Paul says to his Companion, "Looks pretty good."
Shannon replies, "Yep. Lights out."
The car continues its ascent, more slowly
now, the engine not
being gunned quite so wildly. As the car passes a white van with blue
lettering, the two men crane their necks and regard the vehicle with
apparent awe. The shoebox makes it way slightly further up the street,
where it is parked between two cars and the two gentlemen exit the vehicle
- while leaving the keys in the ignition.
The companions walk down the hill, back the way they came, slowly,
quietly, hugging the hillside behind the parked cars, watching and
listening intently. Shannon holds a rather conspicuous looking large
square torch.
They reach the van quickly, and while looking around suspiciously, they
press their faces to the windows of the ConnecTel company vehicle to take
stock.
"Holy shit!", hisses Paul - his excited
voice muffled by sensibility,
"There's two laptops in there!"
Shannon looks quickly to confirm, glass-eyed pleasure washing over him. He
takes Pauls coat sleeve and tugs, and the young men move away from the van
into the shadows to converse.
"What do you think? We've hit him the last
two weekends in a row, both
times taking a laptop...", Shannon starts.
"... And yet now he has two laptops in
his van?", Paul finishes their
collective thinking.
"It has to be a trick, there must be some
kind of tracking device
in the laptops. There's no way anyone, even Telecom employees, could be
that fucked."
"I don't buy into all this homing bleeper
shit. I want to go for
it. I mean..."
"... Yea, I know. It's a pair of laptops,
fuck him."
The late night investigators grin at each other, and reach into their
pockets. They both remove a pair of gloves, Paul with a light grey pair of
leather gloves, and Shannon with what appear to be white gardening
gloves.
"Man, I thought you were getting rid of
those daffy gloves", Paul
grimaces.
"So sue me"
"It's not like they're not suspicious or
anything."
"And carrying this great big fucking torch
isn't either?"
Paul pauses, mouth half open with a lost thought.
"True. Alright, you throw. There's a brick
over there."
"Shit, me? I did it last time! This is
your turn."
Paul steps back into the shadows.
"Bollocks, you did this van last week -
but we did that other one
out in Stokes Valley, and I threw that time..."
"Oh... shit, yeah. Alright, I'll
throw."
"Let me check... hang on..."
Pauls voice fades as he quickly moves to the van alone, he reaches up and
takes a hold of the roof spouting and rocks the van back and forth, rather
violently. Paul stops, listens, and repeats. Satisfied, he returns to
Shannon, who grins and "Didn't beep off, definately a good sign."
"Kick arse."
The men split up, Paul takes position just beyond the van, in the shadows,
as Shannon searches a flower bed with a fallen over fence. Shannon makes a
clucking noise, and picks up a broken brick, weighs it in his hand like
Indiana Jones and the bag of sand, nods to himself, and begins to walk in
a quick semi-circle back to the van.
Shannon picks up speed, and at the arc of
his bee-line, he makes a
gurgling noise and throws the brick into the van window. The noise is
hurrendous, shattering the still night. To the boys it sounds as if an
Atomic bomb just went off, but suddenly a new sound, like they've not
heard before, invades. What is quite possibly the loudest car siren
they've ever heard in their short lives screams like a wounded banshee on
LSD. The normally experienced boys collectively shit themselves, and
instead of following through, both run back to their shoebox.
Paul reaches the car first, a blur of grey,
black and hair, leaps
into the vehicle, and starts the ignition. Just as Paul is revving the car
to take off, Shannon has entered and pulled the door closed - which is all
the confirmation of having his partner Paul needs, as he takes off up the
hill with a shriek of engine and a graunching of gears.
Three hours later, the small white car creeps again up the hill, and again
the two extra-curricular activity men are very intently studying the
surrounding neighbourhood. The street is again quiet, the alarm has shut
itself off.
Paul stops the car short of the van, and Shannon alone steps out and
investigates, returning to the shoebox with an odd look.
"They're still there. Nothing has been
touched."
"Oh, too wierd. I guess the owners aren't
home and everyone else
is so damned used to car alarms... Do you want to go for it?"
"Uhm.. I don't know."
"I'm definately pretty wierded out by this,
it could be a
catch."
"Isn't there a law against that?"
"There's probably a law against what we do
too..."
"So its settled. I'll be back in a
tick."
Paul grins to himself as Shannon slinks towards the van. The car slowly
moves it way up the street, and timed together, Shannon tears the laptops
out of the broken window, and meets up with the car on the other side,
leaps into the open passenger door, and once again a great puff of blue
smoke and grinding of gears, as the pair shuttle up the hill.
"You fuckin' beauty!"
"She's shit hot, T2400CS and some kind of
Satellite"
"Holy shit, Satellite? Man, we're going up
in the world."
"I guess nobody bothered to inves..."
"... I think there's someone following
us."
Pause.
Shannon attempts to inconspicuously turn around and play in the back seat
as he watches the two white Transit Vans, somewhat reminiscent of the
standard telecom large van, closely behind the car.
"Oh... dear..."
Panic registers on Pauls face;
"How the hell can we be snapped? I didn't
see them at all, they
were just there. I can't see any markings on them, they might just be
random road traffic."
"A pair of identical white Transit Vans at 4
in the fucking
morning?"
"Well, shit, I'm trying to be optimistic
here... They say that if
you think positive thoughts then positive things happen, and damnit, I'm
thinking positive. You can kiss my arse."
The small white car, with its tag-along groupies, winds its way through city streets.
"Paul, man, we have to dump these
things."
"Yea, definately, but how? How are we going
to pitch them without
being obvious? I mean, its not like we can just throw them out of the
window."
"Drive down an alley, chuck them into a
dumpster?"
"Not... Oh thank christ... Oh,
man... they've turned off. It must
have been a nasty coincidence."
"Nasty? I think someone was telling us
something."
The two men wind their way out of the city, into the suburbs, and back to
Pauls house. The clamber out of the car, their new hard-won prized
possesions held tightly, and enter the house.
The laptops are separated, one to each thief.
"See you next week? Saturday?"
"Yep, cool. Laters man."