by Thomas Perry
A half hour later, the Subaru pulled off the highway at Shreveport. The car glided across the next intersection and into a Mobil station. One of the men got out and started a gas pump, then put the nozzle in the gas tank. The other three were on the way to the restrooms on the far side of the building. Lee Wolf was one of the three, so Leah knew she had no chance to pick him off.
Leah turned off the highway and into the rival gas station across the road and pulled up at a pump. Her rifle was in the back of the car under the floor with the spare tire. She could get her hands on it, but she was surrounded by people getting gas, buying snacks, and coming to and from the restrooms. Both gas stations had surveillance cameras.
Leah had to be closer. She pulled forward past the pumps and drove across the road to the station where the Subaru was stopped. She got out, swiped her card on the gas pump, stuck the nozzle in her gas tank to fill it, and walked.
She walked past the car, crouched as though she had dropped something, stuck a transponder onto the bare metal gas tank, and felt the magnet stick. She pretended to pick something up and put it into her pocket, stood, and headed for the ladies’ room, going the opposite way around the building from the way the men had gone.
While Leah was in the ladies’ room, she turned to the tracking app on her phone. She saw the red dot that symbolized the transponder she’d put on the Subaru. As she watched, the red dot moved slightly, and then stopped, as though the driver was waiting for an opening in the traffic or the signal to change, and then pulled out.
The dot returned to the interstate highway and up the eastbound side.
When she returned to her car, the tank was full and the pump had clicked off. She put the nozzle back on the pump, got into the driver’s seat, and went after the Subaru. She hoped that they were going to stop and sleep somewhere, because she was having terrible trouble staying awake.
It had been a hellish trip for her. The Subaru had taken numerous side trips through dozens of small towns, driving slowly like tourists sometimes, and taking long detours through business districts. The Subaru doubled back a few times, so Leah had been afraid they might have spotted her. They had changed drivers a few times, but Leah couldn’t.
Now that she was able to follow them with her phone, she didn’t have to be close enough to see them, but she couldn’t let them get so far ahead that she lost their signal. She would go fast until she caught up, and then she’d drop back and be invisible. Leah caught up enough within the next ten minutes, saw the Subaru, slowed a bit so she couldn’t be seen, and then relied on the transponder’s signal.
She followed the Subaru from a distance. It was moving toward the Shreveport airport. The signs appeared more frequently. Finally, there was one that said, “RENTAL CAR RETURN.” The Subaru took it.
“Oh crap,” she said. It was puzzling that they were here at all. It was a destination they could have reached on the first day. Now were they going to fly somewhere?
She followed the Subaru until it swung into the lot for one of the rental car agencies. She pulled into a striped space near the entrance, jumped out, and dodged up the nearest aisle of parked cars.
As she was walking across the concrete floor of the rental structure, she could see that one man was going to fetch a car and the other three men were waiting by the rental kiosk with their luggage. One of the three was Lee Wolf. She sped up and gave them a wide berth, moving to intercept the one going for the car.
She was rapidly closing the distance between her and the man. The man heard her footsteps, then nearly tripped as he turned his head over his shoulder to look at her. She came closer, smiling warmly, all teeth. “Can I help you find your car, sir? Here, let me see your key tag.”
He let her take the key with the plastic tag on it. “Row R, Number 18. “Right this way.”
She led him to a gray Chevrolet Malibu, handed him the keys, and turned to go. As he opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat, she used that moment to bend down as though checking the odometer. She put another transponder under the rocker panel of the car, bobbed up, and left. In a moment she was in her own rental car, driving forward to skirt the various entrances to the rental returns and continuing on and out.
Lee Wolf was driving. He was always careful to take a turn at whatever chores other people were expected to do. If it seemed wise to have one person go into a diner and buy four sandwiches while the others stayed out of sight, then the first to offer to fetch the sandwiches was Lee Wolf.
He drove along Interstate 20 shopping for the right kind of town. Shreveport had been too big, too urban, and too busy. Alexandria was too close to Shreveport, as were Bossier and Haughton. Sibley and Vienna were a bit too small. He liked West Monroe and Monroe for this kind of robbery, but he kept going past them, examining a few other towns for most of the day, before he returned to West Monroe.
He turned off the interstate and onto the bridge over the Ouachita River. This was a wide, navigable river, and the bridge was a long, low span rising to a swing bridge at the center made of steel grating with a superstructure of steel girders. After that the bridge continued as a long, low span of pavement into what Wolf thought of as Monroe proper.
He had come through the town years ago, and it was almost as he remembered it. The city was not ugly, but not beautiful either. It was more poor than rich, but it had a few good-size office buildings. There was a University of Louisiana campus, but Wolf never sought it out. As he told the others, “We’re not here for their diplomas. Their money will be enough.” The police station was on Grand Street, so he made a mental note to keep Grand Street at a distance. When they had been through town several different ways, he stopped outside town on a lonely road.
“What do you think?” he said.
“What do you mean?” asked Dave Sherman.
“That was it,” Wolf said. “We’ve been there.”
Bob Carpenter tried to help the conversation along, to preserve the good mood. “I thought the idea was to get a pile of money. This place doesn’t look like they’ve got much of it.”
Tony Wagner said, “I did see a couple of banks, but they didn’t look like much.”
Wolf said gently, “I’m sorry, guys. I haven’t been very clear about this, and that’s not fair. Remember who we are. We’re a subcommittee working for the Community of Ararat, provisional capital of the Swift Sword of the Savior, USA. We are out to get enough money to tide the community over this fall and winter, with the confidence that in the spring our needs will be met with an influx of normal funds and a growth in our food supply. We are not capitalists—we are groundbreakers for a Christian civilization. Remember what the Lord’s Prayer says? ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Not a continuous feast, or a chauffeured Rolls-Royce to take us to all the three-star French restaurants. We’re not asking the Lord for more than we need for this day, nor are we taking bread out of the mouths of others. We’re going to rob a bank. All the money is insured by the federal government. We’re just bleeding the beast.”
Dave Sherman said, “But wouldn’t it make sense to go for a big bank, where there’s more money?”
“Not really,” said Lee Wolf. “If you study a big bank in the center of Manhattan, it has a whole lot of net worth. At any moment they have billions of dollars in deposit accounts, collateral on loans they’ve made, stock and bond investments, contracts for precious metals. In some of those banks it’s tens of billions, and some probably hundreds of billions. But it’s not where you can put your hand on it. Some of it is ownership of land, or office buildings and skyscrapers, and some is just numbers on a balance sheet that’s not even physical. It’s on a computer server somewhere, and it’s on the move. It can disappear from there to a bank in Zurich or Hong Kong in a thousandth of a second, and something else will appear there. Or not even there, but in the home office in Brussels, London, or Tokyo. The point is, none of it is worth anything to us because we can’t put it in a bag and carry it home. All we want is about four laundry bags
full of cash. And where does that come from?”
“Beats me,” said Tony Wagner. “Never seen a bank without some.”
“All banks do have some,” Wolf said. “They have enough for the immediate needs of their customers. A giant bank in New York won’t need a lot of cash most days—just enough to stock the cash registers of the stores and restaurants for a few blocks around. They don’t need enough for all of Manhattan, because there are four or five other banks in the next couple of blocks. They don’t use much cash. They don’t do lending, investing, transferring, or anything in cash. In big cities even the prostitutes take credit cards. Nobody needs cash, so they don’t keep much around.”
“So you’re saying—”
“I’m saying a bank in Monroe or West Monroe, Louisiana, probably needs to keep around about as much cash as a bank in Manhattan. There are still construction companies in these little towns that buy wood from some guy’s land, where he runs a sawmill to cut and plane it. He probably makes his payroll in cash too, so he doesn’t have to fill out forty pages of forms when he hires an extra man for a week’s work. If he’s rich enough to have help at home, he pays them in cash. This is a land of truck farmers, shopkeepers, owners of small restaurants and repair shops, and tradesmen. If you buy a car secondhand, it’s probably from the guy who drove it first, and he’s not going to take a check unless he knows you. Maybe not even then.”
Bob Carpenter smiled. “You’re saying these small banks in small towns are as good as anywhere.”
“For what we want they are,” Wolf said. “What we want is four bags of cash money, and it doesn’t have to be hundreds. Small bills are less money, but they’re safer for people like us to spend. And besides that, if we steal it here, what we’re up against isn’t the police department of the city of New Orleans. We’re up against whoever drew patrol duty in West Monroe today.”
At 5:45 p.m. two men entered the Monroe Manufacturers’ Bank. The clerks and assistants from the small businesses nearby had come in and deposited most of the money from the day’s sales for the night. Many stores in Monroe weren’t usually open after six, except the month before Christmas, and it was still summer. The two men went to the stand-up desks on the sides of the foyer and used the pens with chains on them to fill out deposit slips and withdrawal slips and do simple arithmetic on the backs.
While they were doing this work as convincingly as possible, the end-of-day business was getting done and the shop clerks were heading out. Behind the bank building were two other men who had arrived in the Chevrolet Malibu today. They were using bicycle locks with jacketed cable to keep the already-locked rear doors of the building shut. Then the two men walked around the building to enter the doors into the foyer.
When the minute hand of the big clock on the wall clicked forward two spaces and back one to say 5:56, the first two men finished writing and brought their slips to the two tellers’ windows. The two new men went to the two doors and each took out another bicycle lock, wound the cable through the two door handles until they were closed tightly, and locked them there. They each produced a paper sign that read, “Bank Closed for Fumigation” and stuck it on the glass door facing outward.
Both men—Tony Wagner and Dave Sherman—stepped to the front counter, vaulted over, and ran to the interior hallway of the building behind the tellers’ stations. The tellers and the few customers were startled and confused, but they hadn’t figured out what could be happening. This seemed to be an emergency. Was there a fire? A heart attack?
What was happening was that Dave and Tony were hurrying along the corridor, sticking their pistols in the faces of the people in the offices, dragging them out into the hallway, and making them sit there on the floor. They patted down the two men and four women and found six phones, which they took. Then they stood over the employees, occasionally aiming a gun at anyone who moved.
In the open foyer of the bank, Lee Wolf and Bob Carpenter raised their pistols and Lee Wolf called out, “Tellers! Take two steps back away from your stations. If an alarm goes off and I hear it, all tellers are going to die. If I don’t hear it and cops begin to show up, all tellers are going to die.”
He walked along the counter, staring hard at them as he spoke. “All we want is cash. Each of you take one of these laundry bags and fill it with cash.” He took three bags out from under his coat and tossed them on the counter. “Do not reach for the bait bags they give you for robbers. This is not your money, and not even the bank’s money. It’s covered by the FDIC. Do not die or make your friends die for a federal agency.”
Bob Carpenter, who was tall and intimidating, went over the counter and held his pistol on the three young women. They were so terrified that Lee Wolf could see their shallow breathing. One of them was wearing a purple silk blouse, and he could see the vibration of her heart beating. None of them was crying, which he took to be good news. He loved terror, but he hated emotions that would slow things down. The three tellers emptied their cash drawers into the laundry bags, and Carpenter looked inside all the bags before he took them and tossed them over the counter to the floor of the foyer.
Lee Wolf said to the nearest teller, “Now you and I are going to the vault.”
He went around the counter with his gun aimed at her. She opened the counter to let him step in. He took her by the arm and steered her into the vault. When they were inside, he handed her the fourth bag. “Fill this bag with the cash from in here. The more big bills, the better.”
Leah was staring at the map on her phone again. The car had stopped. It was parked behind a building on Second Street. The map on her phone showed a few names of businesses, and the nearest was a bank. A bank robbery? Of course it would be. That was the way several of these homegrown militias had made up for deficits. Why not the SSS?
The intersection was Second and Bullock.
* * *
As Lee Wolf stepped to the door of the vault, he caught some movement in the corner of his eye and pivoted toward the glass surface beside him, which was the upper part of the separate room containing cubicles where people went to examine the contents of their safe deposit boxes. The lower part was wood. On the inside was a man in a dark blue uniform. He was kneeling on the carpeted floor of the room, where he had been lying in wait below the glass level where people couldn’t see him. Wolf knew bank cubicles like this all had automatic locks that would lock whenever the door shut.
Wolf looked at him, and the man raised a big model 1911 military .45 pistol and fired. The bullet hit the clear wall and pounded a white impact mark on the glass with a circular spiderweb crack around it, but didn’t penetrate it. The man realized instantly that the glass, which he must have seen a thousand times if he worked here, was bulletproof. All he had done was alert Lee Wolf to his presence.
When Lee Wolf moved a step to the side to see the guard better, the guard fired again, pulverizing the glass in another spot, blocking Wolf’s view. As Wolf stepped along the glass, the guard fired again and again, turning large sections of the pane into white opaque circles so Wolf couldn’t see him clearly.
Wolf had already seen all he needed to. He had identified the pistol, and he could count. As soon as the guard fired his seventh round, Wolf knew he would have to release the single-stack magazine and replace it with a full one. Wolf knelt on the floor by the wooden side and fired four shots through the wood, then peered at the guard over the wooden section and through a clear inch of the glass. The man had been hit at least twice, once in the head.
Wolf rose to his feet as the girl turned to run. His hand shot out, snatched a handful of her long hair, and jerked her back to him. “I’m not going to be shy about shooting you too, darlin’. Now get me that bag of money.” He swung her around and pushed her back into the vault.
He stood by the door and looked around the foyer. He could see that most people were still standing in a compact herd under Bob Carpenter’s eye, some of them unsuccessfully trying to crane their necks to see the guard’s body.
He shouted, “All right, boys! Time to go!”
He heard running feet, and in a moment the others were in the foyer too, shouldering the laundry bags full of money.
They stood by the door watching the bank employees and customers while Tony Wagner unlocked the bicycle lock, and then they all backed out. Tony reattached the lock to hold together the door handles on the outside and ran to catch up with the others.
As Leah Hawkins drove toward the bank, she held her phone in her hand and stared at the screen. The car was still there. But as she watched, it began to move, going backward. Then it went forward. They were leaving.
She was still a mile behind them, and they were turning again, heading west. They were going toward the river.
She had to beat them to the bridge. She could see that the entrance to the bridge was at DeSiard Street. She had seen it on the way into town. The bridge was old. It was long, and it had a swing-bridge section in the middle. She didn’t know if it still swung open and closed, or if that was some obsolete feature that wasn’t used anymore. All she could do was head there and hope she got there first.
Somewhere in the distance she heard sirens. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that she was one of a limited number of people who welcomed that wailing sound.
DeSiard Street was ahead of her—three short blocks, then turn left.
Leah drove hard and in a moment she was on DeSiard Street and accelerating again. She could see the bridge clearly now. There was a long, nearly flat approach, paved like a road onto the water of the wide river. It narrowed to two lanes a distance ahead. It was a few minutes after six, and she was seeing traffic that was probably heavier than it was for most of the day on both the westbound and eastbound lanes.
