The Heist

or Chris Hemsworth either. “Are you a hooker?”
    “I don’t think hookers buy men drinks,” Kate said. “I think it works the other way around.”
    “I haven’t got a lot of experience with hookers.”
    “Me neither. Do you want the beer?”
    “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”
    They sat in awkward silence until two fresh mugs of beer were set in front of them.
    “Cheers,” Kate said, hoisting her mug.
    They clinked glasses and Chet chugged his down. “I meant no offense.”
    “None taken,” Kate said.
    Chet wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m recently divorced and I guess I’ve forgotten how to talk to women. Then again, seeing how things went with my ex, maybe I’ve never known. What brings you to Gallup?”
    “You,” she said, and told him basically the same story they’d given Boyd Capwell two days before. “We need your makeup and special effects skills to convince our mark that what is happening is real.”
    “I’m in,” he said.
    “Wait a minute,” she said, startled. “You don’t even know what we’re willing to pay.”
    “Has to be more than what I’m getting now,” he said. “Plus you bought me a beer.”
    “Has it occurred to you that what we are proposing is most likely illegal, and if things go wrong you could be arrested?”
    “Lady, jail can’t be any worse than this hellhole I’m in now.”

If George Pogue had a mustache, he would have been twirling it like a silent-film villain. In the absence of a mustache, the pale, balding banker sat behind his desk, tapping his pen on a bulging file folder, looking at Tom Underhill as if he was an unpleasant smudge on his calendar. To Tom, the tapping of the pen sounded like the ticking of a stopwatch, counting down the seconds until his home was taken away from him, his wife, and their three children.
    “I’m not asking for a free ride,” said Tom, dressed in his best suit and tie. He wanted to impress the banker with his professionalism, but he felt like a kid trying to pretend he was a grown-up. “I am willing to make payments.”
    “How gracious of you,” Pogue said.
    “All I ask is that you adjust the principal to take into account the reality of the marketplace. We both know that the house isn’t worth much more than half what I paid for it.”
    When Tom bought the house in 2006, it was at the height of the Southern California housing market, and $557,000 seemed like a steal for four bedrooms and two baths in Rancho Cucamonga, a rapidly expanding suburban community in San Bernardino County. Thousands of houses were spreading across the valley and creeping up the hillsides toward Mount Baldy. But then the housing bubble burst, the market took a dive, and jobs in the area evaporated. Entire housing tracts became ghost towns.
    “But the fact remains, five hundred fifty-seven thousand dollars is what we paid the builder on your behalf,” Pogue said. “That is cash that is now gone. I fail to see why the bank should take the loss.”
    “Because I was stuck in a subprime loan with an adjustable interest rate that skyrocketed. Every six months it jumped up, even as my income was going down. I repeatedly tried to renegotiate the terms, but you wouldn’t let me.”
    Pogue held up his hand in a halting gesture. “I don’t need to hear the litany of excuses or your version of events. The fact is, you have fallen woefully behind in your mortgage payments.”
    “I’ve sent you a check every month, but you haven’t cashed the last four of them.”
    “Because the amount you are sending doesn’t meet the minimum payment due.”
    “It’s what I can afford,” he said. “It’s what my payments were before you kept jacking up the interest rate.”
    Pogue waved off the remark. “It has come to the point that we have no choice but to exercise our right to seize the property and auction it off to recoup our losses.”
    Tom took a deep breath, trying to control his anger. He didn’twant to be on the eleven o’clock news that night, depicted as the angry black man who threw himself across a desk and strangled a white banker.
    “Instead of listing the house for half what I paid for it, and then letting it sit vacant for years while squatters and vandals strip the place,” Tom said, “wouldn’t it make more sense to just lower the loan amount to that same figure so that I can afford to stay in my home, maintain the property, and provide you with cash flow?”
    “It’s more complex than that,”