A Clean Getaway, Page 2

hole in his shoe. He screamed and collapsed, grabbing one of his ugly, black brogans as blood poured onto the faded asphalt.

  “You shot me,” he said. He was hunched over, the back of his jacket exposing a small pouch for his handcuffs. I grabbed them and used his vulnerable position to push him onto his belly. I reached up and grabbed the left thumb, bent his arm behind him and cuffed it. Then I did the same thing with the right arm. When I had him all trussed up, I got him onto his feet – or maybe onto his foot at that point – and we limped over to the police cruiser.

  Morrison didn't want to go into the trunk, but his hands were bound and he was off balance because of his injured foot. Frank was a big guy, and heavy. Finally I had him tucked into the trunk.

  “I'll call 911 and tell them where you are,” I said. “If you're smart, you won't come after me. Maybe you think you owe me one, after I shot you. But remember that you're alive because I let you live.”

  “You don't think we'll get you? We'll get you. I got your license. I got your name. I know where you live.”

  “You mean Phillip Orr?” I said. “That's just my little joke. My name's Phillip. Or it's not.”

  I slammed the trunk and returned the gun to its deep pocket in my tool belt. From another pocket I took a prepaid cell phone and called Curtis. He had a prepaid cell, too. Almost untraceable. After we were done with them today, we'd chuck them somewhere no one could find them.

  “Come pick me up,” I said, and told him where I was.

  “That's all the way across town,” he said. “What the hell happened?”

  I sighed. Curtis was going to hold me down. I had known him since we were in first grade, and there was no one else I could trust to help me with something this outrageous. We were roommates now, a couple of guys who couldn't afford to live alone in the city. He was stupid and lazy, but I could count on him. He picked me up twenty minutes later, and we headed back to his place to count the take. On the way back, I got him to call 911 and tell the cops Morrison's location.

  Eighty thousand dollars. That's what we got. It took us a long time to count it all, and then afterward, we just sort of sat at the kitchen table and looked at one another. The stacks of money were separated into hundreds, fifties and twenties. Nothing smaller. It was more money than either Curtis or I had ever seen. We waited until after dark, then filled the money bags with sand and threw them into the East River. My phone followed. I wiped the hard drive on my computer and tossed it too. I'd used three different proxies to hide my IP address from Craigslist, but you can't be too careful.

  We spent two days watching coverage of the “daring robbery” on the local newscasts. The security guard was going to be all right – the pepper spray had hurt, but it wasn't lethal. Detective second grade Frank Morrison fared a little worse. He'd had his big toe shot off by a robber. I snickered a little about that. The newscasters put up a not-very-good likeness of me on the screen. The day they did that, I went into the bathroom and shaved my head and mustache. And the amount of money we'd stolen kept growing with every news report.

  “They say it's a hundred and twenty grand now,” Curtis told me the second day. “Are you sure we counted the money right?”

  “They just say that so they can make some profit back from the insurance company,” I told him. That's when Curtis told me I had all the angles covered. I wish he had been right.

  By the third day, the talking heads on the TV had moved on to different stories. That worried me. The media might have moved on, but I was pretty sure the robbery was still a priority with the cops. With no news coverage, I couldn't track what was going on.

  We wanted no links to the job at all. And there would have been none, if Curtis had done the smart thing. But like I said before, he was stupid. He kept his cell phone – why, I don't know. He could have gotten a new one easy. But I saw him talking on it one afternoon, a few days after the robbery. I snatched it out of his hand.

  “He'll call you back,” I said and snapped it closed. Curtis just gaped at me.

  “They can trace these, dummy,” I said. “This is the phone you used to call 911, right?”

  Mutely, he nodded.

  “If you've had it on at all, they can use it to find us,” I said. I didn't ask him why he hadn't thrown it away. Years of knowing Curtis had made me understand that screaming about it wouldn't stop his dumb behavior – it just made him feel bad. And any energy I put into anger was energy that wasn't going into figuring out how to deal with this situation.

  “Go upstairs. Look out the windows on both sides of the house and tell me what you see.”

  Curtis rumbled up the stairs, and a few seconds later thundered right back down. He was out of breath.

  “Couple of cop cars at either end of the block,” Curtis said. "Nothing out back yet.”

  “Go get the money,” I said. I went to the junk drawer in the kitchen and pulled my little .25 automatic. We still had most of the money, tucked away in a black duffel bag under Curtis's bed. I was peeping out one of the heavy blackout curtains in our living room. Detective Frank Morrison hobbled down the sidewalk with the aid of a pair of metal crutches. He and a crew of uniformed officers were just getting out of their cruisers at the far end of the block. Curtis came back down with the money. He set it on the living room floor.

  “Take a look at this,” I said, and pulled the curtain slightly away from the window. Curtis stepped forward to peer out, and when he did, I put the muzzle of the .25 behind his ear and pulled the trigger. The bullet never came out – instead, Curtis simply slumped to the floor. A little blood poured out of the hole in his head and stained the carpet. There was a moment when I swear he understood what I'd done. But I am still human enough to hope not. The shot froze the cops, and they all began to back toward their cruisers. Morrison hobbled as fast as he could, and I bet none of the patrol officers moved to help him.

  I grabbed the duffel bag full of money and went through the kitchenette, out the back door and through the back yard. I left all the dead weight – everything that tied me to my old life – behind me.

  When the cops went into the house, all they would find was the husk – the man I used to be. And that didn't matter anymore. I walked down the sidewalk, feeling the clean heat of the early spring sun on my face. Behind me, there were no footsteps.

  It was a clean getaway.

  END

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