The Fool's Run

That’s my personal record,” LuEllen said from the door. Her face was screwed tighter than I’d ever seen it.
    “Right. I’m done.” I threw all the tools back in the tennis bag and wiped my forehead on a shirtsleeve. “Christ. I’m falling out.”
    “Let me in there,” LuEllen said. She pulled open the drawers in the file cabinets and dumped the papers on the floor.
    “Like we were looking for money,” she said. “Let’s go.”
    We walked back to the front door, where she picked up her tennis bag. “Carry mine,” she said. “It’s heavy.” I stripped off my gloves and took her bag. It felt like an anchor was stuffed inside.
    “What’s in here?” I asked.
    “Guns.”
    “What?”
    “Pistols. Heaters. Rods. Gats. You know. Guns. One of the Ebberlys is a collector.”
    “Why take them? If we get stopped . . .”
    “Because this is supposed to be a horseshit smash-and-grab burglary, looking for money, dope, jewelry. One inch up from a stereo thief,” she said as we stepped out on the porch. She carefully pulled the door shut behind us. From ten feet away, it would look intact. “Nobody but a real specialist will leave guns behind. On the street, pistols are as good as cash. If we left them, the cops would know something was wrong. We had to take them.”
    “So what do we do with them?” I asked as we walked out of the Ebberlys’ driveway.
    “Throw them in the river,” she said. “Drop them in a sewer. I don’t care. We couldn’t leave them.”
    Our walk back to the car seemed to take twice as long as the walk to the house. A mailman came down the street in his red, white, and blue jeep, and nodded at us as we went by. LuEllen told me twice to slow down and talk. “You look like one of those long-distance race-walkers,” she said with a practiced smile. “Slow the fuck down.” At the car, I dropped the tennis bag in the back and buckled up before we pulled away.
    “Jesus Christ,” I said after a couple of blocks, as my stomach uncoiled.
    “It does get intense,” LuEllen giggled. She went into her purse for the cocaine again and took two hard hits.
    I’d never been caught inside a factory during one of my midnight research excursions. With a couple of exceptions, I walked inside with a regular employee, a paid guide. If somebody had stopped us to question my presence, the employee was supposed to claim I was a friend waiting for him to get off, that we didn’t think it would hurt if I hung around for a while, sorry about that, etc.
    On the few occasions I went into a hostile plant, cold, the pre-entry research had been so thorough and the objectives so limited, that I had been more interested than excited, and not particularly worried.
    This entry had been different. More free-form. Like jazz, say, compared to Bach. If you’re an anonymous guy in a huge defense plant and a security guard comes by, that’s one thing; there’s a ninety-nine percent chance you can talk your way out of any problems. If you’re in somebody’s house and they walk in the door, that’s something else altogether.
    I was still buzzing from the entry and LuEllen started backseat driving. She kept me three miles an hour under the speed limit, and called out every street and stop sign. When we got back, Dace met us at the door with an anxious look.
    “What happened?” he demanded.
    “What does it look like?” asked LuEllen.
    “We went in,” I said, grinning. “It was perfect.”
    “Get the computer stuff?”
    “Yeah. We’re wired in.”
    LuEllen walked across the room and grabbed him by the ears. “C’mere, you,” she said, and tugged him into the bedroom and slammed the door. I was left by myself in the front room. A few minutes later, when I realized the apartment wasn’t quite as soundproof as I had thought, I got the watercolor kit and drove down to the Potomac. It was hot and humid; the buildings across the river shimmered like white silk scarves, and I tried to get them down just like that.
     
    I GOT BACK to the apartment late in the afternoon, arriving just behind a metallic-blue Corvette. The ‘Vette took the first available slot and I pulled in three spaces down. The ’Vette’s driver was already striding down the lot when I got out of the car. It was an entrancing sight. She was small, dark-haired, and perfectly built. She moved like a dancer.
    She used her key at the entry door and let it close behind her. I used my own key and caught her waiting for the elevator. She