Home    Hardluck Thoughts    Guest Editor    Submissions    Archives

The Inside Job

J. Mark Bertrand

Robbing banks? Not anymore, not in this century. More like robbing bits—robbing information—only for that you have to speak code. And I don’t. Inside, they taught me a lot, but it was mostly worthless. Teach him about great books, give him a university degree even, but not about computers. Education to make you impotent, absolutely. But not the sort that gives you power. Humanities they called it.

And I say: not anymore. Not in this century.

***

“Finding Joan, that was a coup for you,” Gravel says.

The way he watches her, you would think he just got out, but Gravel they released a month before me. Joan, she’s older than me, mid-forties, not exactly pretty but she fills her clothes in a way that makes a man contemplate. You could settle down with a woman like this, you tell yourself, and not feel like you’ve renounced life. Gravel sees it, I can tell.

“You’ve landed on your feet, Tanner,” he says.

I follow his gaze to the curve of Joan’s breast. A low-cut top, and she’s leaning over to place drinks on the table in front of our guests: her friends, people I know only slightly. Gravel was my one invitation, because he’s the only friend I have and we grew up together. He’s like a brother. He expects me to always be there. So far I always have.

“She’s the real deal,” I tell him.

We’re just out of earshot, voices drowned out by music from the stereo and the laughter of Joan’s girlfriends leaning over the balcony railing. Gravel gives them a thorough inspection, but I keep my eyes to myself. Some mistakes I don’t intend to repeat.

“At first,” he says, “I had it pegged as just a sex-starved maniac throwing himself at the first available thing. Eight years is a long time.”

“She don’t care about that,” I say. “Past is past. Plus, Joan’s older.”

Gravel laughs. He has the best teeth of anyone I know, a gleaming testament to symmetry.  They would devour him, the girls, if they could get past the scar.

“You always used to fall for the teachers back in school,” he says.

“They never looked like that.”

“No,” he says, giving Joan his attention again. She picked the blue summer dress for this, the one that ties behind her neck and leaves her tanned back bare. A special occasion, she said: our first time hosting as a couple. My first time hosting, period, I told her.

At the table there’s the manager and his wife, along with a loan officer and a couple of the older tellers, Joan’s colleagues. Her friends are all people from the bank because all she did is work before I came along.

Like she can sense we’re talking about her, Joan floats by, still glowing from the chatter at the table. She smiles down on us both and then leaves for the girls on the balcony, who are calling down to someone in the parking lot.

“She’s a class act,” I say, mainly to myself. I need reassurance. I need to nail it down in my mind. This is the way people are meant to live. Come home from work, pour a little wine and enjoy the company of friends.

Normal, this is. The way God made us to be.

 ***

Inside, besides the teachers, there was a chaplain. They called him that, but he was really a building contractor who volunteered on the weekends. Easy pickings is what we are, my cellmate used to say. A captive audience. If you went to the services, it was mainly for something to do, or because you grew up in church, or because of the rumor that the chaplain found construction work for guys when they got out. A couple of Bible thumpers crowded the front row, men who filled out the weekly worksheets to get a certificate at the end of six months.

Me, I stayed in the back. I never sang, I never clapped my hands. I never went down the aisle between the folding chairs and let the chaplain lay hands on me. But I was there.

My cellmate flashed his grin at me every week when I came back from services. “You found religion, huh?”

I wanted to tell him: there’s something there. Something deep. Deeper than Humanities. Only I couldn’t tell if it was deep enough.

*** 

Gravel waits till everyone’s gone. The two of us ferry glasses into the kitchen to Joan. She never leaves a mess for morning. Tackle it now, that’s her philosophy.

“About that other thing,” Gravel says.

“Not yet.”

When he got out, Gravel didn’t land on his feet. He had a month’s lead on me and it took me five more to catch up. By the time I found him, he was doing gas stations and laying bets with the money, hoping to impress people with connections and pick up where he’d left off. I tried to rein him in, but he freaked out.

“Maybe you found Jesus in prison, Tanner, but not me. Look at you, man. Pathetic. Broken. You want to hide? Not me. I’m gonna live.”

Now all that defiance is gone: he can’t tell me what he really thinks. He has to compliment my woman and my new life, because he thinks I’m his only hope.

We leave Joan humming over the dishes, then settle in the living room with the television turned up. Gravel leans over the arm of his chair so he can speak right into my ear.

“Seventy grand,” he says.

“There’s no way.”

“Then I’m a dead man.”

I have to ponder this. Seventy thousand dollars. One of the first things I did was open a savings account. The money from the building jobs wasn’t much, but I could live on less. The chaplain went with me to do the papers, and that’s where I saw Joan. With the chaplain right there, I couldn’t exactly break the ice, so it was later that I found an excuse to talk to her, to ask her out. I have two thousand in that account. I would hand it over for Gravel in a heartbeat, but two grand won’t make a difference.

“They mean business, you know,” he says.

“I told you not to—”

Joan pops through the doorway. “What’s going on in here?” Her smile fades as she takes the scene in. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” Gravel says. “My neck’s on the block.”

Joan blinks. “Your neck?”

“Shut up, Gravel.”

“If I don’t get seventy grand—”

My hand flashes out, and before I can call it back Gravel’s kneeling on the floor holding his mouth. Joan just stands there, wide-eyed.

“I said shut it.”

I knew right then it was over. All of it. The new life, the future, the streak of luck that carried me from the penitentiary into a bank teller’s bed. She can’t forgive the past if it doesn’t stay the past.

Joan must be reading my thoughts. “I’ll leave you two to talk,” she says, and she shuts the bedroom door behind her.

“Sorry,” Gravel says. “That was stupid.”

“You better go.”

*** 

There’s no such thing as luck, according to the chaplain. There’s only God looking out for sinners. The way he does it is puzzling. Sometimes he punishes the righteous and rewards the iniquitous, or so it seems. But that’s not how it really is. God, says the chaplain, is in it for the long haul. He knows the end from the beginning and all that.

“I’m serious about us,” I told Joan. “I’m in this for the long haul.”

This was just the third time we’d gone out, too soon for me to be talking that way. I thought I’d spooked her, but she surprised me that night by saying, “Why don’t we make love?” and later, “Why don’t you move in?” Four months later, my head is still spinning. If I could have told the chaplain, he might have said it was the iniquitous getting the reward, part of the devious divine plan. But her love made me feel righteous, whatever I was in my maker’s eyes.

The first night I spent with her, I stayed up afterward and thought long and hard. What was I getting myself into? What did she see in me? It was strange. I could never confide in him in real life, but in my mind, I asked the chaplain these questions and pretended to hear his replies.

“There are women who always fixate on the wrong men,” he explained. “There are women who court disaster.”

“If she loves me, what does it matter?”

“Everything matters,” the chaplain said. “And what kind of love are we talking about?”

To be honest, I didn’t know. But living with her, having this constant feminine presence, this ordering principle, made me happier than I’ve ever been. It didn’t make sense that Joan would fall for someone like me, but a lot of things don’t make sense. And they don’t have to, either.

***

She’s still dressed, sitting on the little chair next to the bed with her feet up. All day, ever since she tied the two swathes of fabric behind her neck, I wanted to come up behind her. I wanted to undo the bow and run my hands over her and whisper things into her ear. But I can tell from her expression this is not going to happen. She is waiting, waiting for an explanation.

“What does he need the money for?”

“Forget it.”

“Don’t shut me out. Why does he need it?”

I unbutton my shirt and kick my shoes off, avoiding her questions. Our whole arrangement depends on conversations like this never happening.

“I’m not involved,” I say. “It’s got nothing to do with me, so don’t worry. I told you I’m a different man and I mean it.”

“You also told me Gravel is like a brother to you.”

“He is, but there’s nothing I can do.”

“He’s in real trouble, isn’t he?”

“Gravel’s an idiot. He thought he was running with some real players, but they were just giving him enough rope to hang himself.”

“And he needs seventy thousand dollars?”

“Yeah, you have it?” I say. It’s the first time I’ve ever snapped at her and I regret it immediately. I think: we’re going to have a fight.

But I’m wrong. The Almighty has decided to reward my iniquity yet again. Joan gets up off the chair and comes toward me, working at the knot behind her neck at the same time.

“I don’t have the money,” she says. “You know I don’t. But I know where we could get it.”

I’m only half listening, distracted by her movement. “Where?”

Joan laughs, and it is a crueler, harder sound than I have ever heard from her. “Think about it,” she says. “Don’t I work at the bank?”

***

Bank jobs are impossible. The skill you need, the level of organization—it’s beyond someone like me. Sure, you can walk into any financial institution with a mask and a sawed off shotgun and walk out with a bag of marked bills, but that’s for hard, desperate men, and it always catches up to you. I know from eight years’ experience.

“You’re wrong,” Joan says. She’s lying naked across the bed, spread out to her full length, smoking a cigarette in the darkness like a femme fatale. “Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. They actually train us to cooperate. The money is insured.”

“It’s not worth getting shot for a few thousand from the teller’s tray.”

“Shot by who?”

“The guards, baby.”

“You mean guard. Singular. We only have the one, and I don’t think he could hit the side of a barn with that old revolver. Plus, they train him to cooperate, too.”

“It still wouldn’t be enough money.”

“There’s enough in the vault,” she says.

Every objection I raise, she has an answer, and the mocking tone in her voice finally gets to me. She isn’t serious—she can’t be. And it’s mean to taunt me this way. I’ve never seen this side of Joan before.

“You know how long I’ve been working there? Fourteen years. I know that place backward and forward. I know exactly how it needs to be done, right down to the very day. The very hour.”

“Can we change the subject?”

“The only person who can open the vault is the manager,” Joan says, “and like you said, it’s only worth it if you can get into the vault. He’ll say he can’t open it. He’ll say it’s on a timer and all of that. But the fact is, he can, and if you’re holding the right cards you can make him. The way you do it—and this is funny, I actually got the idea from a movie—the way you do it is you take his wife hostage.”

“His wife?” I remember the manager and his wife from the party earlier. She was a round-faced blonde with crow’s feet and a funny story about her husband always forgetting things. I kind of liked her.

“One of you takes the wife hostage and the other goes with him to the vault to get the money. It’s clean and simple. He’ll cooperate because no one can blame him for it afterward.”

The hand with the cigarette comes to rest on her stomach, rising and falling as she breathes. In the dark, I can make out the column of smoke rising from her and I feel like suddenly Humanities and Religion have come together: I have fallen into a ring of Dante’s hell, only I don’t know which one. I can hear the chaplain’s voice in my head, only he’s not saying anything. He’s just wheezing real hard like he can barely keep up.

*** 

Gravel’s like a man with a gun to his head. He sees us from across the restaurant and rushes over, glancing behind him to make sure he wasn’t followed. Paranoia. Joan and I have this tradition of breakfast out on Saturday mornings. We drink black coffee and flip through the papers trying to decide how to spend the day. But this is the end of it. She didn’t tell me until we sat down that she’d called Gravel, and now he’s turned up not five minutes later.

“Count me out,” I say.

“Out of what?” he asks.

So Joan tells him. His eyes grow wide and he rattles off all the objections that I did the night before, but instead of staying firm, he buckles. When you’re drowning, you reach out to any lifeline, no matter where it’s tied. After a while, it’s just Joan explaining all the details while Gravel fingers the scar along his chin.

I gave him that scar, years ago, when I struck him by mistake with the back of a hammer. Busted his jaw, gouged a livid hunk of flesh from his face, and disfigured him for life. All because he didn’t knock before he came in the back door. I thought he was the cop I’d seen out on the street. I’d been drinking and it was dark.

“We could do this,” Gravel says. “We have to do this.”

“No.”

“I only have until the end of the week.”

“It’ll need to be Tuesday, then,” Joan says. “The vault will be full, and Hardy, the manager, leaves for St. Paul the next day for a week.”

“No.”

“Can we do it with just two of us?”

“You’ll go to his house,” Joan tells him, “and wait until he’s gone. The wife will be alone. You go in, hold her at gunpoint, wait for the call. Then Tanner arrives at the bank: puts his mask on, disarms the guard, and makes Hardy call home. You answer, he opens the vault for Tanner, and that’s that.”

“No.”

“What about the silent alarm?”

“Under my desk,” Joan says. “I’ll say afterward that I thought I’d pressed it, but must have panicked.”

“The problem,” Gravel says, “is we don’t have any guns.”

“No,” I say, “the problem is that you’re insane. You’re not going to do this. I’m not going to do it. It’s crazy to even talk about it.”

“I have the guns,” Joan says.

“You what?”

“I have the guns. A pair of Smith & Wessons that used to belong to my dad.”

Gravel raises his coffee cup to Joan in a mock toast and she clinks her mug against it.

“Here’s to saving my life,” he says.

“To salvation,” Joan says.

And I say, “To hell with you both.”

*** 

Monday morning the phone rings and I know it’s the chaplain. He will have heard already that I wasn’t at church yesterday, and now I haven’t shown up at the job site, either. Joan didn’t want it that way: she said I should stick to my normal routine or it would raise suspicion. But suspicion is what I want. Pick up the phone, I tell myself. Pick it up and confess. Tell the chaplain to come and get you, beg him for help. He might have the money, or be able to come up with it—and maybe, as part of some mysterious divine chicanery, he might just hand it over.

Joan left for work an hour ago. Gravel is sitting outside the bank manager’s house, “casing the joint,” as he said. And I’m left alone, looking at a pair of blued revolvers on the kitchen table, listening to the phone ring.

Pick it up.

I reach for it. I lift it from the cradle. Too late. On the other end, nothing but a dial tone.

*** 

They had to do surgery on Gravel’s jaw, and the stitches were still in the day we rushed the liquor store with a brace of shotguns. We needed the money for a weekend down in Daytona, where Gravel said he was going to find the woman of his dreams. It had come to him one night in the hospital: Daytona. Now it was a quest, only we had to bankroll it. He wanted to go down there in style, and I owed it to him to make that happen.

Behind the counter was a bald guy in his mid-sixties. He must have seen us through the window when we were getting out of the car and sized up the situation all at once. Under the counter he kept what they call a “barbecue gun,” a shiny, engraved Colt .45 a Texas Ranger might wear when he’s going out on the town. Gravel and I walked through the door with our masks pulled down and our shotguns tucked behind our hips.

The old man welcomed us to his store with a magazine full of lead.

We never made it to Daytona and Gravel never met the girl of his dreams.

And I still felt like I owed him.

***

 Which is why, the next morning, I’m sitting in a stolen car in front of Joan’s bank, watching the guests from our party file into work. I’m waiting on a call from Gravel, who I dropped off on the manager’s street, reporting that the round-faced, crow-footed blonde is squared away. My mind is wandering. All I can think of is Joan and the way she was last night after I finally agreed to do it. She was on top of me, clawing at me, dragging me into the bedroom, urging me with words that had never come out of her mouth before, any notion of ‘making love’ forgotten entirely.

“I’m doing it for you,” she told me. “For your friend. For us.”

“But you’re not doing it. And it isn’t about us.”

To which she cooed and cajoled, willing to put up with any barb or slight to get what she was after. It turned my stomach, but here I am. Going along with her plan like some idiot from a forgotten time who doesn’t realize the world has changed.

The phone chirps. I answer it. Gravel whispers. Go ahead. Get it over with.

*** 

I keep my head down in the parking lot. The point is to be nondescript and give the surveillance cameras nothing to work with. One set of glass double doors leads into a vestibule and there, pausing next to the table stacked with financial brochures, I pull the mask down over my face. The cotton knit might as well be a sensory deprivation chamber. The moment it goes down all I can hear is my breathing and the thump of blood in my head. Sweat swells from my pores like it’s being forced out by the pressure. I lift the revolver from the pouch pocket of my new thrift store duffel coat, then push open the second set of glass doors.

No one inside has noticed me up to now, and even as I walk across the thick green carpet with my gun arm extended, they all seem to be minding their own business. One of the loan officers is chatting on the phone. A secretary passes a few yards in front of me with a file open under her nose. I can smell her perfume as I cross her wake.

In the whole building, only Joan is looking straight at me. I see her and notice the smile on her face. My hand raises halfway to wave, but then I clamp it against the other one to hold the wheelgun firm. Someone murmurs in the distance behind me and I’m about to turn around when Hardy, the manager, walks right up to me. He jerks to a stop, takes in the gun barrel and steps back.

“This is a hold up,” I say. My voice cracks on hold and I have to repeat it.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Hardy says. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

I blink. This is too easy. “The vault. Open it up.”

Hardy nods off to the left and, following his gaze, I see that the vault is already wide open. Inside, a uniformed guard with a clipboard is logging a group of thick money bags with the bank’s logo. I point the revolver at the guard and push Hardy into the vault—as an afterthought, I yell, “Nobody move!”

Sweat stings my eyes. Hardy and the guard stand back and let me test the weight of one of the bags. Too heavy to carry with one hand.

“What we’re going to do,” I say, “is each of you take a bag, and you walk them outside for me. Nobody’s going to get hurt.”

Should I tell him Gravel’s got his wife? There doesn’t seem to be any point. It would have been better to have Gravel here with me, if only we’d known.       

At gunpoint, Hardy and the guard carry a bag each out of the vault, and the three of us march through the bank lobby toward the door. Now everyone is looking, shocked and still. I glance over my shoulder: Joan is still looking straight at me, still smiling.

Only when I turn back around do I realize it: I’ve been betrayed.

There, crouched in the corner, is another uniformed guard. He isn’t old and broken down the way Joan had said. This guy is broad-chested with an military haircut and a shiny black pistol halfway out of the holster.

My revolver moves. The front blade of the sight finds the guard. My finger contracts. The cylinder rotates, the hammer drops, and a tremor runs down my arm. The flash blinds me. I keep the revolver spinning, firing until the gun runs dry. Through the smoke, I see the guard crawling on the carpet, angry with pain. The other guard, a few paces in front of me, drops the bag and goes for the gun on his hip. But I club him down with the smoking revolver.

“Come on,” I tell Hardy. I heft the bag the guard dropped and start toward the door, but the bank manager backs away.

“Come on or your wife is history!”

This doesn’t stop Hardy. Either he doesn’t understand, or he doesn’t care. He keeps moving away from me, and then a shrill alarm splits the air.

Joan.

I head for the door, taking the one bag with me, seeing the pistol-whipped guard wrenching his gun free as I pass. No time. I keep running. I’m already in the vestibule when the glass shatters behind me, the shards bouncing off my back.

***

It takes me fifteen minutes or more to get my head under control. Stop at the red light. Breathe. Act normal. What happened back there? What happened? All I can think: she betrayed me. She set me up. She said there was only one guard and there were two. She said she wouldn’t trip the alarm and she did. And it wasn’t silent: my head is still ringing from the blast. I’ve just killed a man—or shot one, anyway. There’s a life sentence in this for me. There’s worse. I can’t figure it out. I can’t understand why.

Joan was smiling. Why?

My hands stop shaking, my breathing evens out. And then I remember Gravel. I have to pat down my duffel coat pockets to find the phone, and then wrack my brain for the number. It rings. Rings. And goes to voicemail.

*** 

He runs up to the car the moment I reach the curb, tossing his mask in the back seat and sitting down hard, his eyes wide with fear.

“You took your time, man.”

“Something went wrong.”

He snarls. “Something went wrong all right. She called me.”

“Joan?”

“I took care of it.”

“What? What did she say?” I scream the words, slamming on the brakes, my voice so loud that Gravel jumps in his seat.

“Come on, let’s get out of here!”

“What did she say?”

“I took care of it, Tanner!”

Now my fists are at his throat and I’m dragging him toward me, getting so close that the scar tissue on his chin looms large. And I notice it: flecks of blood on his face. I let go.

“She said it blew up. She said it went crazy. She said to take care of the wife.”

She said to take care of the wife.

*** 

We stop in the parking lot of a suburban shopping mall and transfer the bag from the stolen car to Gravel’s, which he left here the night before. Both of us are too numb to speak. There’s the question of the gun, and I know he’s thinking about it, too. A murder weapon now. We have to ditch it somewhere it will never be found.

“I’m sorry,” Gravel says.

“Shut up.”

He drags the money out of the back seat and dumps it in the trunk of his car. We both stand there looking at it for a while.

“At least we got that,” Gravel says.

“It’s not worth it.”

“If it saves me,” he says, “then it’s worth it.”

“So that woman had to die to save you?”

He shrugs. “Ain’t that how the chaplain says it works?”

I use the edge of my hand on him, hitting right under the chin and snapping his head back. He stumbles into a fighting stance, lifting his fists, but then he drops them, shakes his head. Not worth it.

“I have to count this money and bring it to them, Tanner.”

“Go ahead.”

He reaches into the trunk and starts tugging at the bag. When that doesn’t work, he grabs a folding knife from his pocket and cuts into the side. I leave him to it and climb into the passenger seat. Just as I snap the door shut, I hear the explosion.

Gunshots are my first thought, but when I turn my head I find Gravel staggering alongside the car, face and hands smeared with purple ink.

Dye packs. I should have known.

*** 

Gravel makes a few calls and arranges a meeting. We only have forty grand in our bag, and it’s stained with dye, but what choice does he have? After a gas station stop, where Gravel tried without success to scrub himself clean, we drive into town to a row of warehouses and storage units alongside a rusty railroad track.

“Stop along here,” he says, pointing to a red metal building with white letters stenciled on the side. “I’ll go the rest of the way alone.”

“I’m not going to leave you.”

He puts a hand on my arm. “I can’t take you with me, man.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Wait here and I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“And if you’re not?”

“I will be.”

But he isn’t. Ten minutes pass, then fifteen and then twenty. I try him on the cellular phone and get his voicemail again.

Heading down the path between the buildings, retracing his steps as far as I can remember them, I keep trying his phone. Nothing. I turn down an alley that runs the length of an empty lot overgrown with weeds. Across the way, I see a row of black cars leaving an arched, hangar-shaped building. They’re long gone by the time I reach the spot.

Inside the hangar, Gravel is twisted into a heap on the concrete floor. They put two bullets in him and left the marked money in a pile at his feet.

I kneel beside his body, the scar I gave him hidden under the purple dye. Or maybe it’s blood. In the darkness I can’t be sure. I want to cry for him. I want to say words over the body. I want to call the chaplain and have him leave whatever work site he’s supervising to come and do whatever he can to cover over this.

I want to go back inside.

*** 

The balcony is empty. I look up at it, remembering the girls who were there just a few days before, wondering who it was they’d been calling down to. He must have been standing about here, just where I am, gazing up the way I’m gazing now. That was lifetimes ago, a world I somehow lost.

I wait until dusk to go upstairs. The automatic lights flicker on in the parking lot as I cross over. I pause a moment beside Joan’s car and flatten my hand on the hood: warm.

At the door I don’t use my key. Instead I knock. And wait.

“You can’t come in,” she says through the door.

“Open it.”

“I called the cops. They know you’re here.”

“Open the door, Joan.”

“Just get out of here,” she says. “You have the money, so stop while you’re ahead.”

I lean against the door, resting my forehead on the wood. “Gravel’s dead.”

At first, silence. Then, Joan says, “What goes around comes around. He murdered that woman and now someone’s murdered him. Am I supposed to feel bad?”

I’m losing it. I can feel myself coming apart. “Why?”

“Go away, Tanner, before the cops get here.”

I reach for the key, slot it into the lock. “Why’d you do this?”

The door opens a crack, and then I push it all the way, but Joan isn’t there anymore. I step inside, leaving the door open behind me, then walk into the apartment. Everything seems old. It’s like going back to your childhood room after years away from home. You recognize the things—they used to belong to you, but in another life. And there’s Joan, standing in the bedroom doorway, something else that used to be mine.

She raises a silver automatic to the level of her hip. “Don’t come closer.”

I stop in my tracks. At the same moment, I hear someone coming up behind me, pausing in the apartment doorway. I want to turn and see who it is, but I already know. It’ll be Hardy, the manager. Nothing else makes sense. Joan’s accomplice. He made things so easy at the bank.

She doesn’t see him, though. “I’ll kill you if you take another step, and I’ll get away with it, too.”

“Why’d you do this, Joan?”

“Why do you think?”

“I don’t know. I thought you loved me.” I can’t help it: I break down. She has the gun and I know she’ll use it. He’s behind me. No escape. I fall to one knee.

“I did it,” she says, “because he wasn’t going to leave her and ten years is a long time to wait. I got tired of it.”

“You wanted Hardy’s wife dead?”

“He wanted it, too,” she says, “but he didn’t have the guts. He’s a lot like you, Tanner.”

The floor creaks behind me. “How long have you two been planning it?”

She laughs. “It was a crime of opportunity. But believe me, I’ve been looking for opportunities. At first I just wanted to make him jealous, but with your past, I knew it would come to this.”

Another footstep behind me. I can feel he’s close, and now Joan sees him, too. The muzzle of her gun shifts over my shoulder.

“Who the hell are you?” she says.

I look up and find not Hardy but the chaplain. He’s wearing the tufted vest and cowboy boots that are his uniform on construction sites. He extends a calming hand in Joan’s direction and pulls me to my feet.

“Ma’am, you can put that down,” he says. “I’ve come for him.”

“Come to do what?”

“I’m taking him,” the chaplain says.

The sound of his voice calms.  The chaplain smells of sawdust and cheap aftershave and the aura of the holy.

“Oh, I get it, I see who you are,” Joan says. And she raises the pistol higher.

“He missed work these last two days,” the chaplain says, “and church the day before. So I’ve come for him.”

“Well, he’s going to cost you something, preacher.”

The click of the trigger is hollow, small, and the three of us hold our breath. When nothing happens, Joan starts working the slide and fiddling with the levers alongside. Then the chaplain makes his move, dragging me out by the collar, huffing at the effort. Effort it is, since I’m kicking the ground and straining forward, hoping to break free, hoping to reach her, hoping to tear Joan apart.

He pulls me out into the hallway and then hustles me along to the stairs, crowding me down them. We are just stepping onto the cracked pavement when a shot sounds upstairs. No glass breaking, no bullet cutting the air over our heads. That shot was private, not meant for us.

“Don’t look back,” the chaplain says.

He walks behind me, hand on my shoulder. A pair of patrol cars with flashing lights pull into the complex up ahead. Cops rush out, leaving their car doors swinging, and the chaplain leads me right through their midst.

They part on either side of us like Egyptians in an Old Testament miracle.

We keep walking till we reach the chaplain’s battered green Ford with the locking tool box across the bed. Once we’re in, the engine rumbles to life and he turns to face me.

“I just saved your skin back there,” he says. “But that’s all I can save of you.”

I rub my eyes. “That’s all that’s left.”

He starts to answer, then stops himself. The truck rolls forward and we leave the apartment complex as more police units arrive.

“You should’ve been dead back there,” the chaplain says. His tone is thoughtful, like he’s pondering the deep things. “You’re not, though, and that’s something. It could be a lot.”

“I’m not fit to live.”

“None of us are,” he says.

Not anymore. Not in this century.

Copyright(c) 2005 by J.Mark Bertrand

Home    Hardluck Thoughts    Guest Editor    Submissions    Archives