Friends in Defiance

Byron and Sheff met when they were kids and became fast friends. Neither was much interested in taking life seriously, so time together and apart was mainly spent goofing around. One day many years later, they got fed up with their dead-end jobs and decided to become criminals. To celebrate the decision, they married their girlfriends, Nancy and Nicole, in a dual eloping situation in Las Vegas. It was the best time they'd ever had up until that point. Being in their early thirties, they certainly weren't kids anymore, but Byron and Sheff were ready to finally start their lives.

The lifelong pals took time in devising their modus operandi and struck upon the notion to rob big rig trucks in the western part of the country. The plan would first involve faking an auto accident on some near-empty stretch of desert highway. A semi truck, they reasoned, would be forced to stop and the driver would get out to inspect the scene, giving Byron and Sheff ample opportunity to sneak into the truck and drive off. Later, they'd sell off the cargo and tractor unit parts on the black market for big cash, live off the bounty for a bit, and then repeat the process when needed. "Lots of semi trucks on the road," they'd often say to each other, which confused the other members of their friends' game nights.

Byron had a cousin named Kurt who drove eighteen-wheelers for various big box companies, so they started bending Cousin Kurt's ear on topics such as security measures and mean worth of typical cargo loads. With a cold beer in his hand and a colder look in his eyes, Kurt told them that most drivers wouldn't think twice about putting a bullet between their teeth before getting out from behind the steering wheel. This unwelcome information set the boys back a few weeks and made them keep their investment manager jobs at Merrill Lynch a little longer.

After thinking on it a bit, Byron had an idea that they would use clever disguises to catch their targets off guard, maybe dress as circus performers or famous movie monsters. This led to an argument over which random pairings of fictional creatures would win in a fight, but both Byron and Sheff agreed that it was a good idea to cover their faces. However, they would need a way to get the driver out of the truck, and Sheff decided that the best secret weapons for a robbery would be actual weapons, like firearms.

Byron abhorred guns, so Sheff set off to procure a couple of revolvers, one real and one fake, from an underground character named Joey Pistola. Even though he was the more comfortable of the two with the idea, Sheff prayed that they'd never have to use them, except maybe to knock out somebody by hitting them on the back of their head with the butt. Joey Pistola came through immediately on the real gun, though the fake one took a few days longer to find. This gave Byron and Sheff a few days to make their own masks, which was the second most fun time they'd ever had up until that point. And by the following weekend, they were ready to try out their plan.

Byron and Sheff agreed that the best location for their hijacking, a term they loathed, would be the New Mexico/Arizona border so that they could easily evade state police from one state into another. Federal officers would be a trickier problem, one that they kept pledging to solve at a later time, though they never did. They devised a cover story for their wives, telling Nancy and Nicole that they were selected to adjudicate an investing competition in Gallup, which was close to their actual destination of Defiance, NM.

However, much of the plan's inertia was drained by the long plane ride, frustrating car rental process, and an argument over their bill from a diner they'd stopped at for lunch. Exhausted, Byron and Sheff saw the truth clearly, that they hadn't thought of all the many roadblocks involved in their plan, like how to drive a semi truck. They hadn't really even cleared some of the roadblocks they'd checked off. For instance, Byron came clean that he didn't have any black market connections to whom they could sell the stolen loot. And for his part, Sheff had exaggerated his thirst to knock somebody out with the butt of a gun, admitting that he'd also elected for a fake revolver. Only his was a rubber one, making it even more fake than Byron's fake gun.

They decided to call off the plan, but took the rest of the weekend to hang out and check out New Mexico. They goofed around, as they always had before turning to lives of crime, and had a fantastic time. At one point, they even stumbled upon a competitive investing function taking place in a small event hall at a Ramada Inn. It was more Podunk than they'd imagined it would be when they'd invented the idea in order to lie to their wives, but Byron and Sheff were surprised to find that they were more interested in watching it than they thought they'd be. They sat down with a couple of cold beers and chuckled through a few events, not as giggly adjudicators from out of town, but as friends, lifelong friends with their long lives still ahead of them.