he always did, but he knew they were right. He had aborted the job because he saw Me’shelle walk across the parking lot. He could have and probably should have waited to see how her presence was going to play into the mix of the job. After all, they had planned for the contingency of some customer entering their field of operations. He could have remained calm, but he panicked and called abort.
“Okay, if that’s the way it’s gotta be, then that’s the way it is,” Travis said.
Just as they had a week earlier, they arrived at the store and assumed their positions adjacent to the front of the store, waiting for the armored truck to arrive.
“Sound check. Mr. Blue?” Ronnie said.
“Sound check, one, two.”
“Acknowledged. Mr. White?”
“Check, two, three, baby.”
“Time check,” Ronnie said with authority in his voice.
“Eight-thirty,” Jackie replied.
“Eight-thirty, check,” Travis said.
“Acknowledged. Weapons check,” Ronnie said.
“Two loaded nine millers, check,” Jackie said.
“One AK-47. Two nine millimeters check,” Travis said.
“Acknowledged. One pump shotgun. Equipment check,” Ronnie said.
Travis turned on the C-Guard. “C-Guard engaged,” he said.
Jackie took out a cell phone and checked the screen for a signal. “Signal at one hundred percent.” She tried to make a call. “Call cannot be completed.”
“Acknowledged. Maintain operational silence,” Ronnie said and they waited.
At 8:45, the armored truck turned into the lot and parked in front of the store in perfect position. The bagman exited the vehicle and went into the store. Travis engaged the jamming device. “C-Guard engaged,” Travis said.
“Acknowledged,” Ronnie said.
Travis looked out the window of the Geo Prism Jackie had stolen, waiting for the bagman to exit the store. He looked over at Ronnie and Jackie in their Pontiac. He checked his watch and thought,
“Acknowledged, Mr. Blue. Assume cover position one and stand by,” Ronnie said.
“Acknowledged, Mr. Green.” Travis exited the vehicle and moved on the armored truck, as Ronnie and Jackie moved to intercept the bagman approaching the rear of the truck. Once Travis was in position, the driver saw him and attempted to call for back up.
When the bagman reached the rear of the truck, he saw Jackie and Ronnie coming toward him with guns drawn. He dropped the bags and reached for his gun. As he pointed the weapon, Jackie fired from both nine millimeters over the head of the bagman, hitting the truck. The bagman dropped his weapon and took cover on the ground behind the truck.
Meanwhile, the driver, who was unable to get anybody at the base station, started to get out of the truck. He jumped down from the truck with his gun drawn.
Travis stepped up. “Drop it!” He pointed the AK-47 at the driver. Ronnie, however, did not wait to see if the driver was going to comply with Travis’s order. Ronnie raised the pump and fired, hitting the driver in the chest.
Jackie quickly kicked the bagman’s gun under the truck and got the four bags. “Objective secured, Mr. Green,” Jackie said and went for the Pontiac. Both Ronnie and Travis maintained their cover positions.
Travis kept his AK-47 trained on the driver. There was a big hole in the vest he was wearing. From where Travis was standing, he couldn’t tell if the bullet went though. The driver was still moving, but that didn’t mean anything.
Jackie drove by and picked up Ronnie, who opened the rear door for Travis. He jumped in as the vehicle passed. They drove to the drop-off point and parked behind an Infinity X4 SUV. “What’s up with the SUV, Jackie?”
“Special request from Murray,” Jackie answered as they exited the Pontiac, took off their trench coats, and got in the SUV. No one said a word while they traveled to Murray’s. Jackie drove, Travis sat in the back seat with his head down, and Ronnie sat up front. Travis noticed how heavily Ronnie was breathing. “You all right, Ron?”
“I’m cool,” Ronnie answered. But he wasn’t. As much as he talked about it, this was the first time he’d ever shot anybody, and it had him shaken. Ronnie didn’t know if the driver was dead. He tried to force the image from his mind, but he kept seeing the driver knocked off his feet from the impact of the 12-gauge round.
When they arrived at Murray’s house, Travis and Ronnie got out and went straight to the clean vehicle. Jackie drove the SUV around back of the house and went inside to make the deal with Murray. Since it was all prearranged, Jackie returned quickly with the twenty grand Murray had promised for delivery of the vehicle.
Once they got back to Travis’s house, they sat around the dining room table and watched as Travis counted the money. They knew it was a lot, but they really weren’t prepared for what Travis was about to say. “There is four hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars here.”
“What?” Jackie and Ronnie both sat with their mouths wide open.
“That and the twenty grand Jackie got for the SUV, minus the forty-seven six we gotta give Freeze, leaves us with one hundred and forty-two thousand, eight hundred dollars each,” Travis said to the sound of silence.
Chapter Thirteen
At noon, Travis sat by the phone waiting for a call. He had called and left a message for Freeze hours ago and still hadn’t heard from him. He was restless and just a bit nervous. This was the biggest job they had ever run, and that worried him. What Travis thought would be a quick hit for some easy cash turned out to be nearly half a million dollars.
He reached for the television remote and turned to channel 7. As expected, it was the top story. Travis listened as the reporter spoke of the daring daytime robbery of an armored truck, which left one man hospitalized with injuries related to gunfire. Travis interpreted that to mean the bullet hadn’t gone through the vest. The driver was only hurt by the fall he had taken from the impact of the bullet. Travis was glad that the man wasn’t going to die.
Then something happened that caught him completely off guard. The entire robbery was captured on film by the store’s parking lot cameras. Travis got up and poured himself a drink. How could he have missed the cameras in the parking lot? As much time as he had spent watching that lot, how could he have missed that? Then he began to ponder the possibility that he could have been caught on tape during one of his many surveillance runs through the parking lot.
The knockout punch came. A uniformed police sergeant appeared on camera to say that the three masked suspects involved in this robbery appeared to be the same three suspects in a jewelry store robbery last month in Manhattan.
Travis was hot, and he knew that he didn’t want to be sitting around with $142,000 of stolen money in the house. In the past, he was able to get money into his account in the Caymans though one of Ronnie’s Wall Street contacts. This was too much cash, though, to trust in anybody’s hands but his. Travis called Freeze again, and left another message. This time he called right back.
“I need to see you,” Travis told Freeze.
“Yeah, I know. Met me at the 205th Street train station in thirty minutes,” Freeze said and hung up.
Travis packed up the money, a few clothes, got the title for his car, and headed out the door, cursing all the way.
