the heist

The Gotham morning was a gray sheet of sleet and sirens.

Inside the Gotham Trust & Savings, the hum of fluorescent lights mixed with the quiet shuffle of bored employees and yawning customers. It was just another Wednesday.

Until the jester walked in.

He wore a worn black hoodie, gloves, and jeans that looked like they'd seen too many streets. But what caught everyone's attention was the mask white, cracked at the edges, shaped like a smiling jester. It tilted slightly to the left, giving it a permanently mocking expression.

He didn't shout. He didn't fire.

He moved.

Within seconds, the fake pistol was drawn and aimed at the ceiling. "Nobody move," he said not yelling, just loud enough to carry. Calm. Icy. "Phones down. Hands where I can see them."

People froze mid-step, mid-word, mid-breath. A guard near the front twitched, but he never made it to his holster. Quentin had clocked him during casing. He pointed the pistol right between his eyes.

"Bad idea," he said flatly.

The guard stopped.

Quentin moved fast he knew his window was tight. Two minutes, max, before silent alarms triggered response. Three if luck was on his side.

He tossed a black duffel at the nearest teller. "You know the drill. Don't stall. Give me what's in the drawer and the bait pack if you want, I've accounted for it."

The teller blinked. "Y-you want the bait pack?"

"It's only fair."

She scrambled.

Quentin had picked this branch for a reason. No vault access without two managers. But weekday tills held between three to six grand. It wasn't a jackpot. But it was a start.

He kept an eye on the layout. Mirror angles. Door reflections. Glass surfaces. He never stood still. He never looked unsure.

Thirty seconds in $2,100.

The next teller hesitated, whispering something. Her hands moved slow. Too slow.

He stepped forward and slammed his fist on the counter. "You stalling, sweetheart?"

She flinched, fumbled faster.

Another $3,500.

Quentin slipped behind the counter he knew the layout, every inch. During casing, he'd marked the hallway that led to the secured employee section: a locked steel door.

He reached into his pocket.

The stolen keycard clipped from the assistant manager one nights ago during a "bump and lift" con run by Kieran slid through the scanner with a soft beep.

Door unlocked.

Inside, he moved fast. Not to the main vault he wasn't stupid. But to the armored deposit chute behind the secondary desk, where small businesses dropped off weekly cash bags. Quentin had timed the schedules. This branch received its Wednesday courier run early.

Two canvas bags sat in a steel drawer.

He grabbed them, zipped them into his duffel, and slipped back out the hallway before the staff realized he was gone.

By now, two tellers had filled the bag with register cash. Total: just over $5,000.

Add the courier drop?

Another $9,000 in unmarked bills.

Not a fortune. But in this city? It was a second chance.

As Quentin backed toward the exit, he glanced at the security camera—directly into it. He tapped the side of his jester mask. "Smile for the Bat," he muttered.

Then came the shift. A change in the hum. Murmurs over hidden radios. Movement by the guard.

Time was up.

Quentin threw the fake pistol down and ran.

Out the door, through the sleet, into the chaos of morning Gotham.

A squad car skidded around the corner.

He didn't go left or right.

He went straight, vaulting over a barricade into a maintenance alley.

stumbled over a dumpster, tore through a narrow passage behind a laundromat. He stripped the mask off, shoved it into his hoodie. Then the hoodie came off—revealing a completely different shirt underneath. Stolen from a thrift bin the night before. He shoved the hoodie into a trash bag already stashed behind a vent.

Thirty more seconds and he was just another kid walking down the sidewalk, duffel slung over his shoulder, earbuds in, head down.

A siren screamed past.

He didn't flinch.

Not until he turned the corner, ducked into an abandoned building he'd prepped beforehand, and finally dropped the bag.

He'd done it. No grand fortune. No action movie explosions.

But he'd robbed a Gotham bank.

"Don't tell me you didn't miss this Nolan."

***

Nolan snapped back into control with a jolt like surfacing from a dream too deep to remember. The duffel bag was still in his hand, heavier now, stuffed with bundled bills and the faint stink of adrenaline. His heart was pounding.

He stumbled into an alley and pressed his back to a wall. Slowly, carefully, he pulled the mask from inside his hoodie and stared at it.

"God," he whispered. "What did I let you do?"

But even as he asked, he already knew.

They'd pulled it off.

He took the long way to a nearby storage locker, one of the rundown self-service types with cash payment and zero oversight. For now, he stashed most of the money in a duffel inside one of the units, wrapping it in a trash bag and taping it under a false floor panel he found in the corner. Then he took $2,000 in small bills and set off toward Gotham's Lower Eastside.

The buildings here leaned on each other like tired old men. The streets were cracked, loud, filled with tired faces and flickering neon. He found the apartment complex he'd cased earlier—Garrison Heights, if you could even call it that. No doorman. No cameras. The landlord was a skeleton in a bathrobe who barely looked up from his tiny television.

"You got first month's rent and deposit?" he asked, voice raspy.

"Yeah," Nolan said, voice steady.

"ID?"

Nolan hesitated.

The man waved him off. "Eh, forget it. Cash is cash. Unit 3B. Try not to die in there."

The apartment was a pit. Bare concrete walls, floorboards that bowed in the middle, a mattress that had seen war.

But it was his.

Nolan shut the door, locked it up tight. He

Next stop: a pawn shop on 9th and Colburn. He bought a used laptop, an older-model camera with a detachable lens, and a busted tablet he talked down to half price. Then a few more stores—he picked up copper wiring, adhesive putty, an old flip phone, a soldering iron, and a backpack to carry it all.

He returned to 3B around 6 PM.

And he got to work.

The table he used was crooked, and the single bulb overhead flickered like it was about to die. But he didn't stop. He took apart the camera, rewired the tablet's internals, embedded the phone's SIM chip into a homemade relay trigger. Soldered wires to motion detectors he pulled from the wall of a cheap security light. Reinforced the doorframe with tension sensors wired to alert his laptop whenever someone tampered with the lock.

By midnight, he'd rigged three surveillance cams, one facing the front door, one at the hallway window, and one hidden inside a coat rack aimed at the center of the room. All routed to a local wireless signal connected to his laptop, which would auto-record and store footage to a drive hidden in the ceiling tiles.

It wasn't elegant.

But it was his fortress.

The city rumbled outside, sirens in the distance, dogs barking in the alleys. He sat in his chair at 2:07 AM, the sweat on his back cold now. He looked around at the flickering monitors, the looping camera feeds.

The room was silent.

Finally, he whispered, "Thank you."

No response.

But for the first time in a long time, he felt like he wasn't entirely alone.

—

A/N: I hope this chapter showed you Nolan isn't worthless, he is actually extremely smart just not street wise.