The Heist

his face in the double-Ds.
    He led Willie inside and slammed the door shut, and she grabbed him again and pulled him into a kiss. Burnside pressed her back against the wall and was hiking up her dress when he felt her suddenly stiffen, and not in a good way. She was looking at something over his shoulder. He was just registering that when someone yanked him away from her and backhanded him across the face.
    He staggered back, momentarily stunned at the sight of two men with black ski masks over their faces, holding him at gunpoint. His first reaction wasn’t fear but anger, and not toward the armed intruders but at the high-end security company that had installed his outrageously expensive, and supposedly state-of-the art, alarm system. I will sue them into oblivion, he thought.
    Willie was frozen against the wall, staring at the man nearest Burnside in wide-eyed terror.
    “What do you want?” Burnside asked.
    The man pointed his gun at Willie and shot her in the forehead, killing her instantly. Burnside’s gasp of horror was louder than the muffled gunshot, which had a deceptively gentle, pneumatic sound. Willie’s head slammed back against the wall with a
thunk
, and she slid lifelessly to the floor, leaving a wide streak of blood.
    Burnside stared at her and backed away, holding his hands up in front of him and waving them as if that simple gesture would, like shaking an Etch A Sketch, just make it all go away. “No, no, no.”
    His attention was so focused on the shooter who’d blithely killed Willie that he wasn’t aware of the other man next to him until he was jabbed with a stun gun. And then he wasn’t aware of much at all because fifty thousand volts coursed through him. He felt heat, heard something go
zing
in his brain, and he was on the floor staring up at the ceiling. His mind made an attempt to reboot, but his body lagged behind, and his first clear thought in that helpless moment was the hope that his sphincters had held.
    He was dragged outside as a black panel van roared up his circular driveway and slid to a stop on the far side of his car, just past his front steps. One of the hooded men opened the back doors of the van, and Burnside was about to get tossed inside when a woman shouted at them:
    “Halt, FBI.”
    While the scene that was unfolding was a fake, the FBI part was true, because the FBI agent was Kate.
    The two men dropped Burnside, whirled around, and exchangedgunfire with Kate. The shooter nearest to Burnside took a hit and was blasted clear off his feet and into the side of the van, his chest covered in blood. Scrambled neurons notwithstanding, Burnside made a feeble, uncoordinated attempt to crawl for cover. Car doors slammed, more shots were fired, and the van sped away.
    Kate looked down at Burnside. “If you want to live you’ll do exactly what I say.”
    She pulled him to his feet and dragged him down the driveway toward the street, where her Crown Victoria was parked, the engine running. She opened the door to the backseat. “Get on the floor.”
    “What?”
    “On the floor!”
    Kate shoved him into the car and slammed the door shut. She ran around to the driver’s side, jumped behind the wheel, and floored it, the tires burning rubber and the rear fishtailing as she fled the scene.
    “Who are you?” Burnside asked.
    “FBI. Are you okay?”
    He did a quick check of his body. There were no injuries, and he hadn’t peed his pants. His body and his dignity were intact. Thank God for that.
    “Yes, I’m fine, but they killed my date.”
    “Of course they did. They never leave witnesses. Anything with a pulse gets put down. If you had a goldfish, they would have killed that, too. Do you have a cell phone on you?”
    He felt around in his pockets and found his phone. “Yes.”
    “Toss it onto the front passenger seat,” she said.
    He flipped the phone over the seat and Kate threw it out her open window.
    “What? Why?” he said.
    “Do you want to live?”
    “Yes, of course,” Burnside said.
    “Then do as I tell you. If they are tracking your cell phone, then another hit squad is closing in on us right now, so we only have a few minutes head start. Give me your shoes.”
    “My shoes?”
    “You heard me. Your shoes. And your jacket, too. Make it fast.”
    He slipped them all off and handed them to her, and she tossed the whole bundle out the window.
    “What did you do that for?” he asked. “What was the point to that?”
    “In case they slipped a