11:17 AM Babies R Us Parking Lot Van Nuys, California
The semi truck lurched to a stop, and I caught Tall Bill’s eyes from the other side of the dumpster. The engine cut and rumbled into silence. We heard the door pop open, and the driver’s keys jingle as he dropped from the cab. I tucked my son’s Buzz Lightyear juice bottle under my jacket so that it looked like a pistol, and I nodded to Bill. We jumped from both sides of the dumpster. “This is a stick up, pal.”
The driver nodded at us, confused and dumb-founded. That’s when I launched into one of the crimeland monologues I’d been rehearsing to myself every since I first saw Goodfellas in the 8th grade. “Toss those keys to my associate, hombre. Don’t worry. He’s got a commercial driver’s license, so he won’t be grinding out the transmission or anything. And then step away nice and slow. This isn’t a movie, you understand? This is real. Although it could be a movie. We might write a screenplay or something about it one day. Maybe pitch it as a true life crime special on the Discovery Channel.”
“He doesn’t speak English,” Tall Bill said. “Just Russian I’m guessing.”
I nodded and walked toward the driver. The poor guy probably spent two decades trying to get to America after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and here he was getting robbed for a truckful of baby formula behind a Babies R Us in Los Angeles. I waved the juice bottle under my jacket, and the driver shuffled backward toward a pile of empty stroller boxes. I clicked my tongue and pointed, and the man threw his set of keys to Bill.
We climbed in and Bill fired up the engine. The truck was filled with three tons of baby formula. It had a street value of millions of dollars, and it could probably keep my two babies fed for well over six months. Bill got the massive thing moving, and we raced past Burger King and Sit n Sleep and on to the main street. This was a daring heist, but as far as we were concerned, we had nothing to worry about. Mr. Vladimir controlled the shipments coming out of this particular Babies R Us, and we had his blessing to take a truckload for ourselves.
“Man, this is just like a movie on Spike!” I yelled out the window. “We need some Scorsese type music playing.” I fumbled through the radio station looking for some Rolling Stones or The Clash or The Marvelettes or anything else from Casino, but the channels were all preset to Russian language talk stations. Bill jammed the gas, and we screamed on to the highway. I spun the tuner dial across the FM stations, but nothing was capturing the moment—Kenny Loggins, Whitney Houston, car commercial, car commercial, Rihanna, weather report, car commercial.
“Ooh, stop it right there,” Tall Bill said.
“NPR?”
“I love eight minute long profile reports on things like bluegrass music and whale breeding.”
“Are you kidding me? We just pulled a brazen daylight hijacking. We’re listening to some Sex Pistols or Slayer, if I could just find something decent on the radio.”
That’s when Tall Bill turned his hooded lizard-looking eyes on me. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “In a minute, I’ll be listening to all the NPR I can handle.”
“What are you talking—?”
He elbowed me hard in the nose. I bit my tongue. Tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes. “I know you need baby formula, too,” Bill said, “but I got triplets at home. I’ll be lucky if the cargo in this rig gets me and my wife through the end of the month.”
With that, he chopped me across the face with his forearm. Blood spattered out my nose. My stomach leapt into my ribcage. Then the double-crosser reached across me, flung open the door and undid my seatbelt. He gave me a wicked push, and I tumbled from the cab of the Babies R Us truck into the rush of highway traffic.
Read Part 2 of “The Formula” here.