Denis Johnson - Angels

They were in it.

In the rear, Dwight was briefly manhandling the chiefest officer available, speaking too softly for James to hear. Bill Houston covered the tellers and intervening customers. James pressed the Ruger into the guard’s face, making him smell the stainless steel: as soon as the money came out he would have to come around and disarm the man, and then take tellers one and two. Between James and Bill were customers who could not be said to be thoroughly neutralized. They were thin — they had known they’d be thin — but it meant as much as ten thousand dollars each to take the bank without a fourth gun.

Dwight was speaking now: “All right, we’re in Phase Two, control and movement.” To the tellers: “I want no alarms. ” To the officers: “I want no alarms. ” To the tellers: “I want drawers open. I want money stacked. I want no alarms. ” Pointing to the vault behind the officers, he said, “You see that vault there? I want that vault cleaned of cash in three minutes. You, and you , will clean that vault of cash in three minutes. Begin now. All others in this area: on your hands and knees, crawl immediately to the tellers’ area over here to my right. Move now. Hands and knees. ” As tellers, officers and customers began doing as they’d been told, he chanted at five-second intervals: “I want no alarms , I want no marked bills. I want no alarms, I want no marked bills. ”

The money was coming out. James wanted to check the clock above the tellers’ area, but knew better. He watched the guard’s face as he moved slowly around the desk to accomplish the man’s disarming. And the face was scary. It was smooth and framed with silver hair and absolutely crimson. The grey, nearly white eyes were sightless — he was having some kind of fit, perhaps.

Burris felt his was the hardest job — to watch helplessly from the car.

For the first moments after James had drawn out on the guard, only James and Bill Junior were visible to Burris. And then Dwight came up from the rear of the establishment, herding together some people and putting them down onto the floor, holding aloft the German machine pistol like something he wanted to keep above a rising flood.

The scene appeared to Burris as a moving diagram flattened out against the window, a vision revealing the weak spots in their plan. It was a big bank. As Dwight moved forward, Bill Houston was left to secure nearly half its area by himself. James’s firepower was nullified; he was useless until the guard could be disarmed. In the recesses of the place, where Burris’s vision couldn’t penetrate, men were cleaning the vault virtually without supervision. Burris had been prepared to endure unexpected calamity — a cop might arrive to cash his paycheck, a self-armed citizen might open fire in defense of his savings — but to witness how tenuous was their command of the bank and its customers, to know that almost any degree of resistance would be uncontainable, would ruin everything, would plunge them into chaos — it made him want to run inside and start shooting people. It was fake! This was bunko! They were bluffing here, they intended to create an impression of strength and get away with money by intimidation. We’re not going to make it, he thought. We can’t handle the least go-wrong. Save myself, save myself. This is crazy!

And now their operation did in fact appear to be going crazy. He heard popping noises from inside the bank and saw James, coming around behind the guard’s desk to take his gun, abruptly moving backwards, as if jerked by the belt. The guard was standing up now, and because of the elevation of his desk — designed to give him a sweeping view of the bank, to make him the most powerful figure in it — he seemed taller than a natural man. In his hand he held a black revolver, and the expression on his face was definite and clear to Burris as he fired again, wounding James somewhere in his abdomen. His face was tight and pale, almost the color of his silver hair. James fell backward, and Burris could no longer find his brother in the view.

And then the guard seemed not to know what came next. He only stood there. Dwight was looking over his own right shoulder, in an attempt to keep secure the area behind the tellers’ windows. And Burris could feel them hitting the buttons in there, could feel the silent hammering tremor of alarms moving under the world and up his legs.

The guard posed in his bewilderment like wax.

Burris was out of his seat and unaware of it, standing next to the car’s open door, an unarmed bandit wearing a false beard on the sidewalk before a bank. “ Somebody kill that motherfucker ,” he screamed.

“ Kill that son of a bitch, ” Burris screamed.

His brother was down. He cried from the pit of righteousness, “ Kill that man! ”

And Bill Houston did.

Now that the shooting was started, Bill Houston wanted it to go on forever. Holding his gun out toward the guard and firing was something like spraying paint — trying to get every spot covered. He wanted to make sure that no life was showing through. He didn’t want the guard to have any life left with which he might rise up and kill Bill Houston in return. When the guard was still, lying there at the open mouth of his C-shaped desk with his jaw hanging off to one side and the blood running down his neck and also back into his hair and his ear, Bill shot him twice more in his chest, and would have emptied the shotgun into the guard but caught himself up short, feeling he didn’t want to spend his shells, because shells were more precious than all the money that surrounded them now. The smoke of gunfire lay in sheets along the air around his head, where light played off the fountain’s pond and gave it brilliance. In the center of his heart, the tension of a lifetime dissolved into honey. He heard nothing above the ringing in his ears.

As Jamie steered James’s pickup — borrowed a little bit ago, she couldn’t have said exactly when — the experience was like that of piloting a boat. The back wheels seemed unconnected to the front. The heat of late morning strewed the asphalt with imaginary liquids, and the world seemed out of synch with itself. She had the black transistor radio going on the dashboard, its muttering and snickering generally submerged in the noises of traffic. Everything was turning to rubber in her hands.

Standing on the seat, hanging onto the windowsill with one hand and the dashboard with the other, Miranda looked to Jamie just like a little baby doll from Paradise in a new dress from Marshall’s, a discount establishment. Miranda was singing a little song: “I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go,” and after a while, as if by singing these words she had made them come true, an urgency crept into her voice and then she was no longer singing but had set up a chant—“Mom I gotta go-do-tha bath -roo mom I gotta go-do-tha bath -roo mom I gotta—”

“Hush, fer Godsakes,” Jamie said, and just then very clearly the transistor on the dash said, “Only twenty more days.” An electric shock of fear ran down her legs. “I gotta go too,” she said.

They were right downtown, on what she believed was a one-way street. At the outermost periphery of her vision, she glimpsed some flowers drifting down like rain when she turned her head to find a parking space. “I hafta go now, right away, because I can’t wait,” Miranda informed her desperately. As if it had just come to life, Jamie felt the deep throbbing of the truck’s engine all around them, and beyond that, the pounding of summer heat so deep their human ears were helpless to place it, the pulse of thought, of reality itself — and she braked swiftly, overcome by a sense that the next moment of time meant everything. Softly the radio spoke to her: “Call 248-SAVE.” “Oh my God,” Jamie said, and tears sprang up in her eyes. “Stay here,” she told Miranda, and got out of the car.