Chump Change.
3rd book in "Fish" Fishbein's Adventures in La-La Land series
Chapter 2
Ask Tony Robbins.
Ask Dr. Phil.
Ask any of the big name, high-ticket motivational speakers from the infomercials and they’ll be happy to tell you: a person usually rises within an organization until they reach a level where they’re no longer effective, productive or competent.
It’s called the Peter Principle.
And you’ll find it hard at work in every outfit from the neighborhood grocery to GM; from the GOP to BBD&O.
And we won’t even talk about the CIA or the Postal Service.
But take a look at Norman Shimazu and you’ll also see that the Peter Principle works just as hard down on the street as it does at the corporate level. Every organized crime famiglia has its share of rank and file and management personnel, who could only rise so far, then ran out of talent, steam or smarts.
For lack of a better label, let’s call them unwise guys.
But the fallout from a crummy yearly performance review at Big Blue, Proctor & Gamble or Verizon is nowhere near as drastic.
Or as permanent.
As a kid, Norman Shimazu rooted for the bad guys in every western or detective show he ever saw.
With the exception of maybe Starsky and Hutch, the bad guys always seemed to wear cooler clothes, drive more expensive cars and hang out with far more attractive women than the forces of good.
So, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the wrong side of the law was where the action, fun and opportunities for career advancement really were.
And Norman Shimazu was light years away from wrangling equations for JPL.
Ditto for Rob Gubbins, Antwon Porter and Javier “Bosco” Chubasco, buddies from his old neighborhood who shared Norman’s infatuation with the felonious side of the street. It didn’t take much to talk them into throwing in with him, and with the nationalities and races represented, they were truly an equal opportunity little gang.
And, since their membership mirrored a lot of the nationalities of some of those early seventies teens filmed on a hillside in Italy singing a feel-good commercial for The Real Thing, Norman and his merry men quickly got themselves nicknamed the “Coca Cola Crew”.
But after ten years in the exciting, wide open game of crime, the Coca Cola Crew had Peter Principled out somewhere near the bottom of the local criminal enterprise’s table of organization.
They still outranked the shaky old geezer who brought the Don his daily cappuccino, but that was about it.
If they ever wanted to get back in the game and maybe even pick up a key to the executive men’s room at the famiglia’s social club, the Coca Cola Crew needed a score.
But it would have to be something big.
Really big.
Even bigger than the steel shipping container full of condoms stolen off the San Pedro docks by another crew a few months before. Unfortunately, every one of the hot birth control devices was a cheap counterfeit, contaminated with some industrial chemical that could cause blisters, a painful burning sensation and a hasty but embarrassing outing to the local Emergency Room for all parties involved. Which made for an unfortunate end to a promising evening for dozens of wearers and wear-ees.
As well as the Mafia capo who had hung onto a few cases for his own enjoyment.
And it quickly resulted in a seriously unfortunate evening for the crew that gleebed the ersatz Trojans in the first place.
The media had dubbed the whole thing, “The Well-Hung Heist”.
So, whatever the Coca Cola Crew was going to pull off, it would have to be worth a ton more semolians and earn way more coverage from the press.
Without giving blisters or a painful rash to anyone.
And as luck would have it, the idea for their big score came knocking, pinging and misfiring its way up their hill a couple of nights after the awards dinner bust at the Queen Mary.
Norman and the crew were sitting on his front porch, knocking back a few brews and watching the sun set, when Antwon’s cousin D-Dawg rode up on his badly rusted, thrashed and dented embarrassment of a motorcycle, a twelve year old Kawasaki ZX-11. A one-time high performance sport bike that had seen better days.
And from the look of things, quite a few of them.
D-Dawg was born with the name Demetrius Saunders. But since nobody in his crowd could spell a word that long and complex, his street name just naturally evolved over time.
The poor kid crashed into adulthood with two strikes against him.
First, he had an acne-scarred face that looked a lot like one of those NASA photos of the surface of the moon.
Which pretty much ruled out getting by on his looks as a career option.
And second, he was too dumb to steal.
D-Dawg worked for the city of Los Angeles; he had a menial filing job in one of their accounting offices, the one responsible for administering the Mississippi River-like flow of small change that flooded in every day from all of L.A.’s parking meters.
On an average year, at least thirty million bucks in nickels, dimes and quarters. Give or take.
And with his clapped out Kawasaki rapidly heading for that big gran prix track in the sky, the time had come for D-Dawg to hit up the city for a little spare change.
He had the motive.
And he had the opportunity.
This could be the perfect crime, D-Dawg reasoned. If only he knew enough about the criminal side of project management to make it happen.
That’s when he reached out to his cousin Antwon, and his partners in crime.
D-Dawg down shifted his beat-up old Kawasaki and pulled off the Pasadena Freeway at the Avenue 26 exit, noticing that his front wheel was wobbling a little worse than usual. He took a right and crossed Monterey Road. Then his rolling embarrassment sputtered and backfired up the steep hill.
His idea was simple. The office in which he worked was the central collection point for all the miniature round metallic portraits of Washington, Jefferson and FDR that got stuffed into the city’s parking meters each day.
There, it was sorted by denomination, counted and bagged, and once a week would be taken by armored car to one of the terminals at LAX, for secure shipment to the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco.
And on an average week, there was usually so much coin of the realm involved, that at least three armored cars would be needed to haul it all to the airport.
His cousin Antwon was impressed. “That’s a lot of muthufuggin’ green.”
With Antwon, everything was muthufuggin’ this, and muthufuggin’ that. In fact, “muthuhfuggin’” was probably the largest and longest word the man knew.
“Uh huh,” D-Dawg answered. “I hear that.”
But as excited as everyone else on the porch was, Norman was still holding back, stuck on a couple of questions that needed satisfactory answers before he would commit himself or his crew.
“How much you figure’s gonna be in one of those trucks, man?”
D-Dawg shrugged. “All’s I know is they called the armored car place and ordered four of ‘em.”
He smiled broadly, revealing a 24 karat gold canine and incisor.
“So, whatever it is, it gots to be large. Know what I’m sayin’?””
Norman nodded. Deep inside, he was allowing himself just the teensiest bit of excitement; this score could easily end up skyrocketing the entire Coca Cola Crew into the big leagues.
“What about security, slick? I mean, we’re talkin’ about armored cars here. You can’t just walk in and Slim Jim the door open on one of those bad boys.”
“Uh huh.” D-Dawg smiled again and reached into the pocket of his jeans.
He pulled out a huge, flat brass key, as big and hefty as the ones the Sheriffs used to use on the cell doors at Central Jail.
“This a master key, my man. Open the door of any armored car in the muthufugguh.”
The Coca Cola Crew was suitably impressed. Even Norman.
“Just make sure everybody gots tan work shirts when you come in. And one o’ y’alls better be carrying one of these.”
D-Dawg pulled a clipboard holding a small stack of papers out of his backpack.
“That way you look official. Ain’t no fool gonna mess with nobody packin’ a clipboard. You feel what I’m sayin’?”
The plan was to show up at the transport office at about eleven thirty on Friday morning. The trucks would all be loaded and idling in the yard with their doors locked, waiting for their crews to finish eating a quick lunch in the locker room, so all those quarters wouldn’t have to endure any stops on their way to LAX.
And with every one of the drivers and guards chowing down inside the building, it should be relatively easy to just sashay on in, pick out an armored car and drive it off.
In and out.
Quick like a bunny.
Just a walk in the muthufuggin’ park.
But at the exact time the Coca Cola Crew was supposed to be driving away with a hefty slice of the city’s weekly parking meter take, they were also scheduled to appear in Room 1276, in Superior Court.
And both the courts and their bail bondsman took a dim view of failure to appear at one’s arraignment hearing.
Between Norman, the rest of his crew and D-Dawg, there wasn’t enough collective grey matter to decipher a wall clock with Roman numerals on its face.
Which put figuring out how to be in two places at the same time just a little above their pay grade.
And there was no point in asking Bosco’s magic eight ball for a quick yes or no, since it had been stuck on “ask again later” for the past nine years.
They finally solved their dilemma a little before midnight, by playing rock, paper, scissors, match.
####
“Norman Shimazu …”
No answer.
“Robert Gubbins …”
The Bailiff’s call was met with another round of deafening quiet.
“Antwon Porter …”
More silence from the Peanut Gallery.
“Javier Chubasco …”
Bosco’s absence and silence made it unanimous.
The Assistant Prosecutor and the Public Defender looked at each other from their tables on either side of the aisle and shrugged.
The judge impatiently checked the time on his watch as the Bailiff called all four names again, this time a little louder. It was eleven thirty on a bright and sunny Friday morning, and his honor was a little miffed.
Because if he had to sit there every day in a black robe that made him look like he was perpetually on his way to his high school graduation, the least these four clowns could have done was show up.
Or for Pete’s sake, call in with a good excuse, like they were sick.
Or better yet, dead.
The judge took a second look at his Seiko.
“Let’s call it failure to appear,” he said to the Bailiff. “Bench warrants for all four. Call the next case.”
As far as Norman and the rest of the Coca Cola Crew were concerned, it all came down to a question of numbers. After all, from a purely bottom line standpoint, there was a lot more money to be made stealing a fully loaded armored car than pleading to a handful of dumbshit misdemeanors.
Besides, they already had almost a hundred smackers invested in brand new, tan Dickies work shirts and a clipboard.
So, while the Bailiff was unsuccessfully calling the roll, they were walking through the armored car company’s gate like they owned the place.
While the Assistant Prosecutor and Public Defender were looking at each other and shrugging, Norman was putting D-Dawg’s master key to work.
And while the judge was angrily looking at his watch and giving the Coca Cola Crew an official no-show, they were driving off the lot.
In the biggest armored car in the muthufugguh.
####
“Oh, shit …”
Norman realized they had a big problem before he even opened the rear doors of the armored car.
They were stopped in an alley behind the rundown and overpriced neighborhood market at the bottom of his hill.
With a transmission that gave up the ghost less than two blocks after he pulled off the freeway.
And to make things even worse, the back of the armored car was stuffed with three hundred canvas satchels full of legal tender for all debts public and private.
And it was all in quarters.
“Hijo de la chingala,” Bosco strained as he lifted one of the sacks. “Son of a bitch, these suckers is heavy!”
With a thousand dollars’ worth of quarters carefully counted and wrapped into rolls inside, each of the sacks tipped the scales at a sprightly fifty pounds.
The good news was, it looked like their non-appearance in court that morning had netted them around three hundred K.
The bad news was, it was a broiling hot day and they were stuck in an alley at the bottom of their hill.
Next to a dumpster full of rotting produce and the various critters attracted by its unique aroma.
In a stolen armored car with a blown transmission.
So near, and yet so freakin’ far.
“Damn, man.” Robbie was starting to sound a little panicked.
It was one thing to pick up a few half-assed misdemeanors. Hell, that just came with the job description.
But getting caught red handed in a broken down, hot armored car with seven and a half tons of stolen laundromat change wasn’t on his list of things to do that day.
“What’re we gonna do?”
“Gimme a second,” Norman snapped. “Lemme think!”
He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Antwon.
“Here, man. Dime D-Dawg. See if he can steal us a pickup or a van, or something.”
D-Dawg was waiting at the house at the top of the hill, less than half a mile away. Blood might be thicker than water, but cousin or not, he was damn sure going to be there when the money showed up to make sure he got his cut, because he had plans for a big chunk of his share.
Namely, a Suzuki Hayabusa.
It wasn’t just the fastest production motorcycle on the planet; it was the fastest one ever made. At a factory-stock hundred and seventy-three horsepower, it could nudge the speedometer needle to just a shade over two hundred miles an hour, straight off the showroom floor. And D-Dawg was seriously jonesing for one.
And at just a little less than eleven thou, a brand new Suzuki Hayabusa was suddenly in his price range.
“Ain’t that a bitch?” Antwon angrily snapped the phone shut and handed it back to Norman.
“You get ahold of him?”
“Uh huh. He say, he don’t know nothing about stealin’ no damn pickup trucks. He say, we want one that bad, we should steal the mu’fugguh our own selves.”
“Well, isn’t that freakin’ special?” Norman angrily stuffed the cell phone back in his pocket and climbed out of the armored car.
“You guys wait here,” he said to the rest of his crew. “I mean it. Nobody leave this damn truck. I’ll be right back.”
Norman was back ten minutes later, perched behind the wheel of a jacked-up and bright red, full-sized Ford pickup with chromed exhaust, huge mud ‘n snow tires and a pair of life-sized plastic, imitation bull testicles swaying from the bottom of the rear bumper.
He backed the Ford up until its scrotum was touching the armored car’s back bumper, and then motioned everyone out into the alley.
His plan was brilliant, even if he thought so himself.
Just have all of the assembled Coca Cola-ers climb into the rear of the armored car and start tossing sacks full of quarters into the back of the pickup. With a little luck, they might get by with only two or three round trips up the hill.
Norman led the way back into the armored car. But when he tried the rear door handle, he discovered that his plan had a fundamental flaw or two.
Sure, positioning the Ford so that its rear bumper was touching the armored car’s might have made it easier to transfer the sacks of quarters from one vehicle into the other.
But it also blocked the armored car’s rear doors, making them impossible to open.
Norman angrily delivered a few swift kicks at the door handle and swore under his breath.
“So, what do we do now, man?” Robbie was even more nervous and edgier than before. The nearest police station was only a mile away, and visions of SWAT teams were now dancing in his head. “What’s the plan?”
Norman continued to stare darkly at the rear door. They were less than half a mile from his house with more than a million quarters burning a hole in their pockets, and he was fresh out of ideas.
Bosco suddenly jumped up from his spot in the back of the armored car.
Like the rest of the crew, he was dumber than a sack full of hammers. But with his notoriously short fuse, he was also the Coca Cola Crew’s man of action.
Their go-to guy.
Bosco let loose with a non-stop torrent of Spanish invective and marched to the front of the armored car, sounding like Desi Arnaz reacting to one of Lucy’s more inspired flights of lunacy.
He jumped into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The engine roared back into life and he slipped the vehicle into gear.
The transmission immediately began to complain loudly, giving off the tortured scream of metal grating and grinding on metal.
Still peppering the windshield with his half-crazed Spanish, Bosco jammed the gas pedal to the floor. The howl from inside the transmission grew even louder, even more unearthly.
But the armored car began to jerk and slowly move forward.
A foot and a half into its journey, a deafening bang erupted from underneath and the entire vehicle lifted a couple of inches off the ground, with the Coca Cola Crew and fifteen thousand pounds of stolen quarters still inside.
“Damn, man.” Antwon slowly shook his head, straightening up from where he had bent over the running board to survey the damage. “I think you broke the muthufugguh.”
The gearbox was lying on the ground, awash in a large puddle of steaming transmission fluid.
“Ain’t this a bitch? Now, what we gonna do?”
“Mira,” Bosco shut off the ignition and turned back to where Norman was still standing by the rear door.
“Check it out,” he beamed proudly in Norman’s direction.
Norman turned and delivered one more angry kick at one of the doors.
This time, it swung completely open, clearing the pickup truck’s rear bumper with half an inch to spare.
In less than a minute, Norman managed to come up with Plan B.
As it turned out, carefully arranged and stacked five layers high, the bed of the stolen pickup was large enough to hold half of the cargo of the equally stolen armored car.
And for a second there, it looked like they might be able to get all the quarters up the hill and into Norman’s house in only two trips.
Then Robbie tapped Norman on the shoulder and gestured back toward the pickup, which was now riding a lot lower on its rear suspension than it had been.
When Norman drove it into to the alley, all four corners proudly sat a good twelve inches higher above their respective tires than one would normally expect with a stock pickup truck.
Even a 4X4.
But now the front wheels were in danger of spontaneously rising off the ground, pulled in that direction by almost four tons of the city’s spare change, pressing down on their brethren in the back.
And if the tail end of the truck sunk any lower to the ground, its artificial gonads were in for a nasty case of road rash.
Which called for a hasty revision to Plan B.1.
Norman immediately had the crew reverse the direction the sacks full of quarters had been flowing, pulling fifty pound bags from the rear of the pickup and transferring them back into the armored car.
It took a few more minutes to remove enough of the bags so the pickup was sitting reasonably level.
Which meant limiting the load to just seventy five bags, or a shade under two tons.
Which was still significantly more than the truck had been engineered to haul. But what the hell, they were only going another half mile.
Two hours later Norman, Antwon, Robbie and Bosco were sitting in the living room of the rundown old house at the top of the hill.
And whoever said that crime doesn’t pay, must have muttered those words before stopping in to see the exhausted small-time criminals sprawled all over the living room.
Or the seven and a half tons of purloined twenty five cent pieces piled in the middle of the floor.
3rd book in "Fish" Fishbein's Adventures in La-La Land series
Chapter 2
Ask Tony Robbins.
Ask Dr. Phil.
Ask any of the big name, high-ticket motivational speakers from the infomercials and they’ll be happy to tell you: a person usually rises within an organization until they reach a level where they’re no longer effective, productive or competent.
It’s called the Peter Principle.
And you’ll find it hard at work in every outfit from the neighborhood grocery to GM; from the GOP to BBD&O.
And we won’t even talk about the CIA or the Postal Service.
But take a look at Norman Shimazu and you’ll also see that the Peter Principle works just as hard down on the street as it does at the corporate level. Every organized crime famiglia has its share of rank and file and management personnel, who could only rise so far, then ran out of talent, steam or smarts.
For lack of a better label, let’s call them unwise guys.
But the fallout from a crummy yearly performance review at Big Blue, Proctor & Gamble or Verizon is nowhere near as drastic.
Or as permanent.
As a kid, Norman Shimazu rooted for the bad guys in every western or detective show he ever saw.
With the exception of maybe Starsky and Hutch, the bad guys always seemed to wear cooler clothes, drive more expensive cars and hang out with far more attractive women than the forces of good.
So, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the wrong side of the law was where the action, fun and opportunities for career advancement really were.
And Norman Shimazu was light years away from wrangling equations for JPL.
Ditto for Rob Gubbins, Antwon Porter and Javier “Bosco” Chubasco, buddies from his old neighborhood who shared Norman’s infatuation with the felonious side of the street. It didn’t take much to talk them into throwing in with him, and with the nationalities and races represented, they were truly an equal opportunity little gang.
And, since their membership mirrored a lot of the nationalities of some of those early seventies teens filmed on a hillside in Italy singing a feel-good commercial for The Real Thing, Norman and his merry men quickly got themselves nicknamed the “Coca Cola Crew”.
But after ten years in the exciting, wide open game of crime, the Coca Cola Crew had Peter Principled out somewhere near the bottom of the local criminal enterprise’s table of organization.
They still outranked the shaky old geezer who brought the Don his daily cappuccino, but that was about it.
If they ever wanted to get back in the game and maybe even pick up a key to the executive men’s room at the famiglia’s social club, the Coca Cola Crew needed a score.
But it would have to be something big.
Really big.
Even bigger than the steel shipping container full of condoms stolen off the San Pedro docks by another crew a few months before. Unfortunately, every one of the hot birth control devices was a cheap counterfeit, contaminated with some industrial chemical that could cause blisters, a painful burning sensation and a hasty but embarrassing outing to the local Emergency Room for all parties involved. Which made for an unfortunate end to a promising evening for dozens of wearers and wear-ees.
As well as the Mafia capo who had hung onto a few cases for his own enjoyment.
And it quickly resulted in a seriously unfortunate evening for the crew that gleebed the ersatz Trojans in the first place.
The media had dubbed the whole thing, “The Well-Hung Heist”.
So, whatever the Coca Cola Crew was going to pull off, it would have to be worth a ton more semolians and earn way more coverage from the press.
Without giving blisters or a painful rash to anyone.
And as luck would have it, the idea for their big score came knocking, pinging and misfiring its way up their hill a couple of nights after the awards dinner bust at the Queen Mary.
Norman and the crew were sitting on his front porch, knocking back a few brews and watching the sun set, when Antwon’s cousin D-Dawg rode up on his badly rusted, thrashed and dented embarrassment of a motorcycle, a twelve year old Kawasaki ZX-11. A one-time high performance sport bike that had seen better days.
And from the look of things, quite a few of them.
D-Dawg was born with the name Demetrius Saunders. But since nobody in his crowd could spell a word that long and complex, his street name just naturally evolved over time.
The poor kid crashed into adulthood with two strikes against him.
First, he had an acne-scarred face that looked a lot like one of those NASA photos of the surface of the moon.
Which pretty much ruled out getting by on his looks as a career option.
And second, he was too dumb to steal.
D-Dawg worked for the city of Los Angeles; he had a menial filing job in one of their accounting offices, the one responsible for administering the Mississippi River-like flow of small change that flooded in every day from all of L.A.’s parking meters.
On an average year, at least thirty million bucks in nickels, dimes and quarters. Give or take.
And with his clapped out Kawasaki rapidly heading for that big gran prix track in the sky, the time had come for D-Dawg to hit up the city for a little spare change.
He had the motive.
And he had the opportunity.
This could be the perfect crime, D-Dawg reasoned. If only he knew enough about the criminal side of project management to make it happen.
That’s when he reached out to his cousin Antwon, and his partners in crime.
D-Dawg down shifted his beat-up old Kawasaki and pulled off the Pasadena Freeway at the Avenue 26 exit, noticing that his front wheel was wobbling a little worse than usual. He took a right and crossed Monterey Road. Then his rolling embarrassment sputtered and backfired up the steep hill.
His idea was simple. The office in which he worked was the central collection point for all the miniature round metallic portraits of Washington, Jefferson and FDR that got stuffed into the city’s parking meters each day.
There, it was sorted by denomination, counted and bagged, and once a week would be taken by armored car to one of the terminals at LAX, for secure shipment to the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco.
And on an average week, there was usually so much coin of the realm involved, that at least three armored cars would be needed to haul it all to the airport.
His cousin Antwon was impressed. “That’s a lot of muthufuggin’ green.”
With Antwon, everything was muthufuggin’ this, and muthufuggin’ that. In fact, “muthuhfuggin’” was probably the largest and longest word the man knew.
“Uh huh,” D-Dawg answered. “I hear that.”
But as excited as everyone else on the porch was, Norman was still holding back, stuck on a couple of questions that needed satisfactory answers before he would commit himself or his crew.
“How much you figure’s gonna be in one of those trucks, man?”
D-Dawg shrugged. “All’s I know is they called the armored car place and ordered four of ‘em.”
He smiled broadly, revealing a 24 karat gold canine and incisor.
“So, whatever it is, it gots to be large. Know what I’m sayin’?””
Norman nodded. Deep inside, he was allowing himself just the teensiest bit of excitement; this score could easily end up skyrocketing the entire Coca Cola Crew into the big leagues.
“What about security, slick? I mean, we’re talkin’ about armored cars here. You can’t just walk in and Slim Jim the door open on one of those bad boys.”
“Uh huh.” D-Dawg smiled again and reached into the pocket of his jeans.
He pulled out a huge, flat brass key, as big and hefty as the ones the Sheriffs used to use on the cell doors at Central Jail.
“This a master key, my man. Open the door of any armored car in the muthufugguh.”
The Coca Cola Crew was suitably impressed. Even Norman.
“Just make sure everybody gots tan work shirts when you come in. And one o’ y’alls better be carrying one of these.”
D-Dawg pulled a clipboard holding a small stack of papers out of his backpack.
“That way you look official. Ain’t no fool gonna mess with nobody packin’ a clipboard. You feel what I’m sayin’?”
The plan was to show up at the transport office at about eleven thirty on Friday morning. The trucks would all be loaded and idling in the yard with their doors locked, waiting for their crews to finish eating a quick lunch in the locker room, so all those quarters wouldn’t have to endure any stops on their way to LAX.
And with every one of the drivers and guards chowing down inside the building, it should be relatively easy to just sashay on in, pick out an armored car and drive it off.
In and out.
Quick like a bunny.
Just a walk in the muthufuggin’ park.
But at the exact time the Coca Cola Crew was supposed to be driving away with a hefty slice of the city’s weekly parking meter take, they were also scheduled to appear in Room 1276, in Superior Court.
And both the courts and their bail bondsman took a dim view of failure to appear at one’s arraignment hearing.
Between Norman, the rest of his crew and D-Dawg, there wasn’t enough collective grey matter to decipher a wall clock with Roman numerals on its face.
Which put figuring out how to be in two places at the same time just a little above their pay grade.
And there was no point in asking Bosco’s magic eight ball for a quick yes or no, since it had been stuck on “ask again later” for the past nine years.
They finally solved their dilemma a little before midnight, by playing rock, paper, scissors, match.
####
“Norman Shimazu …”
No answer.
“Robert Gubbins …”
The Bailiff’s call was met with another round of deafening quiet.
“Antwon Porter …”
More silence from the Peanut Gallery.
“Javier Chubasco …”
Bosco’s absence and silence made it unanimous.
The Assistant Prosecutor and the Public Defender looked at each other from their tables on either side of the aisle and shrugged.
The judge impatiently checked the time on his watch as the Bailiff called all four names again, this time a little louder. It was eleven thirty on a bright and sunny Friday morning, and his honor was a little miffed.
Because if he had to sit there every day in a black robe that made him look like he was perpetually on his way to his high school graduation, the least these four clowns could have done was show up.
Or for Pete’s sake, call in with a good excuse, like they were sick.
Or better yet, dead.
The judge took a second look at his Seiko.
“Let’s call it failure to appear,” he said to the Bailiff. “Bench warrants for all four. Call the next case.”
As far as Norman and the rest of the Coca Cola Crew were concerned, it all came down to a question of numbers. After all, from a purely bottom line standpoint, there was a lot more money to be made stealing a fully loaded armored car than pleading to a handful of dumbshit misdemeanors.
Besides, they already had almost a hundred smackers invested in brand new, tan Dickies work shirts and a clipboard.
So, while the Bailiff was unsuccessfully calling the roll, they were walking through the armored car company’s gate like they owned the place.
While the Assistant Prosecutor and Public Defender were looking at each other and shrugging, Norman was putting D-Dawg’s master key to work.
And while the judge was angrily looking at his watch and giving the Coca Cola Crew an official no-show, they were driving off the lot.
In the biggest armored car in the muthufugguh.
####
“Oh, shit …”
Norman realized they had a big problem before he even opened the rear doors of the armored car.
They were stopped in an alley behind the rundown and overpriced neighborhood market at the bottom of his hill.
With a transmission that gave up the ghost less than two blocks after he pulled off the freeway.
And to make things even worse, the back of the armored car was stuffed with three hundred canvas satchels full of legal tender for all debts public and private.
And it was all in quarters.
“Hijo de la chingala,” Bosco strained as he lifted one of the sacks. “Son of a bitch, these suckers is heavy!”
With a thousand dollars’ worth of quarters carefully counted and wrapped into rolls inside, each of the sacks tipped the scales at a sprightly fifty pounds.
The good news was, it looked like their non-appearance in court that morning had netted them around three hundred K.
The bad news was, it was a broiling hot day and they were stuck in an alley at the bottom of their hill.
Next to a dumpster full of rotting produce and the various critters attracted by its unique aroma.
In a stolen armored car with a blown transmission.
So near, and yet so freakin’ far.
“Damn, man.” Robbie was starting to sound a little panicked.
It was one thing to pick up a few half-assed misdemeanors. Hell, that just came with the job description.
But getting caught red handed in a broken down, hot armored car with seven and a half tons of stolen laundromat change wasn’t on his list of things to do that day.
“What’re we gonna do?”
“Gimme a second,” Norman snapped. “Lemme think!”
He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Antwon.
“Here, man. Dime D-Dawg. See if he can steal us a pickup or a van, or something.”
D-Dawg was waiting at the house at the top of the hill, less than half a mile away. Blood might be thicker than water, but cousin or not, he was damn sure going to be there when the money showed up to make sure he got his cut, because he had plans for a big chunk of his share.
Namely, a Suzuki Hayabusa.
It wasn’t just the fastest production motorcycle on the planet; it was the fastest one ever made. At a factory-stock hundred and seventy-three horsepower, it could nudge the speedometer needle to just a shade over two hundred miles an hour, straight off the showroom floor. And D-Dawg was seriously jonesing for one.
And at just a little less than eleven thou, a brand new Suzuki Hayabusa was suddenly in his price range.
“Ain’t that a bitch?” Antwon angrily snapped the phone shut and handed it back to Norman.
“You get ahold of him?”
“Uh huh. He say, he don’t know nothing about stealin’ no damn pickup trucks. He say, we want one that bad, we should steal the mu’fugguh our own selves.”
“Well, isn’t that freakin’ special?” Norman angrily stuffed the cell phone back in his pocket and climbed out of the armored car.
“You guys wait here,” he said to the rest of his crew. “I mean it. Nobody leave this damn truck. I’ll be right back.”
Norman was back ten minutes later, perched behind the wheel of a jacked-up and bright red, full-sized Ford pickup with chromed exhaust, huge mud ‘n snow tires and a pair of life-sized plastic, imitation bull testicles swaying from the bottom of the rear bumper.
He backed the Ford up until its scrotum was touching the armored car’s back bumper, and then motioned everyone out into the alley.
His plan was brilliant, even if he thought so himself.
Just have all of the assembled Coca Cola-ers climb into the rear of the armored car and start tossing sacks full of quarters into the back of the pickup. With a little luck, they might get by with only two or three round trips up the hill.
Norman led the way back into the armored car. But when he tried the rear door handle, he discovered that his plan had a fundamental flaw or two.
Sure, positioning the Ford so that its rear bumper was touching the armored car’s might have made it easier to transfer the sacks of quarters from one vehicle into the other.
But it also blocked the armored car’s rear doors, making them impossible to open.
Norman angrily delivered a few swift kicks at the door handle and swore under his breath.
“So, what do we do now, man?” Robbie was even more nervous and edgier than before. The nearest police station was only a mile away, and visions of SWAT teams were now dancing in his head. “What’s the plan?”
Norman continued to stare darkly at the rear door. They were less than half a mile from his house with more than a million quarters burning a hole in their pockets, and he was fresh out of ideas.
Bosco suddenly jumped up from his spot in the back of the armored car.
Like the rest of the crew, he was dumber than a sack full of hammers. But with his notoriously short fuse, he was also the Coca Cola Crew’s man of action.
Their go-to guy.
Bosco let loose with a non-stop torrent of Spanish invective and marched to the front of the armored car, sounding like Desi Arnaz reacting to one of Lucy’s more inspired flights of lunacy.
He jumped into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The engine roared back into life and he slipped the vehicle into gear.
The transmission immediately began to complain loudly, giving off the tortured scream of metal grating and grinding on metal.
Still peppering the windshield with his half-crazed Spanish, Bosco jammed the gas pedal to the floor. The howl from inside the transmission grew even louder, even more unearthly.
But the armored car began to jerk and slowly move forward.
A foot and a half into its journey, a deafening bang erupted from underneath and the entire vehicle lifted a couple of inches off the ground, with the Coca Cola Crew and fifteen thousand pounds of stolen quarters still inside.
“Damn, man.” Antwon slowly shook his head, straightening up from where he had bent over the running board to survey the damage. “I think you broke the muthufugguh.”
The gearbox was lying on the ground, awash in a large puddle of steaming transmission fluid.
“Ain’t this a bitch? Now, what we gonna do?”
“Mira,” Bosco shut off the ignition and turned back to where Norman was still standing by the rear door.
“Check it out,” he beamed proudly in Norman’s direction.
Norman turned and delivered one more angry kick at one of the doors.
This time, it swung completely open, clearing the pickup truck’s rear bumper with half an inch to spare.
In less than a minute, Norman managed to come up with Plan B.
As it turned out, carefully arranged and stacked five layers high, the bed of the stolen pickup was large enough to hold half of the cargo of the equally stolen armored car.
And for a second there, it looked like they might be able to get all the quarters up the hill and into Norman’s house in only two trips.
Then Robbie tapped Norman on the shoulder and gestured back toward the pickup, which was now riding a lot lower on its rear suspension than it had been.
When Norman drove it into to the alley, all four corners proudly sat a good twelve inches higher above their respective tires than one would normally expect with a stock pickup truck.
Even a 4X4.
But now the front wheels were in danger of spontaneously rising off the ground, pulled in that direction by almost four tons of the city’s spare change, pressing down on their brethren in the back.
And if the tail end of the truck sunk any lower to the ground, its artificial gonads were in for a nasty case of road rash.
Which called for a hasty revision to Plan B.1.
Norman immediately had the crew reverse the direction the sacks full of quarters had been flowing, pulling fifty pound bags from the rear of the pickup and transferring them back into the armored car.
It took a few more minutes to remove enough of the bags so the pickup was sitting reasonably level.
Which meant limiting the load to just seventy five bags, or a shade under two tons.
Which was still significantly more than the truck had been engineered to haul. But what the hell, they were only going another half mile.
Two hours later Norman, Antwon, Robbie and Bosco were sitting in the living room of the rundown old house at the top of the hill.
And whoever said that crime doesn’t pay, must have muttered those words before stopping in to see the exhausted small-time criminals sprawled all over the living room.
Or the seven and a half tons of purloined twenty five cent pieces piled in the middle of the floor.