of fat from a six-ounce T-bone, heated a frying pan until his spit bounced, and slapped down the meat. In the crisper there was a head of Romaine, a fat red tomato and most of a green pepper. He washed and dried the lettuce, quartered the tomato, paused to turn the steak and then cut the green pepper into ribbons, diced half an onion and chucked everything into a clear glass bowl, added a spoonful of Paul Newman salad dressing.

  By now the potatoes needed mashing. He lowered the heat under the frying pan, drained the pot and pounded the spuds into fluff, then cracked another beer and set the table for one, lining up the stolen hotel cutlery just so.

  While he ate, Greg tried to figure out how to deal with Martin Ross. If Ross was laundering drug money for Mendez, or people Mendez was working for, it wouldn’t take the cops too long to bust his ass. Then the money would be gone forever, seized and swallowed whole by government gluttons.

  He also had Mendez’s employers to consider, unless it turned out he was a one-man show. How long would it take for the bad news to make it to head office, and then what? He imagined that drug lords must be a fairly pragmatic bunch of guys. They’d shrug off their losses, personnel and financial-wise, and move on to something else. What else could they do — take a quickie Berlitz immersion course in English followed by a midnight parachute drop into the city?

  Greg ate some potatoes, carefully cut the steak away from the bone. His molars exploded a radish.

  What about going over to the house, holding Samantha hostage while Ross made some heavy cash withdrawals?

 
He cut the chunk of meat into squares and triangles, pushed the odd-shaped fragments to one side of his plate and stabbed down with his fork. The tines pierced the meat and rang against the plate.

  Marilyn thought he was being musical and tried to form a duet.

  Greg yelled, “Shadup!”

  Playing the hostage game with Samantha could be lots of fun. She’d had a certain look in her eyes — Randy’s handcuffs might be a popular item … On the other hand, giving her his telephone number had been an amazingly dimwit thing to do, a real bonehead play. But as long as she believed he was a cop, he’d be okay.

  Until she told some other cop about him.

  But there were more than a thousand cops on the VPD — no way they’d all know each other.

  Greg knocked back his T-bone, his jaws single-minded and relentless, rising and falling in a savage, graceful rhythm that soon emptied his plate. As he ate, Marilyn fluttered restlessly in her cage, watched him with dark and glittery, unintelligent eyes.

  Snatching Samantha and using her as a hostage wasn’t such a great idea because — Greg kept thinking about it as he stole another beer from the fridge — if her banker daddy decided his bottom line was more important than her bottom line, all he had to do was dial 911 and it’d be game over. Cops, tear gas and tears. Judgement.

  But what if he made a date with her, treated her to a romantic weekend at a surprise destination, some sleazy out-of-town motel, and she had no idea what he was up to? Once he’d spirited her away, all he had to do was phone daddy and make it clear that if he didn’t cough up Garcia Lorca Mendez’s dough, he’d never see his daughter again.

  Kind of a vague plan, Greg.

  How much money, for example? Greg had studied the briefcase full of spreadsheets until his head was stuffed with every number you could think of, and all he’d had to show for his labours was double vision and a powerful thirst. Also, whatever amount he demanded, ten grand or a cool million, how would he arrange safe delivery?

  What he liked about banks, it was nice and simple, a steak-and-potatoes kind of thing. You walked in, grabbed the cash and turned around and walked out.

  Greg washed and dried the dishes, snatched another beer out of the fridge. He went into the living room and turned on the television, tuned in the channel that told you what time it was.

  It was 9:17:32, and moving right along, one second at a time. Greg flipped through to TSN, the sports network. He stretched out on the sofa and watched race cars that looked like toys drive around and around and around. The cars were painted in bright primary colours and plastered with advertising decals. Flame shot from their exhaust pipes. The tires were fat and the cockpits were tiny. Every so often there was a close-up of a helmet and a pair of goggles, but there might have been poodles tucked in there behind those windshields, and he’d never have been able to tell the difference. There was very little sense of speed. Once in a while a driver would miscalculate and smash into another car or a concrete wall, but other than that, it was kind of boring.

  Greg’s eyes began to glaze over. He fetched himself another beer and a clean ashtray. The cars droned around the circuit, white noise. There was no chance he’d fall asleep in his chair and set himself on fire, however, since he couldn’t get all that money out of his mind. Buckets of cash that were gathering dust in a vault somewhere and didn’t belong to anybody, really.

  He had a vision of himself strolling out of the house of red bricks and wrought iron, the shiny black briefcase stuffed with hundred dollar bills, Samantha running after him, wanting to be with him … The television cried out. Greg’s eyes snapped open in time to watch the instant replay as a glossy blue car suddenly became airborne, touched down hard and rolled. A wheel broke loose. Chunks of shiny blue metal danced across the asphalt, and then the car suddenly vanished in a huge orange fireball laced with black … Greg said, “Holy shit!”

  And found himself staring at a smiling babe who looked an awful lot like Hilary, and was crazy about her boyfriend because of his choice of aftershave.

  He turned off the TV and went hunting for another beer, discovered he’d killed them all and broke open a bottle of rye whiskey, ice from the freezer.

  Driving formula one race cars and robbing banks were both risky businesses. But the glossy blue car wouldn’t have turned into a fireball if the driver hadn’t been in such a hurry.

  Greg leaned against the sink. Maybe he was better off sticking to bank robbery. Maybe he ought to forget all about his ambition to get rich quick. Maybe the smart thing to do was forget about robbing and stealing altogether, take early retirement. He drank some rye, found himself remembering his first bank. The teller’s name was Lesley. She had soft brown eyes and mouse-brown hair with a wide streak of white in it, that she could not explain. He learned on their first date that she had a weakness for witchcraft, black magic. He was just starting out, and lacked confidence, so he put up with her weirdness, the incense and pentagrams, candle wax on his best pair of pants.

  The original idea had been to seduce her, sweet-talk her into committing major bank fraud. Then grab the money and abandon the honey. It hadn’t worked out that way, though. That first heist had been an accident, pure and simple. He was supposed to meet Lesley for lunch. Just for laughs, he’d showed up wearing a false moustache and a cheap wig. Walked up to her wicket and said, This is a stick-up in a low, growly voice. Her face had gone white as that witchy streak of hair. Without a word, she’d emptied her cash drawer on the counter. He stood there, struck dumb, waiting for her to look at him, but the best she could manage was to look right through him.

  It struck him then how frightened she must be. And that he was being filmed, that she might have activated the silent alarm and that he better get the hell out of there.

  Ten minutes later, the wig and moustache stuffed down a sewer grate and the cash locked away in the trunk of his car, he’d driven back to the bank with an apologetic look on his face, late for lunch and sorry about it. A uniformed cop at the door had held him back but promised to deliver the message. That first heist, he’d grossed over two thousand dollars. Not bad, when all he’d hoped to get for his trouble was a look of shock, and a laugh.

  But it was a real kick, listening to Lesley, between sudden gusts of tears, describe to him in great detail how the robbery went down and how terrified she’d been. For a week or two, the hold-up was all she wanted to talk about. He was an avid listener. She started seeing a therapist, and told him about that, too.

  Fascinating stuff.

  But then he happened to meet a woman named Bobbi who had sparky green eyes and bleached-blonde hair, lived to ski and smoke dope and supported her vices by working at a seven-wicket credit union.

  Greg chewed on an ice cube, realized the only reason he was doing it was because he’d drained his glass. He reached for the bottle, almost knocked it over, unscrewed the metal cap and poured himself a really stiff one.

  Bobbi had been a lot of fun, full of vim and vinegar. He walked into her bank wearing a latex skull cap, bushy false eyebrows, bags under his eyes, used glasses bought for a couple of dollars from the Salvation Army, a brand-new nose and a slab of foam that he’d stuffed between his shoulder-blades, a pair of elevator shoes that added three inches to his height and made him walk with a two-legged limp. If he’d been a donkey they’d have shot him. Might do it anyway. He grinned, wiped rye from his chin. He’d hobbled into the bank looking, he hoped, like Peter Lorre after a growth spurt.

  Bobbi listened to his sales pitch, blinked twice and slid open her rash drawer, pulled a twenty and told him to scram or she’d call the cops. No, really.

  Then, when he’d dropped by her apartment that night, looked him straight in the eye and said exactly the same thing, in exactly the same tone of voice.

  Scram, or I’ll call the cops.

  Greg touched up his drink and went into the bedroom, put his glass down on the bureau and yanked open the top drawer. He had a picture of Bobbi tucked away in there, a silverf
ramed shot he’d taken down by the beach, at English Bay. Bobbi with her wet hair combed back and off to the side, squinting good-naturedly into the sunlight, hands on her hips. She was wearing a pink two-piece that still made him want to look everywhere at once.

  Searching for the picture, Greg pushed aside a pair of grey socks that felt particularly heavy. He gave them a shake and a 22 calibre Bumblebee Pocket Partner fell into his open palm.

  He nipped at the rye, tried to remember where the little gun had come from. A bar in Yakima, Washington. He’d gone down there with some woman … And then he was off and running again, remembering another bank, another whirlwind romance, another heist and another betrayal. What was wrong with him, anyway? He sank a mouthful of rye, peered hazily at the level of liquid in the glass, then slammed it down on the bureau and pulled the Bumblebee’s slide back half an inch, until he could see the tarnished wink of brass verifying that there was a round up the pipe.

  He shoved the gun in his pants pocket and resumed rooting around in the drawer. His clumsy fingers bumped up against cold glass. There she was, he had her now. He tilted the frame to minimize the glare of light from the ceiling fixture. Bobbi smiled up at him as if she didn’t have a care in the world, no regrets.

  Greg said, “Hey, quit looking at me like that!”

  Bobbi’s smile didn’t falter. When he’d asked her to pose for the snap she’d pushed her sunglasses high up on her head, into her hair. The lenses, pointing almost straight up, reflected two perfect burning yellow suns.

  Greg lost his balance and lurched sideways, rattled the mini-blinds as he fought to regain his balance. He studied her eyes and her hair and the curve of her lips, the tanned skin and blue sky and tight pink bikini, how all the pastel colours and curving lines came gracefully together and slipped away.

  He felt the hot, salty tears rise up in his eyes and spill down his cheeks. He’d completely forgotten about the sunglasses and probably a lot of other stuff as well, meaningful details, unbearably sweet moments.