Fall Down Easy Read online

  Fall Down Easy

  Laurence Gough

  © Laurence Gough 1992

  Laurence Gough has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1993 by Victor Gallncz Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  One

  The mini-blinds were broken. Several rows of the thin, pale green plastic slats had been bent and crushed as Greg nervously spied on a City of Vancouver blue and white that had, for no apparent reason, parked halfway down the block.

  Greg’d told himself to relax, it was nothing. He went into the kitchen, grabbed a can of beer out of the fridge and drank it while the patrol car sat there, its idling engine polluting the atmosphere. Man, what were they up to now?

  The canary chirped.

  Greg hissed at it like a snake, and it dropped to the bottom of its cage and fell silent.

  He killed another beer, snorted a couple lines of coke. Big mistake. Now he was really worried, more than a little paranoid. He used a whole roll of shiny black electrician’s tape to fasten a sawed-off double barrel twelve gauge Purdy to a kitchen chair, taped the triggers together and tied them to the doorknob with a length of twine. He crouched behind the weapon and squinted down the short barrels, made sure it was lined up just right. He lit a cigarette, cocked both hammers and ran back into the bedroom.

  The cops were still there. He sniffed a little more coke, honing that edge and keeping it sharp. The bed was littered with handguns. He snatched up his favourite, a Colt 357 magnum. Too heavy. He couldn’t hold it still, it’d break his wrist the first cap he busted.

  His fingers plucked at the mini-blinds, twisting and turning. The cigarette burned his upper lip. He swore and spat the butt on the carpet. A light went on inside the patrol car. There were two uniformed cops in the car, someone else in the backseat.

  He hurried into the kitchen, checked the Purdy and snatched another beer out of the fridge, ran back into the bedroom.

  The cops were still there.

  He turned his back on them and lit another cigarette, shielding the flame from his lighter with both hands.

  When he looked up, the car was gone. Now what? He could phone Hilary, invite himself over. But was that such a good idea, when he was wired?

  Not really.

  He shoved his arsenal to the far side of the bed and lay down, found the remote and used it to turn on the TV, run up and down the channels.

  Twelve hours later, the fat worm of sunlight that had slipped through the gap in the mini-blinds and spent all morning crawling across the tangled sheets made it as far as his right eye. Greg coughed, rolled over. A manic burst of laughter from the foot of the bed yanked him out of his dream.

  Greg struggled to a sitting position.

  Arnold Schwarzenegger was still chuckling. He’d made a joke, and Greg had missed it. Schwarzenegger’s blocky, cheerful face overflowed the Hitachi’s tiny screen. Greg turned up the sound. Arnold was denying that he intended to run for Governor of California. Greg flipped through the channels. He found a tennis match on TSN, Martina thundering around the court. Every time she struck the ball it made a sound like somebody ripping the tab off a frosty cold one.

  Greg, still waking up, slowly became aware that the bedroom was hot and stuffy and that he had a terrible headache and an overpowering thirst. He turned the TV off and climbed out of bed, heading for the fridge with such single-minded purpose that he came within inches of overrunning the trip wire and blowing himself in half.

  He gingerly lowered the Purdy’s hammers, relieved the fridge of a litre of fresh orange juice and drank deeply. He continued drinking as he went to the door and opened it a crack. Cold juice trickled down his chin, on to his belly. He scratched himself.

  The hallway was empty, deserted. He picked up his delivered copies of the three morning newspapers, shut and bolted the door. Back in the kitchen, he tossed the papers on the pale blue Formica table and then poured six cups of bottled water into the coffee machine’s clear plastic bladder, dumped a careful measure of his special blend of Kenyan and Dark French beans into a fresh filter and turned the machine on.

  In the bathroom, he studied himself critically in the cheap full-length mirror screwed to the door. Then he turned on the shower, waited until the water ran hot, adjusted the temperature and stepped into the tub.

  The heat lamps dried him while he flossed and brushed his teeth, smiled a foamy rabid smile. Hilary was crazy about his smile. It was what had snared her. He tried the smile again. Sweet kid. Too bad, what he was going to have to do to her. He spat into the sink, rinsed his mouth and spat again. She was the possessive type and, even worse, had an active imagination. He’d told her he was an out-of-work actor from Toronto and she’d bought it okay, but never stopped asking questions. Greg didn’t like answering questions. It was too much like work, keeping track of his lies.

  He used the dryer on his curly black hair, fluffing it with his fingers, trying for more body. The perm was starting to go, not that it mattered.

  Naked, he wandered back into the kitchen, mixed a fresh batch of cinnamon and sugar and cut four thick slices of sourdough bread off a loaf and dropped them in the toaster.

  By the time the toast popped he’d sunk half a cup of coffee and was starting to feel like a citizen again. He lightly buttered the toast and added a heaping spoonful of cinnamon, gobbled it down. He was drinking from his favourite mug. The mug had a pattern of small black and white squares, like a chessboard, except the shape of the squares was distorted by the curve of the mug. That was the way he perceived people — simple but twisted.

  He added milk to the coffee, stirred it clockwise with a spoon. He was fascinated by patterns of every kind — patterns betrayed you. If you followed a pattern the cops would pick up on it and use it to put you away.

  Still naked, Greg drank his coffee and ate his toast. He liked to walk around the apartment naked on the day of a heist. He was no Schwarzenegger and didn’t want to be, but he was proud of his body, the flat, taut musculature that he worked so hard to maintain. Being naked made him feel powerful. But at the same time, it made him aware of his vulnerability. There were mirrors all over the apartment, huge gleaming sheets of silvery glass at every turn. It wasn’t vanity — the truth was more complicated than that — he loved to surprise himself, confront his image from unexpected angles, in varying conditions of shadow and light. The thought of seeing himself through the eyes of a stranger endlessly fascinated him.

  He poured a second cup of coffee and went into the living room. The midday sun had turned the furniture into gold. He sprawled out on the sofa and browsed through the newspapers, read the crime news and sports section, columns and columns about the latest brain-dead stiff to make six million playing right field.

  The telephone rang three times and fell silent. He counted ten and it started ringing again. He picked up.

  There was a pause and then Hilary said, “Greg?”

  Greg said, “Who is it?”

  “Hilary. Can I talk to you a minute?”
>
  “What about?”

  “Tonight.”

  “You can’t make it?”

  Hilary said, “What? Don’t be silly. I just wanted to know what you thought I should wear, that black satin dress I bought last weekend, or the red one I wore the night before last.”

  “Black,” said Greg. “Wear the black.”

  “Not the red — you sure?”

  “Black,” said Greg. “It’ll suit my mood.”

  Hilary said, “Greg?” Her voice was low, dripping with spice and musk.

  “What, what?”

  “Should I wear anything else, or … ” Her voice trailed off. Greg waited, listening to the background chatter of somebody’s keyboard. Finally Hilary said, “You’re really awful, aren’t you?”

  Greg said, “Just wear the dress, baby. Remember what I said about keeping it simple?”

  “You still picking me up at eight?”

  Greg said, “Somewhere around there,” and apologized real quick, before she could hit him in the ear with the phone. He lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling fixture, read the Globe and Mail’s comic section while she enthusiastically told him about a new perfume she’d discovered, that was going to drive him crazy. Finally he couldn’t take it any more, told her there was someone at the door, and gently hung up.

  He lit another smoke, his fourth or maybe fifth of the day. What right did he have to treat her like that? None at all. Creep. Was it her fault she happened to phone while he was lying around the apartment trying to get himself psyched up to pop a bank? No way. He sat up, snatched the phone off the coffee table, dialled her number. An older woman picked up. Greg didn’t recognize her voice. He asked for Hilary and the woman said Miss Fletcher had apparently gone for lunch.

  Greg finished his cigarette and then lay down in the middle of the living-room floor on the creamy DuPont carpet and did nine push-ups, because the gun he was going to carry that day was a nine-mil. He followed the push-ups with twenty-six sit-ups, because he was twenty-six years old, and then rolled over on his belly and did his three-digit apartment number in hot, sweaty push-ups, sets of ten.

  Finished, he glanced at the electric clock over the sink. One-thirty. Perfect. It’d take him at least an hour to vacuum, wash and wax the kitchen and bathroom floors, wash the dishes. By the time he finished he’d need another shower. Add at least an hour for makeup and another twenty minutes to choose his clothes and dress, ten more minutes to load and clean the gun, and he was right on schedule for his planned departure time of 4:00.

  Greg knelt and reached under the sink for a can of Comet cleanser. The snout of a 25 calibre semi-auto wedged into a bend in the drain was pointed right between his eyes. The day’s first lightning bolt of adrenalin ripped through him, warming his flesh and tickling his bones.

  Vacuuming was a breeze, something he almost always enjoyed. It took him a little longer than he’d expected to wax the kitchen floor, but when he’d finished the yellow linoleum gleamed like ice.

  He showered again, towelled himself dry, splashed on a little cologne, slipped into a pair of loose-fitting dark green twill pants, brown socks and a forest green shirt, all of it bought by mail from L L Bean. Greg’d bought all his clothes long distance ever since buying a silk tie from an Eaton’s clerk whose previous incarnation had been as a bank teller. Greg had caught the panicky look in her eyes, recognition and fear, and then the shutters came crashing down as she decided she was hallucinating, that Greg had to be a bad dream. He’d taken no chances, though. Paid with cash and gone straight home to bed.

  He booted his rented Macintosh, dipped into the file called Faces. Today, feeling pugnacious, he was thinking along the lines of a broken nose, cauliflower ears, bulge of scar tissue over the eyes. Maybe an open cut or slash high on a cheekbone.

  Greg believed in playing fair. The mask he fashioned had to fit his mood, present a kind of truth. He smiled, remembering a classic description of a bank robber he’d clipped from a newspaper years ago. He had a scar, said the witness, and a gun. These two useless details were all the police could pull from a man who’d spent a full ten minutes with the bandit, staring uninterruptedly at him from the passenger seat of his stolen car.

  A gun and a scar.

  Greg could picture the robbery squad falling asleep over the mug books.

  But the scar across the cheekbone was out, he saw as he tapped the keyboard, working his way through the file. He’d used the scar a little over a year ago, when he hit a Bank of Commerce. Studying the colour screen, Greg saw he’d gone for a kind of Chinese look. He couldn’t recall why. The teller hadn’t been Chinese. What was her name? Greg had to look it up. Beverly. There she was. With the Brooke Shields’ eyebrows and Streisand nose.

  The scar tissue over the eyes would work just fine, though, and the mashed nose was great. The ears might be a little tricky; matching the skin tint. He could give himself a short diagonal scar that ran, say, across his chin up to the corner of his mouth. If he mixed a little red tint into the face putty, he could make the scar look inflamed. Then he could mix in a little bit of paper-thin, translucent sheet latex, give himself a secondary infection. Greg was getting into it now. His artistic side bubbling away, on the boil.

  He scrolled through the file, staring at his previous faces as they drifted up the screen, seeming to levitate into the electronic darkness. Occasionally he stabbed at the keyboard, locked a face on screen and avidly studied it, devouring the details, memorizing every pore.

  When Greg’d viewed all the faces and was confident he knew them all and was in no danger of repeating himself, he turned off the computer and went into the bathroom and began to go to work, transforming himself from stud to pug.

  In twenty minutes, he added five years and a thousand body-blows to his age, dropped twenty points from his IQ.

  Grunting, he brought up his fists, lowered his shoulders, feinted, and tossed a left hook at the mirror that caught his reflection flush on the jaw. His head snapped back and he shuffled out of range, grimacing in pain. He looked great — like a punched-out extra from one of the Rocky films.

  Peering out from behind his eyebrows, Greg tried the actor’s voice on for size. “’Dis is a stick-up. So stick ’em up!” He started laughing. A ridge of scar tissue sloughed away, hung from his lower lip like a dehydrated worm. He pressed it back into place, working the putty-like substance into his flesh. Nobody would believe a voice like that, even if they could understand what he was saying. He tried again, taking care to speak slowly, not rush his words. “This is a stick-up.” No, hold-up was better. He made a fist and thrust his index finger at the mirror, cocked his thumb as if it was a hammer. “This is a hold-up. Gimme the cash or I’ll blow your head off.” Nah, too dramatic.

  He tried, “Gimme the money or I’ll shoot.”

  Yeah, that was a lot better. He waited a moment, got set and then took it from the top, walked up to the tiled counter, pointed the fist that was a gun, stared into the mirror with eyes that were remorselessly cold and deadly and said, “This is a hold-up, sweetie. Gimme the money or I’ll shoot!”

  Wowie zowie. Very scary.

  He bulked up his stomach with a folded bath towel, wedged a pair of foam shoulderpads under his shirt. He looked pretty good, but not perfect. To add a touch of menace, Greg slid a cheap silver ring — a death’s head with red glass eyes he’d bought at a biker shop for ten dollars — on his righthand pinky finger. Now he was a brawler with a belly, a fighter run to fat. Obviously past his prime but still not the kind of guy most people would choose to mess with.

  For extra insurance, Greg shoved a spare clip and his favourite piece, a fourteen-shot 9mm Browning, into the side pocket of his moss green L L Bean windbreaker.

  During his career as a bank robber he’d only showed his weapon twice. It was not a smart thing to do because if you used a weapon you were looking at armed robbery — a heavy rap, maximum security, extra time.

  But sometimes things got out of hand; you were
forced to demo the ruthless side of your personality in order to control the crowd, settle down the rowdies.

  Even if you didn’t carry a weapon, the sad truth was that there was always a chance the prosecutor would sweet-talk or coerce your victim into remembering she’d seen a weapon. If the jury bought her lies you were dead meat, crispy on the outside and cooked all the way through. So the best plan was not to get caught in the first place.

  The Secret of my Career as a Bank Robber — Don’t get caught.

  From time to time Greg wondered what would happen if he waved the Browning or Colt or Smith & Wesson in some guy’s face and the dope kept coming. From time to time he wondered if he could take the guy out.

  He had a mean streak, sure. But if it came right down to it, would he turn into a killer or take early retirement?

  He just didn’t know.

  Two

  It was early, a little past four, but traffic was already thickening; moving into the meat and marrow of the rush hour. The Caprice’s front end bounced as the tires hit the curb. Willows gave it a little more gas, pulled in behind a blue and white.

  Claire Parker said, “You still get a kick out of it, don’t you?”

  Willows turned off the flashing red dashboard light, then the engine. He slipped the keys in the pocket of his leather jacket, got out of the car, locked the door and slammed it shut.

  “Get a kick out of what?”

  Parker shut her door, made sure it was locked. It was amazing, the circumstances under which people would steal. She said, “Out of parking on the sidewalk, Jack. After all these years, you still get a little surge out of parking on the sidewalk, don’t you?”

  Willows grinned, didn’t deny it.

  They were on Main Street, standing in front of the Rialto Hotel, located a convenient five blocks from the Public Safety Building at 312 Main and the roughly one thousand cops who called it home. They were within easy walking distance of a Sky Train station and a McDonald’s outlet, the terrific architecture of the CNR terminus and eye-popping displays of the Science & Technology Center. A devious real-estate agent might have been able to make it sound like a wonderful neighbourhood.