Awesome

 For Darren. Today's muse. Cheers Dazz!

Awesome

Bobby Suarez was innocent. He had always maintained this, even as the police officers laid down the evidence before him. They told him they had caught him bang to rights. His DNA was all over the place.

Bob told them he didn't give half a shit where his DNA was or wasn't. He hadn't been to the barbers that day and he knew nothing about the robbery.

The police told him that they knew the West Side Rippers had been involved. They pointed out that Bob was wearing the traditional red and purple colours of the Rippers. Bob denied being a gang member and told them that his clothes were merely a coincidence. He thought he looked good in red and purple. Matter of fact he looked good in anything, that's why he was known on the streets as "Awesome".

The police told him that they had witnesses. People who had seen him there, could put him right at the scene during the robbery. Bob told them that as far as he was concerned, they could witness the back of his ass. They had nothing.

Unfortunately for Bob "Awesome" Suarez, the judge tended to see things differently. He sentenced Bob to ten years.

He still protested his innocence, even as they took him away. But by then, it was far too late.

They never got anyone else for the Barber Shop robbery. But then, why would they look? The witnesses they found (or more likely bribed, Bob was apt to tell people) said there was only one guy, and that guy was Bobby Suarez.

Bob had his own theories on who had taken a gun into Old Joe Feeney's shop and bludgeoned the poor guy half to death for the meagre takings. He reckoned it was certainly one of the Rippers, and he had his suspicions who. Right name, wrong brother.

His brother Billy was two years younger, three inches taller and twice as stupid. They had more than a passing resemblance to each other and during the middle years of Billy's teens, could have passed for twins. People frequently mistook Billy for Bob and Bob for Billy. Even their mother had to look twice.

On the day of the robbery the brothers had been smoking weed together in the Ripper's clubhouse. Bob missed that place. It wasn't a house as such, more of a dilapidated shack ready to collapse. The sort of place where you didn't lean too heavily on the walls.  There had been three of them; the Suarez brothers and Dinky Mahoney, so called for his diminutive height of almost seven feet. It certainly wasn't him the witnesses had seen. They would have certainly remembered him.

They'd been arguing. Dinky had announced that he was the biggest and baddest of the three of them. Billy had disagreed, adding that not only was he far better a criminal than either of the other two, he was also more intelligent, better looking and, of course, possessed the most superior genitalia. At this Bob and Dinky fell about laughing.

"Prove it," Bob had said, "I don't wanna see your dick though, I've seen that," he crooked his little finger and Dinky guffawed again.

Billy had blushed. "I will so prove it. Tonight, we'll meet again. Whoever has the biggest stash is the winner."

"Money from what?" Dinky asked, "You gonna go sell that fine ass of yours?"

"A robbery," Billy announced. "You gotta go knock somewhere off."

It had seemed a good idea at the time, and Bob had willingly agreed to it. The three of them had gone their separate ways. Billy, obviously, had not wandered far. Feeney's Barbers was just two streets away from the clubhouse. Bob had no idea whether Dinky had managed to find a victim or not, at the time when they were supposed to be meeting up and comparing notes, Bob was sat in the back of a patrol car with his hands cuffed behind his back, already denying all the charges against him.

So he was in jail. He wasn't too worried, his lawyers were already on the case. The DNA that the judge had used to convict him was going to set him free. Bob knew damn well there was DNA of his there, but it wasn't from the robbery, it was from the day before when Joe Feeney had almost sliced the top of his ear off. The guy was half blind. Turned out his lawyers had found some other witnesses, including the EMT who'd been attending something else entirely and had wandered in to take a look at the guy with blood spurting out of his ear. So no, Bob wasn't worried at all.

Besides, because the cops were so hell-bent on framing him for that robbery, it hadn't even occurred to them that he could have been involved in the bank heist across town. Bobby grinned to himself. He wasn't just a good criminal, he was Awesome.