NOT
QUITE THE AVERAGE BANK ROBBERY
By: Paul Revis
07/15/2012
So, what to do? You’re a few short
months from retirement, sick and tired of the new and improved
changes at work that only serve to complicate things all out of
proportion to the perceived improvements. You have absolutely
nothing in common with the people you work with anymore since you
potty trained your last kid thirty years ago and your body is in no
shape for extreme sports. A bit of golf perhaps, but certainly not
the all-in basketball or kick boxing that has become the latest
topics on the agenda of boring tripe that is supposed to stimulate
your tired brain. Your knees are shot, and your lungs hurt from too
many years of smoking. So, you do what you’re not supposed to
do once too often, irritate the wrong people at the wrong times, and
generally give out the impression that you don’t really give a
crap anymore, because frankly, you don’t. You should, of
course, because the consequences aren’t that good if management
decides to take that next one small mistake you make, blow it up all
out of proportion and hang your butt out over the fire to swing and
roast.
Of course you make that inevitable mistake. A stupid
mistake really and one that under normal circumstances wouldn’t
garner a second look by anyone, but by now people don’t like
you despite what they have said to your trusting face. You know that
by the reports written by your co-workers complete with lies and the
investigation by management complete with the suggestion, strongly
made of course, that you should resign or face being fired.
Welcome to the ever increasing world of the
unemployed, and uninsured. Conversations with others and you find
that jobs for old folk like you are as plentiful as the proverbial
hen’s teeth. You suck down what little pride you have left and
stand in line at the food bank. They’re nice there. They
don’t judge you while they load up your Cadillac’s trunk
with free food that you know you’re going to have to eat
quickly before terminal spoilage sets in, leaving a week of not
eating until you can go back and load up again. You could afford the
Cadillac then and you were proud of the darn thing, which may be
another reason the people you worked with didn’t like you so
much, but now it is going to be a decided liability with its thirst
for fuel and the fact that even though it looks nice, you know it has
underlying problems. You know it’ll be an issue soon, and you
know you’re going to have to sell it to help you survive. That
knee is really beginning to hurt and the wife with her health issues
hasn’t had a job since Nixon was president and the job she did
have way back then doesn’t even exist, any more than the
company she worked for. Free clinics and hand out medical
“assistance” just grate on your nerves. The bottom line
is that you need money. Just like before when you had a pretty good
job that you threw away because, let’s face it, you aren’t
all that bright to begin with, and you’re getting old. Not a
good combination of facts. You sit down and begin to arrange your
miserable life, wallowing in the despair and depression you have come
to know and love so much lately. The house is actually paid off, as
are the cars, and everything else you own. It’s really not as
bad as it could be, but still it isn’t good because as soon as
the little bit you had saved up is gone you’re done.
Skill sets. What are your skill sets and how can
you exploit them to acquire the much needed cash to fill your wallet?
You’re kidding, right? If you had any actual marketable skill
sets you wouldn’t be where you are. You settled for a job that
paid a decent wage for an unskilled dummy like you, not a career that
would make you feel satisfied and happy to get up in the morning to
whistle your sorry behind off to work.
While out looking for that elusive job in a small
town several miles from home you notice a tiny bank. Not a fancy new
bank, but one that looks like it might have survived the Great
Depression of the 1930’s, barely. The brickwork is a bit worn,
the sign fading just a little, not badly, but certainly not as crisp
as the mega-banks around your town, and a seed is planted in your
tired brain. Bank robbery! Now there’s something you could
do. That’s where the money is, or so said John Dillinger when
asked why he did it. Look what happened to him though. Things have
changed over the last seventy plus years, and Old Johnny Boy just
went too darn far. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t
it? One hit and run, just enough to get you out of the hole you’re
in and no one is the wiser. Sure, the Feds glom onto a bank robbery
like a leech on a salmon, but it’s a tiny bank, and tiny banks
aren’t going to have a lot of cash in them, are they now? You
have a gun, and you have a unique ability to plan a tactical escape
route, things you did in your old job.
Tell no one, not even the wife, who has been
uncharacteristically supportive of you lately, and plan. Plan to the
last detail, and if all goes well, the only law broken will be bank
robbery. That’s a biggie of course, but not like killing
everybody in the bank and blowing up stuff on the way out. You want
to avoid that sort of thing since other folk have no sympathy for
bank robbers who kill everybody, and in case you’re caught, a
bit of sympathy could go a long way in court. You do, however, plan
to pack a second gun. Just in case something goes south.
Thursday is the day you’ve picked for this
little adventure, just after opening. The armored car should have
dropped of the working capital following the Wednesday closure and
that should make it worthwhile to hit the place. There hasn’t
been enough gas money to make very many recon runs to the bank, but
you’re pretty sure that’s how it’s done since
you’ve seen it done that way at your local mega-bank. Why
should this one be any different after all?
You begin to wonder when the fear is supposed to kick
in, because oddly there is none. Shouldn’t you be afraid?
“Anything that can go wrong…” In your case it
always seems to, and there is quite a lot that could. The fear
should be making you sweat like a hooker in church, but it’s
not and that is a bit disturbing in itself. Something seems, well,
almost right. Like this is supposed to be happening in the cosmic
scheme of things and you feel exhilarated as you park the Cadillac
behind an abandoned farm house a good three quarters of a mile from
the bank. The driveway appears to be used quite steadily by the
local teenagers as a place to park and do whatever it is that
teenagers do nowadays in cars late at night. Several well used dirt
bike trails go off into the distance behind the house as well which
is why you’ve brought yours along in the cavernous back seat of
the big sedan. One complicated trail in particular makes a strange
little loop from the farm house to just about across the street from
the bank, and since you’ve silenced the bike to within an inch
of its life, it should be easy to fool everyone into thinking you are
going to follow the trail out quite a way. There should be enough
time to simply ride back to your car, plop the little bike through
the back door and ease on down the road. At least that’s the
plan.
You carefully go over the last of the details in your
mind, still without that nagging fear you’re pretty sure you
should be having about now since you’ve just eased the bike out
of the back of the car. A few rides up and down the connected trails
to complicate anyone’s attempts at following your tracks, and
it’s off to the bank. The trail ride has done nothing for your
fear level. In fact, in your head it’s a bright and sunny walk
in the park with your favorite movie star. Things couldn’t be
more normal. You know that’s not right, you know it’s a
problem, and you know you should be sweating bullets. This is a bank
robbery you’re planning for goodness sake, the whole FBI
investigation thing, and it still feels like a walk in the sun.
As you’re about to pull out onto the street you
notice not just one armored truck making its delivery, but two.
That can’t be right, you think. What bank this size needs two
armored truck deliveries for a Thursday opening? Again, you get
that nagging feeling that something just isn’t quite kosher in
bank robbery land. You adjust the guns in your belt as you notice
that the trucks are facing each other. You’re pretty sure that
one truck following another would hardly turn around to block the
easy exit of the other, or that the crew of the first truck would be
leveling weapons on the crew of the second truck. Whistles and bells
go off in your head as you realize that someone else is horning in on
your bank robbery. Of course the easy and prudent thing would be to
merely let loose with an expletive or two, turn your tiny bike around
and call it a day. But you can’t, can you? Of course not.
You’re not that smart are you, hero? You think that just maybe
you can turn this into something good, and besides, now you’re
just downright pissed that someone else beat you to it. And they’ve
got a whole lot more invested into it than you do, with that armored
car and expensive rifles, and what the hell is that, a rocket
launcher there? Rocket launchers aren’t good. They tend to
mess things up quite a bit, especially when unleashed on one guy
riding a pocket bike.
Where the dirt trail ends and where you are is at the
bottom of a slight ditch at the side of the road, so that all that
could be seen of you would be the top of your head. You are for all
intents and purposes well hidden from the activities going on at the
bank across the street. Enough weeds and shrubbery on both sides of
the road hide you well. It’s time to think this out. A car
goes by in front of you but doesn’t even slow down. No one
notices a thing, not even the guys with the guns. They’re
bold; you have to give them that.
You leave the bike, get down a little further and
ease right as slowly and quietly as you can even though there is no
way the bad guys across the street would ever hear you. You drop
down and begin to think, and there on the ground is the answer you
were looking for. A plan forms in your brain just as you hear the
first shot being fired from across the street. A man from the second
truck is lying on the ground and you see the shooter leaning across
the first truck. It’s obvious what has happened. You know
your plan is flawed, seriously flawed, and weak at best but now you
are a man on a fool’s mission to save the day, just like
“Mighty Mouse”.
The answer to your dilemma, the one lying at your
feet, is a cast off plastic 2Ltr soda bottle, two of them in fact
resting neatly beside an empty whisky bottle. Having a little of
that whisky right about then would have been a welcome addition to
the butterflies now finally beginning to well up inside your belly,
but would have seriously eroded what little reaction time you have.
You slide the bottle onto the barrel of your most powerful gun and
check to see if it’s even possible to gain a sight picture with
that lump of plastic hanging off of the barrel and are surprised when
in fact you can. Not perfect, but good enough to make it work. You
scramble up the slight incline, slither across the road like a very
fat and slow snake, but make it without being seen, slide into the
other trough and take stock of the damage. Elbows skinned, clothing
ripped and dirty, chewing the dirt in your mouth. All that
meticulous planning you made for those long weeks, out the door. Why
are you doing this anyway? Just let it play out and stay uninvolved.
Down in your gut you know this isn’t going to end well.
You readjust the plastic bottles on the gun barrels
as you ease up the incline and poke your head over the top just in
time to watch the guy with the rocket launcher blow a rather large
and raggedy hole in the far side of the old bank while two of his
cohorts watch. You wonder if there is any more ammunition for that
nasty bit of pipe or if that was it. Chances are that no one is
going to drag one of these things around with only one round of ammo,
so, still a threat. The two watchers squeeze into the still
smoldering hole in the bank’s wall, just about where the vault
was located if memory serves, and you take that opportunity to open a
hole of your own, in rocket launcher guy’s head, the now
useless plastic bottle serving as a one-use silencer. You’re
surprised at how well it actually works as the big magnum sounds more
like a stick on a big fluffy pillow than a booming engine of death.
No matter, threat neutralized. Isn’t that how they say it on
television, “neutralized”? Dead in actuality, and you
know that since you’re close enough to see that the guy’s
head is only half there. All there five seconds ago, half there now.
Mission accomplished, except that now you hear gunfire from inside
the old bank, and gunfire from the other armored car. Some
overweight, red-faced old guy in a very nice suit explodes from the
front door in what for him would have been a dead run, only to be
stopped suddenly and knocked over backwards by several bullets fired
from what you thought was the good guy’s armored car.
Things are not what you expected, are they, hot-shot?
Who do you defend, and more to the point, do you in fact defend
anyone at all? Chubby guy in the suit? A little late for that one
obviously, but if there are any more of them inside how will you
defend them if they too should come crashing out the door? As if to
emphasize the point, another one does, with the same result, despite
his bobbing and weaving. Nope, the guys in the other armored car are
not the good guys. Two sets of bad guys? What are the odds of three
sets of asset adjusters hitting the same non-descript bank at exactly
the same time? What is in that bank anyway to make it so darn
attractive to this bloodthirsty bunch of thieves and why, after all
of this time have you not heard even one whisper of a siren?
A couple of well-placed shrubs look like they might
just provide you with enough cover to approach the spot where rocket
launcher guy lay without getting yourself dead, compliments of his
pals or the other set of do-badders. Slow and easy you make it from
one thin shrub to the other, to a flowerbed, to dead rocket launcher
guy. Inside the close fitting backpack still wrapped around his
shoulders you discover that in fact there are still three sweet
looking anti-tank rounds, their exhaust tubes pointing up like
antennae. Good thing you are such a good shot, otherwise you might
have damaged one of the rounds. That’s when you notice that
launcher guy is wearing body armor. Not the cheap stuff either, the
latest lightweight armor, and it’s new. That could be handy,
and since he doesn’t need it anymore, you decide to grab it for
yourself, hoping it does more good for you than it did for dead
launcher guy. You scrape some of the more prominent blood and brain
mater off and slip it on, not too happy with the loud noise the
Velcro makes as you firmly cinch it to you.
You fail to make mental note of how you now look or
what it will take to explain yourself out of this situation should
you, in fact, get caught, don’t you, hotshot? Long term
planning under extreme circumstances never was one of your strong
suits. And that brings up another minor issue; you have no idea how
to load or fire one of these things. You’re pretty sure that
merely chucking the rocket down the pipe and pulling the
trigger-looking thing isn’t going to do it, and as looking it
up on U-Tube isn’t an option…. Wait a second, yes it
is! Smarty-pants phone out, punching up rocket launching tutorial on
U-Tube… Damn, it really is almost that easy! Rocket down the
pipe, safety nose cone off, rocket launched, no more armored car, how
cool is that? Nagging feeling that something is still very wrong
and you just can’t put your finger on it. Anyone else would
have remembered the two watchers that went in through the hole in the
wall, but not you. You’re too darn pleased with yourself for
blowing up one of the armored cars to remember that minor detail,
right up to the time you see a decidedly nonbank employee poke his
head around the corner just ten feet away from you to see what the
loud noise was all about.
Satisfied that you are the undead rocket launcher
guy, he gives you the thumbs-up and ducks back inside to continue
with whatever dirty business he was disturbed from doing. That was
the wakeup call you needed. You ram another rocket into the pipe,
rip off the safety nosecone and laying it carefully next to you, do a
quick look-see through the hole in the bank’s wall which
confirms your suspicion that the hole is now an external doorway to
the vault. Bad news is that nothing is going on inside the vault,
and the door is closed, bolts in place, securely locked. Whatever
this means it can’t be good, you decide, and retrieving the
launcher, skitter towards the main entrance for another look-see from
that direction. A peek around the corner nets you nothing but the
sight of desks and counters. There aren’t any bodies draped
over the counters, or laying on the floor, at least none that you can
see. Who knows what is on the other side. Customers, other bank
employees, the inevitable bank guard, any one of them could be
bleeding to death just out of sight. There hadn’t been that
many gunshots that you could hear, but that didn’t mean much,
what with all the ruckus and the heavy brick walls of the bank
dulling the sounds. Getting inside just to have a look around
doesn’t seem like such a good idea despite the heavy weaponry
cradled in your arm, but they do believe that the real rocket
launcher guy is still alive, so…
You call up your best tough guy look; wipe the sweat
and dust out of your eyes, and crash through the front door like you
were robbing the joint. In your best deep voice yell out, “Hey!”
and look carefully around you. No reply. No sounds anywhere, not
even the moan of a dying ne’er-do-well. Maybe the rocket
launcher isn’t the best weapon to have poking out in front of
you at this point, so you sling it over your shoulder and pull that
handy magnum from its holster. You realize that this isn’t
looking the way it should. It hasn’t from the beginning, it’s
all been wrong. There isn’t anything on the desks, no
brochures for low interest loans, no cups of pencils, no computers,
nothing that you would see in a real functioning bank. There is dust
everywhere, and cobwebs and spiders. And then of course it hits you;
the place is closed, has been for god knows how long. So why the two
armored cars, the guys being shot, or the big hole in the wall? What
the hell is happening? Your face drains of color as the realization
of just how much trouble you are in occurs to you. Not five minutes
earlier you had removed a large portion of some guy’s head and
blown up an armored car and you still don’t know for absolute
sure if they were the bad guys or not, and who were the guys you
figured were the bank employees that got themselves killed?
You continue to look around, still trying to put some sense into
this equation, when you spy a banker’s box on the floor just
outside the vault door, its lid slightly askew, green paper in a neat
stack showing from the corner of the box. Cash and a darn lot of it
too. You bend down to look closer, grabbing one of the bundles to
rifle through. It’s not phony, the serial numbers aren’t
even close, and the bills are used twenties, fifties, and hundreds,
not in any order. You’re not sure how much there is but you do
know one thing for certain, you are the one that’s going to be
spending them. Now the panic sets in, not the getting caught by the
cops kind of panic, hell, that’s been there since you blew up
the armored car, no, this is the how do I move this hundred and
twenty pound box of cash before the other guys discover I have dib’s
on it and want me dead for claiming it kind of panic. Where the hell
are the two missing bad guys? You find yourself wishing there was a
hardware store close by that carried dollies. No matter how good you
are you can’t think of everything. Maybe they did, maybe they
thought of packing a dolly onto the truck but that means you have to
hunt them, not keep away from them, which poses another problem for
you to ponder. The bad guys need to get away and leave the box of
cash for you. If you hunt them and kill them it poses more questions
than it answers. Where are they? Why are there no sirens? Somebody
must have seen the smoldering ruin of that other armored car by now
and panic phoned the police. Doesn’t anyone get involved these
days? Is no one paying attention?
Let the chips fall where they may, you figure and holster the
magnum while swinging the rocket launcher to fore. At the very least
you should be able to bluff them into leaving, although exactly how
you are going to manage that since you are supposed to one of them
isn’t quite clear to you yet.
You manage to discover, at long last, the back door
of the bank, and smell the distinct odor of diesel exhaust. A
clatter of metal against concrete, and the distinct sound of a steel
door being slammed just outside.
“Ralphie?”
“Ralphie, are you still with us?”
A long pause and then; “Screw it, Ralphie’s
done, let’s move it!” followed by the roar of a
turbocharged diesel engine and then silence.
This is too easy, it has to be a trap of some sort
you think as you ease yourself out the back door and find the
collapsible dolly the bad guys just threw out of the truck for you.
Trap or not, the lure of a giant box of cash is just too bright and
shiny to ignore, so you grab the dolly and toss it inside. Out the
front door, watching and listening, and wiping the fingerprints off
of every surface of the rocket launcher, including the rocket, you
dump the tube next to what you figure must be Ralphie’s body.
The lack of fingerprints may be a problem, but then Ralphie is
conveniently wearing gloves, so you just might get away with this.
Quickly back inside, you get the dolly under the box
and begin to drag it out the door, still on high alert for anything
that might smack of law enforcement, or the competition returning for
their missing box. Box is heavy, isn’t it? Even with wheels
under it the darn thing is heavy, and it seems to be getting warmer
because now you are beginning to sweat as you tug the box along the
broken driveway toward your little pocket bike and that big beautiful
Cadillac. You know you aren’t going to get this load up and
over the swale by the road, and if you did it would leave tracks, so
you have to go down the drive and across the road, all in the open
for anyone to see, but you’re almost there, almost across the
road and you can see your little pocket bike just sitting there,
inviting you to sit and ride off into the sunset with a huge load of
cash trailing behind. You know it isn’t going to be easy
maneuvering the bike and tugging the box. Almost there now, away
from the bank and the questions that just being there would raise. A
wheel bumps hard against a large rock, spilling the box onto the
ground and you struggle to right the darn thing, struggle to hurry
away from there with your prize, your ill-gotten treasure. It’s
about this time that you feel the first tightening grip in your
chest. You ignore it because it’s not that bad. Not yet
anyway. You jump on the little bike and jump on the kick-starter,
feeling the engine spring to life, and the numbness spreading down
your arm as well as that grip deep inside your chest getting tighter.
You’re not going to make it, Henry, you were
never meant to. It’s the way of things. People like you are
never meant to make it. If it’s too good to be true, then it
isn’t.
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