The Rat Burglar raises the dart gun to the dummy, but instead of shooting at range, as is advisable, he starts creeping up behind it, risking detection with every step. One crack of an ankle bone, one squeak of shoe rubber, and he’s busted. He knows my audiometry; why would he risk it? It makes no sense. But it affords me the best chance I’ll get.

With my guts tied painfully in a Spanish bowline, I sponge across the floor toward the thief who has stolen everything from me. Unfortunately, when I train my sights on the Rat Burglar I realize it’s a lot harder to squeeze a trigger while viewing a human being on the other end of the barrel than it is a cube of ballistic gelatin decorated with the facsimile of a rodent. My arm shakes wildly. I have as much of a chance of hitting the Nakamura sword as I do the thief. I’m going to need to get much closer.

The sponges exhale under my shoes as I creep forward, but only I can hear it. At twenty feet I am still too far away to be confident in my marksmanship. Ditto fifteen. Ditto ten. I sponge forward until I am five breathtaking feet away. The Rat Burglar’s gun is aimed at the mannequin’s back. My gun is aimed at the Rat Buglar’s back. For a long moment we stand like this, suspended in time, guns wavering in space.

At this range, and at this angle, I detect two things. One, the syringe is a fatty. At least one hundred milligrams. And two, its odor signature is sperm whale feces and hamster vomit.

Motherfucker is going to juice me with over a hundred milligrams of Nix.

Then the Rat Burglar does something astonishing. His arm sags as if the dart gun is impossibly heavy. His head hangs. He reholsters the gun and pulls out a Cincinnati cord, wrapping the rubber tube twice around each hand. For totally inexplicable reasons, he wants to do this the old-fashioned way. He wants to choke me out.

The Rat Burglar’s arms are shaking. So are mine. We look like a tandem team executing a subpar field sobriety test.

He takes a step toward “me.” Behind him, I flex my arms until the barrel wavers mainly in the area between his shoulder blades. My vision goes fuzzy, then ultraclear. Bile and water tide in my mouth. Even though I have rehearsed dozens of tough-guy things to say at this moment, I cannot utter anything. Instead I just chamber a round and let the gun speak for me.

“Stop or die,” the gun says in imperative gun language.

The Rat Burglar freezes at the sound, slumps in defeat, turns around.