Free The Heist by Will McIntosh Page A

had no security cage nearby because it was a fire exit.
    *  *  *
    There was nothing but day slots back there. By the time the door clicked open, meaning Bill had changed and got the fire alarm disconnected, Marty had lost two weeks of his life. Not that it would matter if everything went as planned.
    He and Frank slipped through the cracked-open door. The narrow gray hall beyond was empty. “This way.” Marty pointed to the right.
    When he’d imagined this scene in his mind, their strides had been smooth and confident, eating up carpeted hallway. Now that they were actually there, they were a sad-looking bunch, limping and shuffling. Marty was bent by such bad osteoporosis he was forced to crane his neck just to look straight ahead.
    Thelma slowed them down because she was ninety-two. By rights she shouldn’t be able to walk at all, but although she moved slowly, she walked with a definite swagger. Marty liked that. She was a tiny woman with chipmunk cheeks and alert blue eyes. There was not a hint of that rheumy film of stupor in her old eyes.
    Two employees stepped out of an open door—dealers dressed in the casino’s signature blue-and-white jackets. Marty and the rest looked straight ahead, like they knew just where they were going. The dealers walked right past. Marty’s heart was racing, but he wasn’t surprised the dealers hadn’t challenged them. As he’d told the others: you go balls-up like you own the place and no one bothers you. Especially if you were a harmless-looking senior citizen.
    Marty turned left at the end of the hallway, heading deeper into the guts of the casino, toward the nucleus, where there were no blueprints online, where, as far as Marty knew, no one but the aliens who owned the casino ever went.
    When they reached the door of the utility room, Marty expected Bill to get to work, but Bill was having a spell. He was staring at nothing, breathing heavily through his open mouth.
    “Come on, Bill. Open her up.” Marty took Bill’s wrist and turned him toward the door. Bill squatted, pulled his electronic pick out of his instrument pouch, and got to work.
    A minute later, they were inside. They locked the door behind them.
    Marty didn’t need to tell Thelma to get to work. She unslung her bag from her shoulder and pulled out the bomb. It looked as sophisticated as Thelma had promised, with microprocessors and slender wires visible inside a rounded stainless-steel shell. Marty found a plastic chair for her to sit in while she attached the bomb to the main circuit panel.
    “It can’t go off,” Frank said from the door, where he was watching the hallway. “Not even by mistake. Not possible, correct?”
    “Frank, would you relax? Please?” Marty said.
    “I want to hear you say it.”
    “Frank, take a deep breath,” Thelma said over her shoulder. “There’s no explosive material present.”
    Frank raised his hands in the air. “That’s all I wanted to hear. Thank you.”
    Thelma muttered something under her breath as she worked the bomb into the high-tech circuitry of the casino’s electrical system. Even knowing the bomb couldn’t go off, it looked scary. Security would shit a brick when they saw it. Marty had been afraid all of Thelma’s experience at the FBI had happened too long ago, that her electronics skills were of the horse-and-buggy variety. Evidently she kept up with things in her field.
    Marty suddenly realized that there was no turning back now; they were really going through with this. In an hour’s time, Marty was either going to possess thousands of years of life force, or he was going to be in jail. He rubbed his face, felt his fingers pressing his skin. “This is not a dream,” he said softly.
    “It can’t be. I stopped dreaming last year,” Thelma said without looking up from her work. Her hands were trembling, but her movements seemed sure. “I don’t know why. Some chemical in my brain ran out, I guess. Dried up. I miss dreaming; I got to be