All Through the Night by Davis Bunn

legs.
    “You’ve got one chance,” Wayne said. “Just one. Nod and tell me you understand.”
    He responded with more of a body tremble than a nod. But the moan was clear enough.
    “I’m going to take off the tape over your mouth. You’re going to tell me where your safe is and give me the combination. Nothing else. I’ll go inside. Get what we came for. Then we’ll leave. You haven’t seen us and we were never here. Do we have a deal?”
    This time the nod was for real.
    Wayne ripped off the tape. “You cry, you die.”
    The guy chattered hard through the words. “You’ll let me go?”
    “You can trust us, Dorsett. More than we can say for you, right?”
    “Don’t have any choice, do I.”
    Wayne ground the pistol in harder. “Last chance.”
    “Ouch, wait!”
    “The safe.”
    “In the wine cellar. Closet beside the pantry. Lift the middle bottle of champagne and hit the switch. The rear wall swings out. Combination is oh-four-six-two.”
    “Say the numbers backwards.”
    When the guy did so, Wayne handed the gun to Jerry. Or tried to. Foster stepped in between them. “Give me that.”
    “Can you shoot him?”
    “You just go do your thing.” The old man took a two-handed grip on the pistol and took careful aim. Foster’s voice was raspy with banked-up rage. “I’ll just sit here and pray this guy asks me to blow him away.”
    Jerry leaned over and mashed the tape back over Dorsett’s mouth. “Naw. You watch. Our man is just dying to behave.”
    Wayne moved to his carryall and dumped the rest of his gear onto the boat. He balled up the empty bag and trotted back to the house.
    The island made a few night-type noises. Otherwise it was totally quiet. Neither of the other two houses he could see even had a light burning.
    Just another night among the isolated rich of Lantern Island.

EIGHT
    T hey spent the rest of a ragged night driving and then counting. Foster was good at the latter, Wayne discovered. So good, in fact, that Wayne basically relegated himself to keeping the accounts. Foster’s fingers lost about fifty years every time they took hold of another stack of bills. And there were a lot of those.
    The safe had been jammed full. Wayne had stuffed with both hands, sweeping one shelf empty after another. The bills were all denominations, fives to hundreds. Wayne had crammed the sack until he could scarcely shut the zipper, so full he staggered trying to lift it. He had then returned to the kitchen, stripped the plastic garbage bag from the trash can, and filled that as well. Even so, he had left far more than he had taken. He was still roaring with his adrenaline high, still waiting with every breath for the lights to flash and the night to shrill and the voice from the dark to shout for him to drop it and spread. Which did not give his feet wings on the return journey but did keep him moving even beneath that double-armed load. He had made it back to the boat with a couple of night birds sounding the only alarm. Wayne dropped the sacks into the boat, Foster pushed them off the bulkhead, and Jerry rammed the motor straight to full bore. The scam artist lay still, his eyes never leaving the sacks. They dumped him on the marsh island’s sandbank, just out of shouting distance from his home. Their last image of Lantern Island was of Zachary Dorsett standing two hundred yards from the edge of his almost perfect world, watching a significant portion of his hard-earned cash drill through the calm Gulf waters.

    While Foster counted and Wayne made notes, Jerry kept order and brewed coffee. Wayne used the community records to list what was owed to whom. At his written instructions, Foster separated the cash into little piles, one for each of the homeowners who lost their stash to the scam artist. They didn’t have envelopes, so Wayne wrote the names on slips of paper and fitted them under the rubber bands. A lot of the bills were old and greasy. Wayne doubted any of the group was going to