Читать книгу How to Rob a Bank - Том Митчелл - Страница 11

As with any skilled occupation, robbing a bank requires specialist equipment. The type of specialist equipment not easily obtained by fifteen-year-olds. Specialist equipment like guns, for example. In the night following Dog Day Afternoon, I lay in bed and my blind eyes stared through the darkness and I felt guilty and I thought about stuff.

I thought about using a stun gun. Obviously an actual gun was a non-starter. I mean, I’m an idiot but not that much of an idiot. Could you convince a bank worker to hand over cash in exchange for not being Tasered? And was I mean enough to do that?

I was pretty sure you could buy one online. Not Amazon (unless you lived in the States) but from a dodgier part of the internet: the place Palace buy their centre backs, the dark Web. It’s like Amazon but with illegal stuff and a slightly higher chance of getting arrested.

Getting a stun gun delivered to your own house would be a mistake of course, but as Dave Royston lived round the corner I’d just use his address. It would be amateur-level easy to intercept Brian the German postman or somehow get to the package before Dave, which is exactly what I did two years ago when buying bangers off eBay (fireworks, not sausages). And if it all went wrong? Well, Dave saw himself as a gangster. He’d get his mugshot on the news and everything. I could just imagine the scene …

The suburban road, all drawn curtains and tired trees, quiet except for the slam of car doors as commuters climbed into Ford Fiestas and Nissan Micras. Suddenly the roar of sirens would break that silence as police transit vans pulled up outside Dave’s house. People dressed like video-game police would pour out of the vans, their guns bouncing against their chests as they thrust forward, up the crazy paving of Dave’s front path. The SWAT team would rush Dave’s door and, the next thing you know, Dave is face down on the tarmac with the lead SWAT guy telling him, ‘No one moves around here without my say-so.’

Would I feel sorry for Dave if he were arrested because of a stun gun I’d ordered? Probably not. He had stolen my Lion Bar.

Still, as much as all this would be funny, the sad truth is that only idiots rob banks with guns, even stun guns. I’d done the research like I’d planned my History coursework. On my iPhone, in the toilet, I’d googled ‘armed robbery’. I’d discovered the moment you take a gun to the party, even if it’s a stun gun, the sentences imposed by judges jump higher than a frog full of helium. And the truth is I wouldn’t feel great waving guns around, even if the worse they could do was stun.

The room was thick with steam and thinking. And was a bit stinky TBH.

I don’t need a Taser, I thought. No. I’d use a better weapon to hold up a bank: MY BRAIN!

(But not literally. You know what I mean.)

In Out of Sight, a 1998 film, George Clooney robs a bank using nothing. No accomplices, no guns, nothing. All he does is enter one of those air-conditioned Hollywood banks with old-style ringing phones and tidy desks and he spots a stranger chatting with a bank manager at some polite table. The stranger has a leather briefcase on the floor. Clooney approaches a teller (the American who gives out the cash) and tells them he has an accomplice. He points at the stranger who, for all Clooney knows is chatting about the weather, and says the guy has a handgun in his briefcase and should Clooney give the signal, he’ll pull it out and shoot the bank manager. Of course, it being George Clooney, the teller believes him and hands over an envelope bursting with dollars.

I’m no George Clooney, but, like Clooney, I’m able to walk and talk, most of the time anyway, and that’s all it took for Clooney’s character to rob the bank.

FYI Clooney eventually gets caught. How? His getaway car has a flat battery. As Mr Stones, the coach of the U13 football team used to say: ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’ Mr Stones didn’t say much else, apart from ‘It’s the taking part that counts.’