PROLOGUE
May 1973
Five of them entered the bank that morning, but they moved with the efficiency and precision of one. The pirate went in first, firing a single shot into the air but not saying a word. The shotgun blast showered the lobby with dust, plaster, and asbestos fibers. At first, some of the customers thought a car had backfired, but the bank employees recognized the sound for what it was. Glances were exchanged, and lips tightened with fear.
With a simple wave of the shotgun’s barrel, the pirate shepherded the customers and tellers to the ground. They were compliant enough, lining up on the ground like freshly caught fish, their fingers laced around the backs of their heads.
The witch was the second one inside, a few seconds behind the pirate, and she made a beeline for Stephen Jewel, the young man who had recently ascended to the enviable post of bank manager. Jewel was thirty-five but looked seventeen and had to shave only twice a week. He had a pretty wife named Larissa and a new baby on the way, and he was very conscious of the fact that he had wet himself upon hearing the report of the pirate’s shotgun. Now this lunatic wearing the green mask was headed right for him. Stephen would later tell police that the witch was a woman, but that he wasn’t entirely certain. After changing his pants, of course.
The witch handed him a note. Scrawled on it were the words, we want it all. He handed it back, knowing full well what the robbers wanted.
“All what?” he asked with a quiver in his voice.
The witch pulled out a pistol and fired a shot at his feet, showering the cuffs of his wide-bottomed trousers with the dust of exploding marble.
“OK, OK,” he said weakly, holding up his hands in surrender. “Follow me.”
He glanced around the bank lobby, which resembled a still photograph. Nothing moved. The pirate had his gun trained on the hostages. A grizzly bear, a werewolf, and a vampire, who’d come in behind the witch, stood guard at the front door. The sixth robber was in the car, parked along the curb in the beaten-up sedan, waiting to whisk the sextet to a better place, a better life.
The witch followed Jewel around the velvet ropes to the corner of the bank, where the vault stood open, its armored door now as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane. A phone on a nearby desk began ringing, startling everyone. It jangled half a dozen times before the caller gave up. His hands shaking, Jewel used his key to open a second door inside the vault, leading to a smaller room and the robbers’ ultimate target. The witch licked her lips when she saw the stacks of cash, delivered not twenty minutes ago via an armored car from the Federal Reserve down on Eighth Street. Two million dollars in neat ten-thousand-dollar bundles.
The witch reached inside her robes, whipped out four large burlap sacks, and handed them to Jewel. She tapped her watch with the muzzle of her pistol then retrained the gun on Jewel. He got the message and started filling a bag with the bricks of cash. When he finished with the first, the witch tied it off with a rubber band and slid it back out into the main vault. Jewel repeated the process with the next three bags until all the bundles were bagged up like groceries. She followed him out of the vault, and he took his place on the floor with the others. The pirate and the werewolf made their way toward the bags, and that was when everything went straight to hell.
A customer named Eleanor Hatfield began shrieking. She was a large woman with makeup that looked like it had been baked on, and she was terrified. Eleanor pushed herself to her feet and began running blindly, her arms covering her head. The desperate voices of the other hostages pleaded with her to lie back down, to take her place on the floor. It was too late.
The witch took one step forward and shot Eleanor in the neck. She tumbled to the floor in a heap, smearing blood across the fresh marble floor. The remaining hostages howled in terror, and another one, this one an off-duty police officer, saw the resulting chaos as his chance. In one graceful and life-ending move, he swept to his feet and drew a small pistol from the holster around his lower calf. He got off a single shot at the witch, but he missed badly. His bullet struck the vault door and ricocheted into a wooden desk, lodging itself into the lumber. The pirate returned fire, catching the officer full in the chest with a twin-barreled blast. The force of the impact blew the officer to the ground like a typhoon, and he lay perfectly still.
This time, the hostages didn’t make a sound, rats that have learned not to pluck the cheese from an electrified platform. The pirate stepped over the body of the officer, silent and bleeding, and yanked one of the hostages to her feet. Her name was Denise Vaughan, and she was one of the bank tellers. The others were afraid to look, secretly thankful that they had not been selected.
With Vaughan in tow, the robbers each grabbed a sack and exited the bank less than ninety seconds after first entering and shattering the morning calm. Outside, they were greeted by a glorious morning, warm and fragrant, with that first hint of summer. The sky was a brilliant blue canopy over the clear air, the kind of day that just begged for a cooler of beer, some beach chairs, and a trip to the seashore.
The Olds was idling at the curb, its driver casually smoking a cigarette, as if he’d just dropped someone off to make a quick deposit. The group poured into the car, and the driver eased into traffic, heading east on Broad. They were nearly two blocks away before they heard the first sirens responding to the bank job. A block later, the car pulled into the parking lot of a no-tell motel, and the werewolf got out. The car sped away.
The robbers never said a word.