Whorl Page 5

  “Who?”

  “Slo-Mo.”

  “Who?”

  Aaron made a face. “The kid, Elmo, the borderline tard.”

  Dave looked around. Aaron never cared who heard him, but it was always a good idea to watch and listen for incoming. “Hey, give him a break, he’s trying,” Dave said, trying to be nice.

  Aaron thought for a second. “You know, I think you’re right. Which is kinda sad.” They reached the Beast and Aaron slowed down the coin-heavy cart with his body.

  “At least he’s nice. I know a few really smart people who are dicks. Hell, half the population of the country has below average intelligence,” Dave reminded him.

  “Yeah, and you know what the problem with that is?”

  “What?”

  “Even ‘average’ is pretty damn stupid. You’re driving,” Aaron told him pointedly.

  The incline wasn’t steep enough to downshift but the truck lost a few mph by the time it crested the small hill. There were vacant lots to either side with random piles of assorted dumped trash, some of it starting to get overgrown with weeds. Off in the distance the ruins of Tiger Stadium were visible, as was I-75.

  Dave took a left when the street ended, and two big pheasants broke from cover. They ran a short distance, then began walking along the curb.

  “Again!” Aaron exclaimed from the box behind him. “Every fucking time we come to Brinks. I swear to God I’m going to have you stop one of these days so I can shoot one.”

  “Your ten millimeter isn’t exactly a good pheasant gun,” Dave told him.

  “I’ve got a shotgun.” The truck rolled past the pheasants, which ignored it. Dave could just imagine what the truck would smell like with a pheasant hanging in the back all day. Aaron was bad enough.

  “Why would you shoot a bird?” Elmo asked them.

  “It’s not a bird, it’s a pheasant,” Dave told him. “And the same reason people kill chickens. They’re delicious.”

  In the Brinks parking lot Aaron hopped out and walked into the office. He was back a few seconds later.

  “Guardian’s in there now, but we’re next,” he told Dave.

  “Fine.” Dave pulled the truck over to the far end of the lot and backed against the fence, facing one of two overhead doors, both of which were closed. He took a long swig of his Diet Coke, knowing he’d have access to a bathroom soon.

  “So how long you going to be doing this shit?” Aaron asked him, stretching out in the captain’s chair some enterprising soul had installed in the back of the rig. No one knew where it had come from, probably a custom van that someone had totaled. It even had cupholders.

  Dave looked back at him through the metal mesh. “What? Don’t you love this job?”

  “Fuck you, college boy. I was looking for a job when I found this one, but it wasn’t the one I was looking for. How long’s it take to get into the F.B.I., anyway?”

  “Depends on the year, and the government budgeting. Application process takes months, at least. But you’ve got to be twenty-five before they’ll hire you, so I couldn’t apply right out of college. They’ve got my application, but whether they’ve even looked at it yet I couldn’t tell you.”

  “If you were a black Chinese handicapped lesbian transsexual you’d probably already be an agent,” Aaron told him.

  “A black Chinese lesbian, what was it? …handicapped transsexual, with an accounting degree, yeah,” Dave corrected his partner. “But I’ve got a couple of letters of recommendation from FBI agents, so hopefully that will move me up on the list.”

  “Door’s going up,” Elmo told them.

  Dave grabbed the radio handset. “1555 heading into Brinks.”

  “Roger that, 1555,” he heard Deano reply. “Remind Aaron he’s there for business.” Dave smiled

  “Fuck you too,” Aaron said to radio.

  They watched the red Guardian truck back out of the building and turn around. Dave waved at the other driver and headed into the cage.

  Brinks didn’t allow the truck crews of other companies access to the inside of their building, but rather had an internal truck cage. Any transfers were done inside the cage. Aaron waited until the door rolled down behind them before hopping out of the back with his clipboard. The cage was that, an actual metal cage inside the Brinks truck garage. They had five feet of room on either side and over twice that in front and back of the truck. Dave shut the truck off and hopped out, Brinks being one of the few stops on their route where he had that luxury.

  The entire back wall of the cage was removable, but most of the time traffic used a pedestrian door secured with a magnetic lock. A Brinks employee he recognized but whose name he couldn’t remember stood on the other side of the door, which was constructed of dark, rough-looking steel slats, like something out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Two men enter…..

  “You guys have anything for us?” he asked them.

  “Two small bags,” Aaron told him. “But I think you’ve got a lot of coin for us.”

  “I’ll go get Arlene,” he told them, and headed off.

  Arlene was the vault manager and showed up a minute later pulling a flat metal cart piled with the loose coin bags Brinks favored, although there was one solitary box of pennies. Thirty-eight years old, she was five foot four in her work boots, and in her bulky coveralls looked like she weighed all of a hundred and thirty pounds. In fact she weight one hundred and ten, all of it lean muscle, and outworked everyone else in the vault, including the high school kids.

  At the door, she waved a hand over her head, and the magnetic lock before her buzzed open. “Hey Dave, how ya been?” she asked him. Her hair was a natural strawberry blonde and teased up big.

  “Good,” he told her.

  “I’ve got two for you,” Aaron said, holding up two small sealed canvass bags and his clipboard.

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” Arlene told him with a smile.

  Aaron looked at the cart behind her. “I was hoping to get my hands on your box today,” he told her.

  “Not until you sign on the dotted line,” she told him with a smirk, and they exchanged clipboards.

  “You two,” Dave said, shaking his head. He looked up from one surveillance camera to another. “Those things have sound?”

  “No,” Arlene said, and leaned forward to give her boyfriend a kiss. Aaron came away grinning. “You coming over later?” she asked him.

  Aaron grabbed the heavy cart and pulled it toward the side door of the truck. “Oh, yeah. I’ll have another deposit for you tonight.”

  “Promises, promises.”

  “You know you two sound like a couple of high schoolers who have never been laid,” Dave told them. They were always like that, and some days it was worse than others.

  “Sounds like someone’s jealous,” Arlene said to him with a laugh, then she headed back out the door with her two bags.

  “Here, make yourself useful, help me load these bags of quarters into the back,” Aaron told Mo, pulling the metal cart to the rear of the truck. Dave wandered back there with them, but there wasn’t really room for him to help out.

  Aaron climbed in the side door, then popped open the rear. “Hand them up,” he told Mo.

  “Hey, have you guys ever had to shoot anybody?” Mo asked

  Aaron and Dave exchanged a glance. “You mean driving around for Absolute?” Aaron said. “No, and you know why? Because we fucking pay attention. We look around. Most of these guys that have these robbery attempts, that have to shoot people, it’s because they’re not paying attention. They’re giving the bad guys the opportunity.”

  “Why’s the hammer cocked on your gun?” Elmo asked Aaron. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Oh boy,” muttered Dave.

  “Of course it’s dangerous, it’s a fucking gun,” Aaron said. “But the cocked hammer doesn’t make it dangerous. This is a Colt Delta Elite ten millimeter. Stainless steel. It’s a 1911—that’s the kind of pistol it is. With a 1911,
if the hammer’s not cocked, the gun won’t fire. Period. You could bang on it with a hammer and it wouldn’t go off, because it’s got two safeties. Look at Davey’s Glock there. No cocked hammer, looks boring, but the fact is that it’s cocked on the inside. Mine looks scarier, but it’s actually safer.”

  Aaron had it more or less right, Dave thought. He looked down at his Glock 35.

  “You ever had to pull your gun?” Elmo asked Aaron.

  Aaron smiled big and jumped down from the back of the truck. He pulled his Colt out of its holster, popped the magazine, and racked the round out of the chamber. He then reholstered the unloaded pistol and looked at Mo, who’d been watching him.

  “Want to see something cool?” he asked the young kid.

  “Su—” Mo started to say, and then he was staring at the muzzle of Aaron’s unloaded pistol. “Holy shit!” he said. Aaron had drawn his gun so fast that Mo hadn’t even seen it.

  “He is fast,” Dave agreed with a nod. “Hitting anything further than ten feet away, though, that’s something he’s not so good at.” Dave had competed alongside professional shooters, and Aaron’s draw was as fast as any he’d seen. He’d taken Aaron to a few “action” pistol competitions, and his partner had held his own, but USPSA-type matches involved a lot more than just fast draws at targets spitting distance away.

  “Kiss my ass,” Aaron said with a smile, reloading his pistol. “Anyway, anyone tries to rob us, they’re not going to be across the street, they’re going to be on our ass. Okay, Elmo, push the cart back to the door it came through, then everybody climb aboard, time to blow this pop stand.” He stuck his Colt back in its holster and climbed in through the back door.

  “Where to next?” Mo asked them when they were clear of the building and heading out.

  “Downtown,” Aaron told him. “The Comerica main vault. Five to drop off, none to pick up, and still it’ll take an hour. That’s why Wednesdays suck.”

  Heading downtown, Aaron yelled to Dave over the roar of the Beast’s diesel engine, “So, when are you going to take your ‘Stang racing? You never race it.”

  Dave laughed. “And I’m not going to. Racing will totally trash it.”

  Aaron sat forward in his captain’s chair. “Then why the hell did you have me put all that stuff on it? You’ve got what, two hundred horsepower over factory?”

  “Because I like going fast,” Dave told him with a smile. “Hey, did I tell you, I upgraded the tires and suspension and brakes to handle the new horsepower?”

  “Yep, and again, what the fuck for if you’re not going to race it?” To Aaron a fast car you didn’t race was like having a hot girlfriend you didn’t bang—it immediately put you under homo suspicion.

  “Leave me alone and go look at the pictures of your birthday present on your phone,” Dave said with a smile.

  Aaron’s face broke out into a wide grin. “Yeah, that was awesome.”

  “What’d you get him?” Elmo asked him. “A hooker?”

  Dave had paid most of Aaron’s course fee three months earlier when they’d attended a 2-day precision driving course at Skip Barber’s Racing School at Lime Rock Park, Connecticut. While the techniques they practiced didn’t have a lot of pertinence when Dave was driving the Beast, it helped him a lot when he was following people doing the PI work. Plus, he was able to write the entire course fee and travel costs off on his taxes.

  “Tranny hooker,” Dave told the new guy.

  Aaron laughed. “Screw you. We went to Skip Barber’s Racing School,” he told Elmo.

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You have a Mustang?” Mo asked Dave.

  “Yep.”

  “What year?”

  “It’s two years old,” Dave told him. “A GT.”

  “What color is it?” Mo asked him. “Do you park it in the lot? I haven’t seen it.”

  “No, I drive an older Cherokee down here,” Dave explained. “That ‘Stang would get stolen in a week.”

  Mo looked from Dave to Aaron, then back at Dave. “You have two cars? How much do you guys make?”

  Dave heard the laugh from Aaron in the back. “Not that much,” Aaron straightened the new guy out.

  “I got a bit of an inheritance,” Dave explained.

  “Oh, cool,” Mo said, bopping his head.

  Dave looked out the windshield. “No,” he said quietly. “Not so much.”

  It was leaving the Comerica vault and heading east that they ran into the traffic jam.

  “What the fuck?” Aaron said from in back. “There an accident or something? There’s never traffic like this, this time of day.”

  “I don’t know, I can’t see anything,” Dave told him.

  “Can you get us out of this?”

  They were in a sea of cars. “By the time I have an opening, we’re going to be at our turn anyway,” Dave said.

  After five minutes, and a quarter mile, they could see what the problem was. Everyone was slowing down to stare at the protesters in front of the courthouse. There were at least a hundred people, some of them with signs, TV crews, somebody with a bullhorn….”What the hell is this shit?” Aaron asked, his face pressed against the mesh partition so he could see out the windshield better.

  “I don’t know….” Dave said. “No, wait, did the trial start? The one with the two cops? Has to be. That’s why it’s such a circus over there, Jesse Jackson was supposed to show up.”

  “That’s where the cops shot the unarmed pregnant lady, right?” Mo asked them.

  “She wasn’t unarmed, she had a knife and stabbed one of them in the arm,” Dave told him.

  “I never heard that,” Mo said.

  “And she was only like six weeks pregnant, there’s a good chance even she didn’t know she was pregnant,” Aaron said through the mesh. “It was the coroner who ended up telling everybody. Didn’t her mother once let slip that even she didn’t know her daughter was pregnant? Now she’s talking about how they were sitting down picking out baby names. Total bullshit.”

  “Then why are they on trial?” Mo asked him, showing some argument.

  “Fuck if I know,” Aaron told him. “Jesse Jackson and all his type have been getting everybody in Detroit riled up, saying it’s racial because she was black, and one of the cops who shot her is white. But his partner is black, or half black, or something. Trying to turn it into the next Rodney King. I can’t turn on the TV without seeing her mother’s stupid face on TV.”

  Dave had observed that the dead woman’s mother was hard to avoid. She had made all the local news shows, and started around the national daytime shows, talking to all the usual suspects. She hadn’t struck him as being especially….intellectual, but she sure was entertaining to watch, if you liked train wrecks.

  “And that’s another thing,” Aaron said. He was on a roll now. “Just how fucking stupid do you have to be to name your daughter Felanie? Honestly. I mean, really, fucking Felanie?”

  “Felanie Washington,” Dave muttered to himself. “Sounds like she should be a senator’s daughter.”

  “And you gave me shit about ‘Ikea’,” Aaron reminded him.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Mo asked Aaron.

  Aaron just blinked at him through the steel mesh, then said, “Hey Mo, you know what’s better than winning the Special Olympics?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Not being retarded.” Then he looked at Dave, who was smiling. “I gotta get out of this fucking city, man,” he told Dave. “The inmates are running the goddamn asylum. Head out west.”

  “’I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit,’” Dave said with a smile.

  Aaron smiled back. “Only way to be sure,” he said with a nod. “God I love that fucking movie.”

  “I grew up in Arizona. Still have that place out there,” Dave reminded him. “You’re welcome to use it any time.”

  “Yeah, that’s a nice spread,” Aaron remarked. He’d vacationed there with Dave for a few days the year before.
“Desert, that’s what I need. Sand, cactus, and no people.” He threw a glance at their oblivious third, who was back to looking out the window at the crowd and bopping his head to music only he could hear. “Who’s the Sheriff somewhere in Arizona, Shotgun Joe? Guy who arrests illegal aliens even though the feds tell him not to, makes his prisoners wear pink clothes, keeps suing the federal government?”

  “Shotgun John Osterman. Tohono County Sheriff, that’s where my place is.”

  “What’s wrong with Detroit?” Mo asked them, jumping back into the conversation.

  “Have you ever been anywhere else?” Aaron asked him. “Chicago, Des Moines, Lincoln, Nebraska? Anywhere? Trust me, if you’d been anywhere else, you wouldn’t be asking that question.”

  “Detroit’s not so bad.”

  “Fifty thousand wild dogs roaming the streets, that’s what the news said last week. It’s the largest city in the country to ever declare bankruptcy!” Aaron practically exploded from the back. “It looks like I Am Legend out there.”

  “Detroit didn’t do that, the dude, the financial guy appointed by the governor filed bankruptcy,” Elmo said.

  “And it’s a good damn thing,” Aaron argued. “Detroit’s been bankrupt for thirty years, it’s about time the adults stepped in and tried to do something about it. Made it official. Goddamn Detroit City Council is a circus act.”

  Elmo mumbled something then, and it might have gone unheard if the armored car wasn’t a bare-walled steel box idling in stopped traffic. Aaron sat forward.

  “Racist?” he said. “I’m not a racist. Do you even know what a racist is? It’s not somebody who can use his eyes and see there’s a difference between how people look or act. Racism is saying that some people are better or worse than others, specifically because of their race. I don’t think black people are stupid, I think stupid people are stupid. I don’t hate black people, I hate stupid people. I hate lazy people. I hate liars. These days you can’t even speak the truth without being called a racist, which is Big Brother censorship bullshit.”