To Sleep Gently (11 page)

A minute later they were laughing again.

They spent the next half-hour chatting away, reliving old times. Then, with a yawn, Dempster said, "I should be getting out of here, it's late."

"Yeah, all right." Then to Angela, now in the bedroom, "Angie, Jack's taking off."

"Goodbye, Jack," she called out. "I'd come out and give you a hug but I'm indecent."

"No problem, good to see you. I'm sure we'll see each other again before I leave." And with that he made his way out, Mike following behind.

"Thanks for coming over, man."

"Thank you for dinner. Hard to believe, but Angela's actually become an even better cook."

"She took this cooking course at the Community College about a year ago. The instructor told her she was brilliant."

"She is. I'll eat her cooking anytime."

"Then maybe we can do it again before you take off."

"That would be great, count me in."

"All right." A pause, then, "I'm sorry about this afternoon."

"What about this afternoon?"

"Well, you were asking me about Carly and I was less than helpful."

A nauseating sort of buzz fluttered through him. "You didn't know anything. Hell, you told me her name."

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry."

"It's nothing, don't worry about it."

"You should talk to her if you wanna talk to her. I mean, if you want, I'd even be willing to mention something to her in my own very cool, suave, half-assed way."

"No, don't worry about it. I don't have time for that kind of crap right now anyway. It was just a momentary crush, that's all."

And no more, he thought—no more of that.

5

When he got back to the house, the guys were still out. He had debated going to the Eldorado for a drink himself, but was too tired and had already had more alcohol than he should have. As much as he enjoyed drinking, he preferred being clear-headed, especially when leading up to a job.

He went to his bedroom and closed the door, stripped down, and then went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. As he waited for the water to heat up, he looked at himself in the mirror. The reflection was strange to him, almost as though he was looking at a ghost. There seemed to be a part of him missing. He didn't know which part, but something wasn't there, and it was something near and dear to him. And now, all of a sudden, like a dormant virus finally awakening, the knowledge that some crucial aspect of himself had vanished made him sick. Or it had never been there at all and he just hadn't realized it before.

He climbed into the shower. The hot water glazed over him, relaxing his body, mitigating his mind. He kept his eyes closed, and allowed himself to wander around the niches, nooks and crannies of his head. Wheels turned in random directions and at various speeds, chopped film erratically spliced without thought, some of it backwards, or upside down. One moment he was on his grandmother's living room floor with a coloring book, the next he was watching Donald and Lawrence Wycza in the cellar with shovels. He turned and walked away up the stairs and to a beat up Mazda truck at the Sam Wharram Natural Reserve, and stared at a beautiful, young fairy tale, which disintegrated, changed, and reintegrated into a gas station two hundred yards down the road, rippling under intense heat waves. He walked along the road  towards it, beside him a beautiful conversation and a lovely soul that he didn't want to leave, even though he knew there was a good chance that every exertion might be used to get rid of it; then he slipped away into a car seat, where a hand jerked him off and sweet hot breath whiffed his face, as a recitation of calculated words clocked him like a hammer, telling him how some people say that a duck's quack doesn't echo, and he had no choice but to get out of the car and walk into a cell, where he would lie in bed at night trying to see light at the end of a long dark tunnel.

Darkness can be harsh, a voice inside his head told him, and some days never come.

#

God, it was so many years ago now. Dempster hadn't worked in over six months, and having overestimated his finances, was running low on funds. So when Frank Bourland called and told him about the job, he didn't see what choice he had.

Frank Bourland was a strong man with attractive, chiseled features. He was a smart man too, and had been doing this kind of work since he was sixteen. He and Dempster had known each other on and off for some time, and had pulled a job together two years earlier. Knocked over an independent video rental store in Muskegon that also held cash and handled betting for a group of independent bigwigs out in Grand Rapids, who liked to dabble more than a little in the races at the Great Lakes Downs. Without much fuss and only a couple of threats, they had managed to walk away with a little over $30,000.

The new job seemed simple enough. Down in Canton, security guards transported money in an armored truck from the Swig Time nightclub on Munson Street to the Wells Fargo bank on Frazer Avenue. While an armored car job is typically best handled using at least three, if not four or five men, this particular job seemed low key enough to be properly executed with only two. And plus, the more on the job, the more you gotta split the take.

Swig Time was the largest nightclub in the area, a swanky dance bar with a 580-person occupancy, a 3,500 square-foot dance floor, a separate shot bar, a martini bar, five service stations and a full game room.

Frank had done his research. Annual revenue for the place was somewhere around $1,100,000, while the yearly cash flow was around $640,000. Weekends were the best time, of course, taking in just about $12,000 on average. The thing was, on Memorial Day weekend Swig Time had a three-day festival party accompanied by additional holiday drink specials, which brought their numbers up considerably, almost doubling an average weekend. Also, because of the holiday, the banks were closed that Monday, and nothing could be transported until Tuesday, which added an extra day's worth of cash to the pot, bringing the grand total to somewhere around $27,000. Bourland had also learned that Swig Time was the armored truck's last stop on a four-stop route, though he had not been able to figure out what the other three stops were, not that it mattered. There was going to be additional cash already waiting in the truck from the earlier collections.

On Monday Dempster rented a 14-foot U-Haul truck under the name Benjamin Grant. He drove it to the Wal-Mart Supercenter on Tuscarawas Street and parked it amidst similar trucks and RVs, leaving roughly eight feet between the rear of the truck and the cinderblock wall that separated the parking lot from the street. He then went in and browsed around the store. He came out fifteen minutes later with a tube of airplane model glue and a small blanket, and climbed into the passenger seat of a blue 2001 Chrysler Cirrus with heavily tinted windows and Bourland behind the wheel.

At four o'clock the next morning the same Chrysler Cirrus as well as a beat up Chevy van parked at the far end of the Swig Time parking lot, where a couple of other cars had been abandoned for the night due to the odd mixture of drunkenness and responsibility. Dempster and Bourland, wearing loose-fitted black suits and ties, got out of their respective automobiles and walked away to have an early morning breakfast somewhere, each leaving a loaded 9-millimeter handgun underneath the front seat.

Dancing didn't start at Swig Time until six but the bar opened at noon, which meant the employees were probably going to show up around eleven. They returned to their vehicles at a quarter of ten. Each of them had put three coats of model glue on his fingertips.

At one o'clock they watched the armored truck pull up drastically close to the club's front entrance. A few early bird drinkers had shown up over the past hour but traffic was extremely minimal and the whole area, for the most part, was empty and quiet.

Two guards entered the club while a third remained up front in the cab, at the wheel. After a moment the driver ran a hand through his hair, bent down out of sight, and came up again with a paperback. Dempster and Bourland put on dark sunglasses, fake mustaches and black fedoras, then got their weapons ready and started their engines.

Five minutes later the guards exited the club, one carrying a heavy-looking postal bin, the other a ring of keys. As the second guard unlocked and opened the rear of the truck, the Chevy van pulled up leisurely and stopped crossways behind it, making sure to keep just out of sight of the left rearview mirror and blocking the truck in against the front of the club. Dempster killed the engine, removed the key and got out as the Chrysler pulled up at an angle adjacent to both truck and van. Dempster threw the van's key into the street.

By making it casual, the guards didn't immediately notice anything wrong, and therefore were slower to react. Before either could take action, each had suddenly found himself face to face with a small, dark, deadly gun barrel.

"Don't drop it," Dempster told the guard with the postal bin. "Believe me, the last thing you wanna do is drop that. Right now that's your life-support system."

The guard's hands rattled. His visage masqueraded as cool and calm, but just beneath the surface was stark terror.

To the guard with the keys Dempster said, "Join my friend there."

The guard slowly crossed between Dempster and the guard with the postal bin, hands raised at half-mast. Bourland had him stop three feet away from him and turn around. He relieved the guard of his Beretta, then told him, "Go up to the passenger side of the truck and knock on the window. Let him see you, and keep cool."

"Jesus Christ," the guard said, then stepped towards the cab of the truck, Bourland crouched down behind him, gun aimed at the small of his back.

He reached the window, then hesitated.

"Do it," Bourland told him.

The guard swallowed, closed his eyes, then rapped his knuckles on the window. The split second the door opened from the inside, Bourland clipped the standing guard with the butt of his own gun and rushed the driver.

Meantime Dempster had removed the other guard's Beretta from its holster. "Now set it down really slow," he said, and the guard bent down to do as instructed. The second the postal bin touched the asphalt, Dempster struck him in the back of the head with his Beretta, then quickly dragged him into the back of the truck. At the same time, Bourland returned with the other guard, and they tossed him into the back as well.

"How was the driver?"

"Piece of cake. Still looks like he's reading."

Bourland loaded the postal bin into the back seat of the Cirrus, while Dempster quickly removed five moneybags and three metal boxes from the back of the truck. They didn't take everything; they didn't have time. The van was helping to block sight of what they were doing, but at any second someone could pull in or stumble around the corner or glance out the wrong window. For all they knew someone had already called the cops.

Everything loaded up, they covered the goods with the blanket, tossed the Berettas, climbed into the Cirrus and drove away, heading towards Tuscarawas Street.

Wal-Mart was busier than Swig Time had been. Consumer-ridden zombies walked and drove all about like slowly dying fish drifting through a crowded aquarium. It took about two minutes to get over to the U-Haul.

Bourland pulled the Cirrus into the eight-foot gap between the truck and the cinderblock wall, and the two of them hopped out. Calm and casual, Dempster unlocked the back of the U-Haul, checked for onlookers, saw none, and the two of them transferred their take from the Cirrus to the storage truck. With this accomplished, they both jumped into the back of the truck and removed their mustaches and clothing, under which they wore shorts and loud tourist-style shirts. Two pairs of sneakers were waiting for them. They traded them for their oxfords.

They got out, closed up the back of the truck and headed for the cab, leaving the Cirrus where they'd parked it.

The mistake was made when Dempster, intent on getting the hell out of Canton, didn't consider that he was still holding his pistol when he got out of the rear of the truck. Bourland hadn't noticed, but it was the first serious blunder he'd ever made. Walking to the cab he stuck the gun into the front of his shorts but it was already too late. He didn't know if she'd seen anything else they'd been doing or not, but the woman with the infant and the full shopping cart had definitely seen the gun, had seen where it went, and the look in her eyes was as though she were staring at the devil himself.

He climbed into the passenger's seat of the cab, and tried to forget about it, even though he knew he couldn't. Never in his life had he goofed like that. What in the world had caused him to do it now?

It took them nearly four minutes to get out of the parking lot. Making their way toward Poplar Avenue, Dempster switched on the radio for any immediate late-breaking news about them. It had now been over half an hour since they'd left Swig Time, but so far there was nothing.

Bourland merged onto Interstate 77, heading north towards Cleveland, while Dempster continued changing channels on the radio.

After a couple minutes everything slowed down. Cars were backed up. With an aggravated sigh, Bourland inched the truck along, keeping with the glacial flow of traffic.

Five minutes went by, Dempster kept playing with the radio, then Bourland said, "Well I'll be a son of a bitch."

Dempster looked up and saw the roadblock ahead. State troopers were stopping every car on the road. As they moved closer, Dempster saw the troopers making brief inspections of every car. He quickly went over in his mind what he was to say in the event that something like this happened.

Then he heard Bourland say, "Oh you can't be fucking serious."

There were police lights behind them, whirling flashes of red and blue. Over the squad car's loudspeaker, the officer said, "Pull around and up ahead, please."

Dempster and Bourland exchanged a glance.

In the rearview mirrors they saw other squad cars on their way, maneuvering and zigzagging through the stalled traffic.

"Pull around and up to the roadblock, please."