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Naruto: Uchiha Shiroge Rebellion
The forklift and the industrial garbage truck had been staged at the extraction point days in advance specifically for this exact moment.
With a heavy thud, the last pallet of gold was lowered into the massive steel bed of the garbage truck. Five tons of solid gold, secured.
Now, all they had to do was casually drive a garbage truck out of Los Angeles County, and they were home free.
Suddenly, Dom's earpiece crackled. It was Donnie.
"Shit! I've got cops on my tail!"
"What?! Where?!"
"In the tunnels! I'm taking them on a joyride through the storm drains right now!"
Lawson's voice cut in immediately.
"Dom, the storm is already starting to break. Get the gold out of the city before the cops lock down the highways! I'll handle Mr. Brasco!"
"Got it! Watch your backs!"
Dom immediately ordered Vince to take the wheel of the garbage truck and roll out, while he jumped into a trailing escort car.
Jesse had already driven the stolen forklift into an abandoned garage a block away to hide the evidence. The extraction was executing flawlessly.
Oh, and there was still one getaway car parked near the concrete embankment, specifically left for Lawson and Donnie.
As of right now, five tons of gold had completely vanished into the wind. The only people left with five-star heat on them were Lawson and Donnie.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
Donnie had severely underestimated the LAPD. He hadn't expected them to deploy rapid-response tactical jet skis into the storm drains. Someone at the bank must have tipped them off about the subterranean escape route.
Right now, Donnie was being aggressively hunted down by his former colleagues. They hadn't opened fire yet—likely hoping to capture him alive—but as the chase dragged on, their patience would evaporate. The bullets were coming.
This wasn't a video game. If Donnie caught a bullet here, he wasn't respawning at the nearest hospital.
"Mr. Brasco, where the hell are you?" Lawson shouted over the comms.
"I don't know! I've been looping through these tunnels for ten minutes. I'm completely turned around!"
When you're blasting through identical concrete tunnels at sixty miles an hour, keeping a mental map is impossible.
"I can't track you if you don't give me a landmark!"
"I'm trying! Wait—I see daylight! I'm hitting an exit!"
Donnie gunned the throttle, flying out of the dark tunnel toward the blinding light.
But instead of shooting out into the LA River embankment like they had planned, the jet ski launched out into the open ocean. In his panic, Donnie had taken a wrong turn and hit an outfall pipe.
"What the fuck! I'm in the ocean!"
"The ocean?! I just got to the car! I'm heading your way! Keep them busy, find a dock, and I'll pull you out!"
Lawson was already behind the wheel of the getaway car.
It wasn't his Dodge Viper, but he had heavily modified it using the Gearhead Trump Card. Under the hood, it was an absolute beast.
He could hit the Long Beach coastline in minutes.
But as he tore through the streets, he noticed the storm clouds breaking. The rain was lightening up. Worse, he could hear the distinct, rhythmic chopping of helicopter blades.
The LAPD had scrambled the ghetto birds.
"Dammit! Jack, my tank is practically empty!" Donnie yelled.
"Hold on! I can see the coast!"
"I can't! It's sputtering! I'm ditching it at the closest dock!"
"Give me a location!"
"I'm pulling up near Thompson Pier! You should be able to see it!"
"Copy that. I know where you are."
Lawson glanced up through the windshield, tracking the police helicopters swarming in the distance. They were zeroing in on Donnie's exact location.
Because they didn't have to navigate street traffic, the choppers beat Lawson to the pier.
But the ground units were still fighting through the flooded streets. Lawson still had a window to pull Donnie out before the squad cars boxed him in.
"I'm on the pier! Where are you?!"
Donnie hauled himself up onto the wooden docks. His suit was completely waterlogged, sticking to his skin and severely restricting his movement.
Behind him, he could hear the LAPD marine units pulling up to the docks. Above him, the deafening roar of a helicopter spotlight sweeping the pier. In the distance, the wail of approaching sirens.
Donnie felt a crushing wave of despair. He was completely surrounded.
"Jack?! Jack?!"
Suddenly, a black sedan roared onto the pier, tires screaming against the wet wood as it executed a flawless drift, slamming to a halt inches away from him.
"Get in!"
Donnie practically collapsed in relief.
"I thought you left me!"
"Mr. Lawson would be very upset if I left you behind! Stop talking and get in!"
Donnie threw himself into the passenger seat.
Seeing their suspect jumping into a getaway car, the LAPD marine units finally lost their patience and opened fire. A hail of bullets sparked against the side of the sedan.
Lawson didn't even flinch. He slammed the gas pedal to the floor and hit the nitrous.
The car launched forward like a rocket. Now, it was just the two of them fighting for their freedom on the streets of America.
"What the fuck! Jack, I don't even have my seatbelt on!"
"Heh. You're not going to write me a ticket for that, are you?"
With Donnie safely in the car, Lawson's adrenaline spiked. He was completely in his element.
"Fuck you! If I still had my badge, I'd throw you in jail just for how you launched this car!" Donnie scrambled to click his seatbelt in, terrified he was going to be thrown through the windshield.
"Well, buckle up, because that was the safest thing I'm going to do today!"
Lawson kept his foot pinned to the floor, the speedometer ripping past 120 mph.
By now, over a dozen LAPD cruisers were converging on their position from every direction, trying to form a moving barricade.
But in Lawson's hands, the sedan moved like it had a mind of its own. He slipped through microscopic gaps in the traffic, drifting around corners and shattering the police blockade with impossible precision.
However, they were still being tracked by the helicopter spotlight. Lawson couldn't lose his wanted level just yet.
"Donnie! Turn on the radio and tune the frequency!"
"Got it! What channel?!"
"Tune it to the LAPD dispatch frequency!"
"What?!"
Lawson had ripped the radio out of a scrapped police cruiser and modified it to tap directly into the LAPD's encrypted dispatch channels.
Instantly, the car was filled with the frantic chatter of the police coordinators.
They heard exactly where the spike strips were being laid, which intersections were being blocked, and where the SWAT vans were staging.
Listening to the tactical feed, Lawson effortlessly bypassed every single trap the LAPD set for him.
Back at dispatch, the commanding officer was losing his mind.
"Fuck! How is this guy dodging every single roadblock we set up?!"
"Sir... do you think he's tapped into our frequency?"
Someone finally figured it out, but it was too late.
The commander immediately ordered a complete radio silence, but Lawson had already broken out of the containment grid.
And without radio coordination, the LAPD's massive numerical advantage instantly evaporated. The cruisers were essentially driving blind.
Then, a massive stroke of luck hit. The winds violently picked up again.
"Now!"
The sudden gale-force winds forced the LAPD helicopters to pull back and return to base.
The eye in the sky was gone.
Without the choppers tracking him, Lawson's pressure dropped by half.
He floored it, utilizing his terrifying driving skills to completely lose the remaining ground units in the maze of Los Angeles side streets.
Minutes later, he pulled into a pre-staged parking garage, ditched the hot sedan, and swapped to a clean, untraceable car.
The LAPD had completely lost them. The heat was gone.
It wasn't until they were cruising down the highway in the clean car that Donnie finally let out a long, shaky breath.
"God dammit. For a second there, I really thought my daughter was going to be visiting me through a glass wall."
"Mr. Brasco, do you really have that little faith in me?"
"Hey, when you're staring down three SWAT units and a chopper, you tend to assume the worst."
Lawson pulled the car over in a quiet, secluded industrial park. He wasn't in a rush to meet up with Dom. First, he needed to see what was inside the General Manager's safe.
He reached into the backseat and hauled the heavy steel box into his lap.
"Mr. Brasco, do you know how to crack one of these?"
This wasn't a standard, cheap hotel safe. It was a high-end, biometric and keypad-secured lockbox.
"Let me see it. Oh, it's digital? Honestly, these are sometimes easier to bypass than mechanical tumblers, but I need my tools."
"There's a kit in the trunk. I'll pop it."
A few minutes later, Donnie bypassed the internal circuitry and popped the heavy door open.
Inside were a few solid gold bars, some loose stacks of cash—and a single USB flash drive.
"A flash drive? Is this the ledger Lawson's looking for?"
"It has to be."
You don't lock a cheap piece of plastic inside a high-end corporate safe unless the data on it is worth dying for.
The Payday App had simply called it a "ledger," and Luca Pastore had used the same word. Lawson had naturally assumed he was looking for physical, paper accounting books.
The Bonanno capos were old-school mobsters in their sixties; none of them knew how to use a computer.
But Francis Ricci was younger and smarter. Once he stole the physical ledgers, he likely digitized all the records onto a flash drive for easy transport and destroyed the paper originals.
"Come on. Let's find a laptop and see exactly what Francis was hiding."
---
6:00 PM. Hesperia, California.
It was a quiet, dusty desert town located in San Bernardino County, roughly ninety miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Inside an abandoned warehouse, the garbage truck sat parked in the shadows. Three men were gathered around a portable radio, listening intently.
"...The tropical storm system has largely dissipated, and Los Angeles is expected to see clear skies tomorrow. In breaking news, at approximately 3:00 PM today, a massive explosion rocked the St. Martin's Bank in the San Paulo district..."
The three men listened to the entire broadcast in silence. When the news anchor moved on to the weather, Jesse spoke up.
"That's weird. The news didn't say anything about suspects being arrested. Why aren't Jack and Donnie here yet? Dom, should we try calling them?"
Dom frowned, staring at his burner phone. Lawson and Donnie were already two hours late to the rendezvous.
Something had obviously gone wrong.
But calling them right now was a massive risk.
"Jesse, what if the cops already bagged them and the news is just sitting on the story to flush out the rest of the crew? If we call that phone, they could trace it right back to us. Right, Dom?"
Vince voiced the exact paranoia running through Dom's head.
"No way. Are the LAPD really that smart?" Jesse scratched his head, clearly doubting it.
"Better safe than sorry," Vince muttered, his eyes drifting toward the back of the garbage truck. "Dom... maybe we should just split the gold and disappear. Jack and Donnie are probably sitting in an interrogation room right now."
A dark, greedy glint flashed in Vince's eyes.
Wealth corrupts. Not everyone can look at five tons of solid gold and remember their morals.
Hearing Vince suggest stealing their cut made Dom's blood boil.
"Shut your mouth!" Dom roared. "Until I know for a fact what happened to Jack and Donnie, nobody touches their share! And even if they did get locked up—or worse—their cut goes straight to their families!"
Dom's furious, ironclad loyalty made Vince shrink back, deeply embarrassed.
Right at that exact moment, Donnie walked through the warehouse doors and heard the end of Dom's speech.
"Wow. Lawson was right about you, Dom. You really are a stand-up guy."
Dom looked past him, confused.
"Where's Jack?"
"He had to run a personal errand for Lawson. He said Lawson himself will be here later to handle the payout."
Vince immediately scowled.
"What?! We have to wait for him too? Who the hell does he think he is?"
Dom didn't even yell this time. He just walked over and punched Vince hard in the shoulder.
"I said, shut your mouth!"
Vince rubbed his arm and angrily stared at the floor.
Dom turned back to Donnie, asking about the escape. Hearing how Lawson had out-driven a police helicopter and multiple SWAT units, Dom couldn't help but shake his head in respect.
Half an hour later, Lawson finally pulled into the warehouse.
He stepped out of the car wearing his real face.
"Sorry for the delay. I had to shake a few shadows before I came out here. Hope I didn't keep you waiting too long."
Dom walked over and pulled Lawson into a massive bear hug.
"Glad you made it out in one piece. We didn't wait long."
"Good," Lawson said, stepping back. "I'm not going to waste anyone's time. Let's get straight to business. As agreed, your crew takes twenty percent. Do you want it in gold, or do you want the bearer bonds?"
Vince shot a look at Dom and Jesse. His greed was getting the better of him again.
"I don't know, man. Twenty percent feels a little light for the risk we took."
Lawson didn't even look at Vince. He just smiled pleasantly at Dom.
"Dominic. Is he speaking for you?"
Dom silently walked over to Vince and backhanded him across the face.
Smack!
"This entire job only happened because Lawson planned it!" Dom yelled in Vince's face. "He funded it! He bought the gear! All we did was lift heavy boxes! Any three meatheads off the street could have done our job! You have zero right to demand a bigger cut!"
Dom was one hundred percent correct.
Out of the six people involved in the heist, only Lawson and Donnie were irreplaceable.
Lawson provided the entire operational blueprint, the capital, the explosives, the boats, and the heavy machinery. Without him, there was no heist.
Donnie's expertise was equally vital. Without him, they wouldn't have found the correct vault wall, and they wouldn't have cracked the safes.
The Toretto crew? They were just muscle. Honestly, Mia had played a more critical role than Vince or Jesse.
By acting as the inside man, she successfully misdirected the bank staff during the explosion, buying the crew those crucial few minutes.
After publicly putting his boy in his place, Dom turned back to Lawson, looking genuinely apologetic.
"I'm sorry about that, Lawson. Vince is just... seeing all this gold made him lose his mind a little."