Iain Levison - How to rob an armored car

“But you think there’s a possibility?”

“Of course, man. I wouldn’t have suggested this if there wasn’t a possibility.”

Mitch nodded. Doug had what Mitch considered a rare social gift, a genuine enthusiasm for meeting people. When they went to parties or concerts, Doug would often disappear with random people he met and be found hours later, having had soul-searching conversations with strangers which he would claim had enlightened him somehow. And before Kevin had been busted, Doug had managed to par-lay this openness with strangers into a thousand-dollar-a-week business. Since it had been so long since Mitch had seen Doug using his gifts, he had forgotten there was a creature with insight and energy inside the stoned blob of protoplasm who now spent his days on the couch, a remote control in hand.

The club was exactly the kind of place Mitch dreaded: a neon-lit, garish, New York City-wannabe dance club, where the crème de la crème of Pittsburgh ’s northern suburbs could buy eight-dollar drinks and spend the evening pretending they were Eurotrash. Mitch groaned as he pulled into the parking lot and saw two Italian men in silk shirts opened to the navel going in the front door.

“Aw, come one, man. This is the best place you could think of? Look at those guys. I don’t wanna go in there.”

“We’re here to sell pills, right?”

“Yeah, but…” Mitch sputtered. “This is Guidoville. Isn’t there, like, a country bar or something around here?”

“Since when do you like country music?”

Mitch groaned again and banged his head on the steering wheel. Doug knew how he felt about dance clubs; they had discussed it a number of times and never reached agreement. Dance clubs were supposed to facilitate meeting women, but for Mitch they did just the opposite. He was good at conversation and bad at dancing, and the loud music in the clubs robbed him of his weapon. These clubs, he felt, gave the advantage to dumb people who couldn’t carry on a conversation about anything except shopping but who looked good gyrating.

“Man, you just gotta chill out,” Doug said. “We’ll have a good time.”

“This is a sacrifice,” Mitch said. “I’m sacrificing here. I’m taking one for the team.”

As he parked, two women in tight miniskirts and high heels walked past the car. Mitch watched, open-mouthed, as they went in the door, suddenly aware of how long it had been since he had seen a real, live, attractive woman in the flesh. He had to get out of Wilton. “Shit, man, who knows?” he said, suddenly cheerful, eyes riveted to the marching asses. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

INSIDE, THE CLUB was exactly what Mitch had expected. Thumping, raging sound-he hesitated to call it music-filled every inch of the place like dirty floodwater, and there wasn’t enough square footage to accommodate all the patrons, a situation that apparently made the business “happening.” People crushed together was the club owner’s dream, but to Mitch it looked like a fire marshal’s nightmare.

“This place sucks,” he told Doug conversationally, who nodded, unaware of what had just been said. Doug made the motion for drinking and pointed Mitch toward the bar. Then, with the calculating gaze of a sniper, he surveyed the terrain, looking for people who appeared to want pills.

And he found them. He grabbed Mitch’s arm to make sure he had his attention and pointed to two guys standing by a rail. They were holding beers but didn’t seem interested in the women or the dancing, and they were scanning the crowd with the same sniper intensity that Doug had just displayed. One of them was bald-headed and muscular, wearing a tight T-shirt, and looked more like a bouncer than a patron. The other was just a normal-looking guy, perhaps a bit underdressed, like Doug and Mitch.

Mitch would never have noticed them. Doug pointed to them and nodded, then pointed to the bar again, instructing Mitch to go and buy beers. Mitch began to push his way through the crowd, feeling the driving beat from the speakers vibrate in his gut. He hadn’t had this much fun since he had been stuffed in the back of an armored personnel carrier in the army, bodies pressed against him, the rifles and entrenching tools of the other soldiers poking him everywhere, comfort impossible. The endless monotony of the beat reminded him of the thumping of the APC’s engine. All that was missing was the diesel fumes coming up from the floorboards. People paid a cover charge for this, he thought.

The crowd at the bar was three deep and customers were holding their money high to get the bartenders’ attention. Mitch was wondering how long it would take him to run out to the parking lot, drive to a beer distributor, and get a beer there, and considering whether or not that would be a time-saving alternative when Doug tapped him on the shoulder. He had the two guys with him. Doug motioned that they should go outside, which was cool with Mitch.

Mitch was amazed; Doug had been able to pick these guys out of a crowd. That had to be some kind of a marketable skill. He was a human drug dog, able to detect a possible customer in a crowded room. In the parking lot, they made their introductions and Mitch shook the two men’s hands and instantly forgot their names, as usual. Then they went to sit in their car, a luxury SUV. Mitch stretched out, enjoying the comfort of the seat, assuming his role was the heavy, the henchman. If the deal went bad, he was supposed to watch Doug’s back. But these guys seemed enthusiastic about the pills and perfectly friendly, so Mitch stared out the window and listened to the conversation.

“These are the good ones,” Doug was saying. “They’re seven-point-fives. This is about the strongest shit you can get, except for the tens, but those suckers are impossible to find anymore.” He sounded professional, like he was giving a presentation in a boardroom. Mitch almost expected him to start pulling charts and graphs out of his pocket and review the strengths of hydrocodone tablets with a laser pointer.

The bald-headed guy rolled a pill around between his thumb and forefinger for a few seconds, then asked if he could take it. Doug nodded. “Sure, man. It’s cool when the buyer takes a pill ’cause it means you’re not a cop.”

Eager to prove that he also wasn’t a cop, the other guy reached into Doug’s little box and took a pill too.

“How much you want for ’em?” he asked.

“I can get five bucks a pop for these, no problem,” Doug said. “It depends how many you want. If you buy in bulk, you’ll get a price cut.”

Doug, Mitch realized, was a good businessman. He had a thousand pills in the box, and the shifty doctor who gave them to Kevin only wanted two dollars a pill. So Doug had started out the negotiations with a possible three-thousand-dollar profit.

Staring out the window, oddly excited by the whole thing, Mitch listened as they haggled. The final price they agreed on was $2,800, which the bald-headed guy produced by just reaching into his wallet. This guy carried around more money than Mitch had seen in months. The only time Mitch ever had a stack of hundreds in his hand, he was on his way to the post office to get a money order for rent. These two didn’t look rich, yet they had a luxury SUV and three grand in cash. He was tempted to ask questions about their lives: What did they do for a living? Who were they? Did they have families? But he was smart enough to know that a parking-lot drug deal wasn’t the occasion for exchanges of real information.

The deal completed, they said their goodbyes and shook hands again as they got out of the car. Eight hundred dollars, just like that. Mitch felt a surge of adrenaline as they got back into their car.

“Holy shit, dude, that was awesome! You’re the man!” He punched Doug’s shoulder. “Eight hundred bucks! We can get a great car for that.”