“Let’s go,” Owen said, beckoning with the smoking gun barrel.
He didn’t have to ask again. Within five seconds, a dazed Woodthorpe was over the counter and standing at rigid attention. One hand was clapped over his ear. All signs of arrogance had vanished.
“Take this,” Owen said, pulling a folded black nylon duffel bag from its clasp inside his overcoat. “Unlock the vault and fill the bag to the top. Understand?”
The new, attitude-adjusted Cecil Woodthorpe snatched the bag, hurried over to the vault door, and started twirling dials. Even the women seemed to have undergone a change, Owen noticed. They were all visibly trembling and scarcely breathing, eyes pointed straight ahead. All of them now had their hands raised. A little blood is a fantastic incentive, Owen decided. His drill team at the base would probably have won top honors every week if his commander had taken the trouble to shoot a hole in someone’s ear now and then.
The vault door swung open. With barely a pause, Woodthorpe dashed inside and started cramming cash into the duffel. Owen moved to a spot just outside the vault and watched him work. The clock on the wall said 1:02. Right on schedule.
“Big bills only,” Owen called. Woodthorpe, working with great intensity, just nodded. His ear seemed to be bleeding less, a fact that didn’t seem to lessen his newfound eagerness to please.
Owen wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead and reviewed the steps of his plan, ticking them off in his mind.
His biggest worry was Donald Ramsey, the branch manager. Ramsey didn’t usually return from his Rotary lunch until one-thirty or so, but nothing was certain. If he happened to be early, the locked and shaded door wouldn’t surprise him, but if he used his key and encountered the deadbolt, he’d know what was up and would call in the cavalry. Besides, Molly hadn’t wanted him here at all. “Ramsey could hurt us,” she’d said to Owen one night. “He’s tough, and he’s smart too. While I worked there, he did a good job.” Owen had replied, half seriously, “He had good help.”
She had laughed at that, he remembered. God, how he loved hearing her laugh.
He wished she were here with him now.
Owen checked his watch. He’d been inside the bank almost eight minutes. Pretty much what they’d planned on. But he had to be careful not to let down his guard. The next few minutes might well determine whether he would spend his future on a tropical beach making love or in a federal prison making license plates.
“Hurry it up in there,” Owen shouted, although he couldn’t imagine anyone working any harder or faster than Woodthorpe was. The man was a bag-filling maniac.
At that moment something — Owen never knew what — made him turn and look at the platform area on the far side of the room, and what he saw made his heart leap into his throat. The CSR who had fainted hadn’t fainted at all, or if she had, she’d regained consciousness; at this instant, she was propped on one trembling elbow and was stretching her other hand up toward her desktop.
“Get away from there,” Owen roared.
Too late. Her right forefinger was pressed flat against a little red button on the side of her desktop. Owen fired without thinking, putting two bullets into the walnut edge of the desk and neatly cutting the wire that ran from there to the floor. But that was also too late. The alarm, he knew, had already sounded — not here in the bank lobby but in the police station down the street.
Mistake, he thought. Big mistake.
But not critical. Molly had anticipated something like this, the way she anticipated most everything. Stick to the plan.
He glanced around wildly, making sure nothing else was amiss. It wasn’t. Cecil Woodthorpe, still emptying shelves like a madman, appeared to have ignored the whole incident. The black duffel looked almost full now, bulging at the sides. No one else had moved. The lady who had pressed the button sat on the floor beside her desk, hugging her elbows and staring at Owen with wide brown eyes. She looked amazed to still be alive.
Owen’s mind was whirling.
He tried not to think about the alarm. From what Molly had remembered about the bank’s emergency drills — and from a couple of false alarms she’d seen last summer — it would take the cops at least six minutes to get here. Plenty of time.
“Okay,” he called to Woodthorpe. “That’s enough. Get out here.” The assistant manager hurried through the vault door, breathing hard, and handed over the bag. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the pistol. He probably figured the only thing worse than getting shot would be getting shot twice. Owen opened the bag and examined the contents, burrowing his free hand several layers deep. The duffel was literally stuffed with packets of hundred-dollar bills.
Without another word, Owen zipped the bag shut and backed carefully across the lobby to the door. The room was as quiet as a tomb. He reached the door, raised one edge of the shade with his gun barrel, and peeked out.
The coast was relatively clear. Across the way, an elderly man with a straw hat and a cane was walking a ratty-looking poodle; just down the street to the left, a bread truck was parked underneath a sign that said LEO’S BAKERY; on the sidewalk near the truck, a little girl was skipping rope, her breath making white clouds in the chilly air; to the right, near the end of the cul-de-sac, an old gray-haired woman in a purple flowered dress and a ragged coat was pushing a shopping cart full of trash bags. She stopped occasionally to inspect the contents of the garbage cans at the curb and stuff anything interesting into one of her bags.
Owen turned and flicked his gaze over the lobby one last time, then put his ear to the door and listened a moment. No sirens. At least not yet.
Now or never. He released the deadbolt, heaved a deep breath, and opened the door.
Three minutes earlier, two city policemen had received the call, swerved onto Palmetto Street, and aimed their cruiser west toward the bank. Officer Scott was almost as short as Owen McKay, and considerably wider. The other — Mullen — was so tall and long-faced he’d acquired the nickname Muldoon, from a TV police comedy that had aired long before he was born.
“Don’t forget,” Mullen said, “to mention me to your sister.”
Scott, who had no intention of letting Mullen get within a mile of his sister, gave him a dark look. “You’re not her type.”
“Why not let me be the judge of that?”
“Because I’ve seen your judgment in action,” his partner said, watching the traffic. They were almost there. “Like right now. How about keeping your mind on the job?”
“This call, you mean?” Mullen snorted. “It’s another false alarm, Scotty. You know nobody would rob that bank.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when they both saw, fifty yards away, a short dude in a ball cap and tan overcoat running down the steps of the bank building. The guy was holding a black duffel bag in his gloved left hand and a pistol in his ungloved right. “That must be Nobody,” Scott said, screeching to a stop in the middle of the street.
The suspect saw them and dodged left, putting the parked bread truck between him and the police cruiser. By the time the officers were out of their car and peeking past the truck with guns drawn, the guy was dashing across the cul-de-sac toward a wrought-iron fence between two buildings. We’ve got him, Scott thought. There’s no way out of here.
At that point, three things happened at about the same time: the little girl wisely dropped her jump rope and ducked into the bakery, the old bag lady in the purple dress pushed her grocery cart into the cul-de-sac from across the street, and the dog walker with the straw hat — spotting the fleeing robber — abandoned his poodle, raised his cane, and marched toward the running man as if ready to do battle.