Then he grabs the table, dragging it—and all our phones—away from us.
What do you want? That’s the question, right? My mom used to tell me: Give a person what they want, you’ll have them in the palm of your hand. That goes double or maybe even triple for bank robbers whose plan has gone kablooey.
They want the bank manager. They can’t have him. So that means they need what the bank manager would have given them.
Access to the safe-deposit boxes.
How do I give them that? Do I need to give them that? Or do I just need them to think I can give them that?
A plan is flitting in my brain like a bug around a porch light, but I’m not sure where all the pieces fall yet. I need more. More information. More clues. More time to understand the dynamic between these two.
But I’m not going to get it. Red Cap lets out a noise from the door, startled and worried.
“Someone’s coming,” he calls from his lookout spot. “Woman.”
Gray Cap’s focus whips from us to the door.
It’s like the seven of us tense as a unit when the sound of the door rattling fills the dead-quiet bank. The sound echoes off the walls and then stops. Agonizing seconds tick by.
“She’s heading back to her car.”
“Keep out of sight,” Gray Cap snaps.
It’s a breath-holding moment, and just when they’re about to let it out . . .
Feedback lances through the parking lot. You can hear it clear inside the bank before her voice booms through the walls, magnified by the megaphone: “I’m talking to the person who’s got the gun inside the bank. My name is Lee. In a few seconds, the phone in there’s gonna start ringing. That’ll be me calling. Pick up, we can figure out a solution to this problem you’ve found yourself in. Don’t pick up? Well, that’s a choice you can make. I don’t think you want to make that choice, though.”
As soon as she stops talking, I start counting.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
Red Cap scrambles away from the door, peering out the window instead.
Seven. Six. Five.
Gray Cap rounds on us, the wounded guard, the scared teller, the older lady, the three teenagers pissed off at each other, and the kid.
Four. Three. Two.
His gun’s rising. Mouth’s opening. Anger’s coming. The dangerous kind.
One.
The phone behind the teller’s booth starts to ring.
Go Time.
— 7 —
The Sister in Question
I should elaborate on my sister here. Because yes, she is the type of woman who comes equipped with a megaphone. Also a shotgun that shoots beanbag rounds instead of bullets, and the kind of fist that feels like it’s full of goddamn lead even when we’re just sparring.
Lee’s almost twenty years older than me, so she’d gotten out before I was even born, ditching Mom a few years before then. We’re not full sisters, but we’re bound together by the same crooked set of con-artist genetics.
She was a kid during a time where Mom wasn’t grifting. Lee’s dad, he’d been a completely regular guy, but he died. And that’s how Mom got into running cons: to keep the lifestyle she was used to.
It all unraveled pretty fast. When they fell, they fell from a damn tall height, so the crash was all the worse. And when they rose again, what Mom did to rise like that . . . Well, Lee doesn’t talk about that time. Not when she’s sober, at least.
I wonder if she thinks I’ll judge her. I don’t know how she thinks I could. She knows what I’ve had to do to survive.
Broken girls, both of us, growing up into women with cracks plastered rough over where smooth should be.
Me, I was born into the con. Came into the world with a lie on my lips and the ability to smile and dazzle, just like my mother. Charm, people call it. Useful is what it is. To see into the heart of someone and adjust accordingly, instantaneously, to mirror that heart? It’s not a gift or a curse. It’s just a tool.
I’ve never known a time when Mom wasn’t working someone. Or what it’s like to have a dad who loves you, even briefly. And I’ve never known a life outside of lying.
But I remember the first day I met Lee. I was six, and she was . . . strong. In the way she moved, how she dressed, the look she shot Mom when she started making excuses about my not going to school . . .
I’d never seen anyone who could shut Mom up. Mom was the one who bewitched people.
Lee didn’t need to bewitch. She commanded.
I’d never felt more instantly connected to a person in my life. I didn’t love her immediately. I was already too wary for that. But I recognized something in her, something I wanted to be but couldn’t even articulate yet: free.