Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief: A Novel

Eventually the police will crack open the safe. They'll want to check what's been taken. But that will come second to corral-ling the surviving hostages and dealing with the mess in the vault in the basement. Even if I am still alive, what's to stop me getting pancaked against the wall by a two-inch-thick steel door when they blast it off its hinges? They won't have cause to be careful. No one knows I'm in here, because no one knows I was robbing the damn bank in the first place.

Oh yeah. I robbed a bank. I should've led with that.

I'm not the only one. Everyone in this bank is a thief.

Ten suspects. Ten heists. That much I've deduced. If that sounds insane, trust me, it is. While I've become accustomed to being a murder magnet, I'm still new to the whole burglary thing. Here's something I've learned: there's more you can steal from a bank than just money.

From what I can tell, the stolen items are: a gold pen, a single dollar, other varied amounts ranging from a few thousand to twenty-five million dollars, a coffee cup, a life, and, to be cute about it, a heart.

That list doesn't quite cover the promised ten heists; there are more thefts and thieves for me to puzzle out. That'll be my framework for solving this, to assign each suspect a robbery. If they consider something worth stealing, maybe it's also worth killing for. Inside these thefts lies motive for murder. The question is: which one?

So, back to the page. Why spend these final hours writing? Because I write these things the same way I solve them. By pretending there's a reader out there, I can assemble the clues in a fashion befitting the fair relay of information of the Golden Age detective novel. I figure if I go back over all the clues, maybe a solution will emerge. And if I can't get there in the next fourteen hours or so, maybe I can put enough of what happened on the page so whoever winds up reading this might be able to piece it all together.

I'm not saying, like, avenge me or anything. But it does have a nice ring to it.

So there you have it. Maybe by writing it all out I can help you solve the murders so far and, in doing so, solve the one that's coming next.

Mine.

THE FIRST HEIST: 

A GOLD PEN

CHAPTER ONE

ERNEST CUNNINGHAM IS DEAD.

While I've stared down my own death on several occasions, I was surprised to read about it, if only because comprehension is one of the faculties greatly reduced by dying.

It took a quick selfpat down and a refocus on the photograph accompanying the breaking news article to accept that I was still in one piece. Pre-trapped-in-a-box me, even in the dimly lit café, passed as pallid but definitively alive. The gloom was not from lack of effort by the morning sun outside, currently putting on a furiously ignored show like a five-year-old's trampoline routine at a backyard barbecue. A thick and mobile shadow blocked it, blanketing the town of Huxley. In any other mystery, this shadow would be clouds foreboding a brewing thunderstorm, ready to cut me and a group of suspects off from the world. Not here. The atmosphere was going for something much more biblical. While people outside still hurried as if through a storm, foreheads tucked into elbow crooks, there wasn't a drop of wind or rain. The black shadow moved across the sky like it was alive.

The news headline wasn't a misprint: the victim was indeed me. Or, rather, the actor Laurence Birch, hired to play me in the upcoming television adaptation of the first of three murder cases I've solved. I'd met him enough twice on Zoom and twice in person to feel guilty about how quickly my eyes skipped over his obituary to seek out the inevitable words: production delayed.

'Reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated,' my fiancée, Juliette, said, plucking her phone back from me and shoving a gooey, buttered slice of banana bread into her mouth at the same time. Juliette has a list of careers as long as the rib-cage tattoo of a poetry-loving surfer: ski-resort owner, writer, murder suspect. All former. Also former was her long hair. She'd recently cut it for a charity initiative, and her style was now abrupt, slick and deserving of an invite to a prohibition-era soiree. She was, as usual, lightly sunburnt, from inhabiting the outdoors as much as I did hospital beds. We'd spent the Australian winter in the mountains, her in a transient ski-instructor role and me recovering from a bullet wound. 

'He doesn't even look like me,' I said. I took out my phone to look up the article myself and read it properly, but Juliette whipped it away.