That’s what rules are for. And that’s one thing I did know, the rules. I was raised on them.
Not everyone knows the rules. Or maybe different kinds of people have different ones.
Not everybody’s the same. For men like me, you can do all kinds of things as long as you stay inside the lines.
Some guys, they make a big score, they go through it all in a week. That’s okay. Stupid, but okay.
Those guys, they always get caught. Either they splash so much money around that people can’t help noticing, or they live straight, like they’ve got a job and all, but they pick too expensive a neighborhood.
Thing is, you want a rich-suburbs lifestyle, you have to keep working. No time off.
It doesn’t matter if they blow a big score in two weeks or live on it for five years—soon as they need money, they go back to work. They can’t be picky, so they take whatever’s on the table.
You never want to work with guys like that. They get known. They know the rules, sure. But it’s not that you’re worried about them giving you up if the job goes bad, it’s that any guy who needs the money, there’s a lot of ways he can take everyone else down with him.
Like if the planner says we’ve got two hours between rotations for the security guards in some building. But it turns out that we’re not getting into the safe in any two hours. The box man says there’s some new stuff on it, going to take him a lot longer than we planned to be in there. Something like that happens on a job, what you’re supposed to do is walk away.
But a guy who needs that money, he’s not leaving. So he changes the plan. That’s hosed right there—nobody can make up a good plan in a couple of minutes.
I know because it once happened to me, just like that. The guy who needed the money, he took over. “You,” he said, pointing at me, “we need more time. We know the guard’s rounds; he’s on his way right now. All you have to do is go down the hall and wait for him to walk past you. Old guy like him, they wouldn’t even trust him with a gun. Step out behind him, choke him out, and we’ve got another two hours to get this thing open.”
“Not me,” I said. I didn’t say why. You never have to say why unless it’s something that was in the plan from the beginning.
I picked up my bag. Two of the other guys got their gear together; one of them kept looking at his watch.
“Fuck it, then,” the guy who needed the money said. He took out this little black gun from one pocket and a silencer from the other.
The three of us got out. The guy who needed money stayed. So did the box man and one other guy. I didn’t know any of them, never worked with them before.
They stayed inside the lines, right to the end. The guy who needed money, he stood up and said he was the one who’d killed the security guard. Said the whole job was his idea. He even said he made the other two guys stay—if they had tried to leave, he would have shot them, too.
It was worth a try, I guess. If the jury believed the other two hadn’t known he was carrying, they might have cut them some slack.
But they put the killing on all three. It doesn’t matter who pulls the trigger, everybody pays the same. I even heard of a getaway man who got life for killing a bank guard who went for his gun. The driver never even went inside the building, but it didn’t make any difference.
There were a lot of good reasons for me not trying to choke out the guard. You hit a guy over the head with a pipe, you might knock him out … or you might kill him. I learned that from the doctor who closed up my face during my first bit.
“You know how people say, ‘He’s got a thick skull’?” that doctor said.
“Sure,” I said. “They’re always saying it about me.”
“Well, in your case, it’s not a pejorative.”
“A what?”
“Derogatory. A put-down.”
“But it means you’re dumb, right?”
“Yes,” the other doctor in the room said. “That’s the way it’s used. But in the medical sense, the human skull can vary in thickness. Here, look at this.”