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  “Wait!” Amy cries. “I’ve got to get Grace.” She digs into her handbag searching for car keys. “We’ll follow them,” she insists as her vision blurs behind tears. “If I can just find my keys.” The purse drops to the ground and she crouches, desperately rummaging around her wallet and tissue and hand lotion and pens and her banking receipts, until the two armored truck workers take her by the arms and help her to stand.

  “It’s too late, they’re gone already. They’re gone! We’ve got to call for help right away.” The uniformed man saying this pulls his cell phone from his pocket.

  The driver, wearing only a dark T-shirt with his uniform pants, is insisting nonstop, “The police, call the police. Get the cops here.” Perspiring and visibly shaken, he turns back to Amy. “Hurry now!”

  “No, no.” She takes a deep, shaking breath with tears lining her face. “No police.”

  “What?” both men ask at the same time.

  “We have to wait,” she explains, a hand pressing back a sob over her mouth. “They told me,” she continues then, looking from one defeated face to the other. “The man with my daughter told me I had to wait an hour. One hour with no police contact,” she barely says, her words choked back with crying. “One hour for my daughter.”

  “What? Jesus, that’s too long! Your little girl—”

  “Please,” Amy pleads. “We have to listen to them.”

  “Take a deep breath and let’s get inside where you can sit down,” one of the men tells her, and she forces herself to breathe in. Her lungs can’t seem to get enough oxygen though. The inhale is ragged and strained.

  The men lead her into the bank, through the lobby to a small office where she sits, then promptly stands and circles the room. The bank manager rushes in behind them. “What’s going on?” He looks at Amy and stops in his tracks. “What happened?”

  “They have my daughter.”

  “Who has your daughter? Is she okay?” He looks out the window and when he does, Amy does too. In her mind, it is still happening, even though the parking lot is empty now. But to her, the man holding Grace is there still, his feet always moving, shifting his weight back and forth, back and forth, turning, jostling Grace in his grip, her ponytails swinging as he moves in shadow closer to the armored truck.

  “What’s going on?” the manager asks.

  “They stole the truck!” the driver explains. “Didn’t you see?”

  “What? No. The truck’s been stolen? You gave it to them?”

  The driver nods rapidly. “Jesus, they took her girl to do it. They took her! Kidnapped her, right in broad daylight.”

  “What do you mean, they took her? You couldn’t stop them?”

  “No. Shit, it all happened so fast,” the other guard says. “I was opening the back door on the truck and the next thing, someone’s got me by the neck with a gun to my head, pushing me right inside. My God, I never saw him coming.”

  “I did what they said,” the driver says, still shaking. “Man, they’d kill him otherwise. And the girl, they had her. So I did it, I called the dispatcher, just did what they said.”

  Amy turns to the bank manager. She holds out her arms, her right hand scraped raw, her fingers shaking. “They took Grace,” she whispers. The bank goes silent, and with a few employees clustered in the doorway, listening, she explains. “He just grabbed her, and his feet, his feet, well they kept shifting.” A breath, she thinks. Breathe. “Grace, her hair, her face. She was so afraid. And I couldn’t see, in the sunlight.” She closes her eyes against all the visuals that won’t line up. “He kept moving closer to the truck. With my daughter.” Finally, when she can only cry, the two armored truck guards fill in their details. Amy, her hand over her mouth, listens closely to each mention of a tone of voice, or type of weapon trained on them, or order given. They followed those orders; the driver lied and notified their dispatcher that they were leaving for their next scheduled stop for only one reason. It was all because Grace was in that man’s arms.

  “You couldn’t use your weapons?” the bank manager asks, shaking his head no, like he already knows the answer. They all do.

  “The girl. My God, if we did anything, they’d hurt her little girl. And as soon as they got her on the truck, that was it. We were out and they took off. They did it, man, they took her. They took everything—the truck, the girl, even my uniform shirt, man. Jesus.”

  “But there’s a camera on the truck, right? Surveillance video? And GPS they can track?”

  “GPS? You kidding me, man? That klunker’s seven years old, we’re lucky to have a working radio on it.”

  “But you called the police?” the bank manager asks.

  “No, we can’t yet,” the driver explains.

  “What? Jesus Christ.” The manager lunges for a desk phone. “Christ, we need the cops, right now!”

  “No!” Amy calls out. “No, we can’t. Because he told me,” she adds.

  “Who told you?” the bank manager interrupts while picking up the phone.

  “The man who took Grace. Oh God,” she says, taking a long breath, remembering how he told her not to talk and to listen carefully. Remembering his one arm wrapped tight around Grace’s torso and the contrast of his dark clothes against her pink jeans and blonde ponytails as he hoisted her up and shifted her weight. “He said they needed one hour. One hour with no police. And then I’d get my daughter back.”

  “So they took her hostage? Just so they could get away?”

  Amy only nods, still crying.

  “That’s crazy,” the manager says. “That’s just crazy. We need the police here, right away.”

  “Please,” Amy cries. “They said not to, and I’m too afraid they’ll hurt her. Please don’t call yet.”

  A quiet second passes. “All right,” the manager finally relents as he sets the phone down. A lock of hair falls in his face; beads of perspiration line his forehead. “I don’t like it, I really don’t, but I’m not sure what to do. They say every minute counts. One hour for your daughter, I guess. That’s it, though. I mean, that’s it. And I’ll keep the bank open so we don’t raise any suspicions. But just an hour. Really.”

  Amy can’t talk. An office window draws her closer to the outside and she moves to it, looking out at the street. Maybe they’ve dropped Grace off and she is wandering alone. They might do something like that. She could be walking in the road and a car might hit her. She can be cowering in a doorway.

  The muted voices of the truck workers behind her repeat fresh details of the robbery. So she knows now. While she fell to her knees, while she squinted through glaring sunshine and harsh shadows, watching Grace hang limp—one ponytail askew, the powder blue hair ribbon flitting loose—another side of the crime played out on the armored truck, with weapons drawn, with lives threatened. All in three minutes time.

  Now sixty more minutes must pass without Grace. Sixty minutes are the ransom for her daughter’s life. No calls will come. They want no money from Amy. Sixty minutes to escape, in exchange for Grace.

  Her only defense will be memory. So for the next hour, she must hear, see, touch, know every small detail that she can remember. The sweatshirt hoods and horrible hosiery masks, the two men outside the truck and the two others who overpowered the driver and deliveryman. Behind her closed eyes, she replays parts of the crime. She sees the man holding Grace turn abruptly to run onto the truck. As he turned sharply, Grace’s legs swung with the jolt and a shoe flew off her foot. The small pink and white saddle shoe skitted across the parking lot. Amy cried out before lunging for the shoe, for all she could have of her child. There was a race, suddenly, against mere seconds as a fourth man, a lone gunman who’d been standing beside the truck, swooped down at the same time. Her legs burned and stumbled, sliding her onto her knees while falling forward, the pavement gouging her skin, her eyes on the shoe. She grasped it and winced when the man’s hand, a mere shadow behind, pressed firmly on top of hers.

  “Let me have it,” she pleaded. A pri
ckling sensation grew on the back of her hand, beneath the breadth of his strong grip. Every bit of his calloused palm, the apprehension of his hold, the knot of a scar, pressed against her, skin to skin. The curve of his grasp, the ruby ring on his finger, all branded her deeply. She will never forget those etched details. Pure physical touch, her one human connection with the crime, became the focal point of the entire battle of wills. “Please,” she insisted when he didn’t relinquish his hold.

  He shook his head no and that’s when her gaze lifted to his. He wore a hood, and hosiery had been pulled over his face. Dark eyebrows splayed disparately beneath it, his nose pulled to the side beneath the hosiery strain, and his eyelids were shadowed slits from which he watched her. She recoiled from his startling appearance and recoils again now as well, quickly opening her eyes to the bright view outside the bank window.

  * * *

  George peels the black sweatshirt off from over his windbreaker, flings it and the weapon onto a padded bench in the armored truck then bends at the waist, pressing his hands into his knees and drawing in a breath. He blows out an exhale and stretches the hosiery away from his sweating face, trying to cool down and slow his heart. When he starts to remove the hosiery, a voice comes from the front of the truck.

  “Leave it on. And where the hell are your goddamn gloves?”

  George looks at his hands, then grabs up the sweatshirt and pulls the leather gloves from a pocket. He tugs them on while watching the man standing behind the driver, giving orders. “Who are you?” When the man turns back to the front of the truck, George moves closer to him. “I asked you who you are.”

  “Reid. Friend of your brother’s.”

  Friend? No friend of Nate’s would wrench a child from her mother, aggressively kidnapping her and subjecting the mother and child to such torment. So everything takes on a different meaning now. Friend, truth, instinct. He’s got to look at details with that awareness. Both the driver and this Reid have removed the hosiery from their faces and cleaned up their appearances, with the driver having tossed the sweatshirt aside to wear the truck company’s uniform shirt. George starts to lift the hosiery off his face again.

  “Hey,” Reid says quietly. “I told you already to leave that on. You’ll be delivering the girl later and we can’t have her identifying you.”

  “Later? You got the truck. Let her go, for God’s sake. I’ll get her back.”

  “And what’s to stop them from calling the authorities then? If they have her, they’ll call the police and we’ll be surrounded in a minute. She’s our safety net. With her on the truck, they’re trapped, and they know it. They give us an hour, they get her back. No hour, no girl.”

  The girl. She sits in the rear seat, securely buckled in beneath a seat belt. Her feet hang idle, not reaching the floor. George lifts the sweatshirt he threw on the bench and pulls the saddle shoe from a pocket. Could he have done more in the parking lot, more than try to reassure her mother? Or would it have made matters worse?

  “Hey, look,” the driver says. He points across the median to the far side of the four-lane road a mile from the bank. A serious car accident requires an ambulance and two police cars. “There’s Jeremy,” he says to Reid.

  George looks out the side window. The ambulance and police cars are stopped, their lights flashing. Twisted metal is all that remains to one car’s front end; the rear passenger door of a smaller car is crumpled like a piece of tin foil, the car itself resting against a telephone pole. A middle-aged man sits doubled over in the front seat of the smaller car while a younger man stands talking to a police officer, motioning various directions.

  Reid glances over his shoulder at George. “He made a nice week’s pay cracking up that car and keeping the officers very occupied this morning,” he tells him.

  All George fears when he looks out the window again is those police officers being radioed of the heist, then looking up from compiling their accident reports at the armored vehicle passing by. “What about these windows? Are they bulletproof?”

  “Glass-clad polycarbonate. Nothing’s getting through this,” Reid answers, knocking on the passenger window.

  “Well,” George continues. “Don’t the drivers of these trucks check in with dispatch? They must be waiting for his call.”

  Reid shakes his head. “The company has no idea they’ve been waylaid. The driver verbally completed his first stop to dispatch, confirmed the second and gave the route number, which is spelled out on this clipboard. It’s the longer route, so the customer’s not expecting him for a while. They do that. Vary their routes and their timing to throw off any robbery attempts.” He considers George for a long second, squinting a little. “He was very cooperative with my guy Elliott, here.” He nods to the driver. “Did whatever Elliott told him.”

  George sits then on the side bench behind the driver area, still breathing hard, knowing damn well the nightmare those truck guards just faced. Did Elliott direct their attention to the child Reid grabbed? Was her life negotiated in the orders? His gaze scans the truck’s interior until it stops at the sight of the girl. He has to get her off this vehicle. “So you’re following the truck’s normal route,” he continues to Reid, though watching the girl carefully and trying to figure a safe way out of this. “Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  Nate walks in from the rear of the truck and sits with George. His gloved fingers drum on the seat. “That’s how we’re going to beat this,” he says through the hosiery still on his face. “Just live normal, don’t raise any suspicions. Elliott is keeping it real professional behind the wheel. And no one will know it was us because we’re going back to our old lives after this. Back to our jobs, waxing the car, paying our bills. Like this never happened.”

  “What’s wrong with you? It’ll never work,” George counters. “It’s too much. Too big.”

  “There’s no reason it can’t work, George.” Nate glances out the window. “Once we unload the money, we’re all going back to our normal routines. Okay? You’ll have your old life back soon enough. It’s genius, man. We’ll blend right in. No one will suspect a thing. That’s our cover. Normal routine. Which is why we’re going to the casino afterward and meeting the others, just like we planned.”

  “They’re in on this too?”

  “No. Shit, they don’t know anything. And we’re going to keep it that way, so stay calm, would you? One day you’ll be glad you changed your mind and went with this.”

  George stares at his brother. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “Get what?”

  “I’m not here for the money. Screw the money.” He lowers his voice. “The girl’s the only reason I came back. Just that girl. You’re all done, kidnapping a child like that.”

  Nate brushes him off. “She’s a kid. She’ll forget. And no one’s going to hurt her, don’t worry. That’s not how we work.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” George grabs a handful of his brother’s sweatshirt. “Look at her. Look at her.”

  Nate pulls out of George’s grip.

  “And what about your car?” George asks. “The authorities will trace it in a minute.” He stands, grabs a ceiling-mounted handrail and studies his brother, trying to read his distorted face beneath the hosiery.

  “Both cars at the bank were removed before we even got this truck off the lot. We have good help,” Nate answers quietly. “And anyway, it wasn’t even my car.”

  Little signs come back to George: the way Nate fumbled with the cooling controls and how he kept adjusting the mirror. They’d driven a stolen vehicle identical to Nate’s. George sways with the moving truck; it’s how his mind feels, swaying, reeling. Vehicles pass them on the highway now. He imagines the radios tuned to traffic reports, pictures the cups of coffee for the commute, the cell phone conversations. All the lives passing are intact. “Why couldn’t you leave me out of this?” He picks up the nine-millimeter handgun off the bench. His fingers close around the barrel and he smashes the black handle against the
goddamn polycarb window over Nate’s head. “Damn it,” he insists. “We’re family, man. Family. What are you doing to me?”

  Nate ducks when the gun hits the window. “Don’t you remember? Last year at the casino, that night when we talked about the perfect gamble?”

  How could he forget now? Over a glass of Scotch, they decided anyone knocking off an armored truck executed a real gamble, one with the highest risk and the highest financial gain. “The perfect heist,” he whispers. “That was bullshit, Nate. Just talk, man.”

  “Not for your brother, it wasn’t,” Reid says from the front, still standing behind the driver. “And the only way to keep you quiet was to get you in that parking lot with a weapon in your hand. Talk and you’ll do time.”

  He stares at his brother. “Get me out of this, Nate,” he says, trying to drag a gloved hand through his matted, covered hair. Hosiery presses it flat. “Give me the girl and let us go.”

  “It’s too late,” Nate explains. “If I didn’t bring you in, you’d put things together and say something to the feds. This way, you get a piece of it. You’ll never have to worry about your liability insurance going up, or the rent in that plaza, taxes, nothing. I took care of you. You’ll be living the dream.”

  Just like their father used to tell him when he played professional baseball. You’ll be living the dream, George. Somehow it all got twisted up in Nate’s mind; it got too extreme. There’s some challenge to meet their father’s expectations. He sits beside Nate again.

  “Listen. I’ll explain to the authorities that I was forced to participate.”

  “Doesn’t matter, George,” Nate answers. “Participation is guilt, regardless of how it happened. There’s no going back, for any of us.”

  But there’s always a way, a crack, a hole, something to get through. Leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees, he hangs his head. The girl starts moving, trying to curl up in the rear seat. When he looks back, her eyes are closed, her ponytails in tatters as she sucks her thumb.