Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers Read online

“I just follow the cable from that camera, let it lead me to the mother ship.”

  “Take your night vision goggles,” suggested Briana. “It’ll be pitch dark above the ceiling tiles.”

  “Check!”

  “You’re going to look like a cyborg in there,” joked Jamal. “Ski mask, army-issue goggles…”

  “And this,” said Jake, handing Riley what looked like a jack for a microphone wired to a round gizmo with a tiny antenna. “We should duct-tape it to your goggle harness.”

  “What is it?” asked Riley.

  “World’s smallest two-point-four gigahertz micro spy cam. My dad got it for me on my birthday so I could hook it up inside my remote control race car and broadcast a driver’s-eye view to the TV. I never got around to wiring it in.”

  “Why am I wearing a TV camera on my head?” asked Riley.

  “So the rest of us can see where you are and what you’re doing,” answered Briana. “Duh.”

  “How far does this thing transmit?”

  “Not very,” said Jake. “We’ll hook up the receiver to a TV in the truck.”

  “What truck?”

  “The pet-supplies vehicle.”

  “With the dogs in the back?”

  Jake nodded. “I ran it by Ms. Grabowski. She’s spending the night with the dogs and would enjoy the company. I already installed a battery-powered television. We just have to bring our own lawn chairs. Since the truck is parked less than fifty feet from the bank, the signal should come in loud and clear. And, of course, you’ll need to wear your Bluetooth earpiece under your balalaika there.”

  “You mean balaclava,” said Jamal. “A balalaika is a Russian guitar.”

  “You guys?” Riley protested.

  “No, he’s right,” said Briana. “The hat’s a balaclava, the guitar’s a balalaika.”

  “No, I mean, I can’t drag you into this thing so deep.”

  “We’re fifty feet away,” said Jake. “That’s not very deep.”

  “Yeah,” said Riley, “in a truck full of stolen dogs.”

  “Rescued dogs,” said Jamal. “Come on, man—use your words.”

  “Riley,” said Mongo, placing his beefy hand firmly on his friend’s shoulder. “All we are doing is what you would do for any of us.”

  “But…”

  “You want me to start squeezing?”

  “No.”

  “All right. Enough said.” Mongo released his grip. “You need me to boost you up to that ceiling?”

  “No, thanks. I think I can manage.”

  “You change your mind, you let me know. I’m not doing anything tonight except watching TV. I hear The Riley Mack Show is on.”

  44

  AT EIGHT P.M., RIGHT ON schedule, Otto and Fred slipped through the back door of the bank.

  The code 2-2-2, 3-3-3, 4-4-4 worked like a charm.

  Otto tapped Fred on the shoulder and swung his mini flashlight up to the lens of the security camera aimed straight at them as they stepped into what looked like a break room for the bank staff. Otto kept the bright beam of his light glued to the camera lens so all the thing would record was a white-hot circle. Fred hopped up onto the kitchen counter and popped up a ceiling tile.

  “Camera cable shoots right.”

  Otto looked right. “Bathroom.”

  “Angles ninety degrees.”

  “Bank manager’s office,” said Otto.

  “Natch,” said Fred, gingerly replacing the ceiling tile, hopping down from the countertop—remembering to swipe it clean of any footprints.

  The two men had spent several hours over the past week casing the bank. They knew what was on the other side of these walls because they had the layout memorized.

  “I’ll go erase the hard drive,” said Otto.

  “You do that,” said Fred, flexing his gloved fingers. “I’ll go break open the piggy bank.”

  Fred went right, through the workroom, to the vault. Otto crossed the dark lobby. A little moonlight seeped through the front windows and a couple emergency exit lights cast a faint red glow, but that was it. No one could see the two burglars slinking around in the shadows. Then again, there was nobody to see them because Fairview rolled up its sidewalks early every night. The only vehicle parked on the street was that stupid dog-adoption truck in front of the pet-supplies shop.

  Otto made his way to the bank manager’s office. He used his picks to pop the dead bolt and a credit card to open the lock in the doorknob. The thing cracked open like the cheap zipper on an even cheaper pair of pants. He stepped in and swung his penlight up the wood-paneled wall to the molding, where he saw a white cable coming down through the ceiling. He traced it all the way to the big man’s desk.

  Of course, he thought. The cameras all feed to the boss’s personal computer so he can keep an eye on his underlings.

  Otto sat in the comfy leather chair and checked out the glowing monitor sitting to one side of the mahogany desk. The screen was split into a matrix of windows, each one displaying a different camera feed for a few seconds before switching on to a new angle. He could see Fred in the vault room, just past the safe deposit boxes, working on the safe.

  Otto pulled out the computer keyboard and started clacking away.

  He wasn’t in the mood to play nice. So, instead of simply shutting down the cameras and doing an erase going back five minutes to when he and Fred waltzed through the back door, he inserted a software disc that would eliminate all the data files on the bank manager’s hard drive. Any pictures of his pets, mother, or girlfriends would be sent to the trash. And not the retrievable trash where the FBI technogeeks could work their data recovery magic and reconstruct them. Nope. Otto was using a souped-up block-erase program to blow the data away.

  “Sorry about that, Mr. Weitzel,” he mumbled cheerfully. “You ought to be more careful about giving your business card to strangers you meet in a bar.”

  As he was scrolling through commands, setting up his memory-kill parameters, Otto noticed something peculiar: someone had already erased a chunk of the hard drive’s memory. Two hours of video data recorded earlier in the week. Monday. Four p.m. to six p.m. Odd. Very odd.

  And they had first exported that two-hour chunk of video to an external drive or removable device.

  Even odder.

  But not worth worrying about. He and Fred still wanted to be finished in time to catch the local news at eleven. They always did that after a job, usually in a motel at least one hundred miles away from the bank they’d just busted into. They liked knowing whether their handiwork had been discovered.

  Otto pressed the final command key and listened to the sweet whir of a hard drive scrubbing itself clean. It took about ten minutes for it to be wiped into oblivion.

  He ejected his disc-erasing disc, tucked it into his gym bag, and headed out of the office, shutting the door behind him. The knob locked but he didn’t bother jimmying the dead bolt back into place because it was time to help Fred load up the money.

  When Otto reached the vault, his partner was still spinning the dial on the safe’s combination lock.

  “Fred? Is there some problem?”

  “Maybe. We got us an Ilco six seventy-three here, Otto.”

  “So?”

  “The Ilco six seventy-three is very testy, very temperamental.”

  “And?”

  “At a recent Safe and Vault Technicians Lock Manipulation Contest in Reno, Nevada—”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “Nope. It’s a very prestigious event amongst your safe and vault professionals.”

  “Go on.”

  “Anyway, the champion—this guy from New Jersey who I met once at my cousin’s sister’s brother-in-law’s—it took him over two hours to crack one of these open. And he was the only guy in the whole competition who could even do it.”

  “So, what’re you telling me here, Fred?”

  “One, I can crack this thing. The champ told me a few of his inside moves.”

 
“And two?”

  “Nothing,” said Fred. “Just that we might not be able to catch the eleven o’clock news tonight.”

  45

  “I’M AT THE BACK DOOR,” said Riley.

  “We see it,” said Jake in his earpiece. “You’re coming in five by five.”

  That meant they were receiving his audio and video signals loud and clear.

  “Let’s rock and roll,” Riley mumbled.

  He flipped open the cover on the burglar alarm box and punched in the secret code: 2-2-2, 3-3-3, 4-4-4.

  He heard a soft clunk.

  “Thanks, Mom,” he whispered.

  Riley tugged down his ski mask, snapped down the night vision goggles, put his gloved hand on the doorknob, and walked into the bank.

  Once inside, he immediately looked up.

  There it was, just where Briana said it would be. The security camera.

  “Ceiling tile,” Jake coached in his ear.

  Riley used a chair to climb up on top of the small break room table, careful not to smoosh the half-empty doughnut box still sitting there: he didn’t want to leave an imprint of his sneaker on a flattened cruller.

  “Going up,” he whispered.

  He stretched out his arms.

  But he couldn’t reach the ceiling.

  Okay. They hadn’t counted on that.

  “It seems I’m a few inches too short,” he said, refusing to panic.

  “I’m coming over there to give you that boost!” he heard Mongo say.

  “No!” Riley shot back in a tense whisper. “Give me a minute, here. I’ll figure it out.”

  “Riley?” It was Briana in his ear.

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s a bunch of watercooler bottles over by the sink. They’re stacked in plastic crates in the corner on the far side of the counter. If you can put one on top of the table…”

  “Got it. Thanks.”

  He stepped off the table to the chair and down to the floor. Thanks to the night vision goggles, Riley could clearly see the tall column of water bottles, each one encased in a hard plastic cube—much better to climb on than the curved sides of a five-gallon jug. This was going to work. Riley went to hoist a bottle off the tower.

  It weighed a ton. Fifty, sixty pounds.

  No way could he carry it across the room and heave it up on top of the table.

  However, he could slide it sideways and watch it drop down to the kitchen counter. He’d climb up and access the ceiling panel from over here.

  With a muffled grunt, he shoved the plastic bottle holder sideways and let it fall to the countertop with a heavy, water-sloshing thud.

  “What was that?” he heard someone say.

  Someone else.

  Someone in the bank.

  Okay. This was bad.

  Riley needed to improvise.

  He hopped up onto the counter. Climbed on top of the water bottle and shoved up a ceiling tile.

  “How much weight can this ceiling grid hold?” he whispered.

  “Not much!” came Jake’s reply. “Twenty, thirty pounds.”

  “Go see what that is,” came the voice from the other room.

  Riley reset the ceiling tile, jumped down from the counter, swung open the double cabinet doors under the sink, tossed his backpack into the darkness, then slithered in.

  Fortunately, there was nothing stored under the sink except a can of cleanser. He pulled one door shut and, working fast, unzipped his backpack, found his trusty roll of duct tape, peeled off a six-inch piece, doubled it over, and, putting the sticky side to the back of the second cabinet door, pulled it shut.

  “What’s going on in there, Otto?” he heard the voice call out.

  “Nothin’,” said a new voice. Gruff. “One of these water jugs here toppled sideways onto the kitchen counter is all.”

  “You sure it’s not a guard dog?”

  “Banks do not, typically, employ guard dogs, Fred. They go with retired cops.”

  “Good,” cried the voice in the far-off room. “I freaking hate freaking dogs.”

  “Me, too. You never know when some German shepherd is gonna want to snack on your shin. For a second, I thought maybe it was the bank manager coming in to watch security camera tapes in his office.”

  “Why would he wanna do that?”

  “’Cause there ain’t nothin’ else to do in this dumpy little town at night.”

  “True, true,” said his colleague. “Now, can we please have some quiet? I’m trying to crack open a safe here but I can’t hear the tumblers clicking if you keep yak-king!”

  “All right, already. But hurry up. You’re taking forever!”

  “I’m hurryin’, I’m hurryin’.”

  Riley heard footsteps walking away. He started breathing again.

  “Riley?” Jake in his earpiece. “Where are you? All we see is black.”

  “I’m underneath the sink,” he whispered, quieter than he’d ever whispered before. “We have company.”

  “Who?”

  “Bank robbers.”

  “What?”

  “Stand by. I need to go to Mr. Weitzel’s office.”

  “No, Riley, you need to get out of there. You need to run away.”

  Believe it or not, when Jake said that, Riley smiled.

  “Never run away from danger, my friend. If you do, you only double that danger.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just something my dad says all the time. So, Jake, check your floor plan. Which way to the bank manager’s office?”

  46

  RILEY WAS CREEPING ALONG QUIETER than a cat hunting a plastic bottle cap.

  Jake guided him out of the break room and into what he called the workroom.

  “Riley?” It was Briana. “Why don’t we call this a dress rehearsal and come back tomorrow night, okay? I think that would be our smartest move, what with the bank robbers and stuff. Okay? Riley? He’s not answering me. I hate when boys pretend that they can’t hear you. Riley Mack?”

  “Easy, Bree,” said Jake, keeping his cool. “Let me just keep steering him away from the vault. I assume that’s where your bank robbers are currently located?”

  “Roger that,” Riley whispered.

  “Okay. We have a picture again. Try not to talk. Nod for yes. Shake your head for no.”

  Riley nodded that he understood.

  “Okay. That doorway in front of you. Go through it and you’re in the lobby. You’re wearing sneakers, right?”

  Another nod.

  “Gumshoe it across the marble at a slight angle to the wall jutting out. Do you see it?”

  Riley did.

  “The manager’s office is on the other side of that small divider.”

  Riley tiptoed through the lobby. Approached the door.

  “That’s it. Hurry, Riley.”

  Riley grabbed the doorknob. It wouldn’t turn.

  “Is it locked?” asked Jake.

  Riley gave him a head bob.

  “Okay, Riley Mack.” Jamal was taking over back at the truck. “Move closer so I can get a good look at the dead bolt.”

  Riley moved up to the door.

  “We’re in luck, man. Looks like somebody forgot to lock it. Crouch down a little lower till you come to where the latch bolt on the doorknob hits the strike plate. There you go. Okay. This is cake, man. You got a credit card?”

  Riley shook his head. He was twelve. Banks don’t give credit cards to twelve-year-olds.

  “What about a knife?”

  Yes! He had his trusty little Leatherman with a dozen different blades tucked in his pocket.

  “Push a flat blade in there against the angled edge of the latch bolt. Good, good. Jiggle the knife back and forth. You feel the latch? Push it in, man. Push it in!”

  Riley did. The door opened.

  “I told you it was gonna be cake!”

  Riley stepped into Mr. Weitzel’s office and silently shut the door behind him. He also quietly cranked the dead bolt back
into its locked position.

  “I’m in,” he whispered, able to speak again since he was behind a closed door. “The security cameras feed to Mr. Weitzel’s computer. I heard the robbers talking about it.”

  “Well, then,” said Briana sarcastically, “I’m so glad they got there before you.”

  “Does his computer have USB ports?” asked Jake.

  Riley checked out the sides of the desktop monitor. “Yes. I found two empty slots.”

  “Excellent. Plug in your memory stick, find what you’re looking for, download it, and get the heck out of there!”

  “Works for me.”

  Riley popped his memory stick into a USB connector. He tapped the return button on the keyboard to wake the computer. Nothing happened. He tapped it again.

  “Nothing’s happening.”

  “Move your mouse up to the hard disk icon and click it.”

  Riley did. The hard drive opened into a window.

  “It’s empty.”

  “What?”

  It hit him. “The robbers. They came in here and erased everything! There are no files left. No security camera footage!”

  “Get out, Riley.” This time it was Mongo urging him to go. “It’s over. You gave it your best shot.”

  “Mongo’s right,” said Briana. “Terminate the mission.”

  “Leave, Riley,” pleaded Jake. “Now. Please?”

  “It’s over, Riley Mack.” Even Jamal, the new guy, was chiming in. “Make like a tree and leaf!”

  “In a minute,” Riley mumbled back.

  He sank down into the big leather chair.

  He had one last shot to find…something. Anything that might help him clear his mother.

  He opened the top desk drawer. Nothing but a stapler, paper clips, and several miniature spray bottles of breath freshener. The second drawer was full of fancy-looking stationery and bank forms. That only left the bottom drawer. It was deep. Probably for hanging files.

  It didn’t matter. Riley needed to check it. If it was nothing but folders stuffed with spreadsheets and memos, then he’d do what everybody was telling him to do: he’d run away and live to scheme another day.

  He opened the drawer.

  Inside was a hidden, high-tech safe.