5
Our sixth job was a bank tucked behind a car wash in a dusty little town that had more stray dogs than cops. Jules said the place ran on paper ledgers and wishful thinking. Ancient security cameras. No dye packs. No guards. Easy money.
Too easy.
This time, Ricky was on edge before we even left our staging site. Pacing, checking his weapon twice, muttering to himself. Sónia tried to calm him, but he snapped at her—loud enough for all of us to hear. “We shouldn’t even need crowd control. We go in, we go out. You don’t need to risk it.”
Cole didn’t rise to it. “She keeps civilians calm, that keeps them safe,” he said. “No casualties means no manhunt.”
“But what’s one less person if we’re so professional?” Ricky snapped.
“Ricky,” Sónia said with a necessary peace, “please. I can do it. We need the money . . .” That’s when I noticed the subtle bump in her stomach.
She had a baby on board.
Ricky wasn’t just twitchy. He was scared.
And as if he somehow could see the future, he was right to be scared. The job went smooth until the last sixty seconds. Jules botched the signal cut—flipped the wrong breaker. Backup lights came on early. The teller hit the emergency alarm. We had thirty seconds, tops, and one more vault to clear.
Ricky moved toward the vault like he’d been waiting for something to go wrong, but Emily beat him to it, which pissed him off even more. In the confusion, a camera flash went off. A high schooler near the corner booth—backward hat, single earring dangling—lowered a disposable camera, terrified.
All of us paused, trying to make sense of the situation.
All of us, except Ricky.
“I . . . I . . . I thought the flash was off . . .” the kid said as Ricky approached him. “I’m sorry. Here! Take it!”
Ricky grabbed the camera and shattered it on the floor, then grabbed the poor kid by the collar and slammed him against the wall. “You think this is a joke? You want to be famous? I’ll make you famous.”
“Twenty seconds!” Cole shouted, hoping to distract Ricky back to the task at hand.
It didn’t work.
Ricky pulled a knife, raising it to the kid’s throat.
A cash register full of bills still in front of me, I was forced to make a choice.
“Don’t,” I said, stepping in just in time.
Ricky glared at me, defiantly pressing the knife forward, drawing a trace of blood. “These fucking people need to learn not to play with us . . .”
A single tear carved its way down the kid’s face. “Please, mister . . . The camera’s broken . . . I won’t say anything . . .”
“This isn’t the plan,” I said. “We’re better than this.”
Cole barked as he and Emily exited the vaults. “Go!”
Ricky lowered his knife. For a second I thought he was gonna let the kid off. But of course, he didn’t. Not Ricky. He faked a step like he was walking away, then swung back and dropped the kid with the butt of his rifle.
Ricky strutted out without looking back. I waited to make sure the kid could stand.
Big mistake.
By the time I made it out, all the commotion of our bikes buzzing off alerted a county sheriff, randomly in town to fill up on gas. He lit up his lights right when we locked eyes, but I wasn’t waiting around any longer to explain.
I burned out the back wheel to do a one-eighty turn, all the smoke from the tire partially obscuring me.
Gearshift. Gearshift. Blow through a four-way stop.
Dodge two trucks. Gearshift onto the highway.
Once there he had no chance. I hit my top speed by the time he had even got to the on-ramp and watched him fade away in the rearview.
But it was too close for comfort.
In the parking lot of a roadside diner hours later, no one spoke. The take was low from the cash I abandoned in the drawer. Ricky was nowhere to be found.
“He does this . . .” Sónia said, trying to hide her sadness with reason. “Ricky . . . He requires space . . . That’s okay . . .”
After Cole paid for the check, he clapped his hands.
“Vegas,” he said. “Let’s take a little break. We lie low, start cleaning some of the money through the casinos. Come back fresh.”
It’s as if Cole read my mind, because I wasn’t telling them about the chase, not after the dye-pack incident.
Two towns over, in another faded motel room with another busted air conditioner, a local news anchor reported on the latest in a string of unusual bank robberies across the Southwest. Behind her on screen, a photograph from a disposable camera catching a bank robbery in action.
The flash caught us. No faces visible. No names. But it was us.
Jules laughed when he saw it. “Told you the youth were gonna get us killed.” Cole didn’t laugh. He watched it once. Then turned off the TV.
We arrived in Vegas in disguise: cheap wigs, fake mustaches, off-brand sunglasses, outfits loud enough to distract but forgettable enough to vanish.
Jules had a trucker hat that read “World’s Okayest Dad.
” Emily wore a denim jacket with rhinestone fringe.
I had a pair of mirrored aviators and a tourist shirt from a roadside reptile zoo.
Dusty . . . well, Dusty just dressed like himself.
We staggered our arrivals. Different days, different doors, different names.
Cole paid cash up front for penthouse suites, high enough to see everything, private enough to not be seen.
The lights were dim, the liquor free, and the air always set five degrees cooler than necessary.
Outside the penthouses, we stayed incognito.
Inside, we were ourselves again. Or whatever versions of ourselves we’d become.
It was my first time in Vegas.
Felt like stepping into someone else’s fever dream. Like walking through a world where the rules didn’t apply to people like me. But by the third hour, I wasn’t observing—I was adapting.
Ricky had reunited with Sónia by then but was more guarded, stuck in his head somewhere between shame and indignation in a way only Sónia was willing to decipher.
He’d disappear for hours to come back angry or wired or dead-eyed, always keeping his distance from me.
Chief looked worse. His balance was off, an uncontrollable shake in his hand—subtle but there.
He leaned more when he stood still. Blinked longer when no one was watching.
All the highballs the waitresses kept bringing him on the casino floor didn’t help.
Cole noticed. Emily noticed. So did I. No one said anything.
I heard later he left the craps tables and went straight to the indoor gun range until it closed.
He needed to hear the shots land where they were supposed to, just to prove to himself he still had value.
“Don’t you find it weird?” Ricky said to Cole and Emily. “That Jules would make a mistake like that?”
They all stopped as I walked into the end of the conversation. Ricky was drunk.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Emily replied, her eyes finding Cole’s.
Ricky wouldn’t let it go. “Not like that . . . Who’s watching the guy that watches all of us?”
He left the room, not saying another word to Sónia or any of us, the slam of the door delivering his final message.
“I just want to have fun!” Sónia yelled from across the room, frustrated.
“I can help you with that.” Jules smiled, unaware there were whispers about him.
And they did have fun. Went to see Bette Midler, I think. Loved it. Jules was the comfort Sónia needed, and Sónia was the distraction Jules needed before he spent the rest of the night in the Spearmint Rhino.
Cole, Dusty, Emily, and I hit the casino floor together.
It bothered me that Ricky would say something like that, but I didn’t know what to do.
So I just went with the flow. Cole had collected what money everyone was willing to give him, to launder with casino chips.
Speaks to the trust we all had in Cole, because people coughed up most of the earnings we’d made to that point.
Slowly but surely, Emily and I drifted away from them, but before leaving, Cole put his arm around me.
“Watch it with her,” he said, tainted with a hint of jealousy.
“Why?” I rebelled.
“She’s not the shortcut you think she is . . .”
At that I left him for Emily, who was watching the whole interaction from afar.
“Have fun . . .” he said, more to himself than to me.
Emily and I disappeared into Old Town Vegas, just the two of us, costumes still intact like we were spending time in someone else’s life for the night.
First stop was a pawnshop tucked behind a shuttered cineplex.
We picked out gifts for each other—ridiculous, sentimental junk.
I gave her a Zippo lighter in the shape of dice.
She gave me a silver chain with no clasp.
Neither of us asked what it meant. We walked down Fremont like locals who’d never left.
Fireworks sparkled across the skyline, and as everyone stopped to watch, Emily pulled me close and kissed me hard.
A few strangers cheered. One old man gave me a thumbs-up.
“What was that for?” I blushed.
“I dunno . . .” She laughed, eyes brighter than the neon. “I wanted to?”
Dinner was at a booth in a smoky lounge where a seen-it-all singer crooned old standards like he still meant them. We ate with our knees touching under the table.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Sure?”
“Is this our first date?” A chuckle grew between us, both knowing what the other was thinking. “We’ve robbed banks together, but this is our first date, right?”
We both let that settle, satisfied in each other’s presence.
“You ever think of leaving?” I asked quietly, calmly.
“I did leave. Once.”
“Why didn’t you stay gone?”
“Cole. I made the mistake of thinking he could change. Besides, if I didn’t come back, I’d’ve never met you. So maybe some things are meant to happen.”
After dinner we traded one show for another, finding the karaoke bar—a dive tucked behind a liquor store where locals sang for each other and nobody clapped unless they were actually impressed.
Emily got up and sang first. She wasn’t good.
Didn’t matter. I believed every note she sang, joining her on the second chorus. Off key, half drunk, fully alive.
We slow-danced under a busted disco ball with six people watching.
A drunk tourist heckled us to “get a room” as he stumbled past the open door.
I told him to shut the fuck up. Emily defused it with a wink and a laugh.
We hooked up behind the karaoke booth curtain.
Later, we climbed a fire escape and shared a menthol on the roof, Vegas still roaring below us.
“You good?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look good.”
I didn’t answer immediately, exhausted by the glow of the night wearing off, the way it always does when the sun rises in Vegas.
“. . . Just tired,” I said. “There’s gotta be a better way to do it.”
“Not one that’s this fun . . . If I just rode away . . . would you follow?”
I looked at her. “Depends how fast you were going . . .”
She nodded. “Too fast for you . . .”
She kissed me again. Slower this time.
That night, Cole walked the casino floor alone.
He was just pulling his chips from the roulette table when someone stepped in beside him.
“Still betting on bad odds?”
Cole didn’t look up. He recognized the voice. “Didn’t know they let pencil pushers like you this close to danger . . .”
Lennox smiled faintly. He was also incognito. No badge. No backup. Just the calm of a man who’s been on both sides.
“You should walk away,” Lennox said. “Game’s over.”
Cole put another stack of chips on the table. “What are you gonna do? Agent Lennox, or whatever the fuck your real name is . . .”
“You can still call me Charlie from Choctaw,” Lennox said, to twist the knife he’d stabbed in Cole’s back years ago. “Hey, I still turn around sometimes when I hear that name. Kind of a reflex when you go by a name that long.”
“We should have known you were a Fed with an alias that stupid . . .”
“Drinks?” asked the cocktail waitress.
“I’ll have a seven and seven,” Lennox said. “Make it a double. My lucky drink . . .” Then he turned to Cole. “What are you drinking?”
“Iced tea,” Cole said softly to the waitress.
“You know we’re the same person. We both want to keep people alive. We both want things to go as planned, no mistakes. We like order, not chaos.”
They both watched as the roulette ball landed on red, and the dealer took Cole’s stack of chips.
“Well,” Cole said, putting another stack of chips on the board. “Are you here to arrest me? Or just talk my ear off like the old days?”
“I’m giving you a chance. And I’m only giving you a chance because you saved my life back in Oklahoma City. I’m not giving you another—”
“I should have left you for dead.”
The spin of the roulette ball distracted both of them. This time when the ball settled, the dealer added chips to Cole’s stack. Lennox added his own chips on the same number as Cole.
“How’d you find me, anyways?”
“Man you never learn, do you? You think I’m the only biker to ever give info to the FBI? We have an informant in your crew.”
When the clatter of the roulette ball ended again, the dealer took both of their chips. Cole finally turned his head, just enough to meet Lennox’s eyes.
“We both agree we live in an unfair world,” Lennox continued. “The system is fucked. This is me trying to correct it. You’re welcome. You can’t outrun what’s coming. We will catch you. And this time, I won’t be covering for you. You’re done.”
Then he finished his drink and disappeared onto the crowded floor like he’d never been there at all.