The Heist

said. “That’s not a good idea.”
    “You’re being paranoid,” Brown said.
    “Just do it,” Nick said, sitting up straight. He had a bad feeling.
    Brown started to make a U-turn in the intersection. And that’s when Nick looked out the passenger window and saw the headlights of a speeding Muni bus cutting through the fog like a freight train emerging from a dark tunnel. The bus T-boned their car, sending it rolling over and over and over before it finally came to rest wheels up on the sidewalk.
    Nick was conscious but dazed, hanging upside down, belted into his seat, as the passenger-side airbag pressed against his face deflated with a hiss. The airbag, and the padding around his waist that he’d used to create his fake belly, had insulated him from injury. He heard the moans and groans of the other three men, which was good. It meant they were alive. His subconscious Scotty did an instantaneous full diagnostic and reported to his conscious mind, his inner Captain Kirk, that aye, they’d taken a beating, but all systems were functioning.
    I can get you impulse power, Captain, but the warp drives are down. It will take me at least two days to repair ’em
.
    Make it two minutes, Scotty
.
    You’re asking for the impossible!
    That’s what we’re paid to do, Mister
.
    He closed his eyes, shook his head, and willed himself to focus. He opened his eyes again. Through the shattered windshield he could make out the SFPUC workers running toward the car, and he could see that they were carrying guns. So much for them being SFPUC workers.
    Nick heard a crunch of glass shards under someone’s shoes. He turned his head and looked out the open passenger window. He could see whoever it was only from the waist down. The guy was wearing jeans and black Nikes, walking slowly and deliberately toward the car and holding a Glock casually at his side.
    Nick’s first thought was that another crew was ripping them off. There was a whole class of predators who specialized in hijacking scores made by crooks more ingenious and industrious than they were. It was one of the risks of the profession, especially when several parties had their eye on the same high-profile prize. Let the best man get there first, then take it from him.
    His second thought was more of a wish. He hoped whoever it was wouldn’t put a bullet in his head before walking away with the Crimson Teardrop. But if the guy was smart, he
would
shoot him, because Nick vowed in that moment to follow the bastard to the ends of the earth and steal the jewel back in the most personally humiliating and financially devastating swindle he could devise.
    The guy stopped at Nick’s window, aimed his gun inside, and then crouched down to look at him.
    “You’re under arrest,” FBI Special Agent Kate O’Hare said.

Kate hated the Federal Building on Mission and Seventh, which was designed not only to be environmentally friendly but also to promote healthy living among the people who worked in it. The main elevators stopped only on every third floor, ensuring that everyone had to walk up or down a flight or two of stairs every day. The only elevator that went to each floor was strictly reserved for deliveries and the disabled, so whenever a case brought Kate to San Francisco, she’d fake a debilitating limp. Sometimes she even brought a cane.
    “Gunshot wound,” she’d say when given a dubious look on the elevator by an agent in a wheelchair. “Tulsa, ’06.”
    Or “IED, Kandahar. Damn shrapnel.”
    From this day forward, she hoped that the San Francisco Federal Building would take on special meaning for her. The sight of it would always remind her of the day she finally nailed Nick Fox. And not, as she feared now, of the forty-five minutes and countingshe’d spent in the twelfth-floor women’s bathroom, her stomach cramped with anxiety.
    She’d taken an inordinate amount of time with her hair this morning, brushing it out and letting it fall to her shoulders, studying herself in the mirror. Everyone said she had her mother’s hair. Deep chestnut, thick, and straight as a pin. Easy to manage unless it was confronted by humidity, and then it was a disaster. The brushed-out hair wasn’t right, she decided. Too much of it. Too Saturday night. She tried wrapping it into a French braid and hated it. Too formal. So she pulled her hair into a ponytail, just like always.
    She’d started out with makeup too. And it looked pretty good until she threw up. So now she