9-1-1 #4
It was about two in the afternoon, and Ace, Sonny, and Jai were all leaning against the shaded wall of the cashier’s cubicle, shooting the shit after lunch.
Eric had been allowed to come out of the cubicle for lunch—Sonny had gone into the house and come back with homemade pastrami and cream cheese on sourdough, which was delicious.
They’d all eaten while sitting on stools by the work bench, or in the cubicle with the door open, or even, in Sonny’s case, sitting on the tailgate of the pickup truck he’d just finished tuning up, and now they were swigging from bottles of soda from a cooler Ace kept out in the garage, with the promise that if Eric would let them know what kind he’d like, Ace would get it for him.
The cooler also kept water, but Eric had seen the men working, and they were fast and meticulous and quick on their feet and dexterous with their hands.
They burned the calories from a midday soda, and Eric enjoyed the taste of raw sugar and caffeine now as much as he had when he’d been a little kid.
He was going to have to start running around the neighborhood in the early morning, now that he’d established a routine of sorts—and he was definitely looking forward to doing laps, even if the pool was tiny and kidney shaped.
But in spite of that companionable quiet, Eric couldn’t deny the rising tension in his stomach, the electricity of anxiety accreting in his joints.
And Ace—and Jai and Sonny—must have felt it too, because while Eric almost screamed, they all cocked their heads like they were listening for something.
Ace grimaced when he pulled out his phone. “Ernie,” he said, and the others nodded like they’d expected this.
Was this because Ernie had talked about storms the night before?
“’Sup?” Ace said, directly into the phone. “Uhm… no. We take the drop tonight, you know that. Today? And the bank in Baker? Uhm… why?”
Ace blinked slowly. “Me and Jai, I guess.”
He listened to the reply and blinked again.
“Okay, so me, Jai, and Eric. Gotta take the drop. Well, ’cause we can’t leave Sonny here alone—oh.
Okay. So we’ll do that. Look, Ernie, it’s your show.
Learned a long time ago not to ignore you, okay?
Yeah, you call Cotton. I guess I gotta go strip my overalls and wash my hands. ”
He hung up with a grunt. “Jai, Eric, we gotta go drop the week’s deposit in the branch of the savings and loan in Baker.”
“Isn’t that half an hour away?” Eric said.
“There is a Business Gold Savings and Loan in Victoriana,” Jai said, sounding absolutely puzzled.
“Cotton’s gonna come look after the cashier stand?” Sonny asked, and Ace gave him a grateful smile.
“Yup. Ernie’s calling him now. Jai, you and me gotta scrub off some engine oil. Eric, set up the receipts and invoices so Cotton can come walk through your day.”
Eric stared at him, absolutely at a loss. “Is there anything else we should know?”
“Yeah. You still got your piece?” Ace asked.
Eric put his hand to the small of his back, where his pancake holster with his Beretta rested under his shirt, practically a part of his soul, much less his skin. “Always.”
“Concealed carry, right?”
“Permit’s in my wallet.” He had a permit to match every ID.
“Good. Jai, you bring what you gotta. I got my knife. I don’t know why we gotta be in Baker in forty-five minutes, but I don’t think it’s for dinner and a movie.”
BAKER WAS a good thirty minutes from Victoriana, and perhaps twice the size.
Not big enough to have a Walmart, Eric thought bitterly, but big enough to have a feed store, a grocery store, a Rite Aid, a two-screen movie theater, and two banks.
There was the Wells Fargo and the Business Gold—the credit union was almost necessary because most of the businesses out there were either franchises or independents and everybody needed someplace safe to drop their cash and receipts.
Correction, thought Eric to himself. Baker should have been thirty minutes from Victoriana. It certainly had been thirty minutes when Eric had been driving back from Palm Springs.
But apparently when Ace was at the wheel, all things space and time were warped beyond rational belief—even when Ace was driving the powder-blue Crown Vic that Jai usually drove.
Jai held on to the chicken stick with stoic concentration—and the occasional “Whoo!” as Ace would take a curve or a corner or pass another car and turn it into a roller coaster ride on a hurricane.
Eric was belted in the center of the back bench seat, being thrown around like a rag doll with a rope tied around its waist, wondering if his core muscles would ever be the same.
After fifteen minutes of seeing his life flashing before his eyes—and holy Christ were there some regrets in there—Ace skidded to a halt in the sand-coated parking lot of Business Gold Credit Union.
He killed the engine and had gotten out and slammed his door almost before the last notes of Metallica crashed through the speakers from the classic metal station Jai had listened to on the way to work.
Jai and Eric got out of the vehicle a little more slowly.
“Dear God,” Eric muttered, putting his hand out to the roof of the car to steady himself.
“You should see him street race,” Jai replied, although he too was resting his hand on the roof of the car. “But don’t blink or the race is over.”
Ace ignored them, busy scanning the parking lot for a moment. He turned to Jai with the familiar command of somebody used to running an op. “Cameras,” he said bluntly, and Jai nodded.
“We are outside their range.”
Eric realized Ace had parked to the way back of the parking lot—the place no woman would park at night—in the far corner, practically in the vacant lot next to the savings and loan.
The cameras perched on the eaves of the building wouldn’t hit anywhere near this spot—but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t hit inside the building.
“Are we knocking the place over?” Jai asked in surprise.
“No, we are not knocking the place over,” Ace replied, annoyed. “But somebody else is, and I think the cops are sending Brady in alone. We’re here for backup. I’d just as soon not be on camera—it would pretty much be our last turn at backup, right?”
Jai grunted. “Da. What is your plan?”
Ace grunted back. “We take turns going in. Eric, you know how to fuck with electronics? Me and Jai are more ‘rip it out of the wall’ kind of people.”
Eric blinked in surprise. He was, in fact, adept at shutting down cameras. “I’ve got lots of fun little gadgets on my phone,” he said. He hadn’t had to think about doing this since he’d committed to his retirement in December, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t equipped.
“Good,” Ace said. “You go in first. Do you need to open a membership and use their computer or anything?”
Eric blinked at him. This, too, was a good gambit. “Let me see what they have when I go in,” he said, but he was pretty sure he had it all on his phone.
“I’ll go in next,” Ace said. “I brought some money to deposit in case I need to.” He shook his head, obviously irritated.
“Love doing this twice, I can tell you, but I don’t want to lose a whole week’s take if it goes sideways.
Okay, so that leaves you, Jai. I’m thinking you want to go in the back door after the fun starts? ”
The giant bald man with the terrifying smile and the coal-black goatee gave him a droll look. “I am a stealth machine,” he said with absolutely no inflection.
Ace cackled and handed Jai the deposit packet, complete with a filled-out slip. “Fair. You go in the front, and I’ll slip in the back. Eric, how long do you need?”
Eric was already scrolling through his phone. “Five minutes. If our robbers can hold off for that long, it’ll be helpful.”
“Okay, then,” Ace said. “You go, I’ll slink around the vacant lot to the back, Jai will go when I’m in place—or before the robbers if he sees them coming. Our job is zero casualties if we can help it, or just dead robbers if we can’t.”
“Will they be stupid, crazy, or desperate?” Jai asked clinically.
“Hopefully just desperate,” Ace said. “You can reason with desperate—all they want is a way out. You add stupid and crazy to the mix and you’re fucked. But either way, Ernie said we were needed, so here the fuck we are. Eric, go.”
“Going,” Eric replied crisply, and pretending he’d been planning to open an account in this Podunk S the bank was relatively full today, so he had plenty of time to stand in line playing with his phone while he looked around.
There were two loan officers in house, behind glass-walled cubicles, and four tellers at the end of the room, behind bulletproof glass.
As Eric tooled with his phone, he glanced around, taking note of the four cameras, one at every corner of the lobby, and started scanning their frequencies with his not-quite-market-spec phone.
Funny, he’d been thinking about deleting this highly illegal ap to make room for more music and a couple of movies, but apparently he’d need to keep using his clean “entertainment” iPad for that.
As he glanced around the room, he made private note that the green lights on two… three… and there went the fourth camera, had all turned to red.
He texted Ace Clear and then started playing Two Dots—because it soothed his nerves, that’s why. Oh do-da-di-da-doh, nothing to see here, folks. Just another guy waiting in line, waiting for—
Jai’s in and they’re here.
Discreetly, Eric tucked the phone in his pocket, made sure his new faded jeans and gray hoodie completely covered the pancake holster in the small of his back, and got ready to be surpri—