Baccano! - Volume 20 - Chapter Pr2

Prologue 2 Vanishing Bunny

Meanwhile On the outskirts of Newark

“So is that really going to work?”

“Oh, it’ll be fine! The word failure isn’t in my dictionary!”

“Maybe that’s why you never learn anything from it.”

“Wha—? Just a— Listen, you!”

“Quit fiiighting.”

Rattle, clank. Rattle, clank. Rattle, clank. Ka-tunk.

A truck with a canvas back and a rattletrap engine bounced noisily down the country road.

It was traveling through the forests of Newark on purpose, taking roads that could just barely accommodate a single vehicle. Inside it, three women were having a loud and lively conversation. Two of them sat in the cab, while the third was poking her head in from the bed of the truck.

The woman in the driver’s seat had a ponytail and was about twenty years old. “So, Lana,” she asked the woman in the passenger seat, yawning, “is it really going to work?”

It was the same question she’d asked a minute ago, and the other woman’s temples twitched. “Huh? Excuse me? Why did you repeat yourself? Huh? Why did you ask that again?!”

Lana appeared to be in her early twenties, and she wore glasses. Her sharp eyes made her look older, which meant her actual age might have been the same as the driver’s.

“‘Why’ isn’t the question. I’m just trying to add the word failure to that bum dictionary of yours.”

“Excuse you?! What’s that supposed to mean, Pamela?! Define bum!!”

“Wow, it doesn’t even have bum in it… I swear. Aren’t people who wear glasses supposed to be smart? It’s total fraud.” Pamela, the woman with the ponytail, gave a disgusted sigh and shot a pitying glance at Lana.

Meanwhile, Lana was getting more and more worked up. She clenched her fists. “That is not what I meant when I said that!” she howled. “Also, excuse me?! You discriminate because of people’s glasses?! That’s…spectaclist!”

“Don’t get the wrong idea, Lana. I wasn’t discriminating against your glasses.”

“Y-you weren’t…? Well, that’s all right, then.”

“I was discriminating against you.”

“Why—yoooooou!”

Lana was about to put up her dukes when a mild voice from the back of the truck stopped her. “Yeeeesh. Quit fighting.”

“B-but, Sonia! Pamela’s being a jerk! She won’t come up with one single plan of her own, and then she nitpicks mine!”

“There are no alternatives for those bizarro schemes of yours.”

“Gwargh… Y-you…”

“I saaaid quit fighting.”

Sonia looked several years younger than the other two. She was wearing an army helmet for some reason and was resting her chin on the sill of the window at the back of the cab. Her laid-back mediation seemed to have been effective: Pamela and Lana turned away from each other in a huff, but the conversation went on, minus the arguing.

“I’ll go along with you on this. For now. I really don’t want a repeat of that time at the museum last year, though.”

“That wasn’t my fault! It was that weird mummy couple or whatever they were! If we ever see them again, I’ll thrash ’em good and shoot out their arms and legs three times each!”

“Don’t. It’s a waste of bullets,” Pamela told her blandly.

“Say, Pamelaaa?” Sonia chirped from behind them. “Will we get to shoot lots of guns on this jooob?”

“…Well, hopefully we won’t need to. If it happens, though, we’re counting on you, Sonia.”

“Yaaay!”

Although the three of them were talking like sisters, the conversation wasn’t exactly a nice, sisterly chat. That was only natural.

“So about this job. Nobody normal would ever think up a thing like this.”

“Huh?”

“Three women…trying to pull a train robbery.”

It was only natural because they were a gang of three female robbers.

They went by the name “Vanishing Bunny.”

Skimming over the particulars—as fans of the famous bandit Myra Belle (aka Belle Starr), the trio of young women was traveling around the States committing robberies.

Most of these jobs didn’t count as real robberies, such as stealing small amounts of produce from fields. When they did attempt the occasional big heist, they’d invariably get hit with a stroke of rotten luck and wind up in a shoot-out with the police or the mafia. They were tragic heroines of their own making.

That said, having muddled through multiple firefights with police squads and the mafia, they seemed to have the favor of Lady Karma Houdini, if not Lady Luck.

Their very worst crisis had happened when they’d stolen jewels from a museum exhibit and were on their way out. For some reason, the doors had vanished, and a crowd had formed outside. Worse, some members of that crowd were police officers.

From what they’d heard later, the doors had been stolen by a man and woman who were wrapped in bandages from head to foot like mummies. The crowd of onlookers had believed it was some sort of publicity stunt.

When Vanishing Bunny had emerged later, they’d been mistaken for accomplices. Not only had the law gotten a good look at their faces, but the cops had chased them around for two whole weeks.

“I really thought our number was up that time. Just the police would have been bad enough, but the mafia, too?” Pamela forced a smile, breaking out in a cold sweat.

Lana huffed in annoyance. “That museum door had sweethearts forever graffiti carved into it by a mafia don and his first love… Seriously, how is that our problem?! How was any of that our problem?! I wish they’d take their complaints to that mummy couple!”

“Lana, calm dowwwn,” Sonia chided in a voice that was as laid-back as ever. There was no telling what she truly thought of that situation. She didn’t sound angry or sad; she joined the conversation with nebulous confusion. “A museum, hmm…? Say, do you know what the train we’re targeting is called?”

“No, I do not!”

Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Pamela pressed her other hand to her temple. “…I wish you’d learned at least that, Lana. Since you’re the one who suggested we rob this train, I would have loved if you knew anything at all about it…!” Promptly collecting herself, she turned to Sonia, acting as if Lana didn’t even exist. “It’s called the Flying Pussyfoot… It’s famous. It has all these molded reliefs on both sides, like sculptures. People call it things like ‘the rolling objet d’art’ and ‘the traveling museum.’”

“How about that…”

“If we get there and you still don’t know what you’re doing, Lana, I’ll have to ask you if this is going to be okay again.”

A train heist.

Yes, this had been a popular method of robbery since the days of the Old West, but how could three women pull one off? That was precisely what concerned Pamela.

“It’s easy! We just have to stop the train while it’s on the bridge! If it stops right in the middle, there won’t be any way to leave it from the sides! Then we’ll carefully take over the passenger cars, starting from the back…and that’s the plan!” Lana said.

“…How are we going to stop the train?” Pamela asked.

“We can probably rig up gunpowder on the bridge and detonate it at some point, right?”

“There you go. Our failure is assured.” Exasperated, Pamela pulled over to the shoulder and got out a map, intending to look for lodgings nearby.

“Wha—?! Wh-why are you giving up already?!”

“Relax, Lana. I gave up on you ages ago.”

“Graaaaah! H-how dare you say that to me?! Hey, Sonia! You talk to her, too— Huh?” Lana turned around expecting to see Sonia, but her partner wasn’t there.

In her place was a mountain of cargo. Hastily, Lana stuck her head through the window, scanning the bed—and spotted Sonia sleeping like a baby in the shadows of the luggage closest to the front.

“…Well, that’s okay. You go on and sleep. We’ll be staying up all night tonight, so you should sleep while you can.”

“No, we’re obviously going to find a hotel and take it easy,” Pamela asserted.

“Just— Just wait a second! Hold on! I’ll explain the brilliance of my plan in a hundred thousand words or less, starting now!”

Thirty minutes later

In the truck that was parked on the shoulder, Lana’s sales pitch ran on for a while.

Lana and Pamela could hear quiet, drowsy breathing through the window that opened onto the truck bed, but neither the enthusiastic Lana nor her listener Pamela were paying attention to it.

In the end, Pamela compromised by agreeing to head to the scene and reopen their debate there, and they finally set off again.

“I swear… If we keep this up, who knows when we’ll ever be millionaires.”

“Don’t you worry about that. Just leave it to me, and… Look, we’ll even be able to live in a gorgeous mansion like that one over there!”

Lana superimposed her own future on the roof of the enormous mansion beyond the trees. Her eyes sparkled.

Pamela shook her head wearily and drove on without a word.

On the way to the highway, multiple cars passed them from behind. Pamela frowned. “I wonder if something happened. There are an awful lot of fast cars out today.”

“They obviously don’t belong to law-abiding citizens, so I bet there’s a war on. Let’s get out of here before we get dragged into it.”

“Good idea,” Pamela agreed. She stepped on the gas, heading away from Newark a bit faster than normal.

The rattletrap engine was still making a godawful racket thanks to its busted muffler, and so the women didn’t notice the discrepancy until later when they were out of town.

In the bed of the truck, the peaceful breathing had gone from a solo to a duet.