CASHING OUT

Cops of the future will look like systems administrators today. They loiter at their desks, absorbed by the glow of their monitors running mesmerizing lines of code. These mopes didn’t even take time outside the matrix for lunch. Detective Mobius, the only Federal Reserve cop to get grandfather-claused into the new Fed Consumer Bank Force, didn’t bother getting to know their names. They dressed identically in black and very uncomfortable looking shoes. No real detective would wear shoes like that. They looked more suitable for dancing than pavement pounding. Their faces looked ashen, like none of them had eaten a vegetable in their lives. Detective Mobius wouldn’t be surprised to discover they were all virgins. If they didn’t venture beyond their cubicles, they would eventually sprout roots and outgrow their fancy Swedish adjustable desks. Eventually, he imagined them decomposing into blanched, pear-shaped balloons brimming with pus and cellulite - and at the top of the department food chain-wise, if not upper management. William, the new baby-faced supervisor made a simple case against Mobius that quickly proved erroneous.

 

How could a man who hated computers survive in a world built on tech? He loathed the changes they brought to the job, the way they separated people into groups of either techies or luddites, to name only one division in society. Since the world went paperless by law, books quickly became a thing of the past except for what was digitized and what remained of the old fashion kind, which were a luxury enjoyed by only by the affluent since old books required upkeep to avoid entropy. Much like their owners. Mobius wasn’t so much a proud luddite as he was a champion of people who simply did not get computers. Little did he know that today would be a landmark shitty day for luddites. The techies at the Fed Bank Force would be taking cash out of their hands and providing them with an equal amount of the new digital currency, accessible via implanted microchip. Everybody got one or would have a chip within the next forty-eight hours. Today’s headline: Detroit: Say Goodbye to the Paper Dollar! The American dollar became American Personal Credit, a nascent government-run Bank that organized and paid workers to collect the remaining cash on the street and install their ID chips. What was once the Federal Reserve, was now the Federal Consumer Bank and acted on behalf of the electorate rather than the elected.

 

Today, paper currency ended its hegemony in the USA. Even as the rest of the planet still believed and recited ad nauseum the nursery rhyme of ancient paper currency. The US would code its own future. The whole shebang would take some time, but it was kicking off now.

​

Today was the final day for retailers and corporations to accept cash as payment. The last day that cash back offers on TVs and cars and new kitchens could be advertised. The last opportunity for anyone to transfer their balances from their old banks to the Federal Consumer Bank. Purchases could only be made via credit card, pin number, or by giving the clerk a thumbs up salute to scan his FCB chip. Beep! Thank you, come again! Meanwhile, the techies at the Fed Consumer Bank and in thousands of bank terminal annexes, worker hives, and cubicle-collaborators coding and engineering a way to make this economic fairy tale a reality.

 

Working hard to launch and maintain the cashless system minus error or glitch, the techies greased the appropriate palms for millions of private transactions per hour while remaining secure in their government-guaranteed jobs. Suddenly, coders were pulling down more than bankers. Cryptocurrency “investing” became a state-sponsored, pre-tax paycheck scheme that never capitalized. Mobius watched them from his perch in the Fed Bank Force security office, where thousands of internally facing cameras eradicated any expectation of privacy. Detective Mobius spotted two young men loitering outside the building and made a mental note of their presence. They looked eerily familiar, like he had arrested them a long time ago, before the country had decided to kill cash and corruption was so easy it was nearly mandatory.

 

_____

 

“Before our Sid and Sal came up with this idea, the whole country going cashless would have meant a double tap to the head for our businesses. Crime was a cash only business.” Paulie Salvatori grinned at the other Detroit dons, radiating confidence and control through the blue haze of his Cuban cigar smoke. He sipped espresso. He knew this would be the swan song of la cosa nostra. Mio dio! If everybody played their part, the families could make infinitely more money and keep their freedom too. Call it ending organized crime in Detroit or giving in to extortion. It was a bad look on both parties.

​

“What, are hookers going to start asking johns to scan their ID chip?”

 

“Say goodbye to our dealers too.”

 

“How will anyone ever get laid again?” Vinnie Tomasino made a jerk off motion with his left hand which was seconded by Rocky.

 

“Quiet, Vin. I’m here to catch you up. Just like in high school, with this guy over here cheating off me in every class. Now get quiet. I’m about to save your family for the foreseeable future.” Paulie laid it all on the line. He detailed the scheme, devised by his grandson and nephew, to embrace a man he used to consider a nemesis but now regarded as a fellow traveler outward bound on a journey toward a distant, but inevitably profitable shore. There was no question. The day cash got cancelled was the ideal time for a robbery. Nobody would be expecting it. Who could imagine it was all a ruse, that cash and gold were not the prizes but only ochre-colored herrings?

 

“I don’t see a downside,” Rocky shrugged his massive shoulders like the final say was his alone to make.

 

“You never do - until half of your mugs are in the hoosgow.” Vinnie laughed with some derision, still unhappy about the marriage of the three families and his place in the organization. He hacked up a wad of rubbery green phlegm and spat on the floor. Rocky didn’t see the humor.

 

“Then, in the name of our families, I’d like to bless this deal with a toast. Not simply with a glass of vino but the way our forefathers did. With blood. Heaven forbid, a disagreement should arise between us later, we’ll already have the traitor’s DNA locked up.”

 

“Should I go home and call Ziu Sam from my land line?” Three old men belly laughed at the irony, they started coughing and it was a minute while their breathing recovered.

Paulie texted Sid. Greenlight.

 

_____

 

“’Say hello to my leetle friend’ has gotta be the most quoted mob movie line of all time.” Sid impersonated a young Al Pacino to Sal as they sat head-to-head, separated by video monitors, strategizing the final execution of their plan. The cousins looked and behaved very much like college students. Recent grads, tops. They were mature enough to plan and execute a highly sophisticated bank robbery using bleeding edge, uber-genius level coding...and immature enough to giggle at just about any dick joke. Given the state of their scaly eyes, anemic complexions, pomaded hair, and saccharine Red Bull breath, people just knew they were tech geeks. Straight outta central casting. All thanks to years of coding in their parents’ respective basements. Although the cousins were wildly different sizes, they had the synced minds of the best ballet duos manifested by performing a pas de deux from pure muscle memory.

​

“Nah. It’s gotta be Pesci in Goodfella’s. ‘Am I funny like clown? Show me what I do that you think is so fuckin’ funny.” Sal was a pitch perfect Pesci. Where his cousin was ninety pounds wet, Sal was one hundred and fifty pounds of solid muscle. There wasn’t a gram of fat on him. Where Sid made women laugh, Sal required no wind up for his pitch. Yet, if you asked nicely, he would own up to being more introvert than extrovert. Just like his cousin and bestie. Born days apart and growing up in the Bonbano Family compound, they were inseparable as they learned to be dangerous.

 

“Wanna go circle the bank one last time?” Sid strategized.

 

“Bong hits first.” Both cousins were incorrigible pot smokers.

 

The Fed Bank was located a quarter mile east of the Chrysler Freeway, which would gift the cousins and their henchmen a quick, anonymous exit. If the freeway proved hinky - or Detroit’s legendary rush hour interfered - they could easily blend into the surrounding neighborhood. Sid and Sal dropped off a spare getaway car in a vacant lot to use in the event things went tits up. Thanks to Ziu Sam, the cameras would be fritzing for the next two days. The garage had yet to be wired. Sal parked a near-expired Taurus and met Sid outside. The only real confidence the cousins were carrying came courtesy of Nonno Paulie. His deal with the government. Ziu Sam quickly lived up to his side of the bargain and even helped the cousins access the bank. They stopped short of giving away passwords and pins. This couldn’t look like an inside job.

​

On the day cash gave up its problematic, historic ghost, Sid and Sal’s proposal would wipe Detroit’s organized crime off the face of the mitten state for pennies on the thug - and enrich the family that did it all.

The Federal Consumer Bank in Detroit was far less imposing than its New York counterpart. Built on the ashes of its predecessor, this Fed was comprised of two connected steel-frame structures: a marble neoclassical bank, an International Style Annex, not to mention a parking garage. The exterior was stately and impressive, as you would expect from a bank. Inside, someone had made a grave error designing the bank as an homage to their favorite decade. The lobby looked like the seventies came down from a bad disco high and puked up all the signature hues of the swingin’ era. Burnt oranges, nut brown, white powder, and pukey yellows omnipresent. Pink tile bathrooms. Corduroy couches. Real-life lava lamps. There was a palpable, velvety aroma in the air. Everything felt too old-timey and sticky for the bank that would hold the second most cash and gold deposits in the US; for the bank that would, tomorrow morning at nine, become the country’s largest and only consumer bank. There didn’t appear to be much in the way of overt security. Just cameras and a few overweight guards packing low caliber heat.

​

“We need a couple guys with special skills – like a safe cracker and marksman, a few soldiers who know their way around a computer. All expendable, of course.” Sid pondered aloud.

​

Sal laughed so hard he snorted at the image of their grandfather’s luddite goons plugged into a VR terminal and drooling at all the pretty colors. “For privacy’s sake, I wanted to keep this in the family. Goons with skills were hard to find. You’ll have better odds of catching a leprechaun this side of Ireland.” After pausing, he asked, “Think we ought to bring Rocky Junior in on this? One less expendable?”

​

The pair walked silently back to Sid’s Land Rover. The Rocky issue could easily morph into the Rocky Catastrophe, if they weren’t careful. They both knew it. He had to be played with a cool, steady hand. They were all mobbed up as Rocky’s family saw it. As cousins, Sid and Sal grew up together and were unnaturally close. While Rocky was also a cousin, he never had that kind of access to the family. Rocky Senior’s wife had chosen to live in the suburbs close to her family. Meanwhile, Sid and Sal shared a loft in Philly while scraping through Wharton. By their late twenties, most people mistook them for brothers. Rocky, on the other hand, was the same age but didn’t graduate from high school. No matter what buttons his father pushed, or fingers he mangled - they wouldn’t give him that damned sheepskin. Instead, he joined the family business at sixteen, immediately after nearly graduating from high school. Like his namesake (hint: not his father), Rocky had trained as a boxer as soon as he was man enough to wield the spit bucket for the older boys in the gym. He was all confidence in the ring, mentally defeating his opponents before the first bell. He liked punching up and taking on fighters well above his weight class. He was dangerous with his fists. He was old school streetwise, too. He could vanish before your eyes in broad daylight. He did not, however, have what one might call a winning personality. Rocky would sooner be flensed than endure meaningless small talk. Suffice to say, basic social skills didn’t come easy for him and were the reason high school wasn’t kind to him. After three years of being teased and semi-regular beat downs, Rocky quit school to focus on boxing and his career as a soldier in one of his father’s top earning crews. These days, he was at the pinnacle of his earnings game. When word came down that cash was going the way of the dinosaurs, even he was smart enough to read the writing on the wall.

​

“Still, he’s Nono’s head of the family. Shouldn’t he be the one to illuminate poor, dim Rocky?”

​

“You think Rocky the Mountain is going to comprehend the end of cash?” Rocky Senior liked to be called Mountain on account of his prodigious size and the way he was stacked like a heap of heavy rocks.

​

“Sal, what if we’ve been looking at this “end of cash” thing the wrong way? This isn’t the end of our thing. But for the general public, we will effectively be put out of our misery. Ziu Sam won the final battle and the war. Those are gonna be headlines.” He was getting worked up. “We deserve a legacy. Something that shows how we gave back to the community. Maybe gaslight the public to forget our history of drugs, murder, gambling, and human trafficking. Those were our sins. Moonshine, prostitution, numbers, and drugs.

​

Victimless crimes! “So, what if we think bigger?” Sid put the question to Sal and the universe at large.

​

“By giving Rocky a piece of the pie? No more weed for you.”

​

“No, seriously, by giving the Detroit omerta a slice. That would buy plenty of Ziu Sam’s goodwill because, by all appearances, we’d be closed for business. Crime would go way down. Agent Jeb Harper and company looked like heroes. Think like a politician for a minute.”

​

“Bribe me first.” Sal joked.

​

“The amount of money we’re talking about stealing is more than enough to keep our families flush for the next few generations.”

​

“And just how much do you think we’ll pull down?” Sid lit a Marlboro, instantly combining his cherry-flavored hair spray, which made the Land Rover smell like a strip club.

​

Sal felt like he was repeating himself. “We’ll skim $.00001 cents per transaction from sea to shining fucking sea! The amount may seem small, but the volume is through the roof. There are tens of millions of transactions every hour of every day, seven days a week, all year round. Cashing in and maintaining the credits would require a financial family office (a different, unrelated type of “Family”) populated by a squad of financial gurus. These slick money magicians would need to be legal, licensed, and on the up-and-up contacts-wise to launder our old cash into credits. Then they’d take the distribution from within the Fed’s hidden accounts to anonymously divvy credits to the list of designatees. This list would be created updated annually by the cousins to advance their own political agendas as the new co-heads of the Bonbano family and newly minted heads of a philanthropic organization that battled homelessness. The wisdom of this approach eluded the second-generation off the boat. Their forefathers ran the first syndicates with heavy hands. They were bent on milking every drop out of every mark. They spent audaciously on cheap crap and invested nothing in the future.

​

The cousins couldn’t see the point in trying to get their fathers’ attention after all the years they’d spent avoiding it. So they went straight to the top, where the original sharks still swam, if in an albeit shallower sea. They went to their Nonno’s. After Sid and Sal gave their pitch to the remaining mafioso, they were clear – no ifs, ands, buts, or sudden caveats. This was the plan he would green light. Nobody should be trusted. Sid and Sal would provide their own goons and gear. Neither wanted to sentence their own crews to a guaranteed bullet between the eyes at the end of the heist. Sal still knew some vile old schemers who would attempt to fleece their own families after the sun set on the desperate era of cash. They could all benefit.

 

That .00001 per dollar added up to nearly a million a year each.

​

If they agreed to liquidate their businesses and submit their cash to a secure, general fund at the Fed Consumer Bank, which would, in the irony of all ironies, be taxed.

​

“Rocky and company might be our only option.”

​

“Oh Jebus. Feel like steak for lunch?”

​

“Why not?” Sal grinned crookedly at the thought of red meat.

​

            Temporarily tabling the Rocky discussion, the cousins drove off in search of a restaurant where they could find some fresh pasta and a memorable house red. At Martino’s, they enjoyed a bottle of pinot noir while spinning their mothballed schemes on a spit. “Clean air. Clean water. Clean land. Pay off the national debt.”

​

“The biggies,” Sal read Sid’s thoughts. “You gotta have clean air.”

​

“What about homelessness? We could build low- or no-income housing.”

 

“People gotta have a roof over their heads,” Sal sipped his wine and felt unusually sagacious. Like he was a benevolent spirit granted the delight of bestowing infinite wealth upon his family.

 

“Education? Immigrants? Drugs?”

 

“Give me your tired, your poor, your stoned, huddled masses yearning to be free.” Sal intentionally misquoted the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. “Don’t worry, we’ll still live like fucking kings.”

 

_____

 

The first day without cash came and went without incident. The bank employees checked in and out on schedule. Nothing suspicious occurred. Detective Mobius clapped his whole team on the back, sent them home for the night, and welcomed the night operators. He decided to stay to ensure a smooth transition to the night systems. Enjoying his umpteenth cold black coffee of the day with a smile, his expression hardened when he heard the fire alarm. Checking the digital floor plan, a red light flashed, indicating a fire in the foyer outside the vault. “Hey Fenton. I gotta fire alarm in the vault foyer. Deal with it while I call the fire department.”       

 

His orders were followed by one of his first hires, Fenton, a reliable, generally easy-going middle-aged man. The sort who lamentably tried a thousand different miracle balding creams and, despite the expense of his failures, was eager, happy even, to pay for the next promising cure. Detective Mobius assumed he never left his desk. He had a nice word for everybody. The rest of his so-called security team stayed wired to their monitors. Like none of them would hear the ear-splitting alarm. Or see the FIRE signs flash red above the exits. Detective Mobius dialed 9-1-1 and was treated to calm elevator music up and under a digitized woman’s voice detailing exactly what did and what did not constitute an emergency. Lock your keys in your car? Not an emergency. Call a tow truck. Disturbed toddlers throwing a dual crying jag that you just can’t take anymore? Not an emergency. Call your mother. Neighborhood teens barricaded the street with their cars for a kegger and live music? Not an emergency. Unless someone is in physical danger, wait out the party. Better yet, join it! “Nothing to see here, el jeffe,” Fenton joked. “Must be a short circuit because there’s nada fire.”

​

9-1-1 kept Detective Mobius on hold, warning him never to touch a live wire and not to touch someone being electrocuted.

​

Thirty minutes later, dos fire alarms. Mobius hoped tonight wasn’t going to be one of those nights when everything went wrong from the taste of his coffee to his wife turning him down at bedtime. He dialed Fenton again. “Got another one, friendo. Sweep the executive suite to make sure no one is still lingering around. I have a feeling there’s not a lick of flame. The legacy system starting to fritz.” Another half hour passed before the next fire alarm, this one in Storage Area P, accessible only by a secure tunnel in the basement. If flame so much as side-eyed those ancient files, there would be a conflagration the size of which hadn’t been seen since the Rouge power plant blast back in ’99. The Industrial Revolution-era steel plant lit up like a book of matches soaked in gasoline and caked in thermite. Mobius keyed the intercom to the security automatons. “Wake up down there! We’ve got fire alarms galore. Two of you get to storage immediately. The rest of you gear up, load your weapons. Don’t forget your vests. Split guard duty shifts between the building entrance and the vault.”

​

Detective Mobius took his finger off the button and waited, hearing mostly grumbles and bones crackling after remaining still for too long. Their panties were surely in a twist. Was the threat real? Where was the fire gear? When he next pressed the intercom button for the security office, Mobius imagined he was triggering an explosion in their office that would wipe out every one of those useless, information-technology-snorting- bastards. “Move!” He hollered at the top of his lungs and watched them scatter like cockroaches when someone turned on a light.

​

“9-1-1, how can I help you?” A nasal, high-pitched voice answered, almost to a comedic effect, momentarily distracting Mobius into wondering if she was an actress from Saturday Night Live. The charm wore off quickly when she explained that she had no idea what he was talking about. Would he please calm down?

​

“Any alarm from the Federal Consumer Bank is supposed to send us the closest police, fire, and medical response units automatically as the alarm gets triggered. I’m an hour into this situ and haven’t seen so much as a single firetruck or flatfoot! We’re a priority response in EVERY scenario. Are you on your way?”

 

“Sir, let me first thank you for sharing your poor experience with the police. My name is Shelly, and I’ll guide you through emergency services.” She now sounded like a pleasantly opiated robot.

 

“Are any emergency vehicles en route?” Mobius screached into the phone as he watched more fire alarms lit up on his digital schematic of the building. Like a damn Christmas tree.

 

“Please hold.”

​

Mobius slammed his phone down in frustration. They would have to do this the old-fashioned way. He checked his monitor to see if his worthless security guards were on task or back at their computers fucking around. The room was empty, and Mobius couldn’t resist a smile. If they feared him, perhaps he could motivate them yet. Acknowledging that the fire situation was only a computer glitch, he walked each floor of the Fed, watching his minions working and inspecting for actual fires and evidence of break-ins. By the time he returned to the first-floor security office, the entire board was blinking fire. Detective Mobius embraced his inner luddite and unplugged the board, silencing it for good.

 

_____

 

In Sid and Sal’s world, two scenes played out simultaneously:

 

Sid sweated out the minutes perched between the first and second floor crawl space, just above the security office. He could see the Fed Bank digital security grid from his snake-scope camera and, turning the other direction, the CCTV feeds. Nothing seemed out of place. He quickly set up the fire alarm to glitch and cascade system error messages system-wide, starting at six pm. Sid also severed the physical connections between the bank and first responders - no alarms necessary. Thank you very much. The security guards were running around like a bunch of demented monkeys trying to fuck a football. 

 

Next, Sid broken through security at the main terminal. Now he could dig as deep as he wanted into whatever he pleased. The Fed Bank servers were under his command. He inserted his flash drive into the port and watched, sweating out the seconds with such extreme trepidation the urge to shit grew from minor to an active emergency status. Potential turtle. The progress bar on the monitor finished. When his job was done, Sid disappeared from the building the way he had entered and popped into a McDonald’s to use little Grimace’s room. Relief had never felt so good.

 

Sal assaulted the vault door with all his purchased might. He couldn’t crack the password, so he swung for the fences with directional explosive charges. Results nil, he reverted to the mining drill and steeled himself for the battle to come. The only way into the vault was guarded by a 9-foot tall, 90-ton steel cylinder set within a 140-ton steel-and-concrete frame that, when closed, created an air and watertight seal. Cracking this is when he would be most vulnerable, which is why Sal brought his own goons with guns. Just in case they needed to defend against any Feds, he made sure they were armed to the teeth. They looked ready to take on a fortified enemy army base. Geared up, they looked identical to Sal. He hadn’t bothered learning their names. He didn’t plan for them to last the night.

 

For the heist to remain undiscovered, they planned the obvious cash robbery as a distraction. While the cash would be useless in the states, the rest of the world wouldn’t make such a quick transition, and some cash could still be used on the black market. While viewed as a dinosaur today, safe crackers in the seventies considered this the Cadillac of vaults; like the Chateau LaTife Rothschild was best in the wine show or how Marlboro won the gold medal for best cigarette year-after-year. He and Sid required streetwise henchmen who couldn’t be broken down during interrogation. For to jail they would go, where nature would inevitably take its course and eliminate the last of them before trial. This is when they would be most vulnerable, which is why he brought his own goons with guns. Just in case he needed to defend against a war party of Fed Bank cops. This assault team looked more prepared to assault a Piggly Wiggly than defend a central federal bank.

 

Nevertheless, Sal wasn’t worried. His team would be long gone if anyone ever uncovered the real robbery. His team worked in the room where they were most obvious, providing the cover of distraction for Sid. Under the spotlights and cameras, the red recording eye captured a frame of footage before one of the henchman hit them with spray paint. Thanks to the Federal Reserve clause of the Patriot Act, the Fed funded its own law enforcement division with an armed detective and a stable of uniformed constables. The addition of tech security was the salient part of the clause. The current level of tech security was, in reality, easy peasy to bypass. Slipped in between competitively boring clauses, The Federal Reserve Board's Privacy program was ostensibly helmed by the Senior Agency Official for Privacy. His job was to maintain the social security database of the private information of every man, woman, and child in the United States. Which was an ongoing affair, one that wouldn’t abide by any bureaucrat with a grudge or agenda.  This would give him access to the personal financial information of every human in the US, citizen and non-citizen alike. Once there, he was a keystroke away from destiny, which was a backdoor into every banking institution in the US. Boom. Target acquired. Chips activate. Execute...

​

The trick, Sal thought, was in the timing. The teams must appear to function smoothly as one. Working toward a single goal. Not getting caught was their highest priority. Better to lose the score than spend life making license plates. While he waited for his cue, he scuttled as close as possible to the potential site of an admin terminal. Dressed like system admins or security guards (they all dressed alike), Sal’s role was to brandish his flash drive at the given moment and upload the lines of code they had written earlier. He was there, on-site, as a failsafe. Just in case any last minute, genius-level coding was required. Between Sid and himself, they had tested and retested their key. Tempting fate, they performed a test run of the code on Comerica Bank by redirecting .00001 percent of each transaction to a nameless, but numbered account on the Isle of Man, where it could easily be accessed. He was presently tapping away on the keyboard with his fingertips, bouncing his heels incessantly on the floor, filling in the silent bars of sound with a measure of human, atonal authenticity. The code itself was intentionally simple. Placing it in the right sequence of the Fed’s code was the hardest part. Everything depended on the coding.

​

Sal and Sid’s vision was shared by their grandparents, the Don’s. Everyone agreed that the best robberies were the ones you never knew occurred. Hence, the requirement for both the cash team and Sid to succeed near-simultaneously. Grabbing cash and gold on the last day of cash seemed like a no brainer. Unless they were forced to cut bait. Sal wouldn’t hesitate to toss the proper men under the bus. Call it survival of the fittest. At the end of the day, the dimwits would be holding the bag, which was probably Tetris-ed full of incriminating evidence too. No one got the gold. No one wanted the damn gold. What was the point of it? If people thought cash was too expensive, socially problematic, and a pain in the ass to transport, they’re better off on the barter system. That would be a come-to-Jesus moment for the capitalists. Still, they’d never get rid of gold the way they eighty-sixed cash. They could throw it in a vault under their personal nuclear deterrent for a decade, then sell it on the street for three times the price. What they didn’t want anyone to know was the cloaked lines of code. Now invisible, and undetectable, they could theoretically enrich the East Side Don’s by millions each month. As far as the Fed Force would know, the system was running flawlessly. Once he finished and cleaned up his footprints, digital and otherwise, the three Detroit Dons were sent a text from their respective offshore banks congratulating them on the size of their initial deposits. Every underboss, capo, lieutenant and soldiers got a taste. According to Sid and Sal’s scheme, they would never deposit another dime into those accounts. However, certain government agencies, think tanks, and genius-types known to have an ounce of empathy became flush overnight. As the Dons of Old quipped “We gave to charity at the bank.”

 

_____

 

Detective Mobius hung up the phone, idly wondering why people still said, “hang up” when they really meant “tap the little red circle on your phone.” He was feeling stone cold blasé. Like he could see the future but wasn’t permitted to share his prescience with the rest of the class. He wanted to see the look on the thief’s face when his fate was sealed. And as the fates would have it, Detective Mobius spied someone crawling into an electrical conduit high above him, then disappear behind a door. He smiled smugly before remembering he would be forced to climb more stairs to trap his quarry. He was behind the last door on the left side of the hallway. Mobius could practically smell his jumpy nerves. He was trapped behind a door marked “Janitor’s Closet.” Minutes metastasized. Something was amiss. Mobius eyeballed his watch. Where the hell was this thieving piece of shit? Eventually, he gave in to his own curiosity. He retrieved his side arm from its shoulder holster and pointed it in front of him as he threw open the door...only to be the victim of a massive glitter bomb. Glitter and confetti of every color in the rainbow exploded into Detective Mobius’s face and stuck to his suit. A week’s worth of showers wouldn’t dislodge all the glitz particulates out of all his crevasses. This piece of rebellion was designed special by Sal and Sid, who had long ago noticed Mobius trying to get an angle on them. Sherlock Holmes, he was not. Detective Mobius kept an eye to the sky for asteroids.

 

_____

 

Rocky, i.e. the cousin who was always left out, determined that something was happening off the books with Sid and Sal. They each ran a crew but were tighter than two top guys should be, cousins or otherwise. They must be scheming. They had something lucrative up their sleeves. He wanted in. He was a cousin. He began stalking Sal during his off hours. He eventually found himself parked across from the new Federal Consumer Bank and watched his cousin prancing around the exterior taking photos for God knows what reason. He couldn’t fathom how the place wasn’t surrounded by twenty cruisers and a chopper. Somebody must have dialed 9-1-1 by now, he thought, wondering if he should get his cousin away from the scene. The lack of police clued him in that something was going down. He couldn’t have been more right.

​

Sal saw Rocky flexing his muscles in his Land Rover and walked over to it, “Sup, cuz? What are you doing on this side of the D?”

​

“Just having a go at a heist, if you don’t mind.” He was nonchalant but immediately psyched when Sid materialized beside them.

​

“Rocko!” He hugged and slapped his cousin on the back.

​

“Hey.” Rocky instantly felt eight years old again, always chasing after his cousins, trying to be their friends, to be one of the guys on the inside.

​

“Rock, you caught us red handed. Can we explain everything to you...elsewhere?”

​

Detective Mobius was standing outside the Federal Consumer Bank building. Pacing back and forth, switching between two phones. He finally reached the cops. Sirens sounded ominously in the distance. In his heart, he knew it was too late when the glitter bomb went off in his face. Now they would all show up and all he would have to show for himself was a big nothingburger. However, for that moment in time, luck was a lady to Detective Mobius that night when the police breached the vault and wound up in a firefight with the remaining goons. They were quickly dispatched. The cops and the security executives at the Federal Consumer Bank slapped him on the back for a job well done. He had no answer when they inquired about the glitter still covering him like a second skin.

 

_____

 

He was slowly forced to reach the obvious conclusion. His family had been excluded. He hit the red button on his phone. Although, Rocky Prime noted later in a forgiving mood, father and son had been included in the proceeds - the generational annuity that would cover his every gin martini to whatever his male heir wanted to pound three generations from now. Neither were thrilled to be left out of the bargaining with the feds. As the Don Prime, Rocky Senior was unprepared to organize, transfer, invest, and hide hundreds of millions of dollars without so much as a trace of the anxiety shits. This, he was assured by Ziu Sam by way of Agent Harper, would be simple. Painless. Probably shits-free. What a different life it would be.

 

They Family gathered in a safe house in Corktown that Saturday morning. The government people had a thing about work starting at nine. Yet, when they rang the bell, no one answered. A sticky note on the door indicated that Harper would be right back gave each don a twitch.  Sal and Sid did their best to herd the three generations of Family into the dining room.  Everyone visibly relaxed when Harper returned with espresso and cannoli for the group instead of a S.W.A.T. team. While he asked them innocuous questions about their ages and health, he prepared a sterile area on the kitchen counter and invited Sal in first - they had decided he would be the guinea pig regardless of how much he loathed the term. He held his right-hand palm-down on the table, separating his fingers and thumb as much as possible. Harper brought out a pair of strange looking plyers, put them between the webbing of Sal’s thumb and forefinger and squeezed. And just like that, Sal was implanted with the very first Federal Consumer Bank chip that would give him - along with his Family and esteemed colleagues in crime - access to untold millions in exchange for quitting crime. Sid took the plunge next. Seeing no adverse reactions, the dons, their sons, and a handful of stakeholding cousins rolled up their sleeves and got in line for their implants. It was the end of cash as they knew it.

 

***

Drew Bufalini has been writing professionally for roughly two hundred years. Mostly as an advertising copywriter. He has imagined, and brought to life, campaigns for many well-known national brands (portfolio: www.drewbufalini.com). He has published fiction in Gargoyle Magazine, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Close to the Bone (so far). Non-fiction credits include Aoide Magazine, Innovative Health, Creativity, Advertising Age, and The Big Idea among others. He recently completed his first novel and is on the prowl for an agent. Drew lives with his wife and crazy puppies outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan.