“No, we are not knocking the place over,” Ace replied, annoyed. “But somebody else is, and I think the cops are sending Brady in alone. We’re here for backup. I’d just as soon not be on camera—it would pretty much be our last turn at backup, right?”
Jai grunted. “Da. What is your plan?”
Ace grunted back. “We take turns going in. Eric, you know how to fuck with electronics? Me and Jai are more ‘rip it out of the wall’ kind of people.”
Eric blinked in surprise. Hewas, in fact, adept at shutting down cameras. “I’ve got lots of fun little gadgets on my phone,” he said. He hadn’t had to think about doing this since he’d committed to his retirement in December, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t equipped.
“Good,” Ace said. “You go in first. Do you need to open a membership and use their computer or anything?”
Eric blinked at him. This, too, was a good gambit. “Let me see what they have when I go in,” he said, but he was pretty sure he had it all on his phone.
“I’ll go in next,” Ace said. “I brought some money to deposit in case I need to.” He shook his head, obviously irritated. “Love doing this twice, I can tell you, but I don’t want to lose a whole week’s take if it goes sideways. Okay, so that leaves you, Jai. I’m thinking you want to go in the back door after the fun starts?”
The giant bald man with the terrifying smile and the coal-black goatee gave him a droll look. “I am a stealth machine,” he said with absolutely no inflection.
Ace cackled and handed Jai the deposit packet, complete with a filled-out slip. “Fair. You go in the front, and I’ll slip in the back. Eric, how long do you need?”
Eric was already scrolling through his phone. “Five minutes. If our robbers can hold off for that long, it’ll be helpful.”
“Okay, then,” Ace said. “You go, I’ll slink around the vacant lot to the back, Jai will go when I’m in place—or before the robbers if he sees them coming. Our job is zero casualties if we can help it, or just dead robbers if we can’t.”
“Will they be stupid, crazy, or desperate?” Jai asked clinically.
“Hopefully just desperate,” Ace said. “You can reason with desperate—all they want is a way out. You add stupid and crazy to the mix and you’re fucked. But either way, Ernie said we were needed, so here the fuck we are. Eric, go.”
“Going,” Eric replied crisply, and pretending he’d been planning to open an account in this Podunk S&L as opposed to the several offshore accounts that could fund him and probably everybody in his cul-de-sac until the day they died, he strolled on into the building.
He was struck by how beige banks were as he walked in. Beige walls, beige carpeting with—oh, hey, mauve accents—and beige furniture. It was Friday; the bank was relatively full today, so he had plenty of time to stand in line playing with his phone while he looked around.
There were two loan officers in house, behind glass-walled cubicles, and four tellers at the end of the room, behind bulletproof glass. As Eric tooled with his phone, he glanced around, taking note of the four cameras, one at every corner of the lobby, and started scanning their frequencies with his not-quite-market-spec phone. Funny, he’d been thinking about deleting this highly illegal ap to make room for more music and a couple of movies, but apparently he’d need to keep using his clean “entertainment” iPad for that.
As he glanced around the room, he made private note that the green lights on two… three… and there went the fourth camera, had all turned to red.
He texted AceClearand then started playing Two Dots—because it soothed his nerves, that’s why. Oh do-da-di-da-doh, nothing to see here, folks. Just another guy waiting in line, waiting for—
Jai’s in and they’re here.
Discreetly, Eric tucked the phone in his pocket, made sure his new faded jeans and gray hoodie completely covered the pancake holster in the small of his back, and got ready to be surpri—
The gunshots into the ceiling werealwaysa surprise. He sank to a crouch like the rest of the patrons and held his hand up, swiveling to see four gun-wielding assholes wearing black ski masks, faded-to-fit blue jeans, andidenticalred zip-up hoodies crashing through the front door.
“Everybody,get down!” screamed the leader. “This is a robbery. You have two minutes to comply.”
Eric joined the rest of the wide-eyed patrons—women in skirts or work uniforms, obviously taking care of their business during lunchtime, men in suits and blue-collar clothes, doing the same. They all sank to the uncomfortable, scantily carpeted floor with their hands over their heads, staring at the gunmen in a grim combination of fear and fury.
Eric—who was rarely on this side of a gun without a backup plan—glanced toward Jai in annoyance and realized that the big man had… disappeared?
That wasn’t right. He was damned close to seven feet tall, nothing short of a giant from a fairy tale. How did that guydisappear?
“Look at me!” A masked gunman was suddenly right there, screaming in Eric’s face, and Eric raised his eyes to the crazedpair behind the black polyester ski cap and blinked rapidly to clear the spittle.
“I’m looking,” he said, keeping his voice down. Stupid, desperate, or crazy, he figured being soothing couldn’t hurt.
“That’s better,” the robber growled. “Ki—Fucker One, what’re we waiting for?” he screamed, and Eric, who sat with the cashiers to his left and the door to his right, glanced over toward the cashier bank. Two of the robbers were behind the windows with the predicted canvas bags, forcing the cashiers to scoop money into them. That seemed legit, Eric thought, but he watched as one of the men—”Fucker One” perhaps?—stared at the clock on the wall, his lips moving.
“Five more minutes,” he said, and Eric glanced to the corner where Jai should have been—and actually spotted him, crouched behind an empty loan officer’s desk, his eyes moving actively over the scene but nothing else.
Those busy eyes made contact with Eric’s, and Eric almost read his mind. The bank crew wasn’trushingthis operation, they were drawing it out.
