Mickey Finn tried to forget the ache in his bones as he stood in line at the Standard Trust on Main Street with a neatly written note clutched in his liver-spotted hand. When had he started to feel his skeleton? Bones were supposed to be the silent scaffolding of the body. Maybe it was his body’s way of saying he was too old to be knocking off banks.
“Next,” the teller said.
The woman in front of him stepped to the counter at the same time Mickey stepped forward to take her place. He scanned the bank behind the thick pair of glasses that would obscure his face from the cameras blinking in each corner of the small room. Wendy, his wife, stood perusing the brochures, seemingly oblivious to the quiet hum around her, but her readiness was apparent in the slight hunch of her shoulders and the unnatural stillness of her head. As soon he started the proceedings, she would plunge a hand into her bag and curl her fingers around the snub-nosed Colt nestled under half-used tubes of lipstick. Her hands would be steady, a remarkable feat given the tremor that made drinking tea a percussive musical experience.
After twelve of these, they had their routine dialed in. They’d refused the indignity of aging mired in a poverty that crept up the way the weeds in their yard had. One day it was all manageable, and the next they were avoiding going out to get the mail, preferring ignorance to the terrifying knowledge, laid out in red ink and capitalized OVERDUEs, that a lifetime of work had barely kept them above the line.
“Sir,” the teller said. She was in the full rotting bloom of late middle-age.
He stepped up to the counter, slid his note across and watched her eyes as she read it. He was used to seeing pupils dilate once they’d read Fill the bag with small bills. 5s, 10s and 20s. No alarm. I won’t hurt you. He could see the shock as they struggled to recall the few hours of training they’d received, which told them to not make a fuss and hand over the money. The bank is insured, let the police handle it. He handed the teller the bag. The woman fought a smile as she filled it, and the distinctive whirr of a siren building toward crescendo began to filter through the bank’s glass doors.
“Give me the bag,” he said.
When she hesitated, he reached over to snatch one of the straps slung over the counter and ran toward the exit, his aching bones forgotten.
The Colt, the great equalizer, was in Wendy’s hand and scanning the room. “No one be a hero,” she shouted before following him out the door.
He screwed up his eyes against the sun as they hauled themselves across the asphalt. God, this parking lot was enormous. The sirens were loud now, earsplitting and angry, wailing on his eardrums. Tires chirped, and he barely heard the officers barking at them to get down on the ground, now over the shrill circular whine of the siren. Everything was an echo of the archetypes that decades of movies had seared into his mind, and he wondered vaguely if what he heard and saw now was what was actually happening or if his mind was surfacing fragments of memory, grainy images of sweaty standoffs viewed in cool theaters with half-chewed mouthfuls of popcorn.
They’d made their choice a long time ago—they hadn’t gotten into this to spend their golden years locked up—but as the distinctive pop of the revolver sounded and the gun jerked in Wendy’s hand, their decision became real, a weight he could feel pressing on his chest. The windshield of the closest police cruiser shattered. Taking matters into their own hands had been easy. A joke that quickly turned into their reality. What if we…and they had. Simple as writing a note and sliding it over the counter.
Mickey felt a dull tearing, like a muted ripping of cardboard, and then he was sitting on the ground watching chunks torn from the heat-softened asphalt dance like schizophrenic puppets. At least they’d made a choice.
~ fin ~
Patrick Szakiel grew up in New Jersey and is currently living and writing in The Netherlands. His work has previously appeared in Shotgun Honey and Close to the Bone, and he’s currently querying a thriller, Helen and Earl, for representation/publication. For more information, go to patrickszakiel.com.
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