Skunk Hunt (3 page)

"You're the only one here," the man stated
flatly.

"Y—y—"

"Aw shut up."

But he had
asked
, the jerk. Marvin's head fell back onto the
rolling footstool used to access some of the higher displays.
Turning his head slightly, he could see the front of the store. The
door, so far away. The stool rolled a little and his neck slid
down. He was again facing the robber. His eyes widened when he saw
the dark slick on the front of the man's jacket.

"You've—"

"I see it," the man answered lowly.
Grimacing, he pulled down the zipper. "Looks like you got me,
partner. Two for one. Not bad shooting."

He took a step forward, began to fall, then
braced himself up on the counter. "You fucking little twerp," he
murmured, shaking his head. "After all that..." And now he seemed
to be talking to himself, analyzing a past and limited future.
"...a fucking little twerp."

The young man's eyes fluttered. He knew he,
Marvin Hemmings, was leaving conscious reality. The question was,
would he be back?

And then a sharp bang brought him back. The
big man had raised his gun. No, Marvin would not be back. The
robber would finish him off. He wanted to explain that there was no
need to eliminate him as a witness. Everything that had just
happened had been recorded for posterity, the images stored safely
at a remote location. But when he blinked out the mist in his eyes,
Marvin saw the man aiming not at him, but towards the front.

The robber fired again. Marvin heard glass
exploding. He rocked his head to the side and saw two concentric
fractures in the display window. It seemed reasonable enough. In
the condition he was in, nothing was particularly irrational. It
even made sense, of a kind, when there was another shot and one of
the musical wine glasses disintegrated. The bullet finished up in
the window, creating a third fracture. The robber was shooting out
the glasses, one by one. Well, that made sense, too. Sort of. But
in spite of his pain and fading consciousness, Marvin acknowledged
something weird about it.

There was a loud thud. The shooting stopped.
Marvin guessed the robber had collapsed. He could not confirm this.
He could no longer turn his head to look.

In fact, the last thing Marvin saw were the
shards of Reidel & Schott Zwiesel crystal scattered across the
floor.

CHAPTER 1

To make a long story short…

Aw, forget it.

I'm not going to tell you anything about
myself that I don't want you to know. All those idiots who spill
their emotional entrails across the daytime talk shows are
worthless souls. Anyone with anything worthwhile inside him keeps
it a secret. Am I about to tell you that I have a malodorous sex
life? That I'm in love with rectal thermometers? That I pick my
nose regularly and wipe the abundant cream off on my trousers? Am I
going to commit an oil spill of the spirit?

But when things go bad, you can't help a
little leakage. That I'm telling you this story at all shows you
how bad things really were. I guess to make this interesting I have
to let you catch a glimpse of the real me here and there, but not
enough to piece me together. I won't allow that to happen. Just to
set the record straight, my first confession above is more or less
true. The rest I made up. Or not. You decide.

One of my good qualities, personality-wise,
is that I have a chronic inability to recognize losers. This is a
good thing, or else I wouldn't have survived my childhood. Take my
father, such a royal screw-up that he managed to get himself and
his partner killed trying to rob a jewelry store. My father caught
a 9mm slug just close enough to his heart to give him five minutes
of added life. You can see the whole thing online, a whole section
dedicated to surveillance videos of diamond store robberies,
successful and otherwise—my father's being the otherwise. I'm not
geek enough to know how that shitwork got posted. I don't own a
computer and have to watch YouTube courtesy of the public access
terminals at the City Library.

If you care to watch, you'll see Skunk
McPherson (whom we mockingly referred to as "Dad") and Winny
Marteen getting out of an '83 Impala that looked like an unrepaired
stunt car from old episodes of the Rockford Files. Those first
images were caught by the Dominos camera next door to the jewelry
shop. I don't know if the proprietor had it there to watch for
robbers or to catch his delivery people scarfing down unauthorized
dough tiles. Whatever it was designed for, it caught clear enough
the casual, almost bored expressions worn by Winny and my father,
marching up like another day at the office.

If I was planning a grand-scale assault, I
would pick a softer target. Real jewelry stores—as opposed to
plastic bead and artificial ruby clump-dumps—are by law required to
have a certain amount of security. Most retailers boost that with
their own devices. They're places to take by stealth, if you take
them at all. Snatch and run kinds of places. Judging by all those
videos on YouTube, my father wasn't the only dummy to think the
best way to make a heist was head-on. But to saunter across the
snowy lot like that, guns drawn like credit cards at a gas pump,
suggested a huge deficit in the intelligence department. It was
hard to jibe with the Skunk I knew. After all, the cops are still
looking for his share in the famous Wal-Mart/Brinks job. To keep
$850,000 hidden for nearly two decades was quite a feat. The family
agreed that the Assistant U.S. Attorney arranged his early release
from the Lee BOP in Jonesville only because he thought Skunk would
eventually lead the feds to the cache.

Skunk always denied he made a cent out of
what came to be known as the "greeter" job, because the robbers had
worn blue Wal-Mart uniforms and greeted the armored car when it had
stopped at the main entrance. All that could be seen on the
surveillance tapes was a smiling store employee slapping a guard on
the back, while another went around to chat with the driver. One of
the guards delivered cash on a small collapsible trolley, then
returned with the day's proceeds—bearing a gazillion unregistered
8-digit serial numbers

Then something happened that none of the
customers swooping in and out of the busy center noticed: the guard
at the rear of the truck turned and got back inside—followed by the
first greeter. Next thing, the greeter up front was being invited
inside the cab. And then the armored car pulled away. It turned out
the greeter disguise was ideal, since most customers (and potential
witnesses) go out of their way to avoid them.

The cops soon gave up trying to pin the crime
on the Brinks employees. They were convinced there had to be inside
work, but in the end the guards’ stories held. When the greeter in
the back of the truck threatened to blow the brains out of the two
guards unless he opened the cab, the driver did the decent thing
and invited the second greeter inside.

Butch and Baptist Congreve—those were the two
Dad claimed took the risk and gained the reward: twenty years for
robbery, five for conspiracy, and life for possession of a firearm
in furtherance of a crime of violence. Dad, an accessory after the
fact (so his lawyer successfully claimed), got ten.

It was Butch who held a gun on the men in the
back. It was Baptist who talked the driver into taking the armored
car to a small road off Midlothian, cinching the matter with a
Tech-9 aimed at his head.

Skunk was waiting for them in a Chevy Astro.
He kept lookout and also helped disencumber the armored car while
Butch and Baptist zip-tied the guards. No one considered popping
them. Once they were safely locked up in the back and the heavy
doors closed, Butch and Baptist removed their wigs and
moustaches.

An hour later they pulled up at Arrowhead
Lake near Cumberland. It was little more than a dead, oversized
pond, but you still needed a license to fish there. Experienced
anglers knew the place was pointless, and it was too desolate for
lovers or sightseers. Odds were very few had visited the lake
earlier in the day, and the hikers that passed through were
unlikely to take notice of the Congreve brothers' pickup.

This is where the story hit the gray wall of
uncertainty. It was a tremendous haul. Cash from ATMs, church
collection proceeds, a nearby Food Lion and another southside
Wal-Mart. Around $832,000 smackers, according to the news reports.
Butch and Baptist claimed they didn't want to spend too much time
at the lake counting their loot. The area was only fitfully
patrolled by park rangers from nearby Bear Creek Lake, but their
luck could suddenly turn. They told the prosecutors that they had
trusted Skunk to stash the money somewhere safe until they could
link up and divvy their shares.

Their story made no sense. From a lifetime of
experience I knew my father couldn't be trusted. An objective
observer from outside the family circle would take one look at his
crusty, shrewd face and undoubtedly think the same. You wouldn't
trust this guy with a dime or a broomstick—especially not a
broomstick. To place over two-thirds of a million dollars in his
care would have been the height of folly, truly.

The prosecutors were inclined to agree with
me. When the Congreve brothers were DUI'd in Boketown, Tennessee
(blood alcohol level .39, the idiots), the sheriff, who seemed
under-informed regarding the niceties of the law, found wads of
twenties amounting to $6,000 in the cab. Sure, the search and
seizure was unconstitutional, but since Butch had seen fit to stop
in the middle of the road, the sheriff had no choice but to move
the pickup out of the way. And when the tow truck driver got inside
the cab to release the clutch, and bumped up against the
rolls...well, there it was. The sheriff reviewed his bulletins and
guessed the connection between the robbery and the evidence.

"You fellers were looking at up to 11 months
for a first DUI offense. But guess what...?"

The sheriff was a funny guy. And right. The
brothers faced life.

Extradited to the Commonwealth, they wasted
no time ratting on my father. It did them no good, because Skunk
claimed the brothers had driven off with all the money in the back
of their pickup. In fact, he told the Assistant D.A. you could have
knocked him over with a feather when the Congreves showed up with
that armored car. They had told him they just needed a lift.

He acquiesced to a lie detector test. It was
inconclusive. Dad might have looked like a born liar, but it was
almost impossible to pin him down.

Limp-wristed polygraph notwithstanding, the
authorities staked their hope on Skunk. One look at how he towered
over the Congreve brothers, and that mad dog face of his, told them
where the power of intimidation lay. Butch and Baptist refused to
look him in the eye at the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Courthouse. In
fact, they suddenly became curiously reticent and forgetful when
they talked to the investigators.

"Mr. and Mr. Congreve," the prosecutor had
declaimed, linking the brothers in a queerly incestuous criminal
marriage, "seem to have a vested interest in keeping Mr. McPherson
out of jail."

Indeed they did. It had dawned on the slowits
that Skunk might land in the same federal bed and breakfast (and
lunch and dinner and snack-time) where they themselves were headed.
He might not prove pleasant company, now that he knew they had
fingered him. But their loss of memory didn't help them. The judge
looked Skunk up and down and decided he'd best be incarcerated, if
only to prevent him from biting someone.

I was eight years old when this all came
down. Barbara was seven. Jeremy...I always had trouble with his
age.

By the time the Assistant D.A. arranged a new
hearing (behind the scenes—that was our theory), and Dad won an
early release, we were practically tweenies. Mom did a poor job of
preparing us for the storm that was about to hit home.

"Oh shit, they're letting him out." She
shifted various piles of dirty linen from one side of the house to
the other, all the while muttering. It was the end of us, we might
as well get it over with and slit our throats. How was she to
support another mouth to feed, an ex-jailbird whose unemployability
was guaranteed? Even if Skunk successfully hid his record, he had
edged past forty, the time when age discrimination kicks in.

"If he so much as lays a finger on any of us,
he'll end up back in Jonesville," Mom said with a kind of deranged
blissfulness. "I only have to say the word to his parole
officer..."

She had a weapon, and she was ready to use
it. But Skunk came home a subdued man. It had nothing to do with
getting humped in prison. Jeremy, who took after Dad in so many
ways, had also been a guest of the State, serving in the sump-pit
at Powhatan for almost two years. He told me that once his fellow
inmates found out he was Skunk's son, no one tried to play
drop-the-soap with him. There isn't a lot of communication between
state and federal prisons. For Dad's reputation to extend so far
had to mean something.

"It still wasn't very nice," Jeremy had
said.

"I've heard stories."

"What do you know? Any place that uses urinal
cakes as room deodorizers is living hell."

It was our belief that Skunk behaved for a
whole two years because he didn't want to do anything that would
risk his Brink's stash. Dad possessed an odd mixture of infinite
patience spiced with an occasional, frenzied 'give-it-to-me-now'.
We wondered if he would wait for a decade, if necessary, before
going near the money—at the risk that someone else would find it,
leaving him with a dozen empty bags. He must have ground his teeth
to nubs worrying about it, but we saw only a man calmly
sleepwalking through his days. There appeared no awareness on his
part that his family was hounded by bill collectors, was
chronically addicted to filing tax extensions, and more than once
experienced real hunger. It was like a long mourning period after
the death of a close relative.