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The Robbery

Posted on November 16, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

He was sipping his café latte and fuming, an impressive feat since the coffee was hot and it must have burnt his tongue every one of the first few times he put the cup to his lips. If it hurt his throat he didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy being angry. She was watching him with a mixture of wonder and dread and even though she didn’t want to be the one to push through his angry fog and find that her hand was bitten off by a rabid monster, it was almost like a reflex reaction to ask, “What’s wrong?”

His eyes seemed to focus on her as if he was seeing her for the first time, “It’s that fucking Vishal. His Slayer keeps attacking my Vampire. I’m sick of it.”

“Sorry, what?”

The look he gave her was like a metal rod being swung against a metal pole and she could almost hear the ringing. “Facebook,” he snapped.

“Oh, right,” she had no clue what the correct thing was, to say in a situation like this so she said, “So attack him back.”

“You think I haven’t?”

“And?”

He shrugged, “I win some, lose some. No big deal. It’s just annoying that he keeps attacking me, that’s all.”

“Who is this guy again?”

“Just some random dude I met somewhere.”

“So why is he on your Facebook?”

“What? You don’t add people you’ve recently met?”

“I’m not on Facebook.”

“You’re not on Facebook? Come one!”

“What’s the big deal. I can keep in touch with my five real friends without needing a website to do it. I have other tools. They are called the phone, email and actually ‘meeting’ them.”

He dismissed the suggestion with a wave, “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Where’s the fun in getting an ulcer because some guy ‘attacked your Slayer’?”

He paused and looked at her, really looked at her, and said, “Don’t do that. Don’t make it sound frivolous. It’s just the next level of make believe. Nothing wrong with that.”

She drained her own coffee and said, “Yeah, whatever. We have to focus. Get your head back in the game.”

He nodded, “I’m good. Anybody fucks with me, I’ll imagine it’s Vishal’s Slayer and go to town on that motherfucker.”

He stepped out of his seat and squatted like he was tying his shoelace and joined his hands together. She placed one foot in the makeshift stirrups he had created. Before anybody could look and register their faces he straightened his back and got to his feet heaving her up and over so that she shot straight through the roof of the diner into the little office the franchise maintained upstairs.

One solid yank at the door of the safe and she was staring at the previous night’s take which didn’t amount to much more than a couple of thousand dollars. Good thing for her then that she wasn’t after the money. It wasn’t difficult getting to the documents hidden in the secret compartment behind the money. She stuffed the files into an inside pocket in her jacket, zipped it up and crashed right out the window almost in time to his bursting out the front door. That was their style, make a lot of noise, move really fast and potential eyewitnesses couldn’t remember anything of consequence with any appreciable degree of accuracy.

Ten minutes later they were in a fast hybrid preparing to cross state lines. He had his hands on the steering wheel but the car was driving itself. In the passenger seat she checked the papers and gave him the smiling thumbs up, “No forgotten Russian nukes in the Middle East this week.”

He nodded and focused his attention on the road, they had a three-mile clear stretch, that also happened to be straight as an arrow, ahead of them. With the press of three inter-related buttons the wide apart seats in the car were pushed closer together, the body morphed to approximate the shape of a cigar and two metre-long wings unfolded out of the doors of the car. With two miles of clear road still to go they taxied off the highway and took off into the clear California sunshine.

No word of the robbery in the diner made it into any of the newspapers, local or national and everybody who saw a woman punch a hole through the diner’s roof would fool themselves into believing that they had dreamt it all up. He went back to his afternoon of hacking and playing Halo 3 while she worked off the stress by stripping for fun and profit. And the world continued to turn like nothing had happened.

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