Read Chapter 6: The Night Before

The Plymouth rattled over gravel and rutted clay, headlamps carving weak yellow cones through the dust. Nobody spoke. Walter sat in the back between Sal and Doc, his knees pressed together, the leather seat cracked and cold beneath him. The suitcase at his feet was lighter than he'd expected—two hundred dollars lighter, to be precise, and that was after the pawnbroker had haggled him down from three hundred.

The gold coin was gone. His father's coin. The only thing left from a life that had ended the day the bank doors stayed locked and the tellers went home with their ledgers and their lies.

"Millbrook's got three banks," Roy said from the front, one hand on the wheel, the other dangling a cigarette out the window. "We've got two days to pick one. Crane, you saw the records. Which one's ripe?"

Walter pressed his fingers to his temple. The motion sickness was bad, but it was better than the alternative: thinking about what he'd just done. What he'd become.

"The Trust Company's got the oldest vault," he said slowly. "But their examiner was here six months ago. Clean papers. The Merchants Bank took a loss in '31, wrote it off quietly. Their books are a mess, but messes attract attention. The third one—"

"Millbrook Savings and Loan," Doc said.

Walter nodded. "Their vault's a Mosler, pre-war model. Twelve-minute time lock, back door's got a secondary bolt that most guards don't even know to check. They've had the same teller for twenty-two years. She doesn't watch the door anymore."

Roy grinned into the rearview mirror. "You really were an accountant."

"I was *good*," Walter said. "That's why they fired me."

The car fell silent. Even Roy had nothing to say to that.

---

The motel room was one room, two beds, and a cot that Sal had claimed by throwing his coat across it. The curtains were the color of nicotine and the radiator clanked like a dying man's last confession. Walter lay on his back, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looked vaguely like a hand reaching down.

Two thin mattresses away, Jack was snoring. Doc had pulled a chair against the door, an old habit from somewhere Walter didn't ask about. Roy had gone out for ice, which nobody believed for a second. Roy didn't drink his whiskey cold.

Walter closed his eyes.

The dream came fast, like it always did.

He was standing in the lobby of the First National Bank of Cedarburg. The marble floor was polished to a shine, the way it had been before the panic. Sunlight slanted through the high windows and fell across the brass teller cages. His cage. His window. His nameplate: W. H. CRANE, ACCOUNTS.

The line was long. The customers were smiling. Everyone was smiling.

Then the rumble started. It came up through his shoes, through the floor, through the marble and the mortar and the bones of the building itself. The windows cracked first—thin, spiderweb fractures that spread from the corners like veins. Then the floor began to tilt.

The customers stopped smiling. They started screaming.

Walter ran. Not toward the vault—he'd never had the keys to the vault—but toward the doors. The front doors. The glass was already shattering, shards raining down like snow. He pushed through the crowd, through the bodies, through the hands that grabbed at his sleeves and his collar.

*"Mr. Crane! Mr. Crane, what do we do?"*

The teller. Young Doris. She was clutching her ledger to her chest, her face a mask of blood and tears. The ceiling was coming down. The marble columns were cracking like gunfire.

*"Mr. Crane, please—"*

He left her. He ran. He didn't look back.

He woke gasping, the motel ceiling swimming above him. The radiator clanked. Jack still snored. Sal was propped against the headboard of the cot, a cigarette burning between his fingers, watching him.

"You were fighting something," Sal said quietly.

Walter sat up. His undershirt was soaked through. "Bad chicken sandwich."

Sal's mouth twitched. It wasn't quite a smile, but it was close. "Right. The chicken."

Walter swung his legs over the side of the bed, ran a hand through his hair. The clock on the nightstand read 3:14 AM. The heist was in the morning. The real one. Millbrook Savings and Loan. He'd been over the numbers in his head so many times he could have balanced the bank's books from memory.

"The war," Sal said suddenly. "You ever think about how easy it was to sleep before you saw the things you saw?"

Walter looked at him. In the dim light, Sal's face had gone soft, aged. The cynical edge was gone.

"Something like that," Walter said.

"My brother, Charlie. He died at Cantigny. Twenty years old." Sal tapped the ash off his cigarette into a tin cup. "I was the one who signed the telegram. The army sent it to the house and I signed for it. My mother was in the kitchen, making pie. I read it three times before I told her."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Sal's voice was flat. "I'm not. He got what he wanted. Died doing something that mattered to him." He looked at Walter, and there was something naked in his gaze. "You ever lose someone like that? Someone it actually hurt to lose?"

Walter's throat closed. The lie rose up from the same dark place as the dream, as the shame, as the reckoning.

"My wife," he said. "Car accident. Last year."

It wasn't true. It wasn't close to true. His wife had left him six months after the bank closed, taking the china and the silver and whatever love she'd ever had for a man who couldn't provide. She was alive, probably, in her sister's house in Toledo.

But the lie tasted like honey in his mouth. It made him look wounded instead of worthless. It made the guilt feel like grief instead of what it was.

Sal nodded slowly. "That's rough, Crane. I mean it."

"Thanks."

They sat in silence as the cigarette burned down to Sal's fingers. He stubbed it out and lay back, eyes on the ceiling.

"Tomorrow," Sal said. "We're going to do something they'll write about. Something that matters."

Walter lay back down. The dream was still behind his eyes, Doris's bloody face, her hands reaching for him.

"Yeah," he said, even though he didn't believe it. "We will."

---

Dawn came gray and cold. The crew assembled in the parking lot at 5 AM, breath misting in the air. Roy had returned sometime in the night—Walter hadn't heard him come in, and he didn't ask where he'd been. The suitcases were packed. The tools were loaded. Jack was checking the Thompson, racking the bolt with practiced efficiency.

Walter pulled on his overcoat. He was standing at the car, going over the plan in his head one more time, when Doc came up beside him.

"You talk to Sal last night?" Doc asked, lighting a cigarette.

"A little."

Doc nodded, smoke curling from his nostrils. "Sal's brother, Charlie. The thing about Cantigny—it wasn't the Germans that got him. It was friendly fire. Our own artillery. Sal's never forgiven the army for it." He paused. "But Sal talks about the war because it's easier than talking about himself."

Walter felt the guilt prickle at the back of his neck. "Why are you telling me this?"

Doc smiled, but there was no warmth in it. "Because if you're going to lie to this crew, you'd better be good enough to remember what you said. Sal's brother wasn't just his brother. He was his only family. And Sal has been looking for someone to share that weight with for a long time."

He clapped Walter on the shoulder and walked toward the car, leaving Walter standing alone in the cold morning air, the lie about his dead wife already settling into his bones like poison.

Roy leaned out the driver's window. "Let's go, boys. Millbrook waits for nobody."

Walter looked at the sky. The sun was rising over the motel roof, painting the gravel lot in shades of gold and rust. It looked, for a moment, like the marble lobby of the First National Bank of Cedarburg.

He shook the image loose and got in the car.