Silent St Louis Bros & Motormouth Mike
On a cool autumn morning in 2002, a small team of men carried out a heist that changed the course of American history. I was part of that team. The de facto leader, actually. I spent the four months leading up to the heist meticulously planning: casing buildings, scoping exits, finding alternative escape routes, timing the process, anticipating police response, and giving myself a migraine fretting over a seeming infinitude of possible fuck ups. Four months of white-knuckled sobriety, of drinking iced coffee all night while sweating at my desk, punching numbers into a calculator. Four months of feeling like I was going to shit my pants any time I merely thought about the heist. Four months of that Mickey Rourke line from Body Heat ringing in my head.
Any time you try a decent crime you’ve got fifty ways you can fuck up. If you can think of twenty-five of them, then you’re a genius. And you ain’t no genius.
I don’t need to be a genius. I need to be prepared. So shut the fuck up.
Any time you try a decent crime…
Shut the fuck up!
And on and on, into the night. I’ve had trouble sleeping my whole life but that four-month period in 2002 was the worst. I was really dragging my ass. No matter how exhausted I was, as soon as my head hit the pillow a demonic carnival would start up in my mind. Regrets and recriminations. What ifs and why didn’t yous. The face of a friend lost at sea in ‘93. The consequences I’d face if Nicky found out what I was doing. After all, whether we succeeded or not, this was going to be the most high profile thing I’d ever done. I just hoped I’d be ready when the time came.
The plan was to steal the goods in transport. It would be easier to rob two armed men in a Brinks truck than find points of egress in a fortified building armed with sensors, alarms, invisible trip lines, and patrolled by scores of humorless, beefy security guards.
I carried out most of the planning stage by myself in Los Angeles. Two of my partners went to New York City six weeks before the day of the heist to carry out renaissance and report necessary information back to me.
We weren’t stealing stolen money or bonds. We weren’t taking sensitive information to ransom back to some high-level operative or government organization. We were planning to steal a work of art. Art is essentially priceless because it’s worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. There’s no set rate, like with currency exchange or other types of goods because artworks are, by their very nature, one of a kind. Of course, it’s harder to sell art than spend cash, but I had reasons other than money to do the heist. What were we going to steal?
The original scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
I arrived in New Jersey in the afternoon on September 4 2002. The other guys had already been there a few days. There were four of us, three to carry out the heist and a getaway driver. The latter was a beanpole motormouth from Galveston named Mike. Just Mike. If someone didn’t offer you a surname in the business, you didn’t ask. If you did, you could get yourself killed. Criminals don’t need to know each other’s last names. Criminals don’t need to know each other’s names, period. But police do. So don’t ask. Even if you’re just trying to be friendly. It makes you sound and seem like a cop. Mike was Mike. That’s it.
Mike could talk your fucking ear off but he was the best driver I knew. I didn’t even think about finding someone else. And I was sure I could trust him because I’d worked with him many times before. The same could be said for the other two, a pair of obese monosyllabic brothers from St Louis named Lee and Van. Lee and Van were as silent as Mike was gregarious. I fell somewhere in the middle. I despise small talk but I’m not a fan of protracted silence either. Like that guy in Fargo who just won’t talk and Steve Buscemi gets mad at him. As annoying as Buscemi is in that movie, I can’t blame his character for getting sick of that silent Swede. I can’t remember the name of the actor who plays him but I’ve seen him in other things. Most memorably as the electrician who calls outlets “holes” in the Frogger episode of Seinfeld.
Mike picked me up at Newark International Airport and we cruised down I-78 to a motel just south of Jersey City. Lee and Van were already there in their own room so I was stuck with Mike for the night. He talked nonstop. Not about nothing…but he talked too much about too much. He fancied himself a Renaissance Man, so he’d launch into these arcane diatribes about Soviet classical music under Stalin or the Shroud of Turin and then, without preamble, he’d start listing his top ten porn stars. He was insane. The only break I could get from his endless barrage of bilious bullshit was pretending to be considerate of his being a non-smoker. I kept stepping out to light one every ten minutes. I smoked so much I almost made myself sick. The brothers saw me out there a couple times and shot me a few sheepish looks. They felt bad but not bad enough to switch rooms with me.
Lee pointed across the parking lot. “Look.” “What?” “Lady Liberty.” I looked. He was right. I could just see the top of the statue from where we stood on the second floor. “Cool,” was all I could say. If Mike was there he’d launch into a monologue about the type of glaze used to sculpt the thing. Or he’d lecture us about the rhyme scheme of the sonnet written on the plaque. Give me your tired, your poor…
I wasn’t poor anymore but I was tired. Bedtime was approaching but I knew I wouldn’t get much sleep.
I didn’t ask the brothers but I could tell they were nervous. When they went back to their room I stayed outside to watch the sunset over the Hudson River, wondering if this was my last night of freedom.
Any time you try a decent crime…
Shut the fuck up, Mickey.
Wouldn’t that suck if we get arrested tomorrow though? I’d’ve spent my last night as a free man in a fleabag motel in New Jersey with a guy who never stops yammering.
Any time you try a decent crime…
The manuscript was going to be put up for sale at Christie’s International Auction House the next morning. We were supposed to intercept the truck on its way to the auction from Columbia University, where the manuscript was being stored. Around midnight I finally had to tell Mike to shut the fuck up, as politely as I could of course, and turned in but I couldn’t sleep and just smoked in my bed as Mike snored and coughed in his. I had my old mauled paperback copy of On the Road with me and thumbed through it, reading all the passages I’d underlined over the years.
Exactly 55 years ago tonight, I thought, Jack Kerouac was spending his last day in obscurity. He was going to bed an unknown writer for the very last time in his life. The next morning the ringing phone woke him and he was famous. A review of On the Road had appeared in that morning’s edition (September 5 1957) of The New York Times, and it was more than favorable. It was rapturous. Gilbert Millstein called it “the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet made by the [Beat] generation.”
Kerouac didn’t know it yet, but fame would kill him. Reporters would dog him for the rest of his life, asking him “what does beat mean?” over and over. Kerouac answered their questions patiently, then sharply, then bitterly. The media wanted a clever quip from him, not arcane references to some “Catholic beatific vision.” They wanted him to say something cool when Jack would be the first to admit he wasn’t. He says so himself in his minor masterpiece The Subterraneans, after attending a disastrous party with a bunch of beatniks too worried about how they were being perceived to let loose and have fun. Drunk on whiskey, Kerouac turned belligerent and got himself kicked out (the party had been thrown in his honor). On the way home, he ruefully coined a Tarzan-esque phrase: “Me hot - them cool.”
Fuck them. Kerouac sabotaged the party on purpose. The whole I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member philosophy. Not a bad ethical north star to follow.
I loved Kerouac growing up and I still love him today. He was a bit of a father figure to me, especially during two difficult years I spent in the reformatory in my teens. I was a rebellious youth and although my father and I got along, he couldn’t control me. Reform schools in those days had quite the interesting enrollment strategy. Two guys would come to your house in the middle of the night, blindfold you, hogtie you, throw you in a van, and drive you to the hellish prison that would be your life for the foreseeable future. I was shocked to learn recently that schools like this are still in operation all across the United States. Paris Hilton was kidnapped and brought to one where she suffered abuse at the hands of her captors. I’m guessing you have Netflix, right? Everybody and their dog has Netflix. Check out The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping when you have a few free hours. It’ll educate you about the troubled teen industry and just how fucked it is.
My experiences helped me relate to Jack Kerouac’s character in On the Road - Sal Paradise, who shares Kerouac’s shyness, restlessness, and damaged poetic soul. But I also related to the human tornado who makes the book so unforgettable. Kerouac’s buddy Neal Cassady, who was immortalized as Dean Moriarty in On the Road, himself spent time in reform schools as a youth. Dean’s infectious enthusiasm for life, travel, sex, booze, fast cars, jazz, and adventure provides the novel its most vividly drawn and ultimately sympathetic character. Sal Paradise is the scribe of the story, recording everything in that hypnotically poetic prose, beautifully rendered and deeply felt. Dean Moriarty is the raw engine of the tale, the mad Ahab at the wheel of every car he and Sal buy, borrow, or steal. An indelibly American character for indelibly American times…that joyous postwar period that created the greatest middle class in history, a time when America was an open book waiting to be read…with “all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it…”
On the Road is a masterpiece, both of its time and outside time. A joyous orgy of words, both a celebration and an act of individual creativity that manages to be simultaneously uproariously funny and heartbreakingly elegiac. If you haven’t read it, you should. It sent a million kids out on the road with their thumbs outstretched…and me too. Frequently imitated but never duplicated, On the Road holds a special place in American literature and in my heart.
The famous original scroll was written on a single sheet of teletype paper, 120-feet long and scotch-taped together by Kerouac himself (he was convinced that stopping to change a sheet of paper hindered the “spontaneous prose” style whose innovator and principle avatar he was). The scroll bounced around for years and years, eventually ending up in the New York Public Library in the ‘90s, until budget cuts forced the library to sell its most precious holdings. What a fucking travesty. One could once view the original scroll in the New York Public Library. It was behind glass, since the paper Kerouac used was of low quality and would disintegrate if every curious fan and scholar touched it with their bare hands, but it was accessible. And here now it was going to be sold to a private collector, some rich asshole who would probably only show the scroll to his rich buddies, very few of whom had even read Kerouac. I had the sense that this rich guy would show off the scroll the same way a hunter mounts a deer’s head on the wall…a certain disgusting acquisitive gleam in his eye…. It made me sick. The great works of art in this world, be they of fine art or literature or music, should not be privatized.
The Heist
We awoke at dawn the next day and started packing up. The brothers met us in the parking lot, their usual reticent selves, but even Mike was uncharacteristically quiet. He may have been a motormouth but he knew better than to distract us in the hours before a heist.
We knew better than to tail the truck with a single vehicle. Mike and I did a pass at Columbia in our rented U-Haul and saw the gray truck was crouched at the loading dock. The driver was standing between the building and the truck, watching the street with his right hand resting on the butt of his gun. The passenger was carrying a courier bag, most likely our precious scroll, from the building to the back of the truck. We circled the block and came in behind the truck as it was pulling onto Amsterdam Avenue before turning left on W 115th Street.
“On 115th,” I said into the walkie-talkie. “Making a right on Morningside drive…now.”
Inching forward in New York City morning traffic, willing our hands not to fidget, we took a left on W 57th Street.
“Peeling off,” I said. “Your truck.”
Mike sped down a maze of alleys before dropping me a quarter mile from Christie’s. I jogged to my position and waited. The truck would continue before stopping at W 57th Street and 7th Ave, kitty corner from Carnegie Hall. I couldn’t help it, that stupid joke popped into my head.
A tourist stops a New Yorker on 57th Street and asks “hey, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?”
The New Yorker nods sagely. “Practice man. Practice.”
From there the truck took a left onto W 48th Street and then into the alley where we were waiting. I was posted behind a dumpster on the same side of the alley as the alley entrance to Christie’s, while Lee and Van were hiding in an alcove on the other side, but from where they would be able to step out and make themselves seen to both the driver and the bagman.
When the Brinks truck appeared we pulled our balaclavas over our faces. The truck was moving so agonizingly slowly…its pace was so glacial I thought maybe the driver had spotted us and was waiting for us to make a move. If I’d been counting Mississppis from the time the truck entered the alley to the time it finally rolled to a stop, I would’ve got to fifty. When the truck stopped I was three feet away from the exhaust pipe; close enough to feel the heat emanating from it when the truck shuddered to a full stop. The brothers were across the street and behind me about ten feet.All three of us were staring at the back of the truck, waiting.
We knew what would happen because the silent St Louis brothers had done reconnaissance for the past six weeks. They’d been in New York since mid-July. True to form, the driver stayed put while the passenger got out. He walked to the back of the truck where I was crouched hidden behind a dumpster. He climbed up into the truck and I readied my weapon: an AR-15 assault rifle mini. The stock was much shorter than the full-length AR-15, and easily fittable under my trench coat. When the driver stepped down from the truck with the courier bag in both hands I stepped from my hiding spot and bellowed “HANDS! SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!”
The courier flinched like he’d been stung by a bee, then dropped the parcel. Lee and Van stepped from their alcove with their AR-15s and pointed them at him. He gaped at us, astonished. I didn’t blame him. We’d literally come out of nowhere. We knew from our research that neither of these men had ever been robbed before. It showed. Their surprise was genuine. I stepped past the courier, whose hands were up, and stepped into the back of the Brinks truck. Lee and Van continued to point their guns at the second man. No point in aiming our weapons at the driver. The truck was impenetrable. The driver was quicker to get over his shock and was already scrambling to grab his radio off the dashboard.
“Gary Valk!” I bawled, making sure to enunciate. I was wearing a balaclava and needed him to hear me. “Your children Mark and Anne attend Riverside High School in Yonkers. Your wife is currently home at 1152 Sprain Brook Parkway. We have men posted outside your children’s school and your home. Do not call the police. If you call the police, I will call my men and they will shoot down your front door, enter your home, and shoot your wife in the head. My other men will enter Riverside High School, locate the 9B classroom…that’s Mark’s…he’s in Science class right now…and the 11H classroom, that’s Anne…she’s in English class. They will shoot your children at my command and I will tell them to do so if you call the police. Take your hands off the radio and place it back in the cradle on the dashboard in front of you.”
The driver did as he was told, then sat back and glared at me in the mirror. He was furious. I didn’t blame him either. We fucking had him and he knew it. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have men posted outside his children’s school or his home. He didn’t know that. He had no way of knowing for sure. Killing his wife would be easy, he knew that much, and the school shooting threat wasn’t as far fetched as it might sound to you. Columbine was still very much in people’s minds in 2002.
As this was happening, Van and Lee were instructing the courier to climb into the dumpster I’d just hidden behind. Good.
“Turn off the truck and toss the keys out the window.”
Another angry stare.
“Don’t make me tell you again, Gary.”
Behind me I heard a creak as the dumpster lid closed with the second courier inside. Then I heard Van speak into his walkie. “Come get us,” he said firmly. It was the loudest I’d ever heard him speak.
Without taking his eyes off me in the mirror, Gary shut the engine off, pulled the keys out, and tossed them out the window. His eyes were smoldering. His eyes said if it weren’t for that gun…
Gary was going to lose his job. He’d been made. Armored truck drivers are supposed to pay attention to any cars that might be following them before and after work, not just during. They’re supposed to take alternate routes home (but few do…routine is the foundation of civilization…you can’t take a different route home every day…you’d run out of routes). Lee and Van had successfully tailed Gary to his home and to his kid’s school. From there it was easy enough to obtain information about him. Because of our methodology, Gary was going to have a hell of a time convincing his soon-to-be-former employer, not to mention the NYPD, that he wasn’t in cahoots with us. I could already picture the poor schmuck in the interrogation room as two burly detectives rub their chins.
You’re saying this guy knew your children’s names? And their classrooms? Plus your home address?
That’s what I’m saying.
We’re gonna go over this one more time.
The other guy would be fired that day too. We knew his name and life just as intimately as Gary’s, just in case these guys switched it up and Gary wasn’t driving. The other guy’s name was McMann. First name Andrew. He lived in a decent-sized house in Brooklyn with his wife, who worked in marketing for the New York Giants. Hopefully she made enough dough for the both of them, because Andrew was now unemployed.
“Meep meep!” yelled Lee behind me.
That’s code for “let’s go!” We use meep meep because I have learned the hard way that people under stress often forget about the clandestine nature of the operation and refer to you by your Christian name. “Hey Jerry! Let’s go!” (My name’s not Jerry. I’m just making a point.) You see it all the time. It’s even a plot point in the first season of The Wire when Omar and his boyfriend rob a stash house and the boyfriend stupidly goes “yo Omar! Let’s go!” A mistake that eventually gets the boyfriend killed, not Omar. To prevent such an error, we say meep meep. Yes, like the roadrunner.
Van stepped around his brother and emptied a few rounds into the back left tire of the truck. The driver flinched. “What the fuck!?” he snapped angrily.
“Relax Gare. He’s just shooting your back tires out.”
Van shot the back right tire out and the whole back of the truck noticeably sagged.
I waited for him to finish before stepping out of the truck. The U-Haul screamed around the corner and up the lane toward us in reverse. He was really coming at us. If I’d been counting Mississippis, I wouldn’t have got to six before the truck screeched and skidded to a halt. The rear license plate was taped over so the couriers couldn’t read it. Good ol’ Mike. Van and Lee piled into the back with as much grace as a pair of lumbering buffalos while I jumped into the passenger seat and Mike peeled out before I could get the door shut.
“Get down, boys!” I shouted, crouching low and squinting at the side mirror, watching as the dumpster lid snapped open at the same instant Gary opened the driver’s side door with gun in hand. Lee and Van tried in vain to make themselves smaller and I winced in anticipation of Gary’s vengeance. But providence smiled on us that morning, dear reader. For Andrew was a tall McMann and was standing directly between Gary and our rapidly disappearing van. Gary gestured frantically for Andrew to get out of the way, but by the time the clueless courier climbed out of the bin and out of the way, we were already peeling back out onto W 48th Street. I heard a single distant pop as the alley and armored truck disappeared from view and were replaced by a blur of brick and storefronts flashing past.
6. Escape From New York
“Anybody hit?” I barked.
The St Louis brothers grunted in the negative and in unison.
“I’m good!” gushed Mike. “That was awesome, guys. Really professional. I couldn’t have done better myself. You know I accepted this job with some trepidation because I’m a California crook, hahaha, I’m used to freeways and shit. First time I came to New York City I was like how the fuck does anything fit anywhere in this fucking place? This would’ve been ‘89 I think. No! It was ‘88. Anyway we were staying in Alphabet City, which I got a kick out of cuz I’m a huge Prince fan and Prince has that song called ‘Alphabet City.’ You guys know that song? Huh. Well, Prince isn’t for everybody. Keith Richards hated him. Still does, probably. Anyway I can’t say much about the job I came here to do but the streets w-”
“Mike,” I said.
“-eminded me of Taxi Driver! Like, I’m serious. I wanted to go to the Army Surplus place on Canal Street and buy the same green military coat DeNiro’s wearing in the attempted assassination scene? You know that scene? That’s a great scene. Really great cinematography.”
“Mike?”
“...camera pans up and, no sorry, it’s called a tilt when the camera pans up. Panning is only back and forth, left to right or vice versa, it’s not up and down. Up and down is called a tilt. Anyway the camera tilts up and shows DeNiro taking pills from this pill bottle right? So you’re like woah, is he on drugs now? Is that why he’s acting so weird? And then the tilt continues and you see he’s got this crazy-ass mohawk! Like…this is before punk rock, so I wonder where Scorcese got the idea for the mohawk. I mean…sure, you had some proto punk bands around like The Stooges and The MC5, but they weren’t punk anymore than Blink-182 is pu-”
“MIKE!” I screamed.
“Yeah man?” he turned to me with an expression of readiness. It was hilarious how Mike would never get angry when you had to shout to interrupt him because when he talked he went into a trance-like reverie but he would jolt right out of it.
“You need to pull over here. I gotta rip that cover off the plate in case we pass a cop.”
“Oh. Good idea. How about right here?”
It was a tight squeeze but I knew he’d fit in it. Mike could handle a car in any situation. He parallel parked it perfectly, leaving four inches between our front and back bumpers while I jumped out to rip off the piece of bristol board he’d taped to our back plate. I checked the front plate, just in case he taped both, but it was clean. He’d always intended to reverse into that alley.
We dropped Lee and Van off outside Carnegie Hall. We’d had a clean getaway but we weren’t going to push our luck. It was highway time. We were getting the fuck out of Dodge. But no speeding, no breaking any traffic laws of any kind. The brothers left their gear and the priceless package with us. We couldn’t get pulled over with that shit in the van. That would ensure our incarceration. We would dispose of the guns and masks somewhere in Pennsylvania before the four of us met up again at a motel in Wheeling, Ohio. Wheeling was seven hours west of New York City. Wistfully, I watched Lee and Van make their way down the sidewalk towards their rented vehicle. Seven hours in a van with Mike. This was going to be a lot.
Maybe we could switch? Say I needed to talk to Lee about something? Something about our split? I was pretty sure we’d be taking the same route. The Holland Tunnel to the Garden State Parkway, then the I-78 out of New York state, I-76 to Ohio. But what the fuck would I say? The take was simple: 25% each. 25% of whatever the take was. That didn’t require much discussion, and Lee barely spoke anyway. No, I was stuck with Mike. I told myself to breathe.
I didn’t dare open the package until we were out of NYC. Call me paranoid, but there were cameras everywhere in New York. Even back in 2002. It wasn’t so far-fetched that the cops might check toll road cameras, bridge cameras, tunnel cameras, and identify us. Once Gary learned that his wife and kids were okay, he’d be telling the whole world to look for a white U-Haul van. He might’ve called 9-11 as soon as I stepped out of the truck. They might already be looking for us.
When Manhattan was firmly in our rearview mirror, I finally undid my seat belt, switched to the back, and did my seat belt back up. We were not going to get pulled over for anything. I checked the speedometer. Mike was going 2 miles per hour over the limit. Good, I thought. Cops get suspicious of people who drive the exact speed limit, only because nobody does it. Speed limits are ludicrously low in the United States. Car accidents are from speeding, especially nowadays. Distracted driving is the number one cause, and it’s not even close.
I opened the courier bag as gently as I could and slid open what appeared to be a box made of plexiglass with Jack Kerouac’s first draft of On the Road carefully spooled inside. My jaw dropped. We’d done it. We’d stolen one of the greatest American novels of both the Twentieth Century…and all time.
“Any joy?” Mike asked, not taking his eyes off the road.
“Nothing but,” I whispered.
“Pizza Hut and nothin’ but!” Mike sang.
I laughed. Let the motormouth go if that’s what he wants. Nothing could spoil my mood today. Today we weren’t mere criminals running from a crime scene (even though we were). We were custodians of a priceless cultural artifact. I felt dizzy with responsibility.
“I gotta put this back,” I murmured. “It’s too much. It’s like staring at the sun, you know?”
Mike nodded.
Out of the courier bag fell two cardboard wedges of equal size and dimension.
“What’re those?” Mike wanted to know.
“I unno?” I answered, grabbing one with each hand. “They look like…buffers?”
“Buffers?”
“Yeah. To keep the case from getting jostled too much?”
“You sure? There might be something in those…”
“Eyes on the road, Mike,” I said.
“Sorry.”
“We cannot get pulled over like this.”
He chuckled. “No we cannot.”
The cardboard wedges had a tear strip running along the top. I yanked one of them and was surprised when a manuscript protected in vacuum-sealed plastic slid out of the thin box and onto my lap.
“Woah,” Mike said.
“Woah,” I said.
I turned it over to the title page. It appeared to be a manuscript for a book by a writer named Mark Helprin. The title was A Soldier Of The Great War. I’d never heard of it. It was fairly recent though. The copyright year was 1991. A little over ten years old. If it was considered a new American classic, it had not yet pierced the popular consciousness. I wasn’t sure any novel could do such a thing anymore. I was wrong, of course. Infinite Jest has since solidified itself in the American pantheon, as has The Corrections.
I wondered if this Helprin guy had anything to do with Jack Kerouac. After reading the first fifteen pages, I decided not. Their only affiliation, if you even call it that, was being American. Helprin’s prose was much more measured and stately than Kerouac’s. Helprin had skill…of that there was no doubt. But historical novels weren’t my favorite thing. I always felt that the writers had half their work done for them by the sheer vicissitudes of history. Seemed like the Twentieth Century had more drama packed into it than the previous four centuries combined. Helprin’s novel looked like an engrossing read but it lacked the spark - actually, more like roaring flame - of Kerouac’s originality and vision.
“Try the other one,” Mike said.
I did as I was told. It was another manuscript, again by an author I did not recognize. The copyright year was 1938. The author was listed as Webb. That’s it. Just Webb. Smiling to myself, I wondered if he was a criminal like me. Or Mike. You didn’t need to know his last name. Webb was Webb. The book was called Runyon’s Ladder. “Never heard of it,” Mike said, unable to hide the disappointment in his voice.
“Don’t worry about it,” I shook my head. “We got what we came for. These other two books are just a bonus. Even the way they were stuffed in here…like an afterthought. Eyes on the road, Mike.”
“Sorry. Columbia probably wanted to get rid of them. Snuck ‘em in there.”
We had no idea how wrong we were. We were oblivious to the gathering storm coming our way. I’m going to leave it like this for the moment, though. While everything is still fine. The shrill and shrieking sirens of New York City were well behind us as we drove onward toward the approaching evening. The constant murmur of Mike’s voice lowered into a murmur, like a clothes dryer or a furnace…low level noise that soothed me and sent me into a fitful sleep. I slept for an hour and a half and woke to the smell of lilac. We’d reached the farmer’s fields of rural Ohio. Picturesque farmhouses nestled themselves into the deep greenery. Silos sailed from soil to sky. The cloud hung low and moody, a 700 foot ceiling. About twenty minutes before we hit the rendezvous point in Wheeling, I looked in the mirror and spotted Van and Lee’s vehicle behind us. I might have dreamed it but I don’t think so. They were laughing at something. Like…really laughing hysterically. It’s not that crazy. The painfully shy can be remarkably light and goofy and outgoing around the right people. I watched them grinning and giggling and smiled to myself again. We were still pretty young then, rich with time. The money would come. Onward we pressed toward the treasure we knew was ours.
“Eyes on the road, Mike.”
“Sorry.”