Sudden Prey

HALFWAY down the block when they went inside and he said, “The two women are inside. Pulled the nylons over their heads. It’s going down.”
    Five seconds later, Del and Kupicek stopped at the corner behind him, then eased forward so they could see the back of the Chevy van and Cale’s head. They were forty yards away.
    Sloan stopped at the next corner up, and eased forward until he could see the front of the truck. “You set?” Lucas asked. He cracked the back door.
    “Yeah.” Sloan nodded, looked almost sleepy and yawned. Tension.
    “Let’s go,” Lucas said. And in the handset he said, “Go.”
     
     
     
    GEORGIE AND CANDY went in hard, very large, very loud, screaming, masks, guns, Georgie first:
    “On the wall,” she screamed, “on the wall,” and Candy behind her, vaulting to the top of the cash counter, screaming, the gun big in her hand, the hole at the muzzle looking for eyes. “On the wall . . .”
    Four women employees and a single customer, a man in a black ski jacket and tinted eyeglasses, were inside the credit union. The woman closest to Candy looked like a carp, her mouth opening and closing, opening and closing, hands coming up, then waving, as though she could wave away a bullet. She wore a pink sweater with hand-darned blue flax blossoms in a line across the chest. Another woman curled up and turned away, looking back at them over her shoulder, and stepped against the back wall, next to a filing cabinet. She wouldn’t look at Candy. A younger woman, a cashier, jumped back, yelped once, put her hands over her mouth, backed away, knocked a phone off a table, jumped again, froze. The fourth woman simply backed away, her hands at her shoulders.
    Georgie said, rapid-fire, a vocal machine gun: “Easy, easy, everybody take it easy. Everybody shut up, shut up, shut up, and stand still. Stand still, everybody shut up . . . This is a holdup, shut up.”
    They’d been inside for ten seconds. Candy dropped behind the counter and pulled a pillowcase out of her waistband and started dumping cash drawers.
    “Not enough,” she shouted over Georgie’s chant. “Not enough, there’s more somewhere.”
    Georgie picked out the woman with the best clothes, the woman with the flax blossoms, pointed her finger at her and shouted, “Where is it, where’s the rest of it?”
    The woman said, “No-no-no . . .”
    Georgie pointed her pistol at the man in the ski jacket and said, “If you don’t say, in one second I’m gonna blow his fuckin’ head off, his fuckin’ head.”
    Georgie was posed in a two-handed TV-cop position, the pistol pointing at jacket-man’s head, never wavering. The flax-blossom woman looked around for somebody to help her, somebody to direct her, but there wasn’t anybody. She sagged and said, “There’s a box in the office.”
    Candy grabbed her, roughed her, shoved her toward the tiny cubicle in the back. The woman, scuttling ahead, pointed at a box on the floor in the footwell of the desk. Candy shoved her back toward the door, picked up the box, put it on the desk, and popped the top: stacks of currency, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds.
    “Got it,” she shouted. She dumped it in the pillowcase.
    “Let’s go,” Georgie shouted. “Let’s go . . .”
    Candy twisted the top of the pillowcase and threw it over her shoulder, like Santa Claus, and hustled around the cash counter toward the door. The man in the ski jacket had backed against the wall at a check-writing desk, his hands over his head, a twisted, trying-to-please smile on his face, his eyes frightened white spots behind the amber-tinted specs.
    “What are you laughing at?” Candy screamed at him. “Are you laughing at us?”
    The smile got broader, but he waved his fingers and said, “No, no, I’m not laughing . . .”
    “Fuck you,” she said, and she shot him in the face.
    The blast in the small office was a bomb: the four women shrieked and went down. The man simply dropped, a spray of blood on the tan wall behind his head, and Georgie spun and said, “Go.”
    They were out the door in seconds . . .
     
     
     
    “ DO IT, ” DEL said, and Kupicek floored it.
    Sloan was coming in from the front. Duane saw him coming, had no time to wonder. The car swerved and screeched to a stop three inches from the van’s front bumper, wedging him to the curb. From behind, in a flash in his rearview mirror, he saw another car wedge in behind him. In the next half-second, the passenger door flew open and