Authors: William D. Carl
Designed by Renata Di Biase
ISBN 978-1-4516-4685-6
ISBN 978-1-4516-4687-0 (ebook)
This book wouldn’t have been possible without the encouragement of my family: Bill and Jackie, Gina and Andrew, and Mary Jane Carl. My thanks go out to my beta readers, who helped shape the book: Chesya Burke, Beth Blue, Brandy Huber, and Tracey West. This book is dedicated to Don Smith, for everything.
BEFORE …
A
ndrei Sokosovich waited in the cell, naked and a little cold. He reached out and swiped his fingers along the side of the Plexiglas wall, tracing a nearly invisible seam, wondering if his family was still being paid their monthly stipend. His captors had promised him financial remuneration last year if he cooperated. In his small village of Kirskania in Siberia, a man’s word was golden, but he wasn’t sure he could trust these Americans. They seemed to be hurrying, hurrying, hurrying, rushing everywhere they went. They held no true conversations, only shouting matches.
The only man he knew was reliable in the entire building was the Frenchman. At his mother’s insistence, Andrei had learned French at an early age. Although he was steadily acquiring a working knowledge of English from listening to the Americans, he was more comfortable utilizing the French language, and he was more comfortable with this old Frenchman, who visited him regularly, taking blood and inquiring about his health. He was probably a doctor of some kind. Weren’t they all doctors in America?
Andrei paced the twenty lengths of his prison, leaned against the bulletproof Plexiglas, pressed his face against its coolness. A red-haired woman watched him from the other side, taking notes on a clipboard. He waved at her, and she, as always, ignored the gesture.
When he had first been placed under glass for observation, he had tried to hide his nudity from the people watching him. In Siberia, he’d rarely been naked, even in front of his wife. Freezing temperatures dictated this modesty. Now, dozens of people a week studied him, their eyes cold and controlling. The shame had eventually
faded, along with many of the memories of his village, lost in an unknown expanse of time.
How long … how long … how long had he been here?
The floor beneath his bare feet was cold concrete. At one end of the cell was a cot with a mattress, a single thin blanket, and a small, cheap table where he kept his books. The rest of the room was as bare as the man inhabiting it. Apart from the one wall made of Plexiglas, the other three consisted of shiny stainless steel. All of it was sanitized.
He must have been imprisoned for more than a year, although the true length of time was ungraspable. More than a year since his capture, his hesitant acceptance of the scientists’ terms, his tearful farewell to his wife and children. He never did learn how they had found him, which villager had reported his dark secret.
Had they found him based on the rumors in the newspapers, or through the complicity of a neighbor? One day, he would have to ask the Frenchman.
Andrei stalked, screamed, felt it happening again. The flash of teeth, eyes golden and wet with emotion.
A single window had been opened directly across from the cell so that he would receive a bit of moonlight from outside.
He padded to the other side of the room, threw his body against the strong Plexiglas.
Howling in rage, he tore at the walls of his prison with deformed hands. He was eager to escape, hungry, and sexually excited.
It would be over soon, some inner voice explained, trying to calm him. Just wait it out. Just wait until morning, when the sunlight would stream through the window. The need to kill would dissipate, and his arousal would wane. The hellish pain would cease for a while.
Somewhere, inside, he knew this.
He whipped his head at a noise across the room.
In a far corner, a man adjusted a video camera tripod, nodded at him.
“Are you really sending Betta money?” Andrei asked. “Tell me that you are, and I will accept your word as truth.”
“Yes,” said the man on the other side of the Plexiglas, his words a soft, lilting French. “They are being well cared for. You should have no worries.”
“Good. Good.”
“How do you feel this morning?”
“Like … how goes it, something the cat dragged in? I am tired. I am tired of so much … this prison, those people watching. I am ready to go home.”
“You know our agreement.”
“Yes.” A sigh.
“You signed the papers, giving us authorization over your welfare.”
“I did.”
“It’s for your own good. Don’t you realize? For your good, and the good of many, many others like you.”
“It does not mean I have to like it.”
“We take no pleasure in studying your case.”
“Some do. I have seen them smiling, seen their traitorous faces.”
“Then you must rise above them.”
“Rise above?”
“You are more of a man than most of these weak specimens.”
Andrei Sokosovich laughed deep and loud.
Pacing the cell. Counting steps one through twenty. Turning. Going back the other way. One through twenty.
Waiting for the light to change.
Wilting beneath it.
Rising again, towering, snapping anxiously at the air.
A mournful sound, echoing throughout the cell.
The smell of meat and blood beyond his reach.
Claws and teeth.
Death of the man, resurrection of the beast.
SEPTEMBER 16, 6:59 P.M.
“G
ood evening, everyone,” Rick Morrison yelled. “My name’s unimportant, but I’ll be your bank robber on this fine evening. I want to see everybody down on the floor! Nobody tries to be a hero, nobody gets hurt.”
Christ
, he thought,
what a cliché
.
He fired a round from his Glock into the nearest surveillance camera, showering a howling bank teller with shards of glass and plastic. The woman dropped to the floor, covering her head with her hands to protect herself from the debris.
Pausing while his associates completed their assigned jobs, Rick grinned beneath the pantyhose that smashed his features into a Halloween grimace. The damn pantyhose were hotter than hell, but quite effective.
Jones scurried around the room, spray-painting the lenses of the thirteen remaining cameras. He laughed in his coarse, horsey manner, pausing for a moment to decorate a bare wall with a smiley face while he made his way to the back.
Rick said, “Hey, Jones. We can do without the artistic flourishes. Just get the job done.”
Jones nodded, making his way to the next camera, which hung perpendicular to the tellers’ booths in the Cincinnati First National Bank. He passed Jack Browning, who was forcing the tellers to their knees in the far corner behind the tall booths and ascertaining whether anyone had pressed a silent alarm. Two of the three women and both of the men were crying, but a middle-aged black woman was glaring at Jack. A wannabe hero always seemed to rise from among the victims of every robbery, and Rick feared
he’d have his hands full with this large-framed woman with an Afro. Her attitude belied years of discrimination or abuse. She’d been around. Her name tag read “Chesya.”
Behind Rick, Saul Wiseman locked the front doors at 7:00 p.m. exactly, the hour the bank typically closed. He placed a gun against the temple of the elderly, bald security guard, walking him to the corner where the tellers knelt. The veins on the old man’s head throbbed blue.
“Not a word, Pops,” Saul said in his nasal voice. “I’m itchin’ to try out this new revolver. Any excuse will do.”
Visibly shaking, the old man handed Saul his nightstick, the only weapon he carried. The robber threw it across the room, striking a desk at the far end of the bank; the guard flinched as if struck.
Rick moved toward the little cluster of people, his eyes resting on Chesya’s contemptuous, slightly yellow gaze. Scratching his head with the barrel of his gun, he asked, “Anyone else in here? Officers or vice presidents?”
The defiant teller maintained eye contact, her chin held high. She looked as though she could spit in his face.
Saul, breaking off from the group, said, “Lemme have a look, boss.” He ransacked the side offices, and from the last one, he hauled out a fat man wearing glasses. “Found him behind his desk,” he said, slapping the man’s sweaty face.
“Bring him out here to join the party,” Rick said. “We wouldn’t wanna neglect anyone.”
When the man was positioned on the floor, hands clasped behind his head like those of the rest of the bank’s staff, he began to sob, big, belly-shaking sobs that threatened to unravel into hysteria at any moment.
“Stop your crying,” Rick warned, holding his Glock so he observed the man down the sights.
“I … I … can’t . . . I can’t.”
“Aw, shit,” Rick said. He pistol-whipped the man on the back of his skull. There was a soft thunk, and the corporate drone dropped face-first to the tiled floor. Three bright drops of blood spattered Rick’s hand, and he wiped it on his jeans. He checked the man’s pulse and exhaled with relief; the fat man would be fine for now.
“Jones, you get all those cameras? You didn’t miss any?”
“Hell, no.” The man began to giggle again, aiming at a blonde’s pretty head. “I got ’em all, boss.”
“Good,” Rick said, pulling the suffocating stocking from his head and dropping it on the floor. “Okay, everyone, pay attention. What we have here is your basic, everyday bank robbery. We’ll be taking any cash you have in your tellers’ drawers as well as anything in the safe. If you people do what I tell you to do and nobody gets all courageous or heroic on me, we’ll be gone within an hour and you can all go home to your families. We’ve done this before, so I can tell if someone’s going to be a problem.” He looked pointedly at Chesya, and damned if she didn’t try to stare him down. “Now, did anyone press any alarms? Alert the cops in any way?”
They all shook their heads except Chesya, whose nostrils flared. Rick mused that she was extremely pretty beneath that mask of fury. She had deep, brown eyes with perfectly plucked eyebrows, a wide nose, and a broad mouth, the lips especially full.
“No?” he asked. “Nobody’d better be lying. If I so much as hear a single police siren, there’s gonna be blood all over this nice white floor.”
He continued, “Well, I’ll need someone to volunteer.” Pointing his gun successively at each of the cowering tellers, he chanted, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe …”
The blond teller hid her face in her hands, shaking uncontrollably.
Rick grinned, adjusting his count as he said, “Catch a teller by her toe …”
Chesya looked as though she would launch herself at him at any moment. He was making this act of violence into a childish game, and it was clear she wasn’t about to play with him. Still, he wanted her to be intimidated, and most people reacted to this off-the-cuff casualness with utter horror.
“If she hollers, let her go …”
Yeah, woman, mess with me
.
I’ve got the gun
.
I’m in control here, no matter how much you hate it
. “Eeny … meeny … miny … moe. Looks like you’re it, sweetheart.” The gun was pointed at the blond woman.
Chesya rolled her eyes, as though she questioned his choice of
victim.
He’s picking Gloria
?
She’ll fall to pieces the minute he cusses her
.
Blondie shrieked when he lifted her by the hair and dragged her toward the vault. “Shut up,” he warned. “I said shut the fuck up.” Profanity was always a good way to keep people frightened, too, and it really seemed to work on the blond teller. Perhaps too well. Her cries ceased, replaced by a muffled keening emanating from her pursed lips.
Meanwhile, Saul began emptying out the drawers at the tellers’ stations, stashing the cash in a couple of white garbage bags. His weird laughter echoed in the tomb-like silence.
“Hefty bags!” he said. “For those tough, tough jobs.”
As Rick reached the locked vault, he shoved the woman in front of him. She was thin to the point of emaciation, as though she were a victim of an eating disorder. Hollow cheeks, hollow eyes, probably a hollow mind. Her hands plucked, birdlike, at the front of her sweater.
He’d seen her type many times in the past—someone scared enough to follow his orders without challenging them, yet coherent enough to do the job. He didn’t think she’d try anything stupid and put her coworkers in harm’s way.
“Please,” she begged. “Please don’t kill me. I’ve got kids at home.”
“Open the vault,” he said, “and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”
He recognized the repository as a Class III Bank Vault from Hamilton. He’d seen them before, marvels of brushed stainless steel with the huge dial of an operating wheel gleaming in the front alongside a regiment of locks. A tungsten plate surrounded the main lock to prevent anyone from drilling into it. It was a sight to behold, truly a beautiful thing. From his research and years of experience, Rick knew that this model was pre-constructed, modular, and welded together into a nearly inaccessible rectangle of fifteen-inch steel. The door alone was ten inches thick. Nobody could blast into one of these babies. This was why he required a bank employee to assist him in opening the vault.