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Armed Robbery a dream by Paul Garner's subconscious The Man himself came and offered me the job. Well of course he would, he knew I'd been sniffing around, looking for something. He was black, middle aged, heavily built, with the paunch of an alpha-male orangutan. Exuding coolness and professionalism, laced with an underlying tinge of menace - the alpha-male again, not someone to be fucked with. We went over the details... an apartment building for overpaid yuppies on the gentrified edge of the bad part of town... one apartment in particular where we could expect rich pickings... the likely jackpot... the size of my cut. It was a no-brainer. Couldn't fail. Couldn't possibly succeed. We pulled up in the parking lot around back and right from the start it was all wrong, of course. For one thing, we were much too late; it was light, morning already. There were people wandering around the lot for chrissake... they hadn't any reason to notice us yet, but they would certainly pay attention once we piled out of the minivan, armed to the teeth. Which we did, of course. Everyone had dressed for the occasion; lots of black and leather, dark glasses. I'd forgotten my shades, so I'd be easily identified later by the people who would inevitably spot me. The Man dished out the guns; M16s, shotguns, submachine guns. Me and another guy got stuck with bits of driftwood which were serendipitously shaped like guns. It seemed to me that my driftwood gun would be as good a Japanese garden ornament, as it was a prop for armed robbery. Needless to say, I had a bad feeling about the job. The plan was to charge across the parking lot like brave-hearted highlanders, run in, grab as much loot as we could, shoot anyone who gave us trouble and get out. It just might have worked, under cover of darkness, during the quietest hours of the night. As things were however, I didn't see how we could hope to shoot all the potential witnesses, even if any of us had had the stomach for that kind of massacre. Everyone was tooled up and getting psyched for the charge. I was getting more and more concerned about my lack of sunglasses and at the last minute I tried to chicken out. "Let's come back tomorrow, before dawn," I suggested, "this is madness." The Man threatened to shoot me on the spot, so I picked up my sawn-off driftwood and suddenly it was all on. Charging across the lot the adrenaline took over and I yelled fearsomely, brandishing my faux gun, and managed to stop worrying about the staring onlookers. We bundled into the apartment building, but something was wrong, of course. Perhaps we had entirely the wrong building, in the wrong part of town, at the wrong time of day. We bundled out again and decided to try and make the best of a bad situation by hitting the building next door instead. It was a school gymnasium. The plan was that each of us in turn would run through the door, blend in with the students, who were doing laps of a fitness course laid out inside, then on the way out we'd try and grab anything stealable. The Man assured us there would be rich pickings, since the students had to remove their jewelery and other valuables for gym class. Our first couple of raids scored some cheap plastic earrings and such like. By the time I got in, did my lap, jumped off a springboard, over a hurdle, ran across some foam mats and got to the checkpoint, all that was left were a couple of rubber badges that said 'Monopoly'. I took them. When I got outside I couldn't see my fellow robbers anywhere. I ran across the lot to where we'd parked the van. On the way a little black boy stopped me and just grinned in my face smugly. I wondered what he wanted, noting that he was very sharply dressed for a youngster. "You're smooth," I said to him in a way that implied extra 'o's in the word smooth. He just grinned some more and did a kind of Bill-Cosby-jazz-cat hat straightening move, except he didn't have a hat. "Yeah you're really smooth." He still didn't say anything, however all of a sudden the parking lot had dissolved and we were standing in the middle of a baseball field. "In fact I'd say you're the smoothest cat I've ever met," I continued, puzzled by his enigmatic silence. "It's probably hard for you to appreciate just what I mean by that," I ploughed on, "but of all the people I've ever met, you're definitely the smoothest. You're young so it'll be hard for you to really imagine how many people I've met in my life, which has been much longer than yours, but it's a lot. A big number. And out of them all, you're the smoothest." Suddenly I was back in the parking lot and the boy was gone. I noticed with a sinking feeling that the van was surrounded by security guards, who had just spotted me. No doubt the police were on the way too, and since I couldn't think of anything better to do I wandered on over to get myself arrested. Back Copyright © 2002 - Paul Garner.

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