One in the a.m. and the city is dead. Sure, there’s still one desperate hour to be squeezed out of the bars down on Sixth, and some of the convention hotels on the Lake are still hopping, but here in the torpid heart of the business district, everything is quiet and empty and dark. Which is ideal, because that means we can position the stolen truck on the sidewalk opposite the bank without anyone complaining.
“Say the word, chief!” laughed Mike, riding high, his pupils tiny black pinpricks in bloodshot whites. He’s revving the truck hard; the frame is shaking with eagerness. I nod, he lets out a whoop, pops the clutch and we lurch hard and fast across the street, up onto the sidewalk, and through the doors of the bank, concrete and glass blasting to powder around us.
“Hot damn!” grins Jimmy in the middle seat, shaking his head. “Listen to that squeal!” The alarm is a piercing shriek echoing through the empty city canyon.
“C’mon,” I say. “A minute, tops.” Mike backs up, pulls out, and then reverses into the hole he just made. We’re out and wrapping the chains around the lobby ATM, and then the 400 horses of the stolen truck grind and groan until the whole machine pops its bolts and rips free of the concrete. It takes all three of us to manhandle it into the bed, and then we’re off, blasting through the flashing stop lights, doing 80, easy.
In fifteen minutes we’re outside of the city, in one of the half-built apartment complexes across the river by the new electric car plant. It’s quiet there, too, all skeletal rebar and rough concrete. Desolate; the only witness is a coyote watching us from around the dumpster on the far end of the fencing.
Mike and Jimmy are dancing around like eager puppies.
“How do we open in, chief?” says Mike. “Sledge? Or saws?”
“Blast it?” ventures Jimmy.
“We don’t,” I say, shaking my head. A look of painful confusion rolls over both their faces. “No time. Machine has a second alarm in it, tripped when we pulled it out of the wall. GPS transmitter; it’s sending a signal right now. Cops are on their way already.”
“The fuck – ” hisses Mike, who’s already spent his cut. I reach into my pocket and they both jump, but I just pull out a couple of wads.
“Five hundred and change apiece,” I say, tossing them each one. “Get going.” They look at me, at the machine in the truck, at the roll in their hand, and they’re gone. Professional might be a bit much, but they’re pragmatic fucks, I’ll give them that.
I hurry to the half-built parking garage where I stashed my bag earlier in the evening. As I mount the last stair I can just hear the sirens as they come off the frontage road. I slide into place, near a big open wall in the garage, three stories up and with a clear line of sight into the large open staging area where we’d parked the truck. I pull the canvas bag out from where I’d hidden it and unwrap the thirty-aught-six from the oil cloth. I’m tightening the scope when the cops swing around the corner and come screaming into the construction site, lights flashing, sirens wailing, they’re feeling good tonight, you can tell. I chamber five rounds, shoulder the rifle, and look down the scope.
Ah, there he is.
Big blonde fucker, crew cut, all-american blue-eyed boy. Same cocky smile as when he’d walked down the courthouse steps a free man. Same cocky swagger as when he’d held the riot gun lower than you were supposed to, when he’d pulled the trigger and sent the tear gas canister through the temple of student protestor on campus, my little brother.
Lookit em down there, playing SWAT, guns drawn, dodging around the stolen truck like they were in a fucking movie of something. Walking and running, just like my little brother couldn’t anymore.
I lined blondey up in the scope.
And I squared the account.
~ fin ~
Eric Williams is a writer living on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous seaway in Austin, TX. He has published a collection of original weird fiction, Toadstones (Malarkey Press, 2022), and selected, edited, and wrote the introduction for Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation (Paradise Editions, 2023), a collection of the translated fiction that appeared in Weird Tales magazine in the 1920s-40s. Check out his website at geoliminal.com.
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