Not the Average Bank Robbery

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.