“What?” Jean surprised me with a knock on my patio door. “You thought you’d do this without me?” Jean was decked out in a similar suit, only hers looked far more badass somehow which was weird as I was pretty sure they were the same outfit.
I dashed to the sliding glass window to open it for her. “Who am I to disagree?”
“Tam is off in the kitchen, but she said to give you the afternoon off,” and the wink that accompanied that was probably also from Tam.
“Awesome,” I grinned, an uncharacteristic thing for me. Even my jaw muscles knew I didn’t ever do that.
“I’d guess that the schematics are kept in a safe in the manager’s office behind the front desk,” Jean said as I reached for the room door and paused. I hadn’t even known where I was going to look.
“Why do you think that?”
“Check your pockets,” Jean pointed to one of the dozens of pockets on this outfit. “I went through them all while you were messing around in the bathroom. I wanted to see what tools we’d get and found the note.”
I felt stupid. I should have gone through my pockets and gotten familiar with my tools. I had lockpicks in a small, leather, roll-up pouch. I had a headset hooked up to a stethoscope-type thing. There were clamps, a retractable rope, halters, carabiners with a matte finish so they didn’t clank when banged together, a glasscutter, some suction cups, penlight, an employee key card, and a few tubes of some gel that became acid when combined. There was also a pocketknife, the kind that came with all the little pull-out tools you could imagine, in a belt-pouch that also had what looked like a mini-fishing/survival kit. I could have spent two hours just pouring over the tools, but I just gave them quick glances and then put them all back.
I also found the note which said,
You’ll find the safe in the manager’s office behind check-in. There will be a folder marked “Blackestmail” in the safe. Bring that to room 471 by midnight tonight and slip it under the door. You can keep whatever else is in the safe. This is the price of my “help.” Betray me and I’ll make sure you never leave the hotel alive.
“Everybody’s looking for something,” Jean shrugged as I read it to myself.
“Sounds good to me,” I crumpled the paper and stuffed it back in a pocket.
“I noticed an employee elevator at the end of the hall,” Jean suggested as we slid into the empty hallway.
“That must be what this is for,” I found the key card and brandished it.
“Housekeeping should be done for the day,” Jean commented, hot on my heels and we hurried down the hall that was decked out in tables full of what smelled like fresh tropical flowers. “The only staff coming and going from the elevator at this time of day should be room service and Tam said she’d give us a heads up if anyone ordered food from our floor or lower.”
“Wait,” I paused at the elevator door. “Why don’t we just pose as room service and bring the manager lunch?”
“Because then we’d miss out on being cat burglars,” Jean took the employee card from my hand and used it on the elevator controls as I nodded my head in enthusiastic agreement.
“My dream job, I gotta say,” I admitted to Jean.
“Sweet,” Jean nodded back at me, and we grinned like idiots of each other until the elevator opened.
Exp +100 (Quest: More Viewers!! Quest Complete!)
The elevator took us to the basement employee parking garage complete with maintenance offices, storage rooms and more importantly, air conditioning vents. It was absurd from a RW perspective since air conditioners had long ago been replaced by the climate control app on smartwatches, but I didn’t care why the vents were there. We picked the lock on a storage room and found the perfect vent with a stairway of boxes that led up to it. We also found some stuff I was coming back for. What? I hadn’t had a brush since coming to prison and it was a really nice brush.
Once I maneuvered my little pack onto my stomach instead of my back, I had just enough room to crawl up and into the largest of the vents. Not that Kodo or Podo were still in the pack and Hex wasn’t in my hair. They’d scampered right out and into the vents before me, their little paws making almost no noise on the metal, making me think that Hex’s float spell was coming in handy for all my adorable little furballs. It was tricky at first to find a rhythm of crawling through the vents that didn’t thunder with the warping of the thin metal, but as my skill in Acrobatic Stealth went up, the sound we made went down.
There was a slippery uphill part that nearly did us in, but we made it by helping each other. Jean pushed me up the ramp and I pulled her up once I got to the top. That little maneuver bumped our skills up by 5 points. I was a little out of breath as we neared the vent that opened into the manager’s office. Unfortunately, the manager was sitting at his desk. The room was relatively small with a nice desk, ergonomic chair, file cabinets, and no visible safe. There were motivational posters and one piece of art in an elaborate frame, and I figured the safe was behind that. The art was a modern reinterpretation of a historical favorite of dogs playing poker on velvet only this one was done by clown artist Ollie Popov, a descendant of one of the most famous clowns in history, who was currently popular for his work portraying old artwork with clowns instead of the original famous figures. This one had six clowns that mimicked the postures and poses of the original dogs. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t to my taste either. The fact that the safe was probably behind that painting was cliché but I loved it.
Jean must have thought similar thoughts because her face was split in a grin just as wide and corny as mine. Jean pulled out her phone and started texting. I hadn’t really gotten around to carrying the cell phones I’d stolen. I hadn’t even activated any of them. It was something I needed to fix before our make-up session with Glenda. I was certainly glad that Jean was with me. I’d have probably figured it out, but she definitely made it so much easier. When Jean was done typing into her phone, she turned the readout to me.
Jean: Need distraction for manager at front desk.
Tam: K. 10 mins.
Jean: Stuck in a vent.
Tam: Send the furballs.
Jean: Furballs in vent 2.
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Tam: 5 mins.
Jean: 2?
Tam: Incoming.
It was a long two minutes, but Tami came through spectacularly. We heard muffled raised voices. The manager got up and opened his door and we got the full brunt of a Tami celebrity fit.
“I’ve got four different chefs all calling for four different types of truffles!” Tam was ranting. “Does this look like a Piedmont white?”
I quickly used my little pocketknife screwdriver to open the vent cover, while Jean held it to keep it from falling in a loud bang.
“This is not a Piedmont white truffle!” Tam was screaming. “This is a Muscat truffle! Do you know what happens when you put a Muscat in a white sauce for a signature Batali white sauce?”
Kodo and Podo, with Hex on their tails, slipped out of the vent as soon as there was the tiniest gap. Whiskers were twitching all over that office.
“You get a brown sauce,” Tam was ranting over the manager’s lower tone. “Did Batali want a brown sauce? NO! And when Batali says that he’s serving a white truffle sauce, he doesn’t mean a muddy brown Muscat sauce.”
We lowered the vent to the floor silently and I was proud of us. I did wonder how long a rant about truffles could go on, but if I thought that Tam had come unprepared for a long argument, I was very wrong. Luckily it was the only thing I was wrong about at that moment. The one piece of artwork did indeed hide the safe.
“Unless you’d like me to take this thousand-dollar Scorzone and peel of a few hundred dollars of the darker part just to make sure the sauce is white,” Tam growled out loudly enough to be heard in the suites. “But then we’d be fraudulently convincing thousands of guests that this bitter Scorzone is actually the smooth musky flavor of a true white. If you’re wanting the new princess and all her celebrity guests to be snickering behind their hands at how immature the AIs for the best chefs of the 2000s…”
I lost a bit of the rest as Jean and I plugged our earpieces in and listened for the tumblers. It was everything I’d imagined it to be. In my sweetest dreams of midnight thievery, I’d never imagined that it would be so easy. Of course, I didn’t believe that the little pop-up minigame was anything like a real safe-cracking job, but it was fun anyway. It was this old-timey safe with a dial that went first one way and then the other three times. For each direction, we had to identify a sound and match it to its source. Four farts, three kisses and twenty-one cheers later and we had an open safe.
“I’m not telling Masuhara Morimoto that he’s got to give up his Black Summer nutty goodness just because you don’t know a Perigord from an Alba!” Tam was louder than before and we were grateful because it covered the clunk of the safe opening.
“I’m saying you need to find me an Alba truffle in the next hour is what I’m saying,” Tam ranted, and I was pretty sure she could have said anything and gotten away with it. These AIs probably knew very little about truffles, whereas my AIs had advanced processing. “A. L. B. A. Alba,” she was spelling it out and I could just imagine their sweating faces as they scribbled it down.
Inside the safe was one envelope labeled “Blackmail” and another labeled “Schematics,” but that wasn’t all that was interesting. It was a really big safe. There were two large stacks of bundles of hundred-dollar bills, which disappeared, split equally, into each of our knapsacks. There were two other envelopes marked “Blackermail” and “Blackestmail.” I slipped those down my back with the other two envelopes, like I had the paperback books in the bookstore, only this time I secured them under my bra strap, so I’d be sure not to lose any out of the back.
“Honestly, who doesn’t know an Alba from a Muscat?” Tam was continuing, sounding almost bored with herself. “Don’t forget the Perigord. Guichon is insisting on using it in some chocolate sauce for the lava cakes. I think it’s a waste since it will be totally drowned out by the chocolate, but he insists that it’s even better than coffee for flavor enhancement.”
The biggest find was Podo’s and when she handed me the skeleton key card from the manager’s desk, I could have wept with joy. We’d gotten lucky on a mechanical lock for the storage room, but the rest of them were controlled by these cards. I traded my employee key card for the manager one and motioned for Podo to put the employee card back where she’d found the manager’s. I hoped it would make it take longer for the manager to notice that their master card was missing. Would it work on the jewelry store door? Podo nodded excitedly and did as I bid.
“Can you imagine? Truffle over coffee for chocolate enhancement? I think it’s too over-the-top when you consider the coffee flavors we could be using,” Tam lectured the manager, who was stuck listening since she was a guest and he was programmed for customer service. “A deep Kopi Luwak expresso-infused crème for a ganache can do more than half a pound of shaved Perigord. What I wouldn’t give to be able to show that blowhard that mine is better than his. Come to think of it. Since you’re getting the Alba, you can also get some Kopi Luwak, kaymak, that’s yak cream, and there’s this new Nigerian cocoa company. Get me two thousand bars of their darkest chocolate. I’ll give that chocolate clown something to think about.”
We rifled through some more desk drawers, careful to put stuff back where we found them, but nothing was as good as what we’d found, and it sounded like Tami was shifting from her job as a distraction and into a chef-orgasm moment. We lifted the critters up into the vent and closed it behind us.
“Just because he can make a life-sized replica of the Eiffel Tower in Chocolate for the reception doesn’t mean he knows how to make it taste amazing,” Tam was muttering as Jean sent her a text to let her know we were safe. “Ah good, get me those things in the next hour and we’ll be fine. I’m sorry to cause such a fuss. I’m not normally so temperamental but working around the ultimately talented has a way of bringing that out in me. If you get all that to the kitchen in half an hour, I’ll send fresh donuts to the front desk for everyone. I’m off to keep Batali from strangling Morimoto for his truffles. Ta!”
We shuffled our way out of the vents and managed to make it to the storage room before we broke out in a serious fit of the giggles. That was a sight to see with Jean, who was helped along by the ferrets tickling her as we slid all the way down the last ramp like kids on the playground.
Exp +400 (Get the Schematics to the Safe Room. Quest Complete!)
Quest: Gather your Team
Convince three specialists to join you to hit the jewelry store safe. You’ll need an electronics specialist (try room 922), a chemist (he hangs out at the bar between midnight and 2am), and two cat burglars (it seems like you have those).
Rewards: 200 xp The Next Step in the Quest.
Accept Y/N.
“I’ve got to see this blackmail that required three whole envelopes,” Jean prodded me as we sat on the boxes in the storage room. Yes, I picked up the brush I’d seen before. It was nothing special except to me.
“I’m a little curious too,” I admitted, tugging the envelopes out of the back of my shirt. Hex was playing with a dust bunny in one corner while the ferrets had disappeared back into the vents.
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I took the one with just “Blackmail” on it and unwound the string and flap. I was glad they weren’t sealed envelopes, or I’d have wondered for a moment if we’d get in trouble. Even as I had that thought, I shoved it down like the old me back in that box where it wanted to be anyway. As I slid out the incriminating photos, I gave a low whistle. This was going to blow our PG rating for sure if they showed this on the screen.
Jean gave out an echoing whistle as we traded stacks of photos. “All I can say is that everybody’s looking for something,” she said, turning one picture upside down with a frown.
“Some of them want to abuse you and some of them want to be abused, right?” I shook my head, and we placed our photos back into the envelopes they came out of, being careful to put them in the correct envelopes.
Then I broke open the last envelope and nearly lost my lunch. They were crime scene photos only it was like no one had reported the crime yet. Ten photos showed ten different men all trussed up for scenes like the previous photos only they were also very dead. There was one last photo. It was of Glenda, the dominatrix of death.
“Um, Jean,” I stuttered out, passing the photos to her and watching her frown carefully. “Did Glenda mean it when she said she’d send a battalion of whatever out to get us if we didn’t show up on time?”
Jean’s face showed no surprise as she got to the last photo of Glenda and a few more pieces clicked together. “She was probably exaggerating,” Jean answered me and kept the photos, holding out her hand for the envelope that was still in mine. “I’ll deliver these to the correct room for the quest.”
I quickly checked our itinerary and gave a little sigh of relief. We had a half an hour to get to Glenda’s make-up session. “Should I be worried?”
“Not unless you’re worried about Tam and me too,” Jean shrugged like we were talking about truffles. “She’s a black widow, but she’s also very selective. I wouldn’t think any of them didn’t deserve it.”
“That’s good,” I nodded, as if that made it all okay. Did it? “So, the Prince of Persia or wherever he’s from?”
“Actually,” Jean gave an odd tilt of her head as if this part was what baffled her the most, “it seems like this time she’s fallen in love.”