Remo Went Rogue
Authors: Mike McCrary
Published by Out of the Gutter, an imprint of Gutter Books
Copyright © 2013 by Mike McCrary
Cover by J. T. Lindroos
This is a work of fiction in which all names, characters, places and events are imaginary. Where names of actual celebrities, organizations and corporate entities are used, they’re used for fictional purposes and don’t constitute actual assertions of fact. No resemblance to anyone or anything real is intended, nor should it be inferred.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without the written consent of the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts for the purpose of review or promotion.
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USA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
You can’t do a damn thing alone, so I’d like to thank the people who gave help and hope during this little fun and self-loathing writing life.
First, thanks to Elmore Leonard, Don Winslow, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, Duane Swierczynski, Charlie Huston and Dennis Lehane. You don’t know me, but thank you for what you do. Thanks, in no particular order, to the following writers, bad-asses, good dudes and Book Gods: Blake Crouch, Tom Pitts, Allan Guthrie, Joe Clifford, John Rector, Peter Farris and Johnny Shaw. Thank you for talking books and the publishing world with me, even if you didn’t know you were doing it.
Big, massive, sloppy love to the good folks at MXN Entertainment (Michelle Knudsen and Mason Novick) for never wavering in their help and support over the years. Mason . . . thank you doesn’t cover it, man.
PART I
1
Leslie likes to fuck men.
Sometimes she ends up fucking some dudes that she doesn’t really like.
It happens.
So what?
When you’re a thirty-three-year-old woman living in
New York
and you like to fuck men, you may find yourself bedding a few pricks. Yes, the literal nature of that statement is understood, but you get it. An attractive woman in a demanding job, working ridiculous hours, surrounded by men of loose moral fiber may have to drop her standards in order to get some.
Sex or the high road.
The low road has an impressive win/loss record.
Again, it happens.
All of this swirls around Leslie’s pretty little head as she nudges back and forth on her back. On a desk.
In the dark.
Having sex with one of those previously-mentioned pricks.
It’s not so much that Remo is a prick, really. Actually, she doesn’t even really know him all that well, probably best. What she does know is that he talks while doing the deed.
Like, a lot.
He’s been rambling practically the whole time.
With hump-altered speech Remo tells a story. “There’s this pack of vicious assholes who decide to hit a bank on a random Tuesday . . .”
Remo describes a seemingly normal weekday morning in the big city. Everyday New Yorkers file into a Midtown bank as it opens. Good folk enter before work, grab some cash, make a deposit, bitch about a fee. All walks of life. Men, women, kids. The wealthy, the middle-class, the just-getting-by. A cultural and financial melting pot.
None of them have a clue what’s coming.
A van sits parked across the street.
Six men wait inside the van, dressed for bad things. Armed and ready.
Three of them are the Mashburn brothers. They sit along one side. Dutch, the oldest brother. is both experienced and damned evil. The middle Mashburn is Ferris, a sharp-minded, ice shard of a man. The youngest, a wiry wacko called Chicken Wing.
The other three are hired hands and pals of the Mashburns. On the opposite side of the creepy rape van sit two more members of this crew. Garden-variety crime boys. A slick criminal called Bobby Balls, and a young punk of a bastard called Country.
Their real names escape Remo at the moment.
The final crew member is the driver,Lester, an aging career criminal who’s never moved up in the ranks. Lester looks uneasy.
Uncertain.
Uncomfortable.
Dutch, the obvious leader, gives the nod. Dutch has his craft down, and has developed some simple rules for working jobs.
Rule # 1: He sees no reason to get creative with dead president masks or all that movie horseshit. Be nondescript; don’t give the law something exotic to look into. Hmmm, where do you find this unique, hard to find mask? Run a check on all retailers that might carry masks like it, pull the security camera video and synch it with the register on the date those masks were sold. Any shit-stain who caught five minutes of any of the ten Law & Order episodes last night could piece that together. Just use something to cover your fucking face.
The crew pulls down classic black ski masks.
Rule #2: Don’t use semi-automatics when doing banks. Don’t use a weapon that spits out evidence like a PEZ dispenser. All those shell casings bouncing off the floor looks really fuckin’ cool in the movies. Glocks going crazy, lead flying in slow-mo, But in the real world
—
Dutch’s world
—
it only creates evidence for cops to bag and help them tell a story.
.357s don’t leave casings.
You say, “But what if you need more bullets? You have to reload, Old West style.” If you need more than five guys with seven rounds a piece to do a bank you don’t deserve the take; go suck a dick. Now if the cops join the party, that’s different. The AKs on their backs are for that.
Rule #3: In case of emergency, use AK.
The crew readies the guns. All nickel plated, rubber griped .357 magnums. AKs strapped on their backs.
And, oh yeah, Rule #4: Witnesses are like shell casings. They should not be able to help tell a story.
The van doors bust open and the masked crew pours out, armed to the teeth. One throws down tosses an innocent bystander to the concrete in route to the bank door.
The five men rage into the bank like cowboys from hell.
A relentless rat-tat popping of gunfire echoes from inside the bank. Screams wail behind the closed doors. People on the street scatter in every direction.
Lester watches from behind the wheel. His eyes drop, each pop of gunfire seeming like it physically hurts him. He rubs a small cross hanging around his neck. He hates all of this and he doesn’t even know why. He’s really struggling with this. It’s not like he’s never been around killing or killed anybody before. God knows, that’s not the case. But today for some reason the pounding blasts from inside the bank, the obvious outcome from those blasts, are almost too much for Lester to bear.
A final bone-rattling shot sounds from inside the bank.
Remo powers on with his mid-sex tale, “Sixteen dead. Three point two million gone. Over in two minutes and eleven seconds.”
At some farmland just north of where the hell are we U.S.A, the bank crew digs a massive hole to stash the cash. Large money bags drop in. Dirt falls. Another thought from Dutch, possibly Rule #5. Don’t get caught with the money. This isn’t an international crime crew of sex symbols off the lot at Warner Brothers. They don’t evade laser sensors and they don’t have the capacity to launder that kind of green within a day of stealing it. They need to keep it safe until the heat subsides a bit. The first forty-eight hours are dicey, but after a few days you can get your money and get on with your life. If you get pinched holding bags of money, well, your options are somewhat limited.
The crew holes up in a tiny dump of a cabin in the
New Mexico
mountains, living like the fucking Amish on a bad day. They make it a day, two tops before a swarm of lawmen arrive with zero warning. The cabin is surrounded by police, and they are not in the mood for any shit.
Dutch peels back a rag posing as a curtain. Like a switch is flipped, a balls-out gunfight ignites. Shotguns and handguns punch at the shoddy construction.
Bullets fly in every direction.
Back and forth like a ballistic shit-fit.
Fire begins, spreads into blaze throughout the cabin. The police hold steady. Dutch and the driver, Lester, fly out the door, fire and smoke pouring out behind them.
The cabin goes up like it was newspaper soaked in gasoline.
The police jump on Lester and Dutch.
Dutch looks back at the burning cabin with a knowing sneer. . . .
Remo, in mid-stroke. “Most of the crew dies in the fire, including two Mashburn brothers.”
Leslie flips a light on, one of those bankers lamps with a green shade.
It illuminates her face as she moves back and forth rhythmically. Around the office are a smattering of quickly removed clothes and empty booze bottles. The 30-something intellectual beauty looks up at Remo, completely shell-shocked. He stares down at her. What?
Remo is older than Leslie, by almost ten years, but a damn handsome man with a bar-boy charm that has served him well over the years. It’s been stated before, Leslie does this with pricks and Remo more than qualifies. None of that bothers her right now. Really, it doesn’t.
It’s not that he’s been talking the whole time. Sure, she’d rather the talk be dirty or not at all, but it’s not that.
It’s not even that she is the Assistant District Attorney assigned to prosecute the very bank crew that Remo has been rambling on about.
What bothers Leslie about all this, what’s really throwing a wrench into this potential pleasure fest, is that Remo is one of the top defense attorneys in
New York City
. Sorry, the top defense attorney in
New York City
, and this bank crew, Mashburn brothers, Lester and the others are. . . .