The last person into the room moved hard and fast, but not as much so as their words.
“Alright. This job can’t wait, so introductions are fast. We’re in the parking lot in three, at the scene in ten. Ready? Steady. Go.”
A finger snapped out, pointed at a wall of meat with a man’s head on it. “This is Lenn. He’s our backup. If something goes wrong, Lenn deals with it. If one of you gets cold feet, Lenn deals with it.”
“Heh,” enunciated Lenn. He picked his nose with calculated menace and discarded the results with calculated indifference.
A second finger, aimed at what appeared to be a twelve-year-old. “This is Jenny. Jenny’s our electronics expert. No alarms, no problems.”
Jenny waved.
“Now, since our regular locksmith got busted for drunk and disorderly last night, this is our backup plan. Yugopogo. His mother was an earwig, his father was a whale, got a little bit of head and hardly any tail. And he gets us through the door.”
“Hello,” I said. Jenny waved again; I bobbled a flipper politely.
“And my name’s Your Boss and I’m your getaway driver tonight. Now let’s get out there and make some money.”
The drive over was tense, although Jenny and I got in a couple rounds of rock-paper-scissors to shake out some of the worst jitters. But then we were there, and we were parked, and Your Boss slammed the door open and whispered something very urgent and we were out and up and at the employee side door of the city’s finest chain pizza outlet, established 1992.
“Ready?” asked Jenny.
“Steady,” I replied.
“Go,” said Lenn, bopping me on the back.
I flinched, nodded, pulled out a finely-braided strand of dampened seaweed, and pushed it into the lock, which it bonelessly glided off of and fell apart.
“Uh,” I said.
Lenn cracked his knuckles.
“Maybe try again?” Jenny suggested.
“Sure. Sure. One second.”
This time I used my backup seaweed. No good.
“Shoot,” I said. I sagged against the door in sorrow, popping it off its hinges and sending it flying into the building, where every single alarm went off at once. Half a second later the twenty-nine cop cars filling the parking lot turned on their lights.
“Oh no,” I said.
“Oh YES,” said Lenn. He raised his hands above his head, hollered, shaped them into fists, and ran towards the ruckus making whooping noises.
I looked to Jenny for moral support, but she was already inside and accelerating.
“Red wire or blue wire?”
“There are no wires.”
“Oh. What do we do then?”
Jenny looked under the desk next to the safe, said “it’s two-five-six-seven-nine-four,” and entered that. It popped open, revealing it to be completely empty.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Didn’t expect that.”
“How’d you know?”
“Well, people write down their passwords in the worst places. But I what I MEANT was that I thought there was supposed to be money in here.”
“So did I.”
Someone kicked down a door (unnecessary) and shouted something very authoritative (maybe necessary?).
“Hide!”
We ducked back into the corridor, spun through two doors, ran into the employee washroom and crammed ourselves into the single stall – Jenny on the toilet, myself inside it. Exactly two seconds later six cops crowded in with us.
“Freeze,” said the smallest cop.
“Already done,” said Jenny. “Muscle cramps.”
“Yeah, you gotta stretch first. C’mon with us.”
One of the larger cops looked down at me. “Hey, you seeing this?”
“Just a shoal of fish,” said the smallest cop dismissively. “Now let’s do that c’monning. We’ve got an early night ahead of us.”
They left, and six minutes later so did I, trailing shame and toilet water all the way out into the now-deserted parking lot.
“Hi,” I said, sticking my head into the car.
Your Boss wasn’t there.
As a matter of fact, Your Boss was standing four feet behind me with a taser in one hand and a cellphone in the other.
“Hi,” I said again.
“Shut up,” she growled at me. “Last time I bring a damned lake monster on a job. Do you know how fast you screwed this up?”
“Gosh I’m real sorry.”
“Not sorry enough. There was barely enough time for me to clear out the safe while you three kicked up a fuss! I almost got caught! I almost got nabbed! Do you know how depressing that is?”
“Sort of,” I said. “But I pretended to be fish.”
The parking lot filled with flashing light again; a lone cop car with five unalone cops. They spread out in an elaborate series of showy poses.
“Officers!” said Your Boss. “I have apprehended the mastermind behind tonight’s events.”
The cops looked at me.
“Well, you can’t prove that,” one said.
“Security footage will show otherwise,” she said.
“We already checked that, lady. Two perps showed up.”
“What!? There were THREE.”
“Nah, nah. A big guy, a little girl, and a suspicious floating log. Nothing strange about it. You should go have a lie down.”
Your Boss shot me with the taser, which failed to penetrate my blubber. In the confusion of the arrest I slunk away across the road, through the culvert, down the creek, and back into the lake.
Why did this sort of thing always happen to me? Next time I was going to try retail.