22

So far so good, thought Lars. The female teller helping him had been nice. Nothing too unusual about a guy wanting to check his safe deposit box. Lars enjoyed when they called him Mr. Oswald. Most of the tellers were too young to even think of Lee Harvey, but the old joke still made him laugh.

She shut the door, leaving him alone with the long steel box. Number 173. He knew it well. Come to Papa, he thought as he eased the lid open.

Eighty thousand dollars cash. Lars took a moment to admire the sight. It never got old seeing that much green in one place. Lars blessed the banks for bundling such crisp new bills. It wouldn’t be as impressive all stuffed in a backpack in loose cash. The neat rows and wrapping bands were a big part of the appeal. Eighty stacks in green-and-white wrappers, all marked with that beautiful, symmetrical number—100—on them.

Like he did every time he entered the safe deposit room of any bank, Lars wondered what else could be in the rows of boxes. More cash. Jewels. Love letters. Dirty movies of ex-wives. Cocaine. He heard that almost 90 percent of all one-hundred-dollar bills have some cocaine residue on them. That meant seventy-two thousand dollars in his bag had coke on it. Incredible.

Eighty grand in cash now filled five zippered freezer bags that Lars had nestled into his nondescript canvas duffel bag. Next came the hard part.

Lars knew his next transaction held the greatest potential for attracting attention. “Yes, I’d like to withdraw a hundred thousand dollars please.” Get ready for some cross-eyed looks.

Maybe leave it. Maybe this is enough. I still have money in Vegas, in Denver, in Arizona. Maybe . . .

Nope. Fuck it, he thought. It’s mine. This is the rent on my life for the past two decades, almost. Paid to live in a sweatbox. Paid to live in the sand. Paid to live like a hermit.

Lars pressed the buzzer, waited for the teller. She returned, all business, ignored his flirting. “Pilar,” read her name tag. Nice ass, if you like ’em big.

Out to the window. A young guy, mid-twenties, now stood next in line at Pilar’s window. She brushed the new guy back with her faux polite bank-speak.

“I’m sorry sir, this gentleman was here first. I’ll finish up as quickly as I can and be right with you.”

He shot a look to Lars, who ignored it and took his place at the window.

“Will there be anything else?”

“Yes, can you change these for me?” He set down two hundreds he’d peeled off a stack. He knew how hard it was to use a hundred-dollar bill in these days of debit cards.

“Twenties okay?” she asked.

“Fine.”

Pilar counted out ten twenty-dollar bills and with a smile said, “Anything else?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

Lars dropped the number of the withdrawal he wanted to make, ignoring her reaction and concentrating on the tingling sensation he felt, not from the mid-twenties guy, but from two men by the door.

If I was that security guard, I’d keep an eye on them, he thought. Baldy’s got an eye for danger and Muttonchops there has an itchy trigger finger. Come on, lady, cut me my check and let’s go.

* * *

Chet nodded in the direction of the farthest teller window. Lyle scratched at his chops as he nodded. They moved slow, not attracting attention. Alarms can go off real quick in a bank, and that brings a world of hurt down mighty fast.

Lars waited for the look of shock to fade from Pilar’s face.

“All of it?”

“I’m leaving the country. For an extended period. Work.”

“I’ll have to get my manager to cosign a check that large, sir.”

“I understand. Thanks for your help, Pilar.”

“Yes, sir.” She walked back past the vault and knocked on the manager’s door.

He knew what she thought. How does an old guy like you with a green-and-white Western wear shirt in need of an iron and jeans that look like they’ve been dragged through the Grand Canyon end up with a hundred grand? And what the hell do you need it all at once for?

Two windows down loitered two Mexicans in cowboy hats and boots. They laughed and spoke in Spanish, boots shedding dirt on the marble floor. An aging woman with leathery skin filled out a slip at a solid stone island in the middle of the floor. The table was topped in white marble veined with grey and stood tall for easy filling out of deposit slips. The high ceilings gave the building the grand appearance you want from a bank. The bulletproof Plexiglas walling off the tellers from the customers gave a sense of security to the staff, but an unease to those trapped outside its protective cover. If you stood on the customer side, you were left vulnerable among the madmen who warranted putting up the barricade in the first place.

Bank robberies have been a time-honored tradition in the Southwest since the days of Jesse James. For this reason, and his own gut instinct, Lars kept the two muscly thugs in his periphery.

Chet and Lyle stepped up slowly, in a purposefully casual meander and straddled Lars, Chet to his left and Lyle to his right, pretending to fill out forms. Lars clenched. He willed Pilar back to the window. She wasn’t receiving his signals.

“One of you boys have a mint?” asked Lars. He turned to Chet, the more dangerous-looking of the two. Something about a shaved head always gave off a formidable vibe. Lars didn’t turn his back to Lyle, simply rotated his neck to see Chet. Chet shook his head.

“No? I think I have one in here.” He hoisted the zippered bag to the counter and unzipped it only enough to dig his hand inside.

Pilar returned.

“Here you are Mr. Oswald. We’re sorry that you’re closing your account with us today.”

“Oh, you can keep it open. You never know when I’ll be back.”

He took the check with his left hand, his right still inside the bag, resting on his gun. Chet spoke up.

“Going somewhere, Mr. Oswald?”

Lars exhaled, centering himself. Then the shots started.

The first one ripped through the side of the bag and into Chet’s arm, the one Lars knew held a gun under his jacket. Why else have a jacket on in this heat? Security guard should have spotted that.

Lars spun and lifted his leg high in a kick to Lyle’s face. Limber is a good thing to be. Means you can reach the nose on an average-sized man with your heel and drive that sucker straight back into his brain. Lyle dodged at the last second, but Lars still got a solid connection and felt the bone crack, even through his boot.

Pilar screamed and hit the floor.

Second shot came from Chet. A wild ricochet that bounced up off the marble and then again off the Plexiglas before embedding in the oak door of the manager with a polite knock.

Lars clamped a fist around the bag and pumped his legs, on the move. He stuffed the check, half-folded, into his breast pocket and tried to snap the fake pearl button closed but gave up when it proved too hard to do on the run. He lifted the bag in front of his face and heard Chet’s second shot echo off the high ceilings. Something struck the bag and punched it into his forehead as he ducked around the island and slid to the floor.

He landed next to the twenty-something with an attitude, who now appeared wide-eyed and respectful.

“You a cop? Off-duty or something?” the young guy said, thinking he had landed in an action movie.

“Something like that,” said Lars. He flipped his bag over and saw the hole surrounded by a ring of burned canvas. A slight smell rose from the singed plastic of the freezer bags and the scorched paper around a neat hole bored into a stack of cash. Check off another thing tight bricks of money were good for—stopping a bullet.

The two Mexican brothers scrambled toward the door, their boots struggling to get a grip on the marble. They passed right by the woman, old enough to be their abuela, and left her for bait. Lars pressed his back against the cool stone of the island, breathed in and out once. A pen on a chain dangled in front of him.

Lars looked to the glass front doors. He could see the reflection of Chet and Lyle both on the floor beneath the teller windows, neither quite recovered from his wounds but both looking madder than hornets. Hornets holding Glocks.

“So what do we do now, bro? Call for backup?” The twenty-something vibrated with adrenaline.

“Well,” Lars gestured toward the security guard, who had taken a position under his chair by the entrance, “I don’t think he’s going to do the trick.” The aging guard tried crawling under it completely, but the chair offered little shelter so he held it out in front of him like a lion tamer as he shielded his path to the door, mumbling the Hail Mary in Spanish as he went.

Lars thought it took a little long, but finally the alarm bell rang. Not exactly a crackerjack team to be looking after his hundred and eighty grand.

The twenty-something clapped his hands. “Whoa-ho. Here comes the cavalry!”

Like a smart bomb locking on target to the sound, a bullet flew from Chet’s gun and blew apart the young guy’s head. A shot meant for Lars.

Lars covered up, but a bit too late. A fine spray of blood hit him like the misters along the sidewalks keeping New Mexico cool, only this spray landed warm and sticky on his skin.

It made him hesitate. Again.

On his left side came Lyle. He put a heavy foot down on Lars’s right hand holding the gun, pinning it to the floor beside a spreading pool of blood from the twenty-something. Lyle brought his gun to rest an inch from Lars’s forehead. Those muttonchops lifted as he pulled his cheeks back into a grin. He had meth-head teeth, rotten and small from grinding during long nights speeding. His breath reeked, or it could have been the week’s worth of food residue in his chops.

Lars couldn’t tell if this character was saving the kill for Chet, who seemed to be in charge, or if he wanted the last thing Lars saw to be his laughing mug. It was Lyle’s turn to hesitate.

Lars reached with his left hand to snatch the pen swinging on the chain and drove it sharply into Lyle’s neck. The muttonchopped smile quickly disappeared.

Being right-handed, Lyle brought his gun hand up to the pen in his neck, and by reflex or stupidity he fired off a round no more than an inch from his ear. The shot struck the ceiling, and a fine snow of plaster floated down.

Lars could tell the pen hit Lyle’s voice box from the ragged cry of pain, like Tom Waits after a bender. Blood oozed out of the tube, mixing with blue ink. The chain swung as Lyle staggered. Lars raised his gun and launched three rapid-fire shots into Lyle’s chest. Perfect grouping, up and down in a straight line over his heart like the light tree at a drag race. Ready, set, gone.

No collateral damage kept running through his mind.

Lars leapt out from behind the other side of the marble island and fired two shots over his shoulder as he did, not intending them to land, only to keep Chet in check. He lunged forward three steps, grabbed the old woman by the neck of her dress and dragged her backwards behind the marble slab. She writhed on her back and moaned, looking sad and scared. If she had looked up at him and said, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” he wouldn’t have been surprised.

He slid her through a slick of red that oozed from the twenty-something’s head, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy saying her final absolution to notice she lay side-by-side to a dead man.

The alarm bell rang on. Lars knew time was an issue. He hadn’t started the firefight, and everyone in here would attest to that, but eighty thousand cash and a cashier’s check for more wouldn’t exactly escape notice when the cops showed up. Lucky for him, the cops worked opposite of the snakes in the hills—the hotter it got, the slower they became.

“Quit fighting it, Lars! If it’s not me, it’ll be someone else!” Chet said.

Cue the hero music. The primal scream, the fearless charge into the open. The bank manager.

Out he came from behind the protective wall of Plexiglas, a shotgun in hand like he’d been waiting to get robbed since the first day he moved behind the oak door. Whatever pep talk he’d been giving himself since the shooting began worked, because he entered the lobby clearly out for blood.

The shotgun led the way by two feet as the bank manager charged into the open. He ripped off a booming shot at nothing and kept up his scream until Chet’s first bullet hit him in the chest. He cut off like a record being scratched. Blood appeared on his blue dress shirt and his tie flew up into his face as he pitched forward, driving the barrel of the shotgun into the marble floor.

As the manager fell, facedown, Chet fired another one right through the top of his skull. The manager hit the floor and the solid stone did to his nose what Lars’s foot couldn’t do to Lyle’s.

Lars was sorry the manager tried to be a hero, but it opened a door for him.

He spun out from behind the island and fired his same rapid three shots into Chet. He grouped the bullets around Chet’s heart.

The old woman continued to moan on the floor, making music with the ringing bell. The two brothers were long gone. The security guard clung, frozen solid, behind his chair.

Lars stood with the bag of cash in hand and went to Pilar’s teller window.

“Pilar? Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Are they gone?” she answered from the floor behind the bulletproof wall.

“In a way.”

No other tellers could be seen, all hunkered down, hoping like hell the Plexiglas would hold.

Lars made it quickly to the door. He paused to move the chair away from the security guard’s face. He’d never seen such terror in someone’s eyes before. The name tag read: “Manny.”

“Congratulations, Manny. You foiled your first robbery. Nice shooting.”

Lars slipped out the door.