Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPRHQRGMJ1JQPBB2NNGAEW

The van smelled of stale birthday cake, which was Bill's fault, and he knew it. "You ate the reconnaissance cake," Molly said. "I ate half the reconnaissance cake. The other half is evidence." She spread the blueprint across the dashboard, smoothing it with the flat of her hand. It was not, strictly speaking, a blueprint. It was a paper placemat from the Golden Dragon Buffet with a maze on one side, and Bill had drawn the layout of the Hargrove residence in crayon over the top of the maze, so that the front hall now shared space with a cartoon dragon holding a fortune cookie. "Explain this to me one more time," Molly said. "Right. So." Bill tapped the crayon. "Bouncy castle in the back garden, that's the diversion. Twelve children go into a bouncy castle, nobody comes out for forty minutes. It's like a Bermuda Triangle for six-year-olds. Meanwhile the presents are stacked on the trestle table in the conservatory, unguarded, gift-wrapped, portable, and — this is the beautiful part — completely untraceable, because nobody keeps receipts for a toy giraffe." Molly stared at the placemat. She was forty-one years old and had once relieved a Belgian shipping magnate of a Vermeer. "We are stealing from a child," she said. "We are stealing from twelve children, technically, since they brought the presents." "That's worse, Bill. You've made it worse." He held up a finger, which was his gesture for a point he considered devastating. "Tarquin Hargrove is seven years old and his parents hired a magician who was on television. The child has a pony. The child has a pony *and* a trampoline, and last year he got a second pony because he didn't like the face of the first one." "He didn't like its face." "Said it looked judgmental." Bill sniffed. "Frankly, the pony was right." Molly looked out the windscreen at the house, which was the sort of house that had an intercom at the gate and a gravel drive designed for the sound it made. Balloons were tied to the railings in clusters of three, in colors that had been chosen by someone with an interior designer. "Entry," she said. "Side gate, during the piñata." "Timing." "Fourteen minutes, which is how long a piñata lasts when the dad insists on holding the rope." "Extraction." "Bin bags. Two each. We go out through the hedge into Fennel Lane, into the van, gone before the candles." Molly folded the placemat carefully along its original creases and slid it into her jacket. Somewhere beyond the gate, a bouncy castle inflated with the long asthmatic groan of a thing waking up against its will, and a woman's voice shouted something about shoes. "One condition," Molly said. Bill waited. "We leave the birthday boy's present. The one from his gran. There's always one wrapped badly — that's hers." "That's sentimental." "That's professional. Nobody investigates a theft where the gran's gift survives. It reads as a miracle. Miracles don't get fingerprinted." Bill considered this, then nodded slowly, the way men do when they have been outmaneuvered and intend to pretend they agreed all along. "Bin bags," he said, "are in the back, under the cake."