Run: 2026-09-23-01M37P55VC5D2C2J5N73Z0X6C8

The van smelled like cold pizza and criminal ambition. Molly peered through a pair of binoculars at Party Palace, where a banner reading "Happy 5th Birthday, Tyler!" drooped across the entrance like a surrender flag. Somewhere inside, forty children were conducting warfare on a bouncy castle. "Target's in sight," she whispered. "Forty presents, maybe fifty. Three tables, one bouncy castle, and a clown who's given up on life." Bill shifted beside her, his ski mask already slick with sweat despite the air conditioning. "Molly, I have to say it. This feels wrong. Even for us." "We stole a kidney once." "We stole a fake kidney from a medical school. This is children, Molly. Actual children. They cry loudly, and they remember faces." "That's why we're wearing masks, Bill." "Our faces are covered, but our souls aren't." Molly lowered the binoculars and gave him a look that had ended partnerships before. "The intel says the birthday boy's grandfather is a collector. One of those packages has a mint-condition 1987 action figure worth thirty grand." Bill sighed the sigh of a man who had lost the argument before it began. Outside, shrieking children drifted across the parking lot like the war cries of a very small, very sticky army. Molly unrolled a blueprint across the dashboard, drawn by hand in gel pen, and honestly better than most professional jobs Bill had seen. The gift table sat near the ball pit, which was either a tactical disaster or a stroke of genius depending on one's feelings about plastic balls. She walked him through it: he'd enter through the front as a distraction while she slipped in with the catering crew, loaded everything into a laundry cart, and rolled it out through the emergency exit. Eleven minutes, start to finish. "The clown always sees everything," Bill said. "That's the tragedy of clowns." Molly waved this off. The clown was on his third cigarette break and had the dead eyes of a man who had seen too many birthday parties. He would see nothing. Bill stared at the blueprint, then at the party, then at his own reflection in the rearview mirror, where a man in a ski mask stared back with profound disappointment in himself. "Fine," he said finally. "But if we're doing this, I'm going in as entertainment." "You can't juggle." "I can't steal presents either, and yet here we are." Molly considered this. It was, annoyingly, a fair point. Somewhere inside, a DJ started the hokey pokey, and forty small heads turned in unison like a flock of hypnotized seagulls. "Fine," she said. "But if you put your left foot in, you'd better get it out. That's the whole point of the song, Bill." Bill pulled his mask down, straightened his collar, and muttered something about dental school. Together they stepped out of the van and toward the greatest heist of their careers, or at least the one with the most cake. The van door closed behind them with a squeak of betrayal.