"meh" story, need advice

I wrote this mainly as practice. I haven't been writing/reading a lot lately, and I have a feeling this piece is mediocre, but I can't put my finger on why. It just feels "meh" to me. Anyways, any comments would be nice. (There's actually a second part of the story but I'm not even finished it yet, so I didn't see the point in including it.

They wove through the snowstorm like ghosts to Sam’s convenience store. Upon arriving they stood outside, waiting for the time to haunt.

Gus and Todd waited for the go-ahead from Vince, who was squinting from the snow and ice attacking him. He saw a lady exit the store with a steaming coffee, and Vince gave a gesture for them to go inside.

It was Todd’s first time robbing a store – or doing any crime, for that matter. But after Vince’s Dad got laid-off from his cushy retail position at the electronics store, which ended with him hurling a car stereo at his boss, and Gus’s parents’ bakery went out of business, money for them was a myth. And they asked for Todd’s help, who could not refuse while under the spell of alcohol. The politicians didn’t care about Belleview, something Gus would go on about for what seemed like hours. The unemployment rate was one of the lowest in the country and the classifieds may as well have been the obituaries.

They waited around the store a little too long, and the clerk eyed them as if to tell them to leave. Gus and Todd huddled around Vince as he unzipped his backpack behind a shelf of potato chips and removed the 9mm pistol. Their plan – or more accurately, Vince’s plan -- was finally in action. “Okay, put your hands up!” Vince shouted. “All the money in this backpack, c’mon, let’s go!” The clerk, a tall Indian man who radiated a strange calmness, showed by his routine motions that this wasn’t the first time the store was robbed. Gus, with his pistol also raised at the clerk, stood at the side of the counter. Spit sprayed from his mouth as he barked, “and don’t press no secret buttons or nothin’. I’m watching!” Todd stood in a dimly lit corner with his gun tucked away. His blue eyes wandered around the room and took moments to stare at his friends eagerly awaiting a backpack full of cash.

Friends. They brought him here to rob a store while sitting on his desk at home was a full scholarship to Yale Divinity School. “Look, you’re gonna need more money when you get there, I’m sure of that,” Vince would tell him. “There’s always the stuff in fine print, you know? My Uncle, or was it my Cousin – I don’t remember – got screwed out of one of those scholarships once. Trust me, you’ll thank us later.” Todd was going to be a theology major; something his Father, who now resides in an urn above the fireplace, wanted him to be. He was going to find himself through the Bible and God. At least, according to his Father.

“Yo, Todd, what’s wrong man?” hushed Gus. Todd’s eyes were fixed on a package of Doritos, and Vince was arguing with the clerk about giving him cigarettes. “I shouldn’t be here,” Todd replied looking down at his Nikes.

“Snap out of it man. Vince is gonna get all the stuff and we’ll leave. No cops yet man, cheer up.”

But a fear of cops wasn’t distressing Todd (although, getting arrested for robbery would probably put a dent in his future plans). It was the feeling of disappointing his Father, a man who had a PhD and would set aside his research to come home at six-thirty every evening to converse with his family. Todd feared that his conscience would inherit the same, vile tangerine-sized tumour that had developed on his Father’s brain.

“Give me the goddamn cigarettes or I will put a bullet into that dumb head of yours!” Vince shouted. Gus broke a security camera with his brutish hands, then wires sprouted from the hole and he gave an unfitting thumbs-up. Vince, realizing the cigarettes were not coming anytime soon, told Todd to cover the door. Todd paced toward the entrance, but had no intention of “covering” anything. He peered out at the wrath of winter, all the white skittering across the black, enveloping the streetlights which stood as ancient monoliths by day and living saviours by night.

A stocky man in a thick jacket and fur-rimmed hood walked into the store, whose eyes turned to big plums at the sight of Todd’s pistol. Todd floated away from the door as Vince tried to control the man, who was seized by confusion.

“You! Get to the back of the store, now! You’re not going anywhere yet,” Vince commanded. He had a firm grip on the situation, until the crime betrayed the criminal. From under the counter, the Indian man grabbed a shotgun and aimed it at Vince, screaming phrases in a language unknown to him.

“Drop your weapons and get out of my store, or I will put many bullets into that head of yours,” he threatened.

Vince panicked. Now, it was a conversation between the mouths of two pistols, the gullet of a shotgun and Todd, who wished to just curl up and die in a hole somewhere. Or better yet, vanish.

“Todd, how about some help here!” Vince said, locked onto the clerk.
Todd was without a trace of assertiveness; nor obedience, but something in between. He was unnoticed as he slipped out the back door of the store into the storm.

A block away on Parkinson street, which was completely deserted, he unloaded and hurled his pistol into an alleyway in a fit of rage. Todd walked around in circles that night – not a wise decision after being involved in a robbery, but his mind was elsewhere. The storm grew thicker and as the whirling white consumed him he found himself more invisible.

Originally, the idea of a robbery excited him. In a Presbyterian home where missing a nightly reading of the New Testament meant serious spiritual and parental punishment -- unless Todd conjured a story about attending a Teen Bible Study that night, which his Mother always fell for -- he wanted to do something beyond the bounds of what was known to him his whole life as goodness.

Gus and Vince, the “uneducated groundlings” as Todd’s Father would say, and the “bless-their-soul-and-I-hope-they-find-the-Lord boys” as his Mother would say, were his escape from his sheltered life. They, the ones who appeared to be empty vessels but were rich with humanity and adolescent curiosity, taught him about being himself. Not to mention, they taught him how to roll weed with the thin paper from his Bible.

So it was the dent in his conscience of not just disappointing his Father but betraying his friends, who in those late nights in Gus’s basement taught him so much. Todd’s shiver came to a tremble as he heard blaring police sirens. He thought of running but a police cruiser rolled up to the curb and an officer stepped out.

“Hi, um, officer.”
“Yes. We’ve had reports of gunshots around this area—“
“G-gunshots?”
“…Yes. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about this, would you…?”
“Andy,” Todd replied.
“Do you know anything about this, Andy?”
“Um…” Todd stalled, realizing his lie. The officer was looking at his pendant of Saint Mark which gleamed under the street light.
“At Sam’s convenience, I think, I heard some things. I’m not certain though—“
Another lie, he thought.
“Sam’s. Hmm. All right, have a good night. Stay safe.”
Todd craned his head toward the foot-printed ground and felt eerily warm in the presence of these frigid conditions. Gunshots? What could have happened? “Stay safe” looped in his head and he decided to go home, the cruiser’s sirens now a decrescendo.

But I didn’t really lie, Todd assured himself the next morning as he read “Teen burglars arrested” in the Belleview Sun. I just told the police officer where the crime was. In fact, I was being a good citizen. Dad always talked about that. It doesn’t matter if I left out that one part, that part about me…

He sipped his bran flakes sheepishly at the table, alone, and read every scathing detail: the backpack full of cash, the pistols, “the one boy who was reluctant to comply with the officer’s orders,” which Todd was certain Vince authored, even though their names were absent from the article. Something particularly startling was the “man in the maroon jacket who tried escaping and was shot in the stomach,” then rushed to a hospital and luckily survived. Mom came into the kitchen, her high heels clacking against the hardwood with her briefcase in-hand, and kissed Todd on the forehead. She gave attention to what he was reading.

“My word, you can’t help but feel sorry for those kids. Dangerous and stupid, but they probably have no food, no family. How was your Bible study last night at Peter’s house?”

“It was good. Learned a lot.” He focused on his cereal, now soggy, and mixed it around, trying to ignore his Mother’s smile. She departed for work and said goodbye to her son, her pure, Christian son. Todd buried his face in his hands and wanted to weep, but his eyes stayed dry.