Run: 2026-09-23-01M37PF9Y8Y94XEQYY340198T4

Molly spread the satellite printout across the kitchen table, pinning the corners with a snow globe, a jar of pickles, and Bill's half-eaten sandwich, which he reclaimed on principle. The printout showed 14 Maple Drive: a modest colonial with a shed, a fenced yard, and a bouncy castle already inflated like a plastic tumor. "Brayden Henderson turns seven on Saturday. Thirty-one guests, one magician, a present table worth four grand." Bill whistled through the gap in his teeth. "Four grand? For a seven-year-old?" "His father invented an app that tells you when toast is done." "That's the dream," Bill said, gazing into the middle distance. Molly unrolled a second document: an itinerary she'd obtained by posing as Brayden's aunt at a school fundraiser, a performance requiring three cupcakes and one deliberately lost sack race. The intel had been worth it. The magician went on at three. Every adult would watch him pull a dove from his sleeve; every child would scream at the dove. That was the window: ninety seconds, presents into a cooler labeled CATERING, out the side gate, into the minivan she'd park in the cul-de-sac. Bill raised his hand like he was in school. "Question. What if the dove goes rogue?" "Then we improvise." "I don't improvise. I have a system." "Your last system got you stuck in a chimney for six hours." "That chimney was structurally misleading," Bill said, with dignity. Molly produced the disguises. Hers was a caterer's uniform, crisp and forgettable. His was a polka-dotted clown suit with shoes the size of canoes. He put the shoes on. They squeaked. He squeaked too, experimentally, and seemed encouraged. "Absolutely not," he said. "Nobody watches the caterer. Everybody watches the clown. You make balloon poodles while I empty the table." "Kids scream at clowns. Sometimes it's hard to tell which kind." Molly counted silently to four—her ceiling with Bill—and laid out the escape route: behind the shed, through the gate, into the van, gone. She'd rehearsed it eleven times with a stopwatch and a wheelbarrow of cantaloupes. The cantaloupes had behaved beautifully. Bill would be the variable. "What about the piñata? I heard there's one." "We're not stealing a piñata." "Is it money?" "It's candy, Bill." "Is it money candy?" "There's no such thing as money candy." Molly pinched the bridge of her nose, decided not to explain the fencing plan again—the one through Danny that ended in Cabo—and asked the question she'd been dreading. "Do you have the lock picks?" Bill patted his pockets, then the clown shoes, then looked at the fridge like a man who'd left an entire personality in another county. "Define 'have.'" Molly stared at him the way one stares at the ocean before drowning in it. Somewhere across town, Brayden Henderson was licking an invitation envelope, unaware his birthday was about to become a case file. "Rehearse the balloon poodles," she said. "If you get stuck in a chimney, I'm leaving you there." "That's fair," said Bill, and took a large, calming bite of his sandwich.