“Waaay ahead of you.” She held up a big floppy rain hat and put it on with a flourish. If Peter wore it, he’d look like a serial killer. On June, it looked like a fashion accessory.
“Very stylish,” he said. “Just don’t look for the cameras. That’s the best way for them to get a good picture of your face.”
The Fast Money door was locked when Peter tugged on the handle, but the lights were still on. Through the barred window, he saw someone hustling out from behind the counter.
“We’re closed,” the man called through the heavy glass. Only a few years older than Peter, he had a drinker’s face, with sunken eyes, puffy skin, and the bloom of broken veins in his nose and cheeks. He wore a polo shirt with the Fast Money logo, a dollar bill with wings.
“My name is Peter. You have something for me?”
“Got a last name?”
“Smith.”
The man nodded. “Yeah, come on back.” The chain rattled as he released it and stepped away from the door. “Let me lock this behind you.”
Peter and June stood at the plastic counter while the man let himself through a heavy steel door into the employee area, protected by thick security glass and at least six cameras that Peter could see. June leaned her back on the counter with her head down and studied her fingernails. Riot Grrrl was a natural.
The man studied Peter. “You got ID?”
“You know who I am,” said Peter. “Let’s get this over with.” His shoulders were climbing up to his ears. Fluorescent lights, vinyl floor, the chemical stink of industrial cleaners.
“Gimme your ID number.”
Peter gave him the first four digits of his Social.
“That’s it,” said the man. He began to count out hundreds, five groups of ten and one group of five. He slid the larger sum into a paper envelope, pushed it through the slot in the glass, then held up the five C-notes. “Five hundred for the convenience fee,” he said, folded the bills and stuffed them into his pocket. He passed over three plastic cards in paper sleeves with the name Peter Smith embossed on the plastic. “Pre-paid credit cards,” he said. “I took the liberty of setting your PIN number. It’s the same as the ID number you gave me. Check the card balances in the reader.”
He pointed at the card reader on Peter’s side of the counter. Peter swiped each card, punched in the PIN, and checked the balance. He was loaded.
“Sign here,” said the man. Peter scrawled something unintelligible on the form and slid it back through the slot. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Smith.”
“Thanks for staying open. You’re a lifesaver.”
The man’s eyes flickered with the only evidence of emotion he’d yet shown. “My pleasure.”
As the locks slammed shut on the door behind him, Peter limped across the shining wet blacktop toward the minivan, June beside him. He was carrying over twenty thousand dollars in his pocket. The thought occurred to him at the same moment a two-door sedan pulled up, an older piece-of-shit Dodge, dark blue or black with cracked plastic fenders. It blocked the path to the minivan.
The doors popped open and two men got out, trailing pot smoke and the smell of spilled beer. Long hair and armloads of tattoos, black short-sleeved T-shirts in the cool evening rain.
“Give me what you got,” the man on the passenger side said, walking out to meet them. He had a three-day beard and the whites of his eyes showed overbright under the streetlight. He held a pistol down at his side. “Give it now or I hurt you bad.”
“I hope you stole that car,” said Peter. “There are a whole bunch of security cameras covering this parking lot.”
The tattooed man walked closer, raising his pistol. It was in his right hand. “Just gimme the money, assface.”
His dumb smirk told Peter the cameras had already been turned off by the nice man inside the Fast Money outlet, who had almost certainly set up the after-hours robbery. He’d chosen the PIN on the cash cards, too.
Peter shook his head. The whole thing just made him tired.
“You want to die?” the tattooed man asked, closing in. The ink on his arms looked like smears in the rainy night. He held the gun sideways like a television gangster, stiff-armed and one-handed, right at eye level. Ten feet away, now five, now two. The driver wasn’t showing a weapon.
Peter sighed. “June, get behind me.”
It was an amateur mistake, thinking it was easier to shoot a man the closer you got to him, and easier still if you put the gun right to his head. Humans had evolved to kill each other with rocks and clubs, their brains were wired to think in those terms. With an antelope femur, closer was better.
But firearms didn’t operate like that. From ten meters, a trained shooter had plenty of time to track and fire at a moving target. The target’s arc of movement would be relatively small across his field of fire, and he’d retain total control of the weapon.
From two meters, it got harder. The arc of movement was larger and the time more compressed, but it was plenty doable.