by Blake Crouch
“Copy that. En route.”
Isaiah set the radio down on the carpet. “Very good. Very good, Matt.”
“You’ll never make it out,” Matt said. “Not in a million years.”
“Well, if it was easy, any old goon could do it. Maybe even you.”
Stu had moved over to the cages.
“What do you see, my man?” Isaiah asked.
“Four-jaw independent chuck, top reversible D-4 cam-lock.”
“Same on each cage?”
“Yep.”
“This happy news or bad news?”
Stu said, “It’s just news. Nothing I didn’t plan for.” He reached into his pocket and tossed Isaiah a chunk of grey metal the size of a chalkboard eraser.
“Stick that magnet under the doorknob.”
Stu hurried off toward the bedroom.
Jerrod followed.
The guards lay still on the floor all around them, just panting now. With the red ball-gags in their mouths, they reminded Letty of roasting pigs. She glanced back at the wall behind the bar. A spray pattern—two dozen holes—arced up toward the ceiling.
Isaiah gagged his man and stood.
He headed to the entrance, glanced through the peephole.
Stu and Jerrod returned, Jerrod toting the empty duffel bags under one arm, Stu carrying a small, beefy drill.
He hit the first cage, had the lock drilled out and off in less than forty-five seconds.
Jerrod glanced at Letty, said, “Shall we?”
He pulled open the door to the first cage. Letty reached in. Both hands grabbing crisp stacks of hundreds bound with black wrappers. On each wrapper, “10,000” had been printed in gold. The cube of money was twenty stacks high, twenty-five packets per story.
$5,000,000 per cart.
Six carts.
$30,000,000.
Give or take.
Something so satisfying about dropping them into the duffel, the smell of ink and paper filling the room.
Letty could feel the eyes of the guards on her as she worked. Stu was already through the third lock, and she and Jerrod had nearly filled the second duffel.
“Report,” Isaiah called from the door.
“Cruising, brother,” Stu said. “What’s our time in?”
“Two minutes, fifty-five seconds.”
Jerrod zipped the first two duffles, pushed them aside.
They started in on the third cage.
Aside from the whine of the drill, they worked with a quiet intensity. The minutes whirred past with a staggering paradox of speed and timelessness.
So much adrenaline raging through Letty’s system it felt like they’d been in this room for hours.
Stu drilled out the last lock. Then he lifted something that resembled a TSA wand and started moving it slowly over the duffle bags.
“We got company,” Isaiah said. “One guy.”
“Need an assist?” Jerrod asked.
“What are you implying, brother?”
“Armed?”
“Just stay on task. I got this.”
There was a knock at the door.
Letty looked up. Would’ve missed the entire thing if she’d blinked.
Isaiah opened the door, dragged a good-looking Latino into the suite, and turned his lights out with an elbow strike.
Ten seconds later, the man was bound and gagged with the rest of them.
Isaiah jogged over as Stu was wanding the last cage.
“We happy?”
“Yeah, none of the cash is chipped.”
“What does that mean?” Letty asked.
“It means they can’t track it.”
Letty packed the last armful of stacks into a duffel and zipped it up. Isaiah, Stu, and Jerrod had already carried most of the bags into the bathroom. Letty tried to lift one, but it didn’t weigh much less than she did. It was all she could do to drag it across the carpet.
Halfway to the bedroom, she heard the guard’s radio.
A man’s voice. Deep, raspy.
“Matt, did your camera show up, over?”
Letty dropped the duffel, rushed back. She turned Matt over, unfastened his ball-gag, and grabbed the radio. The closest weapon was a MAC-10 lying on the coffee table.
She grabbed it, held it under the man’s chin.
“Matt, do you copy, over?”
She said, “Tell him he just showed up and that you’ll be back online momentarily. Say just those exact words.”
“Letty, what’s up?” Isaiah from the bedroom.
She held up her finger.
Stared straight into Matt’s eyes, saw plenty of steel there, but some fear too.
Hopefully enough.
As she held the radio to his mouth, it suddenly occurred to her what she was doing. That she was threatening a man with his life. Of course she wouldn’t pull the trigger if he sold them out, but still—a line had appeared and she’d crossed it.
Without hesitation.
Pure reaction.
Her first armed robbery.
You have no choice. You have to get out of this hotel right now.
Matt spoke into the radio, “He just showed up. We’re installing it now. Be back online momentarily. Over?”
“Copy that.”
She took the radio and bolted back into the bedroom.
The duffels were gone and Jerrod was just lowering himself down through the crawlspace.
She stopped at the edge of the gaping hole and got down onto her knees. Isaiah gave her a hand over the lip of the marble. She found her footing in the crawlspace, the urge to be out of this mess, out of this hotel, this city, overpowering.
A sense of panic, of time running out enveloping her.
Then she was climbing down the ladder into room 968, listening to the marble slab slide back into place. The soles of Isaiah’s BDUs descended toward her as he maneuvered through the ductwork.
18
It took Letty four tries to get her left leg through the harness.
Isaiah watching her from the window.
He said, “You gotta lock that shit down.”
“Lock what down?”
“Your panic.”
Stu had rappelled out the window four minutes ago. Jerrod right on his heels. Now Ize had the last three duffle bags on belay, smoothly lowering two hundred and fifty pounds of cash—$12,000,000—to the convention center roof.
The radio crackled again.
A rod of tension shot through Letty’s entire body.
Isaiah unclipped his locking carabiner from his harness and moved over to the bed.
“Matt, we still have no visual, over?”
Isaiah lifted the radio, pulled off a passable impersonation.
“This one doesn’t work either, over.”
“Are you messing with me? Over.”
“Nope. Over.”
“I’m bringing one up personally. Over.”
“Copy that.”
“See you in five.”
Isaiah said, “Now you can panic.” He grabbed her harness, gave it a hard tug. “Ever rappelled before?”
“No.” She could feel a wave of nausea coming on.
“Easiest thing in the world.”
“I’m sure.”
As they approached the gaping hole in the window, Letty felt the night-heat of Vegas and the smell of the Strip and the desert ripping through. Sage and car and restaurant exhaust.
Isaiah had rigged a sophisticated anchor system out of webbing to the bed frame.
“I don’t want to die,” Letty said.
A black rope had been halved and thrown out the window.
“Go ahead, look,” Isaiah said. “You need to see where you’re going.”
She edged up to the glass, poked her head through.
“Oh Jesus Christ.”
Stomach swirling. Body in full revolt against this.
Stu and Jerrod the size of Lego men far below.
The curve of the building a dizzying mindfuck.
Isaiah grabbed her belay device, threaded the rope through, then locked everything into the carabiner on her harness.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“I hear that. But personally...I’d rather fall and die than be in this room when hotel security busts through. You feel me?”
She nodded.
He grabbed her hands, put her left on the rope near the belay device, her right on the rope further back.
“This belay device is your friend, your brake. When the rope is back here,” he touched her right hand to her hip, “you won’t move. When you raise it up, it’ll allow the rope to feed through. You’ll drop.”
Her heart was going like mad.
“Two things. Do not let your left hand get too close to the belay device. It’ll chew it up. You’ll let go and die.”
The radio crackled. “On my way, Matt. Say, did you ever send Mario down? He never showed, isn’t responding, over.”
Isaiah said, “Look in my eyes.” She did. “You go down in a sitting position. Control your speed.”
“I can’t do this.”
“You have to do this.” He helped her up onto the lip of the glass.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You been through worse than this. Put your right hand in the brake position.” She clutched it, held it to her hip. “You ain’t gotta squeeze so hard. Relax. Now lean back.”
“I can’t.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Matt, do you copy, over?”
“Lean. Back.”
She hung her ass out over the gaping darkness, her stomach turning itself inside out.
“Now raise your right hand slowly, until you feel the rope begin to glide through the belay device.”
“I—”
“Do it!”
“Matt, do you copy, over?”
She raised the rope off her hip.
Isaiah smiled at her from inside the room, said, “There you go, now let it slide through your grasp, but not too fast.”
She opened her fingers, felt the rope move through.
She dropped a foot.
“Keep it going,” Isaiah said, “and I hate to rush you, but I do need you to hurry the fuck up.”
She descended in erratic bursts.
The sensation of plummeting to her death never out of her mind.
Twenty feet below their window, she lowered past a room where the curtains had not been drawn. Glimpsed a couple watching television in bed less than ten feet away, their faced awash in high-def glow.
She ventured a glimpse down, surprised to see that she was already halfway to the ground. Lifting her right hand as far off her hip as she’d yet dared, she felt the rope streaming through her loosened grasp. The balls of her feet bounced off the windows. For a fraction of a second, it was almost fun.
She touched solid ground, her legs buckling, relief blazing through her veins.
Jerrod caught her before she fell.
They stood at the edge of a field of commercial AC units that were noisy as turboprops. He unscrewed her locking carabiner, ripped the rest of the rope through her belay device, and said, “She’s down, Ize. Let’s blow.”
Letty looked around—too dark to see much of anything beyond the fact that Stu and all but two of the bags were gone.
She was about to ask where he was when Isaiah hit the ground beside her.
She said, “Wow, you’ve done that a few times.”
“Once or twice.”
The men shouldered the last two duffels.
Jerrod led the way, threading between the roaring AC vents.
“How much time do we have?” Letty asked as they ran.
“They know something’s up. But we magnetized the lock in the suite. No keycard will get them through. Yelling for someone to let them in won’t get them through. They’ll have to break it down.”
“And then?”
She was having to shout to be heard.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The guards saw us go through the bedroom and disappear. I moved the marble quietly, but I’m guessing they’ll connect the dots in a hurry. Or else someone will spot us on this rooftop.”
“Cameras up here?”
“Possibly. Whether or not they catch us at this point will depend on how quickly they can lock down all exits from the property. And if they’ve conceived of a theft like this.”
They climbed over a four-foot wall.
Jerrod said, “Almost there.”
Letty spotted the shadow of Stu up ahead.
They reached him.
Isaiah and Jerrod let the bags slough off their shoulders. She peered over the ledge. The wall dropped six feet to the top level of a parking deck. A white Suburban idled below, the rear cargo doors thrown open.
The parking deck was well-lit, inhabited by a smattering of vehicles, but otherwise still and quiet.
“Your boy showed,” Isaiah said. He looked at Jerrod and Stu, said, “Homestretch. There will be cameras. Move like the wind, gentlemen.”
He hoisted a bag, swung it over the ledge, let it fall to the concrete on the other side.
The remaining bags followed.
Then the men.
Then Letty, climbing over last, letting her feet hang for a beat before dropping.
The Suburban’s rear seating had been removed.
Stu loaded the final duffel as Letty hurried around the back and climbed up into the front passenger seat.
She pulled off her mask and smiled at Christian.
“Good to see you again,” he said.
Ize and his crew piled in, doors slamming.
Isaiah said, “Christian, glad you could make it.”
Christian shifted into gear. “Where to?”
“Ninety-five north.”
Christian drove down the ramp into the parking garage.
A tense silence descending over the car.
After the second overly hard turn, Isaiah said, “Just drive cool, my man. This ain’t the movies. No one’s chasing us yet.”
Letty checked her iPhone—2:23.
Hard to believe that only twenty-three minutes had elapsed since the guards had walked into that suite. She’d worried enough in that time span for three lifetimes.
Each corner Christian turned ratcheted the knot in her stomach a little tighter.
Her hands trembled. She tried to steady them, but she was too amped.
She looked over, studied Christian. “You all right?” she asked.
He nodded, but he looked scared as hell.
The road out of the garage seemed to go on forever, like the Penrose stairs.
Turn.
After turn.
After turn.
Letty stared out the window, watching all the paint jobs of the cars gleaming under the harsh light.
Something reached her through the glass. She lowered her window two inches.
There it was—the screech of tires across smooth concrete.
She said, “Someone’s coming up fast.”
Jerrod said, “Ize? Should he pull into an open space? Let them pass?”
“Hell no. All likelihood, they got a vehicle description. We need to get the fuck out. Just drive, my man. And try not to crash.”
The screeching drew closer.
Letty heard Isaiah’s glass hum down, turned just in time to see him climbing up onto his knees, pointing an AR-15 through his window.
She buckled her seatbelt.
Christian took a hard, squealing turn.
A black Escalade ripped into view.
Isaiah opened up.
Three bursts on full auto, a smear of silver-rimmed holes starring the engine and driver side door of the Escalade. Its right-front tire blew. Christian gunned the Suburban, its back end jutting left, smashing into the side of the Escalade as it passed.
“Down!” Isaiah screamed.
The back window of the Suburban exploded in a
splash of safety glass, bullets chinking into the cargo doors.
Christian cranked it around one last curve.
Letty saw them first—a black strip lying across the exit lane up ahead.
“Spikes!” she yelled. “Other lane!”
Christian steered over a six-inch concrete median with a violent shudder that seemed to tear apart the undercarriage. The entrance gate snapped off as they punched through and made a hard, blind turn into traffic.
They accelerated down Las Vegas Boulevard.
The Strip still rocking at 2:30 in the morning.
“Nicely done,” Isaiah said. “Now hang a left at the next intersection.”
Letty glanced back. Traffic moved slowly but there was plenty of it.
The curve of the Wynn fell away.
She heard frantic honking, accompanied by a symphony of sirens. Several SUVs a few hundred yards back were fighting their way through traffic with little success.
“Radio and scanner would be nice,” Stu said.
“Doing the best we can, brother.”
Letty said, “They’ll put out a description of the Suburban, right?”
“APB, no doubt.”
They lucked out, caught a protected green arrow at the next intersection.
Christian turned onto Desert Inn Road.
Compared to the Strip, this street was practically vacant.
Christian said, “Should I speed or just—”
“Hell yes, speed. We just knocked over a casino, son.”
The man pushed the gas pedal into the floor.
They screamed past a vacant lot where a new hotel was in its foundational infancy.
Then Trump Tower.
“Let’s get off the beaten path,” Isaiah said.
“Any particular direction?”
“Just keep us moving north.”
They drove residential streets dead quiet at this hour.
Isaiah said, “Now you keep it under control. Only drive like a maniac if you see the Po-Po coming.”
Letty leaned against the glass. Tried to steady her rampant pulse, but it wouldn’t slow. They hadn’t just robbed at gunpoint. She’d been part of a crew that had fired on casino security. Isaiah could have killed the driver. And if the cops showed, tried to take them down, was there any doubt that a gunfight of epic proportions would ensue?
How did you let it get this far?
Because I needed it to.
Are you really this person, Letisha Dobesh?
She smiled.
Because she was.