Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE8W1AQVHQB2N6VYMN9H85T

The rain hammered against the window of the van, which Bill had painted to look like a florist's delivery vehicle, except he'd spelled it "FLOREST" and refused to fix it because "nobody reads that carefully anyway." Molly sat in the passenger seat with a clipboard, studying a hand-drawn map of the Hendricks' backyard like it was a bank vault schematic. "Okay," she said. "The party starts at two. Bouncy castle goes up at one-thirty. That's our window." Bill cracked his knuckles. "I still think we should go in as clowns." "We are not going in as clowns." "Kids trust clowns." "Kids are *terrified* of clowns, Bill, that's literally the whole thing about clowns." "Not my clown. My clown's got a gentle energy." Molly closed her eyes and counted to five. This was a tactic her therapist had suggested for anger management, though she doubted the therapist had ever pictured it being used mid-heist with a man in a rubber wig sitting shotgun. "We're going in as the balloon company. Simple. Elegant. Nobody questions a guy delivering forty balloons to a seven-year-old's birthday party." "And the presents?" "We load them into the balloon truck under the guise of, quote, 'inflating them properly at the warehouse.'" Bill turned to look at her. "You're going to tell a birthday party full of parents that presents need to be inflated." "I'm going to tell them whatever gets us out of there with a truck full of Nintendo Switches and unopened Lego sets, Bill." He considered this. "There's a piñata." "I saw the piñata." "It's shaped like a dinosaur." "I know what shape it is." "I want the dinosaur." Molly turned to him fully now, clipboard trembling in her grip. "We are not stealing the piñata. The piñata is not the mission. The mission is presents. High-value, resellable, does-not-require-a-baseball-bat-to-retrieve presents." "But it's shaped like a dinosaur, Molly." "Everything is shaped like a dinosaur to a man who peaked emotionally at age nine." Bill sat back, wounded, and stared out at the rain like it had personally betrayed him. After a moment he said, quieter, "You really think the balloon thing'll work?" "It worked in Ohio." "That kid saw through it in four minutes." "That kid was gifted. This is Ridgewood. Average kid, average parents, one of whom is already on his third mimosa according to the intel." She tapped the clipboard. "We walk in, we look natural, we grab everything with a bow on it, we walk out. Presents into truck, truck onto highway, gone before the candles are even lit." Bill pulled the rubber wig from the glovebox and turned it over in his hands like a man saying goodbye to an old friend. "Fine. No dinosaur." "No dinosaur." "But if there's a piñata *later*, at a *different* party—" "We'll discuss it as a team." He smiled, satisfied, and shoved the wig back into the glovebox. Outside, the rain kept falling, and somewhere two blocks away, a bouncy castle began, unknowingly, to inflate.