Stolen Prey

you or call you outside of work, and you better stay away from me, too. I can’t help with the gold.”
    Both Turicek and Sanderson said that he’d done well, but he could see that both were sweating. He’d seen Turicek studying him, past his computer monitor, during the afternoon, and it occurred to him that if something should happen to him—call it like it is, he thought: if somebody killed him—then there would be no connecting thread between the theft at Polaris and Turicek and Sanderson.
    Would Turicek be capable of killing someone?
    He didn’t know. He suspected, though, from stories Turicek had told about his life in post-Soviet eastern Europe, that he’d know somebody who would not only be capable of it, but would do it for ten bucks and a pair of hubcaps.
    Huh.
    He got a kettle out and dropped in a package of spaghetti,blew more smoke. He could just begin to smell the sauce starting to get hot when there was a knock at the door.
    He went and asked, “Who is it?” and a voice said, “Police.”
    He opened it and started to say, “Hey—”
    Not careful enough.
    The two Mexicans blew through the door and smashed Kline back across his kitchen table, over the chairs, into the living room, and when he finally stopped rolling and twisted to look up, there was a gun in his face.
    “Do not say a thing.”
    Kline’s jaw worked but no sound came out. His mind was working, though: and his mind told him that these two Mexicans would find a way to get him out of his apartment, and then they’d cut him into sausages. Getting shot would be far preferable, and the only rational way out, if he couldn’t think of anything else.
    The second Mexican had shut the door; he had a small backpack and took out a roll of tape, and Kline figured that if they taped him up, he was dead. He loosened his bowels as much as he could, and tightened his stomach, and cried at the Mexican over him, “I shit my pants. Oh, God, I shit my pants.”
    The stench confirmed the fact; the two Mexicans were disgusted at this sign of abject cowardice, and Kline thought,
Gotta get in the bathroom.
    The Mexican with the tape said, “Put your hands up,” and Kline sobbed, “I shit my pants, man. I got a load in my pants…. Oh, God, I’m still shitting myself….”
    The older of the two Mexicans looked around and said, “The bathroom,” and Kline thought,
Please, Br’er Fox, don’t throwme in the bathroom
, and he sobbed, “Aw, Jesus, it’s still running out of me….”
    “Get in the bathroom,” said the Mexican with the gun. The muzzle was four inches from Kline’s eyes, and, still sobbing, and now holding the seat of his pants, he pushed himself to his feet and hobbled toward the tiny bath. The toilet sat directly in front of the door. To the left, there was a vanity counter with an absolutely critical drawer, part of an incompetent remodel: the vanity was too big for the tiny bathroom, but had been on sale at Home Depot.
    To the right of the sink, a tiny window, no bigger than Kline’s head, which might once have been intended to provide ventilation, was sealed shut with years of paint and silicone. The window looked out over the bookstore; or would have looked out, if somebody hadn’t painted the glass yellow.
    To the left of the door, an old cast-iron bathtub.
    Kline hobbled into the bathroom and turned and undid his belt, and dropped his pants, and the stench got worse, and Uno frowned and stepped back, but kept the gun pointing at Kline. Kline kicked off his jeans, and then his underpants, and then unrolled about ten feet of paper from the toilet paper roll, and looked down between his legs.
    The Mexican looked away, not wanting to witness this, and quick as a snake, Kline kicked the door closed and pulled the drawer out of the vanity.
    The open drawer blocked the door as effectively as a chain lock; Kline threw himself into the bathtub as the Mexican outside kicked the door, once, twice, and then Kline reached across with the handle of the toilet plunger and punched out the small window and began screaming for help.
    He screamed, at the top of his lungs, “MURDER! THEY’RE MURDERING ME! HELP! FIRE! FIRE! THEY HAVE GUNS! MURDER!…”
    The first bullets punched through the door and took out the toilet tank, and Kline dropped lower in the tub, but the tub was short, and his knees stuck up, and the Mexican, still kicking the door as Kline screamed, finally simply sprayed the bathroom with bullets, one of which went