“I don’t know, man. I feel a little iffy about this job,” Savoy said. “But I can’t tell if it’s a gut feeling or if it’s just because working in places decorated for Christmas feels like a bad omen.”

“Bad omens? We got fuckin’ Rudolph up here guiding the sleigh tonight. There isn’t a better omen than that,” Nero smartassed.

“Wow, that’s an original fuckin’ joke,” their driver, the aforementioned Rudolph grumped. “Why don’t you tell one I ain’t heard a million times before?”

“Damn, Scrooge, who pissed in your porridge?” Nero asked. “I was just trying to lighten the mood.”
(more…)

“How long do you think it’ll be before they start lookin’ for us?” Sable asked. Cairo was driving, so Sable had her feet up on the dashboard and was eating Sour Punch Straws.

“I don’t expect that they will,” Cairo said. “As long as they never find out we’re working outside of the app, they should have no reason to think we haven’t merely retired.”

They drove along for a while in relative silence, save for Sable’s gooey chewing, the radio, and a beep every so often from the police radar detector, until Cairo’s face shifted into a pensive frown.

“Frenchy could be a problem,” she said.

“How?” Sable asked. She didn’t look up from the candy straw she was peeling apart from the rest in their plastic tray.

“It depends on what she knows. We don’t know when she disappeared or where she fucked off to.” Cairo considered the angles. “If she knows we took the money, she could report that it should be incoming.”

“Wouldn’ be in her interests though,” Sable said. “That was her job. Means she’d be responsible for making sure the money came in.”
(more…)

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.
(more…)

They were in the Titanic Exhibit gift shop. There were necklaces for sale, with pendants made from supposedly genuine pieces of coal brought up from the Titanic’s wreckage.

“That seems rather tasteless,” Cairo commented.

“That shit’s probably haunted,” Sable said.

“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.
(more…)

“Okay, you’re good. Go!”

Summer pulled the plastic cap off the bottom of her boot heel and let her pocket knife fall out of the hollow into her hand. Pulling out the Phillips screwdriver bit, she set to work unscrewing the battery panel of the Laser Lock on some hapless kid’s locker.

In this post Columbine world, being caught with a weapon on school property – even one as dull and useless as the blade in her pocket knife – had ridiculous consequences. So Desi, her best friend, was keeping guard at the door to the outdoor halls. They weren’t supposed to be in the hall this early either, but getting caught in the building before the first bell was an infraction they – especially Desi, as a straight A student – could talk their way out of.

Summer had a good thing going with these Laser Locks. The infomercial for them started airing earlier that year. In it, kids pointed their little color-coordinated remote controls at the Laser Locks on their lockers and the locks popped open instantly, no combinations or keys needed. Having a Laser Lock shaved valuable seconds off a mid-day locker trip that might otherwise make it impossible to get across campus in the five minutes given before the bell rang, earning one an inordinately high punishment for tardiness. Or it would, if Summer didn’t steal the batteries from these locks.
(more…)

“Hey Cleo! Look at this.”

“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.’
(more…)

Everything had been going fine, tripped alarm notwithstanding. The tripped alarm worked out in their favor as now they could use the emergency exit to move the bags to the van. Cleo and Dixie had a decent assembly line going. Cleo was bagging up sculptures and then tossing the bags out the fire door to Dixie, who in turn tossed them through the open doors of the back of their driver’s van.

“Loving this efficiency, Dixie,” Cleo said. “It’s truly some Henry Ford shit.”

“I know! I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many bags at once,” Dixie agreed. She swung another bag into the van. It landed on the pile of bagged sculptures and made both a crunching and a shattering glass sound. Dixie winced.

Cleo looked up at the sound and gave Dixie an admonishing glance.

Just then, Southern burst into the gallery. He and Nero, their crewmates on this job, were supposed to be in the lobby holding off the cops.

“Nero’s just been killed! We need to leave!” he said.
(more…)

“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.
(more…)