If you think I actually own any of this, you're wrong. It's the brain child of Angela Robinson and the property of Sony Pictures.

Chapter 8:

I was pretty quiet for the next twenty minutes while we waited for the guard to return. Uncharacteristically quiet, as Amy put it around about minute number nine. Ronnie didn't say anything. He was perched on his little I-beam, his dark eyes looking down on us as we sat in mid air, waiting. I couldn't help but feel like he was a coiled cobra waiting for that perfect moment to strike at his prey.

Stealing something is easy. Anyone can steal something, really. Smash a window, grab whatever you're after, run like hell. Let's face it, it doesn't require much in the way of creativity to actually steal something.

Not getting caught is the hard part. Your standard smash-and-grab, you'll be lucky to make it home before you get nabbed. But in a real theft; one with a little artistry, some sophistication, and a little finesse; far more planning goes into the getaway than the theft itself.

That's where most thefts fail. I mean, technically, I could probably have walked all the way up to the vault right then and there. I would've had to smash my way through the door, which would've set off every alarm in the building, but I could've probably made it to the vault; opened it, and probably got his Ronnie's diamond for him.

Of course, that would leave me with a big hole in the vault door, my face in every newspaper on the west coast, and probably up shit creek without a proverbial paddle.

Which is why I was the best at what I did. Theft is a combination of patience and intelligence. You fail on one, you fail on both. Ronnie wasn't dumb, by any stretch of the imagination, but he was a lousy thief. He was too impulsive, too impatient. Amy, on the other hand, would've made an absolutely spectacular thief, if she ever decided to cross over to the lawless side of the street.

That was another thing that kinda annoyed me about the boogieman that the DEBS had turned me into. I had never carried a gun on a heist in my life. The way I saw it; if you needed a gun, you were doing something wrong. Sure, I carried my trusty Beretta when I was walking down the street; not so much at the moment, since Ronnie had it locked up in his safe; but once I got into the building, it was guns-free all the way. And somehow, if you believed the DEBS, I'd managed to kill, maim or shoot every single security guard that had ever stumbled on me. Hell, half the heists that they'd credited me with weren't even mine; and at least half of those were insurance scams. They'd worked, largely because I hadn't exactly been in a position to come forward to protest my innocence. I guess what annoyed me more was the fact that I didn't get any credit for a lot of the things I did steal, largely because the body count wasn't high enough.

Okay, yeah, I'm a little bitter.

"He's in the elevator," Scud's voice sounded again over the earphones.

I leaned over slightly to see the elevator car begin rising up from the ground floor. "Copy that," I replied, "get ready to play back his last trip around the sixth floor." With a little luck, we could overlay the guard's previous, uninterrupted trip around the floor relatively well-synchronized with his current trip around the top floor. Close enough, at any rate, that the guard still at the station on the ground wouldn't notice anything. This guard's obsessive-compulsive nature was really gonna play in our favor. That was good, because the vault room was a glass-fronted office. Once the guard came back, we had absolutely nowhere to hide.

"Okay," I said as the elevator drew to a halt, uncomfortably close to my right arm, "begin playback."

Scud signaled his acknowledgement at the exact moment that I heard the elevator door slide opened. Perfect. All that was really necessary was that the guard downstairs hadn't seen the door open. That could draw his attention to the fact that he was seeing recorded footage.

"Let me know when he opens the vault room," I said. I climbed onto the narrow ledge next to the outside elevator door; the one where there wasn't an elevator parked waiting.

"Okay, vault room opened in five… four… three… two… one… he's in. Move, you've got forty seconds," Scud announced.

I needed two things to really go my way on this one. One, I needed for the vault room door to be relatively soundproof, because the opening of the elevator door was actually pretty loud; and two, I needed for the guard not to turn around. There was absolutely no way he was going to miss me sprinting down the hallway if he did.

I slapped the manual release on the top edge of the elevator door and slid them opened.

I quickly unclipped my harness, and let the carabineer hang and ran flat out towards the glass-fronted office at the end of the hallway. On the other side of the glass, I could see the guard's receding back as he swept the flashlight back and forth.

"Twenty-five seconds," Scud announced, but I didn't have time to acknowledge it.

This door was actually pretty complicated. A key card and access code opened it; and there was no way we could bypass it. The system, however, was vulnerable at exactly one time: when the door was already open. If you knew what you were doing, you could fool the system into thinking that the door had never closed, and the lock would never engage.

I skidded to a stop next to the door. And quickly adhered a piece of electricians tape just above the edge of the door. Hanging, then I slipped a small piece of a plastic garbage bag under the tape so that it hung just past the top edge of the door. I stepped back quickly. In the darkness, they were almost invisible, if you didn't look too carefully. We'd have to chance that.

"Six seconds," Scud announced.

Time to go. I sprinted back towards the elevator and dove headlong into it, gripping the hanging carabineer as I did so and re-engaged the door which slid shut automatically.

Yeah, it was a stupid thing to do. If I'd missed, I would've fallen headfirst into an empty elevator shaft, but I didn't.

I clipped my harness back in while still hanging in the middle of the elevator shaft. Just because I'd done something dumb didn't mean I'd developed a death wish. I could feel Amy's unbelieving eyes on my back as I clipped in.

Sure enough, she looked pretty pissed when I swung around to look at her. Sorry, I mouthed at her.

The lock on the door was a quadruply-redundant system of laser diodes and electrical breaker-circuits. You had to block all of them simultaneously in order to convince the system that the door was opened. Blocking them after the door closed would accomplish absolutely nothing, so they had to be blocked while the door was still opened.

Sometimes, the simplest design flaw is the most useful. Something nobody would have seriously considered to be a flaw, but it was enough. It was enough that I could trick it spending all of three bucks at a hardware store.

The door opened outwards.

When the guard opened the door on his way back out of the office, and it swung closed, the black garbage bag I'd fastened to the door frame would be pinched between the door and the frame, meaning that none of the sensors would register the door as being closed. Which meant that the bolt on the electric lock would never engage.

If the door had opened inwards, I would've been screwed.

Oh, I would've found a way, to be sure, but it would've been a lot harder.

"Good job," Scud announced. "The door's rigged, and you never showed up on the monitors."

"Can you tell if it's locked?" I asked.

"Not from here," Scud replied. "Guess you'll find out when you get there."

I took a seat next to Amy on the beam. "Next time, it's your turn."

She smiled, "you kidding? It's your crazy plan."

"True," I admitted. I turned to Ronnie, "okay, we'll be heading in in about ten minutes. You stay here."

"I'm going in with you," Ronnie replied firmly.

I shook my head. "No way. Everyone going in has a job to do. What, exactly, do you figure you're going to be doing in there? Can you pick the lock on the cage? How about fit under those laser beams? If you have something to do, go ahead and let me know what it is."

"How about keeping you from trying to screw me over?" Ronnie replied.

"How? We can't open the vault, and even if we could, there's nothing in there we want to steal; but the more people we put in that room, the greater the chances that we'll get caught doing it, so if you want to come in, come in next time."

Ronnie glared at me for a moment before he finally relented. "Fine," he said, "but your gloves stay here."

Ronnie wasn't just being petty here either. Without gloves, it would be almost impossible for me to avoid leaving fingerprints somewhere, so all he had to do was make one anonymous phone call, and Amy's and my lives would suddenly get very uncomfortable.

Which meant that at least for the next couple of weeks, when so many people had passed through that room that our prints would be completely wiped out, he owned our asses.

So much for the "cut and run" option.

Bastard.

"Okay, but Amy keeps her gloves," I said slipping the blue nitrile gloves off of my hands and handing them to Ronnie. "We need the safe's combination panel to be fingerprint-free."

I could pretty much see the gears grinding behind Ronnie's eyes. He was seriously considering saying "no" just to piss me off, but at the same time, he wanted that diamond.

Ronnie's a total prick, but at least he's reasonable about it. He finally nodded his agreement.

The guard made his trip back downstairs pretty much right on time. Close enough, at any rate, that the guard downstairs wouldn't have noticed the slight time lag between the departure of the elevator on the security monitors, and the elevator actually moving.

This guard was rapidly becoming my new best friend.

Amy and I quickly opened the outside elevator door and slipped again into the hallway.

"You have twenty minutes," Scud said, "starting now."

"Confirm," I said.

The door was unlocked. I'm not gonna go into details, but sometimes I'm so brilliant, I even amaze myself.

The Vault was pretty much impossible to miss. Large cage protruded from one of the walls of the office around a massive steel door. The only feature adorning the vault door itself was a small LCD panel in its center, and a keypad underneath it.

First off, I have to say that movies are bullshit. I always have to laugh at the movies when the heroine (or hero, I guess; I tended to notice the girls a little more) strides up to a locked door, pulls a hairpin out of her hair, wiggles it around in the lock for a few seconds, and practically without breaking her stride, flings the door opened and walks in.

Yeah, it doesn't work that way.

My absolute best time is about four minutes. This one took me almost nine. Scud had to ask me four times whether something was wrong with me. "Your average time on a lock like this is five minutes. What's taking you so long?" He asked me over and over again. I decided not to answer that one.

"Ten minutes," Scud announced, just as the door to the cage swung open.

That was enough; barely. I was going to have to work on speeding that up the next time we broke in here. What the hell was the matter with me?

I dug around in the duffel bag and pulled out a spray can. I waved it in front of me, producing a fine mist which filled the small chamber. Green laser beams practically filled it.

Amy dropped down to the ground looking under the lowest beams. "I can't fit under that," she said, standing up.

"Sure you can," I said, my gaze dropped to her chest, "but you might need a little help."

"Help? What do you mean by…"

Her question was cut off when I handed her an eight-inch wide Ace bandage.

"What's this for?" She looked at me.

"Well, you might have to lose a couple of inches," I told her.

She looked confused for a moment before I shyly nodded at her chest again. Her eyes widened, "oh, you've got to be kidding me."

"Hey, it's not my fault that you've got an absolutely phenomenal pair of…"

She shivered, "that's not the…" She stopped, looking at me, "phenomenal?" She asked.

"Um, girls?" Scud's voice sounded over the radio, "as much as I'm enjoying listening in here, have you noticed a big heist-like thing going on right now?"

Amy and I shared a smile. "Okay, Scud, shut off your monitors for a second, Amy's changing. That's applies to you too, Ronnie."

"I'm a thief, not a scoundrel," Ronnie's voice was indignant. He much, at least, was true. He'd turn around while a woman changed and he wouldn't even peek, but for some reason he didn't have the slightest qualm about beating one up. I'd had a couple of broken bones to prove it.

While Amy changed, I lay on my stomach, stretching a long, telescoping rod out in front of me. A small, but strong magnet was affixed to the end of it, and it trailed a long rope, looped back on itself, behind it. That would be the pulley to drag Amy under those laser beams.

I turned around to see a slightly less feminine-looking Amy finishing buttoning up her shirt. "Next time," she said, "you go under the lasers."

"Deal," I replied. "Okay, guys, you can look now," I called over the radio.

Actually, getting Amy under those lasers was less dramatic than I thought it would be. She had a couple of inches to spare. She actually maneuvered her way around the rather cramped space with unusual grace. I had to remind myself again that she wasn't exactly a stranger to this kind of thing. The most adventurous thing I'd seen her do in the last four years was drive out to the coast to paint a sunset.

"How many times do we have to enter the wrong code?" I asked Scud.

"Four," Scud replied.

"Okay," I tilted my head in Amy's direction, "go at it."

Amy started tapping in digits at random. Every so often the panel would inform her that she'd got the wrong code. No surprise there. The odds of us getting the right code were, what, four in a billion?

"Now, remember not to tap in all nine digits on this one," I said, "we don't want to set this thing off, we want the guy who works here to do it."

"Okay," Amy replied, "six digits coming up."

"Girls, it's a school night. Time to come home," Scud announced.

"How long?" I asked, as I pulled Amy back under the laser beams.

"Three minutes. Move," Scud told me.

I quickly threw all our equipment into the duffel, quickly scanning the room to make sure that we weren't leaving anything behind. A thin mist still hung in the cage, but that would dissipate for the most part by the time the security guard returned. "We're moving," I said.

The door was still unlocked when we opened it. I reached up to remove the electricians tape before I allowed the door to close and lock, then together, Amy and I darted back to the still-open elevator shaft. We were strapped in and the elevator door had just closed when I heard the other elevator begin its ascent.

-x-

It wasn't until we were back in the car that I took my first steady breath in almost two hours. That had gone relatively smoothly; but that was the easy part.

"Okay, that's phase one," I said, "tomorrow, we get that combination."