THE NERVES UNDER my skin are as sensitive as the tip of my dick as I lay my head back on the headrest of Nix’s black GMC Denali. Surrounded by the calming black interior, leather seats, and blue display lights, Nix and I look out the windshield across the street. Past the bright green leaves of the trees in front of us, and on the other side of the four-lane road that flows with light traffic, sits Rock’s navy blue Cadillac Escalade, lying in wait between the bright yellow lines of the parking lot of Hyperion Bank. Inside of Rock’s SUV is the crew we’ve officially commissioned to pull off this job: Terry “Rock” Brenham, Marcell Pemberton, and Ricky and Donny Fontane.
My little wonder boy, Tim Sandusky, isn’t in the Escalade with them. He’s a rookie who’s still trying to earn the right to be a part of my long list of associates, and he’s yet to earn his place. Just because he was able to successfully sneak inside that pig’s house and steal my ten grand back doesn’t mean he’s ready to step up to the big time, and it doesn’t mean he’s ready to be trusted enough to even take out my trash. Kid’s got a long way to go, but pulling off the Detective Mason job three days ago was a good start. This will be considered just another single step in a marathon. I’ve got a little bit of faith in the kid after the Mason job, but Nix isn’t convinced.
Even as we sit here, watching our latest plan getting ready to unfold in front of us, I can still feel the anxiety wafting off of Nix. Through his all-black outfit and black hat that he has pulled down low to hide most of his face, I can tell he’s not comfortable as he usually is in moments like this, and I know Tim has a lot to do with that. He’s been telling me this is a bad idea since I first informed the crew that Tim would be helping with the heist that night at Club Asylum, and even though he hasn’t said anything about it yet today, I know it’s coming. I can tell from how he lifts his over-sized, tattooed hand and rubs his chin, ruffling the thick black hairs that hang from his face. I’ve known Nix for fifteen years now, and when you’ve been friends that long, you really know each other.
“Say it, Nix,” I tell him, instead of waiting for him to do what I know he will.
“You already know, but it’s too late now,” he replies in his signature low growl of a voice.
I release a deep breath and stare out the windshield at the dark gray concrete building that is Hyperion Bank, anxious to get this show on the road, eager for the chaos to erupt in front of me.
“The kid’s gonna be fine, Nix. He’s a criminal at heart,” I respond as calmly as I can.
“You don’t feel like this is a risk?”
“Everything we do is a risk.”
“This is different, Solomon,” Nix snips, still staring straight ahead even though we don’t expect anything for another ten minutes. “You’re right that everything we’ve ever done has been risky, but this kid is an unnecessary risk. We don’t know him, and he came to us. He came to us in the middle of the club, like he was trying to make sure he was seen. I don’t know why, but something about him just doesn’t feel right to me. Something’s off. I can see it in that baby face of his.”
“You think he’s a cop?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do with ‘I don’t know?’ When he first came to us, you looked into him and didn’t find anything, right? He’s not related to any cops, he lived with his parents until he was eighteen when they both died in a car accident, and he doesn’t have a job now, after being fired from his little car dealership gig a few months back. He’s got priors for petty crimes like theft and dealing weed. He’s just trying to come up, and he’s got balls of steel for coming into the Asylum like that.”
Nix doesn’t respond. He knows that he’s already done his homework on Tim Sandusky, and he came up empty. Whatever he’s feeling right now is simply his personal gut feeling, and it’s based on nothing, so he knows I won’t change my mind on this, but Nix and I friends, and he’s the only person who gets away with voicing his opinion against mine. After everything I’ve been through in my life, Nix is the only friend I’ve got, and he’s the only one I want. He could say anything to me and it wouldn’t break what we have. We came up together from nothing, the absolute bottom, the damn gutter, and we made it out by working together. So if he’s talking, I’m listening, even if we disagree.
“Alright, alright, Nix,” I say after another loud exhale. “You know we can’t go back on this now. The kid is literally standing on the corner, waiting to signal as the truck arrives, so we can’t change the plan this late in the game. But after this is said and done, we’ll slow down with Tim. Watch him more closely when we’re not around to see what he’s into away from us, and we’ll go from there.”
“Good. I think that’s smart,” Nix replies, as satisfied as he’s going to get on this subject.
The rest of the crew wasn’t exactly thrilled with bringing along a nobody to a heist like this either. It wasn’t until I told them that Tim would be working pro bono that they started coming around, and I had to make sure his involvement was extremely limited before they would agree to work with him. So, Tim’s job has been reduced to merely standing his young ass in a bus stop at the end of the street and waiting to see the truck approaching, approximately six minutes from now, so he can signal to the crew in Rock’s SUV that it’s game time. He’ll send a text to Rock’s burner phone and mine, and as soon as the text is sent, he’ll dump his own burner and take a cab back to wherever he lays his pretty little head at night to await my call. That’s all he’s expected to do, and he’s doing it knowing he won’t get a dime of the money we steal. You’ve got to earn your keep in this game. Nothing comes free. You don’t become a somebody in this game by riding the coattails of real criminals.
As for the rest of today’s festivities, the job is simple when you’re working with a crew as experienced as the one we’ve assembled. Nix and I outlined the whole plan based on Nix’s assessment and reconnaissance over the past three weeks, and it goes a little something like this. The armored truck that drops the money will arrive approximately four minutes from now, and is usually right on schedule, give or take a minute or two. As soon as the armored truck comes into view, Tim signals the crew from the bus stop as it passes him, and the crew gears up with masks and gloves to cover every piece of skin they have, and they’ll lock and load as the truck approaches and slows near the back door entrance of Hyperion Bank. As the truck comes to a stop, the crew will exit the Escalade and rush the delivery boys after they get out of the truck and open the locked compartment in the back where all of that beautiful green money is. They go two at a time in intervals—first Rock and Marcell, then Ricky and Donny thirty seconds later. The delivery boys will be armed of course, so my guys will be going in hot and ready to shoot if one of these pigs makes them. Any body part goes towards their weapons, my guys drop them on the spot. Rock and Marcell force the deliverers into the back of the truck and toss their weapons and any communication devices they have out the back, while Ricky and Donny come from behind and start taking money. Every single bill they can see is to be snatched up. Once the deed is done, our guys exit and lock the two delivery boys in the back of their own truck, zip tied and gagged, while the four-man crew jumps back into the Escalade and slowly drives away. They’ll drive east while Nix and I drive west. Rock will keep the money until I know that we’re in the clear, at which point I’ll call the entire crew on their burners, and we’ll meet up at one of my warehouses on the edge of Philly to divvy up the cash. Simple, right? It’s a freakin’ piece of cake, and based on Nix’s assessment, we can expect the delivery truck to pull up in about two minutes or so. Game time, baby! Jesus-freakin’-McChrist, I love my job!
“Should be about ninety seconds now,” Nix reminds me as he adjusts himself in his seat, the adrenaline beginning to pump throughout his massive body.
I smile to myself as the seconds tick by, knowing we’re about to grab a ton of money, and Nix and I have come so far in this game that we don’t have to do anything but sit here and watch our money come to us. We’ve come a long way from Cash N Check.
It’s almost time, so I look out of Nix’s window to see if there is anything suspicious happening. No cops, no pedestrians too close for comfort, no security guards from Hyperion taking a smoke break. With Nix’s side clear, I turn to my right and look out my own window. It’s there that something catches my eye. It’s not a cop or a security guard or a civilian who might try to become a hero. It’s a woman.
Her skin is pale and flawless, and her blonde hair glows in the Philadelphia sun as she approaches the parking lot we’re sitting in wearing a black leather jacket with skin-tight blue jeans. She has her hands in her pockets as she walks towards us, but I can’t quite make out her facial features just yet. She’s still too far away. I find myself fixated on her as she comes closer, and even though I can’t see her clearly yet, my mind fills in the blanks for me.
Reina.
I feel my heart surge. My skin flushes red under my black sweater and black denim pants, and I can feel myself losing control of my breathing as the excitement, fear, and anger start to boil in my stomach, sending mixed emotions shooting through my veins. What is she doing here? After all this time, this is how I see her again? Walking down the street without a care in the world, still living in the city we knew each other in?
Suddenly, memories come rushing back to me like a levee has broken and the waters are flooding in, the current too strong for me to do anything about it. All I can do is drown within my own mind as I see Reina and me standing within the narrow walls of the alley next to Aaron’s Arcade. I see the way she looks at me with those heart-stealing blue eyes and I feel like I’m right back in that moment, my soul being snatched out of my body. I see the two of us climbing the stairs of her parent’s gaudy house and ending up on her gigantic bed, living in each other, becoming one beneath her soft white sheets. I see us leaving the scene of a crime as Nix and I run out of Julia’s Jewels with bags full of money and jewelry, and I remember the way I felt as I looked at her in the rearview mirror and saw the focus and determination in her eyes as she drove us out of there, right after she had risked herself being an accessory by getting out of the car and distracting a cop that had walked by as we were getting ready to exit the building with tons of evidence in our hands. I remember how it felt, and it shakes me to my foundation as she approaches, nearly visible now.
“What the hell is going on?” I hear Nix mutter, but I’m too hypnotized by the approaching woman to really register what he said.
She keeps coming, and I keep staring, completely forgetting what I’m supposed to be paying attention to. My heart pounds under my clothes, but I’m sure it’s still visible to Nix. Reina left my house one day and never came back. Not one single text, not one phone call. She disappeared out of my life and I was never the same again. How could she do that to me, and then just show up here out of the blue? It’s like a fantasy of some sort—better yet, it’s a twisted nightmare, and I realize that now as the woman takes another long step and her face becomes clear.
“Wait, what the hell?” Nix barks, but I’m not sure what he’s talking about. I’m still watching the woman come closer, and I feel my heart drop into my stomach when my brain finally realizes it’s not her. It’s not Reina. The woman comes into view and I see her eyes are brown, her nose is the wrong shape, and she doesn’t have the angelic glow I remember Reina having from the moment I first saw her. It’s not her, but just thinking that it could’ve been was enough to break my heart all over again, not to mention break my attention away from what I was supposed to be watching unfold at Hyperion.
“Solomon, what hell? Come on!” Nix yells at me, and I turn around to see him getting out of the vehicle.
My mind finally snaps back into place and I look to see what’s gotten him so hyped up. My eyes go berserk as I frantically scan the area, trying to see what’s going on. I look directly across from us at the bank, and I don’t see the truck there. No one is outside of the bank, there are no cops. No flashing red and blue lights. It’s quiet and calm, just like it has been all day. What’s the big deal? The delivery truck isn’t at the bank, but I look and see Rock and the rest of the crew standing outside of his Escalade with stunned expressions on their faces as they look out at the road leading to the bank. There, in the middle of the street is the black armored truck that’s supposed to be coming to us, but instead, it’s stopped down the road, all of the doors are open, and the two deliverers are face down on the concrete road with their hands behind their heads, their tan shirts and black pants flapping in the breeze as they lay on their stomachs in the middle of all the confusion around them.
“What the fuck?” I hear myself say as I watch it all unfold. The truck is being hit by someone else.
There’s another crew dressed in all-black, waving around AR-15s at every vehicle in the road dumb enough to get too close to the crime scene. Four men are standing on each corner of the armored truck, guns pointed at traffic, forcing them to stop and turn around. The two delivery boys are being held at gunpoint by a man each, and as I’m watching it all, four men hop out of the back of the truck with duffel bags that look stuffed full of cash. As they hit the ground, one of them makes a circular signal with his arm, and every single one of them turns on a heel and runs for a black van with blacked-out license plates. It took them less than sixty seconds to make it all happen. It’s like they took our plan, and upgraded it with heavy artillery and more bodies. How the hell? What the hell?
Five seconds later, as bewilderment freezes me and my crew in place to do nothing but watch, the van is pulling away from the scene while the deliverers lay there on the ground, unmoving. After the van is gone, pedestrians and drivers get out of their vehicles to check on the scene, and I see people scrambling to pull out their phones, obviously dialing 9–1-1. It’ll only be a second before the sirens start to wail, so I know we’ve got to get out of here.
Nix stands about thirty yards in front of me, still stuck in a stare as he realizes our heist has been hijacked right in front of our eyes, and there’s nothing we could’ve done about it. He just stands there with his hands at his sides as Rock and the rest of the crew look at us for direction. I’m not sure what to say to anybody, but then a thought hits me like a punch from Mayweather.
“Hey, we’ve gotta go!” I hear Rock shout as he starts to get back in his SUV, followed by the rest of the crew.
“Where’s Tim?” I ask, low at first, but louder the second time as I look down the street next to the bus stop he was supposed to be sitting in. “Where is Tim?”
Nix looks over at the bus stop and he sees what I see. The armored truck is already passed the bus stop Tim is supposed to be in. He was supposed to text Rock and me when the truck approached and passed him, but we never heard from him. He never texted, and he’s nowhere to be found. Nix turns and looks at me over his shoulder as it dons on all of us. Nix was right. Tim played us.