Free How to Rob an Armored Car by Iain Levison Page B

time that Mitch had said would be best. The loading dock was busiest at around six P.M. Mitch had been right about everything. It had been so easy.
    When they pulled out onto the street, Doug was becoming almost manic. “We did it! Holy shit, man, we did it!”
    They high-fived and began talking excitedly. They recounted each second of the experience they had just shared and laughed about Doug’s mention of the Boston Strangler. When they pulled into the driveway, Mitch was waiting for them, businesslike.
    “Oh, man, it was so easy,” Doug yelled as he got out of the truck. It had just occurred to him that, as rent would be paid with this TV, there was no reason to pick up the dreaded Sunday brunch shift now to compensate for his buying the green shirt.
    “Keep your voice down,” said Mitch. He bent down and began unscrewing the Nevada license plate which, fortunately, hadn’t gotten them pulled over. Mitch slapped Kevin’s real plate back on.
    They took the TV into the cramped living room, wrestled it out of its packaging, and Doug and Kevin connected the cable. Then they all sat down and stared as the forty-two-inch screen came to life.
    “Man,” Kevin said, reclining on the worn sofa in Doug and Mitch’s ratty wood-paneled apartment, with its stained, once-white carpet and its walls gray with pot smoke, “this is the life.”
    “For another two days,” Doug said. “Then we gotta give it to the landlord.”
    “Let’s just pretend it’s ours for forty-eight hours.”
    “Cool.”
    They settled back and stared at the screen.

    THE NEXT MORNING, winter arrived. It was Mitch’s first full day of dog-walking by himself, and he found that the job he had imagined was hilariously easy could, if done in a blizzard, be as much of a nightmare as inventory day at Accu-mart.
    His first dog of the day was a St. Bernard named Duffy who considered the blizzard a gift rather than an irritation. Two hundred pounds of playfulness, he bounced around on the icy sidewalks, chased snowflakes, and pulled Mitch into a gutter, nearly spraining his ankle. At that point, Mitch decided that, as Duffy seemed reasonably obedient, it would be safer for all concerned if he was just let off the leash and allowed to run a little by himself. Mistake number one.
    The second Mitch unsnapped the leash, Duffy, who was familiar with the sound, motored off around a corner and was gone, leaving Mitch standing in the snow-covered road, leash in his hand, listening to the gentle hiss of the snowfall.
    Feet crunching in the snow, Mitch walked to the corner and looked in the direction the dog had disappeared. At the far end of the block, nearly disappearing in the light fog, he could see a St. Bernard’s ass bouncing up and down as it grew steadily smaller.
    Dammit! What did a dog walker do in this situation? Go home and wait for the dog to return on his own? Kevin, who had left strict instructions never to let the dogs off their leashes, might not be the best person to ask. Surely Kevin would understand if Mitch told him about nearly spraining his ankle in the gutter, right? Mitch tried to imagine Kevin’s reaction to the gutter story and decided that empathy might not be Kevin’s strong suit. He began jogging after Duffy. Mistake number two.
    He almost immediately slipped and fell on the ice. Powdery snow covered his face.
    “Shit!” Mitch screamed. He got up and was angrily shaking himself off when his cell phone rang. It was Kevin. “Shit,” he said again, and decided not to mention Duffy’s disappearance.
    “Dude, check this out,” said Kevin. “I opened the safe.”
    “The safe at Jeffrey’s?” Mitch was flush with relief that Kevin hadn’t called to check that everything was going well. “What’s in it?”
    “Pills, man. Boxes and boxes of pills. He’s got, like, everything. Hydrocodone, OxyContin, morphine. Shit, I’ve never seen so many pills. The guy must be a drug dealer.”
    “Isn’t he a doctor? Maybe all that shit is