Blessed Are the Bank Robbers by Chas Smith

Author:Chas Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

PARADISE LOST

Cousin Danny was ground, heartily, into the pavement, on an on-ramp to the 5 South in Oceanside, California, baseballs bouncing around him, cheek and knees scraping, six weeks after his first bank robbery, on a hot autumn morning, completely surprised.

Utterly baffled.

Not ready for, nor expecting, this.

Police officer screams mingled with other police officer screams, weaving into an incoherent din. The morning sun piercing his eyeballs, the day’s heat already rising from the pavement. The officers kept him laying face down, hands tightly handcuffed behind him, while they searched his car for weapons and evidence. Screamed questions—the only one he could make out was about baseballs.

“Why do you have so many baseballs, motherfucker?”

The previous six weeks had been such a surreal blur that being pressed into an on-ramp by screaming police officers didn’t necessarily seem strange. Everything was strange. Strange was normal.

Traffic stacked up behind them with commuters craning their necks.

Caught.

He was caught entirely surprised, having pushed that eventuality far out of his mind. But here he was. The pulsing adrenaline, similar to the rush he felt when robbing a bank, allowed him to grit his teeth and stay in the moment. There was no real fear, only moving through each molasses second at a time.

After an eternity, he was hauled into one of the police cars, taken straight to an interrogation room, and kept waiting for hours, the police officers wanting a full confession and no procedural mistakes now that they had their man. The one they had been looking for. They had been mystified by the string of bank robberies, how neat they were and also how rapid their succession. They didn’t fit a typical pattern of hardened pro, nor drug-addled yokel, nor sociopathic thrill seeker. Desperation oozed from each hit, but there were no real clues until a partial fingerprint taken from a piece of latex glove revealed their man was a registered nurse named Daniel James Courson. He had taken to wearing latex gloves after that initial robbery in order to conceal his prints, since they had been taken when he enlisted in the Coast Guard. He had no memory of ripping the glove, a dozen robberies in, but had noticed it when he arrived back at his apartment and didn’t pay it a second thought.

He was, only to the powers that be, a high-profile criminal who had committed a string of high-profile crimes, and so bail was not offered. He was blasted into another world with its own hierarchies, language, honor, and code. After the initial interrogation, where he refused to speak, he was allowed to see a lawyer, processed, then tossed into a box with no windows and no way to gauge the passing of time save the meals delivered to his cell thrice daily.

But imagine being an evangelical Christian, albeit a former one, from a long line of evangelical Christians, the only one of whom ever breathed prison air being a motorcycle outlaw-in-law with the last name Cool, not Courson. A middle-class,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.