Confessions of a Bombshell Bandit

by Gemma Halliday

  Here’s what critics are saying about

  Confessions of a Bombshell Bandit:

  "I adore Gemma Halliday's 'Confessions Of A Bombshell Bandit’… another short story that has me putting the author's name on the top of the list the next time I go book shopping because I love this author's voice! I love unrepentant Carrie in all her glory and I love this story."

  - Mrs. Giggles, Book Reviewer

  "Gemma Halliday’s story will leave the reader howling with laughter! This delightful tale is exceptionally clever as the reader is lulled into accepting Carrie’s viewpoint. Well done!"

  - Kwips and Kritiques Book Reviews

  Here’s what critics are saying about

  Gemma Halliday's books:

  "A saucy combination of romance and suspense that is simply irresistible."

  - Chicago Tribune

  “Smart, funny and snappy, SPYING IN HIGH HEELS is the perfect beach read!”

  - Fresh Fiction

  "Gemma Halliday writes like a seasoned author leaving the reader hanging on to every word, every clue, every delicious scene of the book. It’s a fun and intriguing mystery full of laughs and suspense." - Once Upon A Romance

  * * * * *

  CONFESSIONS OF A

  BOMBSHELL BANDIT

  by

  GEMMA HALLIDAY

  * * * * *

  ebook Edition

  Copyright © 2006 by Gemma Halliday

  http://www.gemmahalliday.com

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  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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  * * * * *

  CONFESSIONS OF A BOMBSHELL BANDIT

  * * * * *

  All I ever wanted was a little freedom. They say money can't buy everything, but that's not entirely true. Money buys you freedom. Freedom from worry, freedom to retire, freedom from the mortgage monster. Freedom to pick up and fly off to the Bahamas, should you get the tropical urge. Or, in my case, freedom to park your car on the street without worry that the repo man will tow it away by morning.

  My best friend, Quinn, majored in psychology at UCLA and she says my obsession with this whole money-equals-freedom thing probably stemmed from a deep rooted issue in my childhood. She could be right. When I was four years old my father went to prison for holding up a convenience store in North Hollywood. He robbed the Indian clerk at gunpoint and left with thirty-two dollars and sixty-one cents before his Volkswagen Beetle sputtered and died two blocks away. He got five years for armed robbery.

  While inside, he got into a fight with another inmate over the Sunday mystery meat and stabbed him with a plastic spork. They added another five years to his sentence. While he was serving those out, a riot broke out in my father’s cell block, which ended up with a guard getting killed and everyone in cell block D got another four years.

  By the time I was eighteen and finally leaving my mother’s cigarette-stained doublewide on the college scholarship I’d worked my butt off for, my father was doing his last six months in San Quentin. That is until he was caught smuggling contraband bubble gum into the yard and held over for another eighteen months. Which quickly stretched into three years when he refused to do the mandatory ten minutes of jumping jacks per day, resulting in an altercation with an overweight guard who couldn’t do a jumping jack to save his life.

  So you see, the price of my father's freedom was thirty-two dollars and sixty one cents.

  As for me, my trappings are less penitentiary but no less constraining. I thought a college education would buy me some freedom. Nope. Just student loans. Quinn, who rides public transportation – an almost unheard of phenomenon here in Los Angeles – says that having a car gives me freedom. Nope. Just a car payment that I can't afford, gas prices that go up every three seconds, and a game of cat and mouse with a repo guy who looks like Harvey Keitel in coveralls. And Lynette, my co-worker with a mortgage, an out-of-work husband, and two kids in diapers, says that being a single twenty-something renting a one bedroom apartment in Chatsworth should be all the freedom any woman needs. To me it just means having to cash in my meager paycheck the first of the month, signing 90% over to the apartment manager, Mr. Chen, and spending the remaining 10% on lots of Top Ramen for one. Not my idea of footloose and fancy free.

  Then again, neither was an eight by nine cell, which is why I made Quinn go over our plan one more time.

  “You’re going to leave the car idling, then we loop around on Pico and take La Cienega straight down to the ten. No stopping.”

  Quinn nodded, her eyes shinning as her hot pink bangs bobbed up and down in the seat beside me.

  “Here, Carrie.” Lynette reached her arm between the console and handed me a .22. I checked the chamber. Fully loaded.

  Lynnie handed another gun to Quinn, who twirled hers like a wild west sharpshooter, almost dropping it on the upholstered seat of Lynnie's mini van.

  “Ready, ladies?” Quinn asked.

  Lynnie and I nodded as one.

  Quinn pulled her Marilyn Monroe mask on. Lynette and I followed suit, becoming Mamie Van Doren and Jayne Mansfield. My vision instantly blurred as I tried to see out the tiny plastic eye holes.

  “Just like we rehearsed,” Quinn instructed. “They’ll be so distracted, they won’t even know what hit them.”

  “Right,” I said. Lynette nodded.

  Then we all stripped down to the matching black and pink polka dotted bikinis we’d purchased at Wal-Mart the day before. We tore open the mini van doors, streaking across the parking lot of the Los Angeles Mutual Bank on Fairfax and Pico, guns drawn.

  Quinn was the first to hit the front doors. She plowed in, her gun stuck out in front of her like an Al Pacino movie.

  “Everybody on the ground, hands behind you heads! Nobody moves, and nobody gets hurt. I’m fucking serious!” She waved her gun in the direction of a guy in a Jerry Garcia tie and Dockers who was making a move for his cell phone. He froze, dropping to the floor along with the other people in line on their lunch break.

  Lynette came in a close second behind Quinn, aiming her gun at the security guard by the door who looked like he’d just started shaving yesterday. His wide eyed gaze bounced between Lynette's boobs, barely contained by the triangles of polka dotted fabric, and her gun, leveled at his chest, not sure if he should be scared or turned on.

  I came in behind Lynette, making my way across the floor of stunned people to the third teller window on the left. I set my plastic, flowered beach tote on the counter and pulled it open.

  The man
behind the counter stared at me, his jaw stuck in the open position, eyes looking from the tote to my generous size C chest, the one thing I’d been happy to inherit from my mother.

  “Hi, there” I said. “Empty the drawer into my bag, don’t even think of pushing your panic button, and keep your hands where I can see them. And,” I added as an afterthought, “stop staring at my tits.”

  Score one for the Bombshell Bandits.

  * * *

  We were making good time, the warm desert sun beating down on my face as the wind flipped my loose hair back over my shoulders. Not that we had a schedule. Not that we were really going anywhere in particular. The man in the seat beside me held the tiniest hint of half smile on his face as he looked at me across the console.

  "So," he said, his eyes laughing, "you're telling me that you just woke up one day and decided to start robbing banks?"

  I bit my lower lip and looked out the front windshield, watching the barren landscape fly by us. "Well, no. That's not exactly how it happened."

  I could feel him watching me, his eyes intent as his hands gripped the steering wheel of his black jeep. The top was down, warm, dry air swirling around us as the speedometer registered ninety. "So?" he asked.

  "So what?"

  "So, spill it. What made you turn to a life of crime?" I could hear the hint of humor in his voice again.

  "It's a long story," I answered truthfully.

  He grinned at me, gesturing to the wide open stretch of road ahead of us. "We've got all the time in the world, baby."

  I couldn't help it. I felt the corners of my mouth curve up. We did, didn't we? "You really want to know?"

  His eyes crinkled. "I want to know everything."

  I took a deep breath. "Okay. You asked for it."

  * * *

  Banks have always been some of my favorite places. I love the hushed tones, the calm in the air, the smell of crisp dollar bills being counted out in neat little piles. In a world where everything is debit cards, travelers checks, and automatic transfers, real money is hard to come by. Unless you're in a bank.

  Between a father in prison and a mother in a doublewide, cash was scarce growing up. And what we did have didn't take more than an empty Folgers can to hold. I was seven the first time I went into a bank. My great aunt Harriet had choked on a Dorito while watching Judge Judy and died at the ripe old age of 94, leaving my mother her collection of glass rodeo clown figurines and four hundred dollars in the form of a check from her estate attorney. I remember standing in line with my mother waiting to cash her check and staring at the wall of brochures that touted the bank's services. Retirement plans. College loans. Home loans. 'Finance your next vacation with a second mortgage' the brochure advised, showing a picture of two happy people, hand in hand on a white, sandy beach that belonged in a Corona ad. I decided then and there that banks were the places where dreams were made.

  It's not surprising that as soon as I graduated from college I took a job at Los Angeles Mutual Bank, home of the famous L.A. 'Moo' dancing cow ads. And I would have probably been content for many years with my just-getting-by life there, too, if it hadn't been for Mr. Leeman.

  "So," the woman across from me said, leveling her even gaze at me above stylish wire rimmed frames. "What exactly is the issue you have with Mr. Leeman?"

  I looked down at my hands, twisting themselves together to gather courage. "He's inappropriate."

  The woman, district manager for L.A. Mu, raised an eyebrow at me. "Inappropriate how?" she asked "Please elaborate?"

  I took a deep breath. "He calls me 'muffin.'"

  "Muffin?"

  I nodded. "And 'sugar cakes' and 'honey buns' and sometimes even 'dumpling pie.'"

  The district manager pursed her lips, but it was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

  So, I plowed ahead.

  "And it's not even that he just calls me these degrading things, but he does it to my chest. He always talks to my chest."

  The DM looked down at my chest. Luckily, I'd had the forethought to dress in a high necked sweater.

  "Now, I've always been a sticks-and-stones kind of girl," I continued. "So, I've tried to shrug it off. But, last Monday he…" I paused. I did another deep breath. "He touched me."

  This got the DM's attention. "Touched you?" she asked leaning forward, her pen hovering expectantly over her clipboard.

  I nodded again. "Yes. He…" I paused, trying to think of a genteel way to say this. Then gave up. There was nothing genteel about it. "He grabbed my ass."

  She narrowed her eyes at me. "I see. She scribbled something on the clipboard.

  "I don't want to make waves," I assured her, knowing that the last person who'd complained against the all powerful Leeman had been transferred to the South Central branch of L.A. Mu, where she had to go through a metal detector every morning, "but I just want him to stop. It's… inappropriate."

  "I see," she repeated. Still scribbling.

  "We all went to the sensitivity training session last month and they said we had a responsibility to the team to report any inappropriate behavior."

  "Uh huh."

  "So, um, I'm reporting it," I said, craning my neck to see what she was writing. 'Grabbed my ass' seemed like a pretty quick thing to jot down and she was now working on paragraph three.

  She quickly slapped a hand over her clipboard, obscuring her notes.

  I cleared my throat. "Right. So, um, I just want him to stop. Okay?"

  "Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Miss Cabot. I'll look into it."

  Hmm. I noticed she hadn't actually said what she'd do. I rose and shook her hand, trying in vain to get a look at her notes, then hopped in my little red Civic (parked two blocks down and behind a dumpster to avoid Mr. Repo) and left the district office for my own L.A. Mu branch, where, I realized looking at my dash clock, I was already five minuets late for my shift. I hated having to tattle on my lunch hour.

  * * *

  "So, what did she say?" Lynette asked. "Are they going to fire The Octopus?"

  Quinn rolled her green eyes up toward her spiked hair. Blue today. "Geeze, Lynnie. The guy grabs Carrie's ass and suddenly he's an Octopus?"

  "He touched my booty, too! In the break room yesterday. My husband hasn't even had his hands on my booty in six weeks," Lynette mumbled wistfully.

  "TMI, honey." Quinn flicked cigarette ash onto the pavement behind L.A. MU. "So, what did she say?"

  I took a long sip from my Diet Coke before answering. Ever since I'd gotten back to my teller window (ten minutes late, Mr. Leeman had irritably pointed out) I'd been running the conversation with the DM through my head. Three hours later, on our mandatory five minute coffee break, I was no closer to a conclusion. "She said she'd look into it."

  "What does that mean?" Lynette asked, popping the rest of her fat free muffin into her mouth. After dropping two babies in twenty months, Lynnie lived on a fat-free diet. "Does that mean he's going to get fired? He should get fired. He's a total perv."

  "And he talks to my chest," I reminded her.

  "He talks to all our chests," Quinn added, making the most of her bee bites in a low cut, V- necked blouse today.

  "God, what I wouldn't give to see him fired." Lynette got a far away look in her eyes, imagining a Leeman-free workplace. I had to admit, the thought filled me with the warm fuzzies, too.

  David, the security guard, stuck his head out of the back door. He was clean shaven, clean-cut, and I'd bet his butt cheeks squeaked when he walked, he was so clean. Rumor had it he'd wanted to join the army – hence his quarter-inch crew cut – but they'd turned him down because the vision in his right eye was only 50%. Lucky us, they let him walk around our branch with a gun instead.

  "Break's over, gals."

  "Thanks, tiger," Quinn said, giving him a wink. David blushed clear to his blond roots.

  "Oh, and Carrie," he added. "Leeman wants to see you in his office. The District Manager is here."

  Lynette raised
an eyebrow at me. "Wow. That was fast."

  Yeah. Almost too fast. I bit my lip. Then realized I'd been doing that a lot lately and made myself stop, knowing it'd look like chewed hamburger by the end of the day if I kept this up.

  Quinn crushed her cigarette beneath the toe of one snakeskin pump and we followed her back into the bank. Lynnie and Quinn took their places at the first and second teller windows, switching out their 'next window please' signs. I passed my window, instead swerving right into Mr. Leeman's big, glass office in the back corner of the bank. Leeman was standing beside his massive oak desk, his bald head shining in the glare from the fluorescent lights. His pencil thin mustache twitched on his pasty upper lip as I entered the room.

  "Miss Cabot," he began in a voice that was all nasal. "I have some sad news."

  I looked from him to the stoic DM. "Yes?"

  "We regret that we're going to have to let you go."

  I blinked. "Excuse me?" My gazed rocketed from Leeman to the DM again. "Let me go… where?"

  Leeman cleared his throat. "Terminate your employment here at L.A. Mu. I'm sorry, but we've been going over your last performance review and we both agree that it's substandard."

  "Substandard? You've got to be kidding me."

  Only he didn't look like he was joking.

  "But… but…" I sputtered, appealing to the DM. "But what about the grabbing? And the 'muffin'?"

  She spoke up for the first time. "Miss Cabot, bringing false sexual harassment claims against your manager is no way to hold onto your job. Mr. Leeman tells me your performance has been slipping for months. You're repeatedly late for work and take excessively long lunch breaks. Today's included."

  "But I was with you!" I was shouting now, feeling my face grow hot with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. But mostly anger. What the hell was going on here?!