Smash & Grab

by Amy Christine Parker

  I double back as soon as I’m sure the guard didn’t see me. Somewhere inside the garage, a car alarm is screaming. It has to be because of them. I jog toward the entrance to the garage, ears ringing, my heart in my throat. What do I do about the guard? They get caught and we’re all screwed. But suddenly I see them launching out of the garage like they’re in The Fast and the Furious.

  They got away. But can they on Monday? Not after what I just heard. Not if it comes down to us or them.

  —

  Last time I was in these tunnels I was with Lexi. I can vividly remember the sweet mint of her lip balm on my mouth when we kissed. But whatever, I don’t even like that flavor. I might’ve thought I did, but it was just the fireworks—they messed with my head. Trapping Soldado and getting all my boys out of this bank safely is my only focus from here on out.

  Our ATVs speed through the main tunnel, kicking up stagnant water so my jeans are wet up to the knees. Even after several trips down here, all of the side tunnels and turns still look the same. I have to pay attention so I don’t take the wrong one.

  “Turn’s up here,” Benny calls out. He’s half sitting, half standing as he rides the ATV with the stack of duffel bags we’re using bundled neatly on the rack behind him. He bounces over a seam and manages to get a little air, his front wheels going up off the ground for a second before slamming back down and releasing a giant spray of water that Eddie has to swerve to avoid.

  “You get that nasty water on my face and you’re toast, bro,” Eddie hollers. He’s beyond jacked up because he’s never been on the job with us; he’s always been outside waiting in the car. The only reason that changed was because Soldado insisted he be a part of this job.

  “It’s too big for just the three of you. You’ll need the extra hands to carry out the loot,” he said.

  He just wanted us all in one place so it would be easier to take us out.

  We navigate the tunnels smooth and easy, arriving at the mouth to our bank tunnel right on schedule. I park my ATV next to Eddie’s. I can hear voices. Soldado’s diggers are back to finish the job. I stick my gun in the back of my waistband. I’ve never shot at someone for real. Today I might have to if it comes down to protecting everyone. Can I do it? Pull the trigger? I hope so, but I don’t want to have to. I touch my Saint Jude’s and say a little prayer. Please, please don’t let it come to that.

  We work our way through the tunnel. With the guys filling up the space, it feels closer than last time. I keep brushing up against the walls. Dirt falls in my hair and face. I try not to look at the spot where Lexi and I buried the rope, because the piece of it we had to wrap around the beam is visible, even though it’s nearly the same color as the beam. Anyone who looked closely enough could see it.

  “I don’t know, man. I can’t breathe in here. I got claustrophobia for real. No, no, no, no,” Eddie says, gasping. He stops midtunnel and looks back at the entrance. “I gotta go. I can’t. There’s no way….” He’s backed out nearly a dozen times since Gabriel got hurt. But he can’t back out for real and he knows it. Being down here with us is his best shot at surviving.

  “You have to. Just focus on me, okay? Don’t think about it.” Carlos grabs hold of Eddie’s shirt and pulls him forward. Usually it’s Gabriel who does that sort of stuff. It’s weird without him. Unlucky. Off. I wait until they get a little ways ahead before I start walking again. I look back at the tunnel entrance one last time. The last job. This is where it really begins.

  We walk the final bit in silence and enter the chamber directly under the vault. Soldado’s men are covered in so much cement dust that they look like ghosts. In the middle of the ceiling is the hole they’ve been cutting into the vault floor this morning. In my head it looked totally different. I imagined it as this neat square, big enough to get all of us into the vault at once, but in reality it’s a series of smooth circles that make this clover shape, just big enough to fit one guy at a time. Soldado’s guys have a rig-mounted drill positioned right under the hole and are cutting out the last of the concrete. The dust they’re kicking up creates a cloud in the room, and we slip on the masks we brought so we can breathe. The room is hot. Like deep-in-the-jungle hot. Unfortunately, the mask doesn’t block out the smell of the sweat and general funk.

  “How much longer?” I yell so they can hear. They talk in rapid Spanish, and then one guy holds up ten fingers and opens and closes them twice. Twenty minutes. Eddie plops down in the dirt and puts his head between his knees. The tunnel’s really getting to him.

  Once the concrete’s gone, the guys attack the steel vault floor. The noise is muted by a drill silencer, but it’s still loud enough to make me edgy.

  Fifteen minutes in and Benny’s phone starts ringing. Twitch. He’s watching the outside of the bank so he can let us know if the vault alarm’s gone off again. It’s gone off dozens of times while the guys dug. Each time the cops investigate the vault, it’s locked tight. Lexi said that they were blaming the malfunction on the renovation upstairs. Which is good. Exactly what we hoped for.

  “Yeah?” He listens for a second, then waves at the diggers. “Bank manager’s comin’ in with two cops.”

  The men stop the drill and we go still. Wait.

  Ten minutes more go by. We barely breathe, even though there’s no way they can hear us this far down. The phone goes off again and Benny jumps, answers it. “They’re leaving again. All clear.”

  “How many times did the alarm go off this morning?” Benny asks the digger closest to him, a guy whose hairline’s so low it almost rests on his eyebrows.

  He shrugs. “Four. They check the vault and go. That’s it.” He gets the drill going again and then it’s just a few minutes more and they break through.

  We start going in as soon as the hole’s big enough to fit one of us. I’m up first. I let the boys help boost me up. It’s nothing like taking the bank through the front door, the way we usually do. I’m more nervous, for one thing. The guys have to feel me shaking. It’s quiet up here. Eerie and pitch-dark. I turn on my head lamp. Benny hands me the duffel with the lanterns, food, and water in it, and I start setting the lights out around the room. Cash is everywhere! Whole stacks of it on movable carts, bundled and shrink-wrapped. So much cash that I can’t take it all in. Talking about fifty million dollars and actually seeing it are two totally different things. I didn’t realize it’d take up so much space. We might not have the manpower or the duffel bags to get it all out. Some of it will end up down in the hole with Soldado when we trap him, but the rest? The rest is coming with us. We’ll need it to keep our families safe until Soldado’s in jail and things start to die down.

  “Call Twitch. Tell him we need more bags, dude. Like, a lot more bags,” I tell Benny, and then Carlos is popping up like some kind of mole from that arcade game, the one where you whack them with a mallet. Only he’s a tight squeeze because his gut’s so big.

  “Ho-ly…” He stares, openmouthed.

  Eddie’s up next, and after we’ve all done our share of gaping, we get busy. At first we’re throwing money into the duffels at top speed, like we’re still on a two-minute clock or something. But slowly it dawns on me that we have all day and night before the bank opens again Monday morning. Hours and hours. It feels weird.

  I slow down. There’s a lot of work, and if we don’t pace ourselves, we’ll get tired too quickly. Burn out. We’re going to need to save some energy for when Soldado shows up. He told us to have the cash ready to move by four in the morning so we could transport it out with plenty of time to get away before the bank opens at eight and the robbery is discovered. Nearly twenty-seven hours from now. That gives us twenty-three to do our work here.

  “Dudes, take it easy, we got time,” I remind the others. “Let’s drill through to the safe-deposit vault. Get the stuff there first, since it’ll take the longest, then bag the rest of the cash.” I reach into my pocket and fish out the note with Harrison’s safe-deposit box number on it that Lexi gave me. Benny makes
a hole big enough to set a charge inside and blow the door but not mess up the tunnel or the two vaults.

  “Fire in the hole,” he says, and we cover our ears and duck in the far corner of the vault. The door sparks, then bows and warps as the charge goes off and the room fills with smoke. I keep expecting to hear the phone ring, for Twitch to let us know that the alarm’s gone off again and this time half the LAPD is on the way in. So when he does, I’m not surprised. We sit in the center of the vault, barely breathing, waiting once again for the all clear. At this moment the cops could be less than twenty feet away, separated from us by the steel door and that’s it. The only thing that keeps me calm is knowing that the vault can’t be opened once it’s time-locked.

  “Let’s go,” Eddie says, and he’s the first through the door with a crowbar dangling from one hand.

  The boys start jimmying open boxes, ruining four for every one they manage to pry out at first because the frame the boxes sit in warps when you pry a box out. I knew it would take time to get them all opened, but I had no idea. It’s a good twenty minutes for each box. If we were planning to hit all five hundred, the way Soldado wanted us to, it would take us forever to accomplish it at this pace. I hit Harrison’s first. It’s the only one I care about.

  “Check this out!” Benny holds up a necklace so heavy with diamonds that it’s hard to believe it’s real. “Think it belongs to some movie star or somethin’?”

  “Probably not,” I say.

  Carlos chuffs. “Man, what does it matter? It’s ours now.”

  “No. We don’t take any of this stuff, remember? It’s sentimental stuff. Irreplaceable. You really want to do that to someone? This stuff is personal, bro. Family heirlooms. Special gifts.”

  Carlos sighs. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. The point is to scatter it around, bury a few with Soldado and the boys.”

  “That way the police can recover it when they get them.”

  “I know!” he says, not really ticked off but disappointed. I get it. There is a lot of money represented in this room. Maybe more than Soldado estimated. A whole lot more.

  I sit down on the floor with Harrison’s deposit box. It has a series of files in it and a thumb drive. I flip through the files, but there’s no way I can check the drive from in here. The paperwork is nothing special. Receipts for jewelry and hotel rooms. Probably proof he’s having an affair, but nothing that’ll get him locked up. I pocket the drive. It’s what Lexi has to be looking for. Whether it has what she needs is a mystery, but in the end it doesn’t even matter. For now it has the potential to be the key to getting Harrison, and so it’s valuable enough that it makes a perfect bargaining chip. She won’t be leaving us behind in here.

  We open box after box and scatter the contents on the ground. Some of the stuff we pack into one of the duffels we’ll pass down to Soldado. I stare at the piles and shake my head. What I don’t get is the point in having something so valuable that you have to lock it up instead of enjoying it. The stocks and stuff are one thing, but the artwork and the jewels? Why buy them in the first place?

  The vaults are ventilated, and normally (according to Lexi’s intel) the temperature is a coolish seventy degrees, but with all of us in here working, it’s getting hot. I wipe at my forehead and go down to the tunnel to get some water. It’s nearly empty. There are just a few more pieces of equipment to be removed. I watch as the diggers pack it into wheelbarrows.

  “You outta here?” I ask.

  “Sí,” the guy closest to me says, his arms slick with sweat and grime. “It’s all you now, cabrón.”

  I glance at my phone. We’ve been working for hours nonstop. I thought it would feel slow, working for this long, but the time is flying past. I can feel it running out. Soon Lexi and her crew will be down here, getting into position, and Soldado, Twitch, and Psycho will be headed our way, guns drawn, ready to take us out once they have the loot. Just because we have a plan to stop them doesn’t mean I’m not panicked.

  We finish going through the boxes just after one on Monday morning. The contents of the main vault take only one hour more. Two hours (or less) until Soldado could show up.

  “Can we really pull this off?” Eddie asks, his voice quavery. I’ve just shown them where the two ropes are and explained what will happen when we pull the one on our side of the tunnel. “What if the beam doesn’t budge? Or it does, but the ceiling doesn’t cave?”

  “It’ll work,” I say with a confidence I don’t actually feel. The closer we get, the more I have the feeling that nothing will go according to plan. We could die. I don’t want to think about it, but somehow it’s all I can think about.

  We bring a stack of the duffels down and place them in the tunnel, just beyond the chamber beneath the vault, where they will get trapped along with Soldado and the other guys. All we need to do now is wait for them to get this far in and pull out the doorway supports.

  We sit just beneath the vault and wait. No one talks. I listen until my ears start to ring. I’m sweating and shivering at the same time. My fingers ache from gripping my gun. Every noise, every rustle of wind and we all startle. It’s getting so the tension is driving me stark raving crazy. Sitting here is torture.

  And then I hear them. Soldado’s voice traveling through the tunnel.

  We exchange looks. Benny, Eddie, and Carlos look terrified. I must, too. I feel it. My whole body is on high alert.

  “Hey, dumbasses! You up there?” Soldado shouts, cocky as hell because so far everything’s gone down exactly as planned.

  “Yeah. We’re bringing out the bags now. Got some of them in the tunnel already,” I yell, and my chest constricts. I don’t sound normal. My voice is too tight. He’s going to figure it out. Sense it. I look at Benny to see if he heard it, but he’s staring at the ground, rocking. Of all of us, he’s been the most betrayed by Soldado. He’s not hearing me or him or anything, I can tell. He seems ready to throw up.

  I can hear footsteps and low laughter—Twitch and Psycho. Probably gloating because they’re in on Soldado’s plan. Getting some share of the take once they kill us.

  “Up there,” Twitch says. Psycho whistles. They’re all the way in, standing in the section of tunnel where the bags are.

  “Now,” I mouth to the boys, and together we pull on the rope. It sticks and I nearly scream, but then the beam shifts. We pull harder. It shifts more.

  “You guys comin’ down or what?” Soldado asks, and there is the unmistakable sound of a gun cocking.

  We pull until I think the blood vessels in my temple might explode, and the beam doesn’t just shift this time—it flies out of place, slamming to the ground with a vibrating boom!

  The dirt above it comes crashing down like a curtain. Dust clouds explode into the air, and I have to squish my eyes shut to keep from going blind. It worked! But then, once I see that the dirt is still falling, that it’s coming down too hard, I start to panic.

  “Get up inside the vault. Now!” We scramble to make it. We boost Carlos up first, and then he helps pull the rest of us up. The chamber is filling up the way an hourglass does, dirt rising like tidewater.

  We lie against the steel floor, coughing, dust puffing off our clothes.

  “You think we killed them?” Benny gasps, coughing violently.

  “It just looked bad. They’re okay,” I say. The way the dirt was falling, most of it seemed to be collapsing in our direction. Even if some of the ceiling in the tunnel collapsed, there’s a good chance that they got out of the way. Now the only unknown is whether Lexi and her friends were able to take care of their end.

  I pick up my phone and text her.

  The wait to hear back is agonizing. What if Soldado got out? What if he found Lexi’s crew? The way he came into the tunnel, I wouldn’t think so, but…the thought of her hurt or worse…my whole body goes cold.

  My phone vibrates and I let out my breath in a rush.

  We did it. Phase two is on.

  I text her back, my fingers shaking so badl
y I can barely type.

  Tunnel down here. See u soon.

  She’s okay. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for hours. Suddenly I’m light-headed. She’s okay. I repeat so I can start to believe it. I set the phone next to me and lean down into what’s left of the space below us. The tunnel is completely gone where the beam supports were. Soldado is trapped.

  And we’re still alive.

  Quinn, Oliver, Leo, and I race for the turnoff where we hid our motorcycles and jump on. I’m buzzing, my whole body whirring like a helicopter, ready to fly. The plan played out perfectly! Our side of the tunnel went down just the way I predicted, the dirt avalanching like something out of a movie. Based on the way the supports were placed, I knew it would work. Still, it was crazy to watch it. Leo, Quinn, and Oliver take off, and I roar after them, leaning into the bike, picking up speed.

  “So he’s okay?” Leo shouts.

  “Yeah. They all are,” I shout back.

  There is daylight up ahead. I weave past the boys and aim for it. We burst out of the tunnel one by one and take off down the street, cutting off a few early commuters. The city spreads out around us, the buildings shimmering because it’s already hot. LL National is right there, partially obscured by haze. The bank is ours. We’ve done everything according to plan. Now all we have to do is take it.

  —

  Whitney pulls up to the front of the bank at precisely five minutes to eight.

  “You guys all set?” Elena asks.

  “Set.” Oliver slips on his gloves and places his gun in his lap. It’s fake. A prop. Just one more thing we borrowed from the twins’ dad. It appears real enough, though. Looking at it makes my heart beat faster.