The Heist

were great. I don’t know how you were able to keep focused with all those people walking in front of the stage on their way to the buffet.”
    Boyd pulled a roll and two pats of butter out of his pocket and set them beside his plate. “You have to be a bit delusional to be an actor. In my mind, I wasn’t in a restaurant performing on a plywood stage with grocery store cashiers, car salesmen, and college students,” he said. “I was Willy Loman, desperately trying to hold on to a life that was coming unglued. That was my world and I totally believed it.”
    “I did, too,” Kate said.
    “I couldn’t ask for a better review,” he said, buttering the roll, “particularly from a Hollywood producer.”
    “We aren’t Hollywood producers,” Nick said.
    Boyd looked up from his buttering. “I thought you said you were producing a show in Los Angeles.”
    “We are, but it’s not like anything you’ve been involved with before,” Nick told him. “We are operatives with Intertect, a private security and detective agency, and we’re on the trail of an international fugitive who has stolen a great deal of money that we want to recover for our client.”
    “What do you need an actor for?”
    “To find this man we have to make one of his accomplices talk, and to do that we have to make him an actor in a play, only he’ll be the only one on the stage who doesn’t have a script.”
    “He won’t even know it’s a show,” Kate said.
    Boyd set his roll aside and took up a drumstick. “You’re talking about running a con.”
    “You’re very perceptive,” Nick said.
    “I did six weeks as Harold Hill in
The Music Man
at the Loon Lake Casino,” he said. “The thing is, cons are usually illegal.”
    “Think of this as an elaborate practical joke,” Nick said.
    “Exactly,” Kate said. “A practical joke that is sort of illegal but not entirely. We’ve been asked to do what the police can’t, and that’s catch a man who has robbed thousands of people out of their homes, their savings, and their retirements. We’re using kidnapping and fraud to accomplish that goal. If we don’t fool the mark, and he goes to the police, we could all get arrested.”
    “But it’s highly unlikely that he will,” Nick said.
    Boyd gnawed on his drumstick. “What’s in it for me?”
    “Fifty thousand dollars,” Nick said. “And the role of a lifetime, an acting challenge greater than any Oscar, Emmy, or Tony award winner has ever dared or attempted.”
    “Because the Oscar, Emmy, and Tony award winners don’t have to,” Boyd said.
    “But we both know that they wouldn’t because they don’t have the guts or the skills, and you will because you do,” Nick said. “And this will prove it.”
    Boyd sat back and looked at them. “And nobody will ever know.”
    “You will,” Nick said.
    “There won’t be any reviews, no film to put on my reel,” he said. “It won’t get me more work.”
    “It might from us,” Kate said.
    “But if I am not utterly convincing in my performance, or another actor lets me down, or a set falls, or some other calamity happens that I can’t act my way out of, I could get thrown in jail.”
    “Or worse,” Nick said, “you could spend another night performing here.”
    Boyd met his gaze. “How big is my trailer?”
    “You won’t have a trailer,” Nick said. “But you will have a mansion.”
    “I’m in,” Boyd said. “I don’t think I caught your last names.”
    “We’re on a first-name basis,” Nick said. “Last names are cumbersome.”

Wilma Owens could drive, steer, or pilot just about anything that moved people from one point to another—cars, planes, boats, Zambonis, motorcycles, bulldozers, helicopters, steamrollers—with the possible exception of the Space Shuttle, not that she wasn’t game to give it a try. She’d grown up in Alvin, Texas, living in a double-wide next to her daddy’s auto body shop. She raced moto-cross and dirt track stock cars, and got a job straight out of high school driving a dump truck for Owens Excavating. Two years down the road she married the owner’s son, Buster Owens, and since they didn’t have any luck getting Wilma pregnant, she kept driving the dump truck. After twenty-six years of marriage and dump truck driving, Wilma divorced Buster, citing terminal boredom. She got a couple double-D implants that perked up her boobs, joined a spin class, and set out on what she’d named The Big Adventure.
    Nine years into