Fireflies: A Katie Bell Mystery (book 1) (21 page)

A
rianna Morrow yawned
and looked out over the sea of oncoming customers. It was a typical Thursday afternoon, if perhaps just slightly busier than usual. Arianna glanced over at Carol on her right and they exchanged the briefest of looks. Carol was a veteran. She knew. Arianna didn’t want to be at the teller desk. She had worked at Third Union Bank for the better part of three years, and doing the job was at this point as easy as sleepwalking. Nothing ever changed, minus the occasional federal regulation that made things more of a hassle interacting with the customers. Arianna saw the writing on the wall; in the next three to five years almost everything would be digital. The only people that would regularly come in to do their banking in house would be baby boomers or older who were hell-bent to stay firmly in the twentieth century.

That was part of charm of Third Union Bank; they prided themselves on a small town, family like feel. The folksy charm even bled over to the rustic artwork on their checks and credit cards.

Arianna did all of her banking online. She had no interest in being there because her head was in a far happier place. Just thinking about him … It sent a chill up her spine.

It didn’t matter that Larry was married, or even that he had a daughter. He had been honest about it from the start, brutally honest and Arianna had loved that about him. Sure she was only twenty-five, but she had always known that she was different than her friends and peers of a similar age … She had been a grown ass woman for a long time, and unlike the current trend amongst most of her unmarried friends of dating losers, little boys that occasionally had some money, Arianna had always been looking for a real man.

Larry was the real thing, in a sea of amateurs. The best part about him was how much he seemed to like her. Sure they had only been seeing each other for a few months now, but she didn’t just see a hot affair with him, (though it very much was that too. Oh how he loved to touch every inch of her, how he seemed to worship her like the curvy goddess she secretly was…) she saw a real future with him. Once he finally left his wife they could move in together … In a few years she could have a couple of kids with him. Not one, because being an only child sucked, Arianna after all would know, but two. She hoped to have a girl first, than a boy. He had a daughter already, but she was sure he would be open to the idea, for her.

“Next person please,” Arianna called out absently, and a pale man dressed in a cheap suit with a bad comb-over approached.

With four tellers, Ron the security guard and the twenty-five or so customers all standing waiting in the lobby, the bank was pretty full. Arianna began to feel a headache coming on. That caused her blood to pump a little faster. If it turned into a full on migraine she would be flat on her back all night with a cool cloth on her neck. That wouldn’t do at all. Larry was free that evening, and she had been looking forward to seeing him all week.

“I want to know what the hell this fee is!” the pale man snapped at her.

He slapped a bill down on the counter and Arianna did her best to put on her standard fake smile and looked down at the bill. She couldn’t see it of course, since his hand was covering the paper.

“Sir, if you’ll just give me a moment I’d be happy to pull up your information and help you sort this out.”

As the word “out” left Arianna’s mouth there was a harsh “pop, pop” sound from across the bank lobby. Arianna didn’t see it, but out of the corner of her eye she did see the mist of red and saw Ron crumpling, his body twitching and jerking like he was having a seizure as he fell.

Something was wrong, but Arianna still wasn’t sure what. That was until she saw him, standing there by the front door, the long smoking gun still stretched out, pointed at where Ron’s head had been only a second before. He was a big fellow, at least two hundred and fifty pounds and had a ski mask over his head.

Arianna wasn’t the only one who didn’t get it for a moment, but then someone, a customer, did, and started to scream.

“
W
e got a problem
. Dimitri just went off the radar.”

Arthur looked up from his file and shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean Agent Pilsner just called me. Dimitri ditched the surveillance.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Nope. Ditched the car, his phone, everything. Pilsner checked his apartment and it’s been cleaned out,” Fields said.

Arthur stood up and opened his desk drawer, grabbing his Glock. “It’s happening today.”

“What is?”

“Whatever Dimitri’s hitting,” Arthur said, grabbing his Hugo Boss suit jacket off the back of his chair and heading for the door.

“Or he could be in the wind,” Fields said.

“No. He wouldn’t just leave. Dimitri will get the job done. It’s what he does,” he added as he turned towards the bull pen. “Agent Tapscott, ready?”

Tapscott had apparently been busy reading something on his phone and he bolted upright and nodded his head. “Ready to rock and roll.”

“Okay, but where are we going?” Fields asked.

“Agent Pilsner has a stakeout van correct? We’ll start there.”

T
apscott was driving
and Fields was sitting shotgun. Arthur had decided to ride along with them but had taken the backseat, his eyes poring over the file as the drove along.

“Dammit,” Arthur said, slapping the file closed.

“What?” Tapscott asked, glancing at his boss in the rear view mirror.

“He’s hitting a bank.”

Agent Fields turned around in her seat. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because he’s been circling a five-block radius. They weren’t able to see what he was staking out because he wasn’t looking at any one place, he was looking at routes around four banks. Look,” Arthur said holding up a single map with a line drawn showing Dimitri’s routes over the past five months.

He handed Fields the map and she looked at it for a long moment. “Shit. I’ll let Agent Pilsner know.”

“Agent Tapscott,” Arthur said, but it was all he needed to.

“Already on it,” Tapscott said and flipped the sirens on before gunning the engine.

A
rianna Morrow felt
the barrel of the rifle pressed into her back and she moved forward, her whole body trembling. “Move faster,” snapped the masked man holding the gun.

They had killed Ron, and worse, they had killed Carol.

After Ron had fallen, Arianna had realized there had been more of them. Five of them, or at least five that she had seen. Some had been disguised as customers, because Arianna was certain that they had just pulled masks on over their heads when the first one had shot Ron. Once the first one had killed Ron another one entered, already wearing a mask with a big duffle bag over his shoulder. He had opened it and the others had grabbed assault rifles from it, as well as explosives and chains.

The leader was the thinnest of the crew, wearing a navy blue suit with a white shirt and a black tie. He had gone up to Carol and had asked her for the key to the vault. Carol had refused and pressed the silent alarm, at which point the man had shook his head and then raised his own pistol. Arianna recognized that it must have had a silencer on the end of it, and squeezed the trigger like it was nothing.

The bullet caught Carol in the neck and she gasped, the noise she made wet and horrible. She clutched at her throat as she tried to say something, her eyes catching Arianna again. Even in that briefest of instances, Arianna could see that the light was fading from Carol’s eyes, as blood spurted out from the gunshot wound and poured down her neck and blouse, staining it a sickly brown.

As Carol sank to the floor, the leader pointed his weapon at Arianna.

“I know she just hit the silent alarm. We re-routed it an hour ago and even if somebody called this in to CPPD their response time to a 211 is six minutes. Unless you want to join your colleague on the floor I suggest you open the vault.”

“I…” Arianna considered lying and then she saw a flash of Larry. Larry, who she would never see again if she lied. Larry, who she cared about way, way more than her stupid job here at the bank. The job that she was more than happy to quit, just as soon as she could live with Larry.

“You need two keys to open the vault,” Arianna told the bank robber, surprising herself at how calm she sounded. “Carol has one of the keys in her desk, and the bank manager Jerry, the man sitting behind the desk over there has the other. I do know the code to get us through the first security door though, as well as the combination to the vault.”

The leader smiled behind the hockey mask. “Very good. Weed, grab the manager’s key.”

The bank robber who had shot Ron, now brandishing an assault rifle walked over to Arianna’s bank manager Jerry, who was sitting in his tiny cubicle away from the tellers’ desk. He pointed the nasty looking rifle at Jerry’s chest and pressed the black barrel into the center of Jerry’s yellow tie.

“Key.”

Jerry swallowed hard and reached up, pulling the key out from underneath his shirt collar. It was on a thin metal chain and he lifted it over his head and handed it to “Weed.”

“Here you go, Coke,” Weed said and tossed the key at the leader, who was still pointing his silenced pistol at Arianna. Coke caught the key without looking.

“Let’s go,” he snapped.

Arianna felt her hands trembling as she moved over to Carol’s desk, trying her best not to look down at the body. She could feel her heels on the carpet, and could feel how squishy it was by Carol’s desk. The carpet was soaked with Carol’s blood.

Arianna opened the desk and pulled out the second key and held it up. She couldn’t hide her hand trembling, and the key rattled a little on an identical silver chain to the one Coke already had in his hand.

W
hich was
how Arianna found herself with a rifle barrel pressed into her back as she opened the first security door (a simple eight-digit keypad and a standard employee key opened that one) and led both Coke and one of the other robbers down the long hallway to the heavy bank vault door.

When they stopped at the door the barrel left her back finally.

Arianna tried not to look right at Coke, but she still turned toward him, to address him. “We need to put the keys in at the exact same time. Once they are in place, I have thirty seconds to put in the combination, and then we turn the keys together to finish unlocking it. Understood?”

Coke nodded his head. “Yep.”

Arianna slid her key into it’s lock, and watched as he did the same. She waited the five seconds necessary before she started to spin the dial, quickly putting in the correct combination. Arianna finished and nodded at the bank robber. Her hand wrapped around her key. “On three. Two, One…” they turned the keys at the same time and there was a soft “click” from the heavy metal door.

The other robber spun the heavy wheel and pulled, and the door opened towards Arianna. Coke pointed his weapon at her. “Inside. With us.”

Arianna opened her mouth to protest but thought better of it and followed him inside. Inside the vault the safety deposit boxes were in a long row and at the end of the first room there was another heavy metal gate with another lock and another keypad. Behind the gate were stacks of cash, neatly bundled and placed on several shelves. She pointed at the lock.

“I can’t open that. It requires both the manager’s key, his passcode and the chief teller’s passcode and … well you shot her.”

Coke wasn’t listening to her. Instead he was looking at the safety deposit boxes, searching for a number.

“This one, Ox,” he said pointing at box 617.

Ox pulled out a blue rubbery material that looked like a stick of gum. He pushed it into the keyhole and then stuck a short fuse into the end of the it. Ox pulled out a lighter and lit the end of the fuse.

“Get back,” Ox said and moved to the side.

The blast sounded like a car back firing and smoke filled the room and Arianna’s ears began ringing. Ox didn’t stop there though, he moved over to the heavy metal door and pulled out a far bigger wedge of the blue plastic, and smashed it into the keyhole. He pushed a larger fuse into it, and lit the end.

Coke ignored him, as he was busy emptying the safety deposit box. He stuffed the whole box into his backpack and zipped it shut.

The second explosion knocked Arianna over, and an alarm started to blare.

The robbers were yelling something, but they sounded muffled to Arianna. In front of her she saw acid yellow splotches hovering in her vision, and for a second she could have sworn she saw Larry smiling at her, offering her his hand to help her up.

Arianna helped herself to her feet, steadying herself on the wall of safety deposit boxes. The explosion had worked, and she dully noted that the safe cage was breached.

Ox was busy stuffing his backpack with plastic-wrapped stacks of hundreds. Weed appeared at the door of the vault, and tossed the duffle bag at Coke. He yelled something at the leader, and Coke nodded. The three of them moved into the cage and worked in unison. The duffle bag contained three more duffle bags. Using switchblades they cut the last stacked cash and slid them into the bags. The whole operation lasted maybe thirty seconds, but when they were done, all four duffle bags were filled with cash and they had cleaned out the vault. Arianna calculated they probably were walking away with a cool four million. They slid the heavy bags across the vault floor and started to move faster, picking up the pace.

Coke was the last one to leave the cage, and he looked around, like he was making sure they had everything. He still had the backpack slung over his shoulder, and he nodded his head, like he had just finished a mental checklist. Arianna clung to the wall, hoping he had forgotten about her. He moved past her towards the vault door, and then glanced over in her direction.

He opened his mouth and said something, and the bank teller could have sworn it looked like he was saying “thank you.”

Instinctively she replied, “you’re welcome,” out of habit rather than actual conscious thought.

Coke raised his pistol and pulled the trigger. Arianna didn’t hear the “pop” over the sound of her ears still ringing, but she felt a sharp stab of pain in her chest, like she had been stung right above her left breast.

Arianna glanced down at her blouse and saw a circle of red quickly spreading. She felt strange, queasy and light-headed all at the same time, like the last time she had tried to give blood at the Red Cross.

“I…” She tried to say more, but she suddenly couldn’t find the words, and even opening her mouth took far more effort than it should.

She was also finding it very hard to stand up. Or keep her eyes open. Everything was just so … heavy.

Arianna felt herself sinking towards the floor, even as her vision faded more and more. She wasn’t sure where she was or why she had gotten there, but it didn’t matter now. All that mattered now was to close her eyes. Everything was so heavy, and her chest hurt. Her heart was pounding so fast, and all she could hear was the thump, thump, thump of it. She wasn’t sure why it was beating so fast, but it didn’t matter.

Nothing did.