Sudden Prey Read Free Page B

A younger woman, a cashier, jumped back, yelped once, put her hands over her mouth, backed away, knocked a phone off a table, jumped again, froze. The fourth woman simply backed away, her hands at her shoulders.
    Georgie said, rapid-fire, a vocal machine gun: “Easy, easy, everybody take it easy. Everybody shut up, shut up, shut up, and stand still. Stand still, everybody shut up . . . This is a holdup, shut up.”
    They’d been inside for ten seconds. Candy dropped behind the counter and pulled a pillowcase out of her waistband and started dumping cash drawers.
    “Not enough,” she shouted over Georgie’s chant. “Not enough, there’s more somewhere.”
    Georgie picked out the woman with the best clothes, the woman with the flax blossoms, pointed her finger at her and shouted, “Where is it, where’s the rest of it?”
    The woman said, “No-no-no . . .”
    Georgie pointed her pistol at the man in the ski jacket and said, “If you don’t say, in one second I’m gonna blow his fuckin’ head off, his fuckin’ head.”
    Georgie was posed in a two-handed TV-cop position, the pistol pointing at jacket-man’s head, never wavering. The flax-blossom woman looked around for somebody to help her, somebody to direct her, but there wasn’t anybody. She sagged and said, “There’s a box in the office.”
    Candy grabbed her, roughed her, shoved her toward the tiny cubicle in the back. The woman, scuttling ahead, pointed at a box on the floor in the footwell of the desk. Candy shoved her back toward the door, picked up the box, put it on the desk, and popped the top: stacks of currency, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds.
    “Got it,” she shouted. She dumped it in the pillowcase.
    “Let’s go,” Georgie shouted. “Let’s go . . .”
    Candy twisted the top of the pillowcase and threw it over her shoulder, like Santa Claus, and hustled around the cash counter toward the door. The man in the ski jacket had backed against the wall at a check-writing desk, his hands over his head, a twisted, trying-to-please smile on his face, his eyes frightened white spots behind the amber-tinted specs.
    “What are you laughing at?” Candy screamed at him. “Are you laughing at us?”
    The smile got broader, but he waved his fingers and said, “No, no, I’m not laughing . . .”
    “Fuck you,” she said, and she shot him in the face.
    The blast in the small office was a bomb: the four women shrieked and went down. The man simply dropped, a spray of blood on the tan wall behind his head, and Georgie spun and said, “Go.”
    They were out the door in seconds . . .
     
     
     
    “ DO IT, ” DEL said, and Kupicek floored it.
    Sloan was coming in from the front. Duane saw him coming, had no time to wonder. The car swerved and screeched to a stop three inches from the van’s front bumper, wedging him to the curb. From behind, in a flash in his rearview mirror, he saw another car wedge in behind him. In the next half-second, the passenger door flew open and the big black pizza guy was there, and a gun pointed at the bridge of Duane’s nose.
    “Don’t even fuckin’ scratch,” Franklin said, in his pleasant voice, which wasn’t very pleasant. “Just sit tight.” He reached across, flipped the shift lever into park, killed the engine, pulled the keys from the ignition and let them fall on the floor. “Just sit.”
    And then there were more guys, all on the passenger side of the car. But Duane, as interested as he was in the muzzle of Franklin’s gun, turned to look at the door of the credit union.
    He’d heard the shot: the sound was muffled, but there wasn’t any doubt.
    “Shit,” said the black man. He said, loudly, “Watch it, watch it, we got a shot.”
    “ GO, ” SCREAMED GEORGIE . She was smiling, like a South American revolutionary poster-girl, her dark hair whipping back, and she covered the inner door while Candy exploded through the outer door onto the stoop and then Georgie was through behind her and the van