Supermarket - Bobby Hall Page 0,48

baseball bat and swung furiously at the front sliding glass door, shattering it.

Walking in with no regard for the law, Frank strolled from aisle to aisle, picking out snacks at will. He opened a bag of chips, ate one, and threw the rest away.

I took a swig, he took a swig.

Over by the self-serving bulk candies, he grabs a handful of jelly beans and throws them into the air above his head one by one, aiming for his mouth. He strolls over to the produce department, grabs a banana, and begins to peel it. Twirling his small black duffel bag, he heads over to a shelf of pasta sauce, grabs a jar, tosses it in the air, and swings, connecting bat to glass for an explosion of red sauce across the aisle floor. Moving to the front of the store, he stops in the middle of aisle twelve, the fluorescent lights flickering in and out just like they always do. With all his might, he kicks the entire shelf, tipping it over. It collides with the shelves in aisle eleven, which repeats in aisle ten . . . all the way down to aisle six, like dominos, where they come crashing down with immeasurable force. With half of the aisles in the store demolished on the ground, Frank cracks a smile, continuing his walk to the front of the store.

Smashing the vending machine open, he retrieves the PayDay he’d been eyeing.

“What kind of grocery store has a vending machine in it?” he snickers, then continues on his way.

Arriving at Customer Service, where Ronda is usually stationed, Frank swigs from the bottle because I, in my apartment, do the same. Hot, I remove the mask, wipe the sweat from my brow, and pull it back down over my face. Drunk, my fingers begin to move slower than usual along the typewriter keys.

Frank jumps the Customer Service desk and slides across it like it’s the roof of a sports car. Landing his feet flat on the ground, he knows what he needs to do next.

He needs to break through the door in front of him, into Hector’s security room. He needs to rewind the tapes and then press record, so none of what he did would be caught on camera by the security monitors. The tapes would go from a perfectly fine, ordered store straight to . . . the aftermath. Straight chaos. There would be no explanation of how it happened.

After fixing the tapes, he would retrieve the money and be on his way.

Frank kicks in the door, revealing the inside of the security room. It’s illuminated by bright screens displaying a live video feed of the entire store. To the right of the monitors, on the floor under a desk, he sees the safe. He knows what to do.

Frank ducks down and locates the keypad. A small, square red light above the three on the keypad signifies it’s locked. Frank plants his left knee onto the floor, removes his black duffel bag from around his shoulder, and downs the rest of his Scotch, throwing the bottle, watching it shatter.

My bottle, however, does not shatter. To the right of my typewriter, it sits in perfect condition, still half full.

As if he’d set the code himself, Frank smoothly dials in 34652. A shrill, high-pitched tone sounds off, the red square above three on the keypad quickly turning to green. The safe pops open. Frank grabs the safe door and opens it, revealing . . . it’s empty!

Nah, I’m just fucking with you. It’s completely packed to the brim with ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and one-hundred-dollar bills; money orders; and checks payable to Muldoon’s Grocery. From what Frank can tell, there’s damn near two hundred thousand dollars in there.

With that, he puts the money in his duffel, laughing at how easy it was to pull the whole thing off. At the same time, I sit there in my apartment thinking about exactly how I should end this part of the book.

In my book, Frank had planned to rob the store. He always had the idea of robbing Muldoon’s blind and running off to Canada, just the way Frank had told me in real life.

He knew the store had no alarm system, just the fire sprinklers, which would automatically alert firefighters and the police station in case of an emergency.

Nobody would know what had happened until morning.

Frank takes his time collecting the money, savoring the process. Once he has it all, he stands