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repeat offenders
By Wayne Webb
CHAPTER 1
Monday 10:37 a.m. April 17th:
The air was quiet and still, despite the weather outside it was calm and almost too quiet within the main atrium in the bank. There was a queue of people that snaked around ten people deep and each of the five teller stations was busy dealing with a customer. The branch was an old one, in fact the oldest in the city and had been standing in it's current state for over a century. The pillars that rose from the floor to the ceiling in the high walled room were massive and thicker than one or two men standing together, each polished smooth to a mirror finish and a few dozen feet apart.
The bank of tellers ran the length of one wall, and though the room was large it funnelled down in a trapezoid shape from the wide entrance to the thinner side where the tellers and the entrance to the vaults was. A security guard stood by the door and while he was not old he was slow, and largely there as a the idea of a deterrent than actually being one. He held his hands cupped into each other at the front, just above the belt line and far from being able to reach his gun.
In the rear there was a younger and more physically imposing guard and he worked on certain days and times to safeguard certain shipments when they arrived. He stood by the entrance to the safety deposit box room, which in turn was next to the gate railing that covered the entrance to the money vault. The heavy circular door clearly visible and in the sight line of two on the five cameras that watched every angle of the room, while recording the entry and exits.
The Bank Manager, Harold White and his assistant Manager Jerry both stood nearby as well with the sixth teller, a younger woman named Barbara who was waiting with them for a client to arrive with a big deposit. Harold was checking his watch and occasionally shaking it and making a show of checking that it was working properly. His displeasure was obvious, while Jerry just look bored to distraction and was waiting for anything interesting to happen. Barbara looked nervous, she was in her twenties and was neither the best nor the most experienced of tellers they had. She was there to look good for the client when they came in with their money.
The doors opened and three men walked in and they had guns already drawn as they crossed the threshold and came up close to the first of the guards who was not even looking their way as the three men strode forwards and approached him. He turned as one of the men came into his perosnal space, but even as he turned to smile and greet them, there was the butt of a gun in his face and it crashed onto the bridge of his nose, shattering it into blood and screaming.
The second of the two men stepped clear of the melee and raised a machine gun and fired towards the other security guard, spraying twenty or thirty rounds at him, the people in line to his left dropping to the ground and covering their heads as they cotton on to the situation. The spray of bullets hacked into the guard by the door to the vault, but the shots also hit the Assistant Manager and Barabara both thrown backwards by the force of the bullets and losing blood and momentum I the process.
Harold stood stock still at first as the guard nearest him exploded into a fine red mist before dropping like a sodden bag of bloody meat and body parts at the butchers. Then he raised a pair of hands, but calm and collected and not shaking at all, as if the situation were expected or run of the mill, like he was ready for it.
Jerry was kicking and coughing blood on the floor nearby him and Harold coughed and pointed at the robber, silently asking if he could assist the dying man. The third robber, the one who had so far done nothing but watch the other two came close and looked at Jerry and Barbara. She looked frightened and was shivering like a leaf, crying profusely and her chest heaving with the wrack of sobs. She looked up at the man, straight into his green eyes and tried to talk to him but no words came out.
“Sorry, I can't believe he did that to you. Why do you go out with him? What a douche bag.” The man sounded very reasonable and not maniacal. He treated the gunshots as if they were a mistake that was easily rectified. That the shooting of them was somehow the inconsiderate actions of a selfish person, an asshole even, but not the homicidally insane act of a man with a gun and the breaking of all social conventions on killing people indiscriminately. The man turned to the one who had pulled the trigger on the gun and frowned at him. “Really, I can't believe you did that to her!” He sounded disappointed, like a father of a child who had made a selfish or stupid mistake.
“Tell me you don't want to? Tell me?” The shooter said derisively.
“Actually? No? Not top of my list shooting random people. Let alone my girlfriend.” The man shook his head and looked at Barbara who was convulsing. “Oh come on? Look at her and tell me that's what you wanted? Ivan? Is it what you wanted”
Ivan walked over slowly his head cocked and as he drew closer to see and smell the blood her knew that it was not, and that Ivan was regretting the decision to shoot towards her already. “Well I wasn't aiming for her Michael. She was just there and it didn't matter if I hit her, she just... got hit.”
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