Eyes of Justice

by Lis Wiehl

  The air inside the bank was a good thirty degrees cooler than it was outside. It felt good to shiver. Walking past the two people waiting in the teller line, Allison joined Lindsay in the small waiting area separating the teller area from four desks that sat, evenly spaced, on the flat blue carpet. One loan officer was on the phone, while the other three were talking to customers.

  “That’s our person,” Lindsay said in a stage whisper as she and Allison sat down. “That Annie Botinelli you made the appointment with. She’s the one who’s on the phone.”

  “Nervous?” Allison asked.

  Lindsay’s smile was tremulous. “Sometimes I can’t believe this is really happening. I mean, I’m going to have my own business. I’m going to call all the shots.”

  “And pull them too,” Allison said, making a joke about the espresso machine that cost as much as a used car.

  Lindsay swatted her shoulder playfully. “Ouch! You never could resist a bad pun.”

  “Sorry,” Allison lied, hiding a smile. The world was finally opening up to Lindsay, eighteen years after their father’s death had nearly shut down her heart.

  “That’s okay. You can make all the bad puns you want. There’s no way I’d get this loan on my own. I’d be lucky if I could get someone to loan me a quarter for the vending machine.”

  It was a big risk. If Lindsay got lured back into the street life—and she would be right in the middle of it with her cart . . .

  “You’re my sister,” Allison said simply. Her heart was full of memories of the kid sister who had always tagged along, wanting to do whatever Allison was doing, see what she was seeing, wear what she was wearing, play with whatever she had in her hands.

  She had spent thirteen years with Lindsay looking up to her. Thirteen years fending her off with annoyance, more often than not. Then, after their dad died, Lindsay had spun out of Allison’s orbit, sucked into a black hole of destruction.

  Finally she had her sister back.

  Lindsay must have been thinking along the same lines. “You’ve always been a good sister to me, Allison.”

  “Thanks,” she said softly, wondering if she really had been.

  “Look, I know you thought I would never get my act together.” Lindsay sighed. “To be honest, there were days—heck, whole years—when I thought the same thing.”

  “But you did.” Allison squeezed her hand and let it go. “And look at you now.”

  Lindsay looked down at her lap. “I keep feeling like someone is going to jump up and snatch it all away. Like I’m a fraud. A fake.”

  “You know what, Linds? That’s normal. Everyone feels that way, at least at first. I think it took a couple of years before I stopped feeling stupid introducing myself as a lawyer. It was like—who am I kidding?”

  Allison and Lindsay had been so busy talking that they hadn’t noticed the loan officer hanging up her phone. Now she beckoned to them. She was a tall, athletic-looking woman in her late thirties with a curly, blond-streaked bob.

  Taking a deep, shaky breath, Lindsay stood and collected the box of cookies and her business plan. Allison followed her.

  The loan officer stood up and offered her hand. “I’m Annie Botinelli.”

  Lindsay and Allison introduced themselves.

  “Wow!” The loan officer looked from Allison’s face to Lindsay’s and back again. “You guys look so much alike.”

  “Thank you,” Lindsay said, and winked at Allison with the eye the other woman couldn’t see.

  One reason they looked so much alike was that this morning Allison had done Lindsay’s hair and makeup, loaned her a pair of earrings as well as a dark blue suit. Even the shoes Lindsay was wearing were Allison’s. At first Lindsay had wanted to wear a shorter skirt and higher heels, an outfit Allison would only wear to a night out on the town. Lindsay was still getting the hang of dressing like a businesswoman. But the suit, which Allison had worn to court many times, said that Lindsay was serious, that she was mature. Just the look her sister needed to project today.

  “I brought a copy of my business plan.” Lindsay bit her lip, as if Annie might refuse it. Instead the loan officer held out her hand.

  As Annie started leafing through the pages, Allison realized she had to go to the bathroom. Again. She had been drinking so much water lately, trying to stay hydrated in the heat. “Excuse me. Do you have a restroom?” she asked.

  Lindsay gave her a slightly panicked look, but they had rehearsed this so many times. Sometime she was going to have to learn how to play grown-up all by herself. And Allison really had to go. As she stood, Allison whispered into Lindsay’s ear, “Don’t forget the cookies.”

  Annie had pointed at a swinging door at the back of the carpeted area. A small square window was set at eye level. When she pushed open the door, Allison found a door for the men’s on the right, a door for the women’s on the left, and an unmarked door at the back.

  In the empty women’s room, she took the second of the two stalls. As Allison pulled up her panties a minute later, she had a sudden realization. She counted in her head. She was late. Could it be?

  No.

  Yes?

  No.

  What had she been thinking, risking it?

  The year before, she had lost a pregnancy in her thirteenth week. They hadn’t known why, not in a medical sense. Not even in a spiritual sense.

  She remembered how she had thrown up Thursday night. How lately smells had seemed so, well, smelly.

  Could she be?

  And if she was, could she stand to lose a baby again? Could they?

  Since the miscarriage, she and Marshall had been in something of a holding pattern. They seldom talked about what had happened, but Allison suspected Marshall thought about the lost child as much as she did.

  It had to be a false alarm. The last week had been horrible. The stress of Cassidy’s death and everything that followed had probably thrown off her cycle. No point in dwelling on the hope or the fear. Both would prove to be misplaced. No point in giving it a second thought.

  In the mirror, Allison stared at her own reflection as if it belonged to a stranger, a young woman with her dark hair pinned up and a faint flush staining her cheeks. Her hand shook a little as she reached for the faucet.

  As she started to twist it, she heard three loud bangs, one right after another.

  Gunshots.

  Her heart seized.

  The shots had come from inside the bank.

  Allison turned off the water. What should she do? Her gaze pinged from one corner of the room to the other. She was trapped in here, trapped in a tiled box without even a window. The space under the sinks was open. There were no cupboards or closets. There was no place to hide.

  On tiptoe she took two steps and stood next to the restroom door. But she was too afraid to open it.

  Over a frantic murmur of voices, a man was yelling, “No alarms, no dye packs, and no tracers, or you all die!”

  Allison stepped back and looked at the door. Looked for what wasn’t there. There was no way to lock it.

  She remembered the unmarked door at the end of the hallway. But to get to it, she would have to leave the restroom and go back out into the hall. The hall that was separated from the bank by only a swinging door with a small window anyone could look through.

  Allison jumped as a woman inside the bank began screaming. She didn’t think it was Lindsay, but she couldn’t be certain. Oh, God, help us. What should she do, what should she do?

  One of the tellers should already have triggered a silent alarm. Should was the operative word. What if they had been surprised? What if the tellers had decided to obey the robbers’ commands?

  Allison pressed herself into the corner on the back side of the door, grabbed her cell phone, and pushed a couple of buttons.

  “Hey, Allison.”

  She blessed caller ID for saving her precious seconds. Keeping her voice as close to a whisper as she could, she said, “Nicole—listen. I’m at Oregon Federal
on Seventh and it’s being robbed. I was in the bathroom when I heard three shots fired and a man yelling about no dye packs and no alarms.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m hiding in the bathroom, but, Nic, hurry, get people here, a woman in the bank won’t stop screaming.”

  “How many men? What kind of weapons do they have?”

  “I think at least two guys, and I don’t know.”

  “Is anyone hurt?”

  “I don’t know,” Allison said again. “Maybe.” She didn’t know anything. Other than that she was paralyzed thinking that at any moment a man might come crashing through the door and shoot her. Shoot her in the belly. She realized her free hand was shielding her flat abdomen and whatever it did—or didn’t—contain.

  “Just hold on a second.” Allison heard Nicole relaying information. Part of her dared hope. Nicole would move heaven and earth to help her.

  Then she was back on the line. “Is there any place you can go that’s safe?”

  “I can’t lock the bathroom door. It’s in a short hall and there’s a men’s bathroom on the other side. There’s another door at the end, but I don’t know if it’s locked, and in the door to the hallway there’s a window they could see me through.”

  “Don’t chance it. Just stay where you are. Get in a stall, close the door, and stand on the seat. With luck, they’ll be too busy getting out with the cash to go looking for anyone. The cops are on their way.”

  Before Allison could move, the noise from the bank suddenly escalated.

  She heard a man shout, “Why are you looking at me? I told you not to look at me!”

  A woman screamed back, “No, I’m not, no, please, what are you—”

  And then another shot. And more shrieks, more shouts.

  But the woman whose pleading had just been abruptly silenced.

  Allison would know that voice anywhere.

  It was Lindsay.

  Her little sister.

  “I have to go, Nicole. Something bad’s happening.”

  “No, Allison! Stay where you are. The cops are coming.”

  Barely hearing Nicole’s words, Allison disconnected the call and set the phone on the counter. She wanted both hands free.

  She took a deep breath, bent down to provide as small a target as possible, and yanked opened the restroom door.

  CHAPTER 24

  As soon as she had understood what was going on, Nic had burst from her cubicle and alerted Martin Buckley, relaying the little that Allison knew. A Portland cop, Martin was permanently assigned to work alongside the FBI’s own bank robbery squad.

  He sprang into action, putting the scant information out over the radio on both the police and FBI frequencies. And he also requested that EMS—emergency medical services—respond.

  By the time Allison broke the connection, the guys on the bank robbery squad were already hustling out the door. Nearly all bank robberies were note jobs, the work of a lone guy with a habit. A robbery with more than one robber and shots fired was already an anomaly. The authorities would be considering a dozen questions: Were there injured or dead? Would it become a hostage situation? If the robbers felt there was no way out, would they try to provoke law enforcement into killing them? Or did they already want to kill a few cops or agents themselves?

  But all Nic could think was, Allison, Allison, Allison.

  She jumped when Leif touched her shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said. The keys were already in his hand. “I’m driving.”

  Just as they pushed open the door, Nic saw Bond coming out of his office. She thought he might be saying her name, but she kept on walking. She had no ears to hear him and no time to stop and explain. Not when Allison might be in trouble. It was better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. Besides, nothing in the FBI’s rules and regulations prohibited those who weren’t on the squad from responding to a bank robbery.

  As they ran for Leif’s car, Nic replayed her conversation with Allison. “I have to go, Nicole. Something bad’s happening.” Would those be the last words she ever heard from her friend? In the background, Nic had heard garbled noises—shouts, screams, what could even have been another gunshot—and then the connection had been severed.

  Had the robbers figured out that Allison was hiding in the bathroom? In her mind’s eye, Nic saw a masked man kicking open the door, the barrel of his gun the first thing across the threshold. And Allison with no place to go. She saw Allison with her hands up, her back against the white wall, her mouth pleading. But the only response might be a bullet to her chest, the sound reverberating in the small space as she slid to the floor, leaving a bloody smear on the wall behind her.

  No! Nic threw herself into the passenger seat and yanked the door closed. Allison couldn’t be dead. Not Allison and Cassidy both. The world could not be such a cruel place. Wordlessly she bargained with and prayed to what she could not yet bring herself to call God. Allison was a good person. The best person Nic knew. She didn’t deserve to die.

  Leif drove fast, with lights on but no sirens. No need to spook the bank robbers by letting them hear the cops approaching. You didn’t want to have them decide to take a hostage along in the getaway car or, worse yet, to hunker down with a whole bank full of them. The robbers would want to get out of the bank, and the police would want exactly the same thing, so that they could deal with them without putting civilians at risk.

  To law enforcement, the money taken in a bank robbery had no value. It was insured by the FDIC, which would print more of it before an agent even finished writing his report. The only thing that mattered was protecting the lives of the innocent people inside the bank and the lives of the people responding.

  The radio crackled with cops and agents giving their locations and quickly drawing up a plan in case the bank robbers were still on-site when they arrived. Routine note-job bank robberies occurred so frequently in Portland that uniformed officers and agents were used to responding and working together. Nic knew that the dispatch center would be contacting the bank by phone to determine if the robbery was real—which she already knew was true—and if the suspects had left. If so, the manager would come outside to meet the cops and agents so law enforcement could ensure that he or she wasn’t being forced to lie about what was happening.

  Nic was sitting on the edge of her seat, as if the extra six inches put her closer to Allison. Traffic was so thick! She could get out of the car and run to the bank faster than they were moving.

  Leif glanced over at her. “Put on your seat belt.”

  It seemed silly. Inconsequential. Who cared what happened to her when Allison was in trouble? Still, she found herself scooting back and complying.

  “Now what exactly did Allison say?” he asked, cutting through the narrow streets.

  Nic repeated the conversation as best she could, then said, “Right before the line went dead, I thought I heard a gunshot. Oh, Leif, what if she’s—”

  He touched her knee for a second and then put his hand back on the wheel and zipped between a Pathfinder and a Subaru. “Don’t say it. You don’t know what’s happening, and we won’t know until we get there.”

  Leif was forced to weave around a panicked driver in an old green Malibu who had simply stopped in the middle of an intersection instead of pulling over. The closer they got to the bank, the worse the traffic became. Leif squeezed through spaces, darted around cars, and managed to keep making progress. But he couldn’t go fast enough, not as far as Nic was concerned.

  Since a police uniform car was likely to be closer, she knew that the cops would probably be the first on the scene no matter how fast he drove. But even if a cop had happened to be driving right by the bank when the call came in, he or she would be trained to keep driving until it was possible to turn into the driveway of a business that was far enough away to appear routine. Again, the cops wanted the robbers out of the bank before they confronted them.

  On the radio, the dispatcher called out one of the unit numbers.
“Dispatch, six-seven. Update.”

  Update? Nic waited for the latest news, not even daring to breathe.

  “Six-seven,” the cop in Unit 67 responded.

  “Manager reports shots fired, one down. Suspects fled.”

  One down! Nic’s heart was a big bird in a too-small cage. What did that mean? Down could be anything from being grazed to dead.

  “Ten-four. Direction of travel?”

  “Manager states unknown.” A brief pause, then, “Second call received. Witness reports two white males running from the bank. Both seen getting into a late-model green or blue four-door compact car, unknown make, driven by a third person. Direction of travel south through the parking lot onto eastbound Market Street.”

  “Copy. License number?”

  “No plate seen.”

  “Six-seven copy. Arriving on scene.”

  “Ten-four, six-seven.” The dispatcher then began to call out the other unit numbers to make sure they had received the same information. “Four-five, copy?”

  “Four-five, copy.”

  Nic barely heard the other units chiming in. “Dispatch said one down, Leif. You heard her. One down.”

  “Don’t go borrowing trouble, Nic. We won’t know until we get there.”

  Still, when he found the street they needed to take clogged by traffic, Leif yanked the wheel until with a bump and a shudder the car was suddenly on the sidewalk. The parking meters whizzed by just an inch from his side-view mirror and then with a clunk they were back on the street again, having circumvented the knot.

  Two minutes later they arrived at the bank and jumped out of the car. The parking lot was filled with cop cars and unmarked cars, with more still arriving, but Nic had tunnel vision. All she could focus on was what lay past the bank’s windows and glass doors. She saw people milling around, but no Allison.

  At the door, Leif held up his badge, and a uniformed officer unlocked it. Nic pushed past him, nearly running. She had to find Allison. Looking for that familiar dark head, her eyes scanned the ever-growing crowd of customers, employees, cops, and agents. Her ears strained to pick out Allison’s low voice among the babble of people crying, yelling, explaining, and barking orders. Then she stopped so fast that her feet nearly slid out from under her. A body, covered by a white sheet, lay on the carpeted area between two desks. A woman’s body, lying on its back. Through the sheet, Nic could make out the fine-boned contours of the face, the slender arms and legs. Over the heart a poppy-red flower of blood was growing as it wicked up blood from the corpse.