Death Prefers Blondes

by Caleb Roehrig

  * * *

  Trying to watch all the security monitors at once was like being one of those plate-spinners on the Third Street Promenade. The steel door went up on one screen, while Davon tinkered in the garage on another; but the plate that looked most unstable, the one that kept snagging his attention, was the feed from Petrenko’s study—where those same two guards were back for more of the boss’s whiskey.

  They’d been roaming the floors, apparently making a general sweep of the castle; and clearly they felt their time was being wasted, because they’d scarcely glanced into half the rooms before heading right back for those decanters of scotch—which were only a few rooms away from where Margo, Axel, and Joaquin were getting ready to pull off the heist meant to fix everyone’s problems once and for all.

  “Guys, there are two guards in the smoking room, so whatever you’re going to do next, do it with the volume off,” he advised uneasily, and the three of them signaled their understanding to the camera.

  “Anybody got eyes on sector six?” A tinny voice squawked loudly and suddenly from the radio of the immobilized guard at Leif’s feet, and the boy nearly jumped out of his catsuit. “We’ve been hailing them for ten minutes with no response. Scout Master, can you see them on the camera?”

  Scout Master. That was probably the guy tied up on the floor. Leif ran his tongue across the back of his teeth, and activated the comm again. “I, uh, hate to be the bearer of bad news? But I think our countdown just started. They’re trying to contact the guardroom, and it’s only a matter of time before the shit hits the fan.”

  Davon’s voice filtered into his earpiece. “One getaway car is ready to go. I just need five more minutes for the second.”

  On the screen, Margo held up a hand, flashing five fingers and then the okay sign.

  “Five minutes it is,” Leif confirmed aloud, hoping they had that long.

  * * *

  Beyond the arched doorway, the turret room was dark. Margo had seen inside it only once, when she and Valentina were still close. The tower had been gutted to the very top, the windows bricked over—save for two decorative ones, facing opposite each other above the roofline—and the walls had been smoothed with plaster and painted a blinding white; a decorative curtain of burgundy damask fell in a grand cascade from the roof down to the marble floor, an astonishing amount of fabric; and at ground level, ranged about the open space, were cases of bulletproof glass bearing unbelievable treasures.

  Margo aimed her LED into the shadows, its glare flashing against the displays. There were eight of them, and if each took one minute to empty, she and Axel could finish with time to spare. The problem, however, was a row of tiny red lights set into the baseboard bordering the entire room. Pulling the pin on Dr. Khan’s fog grenade, she watched as a plume of pale vapor spilled forward into the turret … and a grid of pinkish beams materialized, crisscrossing the cloudy air.

  Another security measure. If they broke any one of those beams … well, they really didn’t want to break any of the beams.

  Margo found a clear path and slid the grenade forward into the room, letting the fog billow and rise to show the full extent of the laser grid. She and Axel sent their packs in next, bowling them through the same opening; then they tucked their wigs into the nylon hoods of their catsuits, lined up in the doorway, and launched forward.

  It was a nerve-racking bit of acrobatics, ducking and twisting through the matrix of beams, the cool vapor of the fog grenade swirling around them. They couldn’t see the room without the night vision lenses, but the optoelectronics rendered the fog an almost impenetrable green miasma, keeping them disoriented until they reached the displays.

  They worked with silent concentration in the dark. Each glass case, like the door, required a fingerprint scan and card swipe, a process that ate up valuable time; and each priceless earring, pendant, and bracelet had to be bagged carefully to keep the stones from scratching one another. By the time they’d reached the last of the displays, the grenade had emptied and the mist was beginning to settle.

  And then the last scanner refused to read Margo’s print. Axel was clearing out his final case, time ticking down, and she felt a stab of anxiety. Before her were the emeralds Valentina had worn to Astrology, and for no justifiable purpose, she wanted them more than any of the others. Rubbing the latex against her skin, she tried again.

  ACCESS DENIED.

  “Miss Anthropy!” Axel’s hiss was barely audible, and Margo looked up. Portions of the laser grid were vanishing—only the stretch back to the door remained. “Forget it, we have to leave!”

  “I can do it! You go, I’m right behind you.”

  Axel hesitated, unhappy, but after a beat he complied. Sliding his pack to the doorway, where Joaquin waited, he then ducked and spun after it to safety. Margo turned back to her display case, dry mouthed, and scrubbed the scanner clean with her sleeve before trying again. This time the sensor turned green, and the case unlocked. She scooped up the emeralds, bagged them as quickly as she could, and then whirled around.

  The air before her was empty. The mist was gone, the laser grid a memory, and Joaquin and Axel stood frozen in the doorway across a dangerous gulf of vacant, shadowy space, eyes wide with dread.

  * * *

  “This is sector eight team leader. Sector six still isn’t responding, and we’re going to do some reconnaissance. Sector one—can you look in on Scout Master?”

  Leif straightened up at the console, eyes dancing from screen to screen. He’d bet all of Topanga Canyon that the two drunkards in the smoking room were being asked to check on him. Sure enough, he watched as one of them spoke into his radio, and a fuzzy voice filled the small guardroom at the same time. “Uh, yeah, roger that. We’re in the middle of a sweep, but we’ll drop in on Scout Master as soon as we’re done.”

  “And that’s my cue,” Leif muttered to himself, activating his comm. “Our jig is up, ladies! See you at the extraction point.”

  “First one to the garage gets the Ferrari!” Davon sang back.

  Checking the feed from the game room, Leif paused. Joaquin and Axel were just … standing there, and there was no sign of Margo.

  * * *

  “Do you remember the layout of the grid?” Axel asked in a frantic whisper.

  “I don’t know,” Margo answered helplessly. She closed her eyes, trying to conjure the image to mind—but it was no use. The beams were deliberately random, and there was no chance she could remember all of them. A little seasick, she crouched to the floor, setting her pack down. She’d have to slide it across first, anyway, and if it cleared the lasers, maybe she could slither after it. “If the alarm goes off, you know what to do.”

  “We’re not leaving you,” Axel stated.

  “You have to follow protocol!”

  “Damn it—” he started, but she didn’t wait for him to finish. With as much strength as she could, she shoved her pack toward the door.

  It barely left her hand before a high-pitched siren started to scream, the alarm wailing loud enough to wake all of LA and half of San Diego. The steel shutter plummeted down, and as Margo’s pack flashed across the threshold to safety, she had just enough time to shout, “Run!”

  And then the barrier slammed home and she was trapped in the darkness.

  19

  The wailing alarm roused Arkady and Olga’s personal bodyguards, who rushed to their employers’ bedroom, shocked to find the door unsecured. Their job security was flashing before their eyes by the time they managed to rouse the couple, Petrenko coming to disoriented and already enraged.

  Screaming abuse in Russian, he stumbled down the stairs, feet heavy and uncoordinated as he hurried for the game room. From somewhere close, he could hear shouting and banging, but a thick fog occluded his thoughts, making it hard to concentrate.

  When he reached the steel shutter of the turret, a man from his private security force issued a fevered report. “We think one of them is trapped inside!”

  “
You think?” Arkady repeated ferociously. He didn’t have his wallet. Where the fuck was his wallet? “What do you mean ‘them’? How many are there?”

  “We’re not sure,” the guard admitted meekly. “Lansky and Valdez saw two women running from the scene and gave pursuit. They’re barricaded in the dining room now!”

  “Women? What the fuck—women? And somebody get this fucking door open!” The billionaire roared. It took a while for his muddled brain to come up with the code sequence necessary to override the system, but soon the steel barrier was ratcheting up, and with the punch of a button the turret flooded with brilliant white light. When they at last saw what awaited them inside, Petrenko, his bodyguard, and the uniformed grunt just stared.

  The room was empty.

  * * *

  When the steel barrier smashed into the floor, it missed Axel’s toes by about two microns. The boy jumped back, slack-jawed with horror and disbelief, and stared at his warped reflection in the brushed metal surface. Then he started shouting. “Margo!”

  “Axel,” Joaquin hissed behind him. “I mean, Liesl. Stop—we have to…”

  Only he couldn’t seem to finish—and Axel was ignoring him anyway. The older boy scanned his duplicate fingerprint again and again, but without the second key card, it was pointless. He kept trying, though, unable to let himself give up. There had to be a way.

  Leif’s voice burst over the comms. “What are you doing? Get out of there before—”

  “HEY!” The shout came from behind him, and Axel whirled, eyes reeling in his skull. Two guards were running toward them from the room next door, already fumbling for their weapons. “STOP RIGHT THERE!”

  “Go to your right!” Leif shouted. “Through the library!”

  Axel and Joaquin took off at a sprint, guards scrambling behind, and stampeded through a room of velvet armchairs and shelves stacked with first editions. At Leif’s direction, they then cut across the salon, open to the ceiling three stories up; into the ornate entrance hall; and then the dining room—where, surrounded by silver candlesticks, lace tablecloths, and massive portraits of bewigged Europeans—they hit a dead end.

  There were only two doors, and the boys heaved them both shut, bolting the locks just as the guards caught up. His heart pounding behind his ears, the men banging against the sturdy wood paneling, Axel gasped for breath. “How do we get out of here? Even if the guards can’t break their way in, Petrenko will have a key!”

  “Can you smash a window?” Leif asked uncertainly.

  Axel looked out through the slender panes of glass at flashlights bobbing in the dark, more guards circling the house, pulling the net tighter. He swallowed, his throat dry. “Negative. We wouldn’t make it fifty yards before we took a bullet.”

  There was a long, awful silence before Leif said, “I’m sorry, but I’m out of ideas.”

  Axel stared at his brother, trying to wrap his brain around it. “We’re trapped.”

  * * *

  The radio at Leif’s feet was almost as loud as the alarm—and twice as insistent. From one end of the estate to the other, the guards all knew about the break-in; and they were still, rather stupidly, trying to coordinate their response on an open channel.

  He should have abandoned the guardroom the second they started talking about sending someone to check on its occupant, but then all hell had broken loose, and Joaquin had needed his help.

  And Axel. Also.

  So now he’d let himself get backed into a literal corner. Urgently, a voice on the radio barked out, “Check the house—every room—two teams to a floor! We’re at the south wall now … we’ll make sure HQ is secure and guide you from there!”

  Prying open the control panel on the console, Leif took “Scout Master’s” coffee mug and dumped its contents over the exposed wiring. There was a flash of hot light, a loud snap, and then the monitors went dark. There would be no more all-seeing eyes tonight.

  And then came the sound of footsteps thumping toward him down the dead-end hallway. His company had arrived.

  * * *

  The sight of the plundered display cases rendered Arkady Petrenko apoplectic. He fulminated in Russian for a good while, as the two men with him made an awkward show of searching the room. But the only conceivable place for a person to hide was behind the curtain—and there was no one there. It appeared no one had been trapped inside after all.

  “Where the shit is my shit?” Petrenko demanded, his voice raw. “You say there are two in the dining room? What the fuck are they doing still breathing my air? Go in and drag them out! Cut off their fucking fingers till they say where my fucking shit is!”

  He stormed out of the turret with the men behind him, and the lights went off again, the steel barrier slamming back down.

  Three and a half stories above the floor, clinging to the backside of about forty feet of burgundy damask, Margo had suffered through the entire performance with her arms burning and the blood draining out of her hands. Thank God the fabric was thick and sturdy, with voluminous folds that disguised how her weight pulled at it. Thank God for the dense shadows that concealed her when the bodyguard checked behind the curtain.

  Thank God Margo had been working on her upper body strength, too. Aside from a few decorative cornices, the wall behind her was smooth as glass, and she’d had to drag herself all the way up, hand over hand. Digging deep, she forced herself to climb the remaining five feet—all the way to the substantial bar from which the drapes hung. Inching to the very end of it, she was only three feet away from one of the turret’s two windows. Outside, she could see the parapet that ran the perimeter of the castle.

  Her first kick cracked the glass, and her second kick shattered it—which was great, because she couldn’t hold on for a third try. She did her best to clear the most dangerous shards from the frame, and then launched herself through, tumbling into the night air and slamming down onto a surface of hard stone.

  Her elbow hurt, and her shoulders and her knee, and a piece of glass had sliced through her upper arm—but she was alive. The problem now was that there was nowhere to run; this stretch of the parapet, bordered on both sides by a hip-high wall, led to only one place: a locked door in the next turret along. And she no longer had her tools.

  Scaling down the side of the castle did not exactly appeal, and she wasn’t sure her numbed arms had the integrity to try—but as she peered over the wall to assess her chances, a third possibility presented itself.

  Far below, a wide terrace of pale stone spread out, wrapping around the open-air portion of a large swimming pool. Glowing with submerged lights, it was a brilliant tourmaline blue in the darkness, casting wobbly shadows against an outbuilding that faced the main estate. Just beneath the surface, Margo recalled, a submerged opening allowed passage in and out of the pool house.

  Before she could give herself a chance at second thoughts, Margo backed up as far as she could go, and ran like hell. When she reached the wall, she vaulted over it and plunged.

  * * *

  There would be no easy way out of the guardroom, just the hard way—which suited Leif fine. Grabbing a fire extinguisher from a cabinet in the corner, he donned his night vision glasses, turned out the lights, and then smashed the switch off the wall.

  A key rattled in the lock and the door swung open, revealing two men: a beefy guy in front, and a beardy guy just behind. The first guard squinted and then leaned in, groping for the missing light switch—and that’s when Leif attacked. The coffee mug whistled as it zipped past Beefy’s ear and smashed directly into Beardy’s chin, drawing out a yelp of pain as the heavy ceramic shattered and knocked the man back. Beefy startled, fumbling for his weapon—but the extinguisher slammed into the side of his head a moment later, and he dropped to the floor.

  Beardy recovered quickly, even managing to free his gun from its holster, but a blast from the extinguisher caught him full in the face as Leif lunged out into the hall, and the guy stumbled back again. Sightlessly, he squeezed the trigg
er, missing his target by a foot. A hard blow behind the guard’s elbow numbed his gun hand; and a swift round kick to the temple a second later sent him to the floor beside his colleague.

  Leif whistled a little as he tied their hands, and then he skipped down the hall, heading for the garage.

  * * *

  The banging at the dining room door had stopped, which was not, in Joaquin’s estimation, a good sign. It meant they knew there was no way out, and they could be patient while somebody went and retrieved the keys.

  Only there was a way out, and he kicked himself for not seeing it immediately.

  “The fireplace,” he hissed, and both boys turned to look at it.

  “We’re right above the kitchen.” Axel shifted his jaw, crossing to the hearth.

  “That wood-burning stove has to vent somewhere, right?” Beside him, Joaquin got to his knees, cranking open the damper. “This must be it!”

  “We’ll throw the packs down,” Axel declared. “Then you go, and I’ll follow.”

  Joaquin wanted to argue; Axel was bigger than he was—taller, broader in the shoulders, more substantially built—and it would be a tighter fit for him. He’d need more time. But arguing him down from this decision would take even longer, and so the younger boy just gave a quick nod and crawled into the firebox.

  One by one, Axel handed him the bags, and Joaquin shoved them past the smoke shelf and down the chimney column; then he crawled up past the damper and into the flue.

  This time, there was no careful movement, no inching progress; Joaquin tucked in his arms, pointed his toes, and dropped. It was painful, but fast, and at the bottom of the chute he plummeted into the oven—crash-landing and rolling out of its arched mouth into the kitchen. It was quiet, ambient light gleaming dimly on the stainless steel fixtures and copper cookware, and as he gathered up the packs, he listened for approaching footsteps.