Day 186 - Repeat Offenders - Chapter 1.2 & 2 - (3150 words)

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REPEAT OFFENDERS

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 1-2 through Chapter 2

“So what is that, less than five minutes away? That's pretty short.” Brian was talking to Aaron but he was not expecting an answer, it was more a way of organising his thoughts. He called out to his fellow bank robbers “Less than five minutes Mike?”

Michael was definitely the leader, both Ivan and Brian addressed him that way, deferred to him and gravitated around him. He was either in charge of the group or at very least directing the plan as it was happening. He looked at everything and strode through the spaces he was in like they were extensions of his body. The arms that knew the width of the room and the feet that felt the ground beneath themselves, recognised every step as a territorial gain. He had authority and not only could anyone see that, he could see it reflected in their view of him.

Ivan was the muscle and the hard man type, he was the biggest of all three men and the most physically imposing, he was a good size and people who looked at him would have instantly recognised his bulk and the way he carried it. He looked like a person on the edge of being a bully, someone not in charge and not imposing his will on others with strength and brute force. He was someone ready to act though, a coiled spring or a tensed viper, the potential for the next brutality was peeking around the corner, backing up into itself keen to be let go.

Brian is the mystery, his position in the group is least obvious. He watches everything as if it were a movie on screen or a novel unfolding in front of him. He is equally entertained and disturbed by what he sees from the varying expressions on his face. The first shot he fired showed how unused to the gun he was, the second that he had never fired it at a human being before. He was possibly a subject matter expert, perhaps it was originally his plan but he needed people suited to the harder tasks for rougher men?

The three men had still not changed positions when the sirens stopped moving and the flashing lights could be seen refracted through the glass of the banks high windows, the reflections bouncing off the door posts marble columns.

Michael tapped Ivan and the two of them nodded at each other and stepped away from the prone Harold White and the three bodies in blood on the ground. All three men met in the middle of the room and then connected hands, as if they were musketeers and pledging unity.

“Ooh wait a second!” Brian exclaimed like a giddy school boy and broke the three handed grasp. The remaining two men had their hands clasped together for a few seconds before uncomfortably looking like they were suddenly not grasping a pledge but holding intimate hands. They pulled away with scowls and a half grin in Ivan's case as Brian stepped across the cowering crowd and climbed partially over the counter to open a teller's drawer and grab a handful of notes from there. He put them in a pocket and zipped it shut.

Brian came back to the side where everyone else was and now approached the thoroughly mystified Aaron.

“Have you got a watch, please?” He asked in a polite and friendly tone.

“What?” Aaron replied, confusion plain in his expression.

“Have you got a watch? You know, like to tell time? On your wrist?” Brian mimed the watch on his wrist, pointing at his own watch-less wrist.

“Oh! No?”

Brian scowled at the response, the inflection making it sound like a question, something he had already decried.

Aaron saw the look and put two and two together and quickly restated his position. “I mean. No. No I don't wear a watch, I use my phone or look up there!” Aaron pointed at the clock on the wall and Brian obliged by turning around and staring at the simple white clock on the wall opposite where they stood, a larger than usual size but plain in all descriptions.

“Ah, I guess that...” Brian did not finish his thought, which was going to be a treatise on how young folk did not have the same needs and habits as the generation ahead of them did. People like Brian and Michael who were older and even Ivan who was in his late twenties and almost two decades younger than Brian and one than Mike. Instead he felt a slam to the pit between his shoulders and a lateral twist that shoved him slightly down and left, wrenching his arm.

“Hey! What the fuck man?” Brian stumbled and stood up again to the sound of gunfire across the room and Aaron, who had bravely, or foolishly, had shoved him away and snatched his gun away from his right hand, was shot in the chest multiple times by both Ivan and Michael before he could turn the gun around from the awkward way he had wrested it from Brian.

In the silence that followed a body hit the ground, and the sound of feet racing towards the door of the bank were heard. Brian ran to the Bank Manager and pulled up his sleeve, finding a gold Rolex there he unclasped it and put the timepiece in his pocket before rejoining the other two men.

“Lower your weapons and come out with your hands up!” The stock standard phrase heard over the tinny reverberations of a loud hailer came into the bank and the three men locked hands again in the three handed clasp.

“Now?” Michael asked Brian who was scowling now, no longer upset by the violence but wearing instead his frustration at things going off the plan.

“They'll be a few minutes and this” He patted his pocket “This is the perfect test, we'll know for sure with this.”

“Fine, but can we go? Pretty sure being shot is not in the best interests of any one of us, you least of all. It's not like these guys, I mean they don't count do they?” Ivan was raising his voice and putting a scary edge to it, telling Brian to get in line.

On cue a red dot appeared on Ivan's chest flickering a little as it settled into place where Brian could see it and his eyes widened and he looked upwards through the high windows to see a building opposite where the sniper likely was, but where he could see nothing at all.

“Now.” He said quietly and on his right wrist he uncovered a device that was shaped like a watch but was not. He pressed a button on the face of it and the three men blinked out of existence.

Chapter 2

Monday 08:12 a.m. April 17^th

Three men stood near a machine, a tall and spindly set of struts and lights that encompassed an area the size of a small room, but was inside of a much larger warehouse sized space. They were static, and then the light around them flickered in and out of phase, like they were pictures received on a failing television set. One final snap of light and they were gone from their current position to come back in the middle of the machine, in the same position they had been in when they were at the bank in the last seconds.

Except it was not the last few seconds, it was now just over two hours before the raid they made on the bank. Michael, Brian and Ivan were in the centre of the machine, which was big enough to have held a dozen people, and they looked small in that space. The guns still held ready to fire and the three handed clasp of each other the middle of their mass.

“Clear.” Brian stated matter of factly and pulled his hand away from the men, and stepped out of the cavity in the machine to walk around to the control panel where his ghostly previous self had been a split second before hand.

“Can we … um...?” Ivan was out of sorts in this environment. It was a stark contrast to the self-assured bully with a gun in the room full of scared and shivering hostages. This was a different world where he was out of place and did not know the rules. Where violence and force ruled he had been a guide for Brian who was the newby, the uninitiated into the mindset of violence. In this machine, where the laws of physics were bent out of shape, Ivan was lost and there was little guidance coming from either of his compatriots.

“He's fine. So we're fine.” Michael stated crisply and walked the same path that Brian had, coming up to him and helping himself to the contents of his pockets, taking the cash and the watch that belonged to Harold White. Brian was concentrating on the panel, looking at readings and tapping at screen, burrowing into the results on the touch screen and frowning. He barely registered that Michael was emptying his pockets, only leaning slightly to facilitate access, not even looking at the ring leader as his hands snaked out the contents and left him to his results.

The machine was Brian's, he was the brains behind the plan for want of a better word. Michael was driving the plan forward and Ivan was now the fish out of water in this space. The three of them provided equally important parts to their plan, to exploit the machine to get rich, take revenge or whatever else motivations drove them.

Michael took the cash and put it on a table nearby with the gold watch. The gold timepiece fell onto it's face, exposing the back and the inscription that was there.

“To Harold from Maude.” Michael raised an eyebrow and Brian snorted a laugh, still not looking away from his work.

“Is that funny?” Asked Michael.

“It's a joke probably.” Piped up Ivan, wanting to be part of the situation but still feeling on the outside looking in. It was good to know something that someone else did not. “You know, the movie?

Apparently Michael did not.

“Well it was a movie way back in the early 70's I think.” Ivan's voice tailed off.

“And you remember it?” Michael seemed amused.

“Well I have seen it, it's good. Maybe he has a younger wife or a massively older one, and they find it funny. I doubt that his wife's name is actually Maude. It's probably an in-joke.” he explained and then doubled back to the earlier comment. “I can appreciate old movies, I have cable. And depth, I'm more than just a thug you know.”

“Really?”

“The inscription is a good thing. The money we should clean and donate to a charity. Get it back into circulation and see if it alarms anything.” Brian interjected and tapped the money on the desk.

Ivan looked disappointed.

“Brains is right.” Michael used the nickname for Brian, Ivan had picked it from the Thunderbirds movies. He looked nothing like the character but with the name and a small change in lettering it fit very well. “If we trigger an alarm we can easily push it away as nothing, but why even put us on the radar. We should donate it anonymously. There's ...” He started counting the bills, a handful of fifty dollar notes. “Seven hundred and fifty dollars?” He quickly recounted it by walking his fingers across the top right hand corner of the sheaf of notes. He knew how to count money, properly.

The three men looked at each other seriously for a few seconds, no one moving and no one saying anything until suddenly Michael grinned from ear to ear and then all three of them were laughing and clapping each other on the back.

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Monday 10:37 a.m. April 17th:

The door to the bank opened and three men who had robbed the place two hours earlier in their experience walked calmly through the doors and came right inside the bank, no guns drawn this time and looking around the room, smiling broadly while taking it all in.

“Morning, beautiful morning isn't it?” Michael asked the slower, older guard whom he had broken the nose of previously. The man was surprised to be addressed so directly, so personally and he started a little before nodding back his agreement in silence.

Ivan walked to where the three people he had shot were standing and he stood right in front of Harold White and asked him the time.

“What now?” Harold said, wondering who this man was.

“Hi I'm John, I'm here to see Barbara, she's my girlfriend. Hi Babs!”

Barbara jumped at her name being mentioned and was embarrassed by the sudden and off-plan attention being drawn to her. “What are you doing here?” she almost hissed the words.

“Just asking the time, I was in the neighbourhood and thought I'd pop in. Nice watch.” Ivan nodded at the bank manager's wrist but the watch was out of sight in that position.

Harold raised his hand and gripped where the watch was defensively, as if expecting a magic trick that would denude his wrist and give it to this unknown individual who was apparently attached to the eye candy teller he had his own eyes on.

“Is there a problem here?” the guard asked in a deep and threatening voice, the reaction on Ivan's face was visible, he was rising to a challenge. He faced down the guard, who was as big and as physically present as Ivan was. They were equally matched, and they stared at each other in a challenging glare, like dogs across a yard. The guard had the home ground advantage but the interloper had the element of surprise and knowing what was going on.

Ivan stood down and raised his hands, a gold watch appearing on his own wrist as his sleeves fell back downwards slightly. He looked at the watch and then right into the eyes of Harold White, “Oh look it seems I have a watch myself. How did that get there?” he followed that up with a bemused look of confusion.

“What the hell? How did you?” Harold pulled his sleeve down and saw his own face reflected in the glass of his watch, identical to the one on Ivan's wrist. Then he softened his tension, his watch was intact and on his wrist. He undid the clasp and read the inscription on the back, heaving a sigh and smiling falsely to the man in front of him, wanting to move him on with that banal facial gesture.

“My bad, oops. Catch you later Babs?” Ivan did not wait for a response but turned about quickly and rejoined his friends who were in line with other customers. Michael stood with his arms folded and waited patiently while Brian was looking, staring at the person he had shot in the back of the head and then off to the tellers and eyeballing Aaron who had not yet noticed any undue attention.

“Shall we go then?” Ivan asked Michael and the three men peeled away and walked out of the bank, to stand and wait outside on the wide concrete pavement that stepped away over a large plaza down to the road.

“Where are the bullets?” Ivan asked suddenly.

“What?” Both men responded simultaneously.

“We have the watch and he has the watch. We have the money and they have the money, right?”

Michael looked at Brian who raised a single eyebrow, wondering where the question was going.

“What do you mean Ivan?” he took on the tone of a high school teacher trying to fathom out the oddity posed by a student lacking the knowledge to frame a question correctly.

“Those things exist in time, in two places right? That's the premise that we are working on, we can duplicate things by stealing them and then returning to now, I mean before, when we landed.”

“Yes. We have the objects and the money, and you can see from Harold we successfully have... completed the task, the mission.”

“So where are the bullets we fired?”

“Nowhere. They have not happened. We went back and that has not happened now.” Michael answered but Brian shook his head.

“Not quite and Van poses a good question. We don't exist twice because we are the anomaly here. Anything with us, in our field is part of the anomaly. But the people we shot, and we all shot someone.” Brian stressed this like it was a point worth highlighting. “They go back to the state they were in, because nothing has changed for them. The money and the watch are now at a new point with new individual time-lines and they coexist in our reality because of the anomaly, and us. The bullets we shot them with are not in our guns, in fact the gun I had is in the same lack of place that the bullets are in.”

“You see? You do see it right?” Ivan was smiling at his question, he had seen the hole in the universe that things had fallen through. He had schooled the know-it-all leader Mike with a nonsense and useless piece of trivia, but one that put the inscription in frame for him. Now he had put an unforeseen thought into the mind of the giant brain that concocted the machine, the one that was the plan and the mechanism for success. He had done that, the man they brought in for his brawn and his balls was proving to be a thinker, at least on a contributory level.

This was a result.

“Fascinating.” Brian was staring off into the middle distance and rubbing his chin, the discussion was over as far as he was concerned but now his mind was in the possible state of the matter than had existed in a time and space until the intervention of the anomaly.

The three men waited in a nearby coffee shop, staring across the plaza with takeaway cups steaming in front of them undrunk and there to assuage any need to explain their presence at the table by the window. Eventually the armoured car pulled into view and Ivan checked his watch and declared.

“One seventeen pm.” then frowned.

“Take two hours off. The watch is on Anomaly time.” Michael noted, “It's eleven seventeen a.m.”

All the elation he felt at being ahead of his partners in the minutes before had evaporated and now Ivan felt small and out of the loop again, behind the curve. He was determined to be more relevant.

“Do we reset and go?” He itched at a gun that was not in his hands, he wanted to kill again.