Django Durango

Things were going quite well, if Dixie said so herself. This was the first time she had applied to be lead on a job. It earned one a ten percent bonus for taking the responsibility of seeing that the score was delivered to the local Syndicate depot. The rest of her crew were out front sweeping loose diamonds off tables and displays and into duffel bags. The diamonds were small and of mediocre quality, but the sheer quantity of them would net a decent profit. Because things were going so well, Dixie was in the back office, cracking their wall safe. She didn’t expect to find anything worthwhile, but she had the time and cracking safes was what she did.

At the last tumbler falling into place, she turned the handle and yanked open the door. A stack of bills sat on top of some official looking papers. She snatched the bills out and put them in her jacket pocket: a tip on top of her lead bonus! This job was turning out real well.

Until the gunshots sounded out front.
Read on…

“All right,” Sable said. “Moment of truth.”

Cairo picked up the hotel phone, flipped the yellowed calling card over, and dialed the number she’d jotted down ten years ago. Sable leaned in close to hear since they weren’t going to risk putting the call on speaker and being overheard.

The phone rang once. Then again. Then the click of connection.

“Good morning, Miss Laurendeau’s residence,” a woman’s voice answered. Cairo knew this woman was definitely not Bijou. Bijou had a comically affected transatlantic accent. There was still a remote possibility that Bijou still lived there, if this woman was just answering her phone.

“Hello. May I speak to Bijou please?” Cairo chanced.

The woman on the other end was silent for a moment, then said, “May I ask who’s calling?”

“Oh, my apologies,” Cairo said, having forgotten to introduce herself before . “This is Cleo.”

“Cleo…?” the woman trailed, prompting for a last name.

“Just Cleo.”

“I see. May I put you on hold?” the woman asked.

“Yes, of course.”

They waited. A moment later, an older woman’s voice asked, “Hello? Bijou speaking.”

Sable nearly choked in surprise at how this woman just answered so readily to her codename, not knowing who was on the other end of the line.
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“Hey Cleo! Look at this.”

Dixie googled the tiny handcuff key that Nero had mentioned and found the website that made them. And they had other products as well.

Dixie showed Cleo a product that looked like a bullet vibrator. However, instead of a tiny battery-operated motor, it contained four lock picks, a “bend to fit” tension wrench, the handcuff key, two different kinds of lock shims, a Kevlar saw, a diamond rod saw, a ferrocerium fire rod, three waxed jute fire starters, and a ceramic razor blade.

“‘If your occupation or recreation takes you into dangerous situations,” Dixie read aloud, “you’ll want to have an EscapeModule on hand… or wherever you can keep it hidden. Just 3.2″ long, this tiny o-ring sealed module houses lifesaving escape and survival tools.'”

“Apparently, you can use the casing as a flint too,” Cleo noted.

“Sounds like it depends,” Dixie said. She read on. “‘Included in this order (but not fitting inside the module) is a small petrolatum packet for just about any survival use you can imagine.’
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“So Dixie? That’s a pretty…” Cleo twirled her hand around, pretending to think of the right word, “Confederate codename.”. She was curious to know if Dixie was aware of or oblivious to the implications behind it. She knew it might be unwise to start this conversation in the van on the way to a robbery, but if Dixie’s codename implied what she thought it might, then she’d probably never work with Dixie again. It’d be better to know if she should be watching her back now than be betrayed later.

Their crewmates on this job, a man called Savoy and a woman named Chartreuse, looked upon this disaster in the making silently. Savoy had a look of deep “oh no” on his face, but Chartreuse looked like she had a ringside seat to a sold-out fight.

Dixie raised an eyebrow at the question. “Are we really gonna talk about this now?” she asked.

“All right, well, my controller wanted to call me Plantation Slavery but it got cut off in the computer,” she said. Chartreuse snorted at this snide remark, but then stifled herself quickly when she saw no one else laughed. Dixie shrugged, spread her hands, and gave Cleo a what-do-you-expect-me-to-do-about-it look. Savoy’s eyes darted between Dixie and Cleo, waiting to see where this was going to go. No one said anything.
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“We should approach quietly,” Method said.

“You would say that,” Madness said.

“Of course I would.” Method replied evenly. “It’s the only logical way to go.”

“Except running in guns a-blazing and scaring the shit out of everyone so they don’t have time to think or fight us.”

Method started in on some deadpanned reasoning involving fight-or-flight response and the variables it brought into the situation but Madness’ eyes glazed over. Cleo and Dixie glanced sidelong at each other, sharing a look of acknowledgement that they had brought this on themselves.

Twins. You rarely ever got the ones with the telepathic link that put them in perfect sync. Instead, you usually got a pair of fuckin’ Geminis, at odds on everything up to and including the hiest plan.  Siblings – especially twins – were always way too comfortable with each other and not comfortable enough with anyone else. It created problems. A lot of times, siblings were so concerned with each other that they couldn’t fit anyone else into their awareness. Or like today, they’d be too busy trying to argue to agree on a course of action.

Cleo and Dixie usually avoided jobs where the other crewmates were visibly siblings. The jobs had been coming up dry lately. The Syndicate had grown by several hundred agents and that meant the job distribution was thinner. So they took the job with these twins (whose codenames really ought to have been enough of a fuckin’ clue that it was a bad idea) and now they were gonna pay for it.
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