Fall from Grace (3 page)

My piece of banking business was short and quick. If luck was on my side, I could get it done in less than a couple minutes and then I’d be back to work before anyone realized I was out longer than expected. Or I wouldn’t. The odds were about evenly balanced, which to a gambler like me are probably the best I could get anywhere.

When my glasses reached the desired darkness, I adjusted my ball cap so that the brim hung a little lower over my face, and walked up to the bank and stepped through the doors. I grabbed a form from the dispenser, scribbled on it, and since there was nobody waiting, stepped to the front of the line. Three of the four tellers were helping other customers; the one without a customer was sorting bills into a pile and writing a few figures on a sheet of paper.

My heart rate increased slightly and I started to breathe through my mouth, as my mind gave birth to a pang of worry. I felt an urge to look up at the cameras and around for any other staff or recently arrived customers, but that would only draw attention to myself. The goal was to make myself as inconspicuous and undistinguishable as possible. No doubt there would be photos, maybe even video footage, of my presence, but I knew they would mostly show a white guy with a ball cap and sunglasses, as normal as you could find in this city. I could be anyone.

I took a slow, deep breath, and allowed everything to slow down for me. In a few seconds, I was back to my normal self, a bit nervous but outwardly calm and collected.

The teller made eye contact with me and, with a smile, invited me to step forward. I did, without returning the smile, and slid the deposit sheet forward, holding it tight to the counter with three fingers.

The teller glanced down at the deposit slip and his smile faded. The hand reaching for the slip jerked back as if it was escaping from a mousetrap. His eyes widened as, for another second or two, he looked back at what I had written on the deposit slip:

“Please give me all your money. Sorry and Thank you.”

He looked up, insulted, but worried. I knew that he was searching in my eyes for the joke, but I shook my head. “Quickly please,” I said, glancing down at the slip to remind him why I was there. “And thank you very much,” I added. Nothing like a few
thank you
s, and
please
s in the right places, even when it’s a command for
no dye packs, please
, to give them efficiency in their manner.

The teller gave me another look, but this time it was a deeper one. I gave him nothing in response; no emotion, no blinks, no smiles, just a blank face. I had no gun, no knife, no weapon of any kind, and there wasn’t even a threat in my note, but the instant the teller looked back in my eyes, I knew I would successfully rob this bank.

South of the border, with their armed security guards, even in the smallest bank in the smallest town, this would be just another form of suicide. But up here in the Great White North, with our slightly tougher gun laws, our overriding sense of the rule of the law (thanks to the Mounties for that), and a nationwide system of banks with centralized training and procedures, things were a bit easier. Robbing a bank like this wasn’t that difficult, even without threats or a weapon.

It’s a lot like gambling. When you step up to the teller and hand over the note, you’ve got to have a certain recklessness, a “who gives a shit because it’s only money/life/jail/death” attitude. You’ve got to show the teller that you mean business. They may think that you don’t have a gun or any sort of weapon but you can’t let them trust that feeling. They have to believe that you are serious about what you are doing and that they had better do what you’ve asked or there’ll be trouble.

Maybe it’s my outward appearance of calm and my polite attitude that pushes these tellers to realize that I’m not someone to be trifled with, I don’t know. I guess that’s why the poker-playing reporters at the paper are reluctant to invite me to their games. When there’s a hand with big money at stake, the only thing I worry about is the basic poker stuff, whether the odds of my hand winning are good and/or if I’m being bluffed. Nothing else. I don’t worry about whether I can afford to lose that money, whether I’ll lose that month’s rent or grocery money or car payment with my bet. I’ve already lost everything in my life due to gambling, so a few hundred or even a few thousand bucks makes no difference to me. You can’t truly gamble if you focus on that kind of stuff, and it’s a weird sort of freedom. So when there’s a big pot at stake, I’m not calculating the cost of the bet on my life, job, and family because I’ve made and lost that bet already. More than once.

Then again, the reaction of tellers probably has nothing to do with me, and more to do with their training that tells them to give the money without a fuss. Even with the dramatic nature of robbing a bank, everything always seemed to go so smoothly that the other tellers and customers usually couldn’t tell the bank was being robbed. It was almost as if it was starting to lose its appeal. But I had to watch out for that because that kind of attitude would only drive me to the casinos, and once I walked though those doors, there was no coming out. This kind of gambling seemed a lot safer. Strange, but that’s just the way it was for me.

Outside the bank, barely five minutes after I strolled in, I walked toward the parking lot. Running would attract attention. I weaved in and out of the parked cars, even stepping into the convenience store to buy a couple of lottery tickets before heading back into the parking lot. By then, I already had removed my cap and opened my jacket to make a slight change in my appearance.

Sirens wailed in the distance but again I walked through the lot, this time directly to my car, the same way a convenience store customer would. The burgundy pickup was still there but the old-man sedan had been replaced by a dark green SUV. I climbed into the car, started it up, and pulled out. I was about a hundred meters away from the strip mall heading north toward the River Valley when I saw in the rearview mirror a couple of cruisers zip across the intersection toward the bank.

I cruised through the neighborhood, acting like someone looking for an address by leaning forward to look out my side windows every couple of seconds. I did this for another five minutes or so and then turned back onto Fiftieth Street heading north until 101th Avenue. Then I made a right toward downtown and my awaiting deadline.

4

The newsroom was what one imagined a major metro newsroom would look like: a large open room filled with clusters of desks, computers, and people typing on keyboards. Since it was about twenty minutes before the online deadline, the place was crowded with reporters of all types and beats pounding out miniature versions of their stories that could be included on the online edition of the paper.

This was a new thing to me, having two daily deadlines for two different editions of the same paper. But since readership of the actual printed version of the paper had been steadily dropping, there was more and more emphasis on creating an online presence. And with every media outlet and bloggers doing the same thing, the speed at which news had to be processed and delivered had increased exponentially since the last time I had worked. Now, instead of writing one story about the body in the field, I was required to write two: a short one for this online deadline and then a longer, more standard news story for tomorrow’s print issue. Once the print issue was delivered, my longer story would replace the shorter one in the online edition and the cycle would start again.

During my first couple of weeks back at work, it was a bit of an adjustment to adapt to this new way of delivering news, but the required skills were the same and a deadline was still a deadline. In my two decades of journalism, I had never missed one. Even during the tough times when my life was falling apart. The power of information, the rush of having news that no one else had, and the desire to be the first to break that news or impart that information, was a powerful addiction, sometimes even more powerful than gambling.

Entering a busy newsroom, with its high ceilings and clattering noise, each individual in a world of his own but everyone joined together in the same united purpose, always reminded me of walking into a casino. The jolt of adrenaline, the quickened heartbeat, and the hope of coming through with a win was almost the same. But unlike a casino, there was always some sort of success in a newsroom, some sort of achievement once the story was written. And with the deadline, there was always an end to your time there. While you could always leave a casino—they did kick you out after a certain time—I could never really come to a conclusion. I always seemed to need something more; even if I was winning, it was never enough.

I wove my way through the huddles of desks, heading toward the city section, which sat near the northeast corner of the room, roughly sandwiched between the sports and business sections. I was barely fifteen feet away when I was accosted by one of the assistant city editors. Mandy Whittaker was her name; she was a gangly woman in her mid-thirties, her long hair pulled back into a ponytail so that she looked much older than she was, more like an old hippie than an up-and-coming news editor. She was a pretty good assistant CE, smart, competent, and a little hard-nosed, but that was part of the territory.

When you’re responsible for making sure that twenty reporters get their stories filed on time, and then need to edit those stories and decide which ones go where in the four pages of the city section, you have every right to be a little hard-nosed. Of course, she was a little tougher on me because unlike all the other reporters in the city section, I had not been walking a picket line a couple months ago.

I had been a scab, was still a scab to many here, someone who had seen the strike as a way of getting a job, even temporarily, at the paper, which before the strike had a reputation as one of the best in the country. I wasn’t completely proud of what I had done, but it did get me off the street and into a better situation, and there were a few other things in my background that would be considered worse than being a scab, so I was able to sleep at night.

That said, the situation at the paper was a little confused because of the strike. Editorial staff and other unionized workers like printers, et cetera, battled management for five long months only to see their union crumble at the hands of Jacob Whyte. The Eastern-based press baron, contrary to union predictions in the early days of the strike, managed to put out a paper every day for those five months, thus keeping the advertising monies rolling while the union coffers were depleted. Of course, Whyte had had the help of a number of scabs, insiders like reporters who had defied the union and stayed at their jobs and outsiders like me. Except for three of us, none of the outsider scabs were given permanent positions; they had neither the talent nor the skill to last long when the real reporters came back. Even though I was a scab, at least I wasn’t one of those insiders who didn’t walk the picket line.

The animosity between the strikers and the insiders, many of whom had been friends, was deep and infected the newsroom like a nasty boil on the ass. So while Mandy had some trouble cracking the whip on some of her union fellows, she had no trouble using it on me when it was called for. “You’re late, Desroches,” she shouted at me without getting up from her desk.

“Sorry, boss,” I said with sincerity. “Something came up and it couldn’t be helped.”

“Just so you know, this isn’t a small-town weekly where you have all week to file your story. Every day’s a deadline here.” It was an obvious crack at me being a scab, because most of the scabs hired during the strike were small-town reporters from weeklies, looking to try work at a daily. Many of the editorial staff thought all of my previous newspaper experience had been at weeklies, but they were wrong. They were also wrong in their contention that working at a weekly was easier; it was only different and, in many ways, tougher.

At a daily, you usually only wrote one story a day, about five a week, and once you wrote it, you went home. At a weekly, especially if you were the only reporter/photographer on staff, you not only wrote the stories, you edited them, took and developed the photos, laid everything out, and if the paper printed its own issues, you also helped fold and inserted flyers. Also, five stories a week wouldn’t cut it at any weekly, even if there was another reporter on staff. My record for most stories in one issue at a weekly was thirty-eight, not one shorter than 250 words. If Mandy or anyone else at this paper that slagged weeklies as the minor league of newspapering ever attempted such a task, they would quickly change their attitude.

“According to my clock, Mandy, the city section’s deadline’s not for eight more hours so I got plenty of time.” By now, a number of reporters had looked up from their work to watch us.

“Yeah, but if you also check that clock of yours, you’ll realize that we now live in the twenty-first century and in this century there are these machines called computers, which allow us to access something called the Internet. And on the Internet, we have an online edition of the paper which has a deadline of twenty minutes from now.”

A number of retorts popped into my head, but I kept them to myself, partly because I had walked into that comment and deserved the dressing-down, but also the guilt over being late because of my trip to the bank was starting to creep in. “Okay, okay, boss. I’m rightly chastised and will have the story for the online edition.”

“I need 150 words from you and they better be good.”

I nodded and sat down at my computer and started typing without taking my jacket off. A good reporter, especially a good police beat reporter, never turns off his computer because all that booting up takes too much time. There was a bit of a lag due to the machine jumping out of its sleep mode and the first words of my lead appeared on the screen a few seconds later, but they quickly caught up with me. And since I had been composing, editing, and recomposing the story in my head throughout my drive from the bank to the paper, I was done in five minutes, plenty of time for Mandy to read it, put in her edits, and then send it off to the online editors who would do a quick proofing before popping it online for the whole world to see.