7
The sun rose over Fresno like a warning.
We rode in fast on separate preplanned routes, matching matte-black helmets, visors down, movements precise.
Downtown was gridlocked, morning rush hour at full churn, construction sites complicating the flow. Horns blared, brake lights bled red down every street. The bank loomed at the corner of an intersection. The glare on the windows at that hour obstructed outsiders’ view inside the lobby.
We’d anticipated this moment. We were ready for it.
The FBI knew a bank was going to be hit—they just didn’t know when.
By dumb luck, it was Murphy who was there that morning, dressed in plain clothes as part of an agency watch team assigned at every downtown bank.
Casually sipping gas station coffee, he kept eyes on the branch manager, the three tellers, and fifteen customers shuffling in line, while he pretended to apply for a loan.
“Whoa. Whoa. New firmware, new board?” Jules hissed onto our comms from a nearby hotel room he used as a makeshift command center. “I’m flying blind here with the security system. I don’t get what happened. They must’ve swapped the panel this week . . .”
We halted our bikes, idling at the meet-up point near the bank entrance. The silence on the comms stretched long enough to feel permanent. Jules’s voice finally spoke what we were all thinking.
“I got a bad feeling about this . . .”
Everyone turned to Cole. He looked back at me with a messianic look, as if acknowledging he predicted this.
There really is an informant among us.
“It’s now or never,” Cole said. “If we back out, that’s it. If we don’t, whatever happens in there . . . There’s no looking back . . .”
I hesitated. “There’s more civilians in there . . . This isn’t some back-road stop-and-rob anymore—”
Cole stared at me like I was speaking a different language.
“You wanna save the world or survive it?” At that moment, as if on cue, the loud rip of forty or so bikes trickled through the traffic jam.
Bikes of all types: big twins, bar hoppers, touring bikes, dual-sports, streetfighters, café racers, even superbikes like ours.
And they were just the first wave.
It was the morning of the largest bike rally in all of Central California.
And it was all part of Cole’s plan.
Lennox was already pacing the street with his team, devising ambush positions around the bank, when he noticed the barrage of motors rolling their way.
Instantly, he knew today was the day. He broke into a sprint, rushing into the nearest hotel breakfast lounge, where multiple law enforcement agencies were staging.
“Move! Move! Perimeter lockdown, now!” he barked.
Scrambled eggs hit the floor as agents dropped forks and bolted from their tables.
Lennox was already on his radio. “I want snipers in the nearest buildings and interceptors on every exit ramp. This is it, people!” Then he turned specifically to the two FBI pilots he brought with him, who had just sat down with their breakfast plates.
“Put those damn waffles down and get that bird in the air!”
Ricky cocked his machine gun. “We’re going in.”
“Fast money?”
“. . . Fast money.”
And that was that. We revved up and rode our bikes through the main doors and straight into the lobby, our form as professional as it had ever been as we dismounted and got to work.
“Get down! Hands where I can see ’em!” Ricky shouted, sweeping his rifle over civilians. “Do you fucking love me? Do you fucking love me? Then don’t fucking look at me! Keep your eyes on the ground! Eyes on the ground!”
Jules came back on our comms. “I can still—Wait . . . Dammit. It’s triggered. We’re hot! I repeat! The alarm is hot!”
But it was too late.
Cole motioned us forward, singling out the manager. “Show me the vault! Show me the vault!”
Emily and I unlatched our saddlebags, then circled back to clear the drawers. That’s when I could tell Emily wasn’t her normal self.
She was finally feeling fear.
Peering through his binoculars, Lennox still couldn’t see anything—anything other than out of the corner of his eye, his subordinates beginning to second-guess him.
“Team Bravo, green light,” Murphy said into his radio. “Suspects are here and in action. I repeat, green light, green light.”
Lennox and the ambush team looked at each other in disbelief.
“. . . Team Bravo? We’re at the wrong bank?
We’re at the wrong bank! Goddamn it! The informant told us the wrong bank!
Everyone move!” Lennox then spoke calmly to Murphy through the radio.
“Stay. In. Character. Let them play their cards. You have backup coming. We want them alive . . .”
Lennox’s voice crackled through Murphy’s earpiece as he watched Sónia zip-tie wrists and force civilians to the marble wall. “Hands behind your back! Now! Now! Now! Now!”
When she got to Murphy, he didn’t resist.
But the second she turned her back.
Murphy’s fingers found the blade hidden in his sock.
Meanwhile, in the hotel room Jules was operating out of, movement on his hallway cams caught his eye—figures in tactical gear stacking outside his door.
His stomach dropped. “They’re here,” he muttered.
“Oh shit, they’re here.” He yanked cords from the wall, smashed the hard drives with the butt of his pistol, scooping up electronics from his desk, then drowning them in the bathtub.
Sparks flew. Plastic shattered. Everything had to go.
“Yo, cowboy! Abort! I’m compromised! Abort!” Jules screamed into our comms.
Dusty sat alone in his semi, parked on a backstreet, motorcycles whizzing by him. He listened to the distress in Jules’s voice and knew he wasn’t kidding. Dusty took a moment to think about how his life was about to change.
“I’m lighting it up,” Dusty’s voice replied back.
He flipped a switch on an improvised remote control device.
A delayed beat—then a blast shattered the skyline.
A half mile away from him a large unfinished highway overpass erupted in chunks of concrete, smoke, and fire, shattering like a felled glacier.
Cars skidded. Pedestrians screamed. Bikers made evasive maneuvers.
Agent Lennox felt the ground shudder, then heard the police dispatcher pulling some of his backup.
“Units required. We have an explosion in downtown.”
The diversion seemed to work. Dusty got out of his truck as if nothing had happened, pulled his hat low, and disappeared into the chaos, boots slapping pavement as sirens wailed behind him.
Back at the bank, we were proceeding as planned. We just hadn’t planned that there would be a new manager.
“Open the safe,” Cole told the manager.
The suppressor at the end of Ricky’s rifle being pressed against the manager’s head briefly stole Cole’s attention. He didn’t like that. But now wasn’t the time to argue with Ricky.
“I swear I don’t know how to open the vault,” the manager cried. “It’s only my second day. I don’t learn how to open the vault until the end of my first week!”
“She’s lying,” accused Ricky.
Chief pushed the manager to the side and started placing charges.
“You got this?” Cole asked. Chief nodded. Cole turned to me. “Get her out of here.”
I led the manager back to the lobby. “It’s almost over. We’re not here to hurt you,” I told her.
Boom.
The vault door cracked open. Smoke and dust rolled like a tide past Chief’s intricate web of spent ordnance.
He read his wristwatch for a few seconds, then gave Cole and Ricky the go-ahead to enter.
Inside, shelves stacked with shrink-wrapped bricks of different currency.
It was everything we were looking for all along. A life-changing amount of cash.
Freedom.
But back at the hotel, Jules was trapped in his room by a handful of tactical agents.
“FBI! Come out, with your hands up!” they yelled, just as Jules flushed his last thumb drive.
“One sec! Just washing my hands!”
Looking through the peephole, Jules realized it was over for him.
“Ah, man, ah, man . . .” No escape options anywhere in sight, he began barricading the door with furniture. “Ya know you guys really caught me with my pants down! Is there something I can help you with?!”
Then the loud revving of a diesel motor came crashing through the wall. As the mortar and drywall settled in the air, Dusty stepped down from the driver’s seat of a large Caterpillar bulldozer he commandeered from a construction site.
“Round it up, chancho! This rodeo’s turned into a goat fuck!” Dusty was out of the room and back into the pandemonium on the street before he even finished his sentence. Jules, never hearing more beautiful words in his entire life, followed behind.
As soon as the last of the cash was secured in the saddlebags, Cole and Chief rose to their feet, expecting to run out of the vault, only to find Ricky’s rifle leveled at them. In his eyes was a strange look they’d never seen before.
“You’re kidding,” Chief said.
“Back down on your knees,” Ricky commanded. “Zip-tie him,” he said to Cole.
“Not like this, man . . .” Cole solemnly reasoned.
“Don’t do it,” Chief said to Cole.
“Do it or I’ll blow his head off,” Ricky responded. “Don’t forget rule number one, no casualties.”
At the same time tensions were high in the lobby. Supervising civilians while a vault is being cleared is always awkward. Sónia, Emily, and I were doing our best to keep everyone calm, but by now we were sensing something was taking too long.
Something was wrong.
“Momma, get in here!” Ricky yelled from the vault, as if confirming our suspicions.
FBI snipers watched through high windows, as Sónia exited the lobby toward Ricky’s voice.
“. . . He can’t take us both,” Chief said to Cole.
Bang.
An explosion of blood burst out of Chief’s thigh, dropping him violently. Before the smoke even cleared his barrel, Ricky had his rifle trained on Cole.
“Don’t make me do it!” Ricky growled. “The next one is right between the eyes . . .”
Murphy had already cut through his ties, and the confusion from the gunfire was enough of a distraction for him to grab Emily. By the time I realized what was going on, Murphy had a pistol to her head, and my gun was aimed in their direction.
“Release your hostages, and I’ll release mine,” Murphy commanded.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the bank manager listening attentively, the terrified look on her face, unforgettable, unforgivable, and begging that I wasn’t going to renege on my promise of no harm.
“Everybody out . . .” I said in defeat. A mad dash began out the door, straight into the arms of the task force accumulating outside, who immediately started apprehending the hostages for questioning.
Sónia arrived in the vault, just as confused as Cole and Chief.
“Zip-tie him and take the money,” Ricky told her.
“What happened to Chief?” she asked, horrified.
“Zip-tie him now!” Ricky yelled, his finger ready to pull the trigger at any wrong move.
Sónia complied out of shock, cinching Cole’s hands behind his back.
“Please,” she said. “Just tell me what’s going on?”
“We have a baby on the way. We need the money more than them—”
“I took care of it,” Sónia replied, full of shame.
“What?”
“There is no baby on the way. Not anymore.”