“Mothman, you listnin’?”

Crap. we’re here. At least where my here is. I ignore Jane’s jabbering- unless the score is a big one today, I’ll get my earful when we get back to the lair. For now, I get out of the car. This is why I was on the door side in the back, so we can move with a minimum of time and fuss and arguing. I climb up to the top of the building on the fire escape ladder, wrapped up in my [stolen, again] trenchcoat and the brown fedora clamped down over my head. No one notices anything, no one [I hope] calls the cops as I make my way to the roof.

I’m counting the whole way. I’ve got three-hundred seconds, five minutes to get to the roof, make the jump, do my part in the scheme and high-tail it back to the car, which’ll be parked in front of the bank with the engine running. All goes right, I’ll get there just as they’re getting out, and Queen Bee’ll man the wheel.

Up on top of the roof now. It’s just two minutes past nine o’clock in the morning. I know because we all wound our wristwatches down to the same second last night. Well, I wound them that way, anyway. We’re all synchronized, a new word the eggheads are using these days.

In just thirty seconds I’ll fly down to the street and start my part. I ditch the trenchcoat and fedora I stole from a church cloakroom last week- it’s one way of getting back at all the mean little Christians for making my life difficult; I steal stuff from them when I need it, or just because I can- and I don’t even look at them as they sail lazily down to the street, six stories below.

Before they even touch the pavement, I’ve bent my knees, dropping my body just a few inches as I keep my head straight and angle my eyes down just a hair or two, to where the street with its cars, noise, busses, pedestrians, cops, street hawkers and paperboys made their noise and bumped and prodded each other with their voices and their shouts and their horns and their wants and dreams and . . .

No time for that. I jumped.

My wings popped open. I flew. The thrill never left, never. It was one part of ‘look at me, Ma! No hands!’ and one part giving the ground the almighty middle finger as it tried to pull me down and turn me into a pile of green puke on the street.

My wings, though . . . my newest babies. Oh, how they saved me. Not with a jerk and a violent tug, the way a parachute would do it. But instead a smooth, sliding motion, a gentle caress like I’d dream at night about Bee or Jane caressing and holding me . . .

Oh, for a dream like that today. Tonight. Now.

But now, now I had a job to do. Ten seconds after my wings had popped I was flying, riding the current and using gravity like a kid on a swingset to go faster, farther. I was speeding, now, shooting through the air like a blue and green torpedo, faster and faster into the morning air, close enough to everyone below I could hear them scream and point and shout my name. Even though I hated the name the papers and the comics gave me, it gave me a little thrill to hear them shout ‘Mothman!’ as I sped over their heads. Every punk kid in high school in Fort Orlan, every little intellectual bastard child of Tom Reichert who looked up at me- they had to look up, because I was above them for a change. For those few seconds, until the fucking American Airman showed up, I was above them in the only way that really mattered. No matter how many of them there were, no matter how many of them bought Christmas trees that I could never enjoy, no matter how many of them had more money than we did, no matter of them whispered ‘Jew-boy’ under their breath when I walked through the halls of the rinky-dink, podunk high school we all hadda go through.

No matter, no matter.

I could fly, and they couldn’t.

And I flew. In one minute I was nearly a mile away from the rest of the crew. And I spotted the jewelry store we’d driven by a half-dozen times while we were hatching and making our plans, Jane going over every detail a dozen times until we were sick of the plans and her a dozen times over.

I flew. I flew and made it to the sidewalk right outside the store and dropped the smoke bomb right in front. Noxious, horrible-smelling white smoke, thick as pea-soup filled the air, and everyone began screaming and running.

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I smiled. People could be so predictable. I always hoped whenever I did something like that that Reichert or his dad or someone like them was in the crowd. I hoped that they’d choke on the smoke, even if it wasn’t the least bit toxic. Maybe they’d panic and have a heart attack or something.

No more now. No time to worry. Now, off to the bank, and fast. I could already hear sirens in the distance, coming here and either putting the bank off or spreading themselves so thin that it’d be a cakewalk to take the money and run.

Flying. Swooping. I was back at the bank in the space of a minute and a half. They were waiting in the car, and when Jane saw me coming I gave the thumbs-up with both hands, and they moved.

Out of the car, into the bank. Jake rolls in first in his wheelchair, looking sick and pathetic. He and Bee roll up to a guard each.

Jake asks the bigger of the two guards a question, holding out a piece of paper and pointing to it. When the big guard looks and reaches out to help, Jake reaches out faster than anyone could follow- dang, that guy was quick! He grabs the biggest guard’s hand in his own and looks him in the eyes. “Sleep,” he says, slapping the guard’s hand. The big ugly fellow’s head drops, his eyes closed, though the rest of his body still stands erect.

As soon as Jake dispatches the big oaf, Queen Bee throws off her trenchcoat, revealing her bright, yellow skintight costume which . . . ahem, ‘distracted’ the other, younger guard she’d been flirting with earlier in the week. Before her coat hits the ground, she’s pulled out her wand, the little number she called her ‘stinger,’ and jolted the poor schmoe guard with enough voltage to knock a half-dozen men flat on their asses.

The second guard hasn’t hit the floor before Jane draws both her pistols and blasts them into the air, yelling out for everyone to get down, this was a hold-up!

Then Monty yelled out that we were the Cadre of Crime, along with some weird and pretty speech. We were too busy to argue or tell him to shut up. Monty was too important for us to ditch. Besides, he never held things up by acting this way.

I’m acting as lookout, checking all the access points. We never cased the joint ourselves; too risky someone might recognize us the day of the job. Miguel had gone through here days before, breaking in at three in the morning and going over every window, door, tripwire, nut and bolt in the place. And the crazy bugger had memorized it all! Guy could barely read or write enough to sign his name, but he could get the layout of a place just by giving it the once over in the dark better than a camera could in broad daylight. So we knew which places to avoid and where we could hit hard.

Like the teller booth at the end of the row, hard to see or target by a guard’s pistol. Mitch is there now, pointing his Winterbeam at some teller- a kid barely older than Mitch himself, who’s fumbling as he puts money in the sack. Jane takes over the teller, as Monty and Mitch head for the safe.

The manager’s freaking out. He couldn’t open his wife’s bra in the state he’s in, much less a bank vault. Monty and Mitch go to work; Monty’s latest eye-contraption turning the metal on the hinges into vapor while Mitch starts filling the gaps in the lock with some new ice-gel he made up back at our base in the subway.

It could’ve gone really, really wrong, but it doesn’t. Per the plan, I take over the tellers for Jane, who does her little trick shots on the latest, greatest security feature in the world: cameras that film you the whole day.

Six bullets, perfect shots from Jane, every one, and the cameras and the film inside are all toast and jam.

The bag’s full after I get done with the fifth teller. The vault’s open now- we’re cookin’ and moving, and we haven’t even been in the place for a minute. The other guards who came running stop when they see Jane’s guns pointed at them, and their friend on the floor, still twitching from his encounter with the infamous Bee Sting.

“One Minute Five!” Jane yells. Bee is already outside, walking slow like she’s just made a withdrawl from her husband’s bank account to pay for a new box of dresses from Macy’s. She had the bored, strolling gait of the wealthy housewife down pat- she once said her folks had been rich and she’d been raised in Scarsdale and then Beverly Hills, and that was how she knew how to affect the walk and talk of the well-to-do. We never knew if she was lying to us; all we cared about is when she could be the face that got us past bank guards, store managers and even the occasional cop or prison guard.

Maybe I’ll tell that last story some other time.

After a few more seconds Snowman and Mister Monocle are finished loading up as much of the vault as they can cram into their sacks. The manager is still freaking out, screaming for the guards over and over again while hiding under his desk. Jane looks at him with so much disgust on her face, just for a second I thought she was gonna shoot him because he was being such a wimp.

“Let’s go, guys!” Jane yelled, “It’s almost two minutes!”

She was right. My distraction would keep the cops away for maybe as long as ten or fifteen minutes, but the capes were gonna be here ‘way faster. And some times, all it took was one, lousy, stinking cape to show up to ruin the whole plan, send one of you to jail, and make all of us move and . . .

I look. He’s in the bank with us.

It’s not the Airman; it’s worse.

It’s The One.

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TO BE CONTINUED....