Robbers

Prologue

The day I met Vic Fuentes was the day my mother was murdered; she was shot on her way home from work, carjacking. A little ironic isn’t it?

I was five, and my mother was raising me all by herself, so that night a social worker came by and took me to a group home. It was only supposed to be for one night, until they figured out what to do with me, but I ended up staying. And that’s where I lived until I was 18.

Vic was three years older than me, but we were attached at the hip. The only time we were ever apart was at school and even then we would find little ways to sneak around and see each other.

And never once did I want to leave.

Not until I was fourteen anyway. Vic’s birthday was a few months ahead of mine and in the late winter of 2001 he turned 18. That meant that he was no longer in the system and the state wouldn’t let him live there anymore; wouldn’t let him live with me anymore.

The night before he left, he found me on the bathroom floor, crying.

I told him I thought I was never going to see him again.

He smiled at me and moved a piece of hair from my face and spoke in the sweet voice that I loved so much.

“How silly you are, Kellin Quinn, to think that I would ever leave you.”

He didn’t move far away, just to some shitty one bedroom apartment a few miles away from the home, but he had to work a lot to pay for his rent and everything so I never really saw him. When he did come to visit though, we talked about how one day I would be out of there and I would come live with him and we’d live happily ever after in his shitty little one bedroom apartment, just scraping by but happy because we had each other.

So when I turned 18 a few years later, I moved in with him in his shitty little one bedroom apartment that barely had electricity and only had hot water if you were lucky. We slept on an old lumpy mattress on the floor without pillows, but I didn’t mind because for the first time in three years I got to sleep next to him again. He continued working the same shitty minimum wage job at the shop and save down the street while I worked at a bookshop.

We were just scraping by but we were happy because we had each other.

That didn’t last forever though. Eventually we got bored with doing the same things over and over again every day. It was too mundane for us.

We were intoxicated when we robbed that convenience store. Surprisingly enough we got away with it, and the next morning when we woke up with about two grand in cash lying beside us we didn’t know what to do. Money really wasn’t something we cared about and we weren’t going to return it and risk getting arrested, so we did the only thing we could think of.

We anonymously donated the money to charity.

I don’t even remember which one it was, we picked the first one we found and gave everything to them.

That was when we decided the life we were living wasn’t enough for us. We took what little money we had and packed up what we needed and Vic went out and bought a ’72 Buick GS Convertible. It was red, but you could barely tell because the paint was so faded and the leather interior had deteriorated pretty badly. We got it for 200 bucks though so I wasn’t complaining.

That was where it all started really. We traveled around the west side of the United States and planned our next heist until we found the perfect place to execute it.

Our first bank job took place in a small nowhere town somewhere in southern New Mexico. It didn’t go as planned at all and if the cops there hadn’t been so slow we would have been caught for sure. This time we walked out with around five grand.

We kept enough of it to get us to the next job and donated the rest to some charity that helped people with aids.

That was how our lives went; one job and one shitty motel after another. We never kept more than we needed to keep going and we were happy.

We were free.