“Ten bucks,” said Doug as he got back in the car. “That’s all I got.”

Mitch nodded and filled the tank with high octane. Funny, he thought, that Doug hadn’t mentioned the Mexican girl in a while. He used to talk about her all the time, planning what he thought were clever ways to engage her in conversation. Something had been going on with him, something he hadn’t been talking about. While pumping the gas, Mitch recalled other ways Doug had been acting weird-his nervousness around Kevin, his cryptic phone conversations. Then his mind switched to the conversation he had had with Kevin the day before. Linda knew about the Ferrari.

That was strange. Only the three of them knew about the Ferrari, and he knew neither he nor Kevin had told Linda. That left only one of them.

Holy shit. Doug must have told Linda.

He stopped pumping and stared into space for a few seconds while he tried to get his mind around why, exactly, Doug would have told Linda about the Ferrari. What could possibly have motivated him to do that? Why had he been hanging out with Linda at all, for that matter? Did the Doug-Linda connection have something to do with Doug not mentioning the Mexican girl? Fuck it, they were on their way to rob an armored car. Was it really the right time to start worrying about this?

When he got back into the car, he looked at Doug for a few seconds and Doug looked back.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Mitch kept staring at Doug.

“Dude, you’re freaking me out. What?”

“Nothing.” He started the car. “Come on, let’s go get this done.”

THE SNOW WAS beautiful. Not beautiful in the sense of aesthetically appealing, because Mitch hated snow. It was beautiful in the sense of making it difficult for police officers to chase and apprehend you. It was starting to stick too, which was even more beautiful. The only way this could not go perfectly now was if the bank closed early or the armored car never showed up.

Kevin parked the pickup on the dirt road by the drainage ditch they had been staring into just the day before, facing toward the road for a quicker exit. Mitch exited the driver’s seat of the Impala and turned it over to Kevin, who got in wordlessly. Mitch liked the fact that no one was talking, as if they were commandos who had mastered their responsibilities so completely that words weren’t necessary.

As Kevin pulled out of the dirt road, he asked, “You guys gonna talk with British accents?”

The British-accent thing had seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, but Mitch didn’t really think that dialogue was going to play much of a part in the day’s events. Besides, the mood that had spawned the British-accent idea, one of pot and partying, was absent in the car, where stress and fear and concentration had taken over.

“Nah,” said Mitch. After that, no one spoke.

Kevin pulled onto Westlake Avenue and they passed the bank. He drove about a hundred yards down the street and then turned around. The street was deserted except for them, every parking space along the curb empty.

“Shit,” Mitch said. “I hope the bank doesn’t close.”

“It’s still open right now,” Kevin said, “and if it’s open, they’re going to need a cash delivery.”

Kevin looked at his watch. “Ten minutes, if they’re on time. You guys want to wait across the street?”

“It’s freezing,” said Mitch. “I think we’ll just stay in the car for a few more minutes.”

“I need to stretch my legs,” said Doug. He got out, slammed the heavy door of the Impala, and walked across the street without another word.

Kevin looked at Mitch. “Is he all right?”

“Is he ever?”

They watched Doug take up a position across the street, shivering in the little alcove by the antique store.

“Go tell him to at least pull his hood up,” Kevin said. “He doesn’t have to pull his ski mask down yet, but it’s probably best not to walk around bareheaded.”

“Shit, there’s no one around,” said Mitch. “It don’t matter.”

Kevin was bumping his knee repeatedly into the steering wheel, so Mitch said, “Are you getting jumpy?”

“No,” said Kevin, sounding more intense than Mitch had been expecting. “I just think you should go talk to Doug. There’s something wrong with him. He’s not talking and he’s fucking standing in the street bareheaded when we all agreed to wear ski masks. The guy’s been on the verge of fucking this up since day one, you know? First of all, he doesn’t even do the one fucking thing he was given to do, which was buy ski masks, and now we gotta wear these fucking things.” His eyes blazing with rage, Kevin held up the old wool cap with the eye holes cut out, his fingers sticking through the holes derisively.

“All right,” said Mitch. “I’ll go talk to him.” He got out of the car and was aware of his feet crunching in the snow as he crossed the silent street. He wondered if instead of helping, the snow would serve as a hindrance, as it was recording his footprints for the investigators. He made an effort to grind his feet into the slush to make the footprints less distinct.

Mitch went and stood in the little alcove, shivering next to Doug. “You all right, dude?”

“I’m fine.” Doug lit a cigarette and watched as an enormous SUV turned the corner and stopped right in front of them, blocking their view of absolutely everything. There were now two cars on the street, the Impala and the SUV, which was black and had tinted windows and was idling right in front of their little alcove.

“What the fuck is this guy doing?” Mitch asked.

“Dude, I don’t know about this,” Doug said.

Mitch had figured it was coming, but he had hoped that Doug would just keep his reservations to himself until the robbery was over.

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t need money this bad, man. I mean, I can work at Chicken Buckets. I should be at Chicken Buckets right now, handing in my drug test.”

Mitch knew Doug felt this way and he had, in fact, always known. Every sign pointed to it, from the poorly prepared car with two gallons of gas in it to the cut-up ski masks, yet he had been denying it to himself, pretending Doug was still an enthusiastic team player. They should have left Doug out of it and he and Kevin should have been there alone. But it was a team effort and Doug was always part of the team.

“Well, shit, man. I wish you’d have said something before now.” He lit a cigarette, aware that Doug was basically asking him permission to go. He didn’t want him to. If Doug left, Mitch knew that nothing would ever be the same between them, that their friendship would basically be over. “Why’d you let it go this far?”

Doug began shifting his weight from leg to leg, and Mitch could never recall seeing him more uncomfortable. For a moment, they watched the black SUV, in which, Mitch now realized, there was a teenage girl being taught by her mother how to parallel park. Over and over, the SUV lurched awkwardly toward a parking space at an extreme angle, then stopped, then jerked forward.

“I gotta tell you something,” Doug said.

Right then, Mitch heard angels singing. There was a clanking and whirring of the heavy chains on the tires of the armored car as it turned the corner. And there it was, old, battered, and lurching, a monolith of scarred metal, parking right in front of the bank. Mitch could see, behind the windshield wipers, the familiar faces of the old guy and the fat guy. They were right on time, despite the snow. God, you had to love this company’s punctuality.

“There’s the truck. Look, is this about you and Linda?” he asked, hoping to move the conversation along. At the mention of her name, Doug looked like he had been punched. “I know about that,” Mitch added.

“How, how… Does Kevin know?”