Run: 2026-10-13-01M4TBTDM8JZH0B9WPTSBW3AHS

Molly spread the floor plan across the hood of the van and pinned the corners with a brick, a juice box, and Bill's left hand. "Stop moving," she said. "I'm not moving. I'm breathing." "Then stop breathing near the blueprint." The blueprint was a crayon drawing Bill had commissioned from his nephew for two ice pops and a promise, later broken, of a piggyback ride. It showed the Hendersons' backyard, a bouncy castle labeled BOUNS, and a stick figure identified as DAD (GRUMPY). Molly tapped the paper with a stubby pencil. She had sharpened it with a kitchen knife that morning, because professionals sharpened things. She had rules for jobs like this: no crying, no witnesses under four feet tall, and no stealing anything handmade. Handmade things had souls, and souls were traceable. "The presents hit the patio table at two. We get twelve minutes while the magician does his finale." "What's the finale?" "He pulls a rabbit out of a hat. The rabbit resists." Bill squinted at the drawing, then at the actual backyard thirty yards away, where a dinosaur-shaped piñata swayed from the oak like a condemned man. "Why is the bouncy castle on fire?" "That's the sun. Kids' suns have faces." Molly produced a laminated clipboard from her clown bag, which also contained a rubber chicken, forty feet of rope, and lock picks that, in that company, passed as a sight gag. "I'm the clown. You're the magician's assistant." "I thought I was the clown." "You cry at balloons." Bill had cried at balloons once, at his niece's fifth birthday, and the family spoke of it the way other families spoke of affairs. He sulked into his juice box until it made the sad squeak of an empty thing. "Thirty kids with a stick and a grudge. That's a security system." "We go during the piñata. Nobody watches presents when candy hits the lawn." Molly had cased three birthdays and a christening to learn this. She knew the choreography of childhood greed the way safecrackers knew tumblers: the gasp, the swing, the scramble, the sacramental hush. Bill nodded slowly, his pre-stupid nod. "Are we bad people?" "We're stealing from a kid with a pony rental. We're wealth redistribution with face paint." "There's a pony?" "Focus. The pony is not in the budget." "What budget? We're stealing." Molly rolled up the blueprint and tucked it away with the reverence of a general filing a map of Normandy. Somewhere beyond the fence, a mother shrieked about the cake. A father, presumably the grumpy one, was losing a fight with a folding chair. The magician's doves were already mutinous in their cage; Molly could hear them plotting. At one fifty-five, the backyard erupted. Bill adjusted his sequined vest, which itched in places sequins should never reach, and climbed out of the van with the dignity of a man who had accepted his sequins. "Remember: in and out before the rabbit." "And if the rabbit resists?" "Then we're rich."