The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (24 page)

Branch manager Donald Ramsey was fond of saying that no one on earth was brave enough or foolish enough to attempt to rob his bank.

He was mistaken.

At 12:57
P.M.
on the first Thursday of December, Owen McKay pushed open the front door of the Palmetto branch and stepped into the lobby.

Owen was a short man, and thin as a hobo’s wallet. His outfit consisted of a cheap overcoat, faded blue jeans, gloves, sneakers, a baseball cap, and sunglasses. If you passed him on the street, the word
odd
might come to mind;
threatening
would not.

He stopped just inside the entrance, took a checkbook from his pocket, and pretended to look at it as he studied his surroundings. It was just as Molly had said. Four tellers side by side behind a twenty-foot-long counter to his left, a glass-enclosed office, empty and silent in the back corner, and two platform officers—customer service reps, Molly had called them—at desks along the left wall. Only three things looked unusual. There were no customers (this was the slowest day of the week, and only a few minutes before midday closing time), no drive-up teller windows (there was no driveway to drive up), and no branch manager (he was attending his weekly Rotary Club luncheon). All these made Owen’s task easier.

The door to the vault was closed. Molly had told him it was usually standing open. A minor glitch—it meant he would require the help of the assistant manager, who was acting as a teller today and was easy to identify since he was the only male in the room besides Owen. Cecil Woodthorpe looked like everyone’s image of a low-level banker: balding, pudgy, and middle-aged, with round eyeglasses and round ears that stood straight out from his head like rearview mirrors.

Owen also located the closed-circuit surveillance camera, mounted near the top of the side wall. Perfect. It was aimed not at him but at the teller area and the center of the lobby. According to Molly, he’d be safe as long as he stayed near the front door.

Ah, Molly.

Owen had loved Molly Fremont from the moment he first saw her in his high school gym class. They’d dated throughout their senior year, and when he joined the army and she enrolled at a community college that fall, the separation seemed only to increase their feelings for each other. A year later, they married, and seven years after that—ten months ago—he took an assignment at an army recruiting center on Oakwood while she left her job modeling sports outfits to take a teller position at the Palmetto Street branch of a regional bank. It was a bad move on both their parts. Their combined salaries barely paid the rent. Three months ago, she had quit her teller job to try to get back into modeling. At twenty-six, she was blond and trim and still looked stunning in just about anything, but she didn’t have an agent anymore, and that industry was struggling like all the others.

One night last month, as they sat in their apartment on the other side of town, picking at their TV dinners and watching CNN’s coverage of a rash of bank robberies a thousand miles away, Molly had an idea.

For weeks afterward, she fiddled with schedules and escape routes and contingency plans, and the final result was Owen standing here now, inside the front door of the bank, with Molly’s checkbook in his hand, surveying the lobby from the corner of his eye and feeling a slight but irritating urge to use the bathroom.

He drew in a long breath, exhaled slowly, removed the glove from his right hand, took a .22 pistol from his overcoat pocket, pointed and aimed, and shot the eye out of the surveillance camera.

The effect was almost comical. Six heads snapped up, every mouth hanging open in stunned disbelief.

“Back up,” Owen shouted. “Back up two steps from your desks. NOW!”

They obeyed immediately. So far, so good, he thought. Molly had told him there was a silent-alarm button at each desk and teller station, but he felt sure no one had yet had time to press one. That was the reason he’d chosen not to use a silencer. A gunshot at close range creates a handy shock effect.

Well, that wasn’t quite true.
He
hadn’t chosen not to use a silencer.
Molly
had. Owen, truth be told, wasn’t much of a planner. What he was good at was shooting things and hitting what he aimed at . . . and taking orders. In the military, he’d had a lot of experience at both. On this occasion, Molly’s orders were clear. All he had to do was follow them.

He threw a quick glance out the door. Nobody in sight. He doubted anyone outside had heard anything—one of the advantages of a small-caliber weapon. Besides, Molly had assured him that the walls themselves were almost soundproof, especially with the thick glass in the door and the absence of windows.

Quickly, Owen threw the deadbolt, yanked down the door shade, and turned again to face the lobby. Behind the teller stations and the CSR desks, Cecil Woodthorpe and the five women were standing rock-still, their backs flat against the walls. One of the ladies had her hands up.

Owen moved to the middle of the lobby, concentrating on the tellers, remembering his wife’s instructions.
Don’t waste time having them empty their cash drawers—the big money’s in the vault. And don’t make them file out into the lobby and lie down on the floor.
Since robbers often order them to do that, Molly had said, there’d been some talk at the bank about installing an additional button near the gate leading out of the teller area. She wasn’t sure if that had yet been done, but she didn’t want to take any chances.

“You,” Owen said to Woodthorpe. “Go to the end of the counter, climb over it, and come out here with me. And make it quick.”

Woodthorpe didn’t move. He seemed to be smirking.

“Now!” Owen said.

The bald man calmly shook his head. “No.”

The second gunshot was as sudden and unexpected as the first. All the women let out little yelps. One of the CSRs folded to the floor in a faint. Cecil Woodthorpe hadn’t moved at all, except for his eyes. They seemed to have grown so wide they might’ve popped from his head.

A neat hole about the size of a collar button had appeared in Woodthorpe’s oversized right ear. Just behind him, a similar hole was visible in the sheetrock of the side wall. Bright blood trickled from his ear onto his white shirt.

“Let’s go,” Owen said, beckoning with the smoking gun barrel.

He didn’t have to ask again. Within five seconds, a dazed Woodthorpe was over the counter and standing at rigid attention. One hand was clapped over his ear. All signs of arrogance had vanished.

“Take this,” Owen said, pulling a folded black nylon duffel bag from its clasp inside his overcoat. “Unlock the vault and fill the bag to the top. Understand?”

The new, attitude-adjusted Cecil Woodthorpe snatched the bag, hurried over to the vault door, and started twirling dials. Even the women seemed to have undergone a change, Owen noticed. They were all visibly trembling and scarcely breathing, eyes pointed straight ahead. All of them now had their hands raised. A little blood is a fantastic incentive, Owen decided. His drill team at the base would probably have won top honors every week if his commander had taken the trouble to shoot a hole in someone’s ear now and then.

The vault door swung open. With barely a pause, Woodthorpe dashed inside and started cramming cash into the duffel. Owen moved to a spot just outside the vault and watched him work. The clock on the wall said 1:02. Right on schedule.

“Big bills only,” Owen called. Woodthorpe, working with great intensity, just nodded. His ear seemed to be bleeding less, a fact that didn’t seem to lessen his newfound eagerness to please.

Owen wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead and reviewed the steps of his plan, ticking them off in his mind.

His biggest worry was Donald Ramsey, the branch manager. Ramsey didn’t usually return from his Rotary lunch until one-thirty or so, but nothing was certain. If he happened to be early, the locked and shaded door wouldn’t surprise him, but if he used his key and encountered the deadbolt, he’d know what was up and would call in the cavalry. Besides, Molly hadn’t wanted him here at all. “Ramsey could hurt us,” she’d said to Owen one night. “He’s tough, and he’s smart too. While I worked there, he did a good job.” Owen had replied, half seriously, “He had good help.”

She had laughed at that, he remembered. God, how he loved hearing her laugh.

He wished she were here with him now.

Owen checked his watch. He’d been inside the bank almost eight minutes. Pretty much what they’d planned on. But he had to be careful not to let down his guard. The next few minutes might well determine whether he would spend his future on a tropical beach making love or in a federal prison making license plates.

“Hurry it up in there,” Owen shouted, although he couldn’t imagine anyone working any harder or faster than Woodthorpe was. The man was a bag-filling maniac.

At that moment something—Owen never knew what—made him turn and look at the platform area on the far side of the room, and what he saw made his heart leap into his throat. The CSR who had fainted hadn’t fainted at all, or if she had, she’d regained consciousness; at this instant, she was propped on one trembling elbow and was stretching her other hand up toward her desktop.

“Get away from there,” Owen roared.

Too late. Her right forefinger was pressed flat against a little red button on the side of her desktop. Owen fired without thinking, putting two bullets into the walnut edge of the desk and neatly cutting the wire that ran from there to the floor. But that was also too late. The alarm, he knew, had already sounded—not here in the bank lobby but in the police station down the street.

Mistake, he thought. Big mistake.

But not critical. Molly had anticipated something like this, the way she anticipated most everything.
Stick to the plan.

He glanced around wildly, making sure nothing else was amiss. It wasn’t. Cecil Woodthorpe, still emptying shelves like a madman, appeared to have ignored the whole incident. The black duffel looked almost full now, bulging at the sides. No one else had moved. The lady who had pressed the button sat on the floor beside her desk, hugging her elbows and staring at Owen with wide brown eyes. She looked amazed to still be alive.

Owen’s mind was whirling.

He tried not to think about the alarm. From what Molly had remembered about the bank’s emergency drills—and from a couple of false alarms she’d seen last summer—it would take the cops at least six minutes to get here. Plenty of time.

“Okay,” he called to Woodthorpe. “That’s enough. Get out here.” The assistant manager hurried through the vault door, breathing hard, and handed over the bag. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the pistol. He probably figured the only thing worse than getting shot would be getting shot twice. Owen opened the bag and examined the contents, burrowing his free hand several layers deep. The duffel was literally stuffed with packets of hundred-dollar bills.

Without another word, Owen zipped the bag shut and backed carefully across the lobby to the door. The room was as quiet as a tomb. He reached the door, raised one edge of the shade with his gun barrel, and peeked out.

The coast was relatively clear. Across the way, an elderly man with a straw hat and a cane was walking a ratty-looking poodle; just down the street to the left, a bread truck was parked underneath a sign that said
LEO’S BAKERY
; on the sidewalk near the truck, a little girl was skipping rope, her breath making white clouds in the chilly air; to the right, near the end of the cul-de-sac, an old gray-haired woman in a purple flowered dress and a ragged coat was pushing a shopping cart full of trash bags. She stopped occasionally to inspect the contents of the garbage cans at the curb and stuff anything interesting into one of her bags.

Owen turned and flicked his gaze over the lobby one last time, then put his ear to the door and listened a moment. No sirens. At least not yet.

Now or never.
He released the deadbolt, heaved a deep breath, and opened the door.

Three minutes earlier, two city policemen had received the call, swerved onto Palmetto Street, and aimed their cruiser west toward the bank. Officer Scott was almost as short as Owen McKay, and considerably wider. The other—Mullen—was so tall and long-faced he’d acquired the nickname Muldoon, from a TV police comedy that had aired long before he was born.

“Don’t forget,” Mullen said, “to mention me to your sister.”

Scott, who had no intention of letting Mullen get within a mile of his sister, gave him a dark look. “You’re not her type.”

“Why not let me be the judge of that?”

“Because I’ve seen your judgment in action,” his partner said, watching the traffic. They were almost there. “Like right now. How about keeping your mind on the job?”

“This call, you mean?” Mullen snorted. “It’s another false alarm, Scotty. You know nobody would rob that bank.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when they both saw, fifty yards away, a short dude in a ball cap and tan overcoat running down the steps of the bank building. The guy was holding a black duffel bag in his gloved left hand and a pistol in his ungloved right. “That must be Nobody,” Scott said, screeching to a stop in the middle of the street.

The suspect saw them and dodged left, putting the parked bread truck between him and the police cruiser. By the time the officers were out of their car and peeking past the truck with guns drawn, the guy was dashing across the cul-de-sac toward a wrought-iron fence between two buildings.
We’ve got him
, Scott thought.
There’s no way out of here.

At that point, three things happened at about the same time: the little girl wisely dropped her jump rope and ducked into the bakery, the old bag lady in the purple dress pushed her grocery cart into the cul-de-sac from across the street, and the dog walker with the straw hat—spotting the fleeing robber—abandoned his poodle, raised his cane, and marched toward the running man as if ready to do battle.

Both the cops and the gunman shouted to the old man to get the hell out of the way. He kept coming. The suspect, without slowing, fired a single shot; the old guy’s hat was snatched off his head as if the wind had taken it, landed ten feet behind him, and rolled into the gutter.