Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GV392VHN974YGTAHWKCFZF

Molly had planned the job with the same rigor she'd once applied to the Guggenheim, which is to say, on a napkin, in crayon. The napkin lay spread across the dashboard of the van, parked with a clear view of the Maplewood Community Hall, where the Henderson boy would turn eight tomorrow at one o'clock sharp. Bill studied it. The drawing showed a pavilion, a piñata rendered slightly too well, and a gift table circled in red with the word VAULT written above it. "Vault's ambitious," he said. "It's a state of mind, Bill." "Guard presence?" "One grandmother by the cake. Ex-military. Eye contact only if you're ready for commitment. The rest are parents, and parents at a party are basically furniture." Bill nodded gravely and wrote nothing down, because the pen had died an hour earlier and neither of them had planned for that contingency. The entertainer was Dazzle Dave, whose magic show ran from two-thirty to two-forty-one, or ten minutes if his rabbit was in one of its moods. That was the window. Molly had watched Dazzle Dave perform at a car dealership opening once and described his sleight of hand as adequate for children and law enforcement. The rest of the operation came out of the glove box: fourteen decoy presents from the clearance aisle, still shrink-wrapped, each containing a jigsaw puzzle of a sad tractor. The play was a swap. Good gifts out, agricultural melancholy in. By the time the birthday boy tore off the paper and found forty pieces of a forlorn Massey Ferguson instead of whatever children wanted now, they would be three states gone. Bill raised the one concern that had haunted him since July, when a six-year-old had spotted him in a tree and told his mother the tree had shoes. "Tyler. The kid made me once. Kids are like customs dogs, Molly. No mortgage, no heartbreak, no scotch. Nothing dulls their instincts." "Then don't be memorable." "I'm a grown man in a trench coat at a party with a bubble machine. I'm memorable from space." "Then you're a delivery driver picking up tables." "At a party? Suspicious from every angle." Molly tapped a line on the napkin labeled EXIT STRATEGY. At three o'clock, forty sugar-amped children would charge the piñata like it owed them money, and the chaos would cover the retreat to the van. If all else failed, Bill was to hand Tyler his watch and claim it was a spy watch, thereby acquiring a bodyguard for life. Bill read the napkin a third time: the sun with sunglasses in the corner, the stick figure labeled DAZZLE DAVE holding something that could have been a wand or a knife. "You've done this before," he said. "I've thought about it a lot. Basically the same thing." "That's what worries me." "Nothing to worry about. Van's gassed, boxes are wrapped, and I brought a balloon-animal instructional tape for the drive." "Molly. How cooperative is this rabbit? Historically." "Eleven minutes, Bill. We only need ten."