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→Of course, it didn’t help that I’d also moved out of my offices and brought all my files and office equipment to my apartment. My kitchen, actually, making it completely useless for anything other than file storage.

→And there were more boxes behind the wall of boxes we could actually see. I’d completely lost Mr. Wong. He was a dead guy who lived in the corner of my living room, perpetually hovering with his back to the world. Never moving. Never speaking. And now he was lost to the ecology of commerce. Poor guy. His life couldn’t have been exciting.

→A wall of boxes lined my apartment, ending in a huge mountain of superfluous products in one specific area of the room. Since my apartment was about the size of a Lego, the minute amount that was left was like a broken Lego. A disfigured one that hadn’t survived the invasion of little Lego space aliens.

→Admittedly, my apartment was a mess, but I still didn’t know what that had to do with my card. That card was a tool. In the right hands—like, say, mine—it could make dreams come true. I looked around at all the boxes of super-cool stuff I’d ordered: everything from magical scrubbing sponges for the everyday housewife to two-way radios for when the apocalypse hit and cell phones became obsolete.

→“It’s exactly like embezzling.” After practically shoving me past my threshold, she closed the door behind us and pointed. “I want you to take a look at all this stuff.”

→“Isn’t that like embezzling?”

→“Apparently.”

→“You can funnel money?”

→“And they’ve all been canceled. I have to make sure I get paid every week. I’ve also funneled all of your remaining funds out of your bank account and into a secret account in the Cayman Islands.”

→Well, crap. This day was going to suck, I could already tell. “Love the yellow,” I said, becoming petty as she herded me out of her apartment and into mine. “You don’t look like a giant banana at all. And why did you cancel my favorite shopping channel in-store credit card? I only have three.”

→“Time.”

→“Time?” I asked a little hesitantly.

→“Not so much kicking you out as putting my foot down. It’s time.”

→“And they fell for it?” Now I was officially appalled. “Who did you talk to? Did you talk to Herman, because he sounds super cute. Wait.” I screeched to a halt before her. “Are you kicking me out of your apartment?”

→“Simple. I called and pretended to be you.”

→“How?”

→I was in the middle of contemplating how familiar they looked when Cookie took hold of my wrist and hefted me off her sofa. “I can do that,” she said as she nudged me toward the door.

→They always wore white rubber masks and carried guns, but they never drew them. Not once in the series of eight bank robberies, thus their title.

→The news anchor was talking about the recent rash of bank robberies. He showed surveillance footage of the four-man team, known as the Gentlemen Thieves.

→“What?” I thought about acting all flustered and bent out of shape, but I was out of shape enough without purposely adding to the condition. In reality, I was a little in awe of her. “You can do that?”