Prologue

"Shit, I'm late." Tori muttered as she ran down the hallway.

The normally upbeat and loud Hollywood Arts was quiet and empty and it looked like not a single person was around. She ran out the exit and sprinted towards the Black Box Theatre and when she got there, she heard several voices chattering inside.

"Sorry I'm late. I had to take care of an old friend." Tori blurted out, flustered beyond belief.

"It's alright Tori, we've only been here for a few minutes." Sikowitz said with a tone of avuncularity.

She quickly ran her eyes around the room and saw Andre sitting with his arms folded and focused on Sikowitz, but he turned around for a second to greet Tori with a cool and friendly nod. Next person she saw was Beck, who flashed a smile at her and did a quick wave. Tori liked his smile, she thought it made him look cute. Beck's smile was abruptly interrupted, however, by his girlfriend, The Bitch Of Pasadena herself, Jade West.

Jade lightly hit Beck on his arm, irritated that her boyfriend was being friendly with such a sloppy newbie like Vega. She hated sloppiness, and saw it as a sign of weakness. And boy, could Vega be sloppy.

"67 minutes, it takes you that long to open a pickle jar too?" Jade sneered.

Vega looked like she was about to protest, until…

"Stop it, the funeral home is 20 minutes from where she lives and it's 10 minutes from the School. " Beck said in a blunt and matter-of-factly manner.

Tori gave Jade one of her smirks, the smirks that she knew Jade hated all so well. The annoyance on her face proved it.

"Not to mention when you started out, it took you 2 hours to get rid of a body and you lived 5 minutes from the butcher's." Andre raised his head and pointed at Jade with his eyebrows raised.

That did it.

"I had to cut it up myself! And she has an incinerator! I'm telling you, if she was half the driver I am, she would've…

"That's enough peopleeeeeeee!" Sikowitz yelled as if he was teaching a class of Kindergarteners.

These kids always bitched about the pettiest things, he couldn't imagine how they managed to do their jobs well and keep up with their studies with all this soap opera bullshit going on. He looked at his employees and students. Tori was still standing, waiting for Sikowtitz to tell her to sit down like the eager to please girl that she is, he asked her to take a seat. Andre, sitting and focusing. Ditto with Beck. Jade still looked sullen and annoyed, but that's just how she is. Robbie and Cat were engrossed in conversation with each other as they always have been since they met each other. It took 10 awkward seconds of Sikowitz's staring before they piped down and started looking at Sikowitz. Trina was nowhere to be seen, the lazy bitch. Synjin looked like he woke up 2 seconds ago, and he's been looking like that since this morning, where Sikowitz found him high while he sat in the chair.

"Damn bath salts." Sikowitz thought sullenly.

Robbie should really learn to be subtle. He has been talking to Cat since the moment they met 3 years ago and nothing has been able to persuade him to stop. Not her eccentric logic, not her kooky behavior nor her disturbing rap sheet. He was telling her a fictitious anecdote that he saw from a movie.

"So anyway, I'm in the middle of the fuckin' weeds laying down. And this cop comes over and says, what are you doing here? I say I'm resting. Here you're resting!? How come not at a beach or a bar? I say, I'm resting…

"Hahahahaha!" She laughed loudly.

"I… I… haven't finished yet."

"It doesn't matter! It's funny because you refused to listen to a cop hahahahaha… and that's funny!"

"Ummmmm… Sure, as long as you think it's funny…"

Thank god she doesn't watch mob movies.

"The process of digital infiltration is sophisticated and intricate, one small misstep can cost you the entire job. The codes are the most vital part, the amount of numbers these sons of bitches come up with is unbelievable. I mean, you hack into a bank and there's 25,000,000 possible combinations! 25,000,000! Could you believe it? Whatever happened to 3 digit codes or simple firewalls? Security evolution! That's what happened! It's not easy, breaking into a digital bank, the software you have to purchase, the hours you put into learning, the nights you stay up… And where does the fucking money go after you take it? Money laundering sites! That's where! And these assholes, they are fucking cheap, I tell you! They want 30% of whatever you got buried in the treasure chest! I mean, I do the heavy lifting, 5 nights a week, and these cunts get 30% of my loot! And for what? Transferring the stuff into a sham website?! I could do that shit on my own! And that's where my personal website, Shapiro store and coin come in… You see, after I take the money…

I hope to god she doesn't think I'm boring.

She smiled sweetly and gazed at him admirably as she listened to him rant on and on about online theft and personal money laundering, whatever those words meant. She didn't really care, she loved listening to him talk, he was full of energy and life, there were no commas or breaks in his sentences. He never stopped talking. Kind of like butterflies when they fly for a very long time, or a baby that never stops smiling, or a beautiful bullet wound that just never stops bleeding and you can see just how much pain the person's in before they finally die and their pain is over and… Wait, what was she thinking about again?

"Cat?"

"Huh?"

"Are you listening?"

"Uh… Yeah! I just zoned out for a minute there, thinking about butterflies and babies and smiles and bullets and…

She finally noticed that Sikowitz was staring daggers at them so she shut up.

Andre sighed as he studied the misfits that surrounded him. Don't get him wrong, he loves his friends. It's just that they aren't as professional as him.

"Tori's sloppy, Jade loses her shit too much, Beck doesn't seem to give a damn half the time, Robbie's paranoid as hell, Cat can't think straight, Synjin is strung out on Smack all day and the bum who begs for change outside works harder than Trina." Andre mused.

He had been in the business longer than anyone else in the room, driving getaway cars since he was 13 and doing crowd control since he was 15. But this job required him to do something different…

Sikowitz decided to begin the meeting without Trina.

"I should really just throw the lazy bitch out." He thought.

"Now that most of us are here, I would like to repeat the details of this job. The bank we're robbing is the First National bank Of L.A. I know that sounds generic but it'll have to do. According to my sources, the safe contains more than 100,000,000 American dollars in paper, and 50,000,000 Euros in gold. The gold belongs to an Arab living in France, he had the gold flew to LA a week ago and he's hoping to have it moved to and sold in Cuba next month, but that's not gonna happen. As for the paper money, we can have it laundered via the factories Lane owns."

At the mere mention of money laundering, Robbie sneered. Sikowitz ignored him.

"And the gold?" Jade asked.

"I have associates in Turkey waiting for them, they're willing to pay the original value of the gold in addition to a 40% mark-up as a fee for all the trouble we've been through."

"You don't need to Lane to launder shit, Sikowitz. I can do it on my site and I can do it for fucking free. This factory bullshit will never take off, but my stocks will work. I can take the money and buy big stocks from my own company under a phony identity and then we can…

"Put a sock in it, you fucking nerd!" Jade screamed.

Robbie frowned.

"Excuse me all to hell for using my brain, you fucking mentally defective cow!" He yelled back.

"I swear I'm going to call the FBI if you kids keep bitching!" Sikowitz said with a pronounced tone of irritation.

An awkward silence filled the room as Jade and Robbie calmed down.

"Are we going to review our places?" Tori asked dutifully, which earned her another generous scoff from Jade.

"Yes, we are. Cat, Jade and Tori will be working Crowd Control, you girls are famous for your… people skills. They'll make the teller give them all their money as well."

Jade looked annoyed that she had to work with Vega and was about to protest until she realized that there was a lot of money in it for her.

Tori started breathing rapidly.

"Oh no! Crowd control?! What if I mess it up? What if I kill someone and leave my fingerprints? And why do I have to work with Jade?!"

She tried her best to remain passive and stoic.

Cat seemed happy enough.

"Yay! Crowd control is fun! I can't wait to break some noses! The cracking sound like popcorn when you start cooking it and then the…"

"Cat, please." Sikowitz sighed.

She pouted and crossed her arms.

"That girl needs a therapist."

"Beck and our absentee guest Trina will be in charge of interrogation. They'll take the manger into the back room and make him open the safe."

"Quick and easy. I'll do the best I can." Beck said with a shrug.

Sikowitz nodded in approval.

"I hope he actually cares." Sikowitz thought.

"Andre will guard the door, pure and simple."

"Don't let nobody in or out, got it," Andre said quickly.

Sikowitz move on immediately.

"I can trust him." Sikowtiz thought.

"Robbie will bypass the security cameras. He can't let us show our faces."

"I got it, I'm using my very own custom designed software called the alarm killer, it'll shut down those cameras in seconds and don't even get me started on the…

"Moving on." Sikowitz waved his hand.

"That kid has more things to say than a 100 year old parrot."

"Synjin will cut the wires, if the alarm goes off, it could mean our lives."

Synjin nodded apathetically, he was halfway through his Heroin High.

"Sober up, dammit!"

"The getaway van will be driven by me and the second van will be driven by our money launderer, Lane. He's waiting outside. We hit the joint at 1 pm, in and out of there in 3 minutes."

"Why would the boss and the launderer driver the getaway vans?" Andre questioned skeptically.

"Do you want to pull this off or not?"

Everyone nodded in agreement as they got up to leave for the job.

All of a sudden, the doors opened and in walked Trina, wearing designer sunglasses, texting with her iphone in one hand and a Starbucks cup in another.

"Sorry, did I miss anything?" She asked without looking up from her phone.