Bank Job by Patrick Shawn Bagley
She says she’s afraid of death, but we’ve been together two weeks now, and I’ve figured out she’s only scared of dying a nobody. It’s four in the morning and we’re lying on clammy sheets in a run-down motel on Route 1, just north of Waldoboro. Headlights strafe the windows as people with normal lives head to work. I blew my last hundred bucks on this room and a half-gram of meth. Nothing to worry about. We plan on getting more money today.
“You ain’t going to get killed,” I say. “So long as you do what I tell you.”
Cheryl laughs. Her fingernails dance along my chest. “Yeah? So tell me what we do about him.” The him in question is Ronald Pelletier, manager of Norumbega Savings in Saco. At least, that’s who he was yesterday. This morning he’s just a corpse in the trunk of my car.
The Saco thing went sour. The how and why don’t matter. It’s done. We ended up taking Pelletier hostage, and stuffing him in the trunk each time we switched cars. We switched a lot during the first few hours. We took an erratic path, too, changing direction every time we swiped a new car: Saco to Brunswick to Kennebunkport to Belfast to Waldoboro, up and down the coast. I told Pelletier we’d let him go in a couple days. He didn’t believe it. It’s beyond me how he managed to keep from suffocating in there, using up so much air kicking around.
I had to make a piss stop near Northport, and told Cheryl to keep our buddy quiet while I was in the woods. When old Ronnie started kicking again, Cheryl popped the trunk and stabbed him six times in the chest with a Phillips screwdriver. That shut him up, but it left us good and fucked if the cops pulled us over. Cheryl wanted to leave him in the woods right there, but I was afraid someone would find him before we had put enough miles behind us.
Lying in bed now, I say, “There’s all kinds of old granite quarries in Rockland, full of trash and junked cars. They fucking reek so bad that nobody goes near them. We’ll weigh Ronnie down and dump him there. It’s only about twenty miles up the road.”
Cheryl gets up and grabs her panties off the floor. “Why don’t we get it over with, then?”
We’re wired to the eyeballs, so I figure why not? Get rid of the body and move on to the next job. Cheryl loads our stuff into the car while I swipe four cinder blocks from a pile behind the motel. In another half hour, we’re cruising down Rockland’s Old County Road, looking for a spot. I find a good one, and back the car up as far as I dare. It’s not a big quarry, but it’s deep. The water looks green under the lightening sky.
Cheryl looks down, crinkling up her nose at the stink. She says, “This sucks.”
“It won’t take long.”
“If we’d shot one of the tellers soon as we went in, those bitches would have known we meant business and we wouldn’t have to be standing here.”
“I don’t kill anybody I don’t have to.” I drag Ronnie out by his feet, careful not to get blood on myself, but there’s a gummy streak of it down the lip of the trunk and on the bumper.
Cheryl lights a cigarette off the one she just finished. “That’s no way to get famous.”
“You don’t get famous robbing banks,” I say. “Bonnie and Clyde, we ain’t. We hit a place, and they talk about us on the local news for a day or two, but they don’t know our names. I don’t want them to know our fucking names. Bank robbers ain’t folk heroes any more.”
“I’ll make goddamn sure they know who I am.”
“You gonna help me with this, or what?”
She sighs and rolls her eyes, but helps me tie the cinder blocks to Ronnie’s hands and feet. Crouching for leverage, we roll him over the side. Cheryl gets down on all fours, leans over the edge. She laughs when Ronnie bounces off the carved-up walls before he hits the water. I get up, brush dirt from my knees. Cheryl’s fine ass is aimed right at me. What a goddamn waste. I take one last look at her ass before planting my foot right in the middle and shoving hard.
Cheryl doesn’t scream, so I figure she smacked her head on the rocks before hitting bottom. There’s a splash, that’s it. No need to look. I pull up a handful of scraggly grass and wipe the worst of the blood off the car. Then I’m gone.
