Wolf was a tall woman wearing a glowing goggled mask over her eyes. A new government program allowed for more vigilante justice after the last great recession led to a shortage of police officers. In the doorway stood Wolf, one of the heroes that patrolled Atlanta. Scarlet held her breath as she peeked around and saw two glowing electric green eyes emerging out of the dark kitchen. Suddenly, she really wished she took a couple self-defense courses in college.Ĭramming the last of the paper bills in the bag, she ducked down and crawled to the front of the counter. They had been so efficient that they never really prepared for facing an opponent. Scarlet paused at the sound, her mind racing. Scarlet grabbed the biggest bills first and crammed them in her little purse, “What’s it look like?” Besides, she didn’t want to screw over the business entirely.Īs she used a pocket sized crowbar from her belt to pop open the drawer, Adam chirped in her ear, “I’m picking up movement from the roof.” Instead, she would swipe the little bit from the register to get them by. Breaking into safes took too long, and frankly, they hadn’t learned how to do that yet. Most places kept a little money up front to be ready for the next day. Sliding behind the counter, she came up to the cash register. She had half a mind to stuff a bag full of bear claws, but abandoned that thought when she got to the front and saw all the cases had been emptied for the night. Slinking through the bakery’s back room, she enjoyed the lingering scent of baked goods from earlier in the day. Ever since then, they decided to pick businesses with smart locks. She had jiggled the door too hard, set off the alarm, and sprinted back to Adam’s car just as they heard police sirens in the distance. The only time they had ran into a real problem was at an antique store that still used bolt locks. She paused a moment just to make sure an alarm wasn’t set off, but it looked like Adam had gotten good enough to take out those things first. Scarlet pushed open the door and slipped in. “Yeah… Disappointed my dad the first time I threw a baseball through his windshield.”Ī few moments of Adam’s grumbling and typing passed before the light on the lock switched from red to green. “Sorry I’m not a sports person,” she said sarcastically. “You don’t own a red baseball hat, so we couldn’t go with ‘Red Cap’ like in the story.” She heard his typing over the comm as he snarked back, “I am hunting for the entry code, Red Cape.” With cameras all over the city, she always assumed she was being watched and on a time table before one of those hero guys showed up. “You’re not really the ‘Huntsman’ type,” Scarlet snuck up to the smart lock and crouched down by the door to wait. “You hate my code name,” Adam sounded like he was pouting. After a Little Red Riding Hood ornament got caught on Scarlett’s bag and she accidentally brought it home with her, Adam said something stupid like it was their destiny, and picked a name for her and his own epithet to go along with it. It had been a little shop that sold old fairy tale trinkets and books. He rigged up their comms in a couple days before they robbed their first store three months ago. Currently, he was a block away in his parked car, working his magic on his laptop and portable internet. A tech genius, he was also drowning in loans. “I thought we weren’t going to use our real names,” Scarlet hissed softly.Īdam, her helper on these little break-ins, was her buddy from college. “You there, Scarlet?” a slightly nasally male voice chirped up in her ear piece. Like she could afford VR goggles for cable…ĭucking behind the dumpster until the light had passed, she finally approached the back door of the Perrault Bakery. An advertising blimp hovered above her, it’s bright lights shimmering with promotions of the latest 8G phone and whatever new interactive show was on cable. She peeked around the corner of an out-of-the-way alley in midtown, making sure the coast was clear. All those anime cosplays she made over the years really came in handy. She wore all black except for the red cloak with a hood pulled up over her head and the matching mask that covered her eyes. It was a Saturday night during a humid Atlanta summer, one where earlier pop-up thunderstorms made the air and her clothes extra sticky. After she finished those goals, maybe she would conquer the world next. At the very least, she aimed to pay off the rest of her student loans and save her grandmother’s house from foreclosure. Okay, maybe she wasn’t world class yet, but she was working to get there. Once upon a time, there was a world class thief in a red cape…
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