The Heist

his fear was that he might have fallen into an even bigger, more awful problem.
    “I don’t mean to seem ungrateful,” Tom said, “but who are you, and why did you just do that?”
    “I stepped in because you’re a magician with a hammer, nails, and a pile of wood and I want to convince you to work for me,” Nick said.
    “I’m not that hard to convince and there are easier ways to hire someone.”
    “This is not a typical job. For starters, I need someone who can transform a Palm Springs vacation home into a drug lord’s fortified compound in Mexico.”
    “Okay, that’s a little off the map.”
    Nick gave him the short-form explanation.
    “You saved my house from being taken by a sleazy banker who tricked me into a crap loan, and now you’re asking me if I’ll help you take down an even bigger, sleazier banker who ran off with people’s life savings?”
    “You don’t owe me anything,” Nick said. “You can walk away right now, and maybe you should, because there are people who’d call what I’m proposing illegal.”
    “Don’t care,” Tom said. “I’m going to love taking that son of a bitch down. Count me in.”
    Two days after Nick enlisted Tom Underhill, Kate stopped by her sister’s place at midafternoon. She’d hoped to catch her father while Megan was away, but her timing wasn’t perfect. Kate pulled up just as Megan was leaving in her huge Toyota Sienna for a Costco run with the kids. They rolled down their windows and talked to each other from their driver’s seats.
    “Good news,” Megan said. “The hunky airline pilot is back in town. I told him all about you and he’s very interested.”
    “I’m not.”
    “He didn’t even blink when I told him you’re an FBI agent,” Megan said. “Usually that sends them running.”
    “Usually?” Kate said. “How many men have you talked to about me?”
    “It doesn’t matter. Can I give him your number?”
    “No!”
    “Your loss. What are you doing here?”
    “I’m taking Dad to the shooting range,” Kate said.
    “This is his nap time.”
    “He takes naps?”
    “In case you haven’t noticed, he’s a senior citizen and he’s still recovering from the sport fishing trip to Mexico he took with his army buddies.”
    Kate knew that was his cover for going to Greece with her. “It’s okay, I’m sure that shooting at things relaxes him almost as much as a nap.”
    Megan drove off and Kate pulled into the driveway. Kate hadn’t planned on taking her dad shooting, but since that was the excuse she’d given her sister, they went to the range together anyway. It was very relaxing for them both. Afterward, she ran the broad outlines of the con and her misgivings about it past him over a couple beers at a bar on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills.
    “Sounds like a winner to me,” Jake said. “And even if it goes to hell, it’s not like you’re going to be backed against a wall in some third-world country and executed by an army of illiterate rapists that the bozos at the CIA, in their infinite wisdom, armed with U.S. weapons.”
    “But I could end up in prison.”
    He waved off her concern. “I’d break you out.”
    “You’d do that for me?”
    “You’re my daughter, aren’t you?”
    Kate smiled. Sure, he’d missed a lot of Christmases and birthdays during her childhood, but not many fathers could be counted on to mount a prison break.

When Neal Burnside was a kid, he wanted to be Superman. Over the years, especially those he’d spent as a federal prosecutor, he decided that fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way was a lousy line of work if you weren’t born on Krypton. By Burnside’s thinking, the Man of Steel could afford to be the all-American hero because his overhead was low. He didn’t have to pay a mortgage, property taxes, or even utilities on his Fortress of Solitude. He also didn’t have to deal with any crap. He could leap tall buildings in a single bound, change the course of mighty rivers, and bend steel with his bare hands without having to worry about FAA regulations, environmental impact reports, or union contracts. And at the end of the day, he could be satisfied going home with Clark Kent’s paltry paycheck because he knew he’d won clear, unambiguous victories.
    Burnside never reached the Clark Kent level of satisfaction as a federal prosecutor, because after a couple cases Burnside realizedhe didn’t so much care about the clear, unambiguous