Smash & Grab

by Amy Christine Parker

  We wedge the wire spool between a set of steel columns and start unwinding it, feeding it down the dark mouth of the chute. The wire snakes inside. I can hear it bouncing around.

  “We have to go down at least two at a time, maybe three.” The spooled wire runs out, and Quinn takes a nail gun and shoots at least a dozen into the end of the wire, securing it to the spool.

  “I’ll go first,” Oliver says. “To make sure it’s safe.”

  “Why should you be first? I’m the heaviest; it should be me.” Carlos puts his duffel bag straps over his shoulder and heads for the chute, but right away it’s obvious that both he and the bag won’t fit inside together like that.

  “You’re going to have to send the money down separate,” Lexi says.

  “No way I’m leaving this up here with you all. No offense,” he says, looking at me for backup.

  “I’ll go last. Make sure the money makes it down to you,” I say.

  “We alternate. One from your crew, one from ours.” Lexi’s eyes meet mine. “We’ll both stay.”

  Carlos thinks it over and then reluctantly squeezes himself into the chute and lowers himself until he’s hanging from his hands. He grabs hold of the wire and makes the sign of the cross on his forehead, since he can’t exactly do it on his chest. “Here goes nothing.” We peer in. It’s narrow enough that he can prop his back against it and walk his feet down the other side. At first it looks easy, but as he lowers himself deeper, the chute gets steep, and I can hear his shoes slipping. His biceps flex as he struggles to hold on. Little by little he disappears from sight. I check my watch. Slowest getaway ever. No way we’re getting out of here at this pace.

  “Someone else needs to go.” I look pointedly at Oliver.

  He queues up. I hear a helicopter outside somewhere, the rhythmic sound of its blades slicing through the air. I can’t see it, but it must be nearly directly overhead. “It is armpit-humid in here,” Oliver complains, scrunching his face in disgust before he disappears by degrees, first his chest, then his chin, then his nose. We stare at the end of the wire, at the many nails holding it to the spool, and at the spool itself, snugly wedged against the steel columns. I can see the wire move when he moves, the gap that’s starting to form at some of the nail points.

  “Should we try one more?” Eddie waits for me to tell him what to do.

  I glance at my watch and jog over to the side of the building that faces Figueroa. The sidewalks are packed with police, police vehicles, and curious bystanders. Officers are still heading into the building, and several others are looking up, examining the outside. I finally catch a glimpse of the helicopter, LAPD in bold lettering on the side. “I don’t think we have a choice.” Lexi comes to stand by me.

  “There are a lot of people down there. It’s perfect.” She grins, and then when I look at her like she’s nuts—because clearly she is if she thinks a whole departmentful of cops below us and crawling through the building is perfect—she adds, “We can blend in with the crowd. Especially once we split up. After you give me whatever it is you’ve got of Harrison’s. I know there weren’t just papers in that box.”

  I’m not surprised that she knows, only that she’s waited this long to bring it up again.

  The wire strains against the nails as Eddie goes in. By now Carlos should be at the bottom, or close to it.

  “Okay, Lex, I want you to go—” Quinn doesn’t get to finish his sentence because there’s more noise in the stairwell. He looks at me, eyes wide. He’s standing next to the chute, the money bags at his feet. He lunges for the tarp that’s covering a pallet full of tiles and covers up the bags as the noise gets closer, louder. It’s people talking. Cops? Construction crew? The noise stops, and the door shakes as someone leans up against it. The handle moves.

  Quinn looks around frantically for somewhere to hide, but he’s stuck. The door is between him and most of the eleventh floor. He gives Lexi and me one last look and jumps feetfirst into the tunnel, catching hold of the cord with both hands, and half slides, half lowers himself out of sight. Leo and Benny take off for the other side of the floor, the part that’s blocked off by plastic sheeting. They duck under it and disappear.

  There’s a tarp-covered pallet behind Lexi. I drive her to it, and together we slip underneath and lie side by side so my mouth is right next to her neck. I slip my arms around her because there’s nowhere else to put them—the space is too tight—wincing as the tarp rattles. The door opens a breath later. We go still.

  “Just let me grab my water, man. I’ll be quick.” A guy walks out of the stairwell. I can’t see him, but I can hear him. Lexi presses herself even closer to me. Now my lips are touching her neck. She shivers when my breath hits her skin. I can’t help myself. I run my lips down to the collar of her T-shirt, just once before I go still again. She inhales, and I can feel her arm break out in goose bumps against my arm. Every part of me is aware of her, the way her body rises and falls as she breathes, the way her shoulder fits into the crook of my arm. We’re on the run from the LAPD and about to escape LL National through a construction-site trash chute and I still can’t ignore the way she makes me feel.

  “Hurry up!” someone else says, farther back, still in the stairwell maybe? “We’re supposed to be outside.”

  The first dude rummages around. I study the edge of the tarp and watch a pair of construction boots flash past. I’m not nervous he’ll find us, exactly, but I can’t help tensing when the tip of one boot moves the edge of the tarp. “Got it.”

  I wait for him to notice the spool or the wire leading into the debris chute, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “Come on!” Stairwell Guy says, and the guy standing near us takes off toward him.

  “Hold your horses, I’m comin’!” The two men continue to talk, but it becomes muffled because the stairwell door closes.

  We wait, ears straining to see if we can hear anyone. One minute becomes two.

  “I kinda wish he’d stuck around a little longer,” I say, my voice low so only she can hear.

  “Me too,” she says almost shyly.

  That’s it, I can’t stand it. I might never see her again, and there’s just all this time that we’ve wasted playing games and dancing around whatever it is that’s between us. I’m not wasting this one last moment. I shift so I can turn her to me. I stroke the side of her cheek, sink my hand into her hair and kiss her. She grabs my arm and presses herself to me. Her mouth opens and the kiss deepens. I make a noise low in my throat because I don’t want it to end, but we’re out of time.

  “You can come out,” Leo says in a stage whisper. I lift up the tarp and he’s right there, Benny next to him, grinning like an idiot. He winks at Lexi and she blushes. Benny just shakes his head and gets back to it.

  He leans into the chute. “We should do the bags next.” He uncovers them and puts one into the chute. I start to object, because if Quinn or anyone else is still in the chute, they’re about to get a twenty-pound cash torpedo to the head, but it’s already sliding down, and then he’s sending the next one down and the next and the next. Four bags in, like, four seconds.

  “I guess it’s me now, right?” Leo sits on the ledge, his camera pointed down, taking an up-close selfie of his feet. He slips the camera around his neck and gets into position.

  “Quinn’s going to be furious that I didn’t go next,” Lexi says as Leo disappears. She straightens her T-shirt and puts one hand on the back of her neck like she’s still thinking about me kissing it. She won’t look at me, though. She knows I’m still holding on to something Harrison-related.

  Benny clears his throat. “Okay, so my turn, then.” He climbs into the chute and grabs the wire. I look back at the spool where the end of the wire is nailed and notice that it’s coming apart at the end. Several of the nails have caused it to split into two and come loose. There are maybe seven nails still holding it in place, but it’s only a matter of time before the wire frays past them. “Benny, the wire,” I warn.

>   “I know. I know,” he mutters as he starts to lower himself.

  “ ‘So it is down to you and it is down to me,’ ” Lexi says in this dramatic voice.

  “Huh?”

  “The Princess Bride. You know…‘Inconceivable!’ ”

  She’s babbling. Nervous now that it’s just us two again.

  “The movie. Tell me you’ve seen it. Come on. Best. Movie. Ever.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Well, okay, it is pretty old, but it’s on TV all the time.”

  “So you’re surprised that I haven’t seen a decades-old movie about a princess and a wedding?” I raise an eyebrow. “Because I look like the kind of guy who’s into that sort of thing?”

  “Well, the fact that you like chess is surprising. And you read Shakespeare and Cormac McCarthy.”

  “No Country for Old Men is a gangsta book, know what I’m sayin’?” I joke.

  She grins. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never read it.”

  The helicopter we heard earlier is back, hovering over the bank, reminding me that as much as I don’t want it to be, this is goodbye. At least until the heat dies down from this job. If it dies down. It’s my last chance to just come clean and give her the thumb drive. She held up her end of the deal, just like she said she would, but I still can’t bring myself to do it.

  “So it’s your turn.” I hold out my hand so I can help her in.

  She takes it and starts to climb in but then stops, looks at me. “If we’d met some other way, do you think…do you think things would’ve been different between us?”

  I look into her eyes and really consider it. “Absolutely.” I tuck a piece of her hair behind her ear and let my fingers trail her cheek. “Definitely.”

  Every girl I’ve ever been with has had to go up on tiptoe to kiss me, but Lexi and I are pretty much evenly matched, eye to eye, so all she has to do is lean in. Her lips are soft on mine, sweet. I pull her closer, hook one finger into the belt loop of her jeans, and she reaches around and sticks her hands in my back pockets. At first I am too distracted by the kiss to know why my brain starts sounding an alarm, but then I remember the thumb drive. Too late.

  “Hey, that’s—”

  “Mine,” she says, depositing it in her pocket. “You think I’d go to this much trouble to get into that deposit box if I wasn’t absolutely sure about what was in it?” She slips into the debris chute. “Goodbye, Christian.”

  I watch her start down the chute, and I can’t think of one thing to say to explain why I kept the flash drive as long as I did. I’m watching her leave, the same way I did that night when she jumped on my car, and like then, I have this overwhelming feeling that I shouldn’t let her go. I make a move to head into the chute after her when something slaps the back of my leg and disappears into the chute.

  Oh my god! The wire!

  The farther I get away from the top of the chute and Christian, the more my heart hurts. I don’t want this to be goodbye. For the first time ever, I don’t want to walk away, and ironically, for the first time ever, I don’t have a choice. There was no other way for this to play out. I blink back tears. I can’t cry. Not here. Not yet.

  I am halfway down when the wire goes from taut to suddenly slack. Panicked, I quickly try to wedge my feet and hands to the sides of the chute, but it’s too narrow for me to get a good hold. I have a slow-motion moment when I realize I’m screwed, and then suddenly I am falling, my body ricocheting off the chute walls. I tuck my arms tight to my sides as I pick up speed, trying to minimize any possible injuries. My head smacks into a ridge in the tunnel, and my vision blurs for a second. Then there is just pain and the horrible gut-clenching free fall that makes my stomach feel like it’s lodged in my throat. The chute curves a little, coming up under me more like a slide. My shoulders and hips ram the sides, and then everything evens out and I’m going down on my back and dropping out of the end of the chute. I nearly land on my feet, but then my foot slips on some construction debris, my ankle twists painfully, and I end up on my hands and knees.

  “Are you okay? Nothing broken?” Quinn helps me out of the Dumpster and dusts me off.

  He’s talking about the ride down, and while it hurt, finding Harrison’s thumb drive in Christian’s pocket hurt worse. I mean, I knew he had to have it, but knowing and seeing aren’t quite the same things. Seeing means you can’t rationalize something away. He kept the drive for one of two reasons: as insurance or so he could sweeten his already large take. Maybe both. Probably both. After all his talk about not wanting to rob banks, it turns out he’s a natural at it. Knowing it was a mistake, I let him get too close, and now the only part of me that’s broken is my heart.

  I test my ankle. I can put my weight on it, but it feels tight.

  “Think you can run if you need to?” Quinn asks.

  “Yeah,” I say, and hope I’m right.

  Shake it off, Lexi, I tell myself. You have what you came for. Your friends are okay. Today was a victory.

  “The wire came down with you. How’s he goin’ to get down?” Benny asks, the frayed end of the wire in his hand, his face tilted up as he stares at the chute.

  Well, it was a victory for my team, anyway.

  When the wire snaps off the spool and goes careening into the chute, I go cold. Lexi’s been inside less than a minute; she’s still too far up, the fall too steep. I lean into the chute’s mouth and call her name. I can hear movement, can feel the sudden vibrations in the chute, and I know she’s being bounced around inside, but she doesn’t call out, not once.

  I stand up, pace. What if she’s really hurt? How do I get down there to find out?

  I need more wire. But there isn’t any.

  Come on!

  There has to be something. I race around, lifting up tarps, inspecting pallets.

  Wait.

  The tarps.

  I pull the one off the spot where less than ten minutes ago I kissed Lexi, and I drag it over to the tarp that we used to cover the duffel bags. I start to tie the ends together, but it’s slow going. My hands are shaking hard-core. I take a breath and will myself to calm down. Finally I have a workable knot. The tarps are long—probably not long enough to get me all the way down the chute, but maybe close enough that I don’t bust myself up.

  I take the nail gun and nail the tarps to the spool, using a sick amount of nails, knowing full well that under my weight, the tarps will probably start tearing away the minute I head into the chute.

  There is noise coming from the stairwell again. The rhythmic sound of many feet. I’m out of time. I grab the end of the tarp and make a run for the chute. The stairwell door starts to open. I shove the tarp inside the chute and jump in after it, sliding a bit before I’m able to get a good grip on the tarp. I peer over the edge of the chute in time to see the stairwell door swing open and LAPD’s finest crowd through the opening, guns drawn.

  “Don’t do it!” the cop leading the way yells, peering into the chute, trying to get a good look at me, his eyes flashing, his gun raised. I have time to think that he has the whitest hair and the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, and then I scramble down the chute, hand over hand, feet slipping.

  I’m feeling good, moving fast, when the tarp begins to shake and I feel myself being pulled back up. I keep climbing down, but I’m not making the same progress. And then suddenly I’m out of tarp and there’s nothing else to do but fall.

  From there it is a manic jumble of hits and hurts as I bounce my way through the chute, pinballing back and forth, falling, falling, falling. It is both a long and incredibly short trip, and the only thing going through my head is I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

  I hit the curve in the slide and it slows me down a little, especially when my elbow impacts and gets stuck, wrenching my shoulder, maybe dislocating it. I cry out in pain because if I don’t scream, I’ll throw up. I rocket out of the end of the chute like a torpedo and slam into the Dumpster. The sound is a thun
dering boom that echoes through the parking garage.

  I scramble out of the Dumpster. My shoulder is screaming, but I can move it, so it’s probably only sprained.

  “Cops. They’re up there. We have to go. Now. Now!” Lexi’s crew, my crew, all of them are staring at me, horrified. “Go!” I yell, and this finally snaps them out of it and they jump to. Quinn, Leo, Benny, and Carlos shoulder the money bags.

  We run for the far wall, where there is an exit door. Up above us I can hear the screech of tires, a police siren, the sounds of people coming. I think about how much Carlos, Benny, Gabriel, and Eddie like that Heat movie and am really scared—for real this time—that we’re about to go out the way they always imagined. Hail of bullets, money exploding out of the duffel bags, falling through the air like snow.

  The money’s going to slow us down. We don’t have minutes before they’re here—we have seconds. And how far are we going to get with giant black duffel bags this close to a bank?

  “We have to dump the cash,” I yell.

  “No, bro, there’s gotta be…we can’t…” Eddie looks ready to lose it.

  I get it. I can barely stomach the idea. All this work, all this risk, and we don’t get anything to show for it?

  “Would you rather go to jail?” I say, and then as if to drive this idea home, I see police lights reflecting on the wall behind us.

  “Do it!” I shout, and everyone drops the bags.

  I can see the top of the police car now, coming down the ramp. I take one last look at the bags, at all that money, and go.