1
She ran.
Shotgun slung over her back, lock-top bank bag weighing down her shoulder, Anne sprinted down the alley behind the First Durango Savings and Loan, feeling the cold November air slash at her lungs and arms. Inside the confines of her rubber mask, she could still smell the gunfire and the blood and the panic sweat like they were being pumped straight into her nostrils. Steam clouded her face with every breath, suffocating. With her free hand, she tore the mask from her head and threw it into the nearest dumpster. Stupid fucking clown face. She kept running.
In the distance behind her, she could still hear the bank’s alarm wailing against the gray morning, but it sounded like the shooting might have stopped for the time being.
She didn’t know who killed that first guard, didn’t see where the shot had come from or who’d pulled the trigger. All she knew was that one second everything was going according to plan, and the next, a bullet had obliterated the guy’s face, reducing it to a messy blur of blood and bone. Anne didn’t even register the sound of the gunshot until it was way too late to do anything about it.
That was when everyone started screaming and running. In the fray that followed, a couple of the other guards managed to snatch their guns back, then started blasting the place up like it was the O.K. Corral. Everything fell apart in fast-forward.
Merrill had been the next to die—one of the guards put three slugs in his front when he wasn’t looking. He’d dropped to his knees, groaning and pawing at his chest as it seeped blood, uncomprehending. A fourth bullet deleted most of his head a moment later, and just like that, poof, no more Merrill. Like the world’s most fucked-up magic trick.
Anne’s brain went into full panic mode after that, a starving rat locked in a tiny cage as the bank turned into an abattoir, a hole in the world filled with dead people. Jessup started shooting. Travis started shooting. Anne started shooting. People ran for their lives. Somebody pulled the fire alarm. Beyond the marble walls of the bank, police sirens started to swell. How the fuck had the cops shown up so fast?
At least Anne hadn’t killed anyone in there. Her pistol, a Glock 17, hadn’t even cleared the waistband of her jeans, and she’d only used the twelve-gauge to buy herself some space, keeping the other guards where they were long enough for her to grab the bag and get out. But for a fleeting second, she entertained the possibility that maybe—just maybe—she’d been the one to shoot the first guard. All it would have taken was a misplaced ounce of pressure on the trigger, the tiniest lapse in attention and the slightest jerk of her finger. Was it possible? Sure, anything was possible. But had she done it?
No. She told herself no. Despite the unholy fucking mess that first bullet had left the guard’s head in, it was clean and sterile, nearly hospital quality, compared to what her shotgun, a weathered but well-cared-for Remington 870, would have done. If she’d made a mistake, if her finger had slipped, the twelve-gauge would have turned his skull into a fucking salad bowl, a moon crater filled with blood and flecks of bone.
Somewhere not too far from where she stood, helicopter blades thumped at the air. She turned her face upward, searching the drab, cloud-scraped sky for the shape of the police chopper, but she couldn’t see anything. Yet.
She kept moving.
Following her mental map away from the bank, Anne cut through the alleys that lay beyond, switching back and forth again and again, making herself hard to follow. They’d gone over this part a dozen times or more: half a mile away from the Savings and Loan, idling at the edge of a lonely little parking lot behind a derelict 7-Eleven, Joanie, their driver, would wait for them in an unmarked van with the doors unlocked. Once they were all in, she’d hit the road, driving the speed limit out of town, and then they’d just keep going until the Durango PD was little more than another shitty memory.
Except, when Anne stepped free of the last alley into the desolate old lot, there was nothing there. No one. Nothing. Not even an oil spot on the asphalt.
The van was gone.
* * *
The plan was simple, as far as bank robberies went. At 10:15 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, Anne, Jessup, Merrill, Travis, and Gemma would enter the front doors of the First Durango Savings and Loan wearing masks, carrying guns. Merrill would hit every security cam in the lobby with a burst of black spray paint, then he and Anne would run crowd control while Jessup, ever the showman, calmly addressed the tellers and patrons. Standard line, really: nobody moves, nobody gets hurt. Everybody knew the deal.
After that, Anne would hang in the lobby with Jess and Merrill while Trav and Gem took the bank manager back to unlock the vault, where they’d drill open a few choice safe-deposit boxes and relieve them of their contents. Back in the lobby, Cathy, their insider, would play good hostage, emptying the bait cash from the teller drawers into pillowcases and setting a good example so her clueless coworkers would stay on the straight and narrow until it was over. There was no keeping the alarms from getting tripped, but as always, Jessup had done his homework: response times for high-priority emergency calls in the city of Durango averaged about eleven minutes, give or take. As long as everything went according to plan, they’d have the job done in five.
By 10:20, they’d all be hell and gone again, and a whole lot richer than they’d been an hour before. A clean operation—no fuss, no muss. And for a couple of minutes there, yeah, it was all going exactly how it was supposed to. The machine was running as intended.
But then someone did the stupidest thing possible and killed one of the security guards.
* * *
A cold spike punched through Anne’s middle as she stood there at the edge of the parking lot, grasping at mental straws, trying to slow her racing thoughts.
Why the fuck was the van gone?
Joanie Perez was a seasoned driver who’d been running with them for most of a year and a half. She’d proven her skills time and time again—she could drive with the best of them, but maybe more importantly, Joanie was steady. Reliable. She didn’t spook easy, and she didn’t make last-minute decisions if she could help it. There was no way in hell she’d have left Anne and everyone else behind to get eaten by the cops.
Not unless she thought they were all dead.
Fury and confusion boiled inside Anne’s skull. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They had a plan in place to keep this kind of shit from happening. Everything was going so fucking wrong.
But standing here like an asshole, wishing Joanie wasn’t gone didn’t make it so. Anne was on her own, and she had to keep pivoting. That was the only way she was going to stay alive now.
She’d ridden into town with Jessup in his robin’s-egg-blue Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight, a full-on land yacht straight out of 1970 that, for whatever reason, he prized more than just about anything else in the world. It was a brutal old luxury beast, a Sherman tank in automobile form with whitewall tires around bare black wheel hubs instead of hubcaps because, in Jessup’s words, it looked mean. Anne and Jess had stashed the sedan in a dark, lonely side alley where it could go unnoticed for a couple of days, until Jess came back to pick it up. Anne cross-referenced her mental map again: unless she was totally turned around, it was only a few blocks away.
She could probably make it. But she had to move—now.
Keeping to the alleyways and side streets, Anne retraced her steps from the empty lot, moving as fast as she could without drawing too much attention to herself. Thanks to the mask, nobody inside the bank had seen her face, and she was pretty sure she hadn’t gotten any blood on her, but the Remington across her back would definitely raise questions, even in southern Colorado. People tended to notice people wandering around carrying shotguns and bank bags full of cash. She kept the Remington slung over one shoulder, gripping it by its stock so it sat along the line of her arm. It wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, but it might buy her a second or two’s head start if anybody clocked her.
She forced her breathing to slow, trying to get her pulse back under control as she went. Panic wasn’t useful now. She had to stay clearheaded. So she walked instead of running, and as she did, she went through the list of her people, trying to take stock of what she knew and what she didn’t, who was alive and who wasn’t.
Jessup. Travis. Merrill. Gemma. Joanie. Cathy. Iris.
Me.
She herself was alive; she knew that much for sure. And since Joanie and the van were both missing in action, odds were good that she’d gotten away—no way the cops would have had time to tow the Caravan if they’d pinched her after things went south. Fair shot that Iris was probably safe, too; as their resident fixer, Iris Bulauer could get her hands on anything—guns, burner phones, extra muscle, whatever—any day, any time, faster and more reliable than DoorDash. But she never got her hands dirty with the actual work if she could help it. She operated behind the scenes and made sure everything went according to plan. She’d also been married to Travis, Jessup’s second-in-command, for basically ever.
Setting Iris aside, Anne turned her thoughts to the others—Jessup, the closest thing to a leader that their crew had, had been in the lobby with her when the shooting started. He’d put down the guard that killed Merrill, but after that, things got blurry. She hoped to hell that Jess had made it out okay. He was a good boss. A good friend.
So who did that leave? Travis and Gemma had taken the bank manager back to the vault, but as soon as that first shot rang out, Travis had reappeared, gun in hand, another magic trick, ready to rain hell down on anyone unlucky enough to get in his way. As for Gem, she was long gone by the time Anne got out. Vanished into thin air. It made sense: Gemma Poe had always been a survivor. Probably cut and ran the second the alarm started howling.
As for the dead? Well, there was Merrill. No question about that. But had she seen anyone else get dropped? She couldn’t be sure. She thought she might have heard Cathy scream as she ran for the door, which made her feel like shit. Last she’d seen of the woman, she was hiding under one of the teller stations, eyes glazed and blank, hands shaking uncontrollably. Shock. Anne wasn’t exactly surprised. Cathy Sleator was a civilian, a woman Jessup had met at a bar and prized open with charm and tequila and promises of a hefty cut of the take once everything was said and done. She’d never fired a gun in her life, let alone had to keep her head down and shit together as people died all around her. She’d just wanted to get back at her boss, some pencil-mustached little creep with a wandering eye who kept cutting her hours. They’d promised her this was going to be an easy job, five minutes in and out, clean as a whistle. Not a drop of blood shed.
Now look what had gone and happened.
Anne had tried to drag Cathy out of the bank when she finally cut and ran, but the woman wouldn’t budge from her hiding spot. So she left her there. Anne wasn’t about to risk her own neck trying to save someone who didn’t want to be saved. Maybe Cath had made it out all right, but maybe not. Anne couldn’t get her hopes up about it. Not now. Not while there were so many chainsaws left in the air that needed juggling.
Between buildings and down alleyways she moved, staying as far away from the main streets as she could. She moved silently, ducking from shadow to shadow, her shoulder groaning from the sheer weight of the bank bag in her fist. She couldn’t lug this shit much farther, but if she was remembering right, Jessup’s Olds was right around the next corner. Up ahead of her, a shot rang out—POW! Acting on instinct, Anne pressed herself against the nearest wall and inched her way down to the alley break, spine tight against the cool brick.
Holding her breath, Anne peeked into the alley. The Oldsmobile was parked halfway down—with a pair of uniformed Durango PD officers standing beside it, one old, one young, both with service weapons drawn. Jessup was on the ground in front of them, slumped awkwardly against the front wheel of the Ninety-Eight, his long black hair pooling around his shoulders like an oil spill. He was bleeding, too. A red lake burbled out from underneath his body and spread across the asphalt.
Anne stood there and blew air through her nostrils in a slow stream. Considered her next move. The world was falling apart. Jessup was hurt, maybe even dying. She didn’t have a lot of options here, and they all seemed to end with her going through these cops one way or another. Great. That was just great.
Anne adjusted the weight of the shotgun over her shoulder and drew the Glock from her belt. Then she was moving up the alleyway toward the cops and Jess. She didn’t slow as she approached, didn’t bother hiding her footsteps or the guns or the heavy canvas bag bursting with cash, none of that. She was out of time to waste. Whatever she’d stumbled on to here, it ended now.
The younger cop—average height, pasty-white with dark hair, only a few years younger than Anne herself—saw her coming, but he was too slow, too green, too nervous. He froze. Sucked for him.
Wordlessly, Anne brought the nine millimeter up and pulled the trigger. The older cop never even saw it coming.
The Glock kicked in her fist, and the old cop’s right knee exploded into a bright red bloom that went splattering across the blacktop. Screaming through bared teeth, he toppled over, clutching at his ruined leg with both hands. The fool wasn’t ever going to go tap dancing again, but he’d live.
Another shot rang out, and Anne heard a stray bullet spang off the brick wall at her back. The young cop had found his courage, after all. Twisting in place, she zeroed the Glock dead at the kid’s brainpan, hand steady. Plenty of better folks than him had taken a shot at her before without walking away. Shithead was bullying a dragon and didn’t even realize. She glanced down at the police-issue SIG in his shaking hands.
“Put it down,” she said. “Now.”
Panic washed over the young cop’s face as he realized the world of shit he’d found himself in.
“Won’t tell you again,” Anne said.
Anne saw the gears of internal calculus turning behind the kid’s eyes. He knew how this was going to go now. Same way things like this always went. He dropped his gun.
Good boy.
“Kick it away,” Anne said, then nodded to his partner, pain-blind and bleeding. “His, too.”
The young cop did as he was told. Anne gestured to the ground with her pistol.
“Down. Now. Cuff your hands behind your back. Tight.”
It took the guy some doing, but he managed it after a second, freeing the silver handcuffs from his belt and click-clacking them tight around his wrists without looking. Beside him, the older cop was still wheezing and whining like a dog that had been run over by a truck as he clutched desperately at his shot knee. Blood gushed freely between his fingers and pooled on the ground underneath him.
“You’re Heller, right?” the old cop groaned. A thick cord of drool ran down his chin from his frenzied panting. “Right? Anne Heller?”
Anne felt her face go hot and red at her name. The cop showed her a mouthful of crooked yellow teeth. The calm in his voice was a put-on, a performance forced through the pain, but the grinning cruelty of it all was real. “Somebody dimed you out. You, and Lees here”—he kicked at Jessup’s feet with his good leg—“and all the rest of your shitbag friends.”
Anne studied him, searching his face for a quaver or a twitch, some tell that he was bluffing. Normally, she would have written it off as standard-issue cop bullshit, but he knew her name. Between that and the way all those sirens had shown up so quickly back at the bank …
Tumblers and gears clicked into place inside her head. Yeah, okay. Shit. Someone had tipped the cops off and kicked the plan to hell. Somebody had fucked them. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that Joanie had taken off and left everybody behind.
She knelt in front of the old cop. Tucked the muzzle of her Glock underneath his jaw.
“Who?” she asked, her voice soft, almost gentle. “Who called it in?”
The cop’s smile grew like a cancer. “Fuck yourself,” he said. “Even if they told me, which they didn’t, you think I’d tell a thieving, murdering piece of shit like you?”
Anne stared knives at him, but she didn’t move, didn’t say anything else. Trying to reason with a cop was like trying to argue with a drunk hog. She was just wasting time now. Her hand tightened around the Glock’s grip and she swung her arm like a rat trap, bricking the ceramic-and-steel pistol’s broadside into the cop’s face with a flat, meaty CRUNCH. His head snapped to the side, and he dropped.
Down on the street, more black-and-whites screamed past the alley, barreling toward the Savings and Loan. No doubt the first responders had made their way inside by now, so it wouldn’t be long until they turned their attentions outward, searching for the remaining perpetrators. Which meant she only had a couple of minutes, max.
Anne went to Jessup and jostled the side of his head, patting one unshaven cheek hard enough to land like a light slap. Nothing. She pulled his hands away from his belly, revealing the wellspring of blood beneath, bubbling out from a little black poke-hole in the center, just above his navel. This close up, she could see that he hadn’t just been shot the once—there was a second bleeding hole high up in his shoulder. Except she’d only heard one shot. Which meant the other had to have happened back at the bank. Fuck. She didn’t have time to think about it right now. Jess’s keys were on the ground beside him, slowly being swallowed by the blood pumping out of his body. She didn’t know where his gun was. She patted his face again.
“Jess? Jess, wake up. Come on, it’s me,” she said. He didn’t stir.
She laid two fingers along the side of Jess’s cold, clammy throat, searching for a pulse. It was faint, but it was there. She plucked his keys off the ground and went to unlock the Ninety-Eight. Snaking an arm under both Jessup’s armpits, she dragged him over and eased him into the back seat, feeling his blood leach into her clothes, hot and sticky. Once she got him situated, she covered him with a battered old squall jacket she found stuffed in the footwell, its navy blue long faded. It wasn’t exactly great camouflage, but it would probably hold up enough if they passed by a highway cop. And if they got pulled over? Well. She’d deal with that if and when it happened.
Her gaze went back to the two cops on the asphalt. She still had questions, and plenty of them. Between his obvious attitude problems and shot-up knee, the older one wasn’t going to be much help, but could be the kid knew something about something. Maybe he’d even overheard a name during the buildup to the total fuck show that this day had turned into. At the very least, he’d make a decent insurance policy if push came to shove. She knelt next to him and pressed her gun against his neck.
“Up,” she said.
Wordlessly, the guy rose. Anne led him to the back of the Olds, popped the trunk, then cracked him in the back of the skull with the Glock, just once. He made a weak coughing sound, then fell forward into the waiting trunk beside the spare gas cans and didn’t move again. After moving the two heavy fuel jugs behind the passenger seat—no way in hell was she about to deal with that cop spilling gasoline all over the interior of Jess’s car in some misguided escape attempt—Anne circled back around and slipped the handcuff keys off the kid’s belt, then clapped the trunk shut and headed for the driver’s-side door. In the back seat, Jessup recoiled from the noxious stench of the gasoline next to his face, then moaned softly underneath the ruddy jacket and went horribly still. Anne hoped he wasn’t dead. She really hoped he wasn’t dead.
Wiping Jess’s blood from the teeth of the car key, she slid it into the ignition and cranked it. Under the hood, the engine roared like some caged beast. Sitting low behind the wheel, Anne glanced over her shoulders, checked her mirrors, then dropped the Ninety-Eight into drive and let it roll out of the alley without touching the gas pedal. She hung a left at the next street, heading northeast, away from the bank and the city center and every cop in the entire goddamn world.
She didn’t know where she was going, because if someone had talked, she sure as shit couldn’t go back to the safe house. Badges were probably watching it with eyes peeled. Same went for her apartment and everybody else’s, too. Everything was compromised. Nowhere was safe. That went double now that she’d kidnapped one of Durango PD’s finest and used a nine-mil slug to kneecap another.
The cops would be watching the highways, but maybe they hadn’t clamped down on the side roads just yet. Could be they were still looking for a busted old van. If she was lucky, she could get out of town while the cops were looking the other way. Out of town was a good start. She’d figure the rest out after that. She’d come this far. She thought she could probably go a little further.
Copyright © 2024 by Matthew Lyons
