3
Lennox exited the elevator on the third floor of the region’s FBI headquarters to a round of polite applause. His appearance strikingly different than back in Spokane. Clear eyed. Freshly shaven. Suit, newly dry cleaned.
He was a different person.
A sheet of cake sat awkwardly on a low filing cabinet, white frosting smeared with blocky red letters: Welcome Back “Choctaw Charlie.” Someone at the grocery store had done their best to draw a little Harley-Davidson beside it. Lennox’s hand was quickly met with a Styrofoam cup of bad coffee.
“Cheers to the King of Stings! We were taking bets, how many bad guys you were gonna bag.”
Lennox gave a half smile to shut down the office humor. “Hope nobody bet smart.”
A couple of agents laughed an obligatory laugh, more at Lennox than with Lennox. None of them actually thought he was funny. Lennox barely touched the coffee. He scanned the room—too many desks, too many suits. It all felt like a waiting room for people who hadn’t bled in the field.
Murphy appeared through the crowd, still with a stiff gait, wearing the classic blue arm sling.
Lennox spoke first. “That’s one way to get a promotion . . .”
“You saved my life,” Murphy said, quietly trying to have a moment.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lennox said, brushing him off.
“No, I’m serious. I owe you one. It’s hard to explain until it happens to you . . . Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” Lennox muttered in a reprimanding tone. “Just don’t ever fold like that again. Stay. In. Character.”
Before Murphy could respond, department directors Thornton and Mathis stepped into the room. “Agent Lennox . . .” They led him into a side office with the blinds drawn. Mathis closed the door.
“Thanks for coming in,” Thornton said. “Been a while. You did good work in Spokane, but your cover’s torched. We can’t put you under, anywhere in the Northwest.”
Lennox folded his arms. “So this is it? A handshake and a cake? Fellas, I knew this day would come, but—”
Mathis and Thornton turned to each other and smiled.
“Ya know, Lennox, it’s so funny,” Thornton continued. “You got no friends in real life, but you sure can fake it with bad guys.”
Mathis slid a folder across the desk. Inside were pixelated stills of bank-surveillance footage, bikers wearing full-face helmets, cash in motion.
“We’ve got something active in the Southwest right now. Multiple robberies. No casualties, yet, but escalating, based on what we know. You’ll like this one. We want you to take lead.” Lennox flipped through the photos.
“They fucking ride bikes to rob banks . . .” said Thornton like a stoked high schooler.
Lennox raised his eyebrows. “Real Wild West shit?” A thin, pale-eyed man in a racing balaclava stared back at him from the photos.
“Smart crew. But we’re on their trail.”
“Word around the department is you’re a superbike guy—”
“Crazy son of a bitch,” Thornton interjected under his breath.
“That one in the picture, we think his name’s Cole Miller. Ever heard of him?”
Lennox stayed quiet, staring longer than he meant to.
The morning of my first job, the sky over Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, was pale, like the color of bone.
Dusty parked the rig half a mile north at a boarded-up gas station that hadn’t sold any fuel since the Carter administration.
From there, he tuned into police scanners, his eyes keeping watch on our escape routes.
Earlier that morning, Chief had handed him two remote-detonated bombs, which he stashed behind rusted pumps.
If things went bad, Dusty would set off a show loud enough to pull every cruiser in the county.
“A little trick I learned from some Green Berets once upon a time,” Chief told Dusty.
“You just give me the signal, I’ll make ’em look the other way,” Dusty assured us through the comms.
Cole walked the rest of us through the plan one more time, even though we knew it by heart. He didn’t like surprises. That made two of us.
“Jules will cut power on the block. We’re gonna be a little rusty.
It’s not okay, but it’s just being realistic.
That’s why we’re starting with a smaller bank.
Still, the goal is in and out in ninety seconds, teller drawers and vaults, cash in bags, dye packs removed.
Clock starts when we dismount our bikes.
Jules . . . ?” Cole spoke into the comms and waited.
“. . . Yes, jefe?” Jules responded, stationed inside Dusty’s trailer.
“Make sure to hit the power right as we dismount, not anytime sooner.”
“Claro que sí, jefe. You got it.”
“Things are looking good. Slow day today, only one cop on duty. Jules will report a domestic disturbance to give him something to do before we go in.”
Cole took a moment to feel the low hum of tension tightening across six bodies trying to stay calm like we weren’t about to rob a bank.
“I lead entry and hover. Emily and Ricky take flanks. Sónia helps secure the lobby, then heads for the vault. Billy—you take everything from behind the counters. Chief, you handle the door and watch the bikes. We go in clean. Absolutely no casualties. No hero bullshit. Fast money.”
An hour later, one click of Jules’s keyboard cut power to the bank’s security cameras in perfect step with us rushing in.
Kevlar under our matching racing suits made us feel a little more invincible, the same as the sunglasses behind our matching helmets made us feel a little more incognito.
Sónia was the first to hop into action, spray-painting over the height indicator on the door frame to weaken witness testimony.
“Hey?! Excuse me?” said the bank teller, catching Sónia out of the corner of her eye.
“Everyone down!” Cole barked. It was the kind of command you’d think didn’t need repeating.
Ricky, Emily, and I fanned out. Chief entered last, flipping the bank’s Open sign to Closed, and forcing the door to lock with a custom-made door jam.
It was the bank’s first hour of business, so there were only a few people inside.
A woman in her seventies shuffling ahead of us, completely oblivious of what was happening, turned to Cole, confused by the helmets and weapons with suppressors attached at the end of the barrels.
“Is the notary in?” she asked with a straight face.
“Ma’am,” Cole said, deadpan, “they’re off today. Have a seat.”
“Typical,” she muttered.
Cole pulled her a comfortable chair to sit in, and as he did, he caught the eye of a nervous country bumpkin, the only customer at the counter. How Cole knew to zero in on him, I can only attribute to that gift Cole always had of reading people.
“Don’t pull out your gun.” Cole said honestly to the country bumpkin. “It isn’t worth it. Not today.” Cole nodded to turn the bumpkin’s attention on Ricky, who had the red laser sight of his Colt 733 automatic machine gun pointed at his balls.
“We’re people just like you,” Cole said, then pointed at me and jerked his chin toward the teller stations.
It was hard to tell what the country bumpkin would do next. I found myself stuck, waiting for his next move. Emily saw me hesitate. She vaulted the teller counter in one clean motion to secure the back-counter employees without resistance.
“The drawers!” she yelled at me.
I moved sloppily, uncertainty weighing me down, heart pounding out of my neck.
But when the manager opened that first drawer and I saw the stacks of cash—actual stacks—I felt something shift.
Not adrenaline. Not fear. But a strange new attraction.
Drawer after drawer with clean bundles, thick rubber bands, the smell of that special ink—I understood something I hadn’t before: This wasn’t about greed.
Not for me. It was the promise of stability.
Finally.
After the crash, after Dad, after everything fell quiet, this was the first time the world had color again.
Into the bags it all went.
“Ninety seconds!” Ricky yelled.
Sónia grabbed the manager, forcing her to the vault.
“We got a walk-in!” Chief yelled back. “Everyone shut the fuck up and get out of sight!” Cole took his helmet off and set it on the manager’s desk.
That was not part of the plan. His identity was still obscured by a racing balaclava, but his disposition was objectively more friendly sans helmet.
He began walking toward the bumpkin, the bumpkin twitching when Cole pulled out two one-hundred-dollar bills and tucked them in the bumpkin’s front pocket.
The door jolted from someone outside trying to get in.
“Say a fucking word and I will blow your fucking head off . . .” warned Ricky to a hostage.
“Bank’s closed for maintenance,” Chief said politely through the door. “Come back tomorrow.”
“This is my money. This ain’t the bank’s money,” Ricky said to the bumpkin. “If anyone asks, you ain’t my accomplice, you ain’t my fucking friend. And that ain’t the bank’s money. You buy your wife something nice. And you tell her a helluva story over dinner.”
Sónia came out of the vault, and we split the money into six identical bags, handing one to each member of the crew. One after the other, we walked out of the bank.
And.
Nobody stopped me. There wasn’t even a soul on the street. Birds chirping, sun shining. It was too easy. Double tap on my visor. Gearshift. Gearshift. And I was out beyond any traffic, blasting through four-way stops, the open road at the edge of town in sight.
But then.
Out of nowhere, an unfamiliar pop.
In an instant I was engulfed in a sticky red fog. My vision impaired, a sense of burning coming from my back, and the overwhelming taste of chemicals choking me slowly.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
I pulled over in a vacant dirt lot, obscured by tumbleweed and chain link, red fog still emitting from the bag of money.
“Goddamn it!”
I’d forgotten to check for dye packs hidden in the stacks of cash.
We’d gone over it so many times in our run-throughs.
There was no excuse for a fuckup like this.
Just as I opened the bag and realized none of the cash was salvageable, Emily arrived, having seen the whole situation play out in front of her.
“What do we do?!” I asked.
“Leave it! Get to the rendezvous!”
She ripped off. And just as the volume of her engine died, the sound of sirens rose.
A pair of cop cars coming my way.
I cut down the nearest alleyway. I thought it would throw the first car off, but these officers were determined.
It felt like the second I lost one, the other was on me, and vice versa.
They clearly had comms with each other. If they had any backup within five miles, they probably would have caught me, the way I was desperately turning down streets, having no idea where they led.
One of them got so damn close to my bike, he actually bumped my tail, pushing me off road into some gravel.
My body’s memory of my high side attempted to paralyze my judgment as I cornered away at the edge of control.
I couldn’t go down. Not on my first job.
A 180-degree stoppie turn is what finally threw them off enough for me to gearshift away to freedom. They weren’t expecting it. Neither was I. Didn’t even know I could still do a turn like that.
But it got me out. Barely.
All those heavy feelings—of failure, of embarrassment, the shame I tried so hard to repress—all of it followed me on the long ride across state lines to a motel in Durango.
The news about the dye packs had already gotten there.
Not because of what happened to me, but because there were two more that exploded in the bag I handed to Chief.
“You think your plans are bulletproof,” I caught Emily saying to Cole, “until someone gets hurt.”
“You used to like that about me,” Cole replied smugly.
They both abruptly stopped as I approached, still covered in dye in areas I couldn’t get off.
Clearly, neither of them wanted to explain. Emily walked off without another word.
“I’m never going to live this down, am I?” I asked Cole.
“Yeah, Chief and Ricky are pissed . . . Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“What you can do on a bike, how you ride, that’s your greatest strength.
They can’t do what you do. You can’t just teach that.
This other stuff is easy to learn. That’s why we put you on the drawers.
Most of the money was in the vault anyways, and Sónia handled that like a pro. ” Then he handed me a stack of bills.
“I can’t take this,” I mumbled. “Not after losing all that.”
“Doesn’t matter. Nobody got hurt, and nobody got caught, that’s what matters. We split everything we get away with. Besides, this is just a per diem. After we launder everything, everyone will get a bigger cut.”
It was the most money I’d ever been given.
Later that night, Emily found me in the motel parking lot.
“What’d you think?” she said.
“I feel like I got away with something I didn’t earn.”
She didn’t speak for a minute.
“You ever think about just pulling out? Taking your bike and just . . .” She waved her arm out, toward a horizon neither of us could see.
“Too late for that,” I replied.
She stepped closer. Closer than anyone else in the crew had been to me. “Maybe not,” she said. “Not for you.”
I turned to look at her. “You know something I don’t?”
Emily hesitated. That was new. “Just think about it. Before it’s too late.” Then she walked away.
Back in the motel, I lay in bed, again staring at the ceiling all night.
The silent intervals of Cole’s snoring, disrupted by the sounds of Sónia and Ricky’s victory sex in the next room over.
We were supposedly on our way to riches but still had to share crappy motel rooms. Dusty just slept in his truck.
I saw Emily leave. Who knows where she slept, but I don’t blame her for feeling uncomfortable in digs like those.
And that was my first job.
All night, over and over in my head, like the most frustrating chorus of a song you can’t part with.
“Fast money.”
“Fast money.”
“Fast money.”
But I knew better.
The faster you go, the harder the crash.