by Diane Kelly
Chapter Three
Phase One: Complete
Smokestack
One of them had a personal score to settle. The other had his dignity to avenge. But Smokestack? Heck, he was just along for shits and giggles. So far there’d been quite a few giggles thanks to that special banana nut muffin he’d eaten earlier.
Cannabis. The breakfast of champions.
He might have no education and no job training, but he was a master at manipulation. Hell, for two years he’d had his parents convinced he was attending college when in reality he’d dropped his classes each semester, got a refund of the tuition they’d paid, and spent his days—and his parents’ money—at pool halls and strip clubs. But that money had all been spent now. He’d managed to snag a credit card a drunk had dropped under the next table at a strip club, but that was a short-term solution. Sooner or later the guy would realize he’d lost the card and it would be deactivated.
Convincing the other two to rob the bank had been a cinch. Both were down and out, throwing themselves a pity party when they’d gone out for beers after last night’s meeting. All he’d had to do was play on their fragile egos, convince them they’d been treated unfairly, and persuade them to fight back against the injustices they’d suffered.
“You were victims!” he’d exclaimed with outrage. “Only a couple of total pussies would take that lying down.”
He’d suggested this little escapade because he liked to start fires. The fact that he’d also get a one-third share of the take was icing on the cake.
Without an education, steady job, or discernible abdominal muscles, it was hard enough getting laid. The girls he went after tended to be streetwise, less gullible. Add in the fact that his crash pad was his childhood room in his parents’ house, and he was constantly getting derailed. But he and his cohorts had come away from the bank with nearly three grand. The other two didn’t know it yet, but the bank was just the beginning. With any luck, by the end of the day he’d have enough cash to buy himself a year’s supply of chronic, a lap dance from redheaded Ruby at club Blue Balls, and a new apartment so that he could finally move out of his parents’ place.
Yeah. Things were definitely on track now.
Chapter Four
Hop on the Bus, Gus
Megan
I punched the gas on my cruiser. Seth looked over from where he hung from the fire truck, a perplexed expression on his face as I sped away from the curb. Of course he knew nothing about the bank robbery. I’d fill him in later—assuming, of course, that the robbers didn’t fill with me lead. In that case he’d just have to read about it in the paper.
The woo-woo-woo of my siren acted like an electronic cheerleader, telling me to Go! Go! Go! before the robbers got away with two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar!
Fueled by adrenaline, I hooked a right on Rosedale, rocketing down the street as drivers pulled to the right to let me by. As much as I hated to admit it, I liked the sense of power my authority gave me. As a child I’d been helpless to stop the bullies who’d teased me about my stutter. But with my badge, weapons, and cruiser, I sure as hell wasn’t powerless now.
I sped past a bus stop where an inordinate number of people seemed to be disembarking. But there was no time to ponder the situation. I had bank robbers to catch. I only hoped the robbers would realize resistance was risky and surrender quickly. On the bright side, if they decided to come out of the bank with guns blazing, at least it was a pleasant day to die.
A quick prayer couldn’t hurt, right?
Less than a minute and a Hail Mary later, my cruiser whipped into the bank parking lot, tires squealing as I braked to a quick stop. Screech!
My pulse thrummed and throbbed, and a sticky, anxious sweat coated my skin. I yanked my gun from my belt and slid out of the car, letting Brigit out of the back and ordering her to stay by my side. Her unique skills could be useful in taking a suspect down or chasing them should they attempt to flee. Still, as always when I deployed her, my heart squeezed a little. Sure, she was a tool, a piece of equipment designed to assist me in my work. But she was also a sentient creature, a living being, not to mention my partner, roommate, and fuzzy-wuzzy buddy. The decisions I made could put her life at risk. If anything happened to her, could I ever forgive myself?
I forced the thought from my head. I couldn’t think about that now. The two of us had a job to do.
With my K-9 partner by my side, I hunkered down and ran as fast as I could to the brick wall next to the front doors, plastering my back flat against it.
What was going on inside?
Had the men who’d held up the bank taken hostages?
Had anyone been hurt?
I pushed the button to call dispatch. “What’s the status at the bank?”
“We don’t know,” the dispatcher said. “We got a quick call from someone on a cell phone two minutes ago but the call dropped.”
Dammit! Brigit and I were working blind here.
A second cruiser pulled into the lot. Officer Spalding. Thank God. Spalding was a stocky black officer with ten years under his belt. Just the man you wanted to have your back.
He slipped from his cruiser, readied his weapon and bullhorn, and crouched down behind the open door of his car. Raising the bullhorn to his mouth, he aimed it at the front doors of the bank and calmly said, “Law enforcement has surrounded the building. Come out with your hands in the air.”
Trembling, I crouched next to Brigit, whispered “good girl” to let her know she was doing well, and aimed my gun at the door in case the robbers decided to come out shooting. Please, please, please, dear Lord! Don’t let that happen! Truth be told, my gun skills sucked. Having been a twirler in my high school marching band, I was much better with my baton. Problem was, a baton was of limited use. It required your target to be within striking distance. While I had a Kevlar vest to stop bullets, Brigit was unprotected. She’d make an easy target. My heart squeezed again, even harder this time. Please don’t let Brigit get hurt!
A moment later, the glass door opened a few inches, then banged shut again.
What was happening?
Were the robbers scrabbling with innocent customers?
If so, it was my job to stop it before anyone got hurt.
Gulping back the cantaloupe-size lump of fear that had formed in my esophagus, I gave Brigit the order to follow me, ran to the door, and yanked it open, dashing inside.
Two screams sounded in stereo. “Aaaah!”
The first scream came from an elderly man who was having trouble opening the door from his electric scooter. The second came from me as I tripped over the scooter and rolled in an inadvertent somersault over the tile floor of the foyer, through the open inner door, and into the main room of the bank, praying all the while that my gun would not accidentally discharge, especially since the barrel was now shoved up under my left boob.
When I stopped rolling, I sat where I’d landed on my ass, pulled my gun up to sight, and scanned the room over it. Everyone I could see had bewildered expressions on their faces and their hands in the air. None wore pantyhose over their heads or held a weapon.
“Where are the robbers?” I hollered as Brigit trotted up next to me.
“They left,” said the old man, backing up with a beep-beep-beep and pulling his scooter up next to me with a zzzzzip. “They ran out the door right after they caught a teller on her phone with 9-1-1. They slapped the phone out of her hand and took off.”
He pointed across the space. I followed his gnarled finger to a young, fair-haired teller who’d gone hysterical, shrieking and crying despite her coworkers’ best attempts to quiet her down.
I looked back to the man. “Did you see which way they went?”
“Sure did.” This time he pointed out the door and to the right. “They ran off that way.”
“How many were there?”
“Three.”
“Were all of them armed?”
“I’m not sure. One of the men stood
outside the front doors so I didn’t get a good look at him. The man who waited inside the doors had a rifle. The one who gave the note to the teller never pulled out a weapon as far as I could tell. He had his hand in his pocket, though, and there was something in the shape of a pistol in it.”
I pulled myself off the floor and addressed the startled crowd. “Everyone stay put for now. We’ll need to get your statements.”
Giving Brigit the command to follow me once more, I headed back outside and told Spalding what was going on. “I’m going to see if my partner can track the robbers.”
Spalding nodded. As he walked toward the building, I instructed Brigit to follow the robbers’ trail. She put her nose to the ground and began to sniff and snuffle her way across the lot in the direction the man had pointed. While Brigit was not trained to track a particular person, she was trained to detect where an area had been recently disturbed and to follow that path to the culprits.
Snuffle-snuffle. Snuffle-snuffle.
While she advanced across the lot and onto the sidewalk with her head down, I trailed along directly behind her, acting as her eyes, watching for cars or people who might get in her way or pose a risk. I ordered her to halt at a corner, raised my hand to stop an approaching minivan, then gave my partner the signal to continue tracking.
A block down, the large group of people I’d noticed on my drive to the bank milled about at the bus stop. One of them, a short, skinny thirtyish man, wore a city of Fort Worth bus driver uniform. When he spotted me and Brigit approaching, he waved to get our attention and hollered, “Three men with a rifle just done hijacked my bus!”
Chapter Five
Gone with the Wind
Brigit
When the trail on the ground ran cold, Brigit stopped and raised her snout in the air.
Sniff-sniff.
She’d been following three male scents, each with a distinctive aroma. One smelled like some type of adhesive. The second smelled of mentholated shaving cream. The third reeked of gasoline and bananas and marijuana. All of the scents dissipated at this spot. Either the men had climbed into a vehicle or Scotty had beamed them up to the starship Enterprise. Regardless, there was nothing more the dog could do.
She plopped her butt down on the ground and stared straight ahead, giving her passive alert as she’d been trained to do. She also curled her tail tightly against her body. With all these people milling about willy-nilly, there was a good chance one of them might step on her tail if she wasn’t careful. Brigit knew from experience that people often didn’t look where they were walking. If they didn’t step on a dog’s tail, they stepped in its poop. Really, humans could be so stupid sometimes. You wouldn’t catch a dog doing something so dumb. But, then again, the species Canis familiaris was superior in so many ways to mere Homo sapiens. The poor things sported only patchy hair, requiring them to augment with clothing. Their teeth were incapable of ripping through thick meat, requiring them to use forks and knives. Their vision and hearing were vastly subpar, too. Brigit pitied the lowly creatures.
Her partner Megan reached down and gave her a scratch on that sweet spot on the back of her neck. “Good girl.”
Brigit risked a quick tail thump of appreciation and took the liver treat Megan held clenched between her index finger and thumb. My kingdom for an opposable thumb. It was the only thing about humans the dog envied.
Chapter Six
Like Candy from a Baby
The Switchman
Hot damn, this feels good!
All his life he’d done the right things. He’d told the truth. Worked hard. Ate his vegetables—even those disgusting, squishy, boiled Brussel sprouts his mother had foisted on him.
And where had being a good person gotten him?
Nowhere.
But he’d changed all that today. In just a matter of minutes he’d gone from nowhere to on his way. Hell, he’d never even held a gun before today. What a rush! He’d felt powerful. In control. But most of all, he felt vindicated.
Smokestack might have cajoled him into the bank heist, but he’d been right. Only a wimp would accept being tossed out on his ass without fighting back.
Nice guys finish last.
No more Mr. Nice Guy.
The Switchman sat back in his seat on the front row of the bus and slapped his knee. “Who knew robbing a bank and hijacking a bus would be so easy?”
Smokestack, who sat directly across the aisle, sniggered. “Told ya.”
Smokestack had also claimed that ninety percent of crimes went unsolved. The Switchman figured his partner had pulled that number either out of the air or out of his ass. He hadn’t called the guy on it, though. It didn’t matter what the odds were of getting caught. Once he’d decided to go through with this plan of retribution, there was no way he’d turn back. He’d laid out a whole new course for himself and he couldn’t wait to see where it would take him.
Chapter Seven
The Buck Might Stop Here but the Bus Doesn’t
Megan
The bus driver squinted, as if doing so would somehow help him better see the mental vision of the bus-jackers in his mind. “All three wore sunglasses and hats with ear flaps. The taller white guy wore a plaid flannel one with button-down flaps. The black man wore a tan one with fleece on the edges. The shorter white guy wore a knit one with those yarn braids hanging down the sides. His hat was green with big eyes on top.”
“Una rana,” clarified a Latina woman who stood at the front of the crowd that had gathered around me.
“A frog?” I’d learned some basic Spanish, and obtained my Spanish surname, from my father. From my red-haired Irish American mother, I’d inherited a tendency to freckle and that quick temper I mentioned.
“Sí,” the woman replied.
I jotted some notes on my pad and looked up again. “What about the rest of their clothes?”
The people exchanged uncertain glances.
“Loose windbreakers, I think,” said the bus driver.
“No,” insisted a blonde woman with a chubby-cheeked toddler on her hip. “They were wearing oversize sweatshirts.”
“No no no.” A gray-haired man raised a palm. “I’m sure they were in sports jerseys.”
“Which teams?”
The man who’d been so sure only a second ago now seemed uncertain, offering only a shrug in response.
I sighed inwardly. “Can we at least agree on a color?”
No consensus there, either. The responses ranged from dark green to navy blue to black. It wasn’t surprising that the witnesses had different takes. Eyewitness testimony tended to be unreliable. Memories malfunctioned under surprising or stressful situations. People tended to be more concerned about saving their own lives than making mental notes of the criminals’ fashion choices.
The only thing the crowd agreed on was which direction the bus had gone.
“That way,” they said in unison, pointing off to the east.
“What was the bus number?” I asked the driver.
“Five ninety-three.”
“Do the buses have LoJack?” I asked. “Or some other kind of tracking device?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” the man said. “I mean, who’d steal a city bus?”
Who, indeed? A bus wasn’t exactly the typical getaway vehicle. Robbers usually tried to make a quick and subtle exit. Riding off in a large, lumbering vehicle was a bold move. And the bolder a criminal was, the more likely it was that things would not end well.
“You said the men had a rifle,” I noted. “Which one of them was carrying it?”
“The black man in the tan hat.”
I saw no harm in giving the man some details. “The men who took your bus robbed a bank down the street first.”
His jaw fell slack. “Holy cow!”
I squeezed the button on my shoulder mic to speak with dispatch. “Be on the lookout for city bus number five nine three. It was hijacked at the corner of Rosedale and South Henderson by the men who robbed th
e bank. Suspects are armed. Repeat—suspects are armed.”
The dispatcher responded. “We’ll get a chopper in the air.”
I collected contact information from the people who’d been riding the bus, thanked them for their time, and turned to the bus driver. “The detective who gets assigned to the case will want to speak with you. What’s your cell number?”
“I could give it to you,” he said, “but it wouldn’t do any good. I left my phone on the bus. One of the riders had to lend me her cell to call in the hijacking.”
A squad car pulled up to the curb. Officer Hinojosa sat at the wheel. He unrolled his window and cocked his head in question. “Heard someone stole a city bus?”
“Crazy, huh?”
“Must be spring fever. You need some help here?”
“Thanks,” I told him, “but I’ve got it.”
“All righty, then. Later.” He lifted his fingers off the steering wheel in a casual good-bye gesture, cast a glance over his shoulder, and pulled back into traffic.
I gestured for the bus driver to follow me. “Come with me to the bank. A detective should be there shortly, and I’ll see that you get a ride back to the city bus depot.”
After I clipped Brigit’s leash onto her collar, she stood and followed me and the bus driver back to the bank, her nails click-click-clicking along the pavement.
When we arrived at the bank, I found several other officers, including Mackey, working crowd control, keeping customers and looky-loos at bay until the detectives and crime scene techs could arrive and do their jobs.
“Fire cool off already?” I asked as we walked past Mackey. “What did you do, ask it on a date?” Okay, so it was a dig, and a lame one at that. But the guy never missed an opportunity to point out my shortcomings or give me crap. I was only returning the favor.
“You missed out,” he snapped, treating me to another smirk. “Turns out the fire was intentionally set.”
Arson, huh? Interesting, sure, though arson crimes fell under the jurisdiction of the fire department. They had their own team of investigators who were specially trained in fire science and could identify accelerants.
