True Blend (3 page)

*  *  *

George peels the black sweatshirt off from over his windbreaker, flings it and the weapon onto a padded bench in the armored truck then bends at the waist, pressing his hands into his knees and drawing in a breath. He blows out an exhale and stretches the hosiery away from his sweating face, trying to cool down and slow his heart. When he starts to remove the hosiery, a voice comes from the front of the truck.

“Leave it on. And where the hell are your goddamn gloves?”

George looks at his hands, then grabs up the sweatshirt and pulls the leather gloves from a pocket. He tugs them on while watching the man standing behind the driver, giving orders. “Who are you?” When the man turns back to the front of the truck, George moves closer to him. “I asked you who you are.”

“Reid. Friend of your brother’s.”

Friend? No friend of Nate’s would wrench a child from her mother, aggressively kidnapping her and subjecting the mother and child to such torment. So everything takes on a different meaning now. Friend, truth, instinct. He’s got to look at details with that awareness. Both the driver and this Reid have removed the hosiery from their faces and cleaned up their appearances, with the driver having tossed the sweatshirt aside to wear the truck company’s uniform shirt. George starts to lift the hosiery off his face again.

“Hey,” Reid says quietly. “I told you already to leave that on. You’ll be delivering the girl later and we can’t have her identifying you.”

“Later? You got the truck. Let her go, for God’s sake. I’ll get her back.”

“And what’s to stop them from calling the authorities then? If they have her, they’ll call the police and we’ll be surrounded in a minute. She’s our safety net. With her on the truck, they’re trapped, and they know it. They give us an hour, they get her back. No hour, no girl.”

The girl. She sits in the rear seat, securely buckled in beneath a seat belt. Her feet hang idle, not reaching the floor. George lifts the sweatshirt he threw on the bench and pulls the saddle shoe from a pocket. Could he have done more in the parking lot, more than try to reassure her mother? Or would it have made matters worse?

“Hey, look,” the driver says. He points across the median to the far side of the four-lane road a mile from the bank. A serious car accident requires an ambulance and two police cars. “There’s Jeremy,” he says to Reid.

George looks out the side window. The ambulance and police cars are stopped, their lights flashing. Twisted metal is all that remains to one car’s front end; the rear passenger door of a smaller car is crumpled like a piece of tin foil, the car itself resting against a telephone pole. A middle-aged man sits doubled over in the front seat of the smaller car while a younger man stands talking to a police officer, motioning various directions.

Reid glances over his shoulder at George. “He made a nice week’s pay cracking up that car and keeping the officers very occupied this morning,” he tells him.

All George fears when he looks out the window again is those police officers being radioed of the heist, then looking up from compiling their accident reports at the armored vehicle passing by. “What about these windows? Are they bulletproof?”

“Glass-clad polycarbonate. Nothing’s getting through this,” Reid answers, knocking on the passenger window.

“Well,” George continues. “Don’t the drivers of these trucks check in with dispatch? They must be waiting for his call.”

Reid shakes his head. “The company has no idea they’ve been waylaid. The driver verbally completed his first stop to dispatch, confirmed the second and gave the route number, which is spelled out on this clipboard. It’s the longer route, so the customer’s not expecting him for a while. They do that. Vary their routes and their timing to throw off any robbery attempts.” He considers George for a long second, squinting a little. “He was very cooperative with my guy Elliott, here.” He nods to the driver. “Did whatever Elliott told him.”

George sits then on the side bench behind the driver area, still breathing hard, knowing damn well the nightmare those truck guards just faced. Did Elliott direct their attention to the child Reid grabbed? Was her life negotiated in the orders? His gaze scans the truck’s interior until it stops at the sight of the girl. He has to get her off this vehicle. “So you’re following the truck’s normal route,” he continues to Reid, though watching the girl carefully and trying to figure a safe way out of this. “Nothing out of the ordinary?”

Nate walks in from the rear of the truck and sits with George. His gloved fingers drum on the seat. “That’s how we’re going to beat this,” he says through the hosiery still on his face. “Just live normal, don’t raise any suspicions. Elliott is keeping it real professional behind the wheel. And no one will know it was us because we’re going back to our old lives after this. Back to our jobs, waxing the car, paying our bills. Like this never happened.”

“What’s wrong with you? It’ll never work,” George counters. “It’s too much. Too big.”

“There’s no reason it can’t work, George.” Nate glances out the window. “Once we unload the money, we’re all going back to our normal routines. Okay? You’ll have your old life back soon enough. It’s genius, man. We’ll blend right in. No one will suspect a thing. That’s our cover. Normal routine. Which is why we’re going to the casino afterward and meeting the others, just like we planned.”

“They’re in on this too?”

“No. Shit, they don’t know anything. And we’re going to keep it that way, so stay calm, would you? One day you’ll be glad you changed your mind and went with this.”

George stares at his brother. “You don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

“I’m not here for the money. Screw the money.” He lowers his voice. “The girl’s the only reason I came back. Just that girl. You’re all done, kidnapping a child like that.”

Nate brushes him off. “She’s a kid. She’ll forget. And no one’s going to hurt her, don’t worry. That’s not how we work.”

“What’s wrong with you?” George grabs a handful of his brother’s sweatshirt. “Look at her.
Look at her
.”

Nate pulls out of George’s grip.

“And what about your car?” George asks. “The authorities will trace it in a minute.” He stands, grabs a ceiling-mounted handrail and studies his brother, trying to read his distorted face beneath the hosiery.

“Both cars at the bank were removed before we even got this truck off the lot. We have good help,” Nate answers quietly. “And anyway, it wasn’t even my car.”

Little signs come back to George: the way Nate fumbled with the cooling controls and how he kept adjusting the mirror. They’d driven a stolen vehicle identical to Nate’s. George sways with the moving truck; it’s how his mind feels, swaying, reeling. Vehicles pass them on the highway now. He imagines the radios tuned to traffic reports, pictures the cups of coffee for the commute, the cell phone conversations. All the lives passing are intact. “Why couldn’t you leave me out of this?” He picks up the nine-millimeter handgun off the bench. His fingers close around the barrel and he smashes the black handle against the goddamn polycarb window over Nate’s head. “Damn it,” he insists. “We’re family, man.
Family
. What are you doing to me?”

Nate ducks when the gun hits the window. “Don’t you remember? Last year at the casino, that night when we talked about the perfect gamble?”

How could he forget now? Over a glass of Scotch, they decided anyone knocking off an armored truck executed a real gamble, one with the highest risk and the highest financial gain. “The perfect heist,” he whispers. “That was bullshit, Nate. Just talk, man.”

“Not for your brother, it wasn’t,” Reid says from the front, still standing behind the driver. “And the only way to keep you quiet was to get you in that parking lot with a weapon in your hand. Talk and you’ll do time.”

He stares at his brother. “Get me out of this, Nate,” he says, trying to drag a gloved hand through his matted, covered hair. Hosiery presses it flat. “Give me the girl and let us go.”

“It’s too late,” Nate explains. “If I didn’t bring you in, you’d put things together and say something to the feds. This way, you get a piece of it. You’ll never have to worry about your liability insurance going up, or the rent in that plaza, taxes, nothing. I took care of you. You’ll be living the dream.”

Just like their father used to tell him when he played professional baseball.
You’ll be living the dream, George
. Somehow it all got twisted up in Nate’s mind; it got too extreme. There’s some challenge to meet their father’s expectations. He sits beside Nate again.

“Listen. I’ll explain to the authorities that I was forced to participate.”

“Doesn’t matter, George,” Nate answers. “Participation is guilt, regardless of how it happened. There’s no going back, for any of us.”

But there’s always a way, a crack, a hole, something to get through. Leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees, he hangs his head. The girl starts moving, trying to curl up in the rear seat. When he looks back, her eyes are closed, her ponytails in tatters as she sucks her thumb.

And her mother must be devastated. George looks at his gloved hand, remembering the feel of her hand beneath it. She wore a skirt and blouse, a delicate gold chain at her neck, and her eyes were desperate. Because she thought he was one of them. She thought he was evil. And all he could do was tell her to give them the one hour as she pulled away from his concealed face, as he took the saddle shoe in his hand.

He had no way to tell her how he walked away from Nate’s car earlier while reaching for his cell phone to call for help. But then, well, then Nate said that thing about bait right when he noticed her and her daughter heading into the bank. And that was all he needed to see, because he knew it. He just knew it. They were the bait. And he couldn’t tell her how he turned back to Nate’s car, crouched low, bent inside the passenger door and pulled hosiery over his head before slipping the sweatshirt on over his jacket. In his rush, he couldn’t maneuver his sweating fingers into the tight leather gloves and so shoved those gloves into the sweatshirt pocket instead. She had no way of knowing that he picked up the gun on the seat, joggled it, swore and threw it back down, then grabbed it again only to try to help. She never knew how he sweat profusely as he accepted that there was no other way to protect them. She’d never know that he couldn’t live with himself if he’d kept walking.

She doesn’t know still that he’s on her side.

*  *  *

Time is a chameleon. It changes its skin, disguising mere moments beneath a forged eternity. Five minutes have passed. Amy’s gaze shifts from the two armored truck guards standing outside the small office to the tellers in the lobby down the hall. She visually patrols, her eyes stopping on everyone to be sure the police are not being summoned. But are they doing the right thing? Minutes matter in cases like this. Do you follow the orders of a criminal mind?

“Would you like to freshen up, Mrs. Trewist? Your legs are cut up pretty bad.” The bank manager motions to her knees. “I’ll have one of the tellers help you.”

Amy looks at her legs. Pavement grit is pressed into the raw scrapes and blood begins to cake on top of it all. She straightens her skirt, pressing out a wrinkle, and feels an injury on her hand. A deep, stinging scrape covers one side of her right palm, the hand that reached for Grace’s shoe. “No. No, thank you.” She squeezes her eyes shut and tips her head down for a moment. “Someone might call,” she finally says. “I have to wait for her. Do you understand?” She needs to run to Grace when she sees her. She needs to bargain if the phone rings. “Do you? I can’t be in the bathroom washing up. My daughter needs me to wait here.”

Turning back to the window, she wills her love to Grace with one slow breath after the other until she hears only the deep whistle of air entering and exiting her body. Her lips form the few prayers she knows and when the driver of the armored truck offers her a chair, her body sinks into it.

Every time a telephone rings, her heart skips a beat. Is there a message about Grace? The last message she had was from the man who took her shoe, who spoke quietly to her. Her left hand rubs the back of her right, remembering his hold on it. She closes her eyes again, trying, trying to recall every single one of his words.

“Let them have the money.” His voice sounded compressed beneath the stocking. It was like a voice coming from beneath a cheap Halloween mask, darkly hollow. “Your little girl,” he said, crouching there, his hand on the shoe after she’d pulled back, shocked by his distorted face. “I’ll do what I can to help her. Cripe, just give them the hour or, really, give them the hour or I don’t know.” He stood then, his head turning toward the armored truck while he backed away, as though checking to be sure it wouldn’t leave without him.

And she noticed his hand again, the one holding Grace’s pink saddle shoe, the hand with that ruby ring, reaching up to wipe the perspiration dripping down his face. She had never seen a hand tremble that much. It looked like the shoe would shake right out of his hold.

“Wait,” she pleaded with him, sensing some shred of assurance in his words.

He turned and started to run toward the truck. But he stopped, and one last time he looked long at her. “Be strong.”

Those were the last words, the last message about Grace.
Be strong
.

She looks out the bank window at the cars driving past, then down at her own hand. It shakes now much the way his did then.

*  *  *

George draws his hand over his masked face and looks back at the child. That’s when he makes a silent vow that has him straighten the ruby ring on his pinky beneath the glove, then brings him to his feet. He walks to the front of the truck and bends low as Elliott continues driving. “The girl.” There it is, the control. Finally. For her. His voice is quiet and steady. “If one hair is out of place on her head today …” He pauses until Reid turns and looks at him. “I’ll kill you. I don’t care about the money, I don’t care who you are.”

With that, he turns and walks the length of the truck, past a built-in computer workstation, past a shelf holding two bomb-protection blankets beside two bullet-resistant vests. He sees it all, unwilling to believe that he is a part of the threat for which it is all intended.