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Infinity Smashed: The Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang Heist (part 2)
The Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang Heist (part 2)
Series: Infinity Smashed
Word Count: 10,800
Summary: Against medical advice, Biff takes a job far above his pay grade and everything goes wrong.
Notes: Part One is HERE. This story won the November, December, and January writing polls, and it was sponsored by the Patreon crew! More notes at the bottom.
Max Love’s house wasn’t just hideous. So was its lawn. It was fluorescent green, mowed within an inch of its life and methodically scrubbed of any dandelions or abnormalities, with an automatic sprinkler system cheerfully clicking along as though it wasn’t high noon in high summer in high drought. Apparently the water rationing didn’t apply to everyone.
“I want to burn it, Biff,” I said. “I want to set this guy’s frogging lawn on frogging fire.”
“Just steal everything ain’t nailed down.”
That made me feel a little better.
I won’t recount the time we spent in Oasis Valley, zapping the burglar alarm, irritating the cops, and sitting around. (Well, I sat around. Biff apparently had his own checklist of things to do, and I mostly left him to it.) At first, Biff stuck with straightforward vanishing, but I was still so wretched at navigating the world while invisible that he finally caved and gave us rich people images instead. It meant we had to keep moving and looking like we had some legitimate reason to be there, but at least I wasn’t constantly crashing into mailboxes and street lamps. And thankfully, Oasis Valley people did not keep track of their neighbors like south side folks did; as long as we appeared appropriately white and wealthy, they didn’t seem to mind. Which was good, since Biff still wasn’t all that mobile.
Which led to Operation: Get Car, and…
“Oh my god,” I said. “What is that?”
“Fuck you, you coulda asked your boyfriend for his car.” Biff couldn't slam the door shut, with his arms' limited range of movement, so he kicked it shut, and for a moment, I thought the bumper might come off.
The Vaygan south side was haven to many an ugly car, but this one was a marvel. Once upon a time, it might’ve been a Volkswagen Beetle; now it was a grade-A lemon. Some optimistic soul had painted it pink at some point, except for its name in careful blue script: “Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang.” The whole thing was covered in gun decals, the interior looked like it'd been attacked by every knife, cat, and sandblaster in Vaygo, and it smelled.
I staggered over to it, fell upon my knees, and did my best to hug the front fender. “I love it. This car is my mom now.”
“Yeah, well, Mommy’s gonna go back to rehab after this, so give it up. It’s a POS loan.”
But I didn’t care about that, or that Biff would have to put a vanish job on it to keep it from being reported to the Oasis Valley Homeowners Association. It was a work of modern art, semi-reliable transportation to and from Oasis Valley, and would probably hold a flat-screen. We were set to go.
Everything seemed to be going so well, we forgot to check the weather report.
…
To be fair, it was a reasonable mistake. It was July in Vaygo, Arizona, in the midst of a horrific drought. It looked like a no-brainer.
But on Friday morning, the heavens opened, the tempest descended, and it didn't stop.
At first, Biff and I reacted with incredulity and mild annoyance. Then, as the rain continued to pelt down, our emotions shifted to growing alarm. At first it was because we were worried about the job, but as the rain kept coming, we realized that we might have bigger problems than our heist.
In Treehouse, rain like this was a common enough occurrence. But Vaygo was a desert city. Drought, fire, strikes, and riots were all normal parts of life, but water coming out of the sky was a disaster on par with the end days. Biff and I sat at his window, listening to the radio and watching the sky. Well, I was watching; Biff was glowering at it as though he could somehow shame Mother Nature into capitulation.
Then the radio announced a flash flood warning. Biff went rigid, leaped to his feet and made for the door, only to have to come back for his keys.
“Where are you going?” I asked. “You can’t run!”
“The shitheap!”
“Relax, we parked it uphill. With bricks. It won’t wash away.”
“It leaks!”
Of course it leaked. Why would a waterproof car be necessary in Vaygo? By the time we got there, the inside wasn't much drier than we were. Worse, it wouldn't start.
That he couldn't pound on the steering wheel only seemed to make Biff madder. He glared at me.
“Get out,” he snarled.
“But--”
“Now.”
I sighed, opened my side of the door, and returned to the torrent.
Biff flicked on the headlights and shouted out the window, “They bright?” When I shook my head no, he looked slightly less angry. “Battery. Fuck it, I ain't buying a new one for this. Jump it.”
I glowered at him. “Fifty percent.”
“Fuck you!”
“Fifty or you can jump this thing yourself!”
He caved and popped the hood.
Unfortunately, after half an hour of struggling and swearing, it became clear that I couldn't jump the thing. It was just too wet. All I was managing to do was hurt myself and possibly the car. Shaking my numb hands, I shouted to Biff, “Is there some other way to get this stupid thing started?”
There was: pushing.
Had Biff been able-bodied, it would've been easy. As it was, the only reason I was able to do it was that Biff had parked on a hill, so I had gravity's assistance (though even then, it took all my strength and weight against it). Unfortunately for him, Biff had parked on a hill on an upward slope, meaning we had to push-start it in reverse. He nearly smashed into a street light and ended our heist before it began, but finally got our intrepid metal chariot started. I piled in, soaked to the skin, and we went searching for higher, drier ground.
Too bad half the Vaygan car-owning population had a similar idea.
We ended up having to park the car in a multistory parking garage up in the business district, and empty our pockets for the privilege. With the state of the roads (and the drivers on them) what would've taken us twenty minutes to walk under normal circumstances took over half an hour in the car.
This was more than just an irritation. Water sloshed in through the sides and bottom of the car as we went through low points, and while Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang kept running (barely), it had some issues in first gear. Since we never got up to more than five miles an hour, we shook, rattled, and rolled through the swamped roads. Biff looked steadily worse and worse through it, and I was deeply relieved when he finally turned the thing off in its miserable little parking spot at the top of a concrete box. But then he just sat there with a glassy look in his eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Silence.
“We can wait. Take your time. It's not like we have anywhere to be.”
He just rested for a while, while I took the opportunity to wring out my shirt.
Finally, he said, “We can't do it tomorrow.”
“No,” I said. “We can't.”
He sighed. “Sunday?”
“Pray,” I replied.
...
Biff did not look much better Sunday, and neither did the roads, but we didn't have much of a choice in the matter. At least the rain had stopped, and some of the surface moisture had evaporated, leaving sinkholes, subway flooding, and swampy humidity in its wake, bad enough that even I wanted to strip down to short sleeves—though I didn’t. Biff insisted that the less skin contact we made with the mark’s stuff, the better, and seeing as he was wearing long sleeves and pants, I did too. Biff made sure to bring water bottles.
We made our way up to the parking garage with apprehension. The car had thankfully mostly dried out, though it smelled even more like cheese.
Biff got in. He popped the hood. This time, I was able to jump it, and Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang started on the first try.
“We love you, baby,” I said, kissing the dashboard.
“We in business!” Biff whooped. He slapped a vanish job on it (we were now driving a marginally less hideous, but far more boring Volvo) and off we went.
Once out of first gear, the ride was much less shaky, and though the car had no air conditioning, it wasn’t too bad as long as we kept all the windows down. Traffic was still a mess, but we made it to Oasis Valley by the afternoon without any real incident. We parked across the street from Max Love’s house, got out, and got to work.
While Biff raised the vanish so we could see each other but not be seen by neighbors, I pulled on heavy gloves and started climbing. Our mark’s ostentatious lawn and garden turned out handy—he had a tall, climbable tree right in front of one of his turrets. Not a cactus, not a yucca, an honest-to-god tree, probably transplanted and maintained at ridiculous expense. The lawn was a sodden mess, but I was able to avoid squishing through it via the artfully arranged concrete stones that bordered between the garden and the lawn. Across the border and up the tree I went, but I took my time; we had all day, and Biff had me covered visually, so as long as I stayed quiet, everything would be fine.
The tree didn’t go close to any windows, but that was fine; it did go up to the roof. While Biff watched, sweated, slugged back water, and pulled on his own gloves, I got up without accident, then went looking for that fake balcony. In the process, I found myself looking into the back yard, which I’d never bothered to pay much attention to, previously. My attention had been focused solely on the house and ways into it. But now I saw--
I came back into Biff’s view, but there was no way I could verbally express my feelings without noise. So I shook my fists, flailed at the backyard, and gave him the look of a hapless god faced with the perfidy of humanity.
Biff spread his hands and looked incredulous.
I defaulted to Pidgin Sign, gesturing big and broad to insure he saw it: “he has a diving pool!”
Of course, what I signed was ‘big lake.’ But surely Biff knew those signs; I’d taught him them.
Biff rolled his eyes dramatically enough that I could see it from the roof. He waved me on as though to say, get on with it.
“I will urinate in this man’s lake!” I signed angrily.
I don’t know if Biff knew the sign for ‘urinate’ or not, but he knew me. With a look of irritation, he drew one finger across his throat, and made a very pointed open-window gesture. I huffed but acquiesced. At least the pool had massively overflowed due to the rainstorm and ruined the back lawn.
It turned out the fake balcony was within dropping distance from the back roof, but that didn’t do me any good; the balcony wasn’t just fake but poorly attached too, and the moment my foot touched the rail, it started to give. I considered somehow getting the window open and swinging inside without touching the railing, only to then realize that Biff was right: the shutters opened outward—that is, into the space the railing blocked. No way was I getting in there unless I tore the whole railing off first, which admittedly probably wouldn’t be hard but not exactly conducive to stealth.
Rolling my eyes, I pulled myself back up on the roof and started looking for a more sensibly designed window. Eventually I found one—locked, but it proved just as amenable to my trusty L-bar as Biff's. After getting it open, I tucked the L-bar back into my belt and swung in to find myself in an enormous room that seemed to be decorated entirely in shades of beige.
It was also a crisp seventy degrees inside, despite the sweltering outdoors. At least we would be able to steal comfortably.
I leaned out and gave Biff a thumbs-up. He made doorknob motions, and I nodded, then shut the window and went to find the front door. Even though it was the middle of the day, the house was surprisingly dim, but I didn’t turn on any lights; I wasn’t sure if Biff had the vanish completely down yet.
Once I let him in, he shut the door again, re-locked it, and to my surprise, he moved out of view and sat under the grand staircase (which, seeing this place, was probably made of plastic). When I didn't follow, he frowned, and gestured for me to join him. “Already fucked up on the weather,” he murmured. “I ain't fucking up this.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but then I realized it: all the standing, driving, and sweating had worn him out. I shut my mouth and sat next to him and took the water bottle when he offered.
Just as well I did, really; Biff's instincts were good. The cops drove by, but by that point were sick enough of our schtick to not put much effort into it. The house looked fine, the door was fully intact and still locked, and after checking both, they left, assuming it was another false alarm. Maybe they called Max Love again, but even if they did, nothing to be done until he got back from the toy conference.
Only once they were definitely gone did Biff stand up and head for the main hall.
“’Kay, got a vanish ‘round the whole house, so lights’re fine, just be quiet. Put all the shit down here in--” Then he stopped, because he'd flicked on the hall lights.
The enormous frames on the walls, which I'd presumed to be family photos or something, turned out to all contain extreme close-up photo-realistic paintings of Max Lovables. The painter had apparently been most interested in their glassy eyes, but there were also disembodied heads, limbs, and bodies.
For a moment, we just stood there. I looked at Biff. He looked uncomfortable a moment, then shook it off and muttered, “You take third, I take first, meet on second. Shit go in the foyer.”
I pulled a heavy-duty garbage bag from my belt and headed off without protest; Biff wasn’t looking so good, while I was still fresh after climbing a house, and anyway, I hoped that the third floor would be less creepy.
For once, Love’s house followed some rules of common sense: he had apparently kept to the lower floors, and the third floor was mostly bland guestrooms. There were still some of those huge framed pop art canvases of plushie parts, but mostly there were abstract art and landscapes, which at least didn’t inspire nightmares. I admit, the palatial bathroom with both rainbow wallpaper and tropical jungle tile was so hideous I sort of liked it, but it was the exception.
I didn’t really expect to find Love’s personal revenge wankery up two flights of stairs, and sure enough, I didn’t. But that was fine, because there was plenty of various other loot. The flat-screen TVs, alas, did not make the cut; they weighed almost as much as I did, and were so big and unwieldy that I wasn’t sure they’d fit through the car door, even if I got them there. The other electronics, fortunately, were more compact; I hauled some very nice stereo equipment down to the foyer without trouble, along with some women’s jewelry that I assumed belonged to Rosenthal.
I finished riffling through the closets, made off with some cuff links, headed down the stairs, and met Biff at the second floor. Or rather, found him standing in a lit doorway, staring.
“What’s your deal?” I asked.
He moved out of the way.
“Oh my god,” I said.
The second floor, it turned out, had the studio and work rooms. Display cases, sheets of paper covered with designs, racks upon racks of fabrics. And on every available surface: plushies. Piles upon piles of them, staring at me with their shiny plastic eyes.
I shuddered and turned the lights off, only for Biff to shove past me and turn them on again.
“No,” I said.
“Fuck you, some of these are worth 2K!”
“Wait, really?”
Turned out there was a thriving underground black market in Max Lovables, of all things, and Biff had read up as best he could before the heist—though he admitted he wasn’t entirely clear on the nitty-gritty distinctions of which were worth the most, since he was not a nine-year-old girl nor the mother of one, and thus couldn’t quite remember the specific tag designs or factory errors involved. So we grabbed them all, and they filled two enormous garbage bags all on their own. I was just glad not to have to look at their beady little eyes.
Biff was smirking at me while I bagged.
“What?” I asked.
“You don’t like ‘em.” The jerk was laughing at me. “You fuckin’ scared of plushies.”
“I’m not scared of them, Biff. I just think they’re possessed by demons.”
He wiggled a rainbow panda into my face, snickering, “it coming. It gonna get’cha...”
“I will electrocute you, I swear I will.”
Once the Lovables were bagged, we started hunting the tapes again, divvying up the rooms between us. I had to give Biff credit; he was methodical about the whole business, insuring that we wouldn’t have to hit any room twice. We went through the work rooms, and while he tore through the office, I hit the rec room, where the entertainment center was.
That held another bounty of robbables, but the shelves upon shelves of movies made me pause. It seemed like a stupid idea to keep his blackmail with all the rest of his movies where anyone could find them, but well, this was the guy who ran his sprinkler at noon. And what if he’d concealed it in a box with something nobody would ever watch of their own volition, Fly-Fishing for Rich People or something?
I shelved it and focused on grabbing all the expensive electronics I could lift, and I was just finishing with that when Biff came up.
“You find it?” I asked, but he shook his head. Well, dang, there went that hope. And Biff had gone through the first floor, with all the personal stuff; surely he hadn’t missed it.
I was starting to have a sense of foreboding. “What if he’s put it in a safe or a safety deposit box or something? That’s what I’d do.”
Biff rolled his eyes. “He ain’t you. Safes’re for important shit, and Rosenthal gets calls from this place. Says she can hear him watching them, so he’s gotta keep ‘em close by.” He surveyed the room, rubbing his chin. “This set-up better than what he had in his room.”
“Yeah, so?”
“You got some revenge porn. You gonna jack off to it in your room, or in this place?”
I thought about it. Personally, if I were inclined to such behavior, I would’ve wanted the privacy of my own room, even if it did have a giant plushie painting watching me do it. But… this was a guy with tons of money who nevertheless blackmailed his ex for humiliation’s sake. “It’d be like bragging, wouldn’t it? To keep it in a room everyone comes to, never knowing.”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking.”
We looked at Love’s movie collection. We couldn’t not; it was right across from us, in an enormous cabinet crammed full of tapes. Apparently Love was a little slow to switch to new technology; even Thomas’s family had bought some DVDs at this point, but not him.
“Before you came up,” I said, “I was thinking what if he hid it in another movie box...”
I could tell by Biff’s face that he thought the prospect plausible, but was no more enthusiastic about it than I was. The only way to be sure would be to manually check each box. It’d take forever.
Biff flopped on the sofa with an air of resignation. Then he thought for a moment, got up again, and started painstakingly getting down to look under the sofa. “Oh, thank fuck.”
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
He tried to reach under it, only to wince. “Here. Help me get it out. And don’t you fucking break those.”
I had to reach as far as I could, but then my fingers touched plastic. They were plastic storage drawers, like the kind Raige had under his bed to keep sheet music in. It’d never occurred to me to check under the sofa, but I didn’t feel too bad about it; I probably would’ve found them after I finished cleaning out the electronics.
I pulled open the first drawer. Then another. Biff swore.
The entire thing was filled with homemade tapes, labeled with date ranges and then esoteric abbreviations: “2005/4/21-30 Bd-SS,” “2005/12/1-20 Ba-CF,” stuff like that. They were meticulously filed in chronological order, stacked with labels facing out, and five of the six drawers were completely packed. (The sixth was half full.)
“What even are these?” I asked. “No way this guy’s gotten laid that many times...”
Biff’s jaw was set in a grim line. He reached in and grabbed a tape from roughly eight months back with the label addendum “D-AR.” Then he turned on the TV, woke up the VCR, and shoved the tape in.
“Do you think--”
I didn’t finish. The tape had started, and it showed…
The dining room. It was empty.
We waited a couple seconds, and when nothing changed, Biff jabbed the fast-forward button. Mandy Rosenthal instantly sped into the kitchen with Max Love.
They started having dinner. Biff kept the fast-forward on, but that’s all that happened: they had dinner. Then the tape cut and started up with a new, different meal, also starring Rosenthal. As far as I could tell, they were perfectly normal meals, no passionate sex on the table or anything, which only made it worse. The whole thing gave me the creeps, and even more so once I realized that these couldn’t have been the original tapes. No, he’d apparently taken those recordings and spliced them together into this one, so as to have the maximum footage of her possible per tape. No wonder he hadn’t changed over to DVDs! How much work had this taken him?
“Biff,” I said, “This guy...”
Biff said nothing. He was digging into the tapes, frowning at the labels.
“‘D’ is probably ‘dining room,’” I ventured. “Ugh, that means that all those are rooms-- ‘bedroom,’ ‘bathroom.’ And I guess ‘AR’ is ‘Amanda Rosenthal…’”
We looked at the tapes. Most of them did not have ‘AR’ at the end. Biff ejected the dining room tape, put in “GBd-SS,” and hit play, then fast-forward. It showed one of the guest bedrooms I’d been through, and a different woman. Apparently that jewelry I’d snatched wasn’t Rosenthal’s.
We sat there on the couch in stunned silence for a bit as the tape played on.
Finally, Biff said, “So that’s what all that fancy tape shit in his rooms was for.”
I hadn’t thought I could get any more horrified, but I did. “Oh god, what about the originals?”
“He must’ve taped over ‘em. Why splice if you ain’t gonna reuse ‘em?”
“Even if he did, and you don’t know that, does he still have these things running in his house? There’s so much electronics in this place, I never thought to look for bugs; I’m going to have to fry everything now...”
Biff was still thinking about the immediate concern, and grabbed for a drawer. “Fuck it, we taking all of these--”
That’s when we heard the sound of a garage door opening. Or more accurately, we felt it, since it was directly below us. Looks like Max Love had come home early.
--CONCLUDED IN PART 3
Series: Infinity Smashed
Word Count: 10,800
Summary: Against medical advice, Biff takes a job far above his pay grade and everything goes wrong.
Notes: Part One is HERE. This story won the November, December, and January writing polls, and it was sponsored by the Patreon crew! More notes at the bottom.
Max Love’s house wasn’t just hideous. So was its lawn. It was fluorescent green, mowed within an inch of its life and methodically scrubbed of any dandelions or abnormalities, with an automatic sprinkler system cheerfully clicking along as though it wasn’t high noon in high summer in high drought. Apparently the water rationing didn’t apply to everyone.
“I want to burn it, Biff,” I said. “I want to set this guy’s frogging lawn on frogging fire.”
“Just steal everything ain’t nailed down.”
That made me feel a little better.
I won’t recount the time we spent in Oasis Valley, zapping the burglar alarm, irritating the cops, and sitting around. (Well, I sat around. Biff apparently had his own checklist of things to do, and I mostly left him to it.) At first, Biff stuck with straightforward vanishing, but I was still so wretched at navigating the world while invisible that he finally caved and gave us rich people images instead. It meant we had to keep moving and looking like we had some legitimate reason to be there, but at least I wasn’t constantly crashing into mailboxes and street lamps. And thankfully, Oasis Valley people did not keep track of their neighbors like south side folks did; as long as we appeared appropriately white and wealthy, they didn’t seem to mind. Which was good, since Biff still wasn’t all that mobile.
Which led to Operation: Get Car, and…
“Oh my god,” I said. “What is that?”
“Fuck you, you coulda asked your boyfriend for his car.” Biff couldn't slam the door shut, with his arms' limited range of movement, so he kicked it shut, and for a moment, I thought the bumper might come off.
The Vaygan south side was haven to many an ugly car, but this one was a marvel. Once upon a time, it might’ve been a Volkswagen Beetle; now it was a grade-A lemon. Some optimistic soul had painted it pink at some point, except for its name in careful blue script: “Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang.” The whole thing was covered in gun decals, the interior looked like it'd been attacked by every knife, cat, and sandblaster in Vaygo, and it smelled.
I staggered over to it, fell upon my knees, and did my best to hug the front fender. “I love it. This car is my mom now.”
“Yeah, well, Mommy’s gonna go back to rehab after this, so give it up. It’s a POS loan.”
But I didn’t care about that, or that Biff would have to put a vanish job on it to keep it from being reported to the Oasis Valley Homeowners Association. It was a work of modern art, semi-reliable transportation to and from Oasis Valley, and would probably hold a flat-screen. We were set to go.
Everything seemed to be going so well, we forgot to check the weather report.
…
To be fair, it was a reasonable mistake. It was July in Vaygo, Arizona, in the midst of a horrific drought. It looked like a no-brainer.
But on Friday morning, the heavens opened, the tempest descended, and it didn't stop.
At first, Biff and I reacted with incredulity and mild annoyance. Then, as the rain continued to pelt down, our emotions shifted to growing alarm. At first it was because we were worried about the job, but as the rain kept coming, we realized that we might have bigger problems than our heist.
In Treehouse, rain like this was a common enough occurrence. But Vaygo was a desert city. Drought, fire, strikes, and riots were all normal parts of life, but water coming out of the sky was a disaster on par with the end days. Biff and I sat at his window, listening to the radio and watching the sky. Well, I was watching; Biff was glowering at it as though he could somehow shame Mother Nature into capitulation.
Then the radio announced a flash flood warning. Biff went rigid, leaped to his feet and made for the door, only to have to come back for his keys.
“Where are you going?” I asked. “You can’t run!”
“The shitheap!”
“Relax, we parked it uphill. With bricks. It won’t wash away.”
“It leaks!”
Of course it leaked. Why would a waterproof car be necessary in Vaygo? By the time we got there, the inside wasn't much drier than we were. Worse, it wouldn't start.
That he couldn't pound on the steering wheel only seemed to make Biff madder. He glared at me.
“Get out,” he snarled.
“But--”
“Now.”
I sighed, opened my side of the door, and returned to the torrent.
Biff flicked on the headlights and shouted out the window, “They bright?” When I shook my head no, he looked slightly less angry. “Battery. Fuck it, I ain't buying a new one for this. Jump it.”
I glowered at him. “Fifty percent.”
“Fuck you!”
“Fifty or you can jump this thing yourself!”
He caved and popped the hood.
Unfortunately, after half an hour of struggling and swearing, it became clear that I couldn't jump the thing. It was just too wet. All I was managing to do was hurt myself and possibly the car. Shaking my numb hands, I shouted to Biff, “Is there some other way to get this stupid thing started?”
There was: pushing.
Had Biff been able-bodied, it would've been easy. As it was, the only reason I was able to do it was that Biff had parked on a hill, so I had gravity's assistance (though even then, it took all my strength and weight against it). Unfortunately for him, Biff had parked on a hill on an upward slope, meaning we had to push-start it in reverse. He nearly smashed into a street light and ended our heist before it began, but finally got our intrepid metal chariot started. I piled in, soaked to the skin, and we went searching for higher, drier ground.
Too bad half the Vaygan car-owning population had a similar idea.
We ended up having to park the car in a multistory parking garage up in the business district, and empty our pockets for the privilege. With the state of the roads (and the drivers on them) what would've taken us twenty minutes to walk under normal circumstances took over half an hour in the car.
This was more than just an irritation. Water sloshed in through the sides and bottom of the car as we went through low points, and while Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang kept running (barely), it had some issues in first gear. Since we never got up to more than five miles an hour, we shook, rattled, and rolled through the swamped roads. Biff looked steadily worse and worse through it, and I was deeply relieved when he finally turned the thing off in its miserable little parking spot at the top of a concrete box. But then he just sat there with a glassy look in his eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Silence.
“We can wait. Take your time. It's not like we have anywhere to be.”
He just rested for a while, while I took the opportunity to wring out my shirt.
Finally, he said, “We can't do it tomorrow.”
“No,” I said. “We can't.”
He sighed. “Sunday?”
“Pray,” I replied.
...
Biff did not look much better Sunday, and neither did the roads, but we didn't have much of a choice in the matter. At least the rain had stopped, and some of the surface moisture had evaporated, leaving sinkholes, subway flooding, and swampy humidity in its wake, bad enough that even I wanted to strip down to short sleeves—though I didn’t. Biff insisted that the less skin contact we made with the mark’s stuff, the better, and seeing as he was wearing long sleeves and pants, I did too. Biff made sure to bring water bottles.
We made our way up to the parking garage with apprehension. The car had thankfully mostly dried out, though it smelled even more like cheese.
Biff got in. He popped the hood. This time, I was able to jump it, and Shitty-Shitty Bang-Bang started on the first try.
“We love you, baby,” I said, kissing the dashboard.
“We in business!” Biff whooped. He slapped a vanish job on it (we were now driving a marginally less hideous, but far more boring Volvo) and off we went.
Once out of first gear, the ride was much less shaky, and though the car had no air conditioning, it wasn’t too bad as long as we kept all the windows down. Traffic was still a mess, but we made it to Oasis Valley by the afternoon without any real incident. We parked across the street from Max Love’s house, got out, and got to work.
While Biff raised the vanish so we could see each other but not be seen by neighbors, I pulled on heavy gloves and started climbing. Our mark’s ostentatious lawn and garden turned out handy—he had a tall, climbable tree right in front of one of his turrets. Not a cactus, not a yucca, an honest-to-god tree, probably transplanted and maintained at ridiculous expense. The lawn was a sodden mess, but I was able to avoid squishing through it via the artfully arranged concrete stones that bordered between the garden and the lawn. Across the border and up the tree I went, but I took my time; we had all day, and Biff had me covered visually, so as long as I stayed quiet, everything would be fine.
The tree didn’t go close to any windows, but that was fine; it did go up to the roof. While Biff watched, sweated, slugged back water, and pulled on his own gloves, I got up without accident, then went looking for that fake balcony. In the process, I found myself looking into the back yard, which I’d never bothered to pay much attention to, previously. My attention had been focused solely on the house and ways into it. But now I saw--
I came back into Biff’s view, but there was no way I could verbally express my feelings without noise. So I shook my fists, flailed at the backyard, and gave him the look of a hapless god faced with the perfidy of humanity.
Biff spread his hands and looked incredulous.
I defaulted to Pidgin Sign, gesturing big and broad to insure he saw it: “he has a diving pool!”
Of course, what I signed was ‘big lake.’ But surely Biff knew those signs; I’d taught him them.
Biff rolled his eyes dramatically enough that I could see it from the roof. He waved me on as though to say, get on with it.
“I will urinate in this man’s lake!” I signed angrily.
I don’t know if Biff knew the sign for ‘urinate’ or not, but he knew me. With a look of irritation, he drew one finger across his throat, and made a very pointed open-window gesture. I huffed but acquiesced. At least the pool had massively overflowed due to the rainstorm and ruined the back lawn.
It turned out the fake balcony was within dropping distance from the back roof, but that didn’t do me any good; the balcony wasn’t just fake but poorly attached too, and the moment my foot touched the rail, it started to give. I considered somehow getting the window open and swinging inside without touching the railing, only to then realize that Biff was right: the shutters opened outward—that is, into the space the railing blocked. No way was I getting in there unless I tore the whole railing off first, which admittedly probably wouldn’t be hard but not exactly conducive to stealth.
Rolling my eyes, I pulled myself back up on the roof and started looking for a more sensibly designed window. Eventually I found one—locked, but it proved just as amenable to my trusty L-bar as Biff's. After getting it open, I tucked the L-bar back into my belt and swung in to find myself in an enormous room that seemed to be decorated entirely in shades of beige.
It was also a crisp seventy degrees inside, despite the sweltering outdoors. At least we would be able to steal comfortably.
I leaned out and gave Biff a thumbs-up. He made doorknob motions, and I nodded, then shut the window and went to find the front door. Even though it was the middle of the day, the house was surprisingly dim, but I didn’t turn on any lights; I wasn’t sure if Biff had the vanish completely down yet.
Once I let him in, he shut the door again, re-locked it, and to my surprise, he moved out of view and sat under the grand staircase (which, seeing this place, was probably made of plastic). When I didn't follow, he frowned, and gestured for me to join him. “Already fucked up on the weather,” he murmured. “I ain't fucking up this.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but then I realized it: all the standing, driving, and sweating had worn him out. I shut my mouth and sat next to him and took the water bottle when he offered.
Just as well I did, really; Biff's instincts were good. The cops drove by, but by that point were sick enough of our schtick to not put much effort into it. The house looked fine, the door was fully intact and still locked, and after checking both, they left, assuming it was another false alarm. Maybe they called Max Love again, but even if they did, nothing to be done until he got back from the toy conference.
Only once they were definitely gone did Biff stand up and head for the main hall.
“’Kay, got a vanish ‘round the whole house, so lights’re fine, just be quiet. Put all the shit down here in--” Then he stopped, because he'd flicked on the hall lights.
The enormous frames on the walls, which I'd presumed to be family photos or something, turned out to all contain extreme close-up photo-realistic paintings of Max Lovables. The painter had apparently been most interested in their glassy eyes, but there were also disembodied heads, limbs, and bodies.
For a moment, we just stood there. I looked at Biff. He looked uncomfortable a moment, then shook it off and muttered, “You take third, I take first, meet on second. Shit go in the foyer.”
I pulled a heavy-duty garbage bag from my belt and headed off without protest; Biff wasn’t looking so good, while I was still fresh after climbing a house, and anyway, I hoped that the third floor would be less creepy.
For once, Love’s house followed some rules of common sense: he had apparently kept to the lower floors, and the third floor was mostly bland guestrooms. There were still some of those huge framed pop art canvases of plushie parts, but mostly there were abstract art and landscapes, which at least didn’t inspire nightmares. I admit, the palatial bathroom with both rainbow wallpaper and tropical jungle tile was so hideous I sort of liked it, but it was the exception.
I didn’t really expect to find Love’s personal revenge wankery up two flights of stairs, and sure enough, I didn’t. But that was fine, because there was plenty of various other loot. The flat-screen TVs, alas, did not make the cut; they weighed almost as much as I did, and were so big and unwieldy that I wasn’t sure they’d fit through the car door, even if I got them there. The other electronics, fortunately, were more compact; I hauled some very nice stereo equipment down to the foyer without trouble, along with some women’s jewelry that I assumed belonged to Rosenthal.
I finished riffling through the closets, made off with some cuff links, headed down the stairs, and met Biff at the second floor. Or rather, found him standing in a lit doorway, staring.
“What’s your deal?” I asked.
He moved out of the way.
“Oh my god,” I said.
The second floor, it turned out, had the studio and work rooms. Display cases, sheets of paper covered with designs, racks upon racks of fabrics. And on every available surface: plushies. Piles upon piles of them, staring at me with their shiny plastic eyes.
I shuddered and turned the lights off, only for Biff to shove past me and turn them on again.
“No,” I said.
“Fuck you, some of these are worth 2K!”
“Wait, really?”
Turned out there was a thriving underground black market in Max Lovables, of all things, and Biff had read up as best he could before the heist—though he admitted he wasn’t entirely clear on the nitty-gritty distinctions of which were worth the most, since he was not a nine-year-old girl nor the mother of one, and thus couldn’t quite remember the specific tag designs or factory errors involved. So we grabbed them all, and they filled two enormous garbage bags all on their own. I was just glad not to have to look at their beady little eyes.
Biff was smirking at me while I bagged.
“What?” I asked.
“You don’t like ‘em.” The jerk was laughing at me. “You fuckin’ scared of plushies.”
“I’m not scared of them, Biff. I just think they’re possessed by demons.”
He wiggled a rainbow panda into my face, snickering, “it coming. It gonna get’cha...”
“I will electrocute you, I swear I will.”
Once the Lovables were bagged, we started hunting the tapes again, divvying up the rooms between us. I had to give Biff credit; he was methodical about the whole business, insuring that we wouldn’t have to hit any room twice. We went through the work rooms, and while he tore through the office, I hit the rec room, where the entertainment center was.
That held another bounty of robbables, but the shelves upon shelves of movies made me pause. It seemed like a stupid idea to keep his blackmail with all the rest of his movies where anyone could find them, but well, this was the guy who ran his sprinkler at noon. And what if he’d concealed it in a box with something nobody would ever watch of their own volition, Fly-Fishing for Rich People or something?
I shelved it and focused on grabbing all the expensive electronics I could lift, and I was just finishing with that when Biff came up.
“You find it?” I asked, but he shook his head. Well, dang, there went that hope. And Biff had gone through the first floor, with all the personal stuff; surely he hadn’t missed it.
I was starting to have a sense of foreboding. “What if he’s put it in a safe or a safety deposit box or something? That’s what I’d do.”
Biff rolled his eyes. “He ain’t you. Safes’re for important shit, and Rosenthal gets calls from this place. Says she can hear him watching them, so he’s gotta keep ‘em close by.” He surveyed the room, rubbing his chin. “This set-up better than what he had in his room.”
“Yeah, so?”
“You got some revenge porn. You gonna jack off to it in your room, or in this place?”
I thought about it. Personally, if I were inclined to such behavior, I would’ve wanted the privacy of my own room, even if it did have a giant plushie painting watching me do it. But… this was a guy with tons of money who nevertheless blackmailed his ex for humiliation’s sake. “It’d be like bragging, wouldn’t it? To keep it in a room everyone comes to, never knowing.”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking.”
We looked at Love’s movie collection. We couldn’t not; it was right across from us, in an enormous cabinet crammed full of tapes. Apparently Love was a little slow to switch to new technology; even Thomas’s family had bought some DVDs at this point, but not him.
“Before you came up,” I said, “I was thinking what if he hid it in another movie box...”
I could tell by Biff’s face that he thought the prospect plausible, but was no more enthusiastic about it than I was. The only way to be sure would be to manually check each box. It’d take forever.
Biff flopped on the sofa with an air of resignation. Then he thought for a moment, got up again, and started painstakingly getting down to look under the sofa. “Oh, thank fuck.”
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
He tried to reach under it, only to wince. “Here. Help me get it out. And don’t you fucking break those.”
I had to reach as far as I could, but then my fingers touched plastic. They were plastic storage drawers, like the kind Raige had under his bed to keep sheet music in. It’d never occurred to me to check under the sofa, but I didn’t feel too bad about it; I probably would’ve found them after I finished cleaning out the electronics.
I pulled open the first drawer. Then another. Biff swore.
The entire thing was filled with homemade tapes, labeled with date ranges and then esoteric abbreviations: “2005/4/21-30 Bd-SS,” “2005/12/1-20 Ba-CF,” stuff like that. They were meticulously filed in chronological order, stacked with labels facing out, and five of the six drawers were completely packed. (The sixth was half full.)
“What even are these?” I asked. “No way this guy’s gotten laid that many times...”
Biff’s jaw was set in a grim line. He reached in and grabbed a tape from roughly eight months back with the label addendum “D-AR.” Then he turned on the TV, woke up the VCR, and shoved the tape in.
“Do you think--”
I didn’t finish. The tape had started, and it showed…
The dining room. It was empty.
We waited a couple seconds, and when nothing changed, Biff jabbed the fast-forward button. Mandy Rosenthal instantly sped into the kitchen with Max Love.
They started having dinner. Biff kept the fast-forward on, but that’s all that happened: they had dinner. Then the tape cut and started up with a new, different meal, also starring Rosenthal. As far as I could tell, they were perfectly normal meals, no passionate sex on the table or anything, which only made it worse. The whole thing gave me the creeps, and even more so once I realized that these couldn’t have been the original tapes. No, he’d apparently taken those recordings and spliced them together into this one, so as to have the maximum footage of her possible per tape. No wonder he hadn’t changed over to DVDs! How much work had this taken him?
“Biff,” I said, “This guy...”
Biff said nothing. He was digging into the tapes, frowning at the labels.
“‘D’ is probably ‘dining room,’” I ventured. “Ugh, that means that all those are rooms-- ‘bedroom,’ ‘bathroom.’ And I guess ‘AR’ is ‘Amanda Rosenthal…’”
We looked at the tapes. Most of them did not have ‘AR’ at the end. Biff ejected the dining room tape, put in “GBd-SS,” and hit play, then fast-forward. It showed one of the guest bedrooms I’d been through, and a different woman. Apparently that jewelry I’d snatched wasn’t Rosenthal’s.
We sat there on the couch in stunned silence for a bit as the tape played on.
Finally, Biff said, “So that’s what all that fancy tape shit in his rooms was for.”
I hadn’t thought I could get any more horrified, but I did. “Oh god, what about the originals?”
“He must’ve taped over ‘em. Why splice if you ain’t gonna reuse ‘em?”
“Even if he did, and you don’t know that, does he still have these things running in his house? There’s so much electronics in this place, I never thought to look for bugs; I’m going to have to fry everything now...”
Biff was still thinking about the immediate concern, and grabbed for a drawer. “Fuck it, we taking all of these--”
That’s when we heard the sound of a garage door opening. Or more accurately, we felt it, since it was directly below us. Looks like Max Love had come home early.
--CONCLUDED IN PART 3
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