The Innocents, Nathan Senthil [best life changing books .TXT] 📗

a start, springing up so fast that his forehead banged on something hard. Cupping the hurt, he lay back again, grunting.

Promising retribution to his injured noggin, he opened his eyes. To his chagrin, he found the upper half of his body stuck underneath the bed.

The tune from the nightmare blared again, giving him another start. Was he not in reality yet? Where did that sound—

His new cell phone!

He rolled out and shot up to his feet. Now there was a stunt his alcoholic ass shouldn’t have pulled. Always sorrier than safe, he gritted his teeth through the comeuppance. The mother of all headaches exploded within his cranium. The edges of his vision darkened while the center flickered with a bright blur. Nausea followed almost immediately, his hand covering his dry mouth.

But nothing came. False alarm. Or it could be true, but just a bit sooner.

He lumbered to the other side of the room, where his table stood. On its top vibrated a Nokia Cityman 300, playing that monotonous tune, its LCD display glowing in the semi dark room.

He picked it up and pressed the green receiver button.

“That’s fast enough,” the voice on the other end said, generous with sarcasm. “Let me guess. Another all-nighter?”

“I’m close, Ray.” Joshua rummaged through the stuff on the table and lifted a wild newspaper. Hiding under it was a Skoal tin. Joshua loved dipping tobacco, but his wife’s aversion to him squirting brown liquid every tenth second made him switch. Now he used snus. No spit. No bulge. Certainly no smoke. Just all the cancerous goodness of tobacco.

“You gotta let go, man,” Raymond said, his voice tired. “It’s not our responsibility now.”

“I’ll take you to the victims’ families. Can you tell them that?”

Silence.

“Thought so. What’s your problem anyway? I’m working my shift and do this in my spare time. Why do you care?”

Joshua twisted the cap open, plucked out two pouches, and fixed them between his gums and cheeks. A rush of energy coursed through his veins and hammered the hangover back into the nothingness from where it came.

“I care because you drink a lot, you only eat once a day, if that, and your marriage is practically in the coffin. All that’s left to do is bury it.”

It was Joshua’s turn to be quiet. He didn’t remember getting back home last night. But seeing that he had been sleeping on the floor and his wife hadn’t woken him up when she left for work, Raymond was correct. His marriage was as good as dead.

It hadn’t always been like this, not until that fateful day.

A year ago, Joshua was called to a crime scene which would change his life forever. A cold-blooded animal, whom the media would eventually christen as Lolly, shot two people at a bank in Staten Island before robbing it. One security guard was DOA and one woman died in the hospital later.

Witnessing the havoc, Joshua knew right then it was his duty to stop this madman.

But Lolly turned out to be one of the most elusive bank robbers in the US, having robbed fourteen banks in as many counties. His crimes were linked by three distinguishable things: the mask, the use of .44 caliber, and his blatant hobby of sucking a lollipop while gunning people down.

“You’re not gonna answer?”

Joshua offered more silence.

“Ugh. Fine. How’s it going?” Raymond asked. “Are you any closer?”

“I don’t know, you tell me,” Joshua muttered, then yelled into the phone. “We are gonna get the fucker tonight!”

“Wait,” Raymond said, his sentence paused doubtfully. “We’re going to get Lolly, the Lolly, tonight?”

“His identity, I mean. Once we know who the asshole beneath that mask is, then it’s only a matter of time.”

“But how?”

“Unrelenting detective work, that’s how,” Joshua said and proceeded to explain.

After Lolly’s gang robbed the bank in Staten Island and hightailed it, they dumped the getaway vehicle in New Jersey, probably switching to another set of wheels. The abandoned car was a 90s Firebird. The FBI tracked it and found that it had been stolen in Memphis.

And they dropped that line of inquiry.

In the months that followed, the FBI tried to trace the bullets and the money, but nothing worked. Joshua insisted they looked into the car angle deeper. But the FBI refused, stating that it was a dead end. In fact, they had a list of cars that Lolly’s gang had used and abandoned, since they first achieved prominence in 1982. All the cars on that list were stolen but the cases were unsolved. All dead ends, they had concluded.

Joshua disagreed.

He had spent a lot of time with the list and was rewarded for his fortitude.

He had noticed that the cars Lolly’s gang used before 1987 were beat cars. Cars that even a novice, or particularly a novice, would steal. No resale value. But from the second half of 1987, the cars employed in the robberies became sedans with good torque and control, which had a lot of resale value. Types of cars professional thieves would steal.

In March 1987, Lolly’s gang used a Ford Escort. But in November they used a BMW, the latest model released that year. How did they graduate from using soccer mom SUVs to high performance vehicles in a matter of months? Joshua hadn’t found an answer for that.

Until he put together the other pieces.

The leader of their gang, Lolly, was not present in three robberies they had committed from 1985 to 1987. Only the other two, the red and blue-masked demons, operated during this time. A criminal doesn’t take hiatus this long voluntarily. They got killed, either by cops or their partners, or they got arrested. Lolly was back in 1987 and resumed his work, meaning it was the latter.

“Okay, so you think he was in prison from 1985 to 1987?” Raymond