“Ew, bail.” Ryatt let go of Jack’s handle, and the 60-pound machine fell atop Bugsy who didn’t even react.
As they jumped down and made their way to the exit, Ryatt spotted Roman crawling towards the container.
“Hey Cheesecake!” Ryatt called him. “Now I know what you meant when you said shitty trap.”
Leo and Ryatt burst out laughing while Roman cried and muttered something. Then he resumed his crawling, his leg brushing along a red streak on his trail.
“Cocksure douchebags,” Ryatt said.
“Yeah,” Leo agreed.
Outside, Thomas was making divots on the damp earth with his boot, looking pale and nauseous.
“You okay in there?” Ryatt asked.
Thomas gave Ryatt an are-you-kidding-me look. “Detroit’s too hot now. Cops and gangsters are both after us.”
Ryatt nodded. “We go nomadic.”
“How? All we know is our city.”
“We don’t have to know. Just watch, learn, plan, kill, rob, and jump to the next place.” Ryatt pointed his chin at the weapons truck. “We have the means.”
“Means?” Thomas frowned.
“Yes.” Ryatt pulled the Desert Eagle and caressed its robust barrel. “Let’s go find ourselves some profitable ends.”
Chapter 12
November 24, 1994. 12:21 P.M.
The aroma of turkey permeated Ryatt’s dreams. Nothing beat spending the cold Detroit morning in a Jacuzzi and napping afterwards, then waking up to the delectable smell of lunch. Especially on Thanksgiving.
Ryatt began making his bed. An imaginary price tag at its corner read $7,050. The exclusive mattress, the pillows, the duvet, all came from Duxiana, a company of luxury bed engineers based in Sweden.
He’d bought them with his share of the profits from a bank robbery they’d performed in Minneapolis.
Thanks to Ryatt’s regime of reckless violence, precise execution and meticulous planning, they had never failed once. Shoot first, talk later.
At the Minneapolis job, Ryatt, as soon as he burst through the front door, shot a customer waiting in the queue to withdraw money. A bullet to the back of the head splattered his brain across the cashier’s window. The terror-stricken cashier was then transformed to putty in Ryatt’s hand. Just the way he liked them.
That day they earned $38,000.
Satisfied that he had made the bed without a crease, he shambled to the switchboard and turned off the AC. While he did, the hand-knotted Persian rug caressed his bare feet and tickled between his toes. He stopped and let the hedonistic pleasure travel up. Goosebumps blanketed his legs and hardened his morning wood into steel.
The rug carried a price tag of $2,850 and was bought with the money he had earned from a job in San Francisco. The one where Ryatt had been forced to improvise. When they had bolted in through the entrance, to their dismay, they found the bank to be void of customers. No one to threaten the cashier with.
Quick-witted and wild as ever, Ryatt acted upon the first idea that popped up in his head as a solution. He wedged his bag into the gap and began peppering the cashier’s safety window. Each shot cracked the see-through material. The eventual white blots on the “bulletproof” glass enlarged every third second; the cashier jerked involuntarily and could have possibly peed a little every fourth second. Her green eyes widened in horror when they espied that the slugs actually penetrated the glass at last and dropped on the other side. She quickly shut her ears and wailed at Ryatt to stop shooting.
They only netted $10,200 that day, but the laughs Ryatt had, which lasted the 200 miles to Reno, were priceless. The stupid cashier hadn’t known that even though the bullets had penetrated the glass, they were as harmless as a foam ball from a Nerf gun. The glass was more “lethal energy absorbing” than “bulletproof”. This misnomer had helped Ryatt on more than one occasion.
Ryatt never returned empty-handed from a job. He understood that if you could get inside the head of the cashier successfully, you had practically won the game. He would pick out a cashier who was middle-aged. The young ones tried to be heroes, and old-timers didn’t care enough about their lives to feel threatened. It was the people in-between, with various commitments hanging over their heads, who had the most to lose and would hold their lives most dear, at least for the sake of their dependents.
Ryatt dragged his feet along the Persian rug, to a closet on the left, which he had aptly named ‘dirty closet’. On the far-right wall stood another closet, a walk-in one he called ‘clean closet’. It was three times as spacious as the dirty one. It contained clothes, sneakers, ties, watches, and boots, boasting the costliest price tag in the bedroom: $47,970.
A proud smile escaped his lips. Ryatt had outdone himself.
Ryatt followed just three simple rules for his phenomenal success in his profession:
1) Show the cashiers murder, hence proving your shooting skills and determination.
2) Get close, even if a glass is separating you both. This intimidated them as no normal person would look at a criminal that closely, especially a bank robber whose pistol had just torn away half the face of some innocent customer.
3) Never let them think. Keep doing something that unnerves them. Shout or shoot. As fate would have it, Ryatt’s weapon was extremely loud, bringing everyone in its immediate vicinity onside very quickly.
On one memorable occasion, a cashier in Staten Island just refused to knuckle under, even after Ryatt had demonstrated his shooting skills and determination. As soon as he dashed through the entrance, he had killed a security guard before the cashier’s eyes. He was an old black man with a lot of grit. This was where Ryatt had learned not to try to intimidate the elderly. Anyways, so when nothing worked, when the old man was visibly contemplating pressing the red button under his table, or maybe dropping a
