SUICIDE HILL
549
next station, catching a shot of Joe out of the corner of his eye. Little Bro had already hit three stations and was holding a shaky bead on the tellers. Tears and sweat were pouring off his face, soaking his phony beard. His face was as red as a baby’s, and his lower lip was flapping so hard his whole head shook along with it. From somewhere in the bank Duane Rice was shouting, “Where’s the fucking security boss!” sounding like a stone loony. Bobby maneuvered both briefcases and his piece too in front of the last teller, going wired when he saw it was a foxy young blonde.
“Where’s the guard! Where’s the fucking security man!”
Bobby heard Rice’s shouts, then turned to scope out the blonde. She had her three drawers open and the money stacked on the counter. Bobby scooped it into the briefcase closest to him, tickling the girl’s chin with his silencer as he clamped the case shut. “You like seafood, chiquita?” he said. “You like a nice juicy shark sausage? Go fine as wine with a nice blond furburger.”
Rice saw the whole bank shake in front of his eyes. His voice sounded like it wasn’t his, and the people cowering at their desks looked like scary red animals. He turned around so he wouldn’t see them, and saw Sharkshit Bobby talking trash to a young woman teller. He was wondering whether to stop it when Gordon Meyers walked out of a door next to the vault. And he knew.
Rice raised his .45; Meyers saw him and turned to run. Rice squeezed off three shots. The back of Meyers’s white shirt exploded into crimson just as he felt the three silencer kicks. The dinged-out ding jailer crashed into an American flag on a pole and fell with it to the floor. The bank became one gigantic blast of noise, and through all of it, Rice heard a woman’s voice:
“Scum! Scum! Scum!”
Bobby turned around at the blonde’s final epithet, and saw a dead man on the floor and Duane Rice and his brother gesturing for him to move. He turned to give the girl a Jaws theme goodbye, and caught a wad of spittle square in the face. Wiping it off, he saw her huge open mouth and knew that whatever she said would be the truth. He jabbed his .45 at her teeth and fired twice. The shots blew off the back of her head. Bobby saw blood and brains splatter the wall behind her as she was lifted off her feet. Recoil spun him around, and then Joe was there, grabbing the two briefcases and shoving him toward the doors.
Outside, Rice was standing on the sidewalk with the third briefcase, jamming a fresh clip into his piece. When the brothers crashed through the doors all sweat, tears and head-to-toe tremors, he shoved the briefcase at 550
L.A. NOIR
Joe and managed to get out, “Go around the corner to the car,” from somewhere cool inside his own shakes. The Garcias moved, stumble-running, the three packages of money banging against their legs. Rice was about to follow when a siren came out of deep nowhere, and a black-and-white with cherry lights flashing zoomed down the sidewalk straight at him. Rice made frantic flagging motions and fell to his knees as if wounded, holding the piece inside his right jacket pocket, knowing the silencer would cut down his range to close to nothing. When the patrol car decelerated and braked, he held his ground, knowing they had to have seen him; when it did a final fishtail, he counted to ten, got to his feet and pointed his .45
at the windshield.
The cops inside were less than four feet away and about to come out the doors with shotguns when he squeezed the trigger seven times, the gun at chest level. The windshield exploded, and Rice flung himself to the ground and rolled toward the passenger door, ejecting the spent clip, jamming in another. When both doors remained shut, he stood up, saw two bloodsoaked blue uniforms and gasping faces and fired seven more times, all head shots. Blood and bone shrapnel sprayed his face, and in the distance he could hear other sirens screaming.
Suddenly he felt very calm and very much in control. He ran through the bank parking lot and down the alley that paralleled Graystone Drive, then vaulted a chain link fence, coming down into a cement backyard. The driveway led him out to the street, and there were Joe and Bobby, standing by the ’81 Chevy Caprice. No neighbors; no nosy kids; no eyeball witnesses. Rice walked across front lawns to the Chevy and unlocked the driver’sside door, then the passenger’s. The brothers got in the back with the briefcases and huddled down without being told. Rice started the car and backed out, then drove slowly down Graystone to Westholme, then across Pico to the freeway. When they were headed north on the 405, the sudden screech of sirens became deafening. The fifty-foot freeway elevation gave him a perfect view of the bank and the street in front of it. It was bumper-to-bumper cop cars spilling shotgun-toting fuzz. Choppers were starting to fly in from the east. It looked like a war zone.
Rice drove cautiously in the middle lane; the challenge of holding down panic in an unfamiliar vehicle kept his mind off the past ten minutes. Moving out of the area, the cop noises subsided, except for occasional blackand-whites highballing it past in the opposite direction. Then when he hit