The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

John M. Floyd Molly’s plan From The Strand Magazine

The bank stood at the west end of Palmetto Street, an old gray lady of a building in an old gray part of town. Only two things made it remarkable. First, it had a long porch with incongruous white columns, as if someone had started to build a plantation home, then, during the process, had forgotten how one looked. Second, it was located on a semicircle of buildings where a mile of featureless pavement with no side alleys and only one cross street came to a dead end.

This strange setting, a fireman’s nightmare, had an unplanned but definite advantage: the bank had never been robbed. The street was narrow and often clogged with delivery trucks and double-parked cars. Its west end was a sort of commercial cul-de-sac containing the bank and two other buildings with iron fences between them, and its east end was home to one of the city’s largest police stations. There was simply no good escape path for would-be bank thieves, and as a result they practiced their trade elsewhere. Smart rustlers tend to avoid box canyons.

Branch manager Donald Ramsey was fond of saying that no one on earth was brave enough or foolish enough to attempt to rob his bank.

He was mistaken.

At 12:57 P.M. on the first Thursday of December, Owen McKay pushed open the front door of the Palmetto branch and stepped into the lobby.

Owen was a short man, and thin as a hobo’s wallet. His outfit consisted of a cheap overcoat, faded blue jeans, gloves, sneakers, a baseball cap, and sunglasses. If you passed him on the street, the word odd might come to mind; threatening would not.

He stopped just inside the entrance, took a checkbook from his pocket, and pretended to look at it as he studied his surroundings. It was just as Molly had said. Four tellers side by side behind a twenty-foot-long counter to his left, a glass-enclosed office, empty and silent in the back corner, and two platform officers — customer service reps, Molly had called them — at desks along the left wall. Only three things looked unusual. There were no customers (this was the slowest day of the week, and only a few minutes before midday closing time), no drive-up teller windows (there was no driveway to drive up), and no branch manager (he was attending his weekly Rotary Club luncheon). All these made Owen’s task easier.

The door to the vault was closed. Molly had told him it was usually standing open. A minor glitch — it meant he would require the help of the assistant manager, who was acting as a teller today and was easy to identify since he was the only male in the room besides Owen. Cecil Woodthorpe looked like everyone’s image of a low-level banker: balding, pudgy, and middle-aged, with round eyeglasses and round ears that stood straight out from his head like rearview mirrors.

Owen also located the closed-circuit surveillance camera, mounted near the top of the side wall. Perfect. It was aimed not at him but at the teller area and the center of the lobby. According to Molly, he’d be safe as long as he stayed near the front door.

Ah, Molly.

Owen had loved Molly Fremont from the moment he first saw her in his high school gym class. They’d dated throughout their senior year, and when he joined the army and she enrolled at a community college that fall, the separation seemed only to increase their feelings for each other. A year later, they married, and seven years after that — ten months ago — he took an assignment at an army recruiting center on Oakwood while she left her job modeling sports outfits to take a teller position at the Palmetto Street branch of a regional bank. It was a bad move on both their parts. Their combined salaries barely paid the rent. Three months ago, she had quit her teller job to try to get back into modeling. At twenty-six, she was blond and trim and still looked stunning in just about anything, but she didn’t have an agent anymore, and that industry was struggling like all the others.

One night last month, as they sat in their apartment on the other side of town, picking at their TV dinners and watching CNN’s coverage of a rash of bank robberies a thousand miles away, Molly had an idea.

For weeks afterward, she fiddled with schedules and escape routes and contingency plans, and the final result was Owen standing here now, inside the front door of the bank, with Molly’s checkbook in his hand, surveying the lobby from the corner of his eye and feeling a slight but irritating urge to use the bathroom.

He drew in a long breath, exhaled slowly, removed the glove from his right hand, took a .22 pistol from his overcoat pocket, pointed and aimed, and shot the eye out of the surveillance camera.

The effect was almost comical. Six heads snapped up, every mouth hanging open in stunned disbelief.

“Back up,” Owen shouted. “Back up two steps from your desks. NOW!”

They obeyed immediately. So far, so good, he thought. Molly had told him there was a silent-alarm button at each desk and teller station, but he felt sure no one had yet had time to press one. That was the reason he’d chosen not to use a silencer. A gunshot at close range creates a handy shock effect.

Well, that wasn’t quite true. He hadn’t chosen not to use a silencer. Molly had. Owen, truth be told, wasn’t much of a planner. What he was good at was shooting things and hitting what he aimed at... and taking orders. In the military, he’d had a lot of experience at both. On this occasion, Molly’s orders were clear. All he had to do was follow them.

He threw a quick glance out the door. Nobody in sight. He doubted anyone outside had heard anything — one of the advantages of a small-caliber weapon. Besides, Molly had assured him that the walls themselves were almost soundproof, especially with the thick glass in the door and the absence of windows.

Quickly, Owen threw the deadbolt, yanked down the door shade, and turned again to face the lobby. Behind the teller stations and the CSR desks, Cecil Woodthorpe and the five women were standing rock-still, their backs flat against the walls. One of the ladies had her hands up.

Owen moved to the middle of the lobby, concentrating on the tellers, remembering his wife’s instructions. Don’t waste time having them empty their cash drawers — the big money’s in the vault. And don’t make them file out into the lobby and lie down on the floor. Since robbers often order them to do that, Molly had said, there’d been some talk at the bank about installing an additional button near the gate leading out of the teller area. She wasn’t sure if that had yet been done, but she didn’t want to take any chances.

“You,” Owen said to Woodthorpe. “Go to the end of the counter, climb over it, and come out here with me. And make it quick.”

Woodthorpe didn’t move. He seemed to be smirking.

“Now!” Owen said.

The bald man calmly shook his head. “No.”

The second gunshot was as sudden and unexpected as the first. All the women let out little yelps. One of the CSRs folded to the floor in a faint. Cecil Woodthorpe hadn’t moved at all, except for his eyes. They seemed to have grown so wide they might’ve popped from his head.

A neat hole about the size of a collar button had appeared in Woodthorpe’s oversized right ear. Just behind him, a similar hole was visible in the sheetrock of the side wall. Bright blood trickled from his ear onto his white shirt.

“Let’s go,” Owen said, beckoning with the smoking gun barrel.

He didn’t have to ask again. Within five seconds, a dazed Woodthorpe was over the counter and standing at rigid attention. One hand was clapped over his ear. All signs of arrogance had vanished.

“Take this,” Owen said, pulling a folded black nylon duffel bag from its clasp inside his overcoat. “Unlock the vault and fill the bag to the top. Understand?”

The new, attitude-adjusted Cecil Woodthorpe snatched the bag, hurried over to the vault door, and started twirling dials. Even the women seemed to have undergone a change, Owen noticed. They were all visibly trembling and scarcely breathing, eyes pointed straight ahead. All of them now had their hands raised. A little blood is a fantastic incentive, Owen decided. His drill team at the base would probably have won top honors every week if his commander had taken the trouble to shoot a hole in someone’s ear now and then.

The vault door swung open. With barely a pause, Woodthorpe dashed inside and started cramming cash into the duffel. Owen moved to a spot just outside the vault and watched him work. The clock on the wall said 1:02. Right on schedule.

“Big bills only,” Owen called. Woodthorpe, working with great intensity, just nodded. His ear seemed to be bleeding less, a fact that didn’t seem to lessen his newfound eagerness to please.

Owen wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead and reviewed the steps of his plan, ticking them off in his mind.

His biggest worry was Donald Ramsey, the branch manager. Ramsey didn’t usually return from his Rotary lunch until one-thirty or so, but nothing was certain. If he happened to be early, the locked and shaded door wouldn’t surprise him, but if he used his key and encountered the deadbolt, he’d know what was up and would call in the cavalry. Besides, Molly hadn’t wanted him here at all. “Ramsey could hurt us,” she’d said to Owen one night. “He’s tough, and he’s smart too. While I worked there, he did a good job.” Owen had replied, half seriously, “He had good help.”

She had laughed at that, he remembered. God, how he loved hearing her laugh.

He wished she were here with him now.

Owen checked his watch. He’d been inside the bank almost eight minutes. Pretty much what they’d planned on. But he had to be careful not to let down his guard. The next few minutes might well determine whether he would spend his future on a tropical beach making love or in a federal prison making license plates.

“Hurry it up in there,” Owen shouted, although he couldn’t imagine anyone working any harder or faster than Woodthorpe was. The man was a bag-filling maniac.

At that moment something — Owen never knew what — made him turn and look at the platform area on the far side of the room, and what he saw made his heart leap into his throat. The CSR who had fainted hadn’t fainted at all, or if she had, she’d regained consciousness; at this instant, she was propped on one trembling elbow and was stretching her other hand up toward her desktop.

“Get away from there,” Owen roared.

Too late. Her right forefinger was pressed flat against a little red button on the side of her desktop. Owen fired without thinking, putting two bullets into the walnut edge of the desk and neatly cutting the wire that ran from there to the floor. But that was also too late. The alarm, he knew, had already sounded — not here in the bank lobby but in the police station down the street.

Mistake, he thought. Big mistake.

But not critical. Molly had anticipated something like this, the way she anticipated most everything. Stick to the plan.

He glanced around wildly, making sure nothing else was amiss. It wasn’t. Cecil Woodthorpe, still emptying shelves like a madman, appeared to have ignored the whole incident. The black duffel looked almost full now, bulging at the sides. No one else had moved. The lady who had pressed the button sat on the floor beside her desk, hugging her elbows and staring at Owen with wide brown eyes. She looked amazed to still be alive.

Owen’s mind was whirling.

He tried not to think about the alarm. From what Molly had remembered about the bank’s emergency drills — and from a couple of false alarms she’d seen last summer — it would take the cops at least six minutes to get here. Plenty of time.

“Okay,” he called to Woodthorpe. “That’s enough. Get out here.” The assistant manager hurried through the vault door, breathing hard, and handed over the bag. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the pistol. He probably figured the only thing worse than getting shot would be getting shot twice. Owen opened the bag and examined the contents, burrowing his free hand several layers deep. The duffel was literally stuffed with packets of hundred-dollar bills.

Without another word, Owen zipped the bag shut and backed carefully across the lobby to the door. The room was as quiet as a tomb. He reached the door, raised one edge of the shade with his gun barrel, and peeked out.

The coast was relatively clear. Across the way, an elderly man with a straw hat and a cane was walking a ratty-looking poodle; just down the street to the left, a bread truck was parked underneath a sign that said LEO’S BAKERY; on the sidewalk near the truck, a little girl was skipping rope, her breath making white clouds in the chilly air; to the right, near the end of the cul-de-sac, an old gray-haired woman in a purple flowered dress and a ragged coat was pushing a shopping cart full of trash bags. She stopped occasionally to inspect the contents of the garbage cans at the curb and stuff anything interesting into one of her bags.

Owen turned and flicked his gaze over the lobby one last time, then put his ear to the door and listened a moment. No sirens. At least not yet.

Now or never. He released the deadbolt, heaved a deep breath, and opened the door.

Three minutes earlier, two city policemen had received the call, swerved onto Palmetto Street, and aimed their cruiser west toward the bank. Officer Scott was almost as short as Owen McKay, and considerably wider. The other — Mullen — was so tall and long-faced he’d acquired the nickname Muldoon, from a TV police comedy that had aired long before he was born.

“Don’t forget,” Mullen said, “to mention me to your sister.”

Scott, who had no intention of letting Mullen get within a mile of his sister, gave him a dark look. “You’re not her type.”

“Why not let me be the judge of that?”

“Because I’ve seen your judgment in action,” his partner said, watching the traffic. They were almost there. “Like right now. How about keeping your mind on the job?”

“This call, you mean?” Mullen snorted. “It’s another false alarm, Scotty. You know nobody would rob that bank.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when they both saw, fifty yards away, a short dude in a ball cap and tan overcoat running down the steps of the bank building. The guy was holding a black duffel bag in his gloved left hand and a pistol in his ungloved right. “That must be Nobody,” Scott said, screeching to a stop in the middle of the street.

The suspect saw them and dodged left, putting the parked bread truck between him and the police cruiser. By the time the officers were out of their car and peeking past the truck with guns drawn, the guy was dashing across the cul-de-sac toward a wrought-iron fence between two buildings. We’ve got him, Scott thought. There’s no way out of here.

At that point, three things happened at about the same time: the little girl wisely dropped her jump rope and ducked into the bakery, the old bag lady in the purple dress pushed her grocery cart into the cul-de-sac from across the street, and the dog walker with the straw hat — spotting the fleeing robber — abandoned his poodle, raised his cane, and marched toward the running man as if ready to do battle.

Both the cops and the gunman shouted to the old man to get the hell out of the way. He kept coming. The suspect, without slowing, fired a single shot; the old guy’s hat was snatched off his head as if the wind had taken it, landed ten feet behind him, and rolled into the gutter.

Crouching beside the truck, Officers Scott and Mullen paused and looked at each other. The old man stopped too. He felt around on top of his head for a second or two and, apparently realizing what had happened and that he was unhurt, lost all interest in engaging the enemy. Simply put, he got the hell out of the way.

The bag lady, unfortunately, did not.

At the sound of the gunshot, the gray-haired woman stopped dead, looked around in confusion, and then started running, pushing her cart blindly along in front of her.

The fleeing robber almost missed her — and would have, if she hadn’t run straight into his path. As things turned out, he slammed into the side of her shopping cart at top speed, tumbling it and her and himself onto the ground and spilling old shoes and magazines and clocks and black plastic garbage bags all over the pavement. Still holding the gun, the robber scrambled to his feet, glanced once at the cops, picked up the fallen duffel bag, and sprinted again toward the barred fence in the wall bordering the cul-de-sac.

“Freeze!” Officer Scott shouted, and fired into the air. The two cops couldn’t fire at the suspect; the woman in the coat and dress was waddling around gathering her belongings and jamming them into bags, directly between them and the escaping robber. As they watched helplessly, the suspect reached a gate in the fence and stopped there, tugging in vain at the vertical wrought-iron bars. Behind him Scott shouted again, and fired another warning shot.

That seemed to make up the robber’s mind. He shrugged out of his overcoat, dropped it, and — with stomach sucked in and head turned sideways — put his right leg between and through the bars, followed by his right arm, shoulder, head, and torso. The space between the bars couldn’t have been more than eight inches, and it seemed impossible that he could make it. But he did. Within seconds he eased the rest of his body through to the other side.

Except for his left hand.

The hand holding the black duffel bag.

The bag, packed full, was far too big to fit. Even from a distance, the cops could see his face. First it registered surprise, then frustration, then anger, then defeat. After another moment’s hesitation, the suspect released his grip and let the bag fall to the sidewalk beside his overcoat. He stared sadly through the bars at it for a second more, then turned and fled. Those in the street behind him saw him dash down a gloomy alleyway, jog left, and disappear.

Scott and Mullen broke cover and ran past the old lady to the gate. Mullen peered through it, then reached out to touch its bars, gauging the distance between them. “That was one skinny dude,” he said.

Scott picked up the dropped duffel bag, hefted it a couple of times, and unzipped the top. He stared for a moment at the bills stacked inside. “And almost a rich one.”

“Be careful,” Mullen said. “We need prints off of that.”

“No need — he was wearing gloves. On the hand holding this, at least.” Scott looked up at the ten-foot gate in the fence and added, “Wonder why he didn’t throw the bag over first.”

“Probably never thought of it. Things happened too fast. Besides, it looks heavy.”

“It is.”

A crowd was gathering. The old lady in the purple dress was still scooping up her treasures, packing them into her trash bags and the pockets of her coat and reloading her rickety cart. She was limping a bit and mumbling a lot, but looked more angry than hurt. Down the street, the mangy-looking poodle was walking around trailing its leash and finally sat down in the gutter beside the straw hat. Its owner, Scott thought, was probably still running.

Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance. A misty rain began to fall.

Officer Scott tucked the duffel bag under his arm, picked up the robber’s discarded overcoat, and studied the faces in the crowd. He knew the branch manager, Ramsey, but didn’t see him among the onlookers. It occurred to him that the bank folks might still be holed up inside. Or locked up. “We better check out the crime scene,” he said.

Mullen grinned. “I’m ready. One of the tellers — Debbie something? — she’s a knockout.”

Scott sighed, rolled his eyes, and headed across the cul-de-sac toward the bank.

“Nothing against your sister,” Mullen called.

The Palmetto branch probably hadn’t seen this much activity since its grand opening, Debbie Martingale thought. Twenty minutes after the incident, detectives and reporters and bank executives from downtown were all over the place, although none of them seemed to be accomplishing much. What did seem to be happening was a lot of back-slapping and congratulating. After all, the bag containing the money had been recovered, nobody had been killed, and the only person injured — the arrogant Cecil Woodthorpe — had turned his battle wound into an opportunity to be more obnoxious than ever. Secretly, Debbie Martingale wished the robber had aimed about four inches to the right.

The most surprising thing was, no one seemed overly concerned that the robber had gotten away. And, though no one had asked her opinion, Debbie had a theory about that.

The first two policemen at the scene — one, she thought, resembled Francis Muldoon on the old Car 54, Where Are You? reruns — were saying that the suspect would probably be easy to locate because he’d been forced to flee on foot, and thus his getaway car was probably still parked somewhere up the street. When they found it, DMV records could produce a name, address, etc.

Debbie thought they were wrong. She had watched, through the glass of the front door, as the robber jogged down the bank’s tall steps. She’d seen him shoot the hat off the old man’s head, crash into the bag lady, and run straight toward that gate in the fence. And she was fairly convinced that any hesitation he’d shown before squeezing his body past those iron bars was play-acting, plain and simple. She thought he’d known very well beforehand that he could fit between those bars if he had to. No getaway car would be found, because he hadn’t planned that kind of getaway. He had planned to walk out — either down the street or through the fence.

But her scenario, like the fence, had holes in it. What about the money? Had he forgotten to throw the bag over the gate first, or — in all the excitement — not had time to? And where exactly had he planned to walk, if he’d not been forced to exit through those bars? Those were big questions, big enough to keep her from voicing her theory. Besides, she had other things to think about at the moment. Cecil Woodthorpe, who was standing in a knot of reporters, had turned and was pointing at her. As she watched, he left the group and marched in her direction.

Great, she thought. Now what?

In a third-floor hotel room a quarter mile from the bank, a woman in a bathrobe and slippers stood at the room’s only window, watching the drizzle and smoking a cigarette, rubbing the bruise on her hip. Her hair was still damp from the rain; she’d wrapped a white towel around it.

She idly studied the traffic in the street below. People walking and people driving, here and there and everywhere. How did the song go? Like a circle in a spiral. To her, all those people mattered not one whit. It didn’t even matter that the room she was in, like most in this part of town, was old and seedy.

She heard a knock at the door. She tensed, cinched the bathrobe’s belt a bit tighter, and crossed the room. The door had neither peephole nor chain, so she put one hand on the knob and one ear against the wood, listening. “Who’s there?” she called.

Immediately she heard the quiet clicks of doors opening up and down the hallway. They wouldn’t be opening far, she knew — just enough for a quick look. She’d checked into the room two days ago, knowing that most of the other guests in this hotel were either pushers or users, and thus generally uninterested in anyone who was not.

“Department of Human Services,” a voice answered. “May I come in?”

Still listening, she heard those same doors clicking closed again. She could sense the sighs of relief, and the thoughts: Welfare Department. Not the cops.

The woman took a last draw on her cigarette, unlocked and opened the door, and limped back across the room to drop the butt into an empty Coke can. Behind her, Owen McKay stepped through the open door into the room. His baseball cap was gone, his sweatshirt was soaked, and one knee of his blue jeans was ripped from the same collision that had bruised her hip.

She turned to face him, and when she did, he raised his shirttail and drew a pistol from his belt. Then he took a roll of yellow masking tape from the pocket of his jeans.

“I assume you’re not really from the DHS,” she said.

“You assume correctly,” he replied, smiling. “Come here.”

Cecil Woodthorpe leaned forward and said, with solemn intensity, “We need a count.”

He and Debbie Martingale were standing together in the back room. He had one hand cupped gingerly over his now-bandaged war injury; the other was holding the still-zippered black duffel bag that he had so energetically packed full of vault cash thirty minutes earlier.

“Why?” Debbie asked.

He hefted the bag onto the table between them. “The reporters need to know exactly how much money was involved in the robbery attempt. When you’re done counting, report the total to Ramsey.” Branch manager Donald Ramsey, who was currently being interviewed by one of the less-known reporters, had arrived at the bank moments ago looking like a kid who’d received a birthday balloon after the party was over.

“Ramsey,” Debbie said to herself. This morning it would’ve been “Mr. Ramsey.” New career plans, Cecil?

When Woodthorpe turned to leave her to her task, she unzipped the heavy bag, looked inside, and, despite herself, murmured, “Whoa.”

Woodthorpe stopped and turned. “What is it?”

“There must be a fortune here.” She reached in to touch a bound packet of bills. “Packs and packs of tens, all the way to the top.”

He frowned. “Good God, Martingale. No wonder your cash drawer doesn’t always balance. You can’t tell a ten from a hundred.”

“What?”

“Hundreds,” he said patiently. “The idiot told me he wanted big bills only. I filled the bag with hundreds.”

Now Debbie was the one frowning. Carefully, she fanned one of the packets with her thumb, examining each bill. She had been wrong, she noticed. It wasn’t a packet of tens. But it wasn’t hundreds either. It was a packet of blank paper with one ten on top. Barely breathing, she took out more bundles. They were all the same: one ten-dollar bill on top, ninety-nine rectangles of plain paper beneath it. Digging underneath the top packets, she made another discovery. The rest of the bag was filled with stacks of old newspapers.

She looked up into Woodthorpe’s suddenly pale face.

“Which idiot are you referring to?” she said.

Owen McKay kept his eyes on the woman as he tore off a strip of masking tape and cut it with his teeth. His eyes flicked away only once, to sweep the room. The suitcases packed and ready in the corner, the shirt and trousers laid out neatly on the bed, the black duffel bag sitting open and empty on the table, along with dozens of bundles of bills, stacked in groups of ten bundles each. On the floor beside the table stood a shopping cart full of trash bags. One of the bags was outside the cart now and in the woman’s hands; she was holding it open in front of him. He focused again on her face.

“The garbage collection business seems to be doing well,” he said.

She shrugged. “I can’t complain.”

“How much?” he asked as he worked with the tape.

“Nine hundred sixty thousand. If I counted right.” She was still looking at him, still holding the mouth of the trash bag open for him. The only sound in the room was the patter of cold rain on the window.

Finally Owen finished wrapping his pistol with masking tape. It was, he had read, the only way to be sure that metal detectors would never locate it. Then he dropped the gun and the roll of tape into the open bag, followed by his sunglasses and the false mustache he’d peeled from his upper lip. He could see that the bag already contained a gray wig, a purple flowered dress, a ragged black coat, and some kind of makeup kit.

She closed the trash bag, secured its top with a twist-tie, and set it aside. “What took you so long?”

“Cops were just down the street. I walked back down to Jefferson and came in from the other way.” He nodded toward the window. “How about the van?”

“Loaded and ready.”

Owen smiled as a thought occurred to him. “How many pillows did you have to use to fill out that dress?”

“Not as many as I’d thought I would,” she said, and laughed. “Too many pizzas lately.” She uncoiled the towel from around her hair and handed it to him. He used it to dry his rain-wet face, then turned his gaze again to the money on the table and the clothes she’d laid out for him on the bed.

“Old woman,” he said, “you do good work.”

Molly Fremont McKay laughed and ran her fingers through her blond hair. “I have good help,” she said. And stepped forward, into his arms.

As they embraced, two thoughts were foremost in his mind. The first was that it was finally over. The plan had worked.

The other was how much he loved hearing her laugh.