[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/AnHDHQE.png[/img] [i]"I'm only the messenger!" "Now you're the message", Parker told him and shot him.[/i] -- Richard Stark [/center] [b]Central City, Missouri 2:34 PM[/b] The front door swung open. Johnny Frost rushed in with his pistol out and slapped the man in the face with the butt of the gun. Dean Swarbrick came behind Frost and pulled him away from the now bleeding man on the floor. "The fuck, Johnny?" "What?" Frost asked as he pulled away from Swarbrick and grabbed the fat man on the ground by the hair and started dragging him across the carpet of the living room. "Stop!" The man on the ground said. "We ain't supposed to rough him up, Johnny." "What? They told us to come over here and talk this fucking guy, right?" "Yeah," Swarbrick shouted. "That's it. Just talk." Frost stared at his partner, then down at the man with the bloody face, and then back to Swarbrick. "There's a shorthand in this business. 'Take care of someone' means kill 'em and 'talk to someone' means to fuck them up." "I fucking work for the Top," the bloody man cried. Blood dripped off his chin and on to the carpet. "I'm on your side." "Shit." Frost helped the man on his feet and passed him a kleenex from his jacket pocket. "I'm sorry, guy. Like I said, it's a whole shorthand and I got mixed up." "Fuck you." Frost saw red and slapped the guy again, this time with an open hand. Blood spattered on the wall and carpet. "I'm trying to apologize and you want to tell me to fuck myself?" "Just tell us what's up," Swarbrick said. "Why are we here and why is it all fire important to talk to us?" "Lawson, you know how the big guy has his stache out in that little town?" "What about it?" Frost asked. "I do the money run out there to put it in the bank. Last few days I noticed a few cars following me. Always alternating, but they showed up enough for me to notice them." "How'd you notice them?" Swarbrick said. "They were junk heaps. One was a Dodge and the other was like a little car that those guys had in that movie Wayne's World, remember that?" "That's it?" Frost looked to Swarbrick and then back to the guy. "You call us out here and take one in the mouth just to tell us you notice a few shitty cars on the freeway? Stop wasting my time, man." The guy held one hand up, the other pressed to his nose to stop the bleeding. "I'm just letting you know. Can't say that I did my job." Swarbrick lit up a cigarette and blew smoke up over his head. "Look, the effort is appreciated, but that bank is well guarded by both the Top's guys and the local law out there. It's probably the best guarded small bank in all the country. Nobody in their right mind will try to rob that bank." ----- [b]Lawson, Missouri 2:45 PM[/b] "This bank is getting robbed!" Pulling back his coat, Digger Harkness revealed his arsenal of boomerangs. The small crowd in the Lawsons Savings & Loans recoiled at first, but looked curiously at the weapons attached to Digger's body. "Son," an old man said with a puzzled look. "Are those boomerangs?" "Sure as shit are, old man." Digger pulled one out and tossed it through the air in a perfect loop. "The thing I love about boomerangs is that they... hold on, I put too much muscle into that one... here it comes." He held his hand out and snagged the boomerang from the air. "They always come back. The thing I love about boomerangs is they always come back, that's what I was trying to say." "Call the cops," the bank manager said from behind the glass partition. On cue, the power to the bank went out. Two blocks away, Electro flooded the town's electrical grid with excess energy and blew the entire power grid for the city of Lawson before getting in his AMC Pace and driving out of town in a hurry. Out of the highly polished and reflective floor came Mirror Master, Captain Cold, Heatwave, and Rhino. "Props to the janitorial staff," McCullough said. "Every surface of the floor polished to mirror shine." "Boomer and Heatwave are on crowd control," said Cold. "Rhino and Mirror Master, you're with me to the vault." They leaped the counter, Rhino breaking through it, and found the vault door behind the counter. It was a large steel thing sealed shut. Cold stepped up to it and placed his palms on it. A spiderweb of ice began to snake across the vault door. Sweat began to bead and freeze on his brow as he dropped the temperature of the steel down to the extreme cold of liquid nitrogen. "Go for it," he said as he stepped back. Rhino's large and powerful fist shattered the steel door into hundreds of brittle pieces. They stepped over the pile and into the vault. There was not a lot of cash out in the open, but Cold's eyes were focused on the rows of safety deposit boxes on the far wall. Six rows of fourteen boxes from the top of the ceiling down to the floor. "We don't have time to get them all open. Mirror Master, open up a mirror bridge back to Central City and keep it open. Rhino and I will chuck them through the mirror." "Cops are coming," Boomerang shouted from the lobby. "Stall 'em!" Cold shouted back. Stepping outside, Boomerang and Heatwave were greeted by a half-dozen sheriff's deputies with guns. "Put your hands on your head and get down on your knees," one of the cops shouted. "Love to," Boomerang said as he flicked his wrist. A blinking boomerang twisted through the air and landed on the roof of one of the patrol cars. "Down now," Boomerang said to Heatwave. They hit the ground as the explosive boomerang erupted and sent the car into the air in a ball of flames. Cops started to scatter from the fiery wreck as Heatwave stood and took potshots at the fleeing deputies with fireballs. "We're ready!" Mirror Master shouted from inside the bank. "The mirror train is leaving the station. Last call!" The two turned and ran towards the vault. The entire contents, safety deposit boxes and cash, was gone. On the floor, Mirror Master looked up at them through the polished surface. "Jump towards me, one at a time!" Heatwave jumped and disappeared through the floor. Boomerang followed suit and landed hard on the floor. Mirror Master laughed while Boomerang shot him the bird. Still laughing, he opened the portal back up and Boomerang fell through the floor. In just five minutes, the bank was cleaned out and the Rouges were long gone from Lawson.