Free New Title 1 by Patrick Lestewka

cash drawers. He conducts the tellers and customers over to the vault, where they will remain locked while we make our getaway. Paul forks stacks of twenties into a Hefty Bag as fast as his trembling fingers can manage.
    “Bring the guards in,” I say.
    “You heard the man,” Dade hollers at the guards. “Move your asses!”
    The unharmed guard complies but the other one, he of the busted face, doesn’t move. So Dade seizes a handful of hair and drags the man, thrashing and wailing, across the tiles. Tiny breaks from position to intercept.
    “The fuck you doing?”
    “Following orders,” Dade says. His eyes read like a grim weather forecast: storm clouds gathering.
    Tiny says, “Gonna kill him.”
    “Fucker called me a nigger! The fuck would you do?”
    THE CLOCK…
    They’re chest-to-chest, Dade glaring up at Tiny. Forgotten behind them, the injured guard raises his pantleg and grabs something black and snub-nosed from a cheater holster. He has the hammer cocked and a bead drawn before I holler:
    “ Gun !”
    KRA-THACK is the sound the pistol makes and ka-chunk is the sound the bullet makes flattening against Tiny’s forehead. The peak of his skull shears off and his eyes roll back in their sockets. His finger spasms on the shotgun’s trigger and the sound is deafening as buckshot tears his feet to shreds but it doesn’t matter because he’s dead, dead on his feet, dead on his stumps, fucking dead .
    Dade swivels, AK riding his hip, and opens fire. The Kalishnakov kicks and the rent-a-cop’s face disintegrates in a cloud of red.
    … TONIGHT!
    Screams fill the vault. Most of these folks have never heard gunshots before and they’re thinking WWIII has broken out in the foyer. I grab the Hefty Bag from Paul. Deacon smashes the emergency phone and slams the vault’s door on thirteen very relieved faces.
    Dade inserts another banana clip and racks the AK’s bolt. His Converse hightops are coated in blood and chunks of someone, Tiny, rent-a-cop, I don’t know who the fuck. He’s Section-8, and maybe he’s been that way for a while now. I should’ve seen he wasn’t wired tight but I didn’t and now we’re wading through a bloodbath.
    “Time to go,” I say through gritted teeth.
    The sidewalk is mercifully deserted. Maybe, just maybe, we’re going to clear this tits-up. But no: we’re halfway between the bank and the van when a police cruiser fishtails around the corner at Elm and Prescott.
    Deacon drops into a shooter’s stance and snaps off six shots. The first flattens the cruiser’s front right tire, the third flattens the left, four, five and six punch through the grille. The cruiser skids to a standstill, steam boiling up from under the hood.
    Perfect. The cruiser’s disabled and nobody’s hurt.
    Dade erases all that.
    He opens up with the Kalishnikov, sweeping the barrel side-to-side like a kid pissing in a snow bank. The cruiser’s windshield implodes and the frame rocks—actually rocks back and forth, like a ragtop on Lover’s Lane—as copperjackets tear through it. And I can make out two bodies jitterbugging in the front seat: maybe young cops, maybe old cops, maybe single cops, maybe married cops, but the only certainty is that they’re dead cops, dead as disco, and the mindlessness of their deaths sickens me. Then the cruiser explodes, erupting into a furious flaming scrapheap that rains charred metal and smoking flesh onto the cold November tarmac.
    I slam my hand down on the AK’s barrel. Dade stares at me with empty eyes.
    “Take me home, Oddy,” he whispers. “Take me home.”
    “Yeah, Dade,” I say. “Yeah, okay.”
    We pile into the van and pull away, leaving four funerals in our wake. I stare out the window at the flaming scalps of radial tire and charred metal and remember…
    … The Magnificent Seven on Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol eighty klicks east of Saigon, walking a trail overlooking the South China Sea. Intel had reported the NVA was offloading three