fifty-fifty

A yank on the strap had the bag tightening across his back. Black, like the coveralls he wore – there was nothing like the classics to scream ne’er-do-well as you crept through the grounds of a congressman’s country retreat at close to three a.m. Will patted down the pockets, fingers working over familiar shapes in them to make certain there was nothing left behind. Snips for the wiring to the alarm – he wasn’t savvy enough with those to hook up some little green lit gadget to guess and pop the code for him in seconds flat – tape for the window for popping out one of the two dozen pretty little panes, blade to cut the piece free of the frame.

The frown deepened as he came up short on putty to pop the window back in. He leaned back into the trunk of the car, flipping open the tool box to grab it. It was cold against his fingers, not as malleable as he might need it but it would warm up in his pocket. Will’s fingers were shoving it down in one of the chest pockets as his eye caught the little plastic box with the earbud in. The growl that rose in his throat was probably closer to a whine of disappointment – in himself – but he reached for the damn things anyway.

Two weeks ago it had been too close, like the universe was trying to build upon Zoey’s appearance back in his life with further miseries. The Carnegie version of A Christmas Carol with all those spirited reminders about changing his ways. Will’s jaw bunched as he pressed the device into his left ear with a meaty forefinger. Messages heard but the moment where he would have to tear his life asunder – finally making the choice between his vocation and the woman who had her fingers wrapped around his heart again, ready to tear it clean from his chest with losing her the second time – hadn’t yet come.

Blue eyes squinted at the pitched roof of the ostentatious house as he turned. It rose above the trees at the edge of the woods like some gargantuan monolith. All the better to lord over the poor plebs of Mystic Falls – most of whom had probably voted him into office in the first place. Unlike the accountant plying his trade on the dark web, in exchange for numerous items of rather suspicious provenance, Senator Straub didn’t have the grounds of his house crawling with thick necked goons. This wouldn’t be a repeat of his having the flee with dogs baying behind him and shots ringing out. Breathing out pissily through his nose Will closed the trunk of his car and headed through the dark towards the house.

He rubbed a gloved hand over his throat before he dragged himself nimbly over the 8ft brick wall that separated the house from the nightmarish fairy tale woods outside. The tree that had taken the brunt of the bullet strikes meant for him had repaid its sacrifice with a shower of splinters he’d spent an hour picking out from his throat – just a little shaving accident, nothing more – and proceeded to lie about for a week.

Now, it’d shaken him up, but it wasn’t going to leave him crawling to the brat who’d pushed the ear piece on him. He didn’t need help, especially not from someone who looked like he’d been in diapers just a few short years before. The first piece had been returned to the owner it had been stolen from while Lex Cameron had still been in high school.

Crouching low, not an ounce of the light spilling from the maid’s window upstairs reflecting on his black coveralls Will jogged across the lawn and almost threw himself flat as the voice shrieked through the ear piece in an unexpected burst of noise. Teeth gritted against it, Will threw himself flat against the side wall of the house. He pressed his forehead to the brick, dragged in ragged breaths until he’d beaten back the urge to tear the device from his ear and crush it in his fist like a bug. Turning so his back was to the brick Will stared up at that light, making sure that nothing had caught the maid’s attention. Nothing, thank God. He wasn’t abandoning this and coming back.

Will turned, heading to cross the long driveway towards the door to the mud room on the other side of the house, the weakest entry point into the house, even if it was a bottle neck into the kitchen. The question he’d pointedly ignored like the ear piece wasn’t transmitting every damn chomp of whatever it was rattling around in those flapping jaws spilled into a babble. More questions he didn’t want to answer. More of that curiosity that was going to get him killed, not the cat. ”Did your parents not teach you that children should be seen and not heard?” Will grumbled under his breath, suspecting his unwanted sidekick would hear it just fine. His mother hadn’t stuck with Dalton long enough to say anything that could stick with him but Dalton himself had shown no interest there unless there was someone to impress. A dutiful son, hanging on his father’s every word.

Bile burned the back of his throat as he broke into another low, loping jog across the gravel. Crepe soled boots light, barely a crunch to give him away. Everything perfect except for the inane chatter. Teeth growing tighter, Will reached a hand up towards his ear. He needed the quiet to make sure he wasn’t storming straight into a problem, needed not to give himself away. ”You shouldn’t know a Monet from a Manet. Stop talking.” A hissed admonishment, his fingers scrabbing back down towards his pocket as it went from what to why. There was no we, he didn’t have to explain any of those to an overgrown brat who didn’t know when it was better to just to go to his room and …

Inches from the door he stopped, the picks slipping into the lock without a single rattle. The burst of sound had him jerking back immediately, yanking the locks out fast enough that he’d be lucky not to have bent them. ”Chill?” Will hissed. ”You’re the one who burst in here like a man in a gorilla suit, just hoping to be noticed. What are you doing?” Saving his behind. Will close his eyes, counting to ten as slowly as he could stomach. Stupid fucking people and their stupid systems, all planned for until that gorilla suited interloper had started to distract him. ”The locks wouldn’t have been a problem if you’d stayed quiet and stopped distracting me. I’m so glad I have your permission … and your lack of faith.” He worked the picks in the lock again, plucking at them lightly until he felt the tumblers give way. Not flashy but that was the point. Tucking the picks into the chest pocket of the suit, Will gingerly opened the door into the mud room.

Wellington boots stood in a neat line on a mat just inside the door, a muddy pair of sneakers kicked off to one side of them. Straub, just like everybody else here, made use of the woods, and his privilege. It was the only way he’d been able to purchase the pair of Edward Lear watercolours. ”You doubt my abilities that much?” he asked, his voice breathy now as he slipped through into the kitchen and towards Straub’s study in the east corner of the house. ”Are you going to light my way there? Pop the safe for me? How about keeping everybody tucked up in their beds?” Barely whispering Will padded down the long hallway towards the room, eyes fixed on the window at that end of the house and the meagre spill of moonlight that bathed the study room. It was cracked, not an ounce of light spilling out of it but as Will approached he heard the low murmur of a voice inside.

Shit.

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And didn’t that explain it. Daddy issues – or should that have been mommy issues. The echoes between the two of them were a stab to the chest that almost actually pained him . Will wasn’t about to trot out of his own family tragedy. A mother practically driven away by her husband’s ever wandering eye, her lack of interest in her child – Dalton might have seemed formidable but when it was your child how could you walk away – a father who spent more time pasting on a smile for the cameras than he did taking any sort of an interest in his son. Had Lex done his homework, digging into the stories that had surely filled every gossip rag in the city just to throw the facts at him now?

Will rolled his eyes, suppressing a groan. The temptation was there again to pluck the earpiece out and crush it in his hand. Perhaps it was no wonder this kid’s father hadn’t been around much, he’d have been driven mad in minutes with the idiocy – emotional stunting had nothing to do with a complete lack of knowledge. ”Pick. Up. A. Book.” Will bit the words out, one on each exhalation. He wasn’t going to start educating Lex, it would only encourage him like leaving crumbs out for the vermin that were crapping all over your apartment, uninvited and unwanted.

The earpiece had been that crumb, a foolish decision that would likely get him caught when the original intention had been the opposite. Lex getting him in through the through the front door not doing much to rid him of the idea that this was any sort of a blessing. Will’s shoulders stiffened, heat rising into his face as he pressed his lips together. ”There was no mention of an app in the alarm company’s records.” It was a whiny argument that slipped past the gratitude that jammed log tight in his throat. The paper file that had been drawn up when the senator had supposedly last updated his system. Straub was supposed to be old school, a hard liner on the classics … a hypocrite apparently when he had the placed wired up like Fort Knox.

Still, that last layer of security had to click open with a snick of picks in the lock. Take that child.

Smugly, Will slipped into the house. As it should’ve been it was dark and quiet. No sign of the family, or of the staff, as he crept through the kitchen and into the rear of the house where Straub should’ve been keeping all the goodies. ”He does possess a sense of humour, although, those were almost serious questions.” The light behind him flickered, almost as though there was a short in the system, leaving Will cursing under his breath. Too many chances to show off and the kid would’ve been insufferable. ”It looked ancient in the full page spread on Straub and his re-election campaign in the Daily last week. I guess you’re going to have to sit on your hands, son.” While he just about cursed at the top of his voice. Electronic locks, alarms, bloody apps and in the end it was Straub himself standing in the way.

Will withdrew back to the closed door of what he presumed was a living room, preparing to ease the door open like he could slip inside. He glanced down at the floor, looking for a tell-tale strip of light there too. ”Oh, you don’t know?” he whispered harshly. ”I thought you had eyes everywhere. Any suggestions Sherlock? You know, now you’ve stated the obvious” Typically he would’ve aborted, waited another night to try again but with the added security that would mean liaising with the pain in his ass again.

Back to where he came. Genius. Will bit back a less helpful suggestion about pulling his head out of his ass and coming up with something a little more sophisticated than ‘go back’. He let go of the door handle, retreating with his eyes still on the study door. Waiting til he was out of sight, he headed through the other doorway. Lex wasn’t wrong, the room beyond could’ve hosted the entire House of Representatives. ”Is that going to keep him out of the way long enough for me to get this picked?” he hissed. He’d estimated ten minutes or so to get in, secure the pieces and get the safe locked again but with Lex yammering in his ear, who knew.

The tiny rear hallway that led off of the dining room looked made for staff but there was another door at the end the dead end passage. The same light shone beneath it but as the sounds shifted within it wasn’t that door that flew open between him. Footsteps sounded heavy in the hallway he’d been in before, jogging up the stairs what seemed to be two at a time. ”Watch him,” Will warned as he slipped into the study. ”He even starts to come back down I need to know. I’m getting another face full of splinters because you were too busy showing off that you managed to get him out of the room with a beeping … whatever you did.” Will slipped behind the desk, lifting the Stubbs’ oil painting – bought legitimately from a London gallery – off of the wall and setting it aside. The safe behind was as old school as it got, a relief rushing out of him in a sigh at the sight. He went to work, securing his lock amp – the one bit of technology he’d learned to co-exist with – to the front of the safe before he started working the dial.

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1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 …

Teeth gritted together hard enough to have it hurting, Will tried to count in his head. No mention of an app had been far more civil than what had really wanted to slip out at his unwanted sidekick’s crowing. Dalton had been a fan of the idea of being seen and not heard, a fan of saying ‘thank you’ even if the gratitude was sticking fast in your throat – there were very few things that man had ever done that deserved those two words – and he’d been happy to live by one of those rules at least.

Without a word he had started to dismantle the network his father had slipped into, the one that traded on other people’s misery, paying for almost priceless treasures with blood man. Not really washing their hands, but smearing more blood over them with each inch deeper they’d sunk into that sunk into that foul world. Perhaps he should’ve made a second attempt to drag Dalton from it kicking and screaming, but as his father had lashed out at him Will had known that Dalton didn’t want to go. Like the senator he was one hundred percent complicit in what he was doing.

They enjoyed it.Just as there had been some measure of satisfaction in taking back what wasn’t theirs, until …

This was an added misery, but not the biggest one. If he could tolerate losing Zoey, then he could put up with that mouth to get the painting out of here. Afterwards the ear bud was going to end up ground to glittering little bits of plastic dust under his boot – the environment was going to have to tolerate it, his sanity had to come first.

…6 … 7 … 8 …

Will counted the beats off against Straub’s footsteps on the stairs. A dual reassurance from the Boy Wonder, with plenty of sarcasm twisting the Wonder part. He might’ve gotten Straub out of the office, leaving the way clear for him, but it hadn’t become a full fledged miracle yet and couldn’t with that incessant yammering and the chewing. A tic started to flutter in Will’s eyelid as he made his dash for the office. ”I wonder if Robin would survive if the Batmobile ran him over,” he posited tightly. ”What do you think are the odds on that?” He’d probably hear them before he was back out of the house, just to prove him wrong.

His mouth pinched, his crepe soled boots quiet on the polished boards of the floor. Chill? Because he could do that with that … ”Will you stop?” Will hissed through gritted teeth as the chomping continued. ”You do get that we’re not going to be able to magic our way into the safe with whatever you’re doing in your app? That means being able to hear the tumblrs.” He resisted the hissed ssssh, trying to push Lex’s voice out of his head, but when your patience was being stripped away one idiot comment at a time it took a major effort. ”Dear God, if you call yourself that again I’ll throw up on the spot and they’ll be no hiding that we were here.” That he was there.

Will’s jaw was tight enough that the muscles felt ready to pop out of the skin like marbles. The only woman he was concerned about attracting had been hurt because of all of this, attracting her back wasn’t fair. But they were already caught back up in that slow orbit of one another, hurt feelings mingling with the love that had never faded. Standing in front of the safe finally, Will tried to focus on the safe, the device that registered the tiny sounds from inside the mechanism that even his hearing couldn’t pick up. ”I’ve been a little busy … thanks to you,” Will breathed. The front of the safe looked solid enough he could dash his brains out on it if he really needed to, frustration at the child on the other end of the line – the mildly helpful one – bled off against the cold iron. ”The owl and the pussy-cat went to see in a beautiful pea green boat, they took some honey and plenty of money, wrapped up in a five-pound note.” The poem tripped off of Will’s tongue smoothly. Lear hadn’t exactly been Shakespeare but his art still fetched a pretty penny.

The pop of the lock was a relief, the door to the safe swinging open silently. The small rolls of watercolour paper lay on the top shelf of the safe. Wrapped in what looked to be archival paper, acid free, the sort of thing that would offer up some protection to paintings that were almost 200 years old – paintings cut inexpertly from their frames. A tragedy that had him wanting to follow Straub up the stairs to wring his neck. ”It looks like you’re not a complete failure at your job after all. Good boy.” Will twisted off the top of the cylindrical case on his back, slipping the tiny rolls into it. He hesitated, looking at a third, larger piece wrapped in the same style. Two? Three? Did it matter when they were all bound to have been bought in the same way?

Slipping back over the wall five minutes later, Straub only just grumbling his way down the stairs, Will adjusted the weight of the tube on his back, making sure it stayed in place as he hit the ground. A quarter mile to the car, his step slowing before he got there. It might’ve been dark but the scrawny figure lounging against the car was obvious enough. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

Will stopped a handful of yards away, covering his face with his hands as he sent up some sort of plea for patience. ”You’ve got a strange idea of perfect,” Will breathed into his palms. He scowled as he dropped them away to look at the child – and he did look barely out of high school. ”I’ll take you developing lock-jaw, but we can’t always have what we want, can we? Yo, yo, yo, your bony backside off of the car, if you please.” The thank you stoppered up in his throat, he would wretch trying to shake it free. Who expected a dickhole to actually have manners anyway? Pointedly, Will removed the bud from his ear, studied it for a moment and then dropped it to the ground, his foot rising to do as he’d imagined.

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Would he feel the count beating behind his eyeballs if he bashed his head against the front of the safe? At this point Will knew he couldn’t afford to take the bud out of his ear and crush it, at least not until he was outside. The burning itch to do it remained though, to stop that shrill, gloating voice rolling through his head. Blue eyes slipped shut, his brows furrowing as he waited for that split second in which Lex had to pause for breath. In that heartbeat he heard what he needed to, almost felt the minute shift behind the plate metal of the safe front.

No, no he didn’t have a head injury, although he’d offer one up to his ‘genius’, uninvited side kick once he was out of here.

Lex’s lack of knowledge was astounding, although Will guessed that if it didn’t flash across a screen these days kids weren’t interested in a thing. Children could’ve reeled off Lear’s poetry once upon a time, now the only thing Lex probably knew by heart were the names of those Pokemen things – or the ingredients in whatever it was he’d been chewing like a cow with cud. Luckily for Lex only one of them needed to be able to tell a Lear from a Singer Sargent. The air could continue whistling through the empty cavern of Lex’s head and out of his mouth in a rush of idiocy that was slowly imploding his own brain cells. Perhaps he'd have enough left to get the watercolours and the bonus he’d found back to the right people when he was done. Perhaps not.

The cylinder was sealed back up, slung carefully over his back before he started to retreat the way he’d come. Every single thing he’d disturbed set back to ensure there wasn’t a single sign of his presence in the house. Straub could scream and shout about the loss all he wanted later but there’d be no route to finding out just who’d done it. Will bit down on his tongue hard, drawing the study door closed behind him to take the same route back out. ”Considering you think I’ve had a stroke, maybe I am crazy enough to stick my hand in that hornet’s nest…” He let the comment hang as he scurried back to the kitchen. ”No, no there’s no into, not even in the business sense.” This was a one time thing, the ear bud destined to be thrown from the car window as he drove away, crushed beneath his tyre, hopefully deafening the kid in the process.

Spotting him leaning against his car as he reached it, his earlier suggestion of Batman running Robin over resurfaced. He wouldn’t need to trash the ear bud then, just wash off the car when he got back to town and feign shock when the call came in about the hit and run.

Will dug his fingertips into his eyes, wondering how it was possible his luck had started to turn sour again. Was losing Zoey not enough of a cost for what he was doing? Did he have to tolerate this as well? Torture. It was torture and he might just cave to it to stop the agony. ”If that’s the bar you’re setting then you’ve lost your mind,” Will grumbled into his palms. Only one of them had gotten into anywhere and it wasn’t the teenager leaving ass prints on his car. ”I’ll take that as a compliment, thank you.” Voice tight, Will started towards the car, gesturing Lex away from it with a sweep of the fist clutching the earbud.

Each finger flexed, the edges of the plastic biting into Will’s hand until he was ordered to stop, the kid suddenly flailing. Will looked up at him, his face a mask of irritation. ”You got me in a door and you got me a clear path. You didn’t part the seas or cure the lame.” The kid was half right, of course. The theft would’ve been a lot harder without the support. Teeth sank into the tip of his tongue Will winged brows at him. So he knew that he was police at least, but not that there was a veritable fortune running through his veins thanks to a con man grand-father and a father who’d gloried in the worst parts of that to give himself some respectability. ”This isn’t endearing me to you, you know? I would have found a way in and I wouldn’t have had to listen to all of this while I did it.” He’d have been pissed at himself though, riding that wave of irritation for days to come.

Will stalked closer, not crushing the ear bud, not, as he’d have loved to, swinging with that hand to knock this kid on his ass and shut him up finally. He held that fist between them, the strain twitching in the muscles of his jaw. ”We’re not a team. Somehow you managed to track me down and start clinging to me like a whining toddler, there’s a big difference. Keep your hands out of my accounts and my business, and get your ass off of my car. You did me a favour this time, that’s it. Don’t come sniffing around again.” Cursing under his breath, he used the remote to pop the locks on the car and stepped past Lex to get in. He didn’t crush the ear bud, although every instinct in his head told him to as he tossed it carelessly into the back seat. ”Thank you.” The words nearly choked him, his voice tight around them. Will gripped the wheel, refusing to look out of the window. It had been an absolute torture the entire time but the kid had been right, he’d helped, no matter how damn galling it had been.

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