Smash & Grab (30 page)

“The bank is already
supposed to be open. We have to hurry,” Lexi says. Her voice sounds strained. Frantically pushing her mask off her face, she stares into my eyes like there's something she wants to say or do. I expected her to come at me with her usual swagger, all flirt and confidence. Ready to con me into handing over the flash drive and then somehow trap us down here. Instead, she's ghost-pale. After what I overheard in the parking garage, I was ready to handle the usual Lexi. And best her. But this version has me wondering if underneath it all she's just a girl who's suddenly found herself in way over her head.

Welcome to my world,
I think, smiling tentatively at her. I've felt in over
my
head since I started doing jobs. Carlos, Eddie, and Benny rush out of the vault like the place is cursed. It feels cursed. Every minute we spent locked inside with Soldado, Twitch, and Psycho buried less than fifty feet away felt like an eternity. I kept imagining them digging out and coming for us. I haul out two of the four money bags we managed to keep, and Benny and Carlos tote out the others. There are more than twenty more underground with Soldado—not that he'll ever get to spend it. It should be enough to satisfy the cops and keep them from looking too hard for the rest. I'm guessing we've got maybe four million total with us. Still the best haul we've had, and more than enough to get all of us and our families a safe distance from the Florencia Heights and the Eme. We leave behind our guns, wiped clean of fingerprints. While we were waiting for Lexi to come, we stood at the edge of the hole in the vault floor and tossed them down. It felt sort of momentous, like the first step toward a new life.

We shut the vault's outer door. I can hear the lock automatically engage again. I exhale. We're out. Now all that's left to do is leave.

From here the plan is supposed to be simple: we go out through the bank doors that lead to the building's lobby, avoiding the street exit altogether. Both getaway cars are now parked on the bottom level of the garage behind the building. The security guard stationed in the lobby will see us go and call the police, but he won't know what cars we drive away in, not until they check the garage's cameras much later, and by then we'll have ditched the cars and will be long gone. The hardest part of the heist is behind us; there's just the short walk outside now. Five more minutes and my bank-robbing days are over.

Lexi moves so she's blocking our path. “We had a deal. I got you out; now it's your turn to give us Harrison's stuff.”

“Once we're outside,” I say.

“No, now.” She holds out a hand, and her friends gather close. Carlos and Eddie laugh in disbelief. They can't possibly be prepared to physically stop us.
This is going to waste time that we don't have.

I sigh and drop my duffel, unzip it, and dig out Harrison's papers.

She and Quinn huddle together quickly.

“This isn't it,” Quinn says, swallowing hard enough that I can see his throat working.

“That's all there was?” she asks, eyes narrowed.

“We need to go,” Leo says, leading us toward the stairway. “We've been here almost fifteen minutes. Much too long. We can't deal with this here.”

Fifteen minutes!

“We have to go right now!” I scoop up my duffel bag and grab Lexi's hand. She struggles.

“You want to separate? Trust me to meet you upstairs?” I ask.

She bites her lip and lets me pull her toward the stairs, her hand tightening on mine. I want her close.

We're nearly halfway there when we hear the sounds of shattering glass.

We freeze.

The bank's security alarm shrieks to life, but we can still hear stuff happening. More glass breaking, then pounding feet. The police. Has to be.

Without a word, we turn and run back down the stairs—to where, I have no idea. There's only the vault and the collapsed tunnel. We're trapped. We were so close and it was all for nothing.

I'm going to jail.

We all are.

People say in times like these your life flashes before your eyes, but it isn't true. There is only the sickening, sinking feeling of being caught and the kind of adrenaline spike that prey animals must feel when they're being hunted. They're running with all they've got, but deep down they know it's not good enough. In the end they were always meant to be eaten.

“Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god,” Carlos whispers.

“Shh,” Lexi hisses. She jabs a finger toward the end of the hallway before she pushes past everyone to take the lead. I'm not sure if I'm imagining it, but I think I hear people coming down the steps now, the squeak of rubber on marble.

She pulls at a door I didn't notice before, probably because it's the same color as the hallway and the handle is near the floor and opens upward, not out. Hiding might buy us a minute or two, but what's the point? Except when I get closer, I can see that it's a cargo elevator with graffiti-covered walls. I have no idea where it goes or what we'll do when we get there. I just crowd inside with everyone else and wait, panicked and silent, as Lexi shuts the outer door and presses the up button. A second, inner door slides shut, and the thing shudders to life. I can't hear what's happening outside the elevator anymore; there is only the mechanical grind of the lift and the sounds of our breathing.

“How did they know?” Eddie says, his voice high and tight.

“One of the tellers might've gotten loose,” Leo suggests.

“I secured the bank people. Oversecured them. There's no way,” Quinn growls.

“What does it matter? We have exactly twenty seconds before this elevator opens up on the fourth floor, okay? We can access the parking garage from the exit up there. We'll only be a few levels from the getaway cars. There is one security guy who mans that door. We get past him and we can take the garage stairs to the first floor. The cars will be right there.”

“We can manage one guard,” I say, more to convince myself than them.

The elevator slows, stops. The door slides open. Lexi pokes her head out. “Clear,” she says, and everyone files out of the elevator. The door closes again, and I can hear it start moving down, back the way we just came. Whoever's in the basement below has called it back down. We have a minute—two, tops—before they are right behind us.

As we hurry toward
the fourth-floor exit, I try not to think about how little time we have or about what we might have to do to get past the guard. I just move. Out of the elevator and down the hall. Quinn nearly collides with a woman when we round the corner. She drops the paperwork she had cradled in her arms and screams.

“Get away,” Quinn yells at her.
“Move!”

She takes off in the opposite direction, her feet wobbling as she tries to run full tilt in high heels.

We head for the exit. I can see it now, the glass double doors, the guard, his back to us, a phone cradled to his ear…and a set of flashing police lights outside. The cop car's just pulled up. The two cops inside haven't seen us, but there is no way we can go out there now.

“The stairs,” I say. “This way.” I take the lead, turning down the hallway that branches off to the right. The stairs are at the very end. We hurtle toward it. I hit the door, open it. Up or down? Which way do we go? I listen for noise in the stairwell. If we go down, the only way out of the building is through the lobby, so that's out. Up it is. I start to climb and the others follow. I am leading us now, and it sucks because I don't know what to do. The fourth-floor entrance is the only other one besides the one in the lobby. The most I'm doing is buying us time. Is there a place we can hide? Wait it out?
Think, Lexi, think.
Most of the floors are exactly like this one, filled with LL National employees. People will see us. Even if we could find an empty office to hide out in, the cops will know we're still in the building. Detective Martin will know. I think about those eyes of his, those determined, obsessive eyes. He will scour every inch of this building to find us. There is nowhere we can hide, no hope of escape. My foot slips on the step and I nearly fall. How could I be this stupid? Why did I ever think this would work? Harrison might have screwed my family to save himself, but I've screwed over my friends trying to get revenge. I'm no better than he is. Tears run down my face, tickle my chin.

“Guys, I'm sorry. I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure what to do now.” I turn around so I can face them. Oliver is directly behind me. He's still got his mask on, but his aviators are pushed up onto the top of his head. The way his hair sticks up reminds me of the night we jumped off the Bank Tower building, less than two blocks from here.
We jumped.
And all at once I have an idea.

There is a moment
when I think that our little trip up the stairway was an exercise in futility, but then Lexi lights up like the fireworks we saw the other night, and suddenly she's not just climbing but bounding up the stairs.

“Where are we going?” Carlos asks, panting heavily. Bet he's regretting all the honeybuns about now.

“Oliver, can we use the trash chute?” Lexi asks. “It's still there. Please say it's still there.”

“At the construction site. Yeah. We could. But if the crew's already working…”

“We have to take our chances. Or…the fire alarm. Can we make the fire alarm go off? Then they'll have to clear the building, right? Crew. Everyone.” She's out of breath; we all are. The money bag I'm carrying is making me slower than usual. I look at Benny, Carlos, and Eddie. They're feeling it, too. Twenty extra pounds each we're toting, and there's no good way to distribute it so that it isn't awkward to carry.

“The chute leads down to the bottom level of the garage. Other than that, there's only the elevator that leads from in here to there. You know they have the elevators manned inside the building, so it makes sense they wouldn't have cops in that part of the garage. We lose the zombie gear and the sweatshirts and go out on foot.”

“So all we need is to set off a fire alarm, right?” Benny asks, his face slick with sweat. He shifts his duffel bag from one shoulder to the other.

“Basically, yeah. We just need someone to trip the system.” Lexi keeps climbing. We must be near the tenth floor by now.

“On it,” Oliver says, and he takes the steps two at a time to the next floor. He whips off his mask and hoodie, hands it to Quinn, and heads for the door with this fancy-looking stainless-steel lighter in one hand.

“The construction starts on the next floor up,” Lexi says. “We need to get there before the alarm goes off and the stairwell gets crowded with people.”

We run full out, not bothering to be quiet anymore and barely make it to the door before the alarm trips. We erupt out of the stairwell. The eleventh floor is stripped down to the building's reinforced-steel frame and concrete floor. There are pallets of building materials and some tools scattered around, but mostly it is an empty shell. Even half the windows are missing, so the floor opens up to the outside. It is crazy hot. July hot.

“Take off your clothes,” Lexi orders.

“You picked a helluva time to start flirting,” I say, because even panicked and on the run, I can't help it. She left herself wide-open.

Lexi pulls off her hoodie and rolls her eyes, but her lips twitch like she's fighting a smile. “No, I mean all your zombie gear. Hurry.”

Oliver's back a few seconds later. “We need to go. Like now. The building's emptying out. It'll be that much easier to find us.” He walks toward the far end of the floor to the group of pallets we changed behind last week and rummages around. “It's not here.”

“What's not?” I ask, getting closer. I don't like feeling so out of control. I'm depending on Lexi and her crew to get me and the boys out, and I'm still not entirely sure we can trust them to, especially now when leaving us might buy them time to get away.

“The winch. It's not here.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I had a rope and winch to get us down the chute. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise…” I lean forward. “Otherwise what?”

“We have to slide down the chute.”

“Okay. And?” Lexi asks.

Oliver messes with his lighter, flips it open and shut. “And it's eleven floors up. That's a long way to go. We go down too fast and the impact at the bottom is gonna suck. We can't exactly flee the scene if we've all got broken bones. We need something to slow us down.”

“We're at a construction site and there's no rope? No. No way. There has to be something.” I start walking around, moving stuff.

“Electrical wire. There's a whole roll right there. Help me get it over to the chute.” Quinn grabs hold of the wire spool and starts to drag it toward the chute. I grab the bottom of the spool and we go faster. There is noise coming from the stairwell. Voices. People from the upper floors evacuating the building. Most likely the construction crew, since, according to Oliver, they're working several floors up. But also office workers. Possibly even police.

Oliver examines the wire. It's narrow and coated in rubber. There's not much to grab on to.

“There's not enough time for us to go one at a time, but I have no idea how much weight this can hold,” Oliver says.

“We either take our chances or go downstairs and turn ourselves in right now,” Lexi says.

I think about what it would be like to do it. Just walk up to the police and confess the way I would at church. Excuse me, sir, but I have sinned….With Soldado caught, it doesn't seem like that bad an idea. I'm so tired of doing jobs and covering my tracks. Coming clean might be a relief. But then I look at Benny. His mom is dying. If he goes to jail, he may never see her again. Carlos and Eddie will just end up caving to the Eme to survive and becoming carnales—sworn brothers, in for life. We've managed to avoid getting jumped in all this time. It wipes away any temptation I have to come clean.

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.