Authors: Nick Stephenson,Kay Hadashi
“I’ll take your share, if you don’t want it.”
The one in the back seat stuck a cigarette in his mouth and was about to light up.
“Hey!” said the man in front, looking back at him. “What’d I tell you about smokin’? No real names, no food, and no butts till the job is done. Take everything out of your pockets except what we need. No evidence. And I do all the talkin’.”
The cigarette was reluctantly put away.
“Where’d you hear about the safe?” the driver asked.
“A dude I know monitors alarm calls at a security company, and the woman is a customer of his company. On the side, he sells customer info for pocket money.”
“Not a bad gig, as long as someone doesn’t finger him.”
“How’d he hear about the money in the safe?” the driver asked.
“He gets bulletins for security changes. One of the bulletins was about her getting a safe installed in her home.” He looked at the driver. “Nevermind. That’s my problem. You just worry about driving.” He looked at the guy in the back seat. “You’re in charge of the brats. Keep ‘em quiet until I say so, then get ‘em crying good and loud.” He turned around again, setting his gaze on the front of the house. “I do the talkin’ on the phone. After we get the safe combo, two of us go to the house. On the way, I’ll call the guy to shut down the home security system for a few minutes so we can get in.” He looked at the guy in the back seat again. “You wait behind with the aunt and kids.”
“My pleasure.”
The driver squirmed in his seat. “Yeah, but once we get the combination, why wouldn’t the mother just call the cops? They could be waiting at the house for us.”
“Cause they’re hostages, and she wants her two little brats back again, safe and sound.”
“How do you know there’s money in the safe if it was just installed?” the driver argued.
“That was in the bulletin my buddy got. An armored car delivery was made to her address one day last week.”
“And if she had only a few hundred clams in there, she’d bring it home herself,” the driver mumbled. “But an armored car would bring a whole lot more than that, right?”
“Exactly.”
They watched the mother leave the house alone and drive off in her luxury sedan.
“You’re right. She left the kids with the sister.”
The leader of the operation opened a shopping bag and handed something to his conspirators. Each got a rubber Halloween mask to wear, images of past Presidents.
“What’s this?” the big guy in the back seat asked.
“We’re wearing masks. You’re Clinton.”
“Ah, come on!” the man complained.
“Yeah, well, I got George Bush,” the driver said, holding the mask up for inspection. He looked at the man in the passenger seat. “What’re you wearing?”
“Reagan. I voted for him twice, so I figured, why not?”
After going through the plan one more time, they put on their masks and checked their pockets for everything they would need, leaving everything else behind.
CHAPTER TWO
June took a small grocery bag to the kitchen as soon as she got home, giving her nieces a cutesy wave. Her sister Amy had the kids at the dinner table with juice boxes.
“Done with rounds at the hospital?” Amy asked from her supervisory position standing over her twin four-year-olds.
“Sorry. Ran a little late,” June said, looking at her sister for the first time. “Is that your latest business suit concept?”
“I’m not sure I like it. Might not make it into the winter catalogue.” Amy tugged at a lapel and straightened a cuff on her business suit. She looked under the table at an active pair of legs. “Ruka, stop kicking Koemi.”
As she prepared to leave, Amy warned her daughters to behave at auntie’s house.
“Where are you staying this weekend?” June asked as Amy grabbed her purse.
Amy waved June away from the kids to talk in private.
“Look, I’ll be at home if anything should come up,” she whispered. “But I’ll have a guest, if you know what I mean.”
“Someone new?”
Amy glanced at her daughters playing with empty juice boxes. “Never mind about that.”
June grinned. “Yeah, we’ll catch up later.”
Amy went to the desk in the corner of the living room. “I got a new phone, and a new number. Too many creeps these days. Major pain in the neck to change contact numbers, too. Which means I have to change them one at a time.” Amy scrawled her new number on a note pad at the desk and tossed down the pencil. “The kids know it already, but make them practice a few times. And as always…”
“Don’t give it out. Yes, I know. Just pick up the kids by six on Sunday. I have a date and don’t want to be late for it.”
“What’s this?” Amy asked in mock surprise. “June Kato has a date? With a man? In the evening? That right there is incentive enough to pick them up early! Wish I could stay and hear about it, but I gotta go.”
With smooches to her daughters and the message from June that everything would be fine, Amy was gone. June turned back to the dinner table and smiled at her nieces.
“Wow! Now that mommy’s gone, we can have some fun!” she told them, smiling brightly.
What she got in return were four big brown eyes looking back at her.
“Okay, what should we do first?”
“We eat our lunch first,” Koemi, the older one said.
“And you eat too,” Ruka said.
“Mommy say make you eat.”
“Oh really?”
She collected the empty juice boxes and tossed them away. She wasn’t even close to being hungry, but needed to find a way to get the girls to eat later.
“Big news!” June said, trying to break the ice with her nieces that were normally much more raucous. “I have ice cream for later.”
“We can’t have ice cream…” one said soberly.
“No sugar…”
“Makes us wiggle…”
“And no juice after dinner…”
“We don’t sleep good…”
“Might wet the bed.”
“I see,” said June, doing her best to suppress a laugh at the tennis match dialogue. “Well, we better follow mommy’s rules, huh? But right now I have a big, big surprise!”
“Mommy gave us homework,” Koemi said. Her legs swung back and forth as she sat on the dinner chair, getting close to returning her sister’s kicks. “Read the books first before we play.”
“Oh? You go to school now?” June asked, repositioning the girls’ chairs further apart.
“Mama gave us books to read.”
“Wow! Can I see one?”
Ruka scampered off to a guest bedroom to where their knapsacks sat on a bed. She returned a moment later with a stack of kids’ books.
“These are my new books…”
“Mine too!”
“Oh, so cute!” June said, slowing flipping through the first book, something with comical pictures of animals speaking in short sentences to each other. “You’re big girls, learning to read now.”
“Just little words,” Koemi mewed in a tiny voice.
“We can write our names.”
“We’ll practice later, okay? I have lots of paper to use.” June looked at the next book, something that looked familiar from her distant past. “These books are so cute!”
She gave them both a book and asked if they could read something to her. While they picked through colorful pages, June put Amy’s new number into her phone, labeling it only as ‘new’. Once the girls had read what they could, June tried again to spring her surprise on them.
“Guess what?” she asked, looking back and forth between them. “Auntie has a big surprise!”
They looked up from their books.
“There’s fish in the pond!”
“Yellow fish?”
“Of course!”
Both the girls jumped down from their chairs and bolted for the back garden.
After feeding the goldfish in the small backyard pond, June worked the energy out of them with several games of hide and seek. Counting to ten one last time, June slipped the phone out of her pocket and made a call.
“What’s wrong?” Amy asked as soon as she answered.
“Nothing. Everything is fine. I just wanted to check the number is all.”
“Did they eat?”
“In just a few minutes. Right now it’s hide and seek.” June heard the girls giggling from their hiding places not far away. “They’re learning to read already?”
“Just stick the books in front of them if they get bored. If you want, you can read the stories to them. They like bedtime stories these days.”
“I heard about the ice cream rule.”
“Give them sugar after dinner and they won’t conk out till dawn.” Amy laughed. “And you really don’t want to give them something to drink in the evening.”
“Unless they find it themselves. But hey, who’s the guy?” June asked, still trying to pry information from her sister, the real reason for the call.
“We’ll talk later, ‘kay? Bye!”
The call ended abruptly.
“You rat…”
June pretended she was surprised when she found the girls in the same hiding places. All three had gotten bored with the game, so they turned back for the sliding patio door that led into the living room.
Just as June looked up, she stopped and grabbed the girls.
CHAPTER THREE
June pulled the girls back and hid them behind her. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded, focusing her eyes dead forward.
“New friends,” a man said. He had a Ronald Reagan Halloween mask over his head.
Standing just outside the patio door, he raised his arm, a pistol in his hand. Two other men in rubber masks raised their hands, also with guns in their grips.
“What the…”
The man posing as Ronald Reagan fired a shot, the aim somewhere past June. The little girls shrieked. June pushed them down onto the patio floor, crowding them under her slender body as best she could.
“Don’t worry,” the man wearing the Ronald Reagan mask said. “The bullet was over your head. If I wanted you dead, you’d be that way. That shot was just to let you know the gun is loaded and that I know how to use it. If you’re smart about this, you’ll be just fine.”
Both the girls were crying. June looked up, still shielding her nieces while trying to comfort them. “Why are you in my home?” June shouted.
“Get up,” one of the men demanded. The largest of the three, he wore a Bill Clinton mask.
“Leave us alone!”
The large man leveled his pistol at her. Still lying on top of her nieces, she had no idea of what to do. With three pistols aimed at her, she decided laying still was best. She kissed the backs of the girls’ heads and whispered soothing words.
“Get up,” Clinton insisted.
“Leave them alone.” Her voice changed to a quiet, steadier tone when she looked up at him. “I’m warning you…if you hurt them there would be no end to the world of pain I’d lay on you.”
Clinton took a step and stood at her head. He reached his gun hand down to her, June lowering her face as the gun got close. Laying her face on one of the girl’s shoulders, she felt the muzzle of the pistol press against the back of her head. “Try me,” he said.
“They’ll be just fine,” Reagan told her. “It’s you that we’re concerned about.”
Unable to watch what was going on, June heard steps around her.
One of them began talking slowly. “Tell the brats to park it on the couch. If the three of you do exactly as you’re told, everything will be just fine. Try to get clever and problems will start. Understand?”
June kept her eyes down, listening to her nieces whimper. In the calmest voice she could muster, she spoke quietly to the girls.
“Girls, we’re going to play a game with our new friends. Number One rule, be very good girls. Understand?”
They nodded in unison, sniffling tears.
“Number Two rule, only talk to me, okay?”
They nodded.
“Last rule, only listen to me, and not them. Don’t do anything unless I tell you, okay?”
“Auntie…”
“Shh.” June hushed her voice to a whisper. “Be quiet, baby. I want both of you to sit on the couch and be very quiet. In a few minutes you can watch TV while you eat your lunch.”
When she felt the muzzle retreat from the back of her head, June pushed up from the patio floor and shooed the girls in the direction of the couch. They got there at a gallop, crowding together at one end, their sobs turning to soft whimpers and sniffles.
Once they settled, June was led into the house, a gun pressed up against the back of her head by Clinton.
Through years of self-defense training, something she still trained at every Sunday afternoon, she knew a way to disarm and disable a man holding a gun to her back. But the method didn’t include two other armed men. The likelihood she could disarm all three without a shot being fired was nil. And she just wasn’t going to put the kids at risk while attempting something with such low odds of success. She gave up on the idea, at least for the moment.
“Stop,” the large man behind her commanded.
She had to comply, but she would also ask questions. The more information she had, the better she would be able to defuse the situation. Standing directly in front of the kids in the middle of the living room, she tried to offer a reassuring smile to them.
“What is going…”
“Shut up.” Ronald Reagan stood a few feet away and aimed his gun at her chest. “Georgie, do your thing.”
It was obvious to June that Reagan was the boss.
Clinton kept his gun at the back of June’s head, pressing hard to make the point it was there. Off to the side, George Bush pocketed his pistol. He moved carefully toward June, one step at a time. From his back pocket, he pulled several loops of heavy plastic zip ties.
The sight of the plastic ties forced up stomach acid, washing the back of her mouth. June had felt the pinch of ties against her skin before, a time that ended in horror. She forced her mind away from the ties, and tried her best to settle her nerves.
Standing erect, she had more options to choose from than prone on the floor. Long her favorite weapon, she balled one hand into a fist, slightly hidden behind her hip, the side away from the man with the ties. She knew exactly what she could do, having trained for something like this a few times in the past. However, that was only training, not real life, and not with four year old nieces only a few feet away. Or so many guns aimed at her. Frustrated she could do nothing, it took all her strength just to stand still.