Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GVBDF4K50CREE62WAC3P83

The van sat two blocks from the Henderson house, engine off, wipers off, the two of them invisible in the gray drizzle. Molly had the blueprints spread across her knees. She'd drawn them herself, which was why the porch was labeled PORCH and the garage GARAGE, and why the banner in the recon photos read BIRFDAY in crisp banner-store lettering. "Okay. The target," she said. "Saturday, two p.m. Security is one dad in a folding chair. He'll have a cooler." Bill leaned in, squinting at the diagram like it might lie to him. "Armed?" "Cooler, Bill. I said cooler." "I heard you. I'm asking if the cooler is armed." "Beer. It's beer." He nodded slowly, chewing his toothpick. "Could be beer now, something worse later. That's how they get you." She tapped the blueprint. "Entry's the back fence, during the balloon animals." Bill studied the route, tracing it with one blunt finger. "Payload?" "Sixteen presents under the dinosaur tablecloth. Big one's silver, size of a microwave. Word is, bike." He whistled, low and long. "Twenty years, nobody ever dangled a bike." "Don't get sentimental. There's a complication." "There's always a complication." "Clown." The toothpick dropped from his mouth and rolled under the seat, into the dark, where it would wait. Bill had faced alarm grids, guard dogs, a cartel accountant with a temper. He had never faced a clown. "Face paint," Molly went on, "red nose, shoes the size of canoes. He does magic." "Does the magic work?" "Sponge ball, two cups. But when he pulls a kid onstage, every adult gets a phone out." "Countermeasure?" "Nobody films a gift table while a kid's yanking a rubber chicken from a hat. We move during the chicken." He leaned back until the seat creaked. "Where's the breach put us?" "Directly behind the bouncy castle." In the recon photo, it loomed over the yard like a striped fungus. He closed his eyes. "That's a fortress, Mol. Inflated vinyl, an exit you can't run through, and it's full of children. Children are chaos agents." "So we go around." "Around is the donkey zone. Blindfolded kids, spinning, pointing." Molly exhaled through her nose and swiped yellow highlighter across the yard. "We hit the donkey lull. They switch blindfolds halfway through. Thirty seconds of nobody moving." "Who's on lookout?" "The grandmother." "The grandmother?" "Every party has a grandmother in a lawn chair, facing the wrong way since 1998." Bill finally smiled, slow and crooked. "Extraction?" "Over the fence. Presents first, then us, then the van." "If the clown spots us?" "Then you do what you trained for." "I trained for banks." "Then improvise. Juggle something." Down the block, muffled by rain, a child screamed with what they chose to believe was joy. Bill stared at the blueprint like it had insulted his mother, then at his own reflection, then at the blueprint again. Sixteen presents. A bike. The easiest job of their lives, and somehow the most terrifying. "Fine," he said at last. "But that bike better be a good bike." "It's a kid's bike." "Then we're stealing it on principle."