Book Eight, Chapter 11: The Score

The movie was flying by, even though, from what I could tell, not much had happened.

It was clear there was some type of architectural or similar horror involved that had kept Molly and Bobby from reaching their destination.

Whatever it was that awaited us on the other side of the vault door would likely be the thing to propel the story forward. I had a raw excitement in my belly, ready to turn into fear or joy depending on what I saw.

The sound of Dina’s drill covered up pretty much everything. It was easy to assume that was intentional on Carousel’s part, or else it wouldn’t have given her the drill in the first place. Something must have been going on elsewhere, something that made lots of scary noises that had to be covered up.

I could feel the walkie-talkie in my hand crackle to life—the bump of its speaker. I put it up to my ear, and while I didn’t know precisely what was being said, my best guess was something like, “Riley… Riley, we’re… we can’t find the door.”

If I could barely tell with it up to my ear, there was no way the audience would be hearing it. I just hoped that Bobby and Molly would be okay.

So far, the storyline didn’t seem very bloodthirsty. There was a real chance that a lot of us could walk away from this with nothing but a few shivers. Not a big chance, but a real one.

I turned my back to Dina and put the radio up to my mouth.

“Repeat that. Are you outside yet, Bobby? Talk to me,” I said. “We’re about to open the safe. You might want to get back down here.”

In response, there was another vibration of the speaker in the radio, but the only words I made out for sure were Molly saying, “Bobby is losing it. There’s some kind of blast doors…”

After that, I couldn’t really tell what she was saying, but she had lost her jokey cadence, which was saying something, given the fact that she had the Wine Drunk trope, which would have settled her nerves and fear. So whatever emotion was in her voice, she had put there intentionally. She was trying to communicate to us that something terrible was happening without giving away the game.

Blast doors, to my understanding, were like thicker panels that would go down over the outside of a building. I doubted that this house had them, but if it was an architectural horror or some type of living house situation, it was possible that the exits had been blocked.

I couldn’t pay any attention to that because Dina was about to make a breakthrough.

When Dina let off the trigger, the sound of metal shearing disappeared for one moment, and upstairs I heard a thump. But soon enough, she had her finger back on the trigger, and there was nothing else to hear.

Camden walked over to me and asked, “Where are Bobby and Molly? Do you want me to go get them?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I can’t even tell what they’re saying, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a code red.”

We had gotten a little uncreative with our “cops are coming” code, but I was fairly certain that Bobby and Molly had not said it.

I picked the radio back up to my mouth and said, “Bobby, Molly, is something wrong? We’re about to open the safe. Make your way down to the basement.”

I wasn’t even sure they could hear me over the sound of the drilling.

I put the radio back to my ear, listening for a response, but I didn’t hear Bobby or Molly. I heard another voice, this time much clearer, whispering in between the sounds of the metal shearing from Dina’s drill bit.

“Five more minutes. Just five more minutes,” the voice said. It was a man’s voice, deep, friendly.

I acted confused. I couldn’t act like I knew what was going on, in case I needed Oblivious Bystander, and in a story like this one, I just might.

“Bobby, five more minutes for what?” I asked over the radio.

There was no response but static, and maybe something that sounded like a dog bark. But it wasn’t coming from the radio; it was coming from somewhere in the distance, maybe even upstairs.

It was just one bark and nothing more. Bobby had not brought his dogs, but the barking didn’t continue, so I didn’t comment on it.

Though I heard noises upstairs, even over the metal grinding, it all came to a sudden halt when there was a pop sound from the vault door.

I looked over at Dina. She stood up, hit a metal button on the front of the mechanism, and then spun a giant metal wheel as the internal mechanics of the door came loose. The giant entrance opened up as the large door swung out toward us.

“Oh my God,” I said. I wasn’t even pretending. I was just that surprised at what I saw, because what I saw was a vault crammed full of every type of valuable I could ever expect to find in such a place.

There were gold bars stacked on the floor, crates, the kind that museums kept their pieces in, as well as the thinner crates for paintings of high value. There were silks and furs, as well as several leather cases.

It was stacked up to the ceiling.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Dina grabbed one of those cases and quickly unzipped it to reveal that it contained large jewels specially fitted into a foam insert.

Everything about the mood changed once we started seeing these things. It wasn’t hard to play the thief who hit the score of a lifetime, because I was truly exhilarated to see it. I was easily looking at millions of dollars’ worth of valuables.

It was stacked so high I couldn’t actually see back into the vault. We must have looked like idiots. We lost track of what we were supposed to do; we weren’t staging it correctly, we were just basking in it. We started yanking it out of the vault and sorting it because we assumed that was normal.

“Molly’s going to need another van,” Dina said, and she was right, because there was too much stuff to fit inside one vehicle.

“I knew it,” Camden said. “I told you this would be the score of a lifetime. That old crook was always talking about how his money wasn’t liquid, but I see plenty of liquid cash right there,” he said, pointing to a giant stack of plastic-wrapped cash, the kind used in shows like Breaking Bad, too much money to count, the kind of stacks you had to weigh just to estimate how much there was.

“He stacked like twenty gold bricks there on the ground just to support the pile,” Nicole said gleefully. “I don’t think I’m going to be in real estate anymore after this.”

“I don’t think any of us are going to be in anything after this,” I said. “I think we’re retired.”

I lifted the radio to my mouth and said, “Bobby, Molly, you want to get down here right now. You won’t believe what’s in here.”

I went up and got on my tiptoes so I could grab a flat crate off the top of the stack and bring it back out to the room we had been waiting in. I took my pry bar and slowly started popping the top where the nails had been used to seal it. When I finally got it open, what I saw was a very neatly packed painting. I didn’t recognize it, it wasn’t from our world, but I knew it was valuable to look at it. It was a portrait of a pretty woman painted in a Renaissance style or similar.

“Dina, tell me this is what I think it is,” I said, acting as if I recognized the painting.

Dina walked over and stared down into the crate. “It can’t be,” she said. “How in the world would it end up here?”

We just looked at each other and laughed.

As we started pulling things down from the pile, I said, “Molly is going to have her work cut out for her. I don’t think she has enough contacts to move all of this.”