and step inside the truck. At the same time, all four of the thieves in the taxi looked down and clicked a black digital Casio stopwatch wrapped around their wrists. The clock was ticking.
They had three minutes and counting.
The next instant, the guy behind the wheel took off the handbrake. Above them, the light flicked to green, perfect timing, and the driver moved the taxi forward, parking outside the bank like he was dropping off a customer. As the armoured truck drove off ahead of them and turned the corner, disappearing out of sight, the guy in the front passenger seat of the taxi grabbed the receiver to the vehicle radio off its handle. It had been retuned from the taxi dispatch depot to the NYPD frequency. He gripped it in his gloved hand and pushed down the buttons either side.
‘Officer down, I repeat, Officer down!’ he yelled into the handle. ‘I’m on East 95th and 1st! I need back-up, goddammit! Send everyone in the area right now!’
As he spoke, the man and woman in the back seat lifted white surgical masks over the lower half of their faces, right up to their eyes, and pulled scrub hats over the top, concealing the upper half of their heads. All four of them were already wearing large aviator sunglasses, covering their eyes, the defining characteristic that would leave them identifiable to a witness. Not wasting a second, the three thieves pushed open the doors and moved swiftly out of the car, the driver remaining behind the wheel, checking his watch. From his seat, he checked the rear-view mirror and saw a commotion in the traffic behind them, right on cue.
Police cars were streaming into the street from a building four blocks north, speeding east and north, their lights flashing, responding to the distress call. He smiled.
The NYPD’s 19 precinct, New York City’s finest.
Every car and officer heading the opposite way.
And at that same moment, the three thieves entered the bank.
The second they passed through the front doors, the trio moved fast. The first task was to subdue everyone inside, most importantly the two guards. That had to happen before anything else. The man and woman from the back seats each pulled out a weapon hanging from a black strap looped around their right shoulders, hidden under the doctor’s coats. They were two Ithaca 37 12-gauge shotguns, police issue, the stocks sawn off so the weapons could be concealed under the coats. Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame had come up with the idea of removing the stock and hiding a shotgun under a coat when pulling a heist. The weapons possessed brutal power and with the stocks gone they were a cinch to conceal, unlike machine guns which were too bulky and wide to hide effectively. Clyde had called the sawn-off shotgun a whippit. The Sicilians, who were fond of the weapon themselves, called it a lupara. With seven shells locked and loaded inside the weapons, the three thieves robbing this bank called it instant crowd control.
They ran forward, each racking a shell by pulling the brown slide on the barrel of the weapon back and forth with their left hand, the weapons crunching as a shell was loaded into each chamber. Across the bank floor, customers turned and saw the sudden commotion.
It took a split second for what they were seeing to fully register in their brains.
Then they reacted, some of them covering their mouths as others started to scream.
There were two guards in the bank, Walter Pick and George Willis, both retired NYPD, both sporting a paunch that middle age and the promise of an imminent pension brought. Both men also had a Glock 17 on their hip, like the two guys in the truck, but neither had a moment to reach for it as the three thieves ran forward, two of them brandishing the sawn-off shotguns, shoving them in people’s faces.
‘Down! Everybody down! Down!’ they shouted.
Meanwhile, the big guy who had been in the front passenger seat of the taxi had already vaulted the counter. He was the point man, the guy who would control the room, but his first job was to get to the tellers. He knew the button for the silent alarm and the direct line to the 19 precinct four blocks away was by the third teller’s foot. Before the woman had time to react and push it with her toe, he was already too close, pulling his own shotgun from under his