Arts and Thefts

by Allison K. Hymas

  It could save Case.

  So I circled back to the restroom, made sure the officer was gone, and returned the mop and bucket. Then I went for a second look at the help office. A storage room, Guard James had said? Well, it wasn’t ideal, but it sounded like a great place to start.

  I headed around to the storage room. I’d seen it right before I’d run into Quinn and Larissa. It was annoying that the storage room wouldn’t connect to the main building, but at least no one would be watching while I got inside and figured out Plan B.

  Making sure no one, especially not Detective Mills, was watching, I headed to the door around the back of the office. It was a heavy metal door, solid and efficient. I tugged on the handle. Locked.

  Well, that wasn’t a problem. I may not have brought all my tools—my grappling hook, basic disguises, snacks and water bottle, and bandanna—but I was never without my lockpick set.

  I looked around again. No watchers. Then I crouched and got ready to work.

  Huh. I leaned closer, tilting my head back and forth to change the view. From every angle, it was the same. Little dents dotted the edges of the key slot. I knew these kinds of scratches, but I hadn’t seen them in months.

  When I first started picking locks, I got in trouble because I did some serious damage to our garage door’s lock. I’d left it scratched and dented, exactly in this way. These were the marks of an amateur lock picker. No one fumbling with a key makes marks just like this.

  Someone had gotten inside before, and I didn’t think they were looking for volleyball nets. I pressed my finger on the lock and it came away glittering with tiny flakes of metal. This was recent, maybe even today. Who did it? Why did they care about this storage room? And how did no one notice them at work? Lockpicking is tough when you’re just learning. It can take hours.

  My gaze landed on a patch of yellow-and-white grass, the kind that hasn’t seen the sun in a long time, just next to the door. Something had been there and been moved. I didn’t have to look far to find it; a plastic storage crate had been pushed a few feet aside until it sat directly under a window.

  I peered up. The window, one of those small, rectangular kinds that flip open, was open as wide as it could go. It wasn’t very high, but it would be a hard climb without the crate.

  My fingers tingled. Unless I was wrong, the person who had tried to pick the lock had failed and tried a window. They might have even still been inside.

  Instincts took over. I stepped back and ran at the wall. In a move I’d practiced many times in past jobs, I vaulted off the crate and up the wall. My hands gripped the edge of the window, I kicked up off the wall, and I hauled myself, headfirst, through the window.

  As I fell, I twisted in the air. The last thing I wanted was to fall face-first onto the concrete floor. I fell on my back on a pile of soccer nets. All the air in my lungs “oofed” out of me, and something blunt jabbed my back.

  I heard a gasp and sat up to see Larissa Eccles staring at me with wide eyes. In her hands she was holding a painting.

  “YOU?” I WHISPERED. THAT FLIGHT through the window, while kind of awesome, had taken a lot out of me. Also, the police might have been able to hear through the wall, even if this room didn’t have a door connecting it to the main building.

  Larissa. Quinn wasn’t the only one with a parent for a judge, and Larissa was a painter as well. She would have known enough to commit sabotage. It had been Larissa the whole time.

  I rose to my feet. “It was you.”

  Larissa didn’t say anything. Her eyes darted around the room and then she threw the painting at me.

  I grabbed for it, snagging my foot in a net as I lunged. We fell, the painting and me. As I landed, I held the painting by its frame, keeping it off the ground. The saboteur’s paint, Larissa’s paint, might still be wet. I couldn’t let it touch the floor and get contaminated.

  Success. The painting survived. I turned the canvas around to see what I’d won.

  A small army of rabid hamsters glared at me. Quinn’s original painting. Huh.

  “This is . . . how did it . . . ?” I looked up from where I lay sprawled, ready to make Larissa tell me everything.

  She had climbed on top of a rentable grill and was facing the wall. “What’re you doing?” I asked. I tugged at my foot, still caught in the net.

  Larissa didn’t glance back. She tossed something aside: a screwdriver. Metal crashed on concrete as Larissa took the loosened air-vent grate off the wall and threw it to the ground. I winced as the sound echoed around the room.

  Horror filled me as I realized what she was about to do. “No, stop!” I called, yanking my foot free. I reached for her, catching only air as she dove into the air vent.

  I climbed the grill, put my face into the grate, and hissed, “Come back! Please!” The air duct behind the vent echoed with the sound of Larissa wriggling through it.

  I muttered every unpleasant word I could think of, from those Rick said when playing Call of Duty with his friends to words like “crevice” and “moist.” Then I tossed my baseball cap aside, pulled my borrowed plaid shirt up over my nose and mouth, and crawled in after her.

  Here’s the thing about air ducts: they’re horrible. That may sound surprising coming from someone like me, who once jumped out of a second-story window using a homemade grappling hook.

  Ha ha. No. Air ducts are not like they are in the movies, all large and quiet and shiny and clean and well lit. Air ducts—this air duct included—are dark and cramped and covered in layers, plural, of dust, pulverized building material, and more dust. Dead insects are scattered everywhere. My shorts and borrowed shirt were getting covered with the gray-and-white filth in the duct. The shirt I could ditch later, but the pants I’d have to hand-wash before my mom picked me up at five.

  As for how people seem to move silently and undetected in air ducts, well, that’s a myth, too. Air ducts echo. They emphasize every whisper and turn it into a roar. You can tell if there’s something moving in the ducts. I’d figured out a way to minimize sound, but it had taken me a while and it still wasn’t perfect.

  Larissa, the amateur who only knew what Hollywood told her, was discovering the joys of air duct travel. I could hear her coughing ahead as she (loudly) turned a corner.

  As bad as the dust and dirt were, or as loud as the echoes were, they weren’t mine or Larissa’s biggest problem. Navigation was.

  The first time I’d traveled by air duct, I’d taken a wrong turn and almost ended up in the boiler room. If it hadn’t been for Case tracking my progress through the wall, I could have fried. After that, I’d gotten stuck, wedged headfirst, when the duct narrowed. Hack had had to come after me, hooked into his climbing gear, and pull me out by my feet. Since then, I’d made sure to look up a building’s layout and map the ducts before I ever tried climbing through them for any reason.

  But Larissa didn’t know any of that. She hurried ahead, and all I could do was follow her and hope to catch up before she got both of us caught or seriously hurt.

  And getting caught was becoming a real possibility. The girl was not quiet, and the naturally echoing metal ducts didn’t help. Even though the storage room wasn’t connected to the main office through an internal door, they were still part of the same building. Soon anyone would be able to hear us.

  Keeping my body, legs and all, flat, I pulled myself forward as fast as I could. Larissa might be trying to get away, but I knew how to move in a duct. I had practice. She didn’t. Soon I was close enough to reach out and grab her ankle.

  Larissa stiffened at my touch and kicked. I held on tighter and hissed, “Stop that!”

  She aimed the next kick at my head. I ducked and tightened my grip. “They’ll hear you,” I said, and Larissa calmed down.

  “Okay,” I said, whispering. The duct made my voice echo. I hoped she could understand me; I couldn’t afford to be louder. “It’s not safe in here. We have to get out. Listen to me; I’ve been in ducts before. You have to spread out
your weight. Flatten out. Use your legs to take some of it.”

  Larissa hesitated, apparently decided that I knew what I was talking about, and did as I told her. “Great,” I said. “You can’t turn around. Back out. Use your hands to push.”

  Air ducts are cramped. That’s why it’s so important to know where to go, so you can get back out in reverse if you have to. I learned that the hard way.

  “What are you going to do when we get out?” Larissa asked, her voice barely audible over the echoes.

  “Probably run.” This whole job had shattered. After dealing with Detective Mills Senior and getting dragged into this air duct mess, I didn’t know how I was going to get that paint sample for Becca. There wasn’t much more I could do with a building full of cops and so little time to make a good plan.

  Maybe it wouldn’t matter, if I could get Larissa’s confession. But Larissa didn’t need to know that I wanted to interrogate her. Not yet.

  Larissa was still for a moment, and then her foot slid back toward me. Her whole body started to come my way and I backed up to make room. “That’s it,” I said. “Very good. Let’s get out of here.”

  I pushed myself backward. Now that Larissa and I were quiet, I could hear the voices of the cops through the walls. I could also hear the air blowing through the ducts.

  That was good—the sound of the air might help mask our echoes. But it came with another problem: flying dust. The air kicked the dust up into my nose, despite the shirt in the way.

  Larissa sneezed. We both froze. “Sorry,” she whispered. I didn’t say anything; I just listened. When it didn’t sound like anyone was coming for us, I tapped her leg and we kept sliding back.

  My feet clanged on metal. We both flinched at the sound. I twisted slowly and looked back. We’d hit a fork.

  That’s right; Larissa had turned a corner. But was it right or left? In the dark and the hurry to catch her, I hadn’t paid attention. I thought it might be right, but that meant I had to turn left to get out, right? I mean, correct?

  The lefts and rights spun in my mind. I decided on left. I angled myself that way, slid out, and pulled on Larissa’s foot to show her where to go.

  It seemed like forever, inching back out to the shed. I kept thinking we should have gotten there, that it couldn’t be too much farther. We passed duct openings, two of them. How had I not noticed them before?

  Clang. My feet hit another wall and my blood ran cold. Another wall. We had gone the wrong way again.

  I breathed deeply, trying to calm the panic. It’s fine, I thought. We just crawl forward now. It will take us right out. I was about to signal to Larissa what to do, when I realized I wasn’t sure if it would. What if I’d miscounted and Larissa had turned two corners? What if we’d backed into the wrong duct?

  The panic came back, hard. I was lost in air ducts with a girl who had no idea what to do.

  “UHH,” LARISSA WHISPERED. SHE WANTS to know what the hold-up is, I thought. But you can’t tell the truth.

  Panic wouldn’t get us anywhere. I thought hard. Okay, emergency procedures. Got it. “Stay there,” I said. “Don’t move.” I picked the left again, and slid backward down the new duct.

  It got a little tight around my legs. At least I’d found out this side wasn’t the right way. I looked straight ahead; the duct on the other side narrowed too, but parallel to mine.

  “Okay,” I whispered to Larissa. “Come on, but turn right.”

  She did, slowly easing herself down the opposite duct. We lay there, facing each other. Larissa was breathing hard. Dirt was sticking to the sweat on her face. Her nose was crusted black. But her eyes were bright and scared.

  “Am I in trouble?” she asked.

  I raised a finger to my lips. I looked back down the duct we’d come through. At the end of one of the ducts, I could see light.

  Turning back to Larissa, I whispered, “I’m going to go down there. Stay here. I’ll find the way out and come get you.”

  Larissa grabbed my arm. “How do I know you’ll come back?”

  “I will.” I pulled free, tugged my shirt higher over my nose, and crawled down the duct. To her credit, Larissa didn’t follow.

  A light meant a vent, which meant it opened into a room. If I could see the room, I could reconstruct the building in my mind and map out which way the storage room was. I could see where the boiler room would be and know how to avoid it.

  I turned and pulled myself through a widening duct to the grated intake vent cover. Down below I saw a desk with a computer and a—wait.

  I moved closer, my face almost touching the grate. Then I took such a deep breath that some of the dust got past my makeshift mask. As I smothered my coughs, I checked again. Yes. Lying on top of the desk, just below me, was Diana’s painting!

  No way. I might be able to pull off my original job. But there was no time to lose. I pushed on the grate. It didn’t budge.

  Of course it didn’t. These things are screwed on from the outside, because it makes sense and because nobody crawls around in air ducts when there are doors. But maybe if I just tried a little harder . . . .

  Just as I placed my hands on the grate, the door opened. Detective Mills walked in and sat down at the desk. From where I was, I could see her twine her fingers together and peer over the sabotaged painting.

  This was the office, the room Detective Mills was using as a base. There she was, right below me. I stayed still and made my breathing absolutely silent.

  What was I going to do? She wasn’t moving around, talking to people, or listening to music. If I moved, she’d hear me. Getting caught skulking in an air duct by a cop is a good way to get yourself sent to military school.

  I’d had a window, a chance to get the paint sample, and now it was gone. I would have to wait until

  Detective Mills left before I could even move to slip away. I could be here for hours, waiting, while Becca tapped her foot outside, the saboteurs continued their scheme, and Larissa waited for me to come back.

  But I couldn’t do anything but hang tight and watch Detective Mills examine the painting. She didn’t move at all. She just looked at the painting, not touching it. What was she thinking about?

  There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” Detective Mills said.

  A park security guard opened the door. “There’s a phone call on the office line for you. Says it’s urgent.”

  “Be right there,” Detective Mills said. She stood to leave, then leaned over the painting one more time. “It really would be a strange paint choice for a child,” she muttered, then hurried out the door.

  Finally! With the detective gone, maybe I had a chance to get the sample and escape. I was trying to figure out how to get past the grate when the window to the office opened from the outside.

  I stopped (wouldn’t you?) and watched as Case fell through the window, sat up, and looked around.

  No, you moron! Get out of here!

  But I couldn’t shout it, of course. I couldn’t do anything but watch helplessly as Case bent over the painting. “Weird paint,” he said to himself.

  Case pulled a couple of plastic gloves out of his pocket. They looked like the kind of gloves the catering staff used to put brownies on the platters in the Contestants’ Tent. They probably were.

  Using the finger of a gloved (well, doubly gloved, in Case’s situation) hand, Case scooped up a puddle of the drying paint. He then pulled a Post-it from the office desk and carefully dabbed the paint on the paper.

  Case set the sample aside. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. All I would have to do would be to whisper his name, and he’d give me the sample. I’d get what I came for.

  After I explained to Case why I was hiding in an air duct: on an errand for Becca. I’d seen a preview of how well that would go over. Plus, our voices coming from an empty office wouldn’t raise any suspicion.

  But the sample lay there, tempting me. What if I could snag it? I couldn’t go through the grate, but a small piece of paper
sure could.

  Steal the sample from my friend? Could I even do that? I lay there, breathing in the dust, fighting myself. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, steal from my friend. But if I didn’t, Larissa would be waiting on me for nothing, and Becca wouldn’t get the sample she needed to solve this.

  Case leaned closer; he’d seen the mark in the corner. He leaned in close, scratched the mark with his fingernail, and leaned back.

  What was he doing? Wait, couldn’t get distracted. To steal or not to steal?

  This would be stealing, not retrieving. It wasn’t mine to take. But if I didn’t, how many people would be hurt by the saboteurs?

  Maybe Case and Hack could solve this on their own. I didn’t have to do anything except use this opportunity to escape.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. Case and Hack weren’t detectives; they might find clues, but they couldn’t piece together what those clues meant. I needed Becca for that.

  Besides, Becca was counting on me. She had taken responsibility for me, for my actions, on her job (or case, whatever), and I needed to return the favor by giving her the evidence she needed. She was my partner, like it or not.

  “I’m sorry,” I mouthed as I twisted slowly, reaching for my shoes. Not easy to do in a cramped duct, but I have experience with crawlspaces. With some maneuvering, I slid them off and undid the knotted laces. I pulled the laces of both shoes out of the holes and put the loose shoes back on my feet.

  Then I slid a piece of gum out of my pocket and chewed it hard as I tied my shoelaces together.

  A tap on the window made us both jump and look over. Hack was there. “Are you done yet?” he asked as he climbed through, rather more gracefully than Case had.

  Case turned to face Hack. “Give me a minute,” he whispered. “Genius like this takes time.”

  I wrapped the chewed gum around one end of my tied-together laces and carefully poked it through the grate. Slowly I let it out over the sample Case had taken.