"I Wait To Die!"

(Excerpted from a Work In Progress)

By William E. Wallace

The Redi-Money robbery was supposed to be the job of a lifetime: no alarms to disconnect, no vault to open; just a plain old-fashioned stick-up, a little bit like knocking over a 7-11.

A 7-11 with nearly five million dollars in the till, that is.

Unfortunately, things don't always turn out the way they're supposed to and that’s how it was with Redi-Money. Only one thing about the robbery ended up being as it was advertised: it was the job of a lifetime; mine and that of everybody else in the crew.

That’s why I’m sitting here with the shades closed in a motel room on MacArthur Boulevard, drinking rye whisky and watching the minutes crawl by. 

 I’m waiting to die.

§

Harvey Kettler had first brought up Redi-Money three days earlier when he picked me up at the Amtrak Depot on Oakland’s Embarcadero. I’d been on ice for awhile at the time; a big deal in Los Angeles six months earlier had gone sour, leaving me flat and my five-year-old photo in prison dungarees on all the local television stations. I had to go someplace where I could hang out until things cooled down. Harvey fronted me enough to get to Denver, so I owed him. 

 

I got back on my feet during my stay in the Mile-High City. Then Harvey sent me word that he had something shaking in Oakland that could set both of us up for a good long time.

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I caught the next train home.

I called him from the pay phone in the station and he picked me up out front, tossing my suitcase in the trunk of his old Chevy. 

“You still got a piece?” he asked casually as we caught the Nimitz, letting me know right away this wasn’t going to be a job for a guy who laid awake at night worrying he might have to hurt somebody.

I nodded. “Two of ‘em. That’s why I was on the train, Harve. They don’t like you to carry weapons onto planes these days,” I added sarcastically. “You might have read something about it in the papers?”

“Good,” he said, ignoring my crack. “I got a deal lined up that will put you on easy street, but we have to take the money away from some people who aren’t going to want to part with it. You in?”

I looked out the window. The stuff I’d been doing in Denver was strictly nickel-dime I hadn’t seen any serious cash for some time. Still, I didn’t want to seem desperate.

“What’s the target?” I asked. 

He smiled because he knew right then I would go for it. A guy who doesn’t want to participate in a crime just says so up front. When a guy starts asking questions about what’s involved, it’s obvious he’s already at least part way on board.

“It’s a check-cashing joint,” he said. “But the real money is in loaning people cash until they get paid. The suckers who use the place pay a big fee for the privilege.”

I turned it over in my head. Maybe I was still groggy from my train trip, but I seemed to be missing something.

 “This is your big deal that puts us on easy street?” I asked. “Seems like chicken shit to me. I’ve seen these places before: they have ‘em in every skid row in America. The people who use them are no-hopers, like your old man before he died of liver cancer – lousy jobs or no job at all; people on welfare, waiting for their next check from the county. How you plan to make a decent score by hitting a place that caters to down-and-outers?”

I was skeptical but also interested. Harvey didn’t blow smoke; if he thought there was money to be made, he usually was working some angle that made it at least possible. He gave me that wiseass face he makes when he knows something I don’t and turned back to the road.

“How much money do you figure these five-and-dime outfits have in the cage at any given time?” he asked.

I shrugged. “A few grand maybe,” I said without giving it much thought. “Maybe twenty-thirty K, tops.”

He was grinning openly now, watching traffic as he got off the Elaine Brown near downtown.

“What would you say if I told you that when we hit this particular outfit, it will have more than four and a half million dollars on hand, all cash, used bills, mixed denominations?” he asked.

It was my turn to grin. This had to be a joke. If it was, it showed Harvey had grown a sense of humor while I was out of state.

“I’d say you were full of shit,” I said.

He glanced at me again. “But if it was true, if there was actually was that much there, ready to grab, what would you say then?”

I laughed. “I’d say, ‘what’s my cut gonna be?’”

Harve gave me a wink. “Let’s get a beer,” he said.

§

Over a couple bottles of Budweiser, Harvey laid out the situation:

Redi-Money operated ten stores in the East Bay, each located in the kind of neighborhood that municipal officials like to describe as “troubled,” meaning they run hot and cold with shit-birds the way some places do with cockroaches.

Every Sunday night, he said, the cash from nine of those operations is delivered to the main branch in Oakland, a cinder-block bunker on East Fourteenth Street, the six-mile stretch of pavement that do-gooders downtown renamed “International Boulevard” to build community pride among the junkies, hookers, crack-heads and hustlers who infect it like flesh-eating bacteria.

In the bunker, the weekly take from all ten branches is run through a counting machine, bundled and prepped for an armored car to pick up at 8:30 Monday morning.

“We can go in at 8:20 a.m., ten minutes before the armored car gets there, and pick up the bundles,” Harvey said. “We throw ‘em in duffle bags, toss the bags into the back of a van and scoot.”

He raised his hands, palms up and empty, to demonstrate how easy it would be.

I mulled over what he’d told me, looking for holes.

“You say the main branch is concrete brick?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The front is on the street and the check-cashing operation is in the offices there.  The counting room is at the rear, with a loading dock where the armored car makes the pick-up.”

“The building is on an open lot, right?  And there’s a chain-link fence around it?”

He nodded. “There’s a single gate that opens on the side street,” he said. 

I visualized it and locked in the image.

“I assume this receiving area is well lit?”

“Not so much,” he said. “There’s a bank of lights over the dock and two lights on the fence.”

“What about closed circuit TV? Is anybody watching?”

“The CCTV is inside the offices. A guard monitors the camera from a security post at the rear, near the loading dock, only inside.”

“One camera?”

“Exactamundo.”

“Any hundreds?” I asked, using cop shorthand for alarms.

“Controlled from the same guard post. An audible that also rings up the cops.”

I thought about that. “So if you get the guard post, you’ve got the entire compound, then.”

Harvey grinned.  “Everything but the bar and hot tub. One-stop shopping.”

“How did you plan to take control?”

“Through the street entrance,” he said. “The check-cashing operation locks down around 1:45 p.m. each night.”

“Same as bars, right?” I said. “They probably don’t want the place jammed with drunken losers after closing time.”

“Right. The check-cashing crew goes home. There’s three people in the counting room plus the guard, and the only thing between the check cashing center and the counting room is a combination door.”

I frowned then for the first time. To get the money we’d have to go through the combo.

“How do we get in?”

“We’ll have the code numbers.”

I looked at him, my smile back and spreading across my face. No wonder he kept getting that smug grin. 

“You have somebody inside,” I said.  My tone made it a question but it wasn’t, really. Even with a sketchy security set-up like the one at Redi-Money, you could only knock the place over with the help of an employee. Otherwise, you would have to use so much physical force to get the cash that you’d wake up every cop sleeping off his graveyard shift in the alleys of East Oakland.

Harvey nodded. “Our contact not only knows the combination, but is giving us a key to the front so we can get in after the cashiers leave for the night. That way we don’t have to pick the front lock or crash it. That gives us more time and plenty of quiet.” 

“Is this guy a friend of mine?”

He hesitated before answering. The pause, all by itself, told me everything I needed to know. 

“It’s not a guy,” he said.  “And she isn’t somebody you know. But you will.”

§

I sighed. Up until then, the Redi-Money job had sounded pretty sweet. Throwing a stranger into the mix changed everything. I didn’t like working with people I hadn’t been properly introduced to. What’s more, I had never done a job with a chick in the crew.

“How does the woman come into this?”

“We’ve been living together for the last few months,” he said.  “I met her in a bar and we went out a couple of times drinking and fooling around.”

“Let me guess: she mentioned that she worked for Redi-Money and you started thinking about all that cash she was handling.”

He looked pained. “Come on, man,” he said. “Give me a little credit. I like this chick a lot. I wouldn’t cozy up to her just to get a shot at the place she works. After we shacked up, she found out I had done time and asked me what for. I told her I was a stick-up artist. She was the one who suggested taking down Redi-Money, not me. She’s the one who told me how much cash passed through that Oakland office, and what the layout of the plant was.”

I stared at him with my mouth hanging open. This was sounding messier and messier. Not only was one  member of the crew a woman, but she was also an amateur who had never done a robbery before. On top of that, even though she didn’t know her ass from a hole-in-the-ground, she seemed to be the one who was setting up the damned job.

“I dunno, Harve,” I said. “How do you know you can trust this chick?”

He looked sheepish. “Because I love her,” he said. “When the job is over, we’re going to get married and go live in Amsterdam: we’ll drink beer and Schnapps, stay high all the time and fuck like rabbits.”

That’s when I should have got up and grabbed a cab back to Amtrak. I’d always thought of Harvey as a level-headed guy; dependable, even, for a crook.  But he was violating all the important rules on this one: bringing a stranger in on a job, working with a woman, letting her call the shots and doing all of it in the name of love. He was going to end up taking a fall, and everybody in his crew would go down with him. 

 

That was what my cold-blooded analytical side was telling me. Unfortunately, it was speaking in a whisper. That $4.5 million, on the other hand, was the loudest son-of-a-bitch in the room, and the only thing I could hear was its voice calling my name.

“So how many people are we going to need for this job of a lifetime?” I asked.

“I figure you, me and one other guy with a gun. Plus a driver for the van.”

“So five altogether, counting your girlfriend, Bonnie Parker?”

“What?” he said, giving me a blank look.

 “Your woman inside,” I said. “Does she get a full share?”

He smiled. “She’s going to be sharing my cut with me.”

Yeah, right. She would be satisfied to share Harvey’s end.  He was farther gone than I thought. 

“That’s a little more than a mill a head,” I said. “That’s based on a total take of $4.5 million.”

“Janice says $4.5 million is just the average that goes into the armored car,” he said. “It could be more, maybe a little less.”

“I take it Janice is the little woman, your fiancée,” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. I wasn’t very successful, but Harvey didn’t seem to notice.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a lot of money for what will probably be about an hour’s worth of work. The best thing is, since the money is already in circulation, we just divvy it up and spend it. We don’t have to fence the shit for pennies on the dollar.”

He was right. It was a lot of money; more than I had ever made on a job up to then.  In fact, it was so much money it made me nervous. I had to shove my hands in my pockets to keep them from shaking.

“I’m worried about the size of the take,” I told him.

“What’s to worry about?” he asked.

“There’s too much of it,” I said. “You got some penny­-ante check-cashing operation here that is rolling up something like forty-five grand a branch each week? That seems awful damned high to me. Where is all that money coming from? It sure as hell can’t be people paying back advances on their general assistance checks or unemployment insurance.”

Harvey spread his hands. “What difference does it make?” he said. “It’s money, man. Enough to retire on.  Enough to last a guy the rest of his life.”

I rubbed my temples. “I dunno,” I said. “It makes me nervous, is all.”

He grinned. “Drink up,” he said. “Let me take you home and introduce you to my bride-to-be.”

I did and he did.  And within five minutes of meeting Harvey’s fianceé, I knew the job wasn’t going to end in a four-way split because Janice was way too good for my best buddy.

Hell, she was way too good for me, but that wasn’t going to stop me from taking her away from him. 

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