“Makes you wonder who really won the Cold War.”
His supervisor, a sharp-eyed man named Vladimir, said, “Who says it’s over?”
John M. Floyd
Molly’s plan
From The Strand Magazine
The bank stood at the west end of Palmetto Street, an old gray lady of a building in an old gray part of town. Only two things made it remarkable. First, it had a long porch with incongruous white columns, as if someone had started to build a plantation home, then, during the process, had forgotten how one looked. Second, it was located on a semicircle of buildings where a mile of featureless pavement with no side alleys and only one cross street came to a dead end.
This strange setting, a fireman’s nightmare, had an unplanned but definite advantage: the bank had never been robbed. The street was narrow and often clogged with delivery trucks and double-parked cars. Its west end was a sort of commercial cul-de-sac containing the bank and two other buildings with iron fences between them, and its east end was home to one of the city’s largest police stations. There was simply no good escape path for would-be bank thieves, and as a result they practiced their trade elsewhere. Smart rustlers tend to avoid box canyons.
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.