A/N: This quote popped up on my computer screen at work - quotes tend to do that here - and I immediately thought Danny and Rusty. I meant to focus more on tone, but I got bored so just churned it out. It's not bad, though. Well, I'll let you be the judge, shall I? Please review, I really do appreciate them.
-for you!
Prefer loss to dishonest wealth: the former will bring you momentary sorrow, the latter lasting remorse.
Rusty watched his best friend read the message on his doormat with amused eyes. It was only the second time anyone else had ever walked on that mat that really understood the irony. The older man grinned. "Nice." Rusty nodded acknowledgement and twisted his keys in the lock. To be technical, he hadn't stolen the house. "Where'd you get it?"
"Ex-girlfriend." To be more technical, the money to purchase the $3.5m pad had been gained by less than honest means. He didn't earn that much from playing late-night poker with Topher Grace and his B-list soap-opera friends. But she wasn't to know that.
"She didn't know." Danny Ocean smiled at the thought and stepped over the mat, past Rusty and the open door. He couldn't help giving a suspicious left-right glance as he shut the door. The things television had done to him. If he was the wordy type, he could have written a book about them.
"She didn't know," he agreed. "Sit down. I'll copy those." He took the Bellagio vault plans out of the other man's large hands and went through into the 'office'. He couldn't remember the last time he went into that room. Nice view.
Rusty had to admit, Danny always made him slightly nervous at first. He was so assured, knew exactly what he was doing. Never lost control for a minute. Someone, once, had paid him the same compliment. He'd smiled graciously and accepted the comment, of course, but he knew he only acted that way because he admired the way it was done by others. One other in particular.
He brought the plans and the copies back to his spacious living room. Danny stood admiring his glass cabinet. He grinned and took the hint, dropping the copies on the table and picking up a bottle of whiskey off the kitchen bench. "Reuben'll throw something at us if we turn up at this kind of hour," he reiterated. He wanted to get into it. Something this big had never even been attempted. He couldn't sit and think about it. That was the way he pretended to operate. Not the way he actually did.
"Yes, he would," Danny said calmly. "So calm down. We're not going anywhere tonight."
Rusty sat down and the older con followed suit. "Spare bed's made up if you want it," he teased. They both knew neither of them would sleep tonight. He leant forwards and spread out the still-warm paper over the table. The vault stared solidly back. It really didn't seem to want to give anything up to him. "Something this big I assume you have a vague idea of how we're going to crack it," he said mildly.
"More than a vague idea," Danny agreed.
"Oh, the cleverness of you," he murmured wryly. Danny ignored him.
The two automatically adopted the same posture as they bent over the diagrams. "Frank should be transferred this week to the Bellagio to give us a better idea of the route to the vault, but this is what I've got so far." Rusty lifted his eyes from the plans and studied his friend's face. Prison had not been kind to him. He looked tired somehow, though the excitement from the job was starting to lift his face. the performer noticed that his audience wasn't listening and his dark eyes met Rusty's blue ones. "Want to pay attention?"
"There's something missing from this picture," he replied absently, taking a measured sip of whiskey.
"Whatever it is, I think you'll find it in the kitchen." Rusty grinned. Danny knew him so well.
"You want something?" Rusty called back from the depths of the aforementioned cupboard.
"I'm fine." He nodded. He'd known – it just seemed polite to check.
"So tell me."
"We're going to need good electronics and a killer greaseman."
He frowned, pouring some kind of sugary cereal intended for children into a bowl. "This is Terry Benedict's vault. We can't just wriggle in there."
"I know. We still need a good greaseman."
"Okay. I know somebody."
"Of course you do."
This stichomythia was what Rusty loved about working with Danny. Pauses were comfortable interludes in a rapid-fire conversation. They accepted each other's role in the good con: Danny was the brains. He didn't have a problem with that or understand quite how the ideas formed under that salt-and-pepper hair. And Rusty knew people. He knew people, individually, that could do exactly what Danny's infallibly genius plan required of them; drivers, grifters, actors, greasemen. And he knew people, generally, as a group; how they would react, how to get them to do what he wanted. So they were the perfect team, really. Danny did the plan. Rusty made the plan work.
"So: greaseman." He pulled a notepad out of a drawer under the coffee table and scribbled a few headings on it. Greaseman. Yen. "Electronics. One man do?"
"If he's good enough." Rusty nodded. Electronics: Livingston Dell, Mitch Halbrum?
"And you say Frank C is in?" Danny murmured acquiescence. Frank Catton. "Okay. What else do we need and why?"
The older man bent over the plans again. "In three weeks there's a big fight at the MGM Grand. Benedict'll go watch, probably with a date or at least guests he's promised company to. So what we've got to do is make him late enough and impatient enough to leave one of us off the floor. Someone can get hold of the codes and then slip off. If we have control of the cameras they can get down the elevator and blow the vault open without anyone seeing anything. Then we take control of their phone lines and divert the 911 call –"
Danny broke off at a chuckle from Rusty, who was watching the progress of this plan as a figure in his head strolling through the diagrams in front of him. "What?"
Rusty looked up, still smiling. "Sometimes I could kiss your mind, Danny."
The object of his attentions grimaced. "Please don't."
"I won't." Rusty held up the hand that didn't have his cereal in it in surrender but the mood that had led the statement out of his lips remained. "I missed you. Life is so boring without you."
Danny blinked. Not surprise at the sentiment, exactly, Rusty guessed, but at the fact that he'd actually voiced it. Mr Cool-as-a-Cucumber. He shrugged inside. Did the man good to know he wasn't just a lump of stone every now and then. "If it's any consolation, it wasn't exactly parties every night down my end either."
"Oh, it was parties every night for a while," Rusty countered. "They just weren't as fun."
Danny gave him a that-didn't-help look. He grinned innocently until Danny looked away. "So, Reuben tomorrow," he deflected. "He's not just going to say yes straightaway."
"He'll tell us we're out of our goddamn minds," Rusty continued.
"So…"
"So we give up too easily. Argue a little bit, let him have his shout, he'll recite three or four failures for us to think about. Then we tell him he's right and walk away."
"What if he lets us?"
Rusty raised an incredulous eyebrow. "He won't. But if he does –" he overrode the response he knew Danny was about to spout – "we wait until after we've had lunch before we bring it up."
Reuben's pockets would be essential to the job. But of course, Rusty had the billionaire wrapped around his little finger. He thought about his earlier assessment. You'd need at least a dozen guys doing a combination of cons. Maybe they wouldn't need a dozen. Maybe ten would do it. He looked over the list he'd rattled off: a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Gethroes and a Leon Sphinx. Not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald, ever. No, ten seemed undercooked somehow. Maybe eleven.
He turned back to his notepad, frowning. Malloy twins. They were annoying to work with, but they knew what they were doing. Most of the time. The Miss Daisy would give them time to switch the camera feeds… Rusty clicked his pen irritably. He knew the actor he wanted. It was getting him that would be the problem. He wrote the name down anyway. Saul. The empty cereal bowl leered at him. He resisted the urge to stick his tongue out at it. Danny saw the look and chuckled. "You need to be a con to be able to afford all this food," he chided. Rusty ignored that. He wondered what Danny would say if he told the bowl he didn't mean it, then decided that the bowl could probably figure that out for itself and Danny didn't need to worry about his sanity on top of everything else.
Insane was such a strong word. He preferred quirky. "So if we intercept the 911 call and send in our own SWAT team we can even carry out the cash without anyone noticing," he mused. Danny grunted agreement. "But how do we feed them fake footage of us robbing it, then?"
There was a pause. He got the feeling Danny knew the answer perfectly well but wanted to keep him in suspense, and shot him a cut-the-drama look. "Does Reuben still have that warehouse in downtown Vegas?"
"Think so."
Danny smiled mysteriously. "We could do whatever we wanted in there."
"Sure could."
"That's assuming he doesn't let us walk away tomorrow."
Rusty rolled his eyes. "Can you imagine Reuben letting us tell him half a job and then walking away? He'll pretend not to care. But he will."
"I hope you're right."
"I'm always right."
He knew Danny could think of a million instances where he hadn't been, but he also knew he wouldn't bring any of them up. They generalised. He was usually right; right enough that he could forget the few times he'd got it wrong. Just among friends. He stood up and drained his whiskey tumbler. "Well, I have a few calls to make." Danny grunted again.
"I'll take these back," he said, picking up the original borrowed plans. "Where are your keys?"
Rusty eyed him in mock-suspicion. "You trash my car you're finished." He nonetheless picked up the keys from the bench and tossed them in the other man's direction.
"That car'll probably fall apart in the middle of the street," Danny retorted, catching the keys deftly. Rusty did stick his tongue out this time. It was an antique, not a piece of junk. Appearances could be deceiving. He liked driving it. So there.
Alone in his house again, he took a deep breath. This was Danny's craziest idea yet. The take was attractive, he had to admit. Enough to take him away from Topher and Josh for good. He could move to the country, set up a hotel. He'd always liked the idea of running a hotel. But robbing from Terry Benedict wasn't like robbing from anyone else. They ran the risk of being torn apart limb by agonising limb. He rather liked his limbs, too. And he still didn't really understand why Danny wanted to knock over Benedict's life's work. Money was never the reason for people like them. And cute as his house-always-wins speech had been, he didn't buy that either.
Danny was keeping secrets from him. He sighed and picked up his cellphone to call the Malloys. He started guiltily as he saw the picture he kept 'forgetting' to change from his screensaver: Isabel grinning energetically at the camera as he looked pointedly in the other direction. What's that about keeping secrets? He asked himself wryly, changing the picture.
He trusted Danny. Danny trusted him. For now, that had to be enough.
A/N: Stichomythia: term usually used in theater to describe a series of quickly-spoken short lines of dialogue.