Ripoff and Run

By Joel Allen

Jerry Brenner is on the run, with a new identity and two million dollars in cash in the trunk of his car. Maybe the crime he committed was a complex heist, worthy of a George Clooney movie, or maybe it was just a simple ripoff and run. Either way, he has to start a new life while the FBI is after him, his brother needs a life-saving kidney transplant and his new girlfriend wonders why Jerry is so reluctant to talk about his past. And with every step he takes, his body aches for another drink. Inspired by a true story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joel Allen
• Release date: Sep 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370782864

Joel Allen

Now retired, Joel Allen was an award-winning TV reporter and anchor for an ABC affiliate in South Carolina. Ripoff and Run is his first novel, based on actual events he covered as a reporter in Eastern Iowa in the 1980s. Allen lives in the Myrtle Beach area with his wife, Deanna.

Book preview

Chapter 1

JERRY BRENNER DECIDED the Friday before Memorial Day would be the perfect day to do it.

After the long holiday weekend, it would be Tuesday morning, at the earliest, before police would find out the Money was missing. By that time, he’d be on a beach in Florida with a new name and a sunburn.

Jerry thought about the heist for months. He was setting it up by doing little favors for his employees at the credit union: Running out at noon to pick up lunch for the senior auditor, filling in at drive-through while one of the tellers was on break, being overly helpful approving applications for the loan department. He figured it would seem perfectly natural then, if he told his people on a Friday at closing time, It’s been a long week, guys. Why don’t you head home early? I’ll lock up.

And then, after the last employee walked out the door, he’d get the boxes out of his car, walk into the vault and start loading cash.

Jerry wouldn’t have even considered doing it if the Money hadn’t goaded him. For months now, it had been there, taunting him. Crisp, solid stacks; inviting and accessible. Cash is an inanimate object, so why did the Money’s attitude always remind him of the girl who sat across from him in study hall his junior year in high school, the one who thought it beneath her to give him the time of day?

Startled and confused the first time he heard the Money’s raw baritone, Jerry cocked his ear and very nearly blurted, Did you hear that? to a teller standing next to him, but caught himself when it was obvious he alone had witnessed it. From that day on, he gradually came to accept he was the only one in the office afflicted by the Money’s derision.

So Jerry knew when the faceless ridicule began, but not how or why. As well-grounded in reality as any good Wisconsinite, Jerry certainly hadn’t been hearing disembodied voices all his life. It was a rather recent and unwelcome phenomenon, one that seemed to coincide with his struggle to retreat from addiction. The further he managed to drag his weary body away from the influence of the bottle, the louder the Money’s voice became.

Someday, if he had the chance, he planned to ask God, or whomever, why Jerry Brenner had to be chosen as The One Who Hears the Money Speak. Until then, he would flinch, just a little, before each trip behind the vault’s heavy steel doors, anticipating the unseen verbal assault that awaited him.

The Money would mock him for this ordinariness, his inability to take a risk, do the unexpected. And Jerry would react as the kid whistling past the old abandoned house on his way home from school, trying to act cool while the willies crept up the back of his neck.

He couldn’t avoid the Money’s sneers. Go ahead and try, but you’ll never get away with it. You’re not smart enough, not nasty enough. You’re stuck, grinding away in your comfortable little credit union manager’s life, not man enough even to keep your wife from running away with another guy.

The last part always got to him. If the Money thought it could play mind games with him about stealing cash… well, fine, but it didn’t have to get personal.

Oh, sure, it can be done, the Money would tell him. Wouldn’t even be that hard. Stuff a couple million into a couple of old cardboard boxes and you can start a new life. But who are you kidding, Jerry? You know you’re not the guy to pull it off.

To tell the truth, the whole idea did scare the hell out of him, but he had to go through with it now, if only to shut up the Money.

_____________________________

DANNY KUKULSKI HAD A GOAL in mind for Memorial Day weekend – eight walleyes, five muskies, maybe a couple of northern pike.

Danny’s Jeep Cherokee was gassed up with his eighteen-foot camouflage fishing boat hitched behind it, parked in the FBI field office parking lot. He planned to take off for Fond du Lac as soon as he got off work, maybe wrap up his usual mound of paper work a few minutes early and get a head start.

"Gonna track down those Islamic geehad up at the lake again this weekend?" Tony Foxwell loved yanking Danny’s chain about his fishing trips. Foxwell was from Brooklyn and could give a flying leap about any sport that needed worms and didn’t involve betting.

Leave the terrorists out of this, Danny said, checking out the fishing report in the Kenosha Morning News sports section. Fishing is serious business.

Foxwell took a seat, propping his feet up on Danny’s desk, which annoyed Danny to no end, which was a big reason why Foxwell did it.

Walleyes tremble, Foxwell said, at the mention of your name. That was about as original as his sense of humor could manage.

That’s what the bumper sticker says. Danny smiled at the thought. Like that’s supposed to be funny. But seriously, I’ve heard Northerns scream in fear at the sound of my boat heading in their direction.

Foxwell was flipping through a Field and Stream magazine, not listening. You know what’s wrong with fishing?

There’s nothing wrong with fishing, Danny said. Though he was pretty sure Foxwell was going to tell him anyway.

No hitting. No cheerleaders. No point spread.

Oh, you can bet on fishing. Like betting on who’s going to catch the biggest Muskie. Or the most walleyes. Danny thought about the rest of it for a second. No hitting? Hey, you ever try landing a twenty-pound Northern, doesn’t wanna get in the boat? You’ll get some physical contact, believe me.

No young babes on the sidelines, though.

Danny had to concede that point. Cheerleaders might be a little tricky. They’d get all wet. Which may not be so bad, come to think of it. He chuckled over his own little insight. Fishing cheerleaders. They’d have to be in swimsuits. Maybe skimpy ones. You might be onto something there.

Nobody didn’t like Danny. He had nearly 30 years in at the bureau, in stops from Baltimore to Ft. Wayne to Kenosha. Everywhere he landed, his dry wit and easygoing nature made him about as popular as a federal cop could hope to get. Most guys hated an assignment like southeast Wisconsin, but Danny was content – an occasional bank robbery, some drug dealing, mail fraud. There was rarely a murder, and the locals could handle that. Nice and quiet. Good fishing nearby.

Danny was hanging in there, finishing up his career as senior resident agent in charge at the Kenosha field office. In a few years, he figured he’d get a part-time security job somewhere, live off his FBI pension and spend the rest of his time making muskies feel sorry they’d ever lived.

Foxwell, on the other hand…

You know, I kinda like it when you go off on a fishing trip.

That sort of remark drove Danny crazy.

And why is that? Danny said, though he was afraid to ask.

‘Cause I’m power hungry and love being in charge, Foxwell said, yanking him again – maybe.

You realize I’m gonna be gone ‘til next Wednesday?

Well aware.

Which means you’ll be responsible for catching every crook in the three-county area over the next four days.

Yeah, like a major crime wave’s gonna happen in Kenosha over the Memorial Day weekend.

Foxwell silently hoped something big would pop up. He’d been with the bureau three years, in Kenosha about a year-and-a-half, and was seriously bored with it.

Here’s what’s gonna happen this weekend, Danny said. Bunch of good old boys who work down at Agri-Crown get together in some guy’s backyard. Agri-Crown was the town’s biggest industrial employer. They knock down about ten too many Miller longnecks and start getting into it about who’s the better quarterback, Aaron Rodgers or Brett Favre.

I think I’ve been to that party.

Talk turns into shouting and that turns into shoving and eventually, somebody starts throwing punches. One guy ends up with a broken jaw, the other with a shiner the size of George Foreman. Next day, they all have hangovers that could bury a moose, but they kiss and make up like nothing happened.

The answer is Favre, by the way. A gunslinger, risk taker, Foxwell said.

Yeah, but Rodgers never took pictures of his willie that he could send to every big-busted cheerleader in the league.

Foxwell couldn’t give up speculating on what might happen over the weekend, with him in charge.

You know, you’re probably right about some ridiculous fight breaking out, but the locals can handle that stuff. What about us?

Danny admired the aggressive way Foxwell pursued every case. He was young, still learning, but he stuck with procedure, followed up well, didn’t complain – much - and was good at writing up reports. The kind of details too many young agents don’t pay attention to these days.

I’m thinking, this weekend, we could see the biggest bank robbery in Wisconsin history, Danny said. And it’s all in your hands.

Foxwell leaned back in his chair, tossed his head back and snort-laughed. I should be so lucky. He shook his head. Never happen, not in this town.

Chapter 2

HI, MY NAME IS JERRY, and I’m an alcoholic. Maggie was among those who were there that night to respond, Hi, Jerry.

That was more than two years ago.

He noticed her right away that first night. With her soft and lovely round face and lively brown eyes, she looked like the last person in the world who’d be attending AA. For her part, Maggie found herself instantly attracted to this amiable man, tall and dark-haired, at the peak of fleshy middle-aged handsomeness. They got together for a cup of coffee after the meeting and within two weeks were living together.

Later, after it was all over, he realized they were just two very needy people. She needed his earnestness; he required her deliverance. Scarcely two months after they met, they married, with members of their support group serving as witnesses in the courthouse chambers.

But his run through the gauntlet began within days after the honeymoon ended. It started when Jerry discovered Maggie’s underwhelming commitment to ending her dependence on liquid refreshment. He discovered she had sought out AA, not because she wanted to or felt she needed to, but because her family and friends shamed her into it with an intervention that she considered highly unnecessary.

It’s been said a good drunk can fool anybody in the world – except another good drunk. Maggie couldn’t dupe Jerry. Too many nights, she’d come home late from her insurance office, professing long hours filing claims or working with clients. He knew better. Within weeks of their wedding day, Maggie was off the wagon and, from his perspective, not trying all that hard to hide it.

As for his own addiction, Jerry fought the good fight day in and day out. Nothing could have prepared him for the pain, both physical and emotional. In the meantime, he played the dutiful, attentive husband when Maggie failed to fight her own dependence. He gave himself karmic brownie points for being such a warm and wonderful spouse, all the while suspecting that he had changed from alcoholic to enabler. His love for Maggie meant he wanted desperately to be there for her, but he also knew his attention simply helped feed her addiction. Since the death of his parents when he was a teenager, Jerry had been the provider and protector to his younger brother, Kevin. Now, he felt destined to perform the same role in his marriage.

When Jerry came home from work unexpectedly one day to find another man in his bed, his fury was tempered with the vaguest sense of relief. He’d been the thoughtful, understanding husband for so many months, through so much tension, it felt liberating to allow himself to explode. But, as always, he couldn’t grant himself that release.

Why? he stammered, as she lay half-naked on the bed in what looked disturbingly like a Cialis commercial.

She gave him a weary smile.

You needed an excuse to leave me. I’m just giving you one, she said. Typical Maggie – dismissing her own irresponsibility as a charitable act.

But Jerry didn’t leave her. He could never be the one to walk away. The day after their confrontation, Maggie packed up and moved out. Two days later, he put the house on the market and moved into a one bedroom apartment.

Within a week, Jerry began hearing a mysterious intonation taunting him as he entered the credit union vault, the voice that put the notion into his head about walking away with stacks of cash in cardboard boxes.

Six months after Maggie moved out, Jerry was ready to prove his worth to the only entity that seemed to give a flying crap about him anymore, even if that caring came in the form of a sneer. He felt compelled to follow through with his criminal plan and he wouldn’t do it for love; he’d do it for the Money.

Chapter 3

FRIDAY ARRIVED. Jerry knew he’d have to act extraordinarily normal that day, whatever normal meant. He struggled to remain his usual self while his mind twisted into a pretzel with the thought of stealing millions and getting away with it.

Managing a credit union is easy, he told himself. Acting natural when you’ve got a plan for stealing $2 million bouncing around inside your head, now that’s nothing short of performing brain surgery on a lab rat.

Lisa Holliday, the teller supervisor, was always the first employee to arrive for work in the morning. He liked her – blond, stylish and professional, fortyish, but carried herself younger. Lisa always had a smile ready, and when he would talk to her, pointing out some obscure company policy, she’d actually pay attention, because she wanted to learn and move up. Now that he was a free man again, Jerry could see himself getting to know Lisa much better, if he weren’t planning to make that sudden move out of town with two boxes of cash.

She peeked around his office door and flashed him the beauty queen smile. Morning, Jerry. TGIF, huh? Dontcha just love a long weekend?

Oh, God, yeah. I’m ready for it.

She looked terrific standing there. She wore a white clingy blouse, sexy and professional at the same time, with a black skirt to finish the classic look.

Big plans for the weekend? she asked.

Uh, no. Not really. Jerry mentally kicked himself. It was a natural question for anyone to ask on the Friday before a long weekend and he should have been ready for it. Yard work. Maybe. He was struggling and he knew it. I’m not sure.

I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Lisa shook her head. Still hard to make the adjustment, huh? Jerry’s divorce was all over the office, though no one had said a word to his face.

Yeah. Yeah, back on my own now. But I’ve had a few months to adjust to being single again. We just got the paperwork out of the way, is all.

It’s not easy. I’ve been there. Hey, if you ever need somebody to talk to, I’m here. Give me a call.

Now she tells him. He’d be a thousand miles away tomorrow.

Thanks, he said. Maybe I will.

Chapter 4

JERRY WAS A KENOSHA GUY, born and bred. It’s an old town, hard by Lake Michigan and well known since the 1850’s as one of southern Wisconsin’s prime shipping ports and industrial centers. The Nash Motor Company, later to become American Motors, had its headquarters there for years. Today, Snap-On Tools is one of the town’s biggest employers.

In the 1890s, a pair of farmers who lived down the road in Walworth County got frustrated enough over the lack of a decent mechanical way to form a bale of hay that they put their minds together and came up with their own invention. The crude baler that Evander Farley and Olaf Swensson cobbled together in Farley’s backyard was an immediate hit with neighboring farmers in Dairyland, and within a few years, their little baling machine had spawned a small but profitable manufacturing plant some miles outside of Kenosha. Farley-Swensson Farm Implements Inc. expanded rapidly during the Roaring Twenties, weathered the Great Depression, added product lines during the booming Post-War years and by the late 1950s, employed nearly 3,000 workers assembling everything from augers to winnowers.

The UAW bludgeoned its way into the plant during the company’s most profitable years and soon became a powerful force in the local economy. Most everybody in that part of the Badger state knew that Farley-Swensson workers raked in just about the best pay and benefits in the upper Midwest. But foreign competition hit the manufacturer hard in the 1980s and the descendants of the company’s founders were forced to sell out to a huge conglomerate. The little hay baler company was now just another anonymous division of giant Agri-Crown Industries, owned by a group of investors led by members of the Saudi royal family. Thus, the Crown in the company name. Shortly after they took over, the new owners gutted and remodeled the old plant, adding a gleaming post-modern lobby and landscaped courtyard, complete with native prairie grasses waving gently in the breeze surrounding an ecologically-correct pond.

By that time, the company’s employees had their own thrift shop. Jerry Brenner came on board with Agri-Crown Employees Credit Union fresh out of college, armed with a business degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a dream of becoming CEO someday. Now, nearly two decades later, he found himself mired at the branch manager level, passed over three times for vice president positions, and fantasizing a way to start a new life, financed by credit union money.

There will undoubtedly come a day when green folding money will no longer exist. The good folks of Kenosha are smart enough to know that. But in a plastic-obsessed society, where credit cards rule the retail world, the blue-collar workers at Agri-Crown still liked the look and feel of real cash in their mitts. To buy a pack of cigarettes or a lottery ticket, they felt that sense of legitimacy that comes from handing over a picture of George Washington or Abe Lincoln that they’d never get from swiping a card.

Payday was every other Friday, when they’d line up their duel-wheeled, club-cab pickups in the drive-through lane at Jerry’s credit union to cash their four-figure paychecks. The Brinks employees took nearly an hour on those payday mornings to fill the vault with shrink-wrapped bundles of hundreds and twenties.

The Friday before Memorial Day was one of those days. Toss in the bundles of money the armored car guys brought in to refill the ATM machines and it became dozens of healthy stacks of cash that lined the walls of the walk-in vault, blocks of solid-green soldiers preparing for a retail war.

_____________________

AFTER LISA, THE OTHERS ALL CAME IN, one by one, taking their places and getting to work. Jerry made sure to say hi to each of them, while trying not to be too nice, all the while wondering if this was really the same way he did things every other day. Damn, it was hard work concentrating on being routine, when being natural required no thought at all.

He heard the front door swing open and then, a bright and cheery Good mornin’ everybody. It gave him a smile every day. Billie Taylor was here, making her usual jovial entrance.

Wilhemina was her full name, but no one dared to call her anything but Billie. A middle-aged, African-American woman who had struggled her way through single-parenthood, Jerry always marveled at the way she kept her life together. She worked her way out of welfare and raised a couple of kids, all while keeping a full-time job and finishing a community college degree. She wasn’t the perfect employee, but he figured she could teach them all a few things about how to persevere.

Hey, Mr. Brenner. Billie peeked around his door. How are you this bright, sunny morning?

Just fine, Billie.

I forgot to ask you yesterday, Mr. Brenner, if you liked pecan pie. She held up an aluminum plate and he could smell the warm aroma of pecans in the air. Made one for the kids, but I had enough filling left over for a second pie and I thought I’d bring it in.

I know what you’re trying to do, Billie. You’re trying to fatten me up and it won’t work. I mean, I hate pecan pie. He paused for a beat and then winked. But if you want to, you can just leave it here on my desk for safe keeping, so it won’t get anybody else in trouble.

She let out a gentle tee-hee giggle. "Mr. Brenner, you are the best boss I ever had. And I swear, that’s not even brown-nosin’. It’s the truth."

Well, bless your heart, Billie, I appreciate that. And you can leave the pie in the break room.

I’ll make sure there’s a big slice left for you.

You do that.

Hmmm. That went well, Jerry thought. He knew he’d need people in the building to say nice things about him, when the police got around to questioning the staff next Tuesday.

Jerry wandered through the morning in a state of hyper-realism, seeing things around the office that had probably been there for years, but he’d never noticed before. He wondered if anybody could perceive the sense of quiet distraction on his face, in his step.

He had barely slept the night before and now caught himself yawning while looking over a loan application. Jerry could imagine falling asleep at the wheel that night on some godforsaken stretch of lonely highway somewhere between here and Florida, rolling the car into a ditch with hundred dollar bills fluttering gently in the breeze.

Chapter 5

THE WAY JERRY FELT, late in the day on that Friday afternoon, was a lot like when his alarm went off on a Monday morning and his body just refused to move. He wanted to keep hitting that snooze button for, oh, say the next thousand years or so and his last, best hope was that maybe by some miracle quirk of Einstein’s theory of relativity or Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, the clock would stop moving forward and he could stay in bed until at least the day after his retirement.

Jerry had been planning for this moment for the past six months.