“Everyone knows dinosaurs couldn’t read, and look what happened to them.”
From the T-shirt collection of Anna Collins
I spent the evening with the floor plans to the Gray mansion, acquired when Colette dated Gray’s architect, and the night stumbling from stress dream to night sweats to more stress dreams, until I finally dragged myself to the shower to wash the stink of fear from my skin, which swirled down the drain like viscous snot. I had a plan – not as good or thorough as the one that had gotten me into this mess – but the details I didn’t know kept sliding parts of the plan around like slippery eels that I couldn’t quite catch.
I spent a few hours with Colette going through the timeline of how she was going to get Sterling out of the house. A call to a P.I. I knew in Boston confirmed that Markham Gray was at his office there and had a full schedule of meetings planned for the next two days, and a visit to Sparky put the finishing touches on my kit. I avoided all thoughts of the look of betrayal on Darius’s face and focused instead on the gift of the information he’d given me about the current state of Gray’s security. I knew how heavy the price tag had been for him, and I treasured it.
Finally, it was time.
I’d modified my tube harness to fit the supplies I’d packed and wore it outside a black bodysuit. I left my leather coat and helmet in the pannier of my motorcycle, which was parked in the alley one building over from Gray’s mansion, and then lurked my way around to the back of Gray’s property.
This was a trickier approach, but the extra cameras made it necessary. I checked my watch – Colette would be at the front door at nine p.m. to pick Sterling up for a late supper club seating. I had twenty minutes to make it to the third floor. I pulled the black silk balaclava down over my face, tucked my hair under the collar of my body suit, pulled up my big girl I can do this panties, and started to climb. My route over the wall and to the back of the mansion was designed to pick my way around camera views and skirt the edges of anything that could be seen from the house.
When no alarms heralded my presence, I started up the wall using window ledges and door frames as hand and foot holds. Gray’s mansion wasn’t a particularly difficult brick building to climb – I’d climbed worse – but there were two tough bits that required a bigger jump than I usually did without a harness. To find the courage for the first jump, I pictured my sister’s naked butt on a billboard, which wasn’t actually helpful because laughter isn’t generally conducive to landing well. My instinct to be like Honor, my D&D rogue, kicked in and saved me from a two-story fall, and I took a few seconds to calm the adrenaline jitters.
As motivation for my second jump, I pictured Darius on his boat, looking relaxed and happy. The peace that flooded me at the thought of his happiness was more centering than all the yoga breathing I’d ever done, and I landed the jump perfectly.
“Just like Honor,” I whispered to myself, and I would have patted myself on the back if death hadn’t been on the line. From there it was a fairly easy grab for the small Juliet balcony that led to the third floor landing. I sent a silent thank you to the original architect of the house for his or her love of Shakespeare, hauled myself up over the railing, and crouched down next to the door to work on the lock.
I checked my watch again – five minutes to go until Colette rang the doorbell. I slid the lock-picks out from the runner’s belt I wore around my waist and went to work. When I was sixteen I’d taught myself how to break into combination locks because it was something Honor would know how to do, and from there, I mastered using lock picks on a variety of household locks. The mechanism on this door wasn’t the easiest, by any means, but it also wasn’t the hardest, and I heard the telltale click of the tumblers opening within three-and-a-half minutes. I put the picks away, pulled on my grippy gloves, and waited.
Forty-five seconds later by my watch, the doorbell rang. I crouched further into the corner of the balcony and waited to see if Sterling passed by. He didn’t, which meant he’d been on one of the two lower floors. A moment after the faint sound of an electronic snick, I opened the door and slipped inside. Ten seconds later, the system informed the house that it had re-armed, and I waited one full minute more, listening to the sounds of silence.
Okay, I inhaled, time to do this. The third floor landing was a blind spot, and the main staircase used motion sensor tech. The bannister was fair game though, so I used grippy gloves and climbing shoes to slow my backward slide down. On the second floor landing I was careful to avoid the steps as I pulled off my harness and removed all the contents except the fake Manet.
This was the part I’d worked out with Sparky to protect me from the thermal imaging sensors in the hallway. With his tech geekery and my fundamental weirdness, we’d put together the perfect, well perfectly ridiculous, plan.
I picked up my T. rex costume from among my supplies on the floor and put it on. Then I attached a portable backpacking heater to the pump and inflated the costume with ninety-eight degree air. It would make me sweat, but would also effectively create a body heat signature in the shape of a T. rex. I sauntered down the hall, in full view of the thermal cameras, like the dino-badass I was.
Finding the hidden latch for the panic room door just under the Agatha Christie shelf was only a challenge because the T. rex had stupid little T. rex arms with the reach of a house lizard, which meant I had to unzip the front, causing a momentary pressure loss. I managed to find the latch before the whole thing deflated, so my size and body shape camouflage retained some of its value. Once inside the panic room, I closed the door behind me and quickly shed Rexie so I could go to work.
I flipped the computer screen on and checked the cameras for movement. There was none, so I kept the exterior camera angles onscreen and pulled out the portable stretcher Sparky had made for me. It was quick and easy to build, and he’d even installed a clamping system that allowed the Manet to be stretched over it without staples.
Phase two involved the extraction tool he’d designed. First it cut through the original wood stretcher to create smaller pieces, and then I used it to carefully pull the pieces free from the outer frame without triggering the alarm. This process took some strength and the precision of a large scale game of Operation, but I’d been practicing since the day Sparky had made it for me.
Retrieving the old stretcher was a vital part of the nuclear arms part of the plan. I believed my intrigue-loving aunt could have hidden something inside the edges of the fake Manet when she painted them, something that could either implicate Gray or exonerate my mom, and I was taking it for insurance.
Once the broken stretcher with the attached edges of two paintings was folded up and put into the tube, I placed the newly stretched Manet into the old frame, stuck it to the wall with Command strips for support, and checked the monitor one last time.
Something moved in the image of the south side of the house, and I froze. The cameras to the south were aimed at the garages, and if a resident of the mansion came home, that’s the direction they’d come from. I stared at the screen for a long moment, but the frame remained empty of anything on two legs or four, so I quickly donned my tube harness and then Rexie, which I re-inflated with hot air. I was ready to make my escape.
My plan was to climb back up the stair bannister to the third floor, wait for the alarm system to disengage when Sterling got home, and slip out the back before anyone was the wiser. It was a decent plan with a sixty-four percent chance of complete success, a twenty percent chance of at least partial injury, and a sixteen percent chance of catastrophic failure. Unfortunately, I realized I was in sixteen percent territory the second my dino-badass-self stepped out of the panic room door.
“There is a gun pointed at your head, and the police are on their way. Put your hands up or I’ll shoot.”
The whole thing would have been hilarious, except for all the reasons it wasn’t. I genuinely tried to put my hands up, but all I could do was watch the tiny T. rex arms strain to break free of their minuscule range of motion and hope whoever was holding the gun would double over in hysterics instead of shooting me.
“Actually,” said a voice that inspired the very best kind of chills, “perhaps we should let the dinosaur have a word.”