Tempted by Trouble Read Online Free PDF

in shorts that barely covered their backsides, shorts that were highlighted by fashionable, furry, knee-high boots; a few of the others wore sandals that matched their gloves, scarves, and sunglasses. We looked at the strangeness as we rode to our destination.
    There were no smiles. There were no jokes. Our game faces were on.
    Rick and Sammy were professionals. All jobs had been walk in and walk out, not a shot fired, people terrified, but not a person injured. They’d made a lot of tax-free money over the last decade, but not enough to rival Wall Street. Family and women on the side were expenses that required a man to have deep pockets. Soon the quick money was gone and it was time to make a few more withdrawals.
    I’d worked with Eddie and his crew on five jobs. I was in an unwanted and dangerous occupation that was a long way from the simple life I had planned for myself back in Detroit. In high school, I’d mapped my life out to the other side of grad school.
    But as they said, man planned and God laughed.
    God must’ve been sipping a Corona, doubled over and slapping his knees right about then.
    Baldwin Hills appeared on our right, behind one billboard for a local radio station and another billboard for The Leonard DuBois Story on HBO. The area didn’t look like much, but Rick and Sammy had said this neighborhood had million-dollar homes. What a man got for a million dollars out there in Botoxville was nothing to brag about. Thousands of L.A.’s hyperinflated properties were being foreclosed on. Every man who had been inspired by free enterprise and greed was tumbling down the hill like Jack, dragging Jill and their tofu-eating rug rats along with them, silver spoons flying from mouths as they busted their crowns on oil- and urine-stained streets populated with the poor and the unknown. The rich had the most to lose, and the people at the bottom of the hills probably took joy in watching all the Goliaths fall.
    I entered the parking lot on Santa Rosalia, just as we had planned. The street ran parallel to Crenshaw at this end but curved and gave us a great escape route. I parked outside the bank and watched the flow of traffic between there and the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza.
    Sammy stepped out first, adjusted his suit coat and tie, then put on his killer smile.
    He tossed me his Mexican switchblade. “Hang on to this for me, Dmytryk.”
    I dropped his souvenir inside my suit pocket.
    Rick nodded, then he stood next to Sammy and took in the surroundings.
    All was clear. Everything was perfect. This small crime would be over in a few minutes.
    Rick and Sammy didn’t walk inside the bank like they were the Sons of Anarchy. They entered the bank at a casual pace, heads up high and confidence strong—not stick-up men, but businessmen making an early-morning transaction, two chisel-chinned CEOs stepping into a Fortune 500 meeting. They walked in like gentlemen and would exit the same way.
    Anxiety moved up my spine like ice, gave me a chill that rivaled the coldness I had felt in Detroit.
    I whispered, “Two minutes.”

1
    Twenty seconds had passed since Rick Bielshowsky and Sammy Luis Sanchez eased out of our stolen Chevy and strolled inside the Wells Fargo bank.
    I adjusted my earphones so I could hear the broadcast from the police scanner, then inhaled the arid and sweet fetor of Poverty and her traveling companion Desperation. John Dillinger. That criminal knew that there were only two ways to get money in the land of free enterprise: You earned it, or you took it at gunpoint. That was about as American as a man could get in the land of red, white, and the blues.
    Inside Wells Fargo, the teller would be terrified. She’d be afraid to look in Rick’s eyes, afraid that he would blow her brains out. She had been trained to surrender the cash on demand. The girl was probably pretty. Rick loved sexy women. He would go to a sexy woman’s window before he went to rob an ugly woman. And a few of the tellers he’d