Normally, they would have been up by 7:30—they got up when the dog did—but their dog had had a big day yesterday, an extra walk up and down the hilly streets of Baltimore and a longer than usual game of tennis ball in the backyard, and was still asleep. So the problem wasn’t that it was too early when they heard a woman’s voice calling them from their living room at 8:45; the problem was that a woman’s voice was calling them from their living room.

“Jerry? Sandra? You there?”

It was Elena from across the street, they quickly realized. They knew it was Elena because she always called Sandra SAHN-dra; she’d done it from the day they moved in ten years ago. They didn’t know if it was an affectation or if she’d just heard it wrong or if she had some kind of quirky speech impediment, although she didn’t call her daughter Mary MAH-ry, and when she had her sewer line replaced, she didn’t talk about how cute the BAHK-hoe operator was.

“I’ll be right down,” Jerry called, jumping out of bed, naked from the waist down, running over to his chair to grab some sweats to throw on just as Elena walked into their bedroom, continuing to talk, oblivious to his state of undress. “…and I thought about calling Lyft or Uber Eats to see if they’d pick it up but I’ve never used them for groceries and I really need to get this dough made so it’ll have time to rise—don’t you just hate it when people bring store-bought!—so I thought I’d just come over and see if you had any yeast I could borrow—well, not borrow, I’m not going to return that same yeast to you when I’m done, of course, but next time I’m at the store—or Raymond if he goes first—” She winked. “I’ll get you some.”

By the time she stopped to take a breath, Jerry had his pants on, albeit untied, and Sandra had quickly pulled on and tied shut the robe that she grabbed from next to her side of the bed, and they were halfway down the stairs, easing Elena back to the front door, when it occurred to them that she was in their house. It was first thing in the morning, and she was in their house. How did she get in? The front door should have been locked.

“Elena,” Sandra interrupted the monologue, “how did you get into our house just now?”

“Oh,” she said, “the front door was open. I knocked a couple times, and when you didn’t answer, I just walked in and kept calling you ‘til you answered.”

Open? The front door was open? It made no sense. As the dread of what he thought might be true settled in, Jerry began looking for the everyday details of their downstairs.

“Sandra, where’s your laptop?” he asked, a bit hesitantly.

“On the dining room table,” she answered immediately. The laptop wasn’t there. Neither was his grandmother’s silverware chest that they kept on the bottom shelf of the china cupboard. He ran back upstairs to their bedroom, three steps at a time, and exhaled loudly when he saw his wallet, right where he’d left it the night before, but then opened it and found his two Visa cards and his credit union debit card missing. As he ran back downstairs, he noticed three light rectangles on the living room wall where until last night there had been three paintings.

Elena had resumed her monologue, now talking about her daughter and son-in-law who “just loves my homemade ciabatta!” coming for dinner tonight, the first time she’s entertained since the latest round of Pandemic quarantining—“we’ve all had our vaccines and boosters, don’t worry, so I’m not really wor—”

They’d been robbed. The words formed in Jerry’s mind somewhere between “ciabatta” and “worry.” Someone had broken into their house while they slept and robbed them. Someone had been in their bedroom as they slept. He ran back upstairs to his office. His I-Mac was still there, but his 2TB external storage drive was gone.

“…means boneless breasts are on sale, but I don’t—”

“Sandra, we’ve been robbed!”

“What?”

“Somebody broke in during the night and robbed us!”

“No, that’s imposs—” she stopped mid-sentence and gasped as Jerry pointed to the empty spaces on the wall where the paintings had been.

“No, Regis wouldn’t let that happen. He’d have barked; he’d have bitten them; he’d have scared—Where is he?” She looked in the living room, then ran into the dining room, then upstairs, calling, “Regis, Regis, ohmigod they killed Regis!” at which point Regis limped out of the spare bedroom, stiff from his arthritis and from just having just awakened. “Ohmigod, Regis, are you ok? Did they hurt you?” Regis sat down, scratched his elbow with his back foot, stood up, and ambled over to the back door to go out for his morning pee.

Jerry, meanwhile, was looking for his phone, hoping the burglars hadn’t found it. It was the new I-Phone 13, and he knew it would bring top dollar. Fortunately, he’d forgotten to plug it into the charger next to his wallet, instead leaving it in his yesterday’s shirt pocket, now in a heap of clothes on the chair. He fished it out and dialed 911.

“You’ve reached Baltimore 911. If this is not an emergency, please hang up and dial 311. If you’re calling the Baltimore Police for anything other than an emergency, please hang up and dial 410-385-1000. If you’re calling the Baltimore Fire Department for anything other than an emergency, please hang up and dial 410-385-0001. If this is an emergency, please stay on the line, and the next available operator will take your call.” The theme from Chicago Fire began to play, hold music by any other name.

As Jerry walked back down the stairs, phone to his ear, a man and a woman that he had never seen entered the house. The man was tall, skinny, and had a scruffy reddish-orange beard; he was wearing blue jeans, a Miami University tee shirt, sneakers, and a Wellfleet Public Library cap. The woman was wearing pink Crocs and what looked like a medical technician’s smock over blue jeans; the smock was covered with miniature Bart, Marge, Homer, and Lisa Simpsons. Her hair was short and styled, her eyes surrounded by some serious eye liner.

“Hey, that’s my cap!” Jerry yelled at the man.

“Yeah, cool,” he answered back, smiling.

“No, but how’d you—” Jerry tried to pursue it when the woman put her hand out to interrupt Jerry.

“I know you’re busy,” she said, “and we don’t want to take up any more of your time than we have to, but we have a file format question.”

“What?” Jerry said, giving them a look similar to the one Regis had given Sandra a few minutes earlier.

“Yeah,” the man continued, “we took your laptop and, y’know, we’re gonna sell it and the external drive, but nobody wants the files, and we know what a hassle it would be if you lost all your shit, so Lainey”—he nodded at the woman—“said we should return your data to you, but we don’t know if you’d rather have—you know—like the actual doc-x and Powerpoint and the raw photo and Garage Band files—”

“—or if you’d rather we converted everything to I-don’t-know,” the woman—Lainey, apparently—interrupted, picking up the sentence seamlessly, “pdfs or mp3s and JPEGs and shit so you could download it to whatever computer you end up getting, know what I mean?”

“You’re the people that robbed us?”

“Oh, and that I-Mac on your desk? Really outta date; doesn’t even have enough memory for the new OS; I don’t see how you do anything on it.”

“You’re the people that robbed us!” Jerry said again, this time more angry than surprised.

“Yeah, it’s just—”

“Well, technically, I didn’t rob you,” Lainey said. “I was out in the truck while Andy and Curly were in here. I probably would’ve come in, but I’d just done my nails—you like ‘em?” she held both hands out in front of her, “and I didn’t want to risk getting nail polish on your stuff; it can be such a bitch to get off—y’know—upholstery and shit like that.”

“I’m on the phone with 911,” Jerry said, showing them his phone. “The police are gonna be here any minute!”

“Oh yeah, good luck with that,” she said, knowingly. “Usually takes them 20, 40 minutes to pick up. You probably haven’t even heard the Mannix theme or NYPD Blue or Hill Street Blues or Blue Bloods—”

Andy interrupted again. “My mom loves that show. She’s had a hard-on for Tom Selleck ever since Magnum P.I..”

“Did you know Erin had a son with Tom Brady?” Lainey asked both of them, just as Sandra and Elena walked into the room. Elena was on her phone.

“Jerry, who are these people?” Sandra demanded. “What’s going on in here?”

“We were just talking about Blue Bloods,” Andy said.

Elena put her hand over the phone. “I love that show! Been in love with Tom Selleck ever since Magnum P.I.!”

“They’re the ones that robbed us!” Jerry said.

“Well, technically—” Lainey started again.

“Ohmigod,” Sandra gasped, “Are they holding us hostage?”

“Technically,” the bearded guy—Andy—said, “it wasn’t a robbery; it was a burglary. I’m almost sure that for it to be a robbery, you’d have to have been awake, and we’d have to have confronted you in some way.”

“Wait a minute,” Lainey said to Andy, “so are you robbers or burglars or thieves?”

“We’re thieves, for sure,” he said—it was obvious he was thinking it through as he spoke—“because we took stuff, but I don’t think we’re robbers because you slept through it,” he nodded toward Jerry and Sandra, “and well, now I think about it, doesn’t burglary require breaking in somehow?”

“And the door was open, so you didn’t break in!” Lainey nodded.

“The door was open?” Jerry blurted. “Why was the door open?”

“Crap if I know,” Andy said, “it’s your house.”

“Why was the door open?” Jerry asked again, this time to no one in particular. “I went to bed,” he said, looking at Sandra, “and you said you’d lock up after Sheila left.”

“Ohmigod,” Sandra said. “Sheila. We were working on the letter to the homeowners association, and I was fading fast, so I said we could just finish it today, either here or on Zoom, and she said we were so close that she’d just stay and do it then, and I said ok, but I have to go to bed, and she said don’t worry about it, I’ll close up when I leave, and I said be sure to pull the door all the way shut and listen for it to latch, otherwise you think it’s closed but it’s not, and the wind’ll blow it open, and ohmigod, I’ll bet that’s what happened.”

At that moment a car horn honked. And honked again. Jerry ran to the front door, hoping that maybe it was the police even though that didn’t really make sense, and saw a man leaning against a dirty white pickup truck that had a green driver’s side door, a primer-coated hood, and multiple dents. He looked to be in his late 20s, early 30s, about the same age as the other two. He looked to be a few inches shorter than the red-bearded guy, had dark, curly hair, and was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey with “#7 Roethlisberger” on the back and a Budweiser cap.

He honked again.

“Andy, Lainey, get your asses out here, goddammit,” he yelled at the house, “I gotta get to work! Oh, are you Mr. Jeffers?” he said in a normal voice as Jerry took a couple steps off the porch toward the truck.

“How’d you know my name?” Jerry asked.

“It was on your credit card. I gotta tell you, I just love your taste in art—”

“—Are you one of the—”

“—That one acrylic, the abstract that looks like seed pods? To die for! It really spoke to my soul. I’d give anything to have one like—”

“—You do have one like that, you have that, you have our paintings, you buncha punk robbers!”

“Y’know,” Curly said, “technically, I don’t think you could call it a rob—”

“—Yeah, we’re sorry you’re taking it so hard.” Andy poked his head out of the front door. “We’re really trying to make it up to you with your computer files, but seriously, man, that art just blows my mind! The one that was over the piano, the one that looked like a two-dimensional Calder mobile…”

“Hey, you jerk-offs,” Curly yelled from the truck, “if I don’t get to work in the next few minutes, they’re gonna fire my ass, and then I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“You know I’ve called 911,” Jerry yelled at Curly; “the police are gonna be here any minute! I don’t think you’re going anywhere but jail.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Curly said. “I just heard the Murder She Wrote music playing through your phone, so they haven’t even picked up yet. It’s a crime how long it takes to get through to the police anymore.”

“Yeah,” Lainey said, “nothing’s gonna happen at least ‘til that Law and Order ‘ka-chank-ka-chank.’”

Andy looked at Sandra and Elena and Lainey and Jerry and then at Curly tapping his fingers on the truck door and then at the empty spots on the living room wall, and then he turned to Jerry and shrugged and said, “We’ve really got to get Curly to work, so we’ll just talk to some Genius Bar people we know and come up with a plan for your files. C’mon, Lainey.”

“OK,” Lainey said as she and Andy walked down the sidewalk and climbed into the pickup. “Nice meeting you. You have a beautiful house. And I agree with Curly about that acrylic. Speaks to me right here.” She put the nail polished fingers of her right hand to her heart.

Jerry heard the Law and Order ‘ka-chank, ka-chank,’ followed by a voice: “Thank you for waiting. If you feel that your life is in immediate danger, please press ‘one.’ Otherwise, press ‘two,’ and an operator will be with you soon.” Watching the pick-up get smaller and smaller as it drove away, Jerry pressed “two” and held the phone away from his ear as the theme from Dragnet played.

– Jon Shorr

Author’s Note: Recently, I read a news story about a family whose dog was returned to them after their car was hijacked. I also recently spent an inordinate amount of time on “hold” with a local government agency. Those two experiences led me to write “The Heist.”