Thank You For Being A Mark

Jackson’s pouring shots of Patron, which is unusual for him because he’s a cheap motherfucker, so I know he’s trying to sell me on something. He’s still wearing his Dade County Pool Services golf shirt, but he’s ditched his work khakis for a pair of baggy basketball shorts in Gators colors. The trailer’s AC is fighting a losing battle against the South Florida heat, even though it’s only March. Dark sweat patches have spread out from Jackson’s armpits, fading out into white salt stains.

I can’t even look at Devin, sitting on a weight bench with his man boobs glistening and his cheeks and chin orange with Cheeto dust.

Jackson hands me a shot and a Bud and I knock back the shot and open the can and wait for him to get going.

“So there’s this house, see? Four old ladies. Three of them are, like, my grandma’s age. And the fourth is even older. They’ve got this nice place. Whaddaya call it, good-sized house, no second floor? A ranch house? They’ve got a pool and I go there every so often to check the water chemicals.”

“Tell him about the passwords, Jackson,” Devin says, and swear to god I burst out laughing. When Jackson asks what’s so funny I make up a story about a meth head pacing outside his tent and calling out to everybody who walks by ‘Halt! Give the password!’ and they both laugh because I do the crazy stare and jerky face-picking pretty well, if I say so myself.

But really what was funny was that when Devin said “tell him about the passwords, Jackson” he made me think of Lennie in Of Mice and Men. My high school class went to see a stage version of it, which I was kind of skeptical about at first, seeing as you can’t have horses and farms in a little community theater, but which turned out to be really good, though I had to pretend to be bored out of my mind so as not to be accused of being some gay drama nerd.

“Okay,” Jackson says. “Enough with the funny stories. I gotta tell you about these marks.”

I hold up my shot glass for a refill. If I’m gonna end up in the can again because of one of his shitty jobs, I might as well get a few free drinks out of it.

“So, four old ladies. Widows or divorced. They’re new to Florida. They don’t know anybody yet, so I’ve been helping them get settled. You know, telling them how to get ready for hurricane season or handing out useful tips: ‘Dave’s Autostop is usually ten cents a gallon cheaper than anybody else.’ Like I’m the fuckin’ Welcome Wagon.”

I guess my face shows that I’m not thrilled with where things are going. I’m not against doing crimes, but judges take a pretty fucking dim view of robbing grandmas.

“Listen. Nobody’s gonna be home. It’ll be quick. Nobody’ll see us. Devin can tell you.”

Devin grins, showing more orange Cheeto dust embedded in the spaces between his teeth. “It’s true. There’s a party at the seniors’ center, right next to the golf course where I work. They’re showing off the new pickle ball courts. They got a band playing oldies. Elvis and all that shit.”

Great. We’ve got Devin providing the intel. What could go wrong?

“Thank you Devin,” Jackson says. “I have it for a fact that the ladies are going to be at the party.”

“How do you know?”

Devin barks out another laugh. “Because Jackson’s been fucking one of ‘em!”

“Fuck you! I have not!” Jackson grabs the beer from Devin’s hand, reaches down and picks up the Cheetos bag and sets both down on the kitchen table.

“Hey!” Devin says, jumping to his feet and towering over Jackson. “I wasn’t finished!”

“You’ve been pounding beers since you got off work. I need you sober. And for fuck’s sake wash that orange shit off your face and put on a goddam shirt. “

Devin slides his lower lip over his upper and sucks in a big breath and I’m not sure if he’s going to cry or slam Jackson’s head through the wall, but then his shoulders sag and he sinks back down to the bench. Jackson gives back the Cheetos as a peace offering. These two have been like that since we were teenagers in Jacksonville.

“Okay. I haven’t been fucking any antique pussy, but that’s not to say the antique pussy ain’t interested. There’s one of the old ladies, Blanche, who’s always giving me the eye. Undoing a button on her shirt, puffing out her tits, looking at my crotch, whatever. Every time I’m over she’s all ‘can I get you a cold drink you poor, hard-workin’ man?’ And I thank her and drink it all sexy. Sometimes I rub the cold can against my chest like I need it to cool off and I watch and she’s practically drooling. Every time I come by, she makes sure to be there. And bit by bit I’ve pumped her for information. Now, a couple of times one of the other old broads has been around. There’s one from, I don’t know, one of those boring cold states, I can never keep them straight. Rose is her name. She’s clueless. Totally clueless. So I try to be helpful. I hear she’s having trouble with her computer, and I studied computers in school.”

“You did?” Devin’s looking lost, which is kind of a natural expression for him. “I thought you took autobody tech like me.”

“Fuck Devin, that’s the act I did for Rose and Blanche. I tell Rose I studied computers and I’m all ‘Maybe you gotta port your data from the motherboard. Here let me look.’ And I see that she has a piece of paper underneath her keyboard with all her passwords on it. All it’ll take is a few minutes in the house without them there. Then we go to an ATM and take out all we can from her bank account and credit cards.”

“Don’t forget the jewelry, Jackson!” Devin says, excited now and rubbing his paws together.

“Of course not. Pete, while you’re in Rose’s room getting the passwords, Devin’s in Blanche’s room with this.”

Jackson pulls a folded piece of paper from his shorts pocket and shows it to me. It’s a floor plan of a room, all covered with arrows and circles and Jackson’s cramped printing. He points to various markings and explains.

“She’s got a lot of jewelry. A lot of it’s cheap glass and shit, but the good stuff is in a Chinese-looking box in the drawer on the bottom right. She’s also got a lot of antique shit and what she calls family heirlooms made of silver and stuff. There’s a little hand mirror thing on her dresser that she says is 200 years old. There’s a wooden box she keeps in her closet, up here, filled with the old fancy silverware – shit that goes back to the old plantation or something.”

I’m looking at the detail on the map and I’m impressed with the amount of information Jackson has gathered. For a guy who hasn’t been fucking her, he knows a lot about this old lady’s bedroom.

“So what are you doing in all this?” I ask.

“I’ll be at the party, charming them so they stay late enough that you can get in and out and hit a bunch of ATMs before they get back.”

I’m adding up what we can expect to make from this. Maximum cash withdrawals from the bank account and the credit cards. Ten cents on the dollar, if we’re lucky, fencing the jewelry and the antiques.

“Is there anything else worth taking? How about the other old ladies?”

“Forget about them. One’s Dorothy, a big mouth know-it-all. I think all she’s got is a bunch of books. It’s Blanche’s house and she’s living there ‘cause she’s broke. And the other one is Dorothy’s mother. Crazy old half-dead witch. She doesn’t have shit.”

Look, I don’t feel great about robbing a couple of old ladies. But money’s been tight since I got out of jail and my truck’s got a cracked engine block, so even two grand could make a big difference. So I say yes and wait for the big shindig.

On the night in question we get in unobserved. The neighbors are all probably sleeping on their couches with Turner Classic Movies playing. The door’s flimsy enough that it pries open easily and Jackson’s given us the code to turn off the alarm. As I’m plugging in the numbers, I see the ladies have it written on a sticky note right beside the keypad, which is how Jackson got the number in the first place. I text Jackson that we’re in.

He texts a thumbs up.

I point Devin toward Blanche’s room and head to Rose’s. As I’m writing down passwords, I hear shuffling footsteps from the other side of the wall. I hold my breath and don’t move a muscle except for the fingers I use to text Jackson.

someones here

Three dots and Jackson’s text arrives.

just ds mom

Me: fuck

Jackson: no worries she takes hearing aids out goes to bed at 9

I hear a toilet flushing from the old lady’s room and tiptoe to Blanche’s so I can let Devin know we’re not alone. As I enter the room, Devin’s opening an old wooden chest full of shiny silver cutlery and tea and coffee pots. I place a finger to my lips and make a shushing sound as Devin turns to me and booms out “What’s silver worth, Pete?”

“We gotta go,” I whisper, grabbing the bag Devin’s been filling with jewelry. “Quiet. The old lady’s still here.”

And then I step out to the hallway and the light comes on and there’s a little blue-haired scarecrow holding an old gangster-movie snub-nosed revolver. In her tiny skeleton hands it looks like the .44 Magnum from that old Clint Eastwood movie.

“Hands up, punk!”

I’ve seen some dead-eyed killers in my time, but this old lady could stare down any of them. I drop the bag and put my hands up and calculate how fast I could turn and get to the door and just when I’m about to move, Devin knocks me sideways to get away. And immediately the hallway fills with fire and smoke and lead. Devin’s blood, and maybe brain matter, sprays my face. I only have a second to process that when a slug tears into my guts and I hit the floor. Pain floods in as the light leaks from the world. In my last image of the scene all I see is the mouth of the old lady’s pistol and those cold rheumy eyes.

So that’s how I ended up in Raiford pulling a five-year sentence and that’s how I came to be shitting into a plastic bag. I’m still hoping for surgery to repair my damaged colon so I can crap like a normal person, but there’s no treatment for my reputation. It’s gonna be a long five years being known as the guy who got captured by a great-grandmother in a floral nightgown.

BIO: Bob Armstrong writes everything but poetry and ransom notes. His novel Prodigies (Five Star/Gale), won the Margaret Laurence Prize for Fiction in the 2022 Manitoba Book Awards and was re-published in 2025 by Roan & Weatherford (with a sequel to come in 2026). His writing has appeared in the U.S. in Inlandia, Clockhouse, Red Earth Review, Kudzu House, Roi Fainéant and Saddlebag Dispatches and in Canada in Prairie Fire, Exile, The Fiddlehead, FreeFall and various anthologies.