Putty in the bank robber's hands, Karen stood with a nine millimeter Glock aimed near her right temple as she singed one of the cops gathered outside the bank's doors with her stare.

"If that pig tries to play Superman, you're dead."

The gunman's lips brushed her ear when he spoke, and a familiar quiver rippled through her stomach, ballooning into a wave of fear and anxiety. He tightened his arm around her neck, reaffirming his grip on her. She struggled against his clutch, digging her fingernails into his forearm, but to no avail.

He stood still, contemplating his next move, she guessed, as he held her against him like body armor.

Do something! She tried willing the officer with the Dumbo ears to make a move. With her eyes narrowed and her stare focused on him, she hoped that somehow the message would zip through the mystical confines of the universe and pop into the mind hovering between the large ears that stuck out from the sides of the cop's head.

She was still staring when she and the robber suddenly began moving backwards, the robber smart enough to know he'd better not turn his back to the cops.

As they shuffled back, Karen figured the gunman was probably going for the rear exit that led to the parking lot behind the bank. "What are you doing?" she managed to ask, frantic, her voice failing, her eyes darting from wall to wall searching for an escape she knew didn't exist.

"Showtime," the gunman whispered through clenched jaws.

Karen’s muscles ached to fight back, stiffening against his pull. But to no avail again. His grip remained firm. He maintained control of her body as if she was a puppet on string. It happened often.
He led her away, past the huddle of bank employees, customers, and the rent-a-cop he'd disarmed, and then paused at the exit.

Sure that he was examining what awaited him outside the doors, Karen conducted her own surveillance. At least four cop cars were parked out back, the lights on top of them twirling in a haze of blue and red, not a siren blaring. The cops had their guns drawn, and were using their patrol car doors as extra buffers between themselves and their bulletproof vests.

The robber gulped deep breaths. Then burst through one of the doors.

Karen’s world moved in slow motion. The cops scurrying to the back of the building appeared animated like characters on the pages of a flip-through book. Mouths moved, but the words were thick and muddled as if they were being played back on a tape recorder in slow speed.

Despite the chaos, she managed to spot Dumbo ears. He was the first to shoot.

He shot Karen.

A flame of pain burned through her arm then grew into a ball of heat that soared through her.

The gunman let go and she fell. Darkness began to hover.

As she lay face up, the officers who rushed over to her dimmed to faceless shadows. Her vision blurred, and the hovering darkness swallowed her.

The next morning, she sat up in bed picking at her dry hospital eggs and giggling in between sips of orange juice as she read about the robber being shot to death by the cops. She had asked Sonny to gather up his stash of the laundered money he'd earned over the past four years and to take them away somewhere long before she had fallen in love with another man. But Sonny had refused to listen.

"So where are you now?" Karen whispered, her tone sarcastic as she stared at Sonny's photograph. Appearing beside the article in the newspaper's Metro section, the picture was probably one of the photos snapped of Sonny while he was booked for some other crime.

"'Want something done right, do it yourself,'" she continued mocking, reciting Sonny's motto. He usually spoke those words before connecting his fist several times with her face or her ribs or her abdomen. She was really no use to him until it came to sex and crime. Well, no more, Sonny, she yelled at him in her thoughts. She had played his hostage decoy for the last time. But his motto never rang so true before.

Karen noticed the door to her room edging open, and she tossed the newspaper beside her food tray.

An officer entered. The cop with the Dumbo ears inched to her bedside.

"Hi, Ms. Richardson--"

"Call me Karen, please."
"I just wanted to stop by to apologize."

His voice dripped with sincerity, his tone easing past her ears and settling in her heart. "But you saved my life." She cast a low, steady glance down his body. His slightly muscular arms were just barely noticeable beneath his light blue uniform shirt. "Besides, you didn't mean to shoot me."

They shared smiles of conspiracy as comfortable silence hung between them. She and David knew how the gig was going to end all along, but they had to remain careful. He was still a cop, and the ink on some of the reports filed in the case of the attempted bank robbery was barely dry.

He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, holding her palm in his for a moment longer before finally turning to leave. They were both aware that their plan could have backfired or gone wrong some other way. A lot could have happened differently, including Sonny deciding she was suddenly expendable. He could have shot her before David had the chance to carry out his part of the plan to get her out of Sonny's clutches.

Later that afternoon, she met with a couple of other cops to give her account of the robbery she had encouraged Sonny to commit. Soon after the officers departed, a doctor entered her room to inform her that her prognosis was a full recovery. She downed the pain killers the doctor instructed a nurse to give her, then relaxed against her pillows. Fantasies of her and David lounging on some tropical island fluttered through her mind as she grew drowsy from the medicine. Imagining the two of them on a white sand beach, living about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars richer, thanks to Sonny's stashed profits from his illustrious criminal life, made for a nice doorway into the dream realm. She couldn't wait to kiss those Dumbo ears again.

Jumbled voices woke her several hours later. She lacked a sense of time, but with her room now lit in soft yellow light, she figured it was now late night or perhaps early morning.

Karen soon recognized the doctor's voice, but not the voice arguing with him. The two men sounded like they were trying to fuss quietly, their voices low. Still, she detected the tension in their words. Her pulse rose. Had the plan gone wrong, after all?

She was sure her heart skipped a beat when she recognized the voice whispering just above her.

She struggled to lift her heavy eyelids. Through half-opened eyes, she stared at the shadowed face until its hazel eyes, Roman nose, and big ears grew more visible.

"I'm sorry," David whispered one last time, and then stepped back.

His silence magnified the words being spoken by the other men, and Karen began to panic.
Her head throbbed. Her stomach whirled. A cold shiver clawed its way down her spine. The man challenging the doctor was obviously another man of the law, possibly a detective given the business suit he wore. It did not take her long to understand what was happening: David had managed to get the big guns to target her. His deception brought tears to her eyes and stuffed her throat with a dry lump that threatened to choke her.

"This woman is recovering," the doctor argued in her defense.

"And she can continue to heal, but I'm afraid she'll do so in custody," the suit responded before striding to her bedside.

He announced himself as Detective Gerod. Then bound Karen’s left wrist to the bed rail with a pair of handcuffs. By the time he finished informing her of her rights and rattling off a list of charges, anger simmered beneath her panic.

Fraud…Conspiracy…Money laundering… Some of the detective's words echoed in her mind as she spied David stealing a moment to crook his lips into a wry smile as he stood behind Gerod.

Her case went to trial within the following year. She suffered a good amount of embarrassment and harassment, thanks to the local press, especially, but she got a bit of a kick out of the Inside Edition episode where the story about her ordeal was titled "Damsel in Distress or Criminal Mastermind?"

Two years and five months later, she received a letter from David. ‘Dear Karen,’ it read, ‘I loved you, but couldn't resist the temptation to take the money for myself once I'd thought up the idea…’Blah, blah, blah… ‘All I really had to do was get the money out of Sonny's apartment and then tell Gerod that you'd made a sort of deathbed confession, believing you might die from your gunshot wound when I first visited you at the hospital. Already growing suspicious of you, Gerod proceeded to investigate and quickly saw how the pieces fit together. With my help, of course. The man was the perfect pawn…’ Blah, blah, blah… ‘Brazil has beautiful people and mountains. Wish you were here…’

Karen understood what David meant by informing her of his whereabouts. He was not only taunting her, but also making a point of how Brazil was a country that lacked extradition laws. What David failed to understand, though, was that she was bound not to spend her whole twenty-year sentence behind bars, particularly if she continued to be the model inmate she had become. David had failed to realize that it would be her coming after him, not the law.

She figured that one good bait and switch deserved another, and could not wait to hack off those Dumbo ears.

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