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.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

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.”

Once again, I lifted the walkie-talkie to my mouth and said, “Bobby, get down here. You need to see this.”

I was stretching thin how much I could ignore the situation going on with those two, but seeing as I had just found a mobster’s treasure, I thought maybe my character would be reasonably distracted.

“Look at this,” Camden said. “It’s just a bag of gold coins. Who did this guy kill?”

We laughed like giddy children.

“He was actually an accomplished thief too,” I said, “but this is more than I ever imagined.”

In truth, the backstory we had been given was a bit scant as far as confirming that the vault would be filled with valuables. There was no eyewitness testimony or anything like that. I half expected it to be empty, which would have been a nice ironic twist.

We continued to pull things down from the stack; we were barely making our way into the vault at all.

But as we grabbed one more crate from the stack of paintings, suddenly we broke through and saw open space on the other side.

“Wait a second,” Nicole said. “I thought the vault was full, but it looks like he just stacked all of this stuff up in front of the door. Damn.”

“So what if he catfished us?” Dina said. “This is more than we would get in a hundred scores.”

Over the radio, Bobby said something that sounded like, “But… they were in pain.”

I looked down at the walkie-talkie, then I lifted it to my mouth and said, “Bobby, what did you say?”

But Bobby didn’t answer. Instead, it was that same man’s voice who said again, “I just need five minutes. Come on, Riley, can’t I have five minutes?”

I didn’t need to know my character’s backstory that well to guess who this voice might belong to. It must have been the voice of one of my old partners in crime, the one who had refused to leave when I called off a heist. His name was Marcus. All I had were a few journal entries and an old article, but I knew what was going on.

Nicole looked up at me, too, because with the drill no longer making noise, everybody could hear what was going on over the radio, especially because they all had their own.

“Is that someone else in the house?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I doubt it,” I said. “Maybe someone else with a radio.”

Ever the skeptic, I was.

But I spoke into the radio again, saying, “Hello? Who’s there? Bobby? Molly?”

There was silence.

I merely shrugged, and we continued tearing down the large stack of valuables and sorting them by type and weight. The heavier things were moved closer to the door for obvious reasons—gold bars weighed so much more than they appeared to.

“This is so weird,” Nicole said. “Why would they stack it right next to the door like this?”

“Maybe they were trying to make a quick exit,” Dina suggested.

Once we had made a big enough dent in the stack of treasure, I squeezed through the hole we had made to get a better look inside the vault, and I suddenly understood where this story was going.

Red Jack Bellanti had not stacked his valuables at the very opening of his vault in order to make a quick getaway, or whatever theory it was Dina was working on.

It wasn’t a stack at all. It was a barricade.

As I looked past all the valuables, I saw a pretty large room, and that’s what it was, a room. A panic room, a safe room, whatever the right word was. It wasn’t just a vault. There was a bed and large stacks of canned food. One of the stacks contained food that was unopened, and a larger stack contained foods that had already been opened and were being stored because there was no way to get rid of them.

I quickly jumped back through the hole we had made in the stack.

“It’s a safe room,” I said. “There’s someone in there.”

Of course, we couldn’t stay outside forever. Instead, we went in one after another until we all had a full view of the room.

It was really nice-looking, the kind of safe room that a rich guy could show his other rich friends. There was something that looked like a large water filtration system, as well as a bathroom that must have malfunctioned because it had been taken apart. I didn’t want to know anything about that.

There was a small kitchenette and plenty of wine racks—the kind that were housed inside temperature-controlled glass cabinets.

“Oh God,” Dina said.

The bed was occupied.

Someone was sitting on it, with their legs crossed and a sheet covering their body. They had what looked like a pillow wrapped around their face and ears. They weren’t moving, but it was definitely a person.

It was actually scary how still they were.

I walked forward, found the furthest edge of the sheet, and ripped it off whoever was sitting there.

It was a man, which was clear to see, though he was stick thin, with long hair and a long beard that reached down below the pillow he was covering his face and ears with.

He didn’t bring the pillow down immediately. In fact, it appeared he was shaking.

Eventually, he built up the courage to slowly lower his hands and reveal his ragged face.

There he was, the man of legend, Gerald “Red Jack” Bellanti himself, shivering like an abused dog. He was an NPC with a Plot Armor of three.

When he saw us, he looked confused.

“I didn’t kill you,” he said in an uneven tone as he glanced over at a table that had several firearms sitting on it, along with a pile of spent casings.

I put out my hand and said, “Let’s keep it that way, buddy.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep