“Okay. Guns out. Masks on. Gloves on. Hoodies up.” Elena goes down the list, and I mentally check off each item.
“They’re starting to congregate outside,” Elena murmurs, gesturing to the handful of bank employees sipping from Starbucks cups.
“Four minutes.” Whitney taps the wheel.
“Any sign of cops anywhere?” I ask, leaning up into the front seat.
“All clear.” Elena turns in her seat, her face pinched like she might cry. “Be careful. All of you.”
“Three minutes.” Leo holds up his phone, the countdown timer gobbling up numbers.
The employees in front of the bank—the manager, Stella, two tellers, and a security guard—edge toward the door. Stella takes out her keys.
“Two minutes.” Leo again, his voice getting smothered up by his mask.
I slip my own mask into place. Oliver and Quinn do the same.
I feel like I’m burning up, like I might spontaneously combust. Every inch of my skin is on fire from the heat or nerves. Maybe both.
“They’re going in,” Whitney squeaks.
“Now!” Quinn gives the order, and like a racehorse reacting to the starting gun, I bolt out of the car, legs panic-nimble, ears roaring, my fake gun smacking against my side as I pump my arms.
Time seems split in two. Some things happen very fast, while others feel suspended. The run seems to take seconds, but the woman walking down the sidewalk toward us doesn’t seem to make any progress at all. My breath is fast inside my mask. Chugging like a train. It’s all I can hear.
Quinn reaches the door just as Stella opens it. He crashes into her and they careen inside. Oliver goes for the guard, jabbing his gun into the man’s back. I take one teller. Leo takes the other. I grip her arm with my gloved hand and move her into the bank. Her mouth is open. Is she screaming? I can’t tell. There’s just my own breathing, the awful gasping.
The door to the bank closes. With the blinds down, the interior is dusky. Filtered sunlight sends flickering shadows across the back wall and the carpet. I glance over at the stairs to the vault. Christian is down there, waiting.
“Make sure it’s locked,” Quinn orders Stella before he follows her to the alarm system keypad and has her enter her code to disable it.
“Everyone else, on the ground. Now!” Leo hollers.
Tears stream down the tellers’ faces. They fall to the floor. I wince as their knees hit first and they collapse onto their faces.
I zip-tie their hands together.
“Please don’t hurt us,” Stella says, her voice calm but her bottom lip trembling. She twists her wedding ring around and around on her finger. “Please.”
We are monsters. That’s how she sees us. Even if we are doing this to get Harrison, she’ll never know that. I’ve crossed a line now; there’s no going back. Much as I hate Harrison, how am I any better? Look what we’re doing.
I knew what to expect, and yet nothing feels like I thought it would. Robbing this bank isn’t a BAM. We’re hurting people, but I can’t take it back. Say I’m sorry. It’s too late for that. The only thing to do is move forward.
“I didn’t know,” I murmur.
“Focus!” Quinn snaps his fingers in front of my face. “We need to get them into the bathroom. Now.”
We walk the two tellers to the ladies’ room and zip-tie each of them to the pipes behind the toilets so they can’t escape.
“Stay here. You’re safe,” Leo says. “We aren’t going to hurt you.”
We keep Stella and the security guy with us. We’ll need them to open the vault.
“Five minutes,” Leo says.
“You won’t be able to rob the vault before the cops show up,” the guard says calmly as he enters his access code. “If you’re smart, you’ll leave right now. You have a chance if you do. Stay and it’s over.”
“Shut it, dude,” Oliver barks, jamming his gun into the man’s back even harder.
The minute the lock disengages, Quinn and Oliver drag Stella and the guard back upstairs to the bathrooms. We don’t open the vault door until they are out of sight.
I lean against the wall, dizzy. I was hyperventilating. Now I might pass out. Leo pulls the vault door open, and a rush of earthy air escapes.
Christian, Benny, Carlos, and Eddie spill out, their zombie masks collared around their necks, each of them gripping oversized duffel bags.
“ ’Bout time you guys showed up,” Eddie says, his face ashen, covered in a layer of sand and dirt.
I look at Christian and have this inexplicable urge to cry. I want him to gather me up in his arms and tell me it’ll be okay. But that can’t happen. The only thing that’s important right now is getting out.
“The bank is already supposed to be open. We have to hurry,” Lexi says. Her voice sounds strained. Frantically pushing her mask off her face, she stares into my eyes like there’s something she wants to say or do. I expected her to come at me with her usual swagger, all flirt and confidence. Ready to con me into handing over the flash drive and then somehow trap us down here. Instead, she’s ghost-pale. After what I overheard in the parking garage, I was ready to handle the usual Lexi. And best her. But this version has me wondering if underneath it all she’s just a girl who’s suddenly found herself in way over her head.
Welcome to my world, I think, smiling tentatively at her. I’ve felt in over my head since I started doing jobs. Carlos, Eddie, and Benny rush out of the vault like the place is cursed. It feels cursed. Every minute we spent locked inside with Soldado, Twitch, and Psycho buried less than fifty feet away felt like an eternity. I kept imagining them digging out and coming for us. I haul out two of the four money bags we managed to keep, and Benny and Carlos tote out the others. There are more than twenty more underground with Soldado—not that he’ll ever get to spend it. It should be enough to satisfy the cops and keep them from looking too hard for the rest. I’m guessing we’ve got maybe four million total with us. Still the best haul we’ve had, and more than enough to get all of us and our families a safe distance from the Florencia Heights and the Eme. We leave behind our guns, wiped clean of fingerprints. While we were waiting for Lexi to come, we stood at the edge of the hole in the vault floor and tossed them down. It felt sort of momentous, like the first step toward a new life.
We shut the vault’s outer door. I can hear the lock automatically engage again. I exhale. We’re out. Now all that’s left to do is leave.
From here the plan is supposed to be simple: we go out through the bank doors that lead to the building’s lobby, avoiding the street exit altogether. Both getaway cars are now parked on the bottom level of the garage behind the building. The security guard stationed in the lobby will see us go and call the police, but he won’t know what cars we drive away in, not until they check the garage’s cameras much later, and by then we’ll have ditched the cars and will be long gone. The hardest part of the heist is behind us; there’s just the short walk outside now. Five more minutes and my bank-robbing days are over.
Lexi moves so she’s blocking our path. “We had a deal. I got you out; now it’s your turn to give us Harrison’s stuff.”
“Once we’re outside,” I say.
“No, now.” She holds out a hand, and her friends gather close. Carlos and Eddie laugh in disbelief. They can’t possibly be prepared to physically stop us. This is going to waste time that we don’t have.
I sigh and drop my duffel, unzip it, and dig out Harrison’s papers.
She and Quinn huddle together quickly.
“This isn’t it,” Quinn says, swallowing hard enough that I can see his throat working.
“That’s all there was?” she asks, eyes narrowed.
“We need to go,” Leo says, leading us toward the stairway. “We’ve been here almost fifteen minutes. Much too long. We can’t deal with this here.”
Fifteen minutes!
“We have to go right now!” I scoop up my duffel bag and grab Lexi’s hand. She struggles.
&
nbsp; “You want to separate? Trust me to meet you upstairs?” I ask.
She bites her lip and lets me pull her toward the stairs, her hand tightening on mine. I want her close.
We’re nearly halfway there when we hear the sounds of shattering glass.
We freeze.
The bank’s security alarm shrieks to life, but we can still hear stuff happening. More glass breaking, then pounding feet. The police. Has to be.
Without a word, we turn and run back down the stairs—to where, I have no idea. There’s only the vault and the collapsed tunnel. We’re trapped. We were so close and it was all for nothing.
I’m going to jail.
We all are.
People say in times like these your life flashes before your eyes, but it isn’t true. There is only the sickening, sinking feeling of being caught and the kind of adrenaline spike that prey animals must feel when they’re being hunted. They’re running with all they’ve got, but deep down they know it’s not good enough. In the end they were always meant to be eaten.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god,” Carlos whispers.
“Shh,” Lexi hisses. She jabs a finger toward the end of the hallway before she pushes past everyone to take the lead. I’m not sure if I’m imagining it, but I think I hear people coming down the steps now, the squeak of rubber on marble.
She pulls at a door I didn’t notice before, probably because it’s the same color as the hallway and the handle is near the floor and opens upward, not out. Hiding might buy us a minute or two, but what’s the point? Except when I get closer, I can see that it’s a cargo elevator with graffiti-covered walls. I have no idea where it goes or what we’ll do when we get there. I just crowd inside with everyone else and wait, panicked and silent, as Lexi shuts the outer door and presses the up button. A second, inner door slides shut, and the thing shudders to life. I can’t hear what’s happening outside the elevator anymore; there is only the mechanical grind of the lift and the sounds of our breathing.
“How did they know?” Eddie says, his voice high and tight.
“One of the tellers might’ve gotten loose,” Leo suggests.
“I secured the bank people. Oversecured them. There’s no way,” Quinn growls.
“What does it matter? We have exactly twenty seconds before this elevator opens up on the fourth floor, okay? We can access the parking garage from the exit up there. We’ll only be a few levels from the getaway cars. There is one security guy who mans that door. We get past him and we can take the garage stairs to the first floor. The cars will be right there.”
“We can manage one guard,” I say, more to convince myself than them.
The elevator slows, stops. The door slides open. Lexi pokes her head out. “Clear,” she says, and everyone files out of the elevator. The door closes again, and I can hear it start moving down, back the way we just came. Whoever’s in the basement below has called it back down. We have a minute—two, tops—before they are right behind us.
As we hurry toward the fourth-floor exit, I try not to think about how little time we have or about what we might have to do to get past the guard. I just move. Out of the elevator and down the hall. Quinn nearly collides with a woman when we round the corner. She drops the paperwork she had cradled in her arms and screams.
“Get away,” Quinn yells at her. “Move!”
She takes off in the opposite direction, her feet wobbling as she tries to run full tilt in high heels.
We head for the exit. I can see it now, the glass double doors, the guard, his back to us, a phone cradled to his ear…and a set of flashing police lights outside. The cop car’s just pulled up. The two cops inside haven’t seen us, but there is no way we can go out there now.
“The stairs,” I say. “This way.” I take the lead, turning down the hallway that branches off to the right. The stairs are at the very end. We hurtle toward it. I hit the door, open it. Up or down? Which way do we go? I listen for noise in the stairwell. If we go down, the only way out of the building is through the lobby, so that’s out. Up it is. I start to climb and the others follow. I am leading us now, and it sucks because I don’t know what to do. The fourth-floor entrance is the only other one besides the one in the lobby. The most I’m doing is buying us time. Is there a place we can hide? Wait it out? Think, Lexi, think. Most of the floors are exactly like this one, filled with LL National employees. People will see us. Even if we could find an empty office to hide out in, the cops will know we’re still in the building. Detective Martin will know. I think about those eyes of his, those determined, obsessive eyes. He will scour every inch of this building to find us. There is nowhere we can hide, no hope of escape. My foot slips on the step and I nearly fall. How could I be this stupid? Why did I ever think this would work? Harrison might have screwed my family to save himself, but I’ve screwed over my friends trying to get revenge. I’m no better than he is. Tears run down my face, tickle my chin.
“Guys, I’m sorry. I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure what to do now.” I turn around so I can face them. Oliver is directly behind me. He’s still got his mask on, but his aviators are pushed up onto the top of his head. The way his hair sticks up reminds me of the night we jumped off the Bank Tower building, less than two blocks from here. We jumped. And all at once I have an idea.
There is a moment when I think that our little trip up the stairway was an exercise in futility, but then Lexi lights up like the fireworks we saw the other night, and suddenly she’s not just climbing but bounding up the stairs.
“Where are we going?” Carlos asks, panting heavily. Bet he’s regretting all the honeybuns about now.
“Oliver, can we use the trash chute?” Lexi asks. “It’s still there. Please say it’s still there.”
“At the construction site. Yeah. We could. But if the crew’s already working…”
“We have to take our chances. Or…the fire alarm. Can we make the fire alarm go off? Then they’ll have to clear the building, right? Crew. Everyone.” She’s out of breath; we all are. The money bag I’m carrying is making me slower than usual. I look at Benny, Carlos, and Eddie. They’re feeling it, too. Twenty extra pounds each we’re toting, and there’s no good way to distribute it so that it isn’t awkward to carry.
“The chute leads down to the bottom level of the garage. Other than that, there’s only the elevator that leads from in here to there. You know they have the elevators manned inside the building, so it makes sense they wouldn’t have cops in that part of the garage. We lose the zombie gear and the sweatshirts and go out on foot.”
“So all we need is to set off a fire alarm, right?” Benny asks, his face slick with sweat. He shifts his duffel bag from one shoulder to the other.
“Basically, yeah. We just need someone to trip the system.” Lexi keeps climbing. We must be near the tenth floor by now.
“On it,” Oliver says, and he takes the steps two at a time to the next floor. He whips off his mask and hoodie, hands it to Quinn, and heads for the door with this fancy-looking stainless-steel lighter in one hand.
“The construction starts on the next floor up,” Lexi says. “We need to get there before the alarm goes off and the stairwell gets crowded with people.”
We run full out, not bothering to be quiet anymore and barely make it to the door before the alarm trips. We erupt out of the stairwell. The eleventh floor is stripped down to the building’s reinforced-steel frame and concrete floor. There are pallets of building materials and some tools scattered around, but mostly it is an empty shell. Even half the windows are missing, so the floor opens up to the outside. It is crazy hot. July hot.
“Take off your clothes,” Lexi orders.
“You picked a helluva time to start flirting,” I say, because even panicked and on the run, I can’t help it. She left herself wide-open.
Lexi pulls off her hoodie and rolls her eyes, but her lips twitch like she’s fighting a smile. “No, I mean all your zombie gear. Hurry.”
Oliver’s b
ack a few seconds later. “We need to go. Like now. The building’s emptying out. It’ll be that much easier to find us.” He walks toward the far end of the floor to the group of pallets we changed behind last week and rummages around. “It’s not here.”
“What’s not?” I ask, getting closer. I don’t like feeling so out of control. I’m depending on Lexi and her crew to get me and the boys out, and I’m still not entirely sure we can trust them to, especially now when leaving us might buy them time to get away.
“The winch. It’s not here.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I had a rope and winch to get us down the chute. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise…” I lean forward. “Otherwise what?”
“We have to slide down the chute.”
“Okay. And?” Lexi asks.
Oliver messes with his lighter, flips it open and shut. “And it’s eleven floors up. That’s a long way to go. We go down too fast and the impact at the bottom is gonna suck. We can’t exactly flee the scene if we’ve all got broken bones. We need something to slow us down.”
“We’re at a construction site and there’s no rope? No. No way. There has to be something.” I start walking around, moving stuff.
“Electrical wire. There’s a whole roll right there. Help me get it over to the chute.” Quinn grabs hold of the wire spool and starts to drag it toward the chute. I grab the bottom of the spool and we go faster. There is noise coming from the stairwell. Voices. People from the upper floors evacuating the building. Most likely the construction crew, since, according to Oliver, they’re working several floors up. But also office workers. Possibly even police.
Oliver examines the wire. It’s narrow and coated in rubber. There’s not much to grab on to.
“There’s not enough time for us to go one at a time, but I have no idea how much weight this can hold,” Oliver says.
“We either take our chances or go downstairs and turn ourselves in right now,” Lexi says.
I think about what it would be like to do it. Just walk up to the police and confess the way I would at church. Excuse me, sir, but I have sinned….With Soldado caught, it doesn’t seem like that bad an idea. I’m so tired of doing jobs and covering my tracks. Coming clean might be a relief. But then I look at Benny. His mom is dying. If he goes to jail, he may never see her again. Carlos and Eddie will just end up caving to the Eme to survive and becoming carnales—sworn brothers, in for life. We’ve managed to avoid getting jumped in all this time. It wipes away any temptation I have to come clean.
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