One of the best things about this ‘job’ is being consistently surprised by the work that people submit. STSC members who I had pegged as being essayist of a certain stripe suddenly present me with outstanding fiction, storywriters succeed in proving that they are also excellent poets, those who are gifted at prose decide to show that they are also proficient painters.
It’s a wonderful thing to discover the depths of everyones talent.
And so it is with todays story. Admittedly AJ (the creator of
) has been putting out fiction for a while but this story represents a levelling up of his abilities. It’s funny how that goes with fiction- often there is a plateau, a slow incremental improvement and then almost instantly there comes a big leap in your skill level. It’s what makes writing such a thrilling pursuit.Anyway. What we have for you today is AJ’s latest and greatest and I am delighted that he has generously offered it up to the STSC substack.
Enjoy.
Crouching Tiger was the first Plainview restaurant robbed by the Suits, a couple of masked men dressed in fitted navy blue suits, white collared shirts, and slim black ties. The robbery happened on a Saturday afternoon, just a few hours before the Chang family would make their regular trip to Amarillo to deposit a week’s worth of cash at the city’s Citizens Bank.
I called Lisa, one of the Chang daughters, when I heard about the robbery at Crouching Tiger. Lisa and I had fooled around a bit in high school until she went off to college somewhere on the east coast. Still, we remained friends over the years and whenever Lisa would come back to Plainview for the holidays, we would go out for coffee - or dinner and mostly drinks if we both happened to be single at the time.
Lisa said that while the family had no clue who the robbers were, the masked men were most definitely locals, given their unmistakable West Texan twang.
“You’d do best to hand over everything in the lockbox ma’am,” the shorter of the Suits had said to Lisa’s mom as though he were asking for a glass of water with his to-go order. His partner, meanwhile, had pulled out a Smith & Wesson pistol and pointed it calmly towards Lisa’s mom who, with shaking hands, unlocked the restaurant safe.
Given that Plainview was a small town of under 10,000, everyone in Plainview had heard about the robbery at Crouching Tiger within the hour. And naturally, the rumors attached itself to the news like wind to a prairie fire.
Some speculated that the Suits had targeted the Chang family for their ethnicity. After all, why rob the Changs when there was a Walmart or an IHOP just a mile away? Others thought that maybe the Changs owed money to shady characters back in their home country - yakuza, the triads, or some group of Asian gangsters.
These rumors were quickly dispelled, however, when Desert Bloom Barbecue - Plainview’s best barbecue spot - was robbed merely a few days later. Benny Hernandez, the long-running owner and pit master of Desert Bloom, was nearing eighty and had taken ownership of the restaurant over sixty years ago when his father ran off with his little brother’s third grade teacher.
“He eventually came back to Plainview some years later to visit. Stood where you’re at right now,” Benny had told me once while I waited for my brisket sandwich.
I had nodded, not having the heart to tell Benny that I’d heard this story from him three other times now.
“I’d never reached for my shotgun faster than I did that day,” Benny said.
Benny and his sons were regulars at old man Davidson’s ammunition shop on 21st Street, a fact that didn’t seem to deter the Suits. When the robbers rushed into the restaurant, the taller one went behind Benny’s eldest grandchild Tim and put a revolver against the boy’s temple.
Tim, a gangly beanpole of a thirteen-year old, had been in the process of bussing a table and was carrying a large stack of trays, the top one filled with used napkins, rib bones, and half-filled containers of barbecue sauce.
“My partner over there’s a bad shot,” the other robber said as he walked towards Benny who was behind the register. “But at that range, I reckon he ain’t that bad.”
Reluctantly, Benny’s three sons - who were in the kitchen and had begun to reach for their back pockets - put their revolvers on the bar counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the restaurant.
“I want all your cash in your biggest bag,” the shorter robber told Benny. “And I want all those revolvers in there too.”
Cursing, Benny emptied out the contents of the cash register into a large brown bag used for catering orders. He then placed each of the revolvers slowly into the bag, frowning to himself, as though deliberating whether this was the time to catch the robbers off guard.
Sensing Benny’s hesitation, the shorter robber cocked his pistol as Benny put the last revolver in the bag.
“Benny.”
“That’s me,” Benny grumbled.
“Double bag our order please.”
Gritting his teeth, Benny placed the nearly brimming bag of cash and revolvers into an empty brown bag, which he handed over to the Suits who then promptly ran out of the restaurant.
I heard about the Desert Bloom robbery while at the University Medical Center over in Lubbock. I was watching the news with Mom as she got her chemo treatment. Like Dad, she had gotten lung cancer, despite having never smoked a cigarette.
“Plainview just isn’t what it once was, huh?” Mom muttered with her eyes closed. This state of the art treatment program in Texas Tech was supposed to minimize the side effects of chemotherapy, something that was hard to believe when, just the previous day, I saw Mom crying on the couch in our living room, holding chunks of her fallen long brown hair. “First, Crouching Tiger and now Desert Bloom? Makes no sense to me why they just don’t go after Walmart or the other big corporate types that could eat it.”
Taking advantage of West Texas’ upward trajectory, Walmart had opened up a location along the six lane highway that passed along the outskirts of Plainview. Within months of Walmart’s opening, there were numerous small business casualties in Plainview. Wade Thompson had shuttered his thirty-year old shoe store and Danny Henderson cut the hours of his 24-hour liquor store in half, just to name a few.
Similar closures took place when the Chili’s opened a couple miles north of the Walmart and when the IHOP did the same a year afterwards. By the time the Suits’ robbed Crouching Tiger, it seemed like half of downtown Plainview had been emptied out, given all the commercial development on the outskirts of town that would service commuters on highway 27.
Many, including Mom, wondered why the Suits would go after the local businesses that needed cash the most. Some even speculated that maybe the Suits were hired by these large, out-of-town corporations to accelerate the demise of downtown Plainview and the rise of its development along the highway.
Uncle Ethan, Mom’s younger brother and an officer on the case, offered a simpler explanation.
“Just plain easier to rob these Mom and Pops,” Uncle Ethan said as he slathered guacamole over his carne asada. He had brought over dinner to our place, knowing that we needed all the help we could get while Mom was going through her treatment. “These local spots don’t bother with security cameras, indoors or outdoors. That’s why we can’t even get an ID on the getaway car. ”
“So they really got no leads then, huh?” Mom said as she mixed together her brown beans and rice.
“Well,” Uncle Ethan said. “These boys are definitely locals.”
“What makes you say that?” Mike asked through a mouthful of steak.
“Robbing the Changs the day before their scheduled trip to the bank. Knowing the Hernandez family well enough to take the grandson hostage. They know their victims.”
Uncle Ethan had a near-legendary reputation in West Texas. Officers outside Plainview would often pass by the station to drop off lunch or dinner for Uncle Ethan, all for the chance to run some case details by him for a few minutes. In all likelihood, the carne asada he brought over for dinner was from an especially thankful officer who had visited him earlier that day.
So it was to no one’s surprise that Uncle Ethan was the one to arrest the Suits when they attempted to rob Nena’s Taquitos. It was the day after the restaurant’s 75-year anniversary, which meant long lines out the door of the restaurant and large amounts of cash in the safe the following day.
When the Suits ran into the restaurant with guns pointed at Nena, the middle aged matriarch of the restaurant, she calmly walked one of the Suits - the shorter one - over to the storage closet where the cash was located and where Uncle Ethan greeted the robber with a revolver pointed directly at his forehead.
My friend Teddy saw the whole incident from the corner booth at Nena’s. He had spoken to Uncle Ethan at the restaurant earlier that day about the upcoming football game between A&M and UT and had figured that Uncle Ethan was just at Nena’s to grab some food. It was only during the robbery that Teddy realized that Uncle Ethan rarely ever needed to buy his own lunch.
“Guns down, hands up,” Uncle Ethan told the taller robber as he walked the shorter one out of the storage closet. Uncle Ethan had his pistol pressed against the back of the shorter one’s head.
The taller robber muttered something unintelligible and put his shotgun down on a nearby table. Shaking his head, he then raised both his hands up in the air.
“Teddy,” Uncle Ethan said steadily. “Go ahead and take that shotgun. I’m gonna bring these boys out back.”
Teddy nodded. “Want me to call the police Ethan?”
“No need - help’s already on the way,” Uncle Ethan said as he marched the two men out through the backdoor of Nena’s. “You just stay put over there Teddy.”
No one truly knew what happened next, but when the officers arrived, the Suits were long gone and Uncle Ethan was motionless, lying face down in the parking lot. Much to Nena’s chagrin, the Suits even had the time to run back into the storage closet to retrieve the unguarded cash.
Apparently, the police department had never received Uncle Ethan’s call for reinforcements. They only arrived because Teddy called 911 once he and Nena realized that they had been waiting for over fifteen minutes. Because of this incident, the department ended up replacing all of their radios within the month, a reasonable reaction given that they hadn’t been upgraded for nearly thirty years.
The radio malfunction, while unfortunate, still didn’t explain how the Suits could have overpowered Uncle Ethan, especially given that Uncle Ethan had a gun trained on the backs of the unarmed men as he walked them out of the restaurant.
“There’s not much I can really remember after walking out to the parking lot,” Uncle Ethan grumbled to anyone who asked about the robbery at Nena’s.
Given the bruising on his head, the doctors at the hospital suspected that one of the robbers had kicked the heavy back door into Uncle Ethan as they walked out of the parking lot together. Uncle Ethan, thankfully, ended up being fine after the attack, aside from intermittent neck pain that he would have for the next couple of years.
Much to the relief of the Plainview residents, the robbery at Nena’s Taquitos was the last by the Suits. The men disappeared in the same way that they entered the stores they robbed - silently and without a trace.
Still, the Suits very much still remained in Plainview’s collective imagination. Whenever a visitor or recent Plainview transplant got to talking to a local, it wouldn’t be long before there was some reference to that strange string of robberies back in the day. After all, there wasn’t much else about Plainview to talk about.
At a recent Thanksgiving, nearly a decade after the robberies, Mom would play the role of the Plainview old timer. After a feast of chipotle smoked turkey, jalapeno biscuits, tamales, and mashed potatoes, our whole family had settled into varying levels of contentment in Mom’s living room. Mike and I were watching the last quarter of the Lions-Cowboys game while everyone else sat on the floor around Mom who regaled her listeners with the legend of the Suits and all the questions that they left in their wake.
Who were they? Where were they now? And why in God’s name were they wearing these fitted blue suits?
“Must have been stressful for you Grandma,” my son Jack said. Jack was my oldest, although he was still young enough to order from the kids’ menu at Crouching Tiger. “Weren’t you also going through cancer treatments then?”
Mom had never asked about how the cutting edge treatments at the Texas Tech hospital were paid for. We had always just told her insurance had everything covered, but it was after hearing Jack’s question that Mom - as she was surrounded by her five intently listening grandchildren - was struck with a moment of clarity, causing her to look towards Mike and I as she began to sob.
Ah! The author appears…
Cute!