Page 9

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JULY 5, 2016 (SIX YEARS AGO)

Haskell

She was in no real hurry. This tiny museum in Spain didn’t currently have anything on display that she wanted, and its internal security was shite, but it did have a tricky ventilation system that kept her skills sharp. Whenever she was in the area, she liked to break in just for fun. Once she’d gotten inside, she’d take a swing through the crown jewels display and window-shop. Just because she didn’t have a need to steal anything there didn’t mean she couldn’t look around.

As she lay in the air duct just shy of the room she wanted to come down into, she heard something unexpected. Footsteps? Couldn’t be. This museum only used one guard inside the building, and he remained in the security room at all times.

There it was again. Definitely footsteps. Stealthy ones. Someone up to no good. She shifted as quietly as she could in her cocooned surroundings, her weight distributed to her hands, elbows, knees, and feet spread across the air duct framing. If she lay on the duct itself, she’d fall right through, even weighing in at just under a hundred pounds. Still unable to see anything below her, she tried to shimmy a little closer to the grate without giving herself away.

A shadow passed in the upper right perimeter. They were still too far out of her range to see exactly who was there or what was going on, so she shimmied again. Now she could just make out a figure in all black.

She was preparing to scoot back when she heard the sound of metal buckling. The figure in the room below stopped, his head snapping up to look at her hiding spot. She looked down the front of her body and saw that her foot had slipped off the frame in her enthusiasm to get a better look at the thief.

“Shite,” she whispered. And then she was falling.

She tried to make herself go limp and twist, but like the cat that was her namesake, she needed more space than just fifteen feet to accommodate the adjustment. The fall seemed to happen in slow motion nonetheless, and mentally, she braced for impact.

When it came, it wasn’t the bone-jarring thud of hitting the floor face-first. There was definitely a significant impact, but instead of landing flat, she hit something oddly angular. Parts of it wrapped around her and absorbed some of the impact, although her head did bounce off something hard—someone’s head—causing her neck to jerk back and her teeth to clack together.

“Ow,” two voices said in unison.

Whoever the guy was who broke her fall set her gently on her feet. “You okay?” His voice was low, just above a whisper.

She spun around to face him and gasped. He had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. Poetically blue. Despite only being able to see his eyes through the black skin-tight hood he wore, she could easily tell he was smiling. Her stunned reaction to him amused him.

“I’m fine,” she finally managed to get out of her mouth. “What the hell are you doing here?”

His eyebrow quirked up, and she heard a soft chuckle.

What does it look like he’s doing, child? Your brothers wouldn’t have said something so trite.

Lord, she hated that raspy voice in her head! Always, it tore her down. “Sorry. Dumb question. Blame it on our knocking heads, making me temporarily stupid.”

“No worries,” he returned. “But we are highly compromised at the moment, so it’s probably best we get moving.” His head nodded toward the security camera, its red light blinking steadily. “Don’t think you’re going back the way you came, so I’m guessing you’re stuck with my exit plan.”

The burglar had a strange accent she didn’t recognize. Australian? Dutch? It didn’t sound like either, but they were the only things she could think of.

He grabbed her hand and took off down the main hallway. In the distance, they could hear sirens. She could also hear the echoes of the radio of the security guard as he closed in on their location. The security guard had been onto them right away.

“Shite!”

“Fuck!”

Their expletives came on top of one another. The man quickly spun on his heel and gave her a push. “Second room on the left. Statue of the rearing horse. Get along the backside of it.”

“We’ll be cornered! There’s only one way in and out of that room,” she hissed.

“Go!” he urged.

As soon as she turned, he slapped her on the ass. She sputtered in indignation, but there was no time to chew him out for spanking her before he gave her a push in the direction he wanted her to go.

When she hit the statue in question at the end of the room, she slid behind it and crouched at its base. It was then that she noticed the hole. Well, not a hole. It was a metal grate that was lying off to the side, one that she could easily get through.

He encouraged her, “Squeeze in there, tiny, and crawl like your life depends on it because your freedom certainly does.”

On her stomach, Haskell slithered into the narrow opening. It wasn’t much larger than the air duct she had been in earlier. Slightly wider and taller, but not by much. She wondered how the man behind her, close to six feet tall and maybe one hundred and eighty pounds, was going to fit. She began crawling as quickly as she could through the heating system and prayed no one decided to suddenly turn on the furnace, especially since she had no clue where this was going to dump them out.

“Keep going, tiny.” And then she heard a click, like a joint popping, followed by a grunt, and then another click and a grunt. Then there were the shuffling sounds of him crawling behind her.

After what felt like an hour, Haskell felt a cool breeze pushing onto her face. Fresh air. Somewhere along this tunnel, there was an exit to the outside.

“When you meet the first junction, go past it,” the man behind her instructed. “About ten feet, there’s a blind turn on the right-hand side. Take it. Then you’re about twenty feet from outside. Watch out for the awkward drop.”

She continued to shuffle along on her hands and knees, past the obvious turn and all the way down to what looked like a dead end. Sure enough, there was a blind turn to the right, and she could vaguely make out moonlight through a narrow rectangle in front of her once she made the turn completely.

When she reached the outer wall, she saw what he meant by an awkward drop. Normally, the vent would have opened up at ground level. But because this museum backed up to a river, the vent opened out to a six-foot uneven drop onto a muddy bank, half of the basement floor exposed at this corner of the building. This called for some rearranging of her body.

“Can you reach my wrists?” she asked over her shoulder.

She felt his body slide up on top of her legs from the knees down, his hands gripping her wrists, which she had put down by her sides. “Gotcha.”

“Okay. Now take your weight off my legs so I can slide them out.”

She felt the pressure of him come up slightly. “That’s all I can give you in this cramped space.”

“It’s enough.”

Like a trapeze artist in the circus, Haskell grasped the man’s wrists in her own hands, similar to his grip. Using her upper body strength, she began folding herself in half, rotating underneath herself so that her legs came out on top. There was a moment where she was certain she didn’t have enough clearance to get her legs over her hips, but she felt him squirm backward in the tunnel, giving her a few more inches of clearance as he dragged her back with him. Now inverted, her feet were the first to exit the tunnel.

“Neat trick,” he complimented her.

“Pays to be small. Okay, I’m ready,” she let him know. With a gentle push, he helped propel her out the tunnel opening. She immediately began to arch her body so that her legs, hips, back, and eventually shoulders and head came out of the gap. “Ugh. I think I know how a pretzel feels,” she said, looking at her arms in a twisted version of an iron cross gymnastics move.

Once his head, arms, and shoulders cleared the opening, he glanced down. “Okay, get ready to drop. Three, two, one.” He let go .

Bending her knees, Haskell was able to absorb most of the shock of the drop. After putting her hands down on the muddy bank to make sure she was balanced, she moved into ankle-deep water to get out of the man’s way.

Up above her, the man was out of the opening up to his shoulders. She watched him purposefully jam one shoulder into the side of the vent, then repeat the tactic on the other shoulder. He’d dislocated his own shoulders in order to fit in the small space, then put them back in once they cleared the vent. It made her wince, but other than the initial pain, he seemed mostly unaffected by it.

In one hand, he had something that looked like a piton. He jammed it into the wall about a foot above the opening, then gave it a pull so that it extended to about a foot in length. Giving it a tug to test how it would hold in the material, and clearly satisfied that it would, he began to weasel his body out of the vent. Once his entire torso was out, he grabbed the piton with one hand, the bottom of the rough ledge with another, and propelled the bottom half of his body out of the air duct with a flip. He landed, relatively gracefully, just in front of her.

“Ready to run?” he asked.

“Whenever you are,” she assured him.

They took off down the riverbed and away from the museum.