Bradshaw

Bradshaw didn’t like it one little bit.  Any of it.  “Not one iota,” he kept repeating to himself, clinching his teeth against the pain.  Maalox had helped at first, but not now, and he didn’t know what to do, all on account of that fucking little white Escort.  Johnny Cash was no longer helping either.  All he knew was that the Escort didn’t belong, and that always meant trouble when you were somewhere you weren’t supposed to be.  He had a perfect right to be in a supermarket parking lot, everyone did, but he didn’t belong any more than the Escort.  Both his pickup and the Escort stood out like sore thumbs in a parking lot full of SUVs and BMWs and Mercedes and Volvos.   He’d been doing fine, but then along came that Escort.  It could be a ride for a store empoyee, a stock boy maybe, but then why was it hiding between two giant SUV’s?  Not easy to spot now.  In fact Bradshaw couldn’t see it at all, which made it all the more menacing. Are we made, he wondered?  But if so, what was the game?  Surely, they’d know I’d spot the Escort, so it made no sense.  And if it wasn’t the cops, there was nothing to worry about.  That’s what Mary Ann would say, and she’d be right, he was being paranoid, but telling himself that didn’t help.  He needed Mary Ann to tell him.  His stomach was on fire.  He grimaced, tapped his hands on the steering wheel, doubled up as much as possible.  He checked his watch.  Five more minutes and Mary Ann would be pushing a cart of groceries this way.  Not so long, he tried to convince himself.   

This was practice.  Mary Ann would spend about an hour in the grocery store and he would wait, and Johnny Cash and a couple of swigs of Maalox would get him through.  This was not his part of town.  He felt like a fish out of water.  Too fancy, but it’s where the bank was.  He had to calm down.  A woman came along pushing a cart up the row.  One of those uppity bitches that go to this store.  Wearing beige and faded green everything.  Shorts and t-shirt.  All loose fitting.  Flat brown sandals.  Toenails painted red.  Slim, good legs, but no make up and her hair was cut almost like a boy’s.  She passed the first SUV, then the space between them that hid the Escort, then the second SUV.  She pushed her cart to the rear of a gray Volvo sedan.  She opened the trunk and began unloading her groceries, and then a man in a ski mask appeared behind her and held a knife at her throat.  As Bradshaw watched the man forced her around to the front of the car.  She didn’t struggle much, as if convinced that if she just did as she was told, it would be okay, or maybe she was just scared out of her wits, too scared to think anything.  The man bent her over the hood, pushed her shorts and underwear down and raped her.

Bradshaw fell out of his pickup.  He’d tried to get out like a normal person, but as soon as one foot hit the ground, the pain in his gut got so bad it doubled him up and he wound up on the ground.  He wasn’t scared of that cocksucker, and he forgot all his reluctance to get involved with the police.  He wanted in the worst way to get over there and help that girl, but the pain just seized him and held on tight, and he was wallowing around on the ground.  Writhing actually, and the next thing he knew Mary Ann was standing over him.  He felt better immediately.  She helped him up to his knees.

“Over there,” he said, pointing.  “Rape.”  Mary Ann looked around.  “I don’t see anything.”  “Gray Volvo.”  She walked over to it, then took out her cell phone.  The cops were there in ten minutes.

*****

     Mary Ann could deal with cops.  She had them eating out of her hand in five minutes.  “Was she needed any longer?”  She asked them.  “My poor husband.”  The cops agreed to meet them at emergency.  “When my husband can talk, he’ll tell you everything he saw.”  The woman was dead, they told her.  Throat cut.  The cops didn’t tell her.  She’d seen for herself before the cops arrived.

     Whatever they gave him in the hospital was so powerful he could have gladly talked to J. Edgar Hoover.  He told them everything he knew, his tongue loosened by the pills.  He only got one brief look at the Escort, but it seemed in good shape, no body issues that he could see.  No he didn’t get the license number.  The guy was about a foot taller than the woman.  The ski mask and tight clothes, all black, like a bicycle rider.  That was it.

     He felt like a million dollars, but Mary Ann had to drive home.

     “You did good, sweetie,” she told him.  “Maybe they’ll catch the bastard.  That poor girl.”

     “I could have saved her life.”
     Being high, he regretted but didn’t feel devastated about not saving her life.  It was just a fact.  Or maybe he wouldn’t have gotten there in time even if he’d been able to run straight over to her.  And then his own life would have been in danger.  He knew nothing about dealing with a person with a knife, plus he was probably thirty years older than the guy.  He hoped he could convince himself of all that when the painkillers wore off.

     “Don’t be fretting over spilt milk, sweetie.”

     “You’re so good with those assholes.”

     “The trick is to be humble.  They’re always right.  Not much different from handling you, come to think of it.”

     He laughed.  Then he had a sobering thought.

     “The bank.”

     “Still there, honeykins.”

     “But…”

     “Don’t matter.  We could have been anybody.  Nothing suspicious.”

     “Except we don’t look like people who live around here.”

     “Mountain out of a molehill.  All kinds go to that store.  Besides, we don’t look like trash.  Just working stiffs.  And there’s a few of them in there all the time.  Don’t worry.”

     They needed the bank.  That was the bottom line, plain and simple.  They’d about run out of country banks, those lonely little buildings out in the middle of nowhere.  It was a breed that was quickly disappearing, and fewer and fewer every year meant that they had to hit them more often than was safe.  It was past time really when they should have been hitting the suburban banks.  Just resistance to change, fear of the unknown, was all that stopped them.  Everything else should be the same, even the getaway, always the tricky part.  Some of the outer suburbs were as spread out as in the country, so if you knew where the cops would be, you could get to a thoroughfare or freeway long before they ever arrived.  Blend in.  It was all timing.

*****

     “If you’re stomach is up to it,” said Mary Ann, “we’ll do the job Friday.”

     She was washing vegetables.

     “I took a roast out of the freezer.  Up to that tonight?” she asked.

     “I don’t know.  Can you make mashed potatoes?”

     “Of course.”

     “As far as the roast goes, let’s see how I feel.  I should be okay for the bank, though, especially if we get those prescriptions filled.”

     “Okay, but don’t get dependent on the pain killers.  I know how much you like them.”

     “I won’t.  Once the job is out of the way, the stomach will settle down.”

     She put a head of iceberg lettuce in the refrigerator and filled a wooden bowl with tomatoes, onions, lemon and garlic.  The floor squeaked as she moved around the kitchen.  He was sitting at an old formica kitchen table they’d bought at a garage sale, smoking and sipping on a glass of milk.  Now and then he ate a saltine cracker and a spoonful of chicken noodle soup.  He wasn’t really hungry, but he knew it helped to keep something on his stomach.

     “Tonight we can go over the map I drew of the inside,” she said.  “Then tomorrow we can drive over the getaway route again.”

     They’d done both things a dozen times already, and he knew it all by heart, but Bradshaw never questioned her.  He couldn’t remember a time when he objected to anything she wanted to do in regard to the bank jobs.  His faith in her was total.

     “If we do well Friday,” she said, “Let’s think about replacing this linoleum with tiles.  It’s almost beyond cleaning.  Think you’ll be up to that?”

     He nodded.  “I’m usually better right after a job.”

     “What brought it on?  Seeing the rape?”

     “That didn’t help, but it was coming on before that.  Waiting in that damned parking lot.”

     “If we’re going to do the suburbs, Hank, you have to get comfortable in that environment.  We don’t attract as much attention as you think.”

     “I know you’re right, Mary Ann, but it’s easier said than done.  I didn’t see a single other pickup in that parking lot and no one had a beard.  There was one tattoo, on a teenage girl.”

     “They’ve all got them these days.  After this job, we’ll practice going to those places before we even know what the next job will be.  Then maybe you’ll get used to it.”

     “Okay.  And it got worse as soon as I saw the Escort.  I knew there was something fishy about it.”

     “Well, it’s all behind us now.  Just the review of the bank and tomorrow the getaway route, and then the job itself.”

     “Getting this job over with will be a relief.” 

     In 20 years they’d never even come close to getting caught, or even spotted.  But then they’d never held up a suburban bank, and it was eating on him.  Maybe they’d give them money that had that exploding dye, or maybe the safe was timed so that the manager couldn’t open it if he wanted to.  The suburban banks were bound to be more up to date than the country banks, and the uncertainty filled him with dread.  Mary Ann said the dye wasn’t important if they made a clean getaway.  She’d looked into how to get rid of it, and it was pretty simple and just took time.  As to the timed safe, they’d just have to trust to luck.  They had no other choice. 

     Mary Ann had never been wrong before.  If the papers weren’t lying, the cops didn’t even know what kind of vehicle they used, and they’d been using the same one all this time.  That was Bradshaw’s domain.  He kept his pickup in top shape always.  Mary Ann’s domain was everything else.  All the details.  Most banks had more cash on Friday than any other day, for payroll checks, and Mary Ann knew that the money was usually delivered on Thurday afternoon.  Years ago she’d worked in several banks, and that had been the routine in all of them.  Therefore, they hit the banks on Friday mornings.  It wasn’t a sure thing, but it was close, and even those very few times when the take, for whatever reason, was relatively meager, it was enough to get them by for a while.  They didn’t need much.  The house and car were paid for, from extra big hauls in the past.  But as a rule, the take was enough to last at least six months.  They were both homebodies, always had been, even when they were younger.  They’d gone out dancing once in a while back then, but even that was hardly a huge expense.  Now they only went to movies and out to eat occasionally, so their biggest expenses were insurance, taxes, utility and medical bills and the savings they put back after every job, ten percent, and rarely touched.  Most of it was in a money market account and had grown over the years into a tidy sum.  They both knew that one day they would decide it was time to retire, either because of age and infirmity or because times had changed so much that there weren’t enough small banks left to make a decent living from.  For the present, though, with both in their fifties, they hoped that day was far away.  They loved robbing banks.       

     They made a good team.  He was lucky and knew it.  Mary Ann lived for staying busy and paying attention to details.  The whole routine and its implementation was hers, from which banks to hit, to how they conducted themselves once inside, to the getaway.  He felt that his own contribution was small.  Besides making sure that the pickup was a hundred percent reliable, all he did was stand tall and look mean with a gun in his hand at the front of the bank where everybody could see him.  It was an old .16 gauge Remington pump that he’d used for bird hunting when he was a kid.  He’d never fired it during a job in the whole twenty years they’d been doing this.  Mary Ann was far too good to let that happen.  She was efficient yet friendly.  She called the tellers “dear” and went right down the line and made sure all the drawers were emptied.  The big money was in the safe, and sometimes they had to be less than friendly if the bank manager raised a fuss about opening it, but that had happened only twice and was solved quickly both times by Bradshaw aiming the shotgun at the man’s head.  They’d never come across a foolishly brave bank manager.

     “Small in time, maybe,” said Mary Ann, when he voiced concern about his limited role, “but essential.  You put the fear of God into them.  And besides, this place would be a total wreck without you around.”  That was true.  He was always tinkering with the pickup, working in the yard or doing maintenance on the house.  He was a first rate handyman, no doubt about it, and it kept him busy.  He also hunted and fished whenever he could find the time and was so successful that it actually made a contribution to their budget.  They ate a lot of fresh catfish and perch and a freezer in the garage was always packed with venison and game birds.  He did his share to make their lives comfortable.  He even did a share of the housework, sweeping the floors, helping with the dishes, doing the laundry.  Mary Anne had objected at first, trusting no one but herself, not even Bradshaw, to do those things right, but he insisted and when she was persuaded that he would perform the chores exactly as she specified, she relented.  Still, even after all these years, she kept a close eye on his housework.

     She hardly even noticed what he did to the pickup or the house or the yard, and never questioned him on it, but her domain was her domain, and he was allowed to do only a few strictly supervised household chores.  One hard and fast rule was no cooking.  He couldn’t even make coffee or heat up soup.  She buttered his toast, put milk in his coffee.  She was a great cook and knew just what he liked and how he liked everything.  How much gravy to put on his mashed potatoes.  How thick to slice the onions and tomatoes on his sandwiches.  How much mayo to put in his salad and how to shred the iceberg lettuce.  Sometimes he wondered how much he’d requested what she did and how much she’d trained him to like it, but it didn’t matter.  Either way he was perfectly content.

    The only thing she did in the kitchen that concerned him a little was her fondness for making pies.  She didn’t let it get in the way of making his meals or keeping the house in order.  It was sort of like a hobby.  Two or three days a week she would spend all morning doing nothing else, and she did it with the same attention to detail that she applied to robbing banks.  She had the whole year planned.  Peaches, different kinds of berries, pecans, all according to when they were most fresh and abundant and cheap.  Sometimes she’d make half a dozen pies at a time and take them to bake sales.  That was all fine, a labor of love, but he started to worry when she decided to take two, a peach cobbler and a pecan, to the robberies.  He couldn’t figure out the benefit, and it seemed risky.  She wouldn’t leave anything so obvious as fingerprints, which might not matter anyway since neither of them had a record, but who knows what cops could do in this day and age.  They’d watched CSI for a while and it scared him.  Maybe they could trace the ingredients back to a certain store, and maybe they had enough of a line on the pickup to keep an eye out for any similar vehicle.  It bothered him, but Mary Ann thought he was being paranoid, and she argued that the pies served a useful purpose.  It confused the tellers and took their minds off what was happening.  That made them less likely to do anything foolish, according to Mary Ann.  He had his doubts about that, but he didn’t pursue the argument.  In his experience, Mary Ann had never been wrong, and that fact, even though it didn’t make him stop worrying, prevailed.