Free Confessions of a Bombshell Bandit by Gemma Halliday

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    CONFESSIONS OF A BOMBSHELL BANDIT

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    All I ever wanted was a little freedom. They say money can't buy everything, but that's not entirely true. Money buys you freedom. Freedom from worry, freedom to retire, freedom from the mortgage monster. Freedom to pick up and fly off to the Bahamas, should you get the tropical urge. Or, in my case, freedom to park your car on the street without worry that the repo man will tow it away by morning.
    My best friend, Quinn, majored in psychology at UCLA and she says my obsession with this whole money-equals-freedom thing probably stemmed from a deep rooted issue in my childhood. She could be right. When I was four years old my father went to prison for holding up a convenience store in North Hollywood. He robbed the Indian clerk at gunpoint and left with thirty-two dollars and sixty-one cents before his Volkswagen Beetle sputtered and died two blocks away. He got five years for armed robbery.
    While inside, he got into a fight with another inmate over the Sunday mystery meat and stabbed him with a plastic spork. They added another five years to his sentence. While he was serving those out, a riot broke out in my father’s cell block, which ended up with a guard getting killed and everyone in cell block D got another four years.
    By the time I was eighteen and finally leaving my mother’s cigarette-stained doublewide on the college scholarship I’d worked my butt off for, my father was doing his last six months in San Quentin. That is until he was caught smuggling contraband bubble gum into the yard and held over for another eighteen months. Which quickly stretched into three years when he refused to do the mandatory ten minutes of jumping jacks per day, resulting in an altercation with an overweight guard who couldn’t do a jumping jack to save his life.
    So you see, the price of my father's freedom was thirty-two dollars and sixty one cents.
    As for me, my trappings are less penitentiary but no less constraining. I thought a college education would buy me some freedom. Nope. Just student loans. Quinn, who rides public transportation – an almost unheard of phenomenon here in Los Angeles – says that having a car gives me freedom. Nope. Just a car payment that I can't afford, gas prices that go up every three seconds, and a game of cat and mouse with a repo guy who looks like Harvey Keitel in coveralls. And Lynette, my co-worker with a mortgage, an out-of-work husband, and two kids in diapers, says that being a single twenty-something renting a one bedroom apartment in Chatsworth should be all the freedom any woman needs. To me it just means having to cash in my meager paycheck the first of the month, signing 90% over to the apartment manager, Mr. Chen, and spending the remaining 10% on lots of Top Ramen for one. Not my idea of footloose and fancy free.
    Then again, neither was an eight by nine cell, which is why I made Quinn go over our plan one more time.
    “ You’re going to leave the car idling, then we loop around on Pico and take La Cienega straight down to the ten. No stopping.”
    Quinn nodded, her eyes shinning as her hot pink bangs bobbed up and down in the seat beside me.
    “ Here, Carrie.” Lynette reached her arm between the console and handed me a .22. I checked the chamber. Fully loaded.
    Lynnie handed another gun to Quinn, who twirled hers like a wild west sharpshooter, almost dropping it on the upholstered seat of Lynnie's mini van.
    “ Ready, ladies?” Quinn asked.
    Lynnie and I nodded as one.
    Quinn pulled her Marilyn Monroe mask on. Lynette and I followed suit, becoming Mamie Van Doren and Jayne Mansfield. My vision instantly blurred as I tried to see out the tiny plastic eye holes.
    “ Just like we rehearsed,” Quinn instructed. “They’ll be so distracted, they won’t even know what hit them.”
    “ Right,” I said. Lynette nodded.
    Then we all stripped down to the matching black and pink polka dotted bikinis we’d purchased at