Playing the Game by Simon Gould Read Free Book Online Page B

Pacific Union Bank, which had been open for business for around an hour. It wasn’t the busiest bank in LA, but that was perfect. As long as they took thirty thousand dollars, the even split would be enough for him to pay off Billy Graziadai and Evan Seinfeld, the two inmates to whom he owed the money. He turned to Jimmy. ‘We’re in, we’re out right? No fucking about. We grab thirty to forty grand and split. We don’t have the time to get greedy, right? Three minutes max.’
                ‘Just like old times my man, just like old times’, Jimmy grinned revealing his uneven teeth, stained yellow from years of nicotine abuse. He’d loved taking scores like this with Tetley and had been genuinely gutted when Tetley had been arrested but never in doubt that his accomplice wouldn’t shop him to the police.
                ‘Hey, Moseley’, Jimmy instructed, ‘Keep it running’. Seizing the opportunity of a deserted sidewalk, they pulled down their balaclavas, and cradling their Mossberg 500 pump action shotguns that Jimmy had managed to acquire, debunked from their getaway car and made haste into the unsuspecting Pacific Union Bank, whose unsuspecting staff were about to have their quiet, mundane working day turned upside down.

 
    14

                Driving slowly down Sutherland Boulevard, it appeared to be like any other typical suburban residential area. Well maintained houses and gardens; just your typical house for your typical family.  Toys and bikes lay on several front lawns where children had presumably being playing last night, which indicated that this was a seemingly safe neighbourhood, where parents would happily let their children play, comfortable that their surroundings offered no threat. It didn’t seem quite like an environment where you would find a potential serial killer to me. A couple of sprinklers watered some of the lawns we drove past and there were a couple of neighbours painting a fence, chatting and laughing as they did so. There were hundreds of areas just like this all across the state. So what was so different about this one?
                We pulled up about a hundred or so yards from number twenty-two, not wanting to alert anyone to our presence. For a couple of moments the car was silent as we both pondered what lay ahead. Then my cell rang again.
                ‘Patton, its Captain Williams’, he sounded pretty annoyed. Then again, like the rest of us, he was perturbed by the futility of our current situation. ‘Well no surprises, number three makes it official. Quantico has dispatched an agent to assist us in our investigation’. He was right, this came as no surprise to me; the FBI were always going to have made their presence felt if this went the way it had gone. ‘They’re sending an Agent Baler’, he continued. ‘When he gets here, I’ll have him hook up with you in the field. By all accounts this guy is pretty shit hot, maybe he could help us figure this out’. That the FBI deemed it necessary to send us someone didn’t dent my professional pride. Any help, any different angle we could get on this, would be welcomed. All that mattered was stopping The Chemist, and quickly. It didn’t matter how.
                ‘I hear you Captain’, I replied. ‘We’ve just pulled into Sutherland now, no sign of anything out of the ordinary as yet’.
                ‘Be careful boys’, Williams for a moment sounded almost fatherly. That was a new one. ‘Proceed with extreme caution’, he paused momentarily, checking something. ‘Backup is one minute out, three cars’.
                ‘Make sure their sirens are off’, I cautioned. ‘If we weren’t meant to break the code this early, I don’t want anyone announcing our arrival to the whole neighbourhood. Tell them we’re going in with a standard four by two formation’
                ‘Understood Patton,’ Williams