The Heist

#1,” and the third “Pre-Op.” An elevator was to her left. A stairwell door was to her right.
    She eased open the door to the operating room and found a fully decked out surgical suite that took its design cues from an Apple Store. Everything was sleek and white. All the equipment gleamed like new cars on a showroom floor.
    She closed the door and peeked into the post-op room. There was the standard hospital bed, the IV stand, and the usual monitoring devices, but the similarities to any other hospital room ended there. The room was luxuriously appointed with fancy French furniture, ornate shelves filled with leather-bound books, a flat-screen TV, and a wet bar stocked with assorted spirits.
    He’s smart, she thought. Posing as an asbestos removal company was the perfect cover for Nick’s scam. It ensured that everyone at the hospital kept their distance from the old building while Nick and his crew were actually creating an elaborate set and staging their con.
    Finally, she went to the pre-op room. The door opened onto a long ward with an abandoned nurses station and several curtained-off areas behind it. She stepped inside and cautiously slid open the first curtain. An unconscious middle-aged man in a hospital gown was stretched out on a gurney and hooked up to an IV drip. Kate checked his pulse. It was strong.
    She made her way through the ward, yanking open curtains as she passed. All six of the men who’d come in that day from the airport were there, each of them sound asleep and, she assumed, a million dollars poorer.
    The windows in the building vibrated, and she heard the unmistakable
thwap-thwap-thwap
of helicopter blades above her. Nick Fox was on the roof, she thought.
Again!
    She ran out of the room and to the stairwell, climbing the four flights as fast as she could, which was remarkably speedy for a woman whose most frequent dinner companions were Colonel Sanders, Long John Silver, Ronald McDonald, and the Five Guys.
    Kate burst onto the roof ready to fire and saw a blue Las Vegas Aerial Tours chopper on the helipad, its side door open, several “doctors” and “nurses” inside.
    Nick Fox was not among them. He stood casually midway between her and the helicopter with his hands in his pockets, the wind created by the chopper blades whipping at his hair and flaring his white lab coat like a superhero’s cape.
    Kate had created the man of her dreams when she was twelve,and she’d hung on to the image. The dream man had soft brown hair, intelligent brown eyes, and a boyish grin. He was six feet tall with a slim agile body. He was smart and sexy and playful. So it was with terrible irony that over the course of the last couple years it dawned on Kate that Nick Fox was the living embodiment of her dream man.
    “Dr. Scholl?” Kate yelled over the chopper noise. “Really?”
    “It’s a very respected name in medicine,” Nick yelled back. “Glad to see you’re wearing sensible shoes.”
    Nick knew she always wore Dr. Scholl’s gels in her black Nikes. It was one of the many things he’d learned about her over the last couple years. Most of what he’d learned intrigued him. Some of it was downright scary. The scary part was offset by a physical attraction to her that he couldn’t explain.
    Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her flawless skin had a slight sheen from her dash across the parking lot and up the stairs. Sexy, but he suspected the fantasy the sheen inspired was better than the reality. She was the job. Probably wore Kevlar to bed. End of story. Still, he did enjoy playing with her. He liked her big blue eyes, cute little nose, slim athletic body, and her earnest dedication to making the world a more law-abiding place. It made his dedication to crime much more interesting.
    “You’re under arrest,” she shouted.
    “How do you figure that?”
    “Because I’ve got my gun on you, and I’m a great shot.” She took a step toward him.
    He took a step back. “I’m sure you are, but you’re not going to shoot me.”
    “Frankly, I’m surprised I haven’t shot you already.” She took another step toward him.
    “Still upset about those Toblerones?” He took another step back.
    “Take one more step, and I’ll put you down.”
    “You can’t,” he said.
    “I can shoot the testicles off an eagle from a hundred yards.”
    “Eagles don’t have testicles.”
    “I may suck when it comes to metaphors, but my aim is excellent.”
    “You can’t shoot me