Jaunt: 7 Effective Habits of a Super-theif (WIP)
She liked ripping off payday loan places, they were in her mind the legal version of a loan shark. At least a shark didn’t get the cops involved when you were short on the vig. Added to that this place was one of the few ‘banking’ services in the area. Thirty bucks for check cashing and ten percent (with a five buck minimum charge) on thei cash machine outside it. The owner ran the place like he was some mob boss and paid his folks only by check so he could get a piece back from what he was paying them. Heavy set guy, old football muscle turning to fat, who liked gaudy watches and his BMW that he kept in a reserved spot when he was there.
Normally Jaunt didn’t do small gigs, but she hated the places on principle and she knew on this weekend they’d be getting a much larger than normal infusion of cash due to upcoming paydays at the mills. Check cashing paychecks would be good, add in that more than a few of the folks cashing such checks would be looking to pay back payday loans meant that he’d get the checks cashed, then get some of the pay right back (and at rates that merited him holding a gun on the people).
Best thing about the place was the fact that it had a full size walk in vault and she could ‘jaunt’ right in, grab a couple packs of bills and ‘accidentally’ leave behind a nice 10 pound electromagnet beside his backup drives that the staff stored every night. The cherry on the top of all this was the place wasn’t a bank, so no federally insured cash for the feds to chase after.
So here she was, in the third floor of the abandoned store across the street waiting for her marks to leave for the night. The boss was heading for the dive strip club he owned across town, where he would be having dinner with his current flavor of the moment (along with a little blue pill to help with said flavor), the guard who loomed behind him would be making moves with his flavor (one of the staff clerks) and the other would head home to tuck her kids in and get a few hours sleep before putting the kids on the bus and running to her day job at the DMV.
The neon lights flicked and some dimmed but not all went out, you didn’t want the hoi poloi forgetting you were there to help them (for a fee) thru junior’s broken arm, the power bill or whatever else you needed to pay. She waited a bit longer, once she had been doing a job and the guy came back to get his damn wallet; so she watched him drive off and kept her inner eye on it till he got out in front of the club.
She moved the eye back to check over the store one more time. Good security for a place that used to be a 50s drive in laundromat. The drive in had been walled up, modern and well built, the front windows were sensor ridden, the thick panes of clear plastic were easily 4 inches thick and the counter underneath them had a thick metal plate to keep out trouble. Behind the wall of plastic and a security door that was possible stronger than the frame it was set in were a bank of cameras, ir and motion sensors and a walk in vault that was not of place in a small town bank like in the movies.
Tough nugget if you looked at it the normal ways. Fortunately for her, Jaunt reminded herself as she stood up and pulled on her gloves and ski mask, she wasn’t normal. Looking into the vault with her inner eye, the sense that let her remotely view things, she saw the packs that held the case she was looking for.
Then she moved from the old office smelling of mold and mildew that she’d used as her staging area into the vault without crossing the distance between. One moment here, the next there. She clicked on the light by the vault door, pulling the heavy magnet out and dropping it between the stack of backup drives and turned it on before pulling out the extra duffel and started loading up the cash. The CDs she moved from their cases into a nice container of acetone she brought with her after she finished up bagging the cash and slung the heavy pack onto her shoulders and pulled a ziplock of dust, hair and crud (courtesy of a barbershop on the other side of the country) and shook it out. Looking over the site, she picked up the second pack and ‘jaunted’ out.
Another job well done that she’d never be tied to.
So she thought.
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:16, Mon 14 May 2018.
