How to Rob an Armored Car

191 Pages·2009·0.89 MB·English

by  Levison Iain

HOW TO
ROB AN
ARMORED
CAR
Also by Iain Levison
A Working Stiff's Manifesto
Since the Layoffs
Dog Eats Dog
HOW TO
ROB AN
ARMORED
CAR
iain
Levison
Copyright © 2009 by Iain Levison
All rights reserved.
Published by Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levison, Iain.
How to rob an armored car / Iain Levison.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56947-599-7 1. Criminals--Fiction. 2. Pennsylvania--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.E933H69 2009 813'.6--dc22
2009011309
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Samantha
HOW TO ROB AN
ARMORED CAR
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
AFTERMATH
1
CHAPTER
M
ITCH WAS WATCHING a forty-two-inch plasma TV when the
woman came up behind him. She was pretty but rough looking, hippieish,
with long hair falling all around what appeared to be a brown bedsheet. He
had been staring at the $1,799 price tag on the TV, knowing he would never
own it, not at what they paid him to manage at the Accu-mart. He would
never own it unless he stole it, and he was wondering where they kept the
inventory sheets for the high-end electronics.
“Hi,” she said, her tone not friendly but brusque, as if the salutation was a
military call to look alert.
Mitch turned slowly from the TV. “How can I help you?”
“Are you a manager?”
Oh, Christ. One of the employees had pissed her off. It could have been any of
them; none of them gave a shit.
Any of them but Charles, the Nigerian, whom Mitch had just sent on a
mission to buy an eighth of kind bud while still on the clock.
“I am.”
“I read that all your clothes are made by political prisoners in China. Is that
true?”
She had an angelic smile on her face while she asked it, but she had really
come looking for a fight. She was holding a candle she was going to buy, and
she had to be feeling bad about coming to a superstore, a huge corporate
conglomerate, to buy a cheap candle, and now she felt the need to pick a fight
with a manager to make herself feel better. This way, when she told her hippie
friends where she got the candle, she could also add the story of how she had
argued with one of the corporate henchmen, which made her a supporter of the
little guy and a friend of the environment, rather than a cheap bitch who needed
a candle and was too lazy to make one herself, like the Earth child she was
posing as would do.
“You’ll have to ask in Clothing,” Mitch said.
This happened once a week. Accu-mart was not a store with good media
coverage. Every time one opened, there were protests. They were exploiting
Third World laborers, they were building huge parking lots which caused a
runoff of dirt and oil to enter the water supply, and they were underpaying their
employees. That last one was true enough, Mitch knew. But people needed
cheap shit, so the stores were always packed. If people really wanted Accu-mart
to go away, they could just stop shopping there, a rule which applied to the
candle-toting hippie bitch who was trying to pick a fight.
“Nice candle,” he added pleasantly.
She put the candle down on a TV set, as if she had never intended to buy it,
had just been carrying it around in case the lights went out. “That’s how you can
sell them so cheap, isn’t it? You don’t pay the people who make them for their
labor.”
“Ma’am, I really have no idea. This stuff just comes in on a truck.”
“Well don’t you wonder where it came from? Who made it? Because they’re
paying your salary, you know.”
“Yeah, they are,” said Mitch. These issues had been addressed in the training
video, and Mitch knew what he was supposed to say. Growing global economy,
market forces, people being offered jobs and earning money, as opposed to not
working and earning no money, blah blah blah. The corporate response sounded
hollow even to him, and he didn’t care. “If someone is making money off these
people, it ain’t me.”
She stared at him.
“Lady,” he said, tired, forgetting his script. “What do you want from me?
Why don’t you go over to the coffee shop and say something to them? You think
coffee pickers in Colombia make any money? How about the people who make
your car tires?” It was burbling forth, all the stuff he thought about while he
restocked floor mats and air fresheners and added up time cards. He knew it
would only be a few seconds before he started casually using the word fuck,
which certainly hadn’t been in the training video, and then he would be back on
the unemployment line and his half-assed health insurance would be gone and he
would be cooking at the restaurant with his roommate, Doug. He took a deep
breath, stopped himself, and stared at her blankly.
“You people,” she said, marveling at Mitch’s insensitivity.
“You know, that parking lot used to be a forest.” This was clearly a first-time
argument for her, and she had retreated to the forest issue quickly. They usually
put up a little more of a fight before they started rambling about woodland