Five minutes before
Five weeks later Hobbs and Alan sat in a pickup truck with magnetic signs on the door panels that read, “Johnson Civil Surveyors.” The truck was parked atop a small hill, looking down on an empty bridge, forty-five minutes south of Tallahassee on US Route 319. Ten feet in front of the truck a pole was stuck in the ground, the kind that surveyors would sight with theodolite.
The bridge was a little over a half a mile long, and had recently been rebuilt because the powers that be had seen fit to dredge out this swampy tributary of the Ochlockonee River in order to make it, of all things, more accessible for fishermen.
There was not a fisherman in sight. And all the times that they had been here, scouting, setting up, rehearsing, and covering their tracks, neither Hobbs nor Hurlocker nor Alan had even seen a boat, much less a fisherman. But Florida had a long tradition of not being able to leave natural waterways alone. That, and spending matching federal funds to generate as much kickback as possible.
Ten minutes before, they had blocked off this end of the bridge with a barrier and a sign that read, “Bridge Repair, Temporary Delay.” On the other side of the bridge, Hurlocker was waiting with a similar sign, around the bend. When the armored truck passed, he would close the bridge from that end. As long as the truck was alone, the plan would work. But last Wednesday—it was always a Wednesday, for payday was always a Friday—a sad-faced old woman had been tailgating the truck and they hadn’t been able to peel her off. So they had scrubbed it for a week.
Hobbs had thought they would never hear the end of it from Hurlocker. “What kind of moon-faced, gas-huffing, inbred, white-trash, roadkill-poachin’—?”
“Redneck,” offered Alan with a shrug.
“Don’t you talk about my people that way!” Hurlocker had bellowed, needing to vent his anger no matter the logic or reason.
“Easy,” said Hobbs. But that just inflamed Hurlocker all the more. He had stomped out of the house and wandered off to the beach, there to vent his fury on the indifferent waves and the impossible-to-catch ghost crabs.
Alan had looked at Hobbs and smiled. Hobbs, for once, smiled back. They sat on the porch of the house, an old cinder-block beach bungalow, built in a time before only rich people could afford houses on the coast.
After a while Alan broke the silence with, “It’s the waiting, isn’t it? The waiting is what makes or breaks you.” And that’s when Hobbs knew he finally understood.
“He’s steady enough,” Hobbs said, nodding after Hurlocker. “He’s just throwing a fit because he doesn’t have anything better to do. He’s bored.”
“He shouldn’t make so much fun of computer games, then,” said Alan.
In the past weeks, Alan had really come along. He had calmed down and stopped being so much of a punk. He listened. He asked questions that weren’t stupid. He’d learned to scuba dive and work a cutting torch.
Over the years Hobbs had seen a lot of guys leave the straight world behind. It wasn’t an easy transition. With most of them, you could tell right away they wouldn’t make it. The heavy heist was a rough trade, and perhaps a dying game as well. It was harder and harder to get away with. Fucking cameras and fucking computers dragging the world closer and closer together. Cops dressed like storm troopers now and were armed to the teeth.
Hobbs was a bad man, sure, but even he saw something wrong with this. The balance had tipped too far in favor of authority, and it was harder and harder for a red-blooded man to make any move on his own. Everybody was on the fear ladder. The cops, the criminals. Everybody answered to another higher-up all the way up the line, until you got to the rarefied air at the top of the org chart that was too thin for any kind of responsibility to survive.
Hobbs hadn’t been born with wealth, but he didn’t want to live his life knuckling under for anyone. If it took courage and discipline and violence to tear a life for himself out of society, well, fine. He’d paid the cost, and he’d go on paying—as long and as much as it took to stay free.
As much as it surprised him, the kid gave him hope. He hadn’t seen anybody like this come along in a while. Maybe it was that the times were too soft. The lure of an easy job was seductive. After all, if you had intelligence and discipline, why not go domestic? Sell out. Suck the corporate teat. Mostly the stupid and the broken turned to crime. Didn’t take long before those kinds went to jail. For them prison had a revolving door.
But Alan was different. He was smart. He understood computers and how to make them work for him. Maybe the heist wasn’t a dying game. Maybe it was just that the times had passed Hobbs by. Sure, a job would always call for a strong arm and a steady mind, but maybe that wasn’t enough anymore.
They sat in the truck and watched the bridge through thick, sweltering air. They ran the engine so the air-conditioning would blow cool. If they had done this job twenty-five years ago, they’d both be sitting in pools of sweat right now.
Shitty music blared from Alan’s earbuds, and he bopped along in time with the endless drone of the trancelike electronic music. The kid kept the strange time of the music by beating his thumbs on the steering wheel.
For the thousandth time today, Hobbs sighted between the two carefully placed vertical strips of painter’s tape on the wind-shield. He checked the radar gun on a passing seagull. It was flying at thirteen miles an hour.
On the open glove compartment lid the LED on the remote trigger still glowed green, showing a good connection with the device. In all the time they had sat there, that light hadn’t flickered even once. It shouldn’t have, given what they had paid for it. And each of the three weeks they had tried to take the truck, Hobbs had cleaned all the connections and replaced all the batteries before every attempt.
Once they had set up the job, they’d had little else to do but wait. He and Hurlocker had tried to teach the kid poker, but it didn’t take. Alan had made a ritual out of making fun of how early Hobbs got up to run and do push-ups. Three days ago Alan had tried to keep up with Hobbs and failed miserably. The teasing had stopped after that. Sometimes the weight of Hobbs’s years was something he could bludgeon somebody with.
Hobbs sighted through the strips and checked the gun again. The bridge wasn’t moving, at zero miles per hour.
The song pumping through Alan’s earbuds changed, and Hobbs frowned, deep lines cutting deeper into his face. It was loud enough that he could hear the inane lyrics repeated over and over again.
“Turn down for what? Whatever. Just turn it the fuck down already.” But he knew he was just cranky from waiting. He got grumpy the same way the kid cranked up his music and drummed the steering wheel. Still, being grumpy was something to do.
“You should turn it down,” Hobbs said.
Alan looked over at him with a quizzical look on his face. He hooked a finger and yanked the earbud out of his right ear. “Huh?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Hobbs.
Alan gave a nod that was all upward jerk and screwed the bud back in tight. He should be paying more attention, thought Hobbs. He should be more patient. That was just more nerves. Hobbs was patient enough for the both of them.
The radio crackled to life. Hurlocker’s voice from the ether. “Coming, in the clear.”
Beside him Alan popped both earbuds out of his head with a sharp jerk. “Is this it? I mean, is it going to happen this time?”
“Steady,” said Hobbs, to both the kid and himself. “Forty seconds, maybe less.” Hobbs picked up the remote trigger. He flipped the safety off, thinking of all those Cold War scenes he’d seen in movies where they flipped the fail-safe off. His thumb hovered over the switch. The LED on the side still glowed green.
“C’mon. C’mon,” Alan muttered. The shitty music squealed through the earbuds. Hobbs wanted to tell him to turn it off, but he didn’t want to lose focus. Still, that music was so terrible.
It was a good play. If it came off, there’d be no snatch, no getaway, no chance of a gunfight. Just more waiting. The waiting could be harder on the nerves than action, but it was safer.
“There it is.”
On the other side of the river, they saw the Moonis-Brainerd truck round the long curve toward the bridge footing. On the far side of the road the swamp gave way to a lake filled with white lily pads and their blossoms. The lake, such as it was, emptied into the channel and flowed under the bridge as if it had all the time in the world, which it did.
Hobbs hit the truck with the radar gun. Fifty-three miles an hour. They were taking their time today. Sixty miles an hour would be a tenth of a mile every six seconds. They were slower, Hobbs would just have to feel it. Shouldn’t matter much. Hobbs sighted between the two pieces of tape on the windshield until the surveyor’s pole appeared like the front sight on a rifle between them.
“One Miss-is-sippi, Two Miss—is-sippi,” Hobbs said deliberately.
“C’mon,” said Alan, “Do it!”
“Three Miss-is-sippi. Four Miss—”
Hobbs pressed the button. Alan held his breath.