The sickly yellow car turned left into a garage and disappeared from view, and Tomas thumped the dashboard.
“There we are, we got him!” he crowed. “Let’s go!”
He reached for the glove box, where two knock-off Chinese .45 pistols sat side-by side. His brother caught his wrist, and shook his head.
“Aw, come on, Sergio!” said Tomas. “What’s the sense in waiting?”
Sergio glared at his younger brother. Younger by ten minutes, but still.
Both men wore identical white shirts with identical blue jeans. They had identical haircuts of identical hair and wore mirrored identical sunglasses. They were, in fact, very hard to tell apart from one another. If you really had to, and didn’t mind getting close enough, you could do it by the teeth – Tomas’ had been broken in a fight when he was sixteen and the replacements didn’t quite match, so that he had a white line along the bottom half of his top row.

“The sense,” said Sergio, pinching the bridge of his nose with his black-leather-gloved thumb and forefinger, “is that we wait for him to leave again before we break in!”
“But that’s half the fun!” said Tomas, pouting. “Besides, what if the safe is locked?”
“That’s what these are for,” said Sergio, patting the brown bag on the backseat. It jingled. He settled down, but something was bugging him. “And of course it’ll be locked, Tomas, it’s a safe. People don’t leave them lying open, it defeats the purpose!”
“Well what are we supposed to do while we wait?” said Tomas.
“I don’t know about you,” said Sergio. “I’m going to get some rest.” He pulled the lever on the side of his seat and leaned back til he was almost horizontal. Tomas glared at his brother.
The glove box fell open at a small tug at the lever, and Tomas reached inside. Next to the cold steel of the handguns was what he was looking for. He pulled out the book-sized tape case and flipped through the selection. He rolled down the window and spat on the ground outside – all disco. He pulled a tape out. Gave it a listen. Ejected it and tossed it out onto the sidewalk.

Nineteen tapes later, he had run out of options. Sergio was well and truly asleep, snorting and groaning in the distinct way he didn’t know to imitate when he was pretending. Tomas reached under his seat. God damn! Where had it gone? That bastard must have moved his magazine. He better give it back. It had Tomas’ favourite centerfold.
Well, if Sergio was going to go around stealing from him in broad daylight, what god damn incentive did he have to do what Sergio told him? Tomas reached into the glove box and extracted his pistol. It was a good imitation of a 1911. Came from the same bootlegger as its sister gun, that rested next to it.
“Little close for sisters,” Tomas said to himself with a filthy laugh. He opened his door and stepped out with a crunch into the pile of colourful audiotapes, stuffing the gun into his belt.

Sergio awakened to the sound of splintering wood. “What the hell are you doing to my radio, Tommy?” he murmured. Then the fog of sleep cleared, and he recognised the sound was coming from outside the car. Across the street, in fact. Sergio sat up in time to watch Tomas glance up and down the street and dart inside the house, the door half-shattered around the lock.
“Shit!” he said through his teeth and reached for his pistol.

Tomas didn’t know anything about the man who lived here, except that he had something valuable. Sergio handled that side of business. He was, as he liked to say, smart muscle. Along for the ride, fifty-fifty.
The walls of the entryway were subdued red, with a thick carpet underfoot that cushioned his step. He could hear the sticky sound of bare feet on tile around the corner. Coming to investigate the noise, no doubt. He raised his gun and pressed himself against the wall, and when the footsteps came close he reached out-
And grabbed a woman. His hand covered her mouth instantly, his gun dropping to jab into the small of her back.
“You make a noise and I make you a cripple,” he hissed in her ear. “Got it?” The woman nodded. She had long, black hair and smelled intoxicatingly female, and Tomas almost couldn’t resist wrapping his arms around her. But that would cause Problems. She might scream. He nudged her forward. “I won’t hurt you as long as you help me out,” he said. She nodded again.
The lounge, round the corner, was empty as well. From the backyard, a child’s voice and the voice of a man could be heard. Playing together.
“You’d better be careful a DINOSAUR doesn’t come get you!” said the man, and then roared comically.

Edwige resisted the urge to call out to her husband, and stole a glance at the mirror in the opposite wall of the lounge. It didn’t tell her much – a face she didn’t recognise behind her, shrouded behind dark glasses and a blank, impenetrable expression. She almost screamed a moment later when an exact double of the face joined it on her other side.
“You took your time,” said one of the faces. “I had to start without you.”
“You weren’t supposed to start at all!” hissed the other.
Her husband’s voice from the backyard again. “Darling, did you see what that noise was?”
The other face, the serious one, whispered: “Someone drove into a fence post next door.” Edwige nodded. The smiling one, the one who had smelled her hair and threatened her, uncovered her mouth.
“Help!” she screamed, and stamped back on the foot of the smiling double. The other one grabbed her before she could run, but not before the smiler had fired a wild shot into the wall.
The serious one tossed her aside onto the couch, and said “Hold her down,” to his grinning duplicate. The back door was opening.

Sergio trained his pistol down the hallway towards the back door as it opened, and a white-haired man started down the hallway.
“Stay where you are, old man!” he yelled. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder to Tomas, restraining the woman by her wrists, and then back to the old man, whose hands were slowly rising to an approximation of overhead.
“This is your wife?” said Sergio, a little disbelieving. That settled it, the old man must have a whole hell of a lot in that safe.
“Please,” said the old man. He had a faint accent that Sergio couldn’t quite place – German maybe. Dutch? Swiss? Turkish? Who cares, he thought. The old man continued: “Please, take anything you want. Don’t hurt us.”
“Yeah, we don’t want to have to hurt you. Take me to the safe, old man,” said Sergio. He took a few hesitant steps closer and let the gun drop so it would only strike the old man in the belly if he pulled the trigger. The old man nodded and pointed to a door leading off that back hallway.
“Follow me,” he said.

As the serious one left, Edwige felt a surge of terror through her body at just the thought of being alone with the smiling one. His hands pressed down on her wrists and as he drank in her scent she could smell his sickness in the air between them. His perverse desire crackled like electricity, made her hairs stand on end.
“He gets upset if I have too much fun,” said the maniac. Edwige saw her own horrified face reflected back at her in the black lenses of his glasses, like the dispassionate eyes of a raven. “But what he doesn’t know…”
The smiler leaned forward and kissed Edwige’s collarbone tenderly, where it was exposed by her wide-necked sweater. He would have gone on, if it hadn’t been for the gunshot.
“Shit!” he yelled, straightening up and grabbing his own pistol out of his belt, swinging it from Edwige to the hallway and back again.

Goddammit, why had the old man had to do that? Sergio grabbed the bag and ran out into the hall.
“What happened?” said Tomas.
“He tried for my gun. I put him down,” Sergio replied simply. At these words the woman let out a wail, which Sergio answered with two bullets with the silent demeanor of one merely cleaning up after himself. “Come on,” he said to Tomas.
“Wait!” said the smiling brother. “The kid.” Sergio nodded, picked up a throw pillow, and went back to the door to the yard. From outside there were two muted bangs like someone slamming a door. Then he came back, discarding the smoking pillow, took a look at the woman with her two bullet holes (One in the heart, one in the throat), and left.
After a second, Tomas followed him.