Caper With Cat and Cane

By Laurel Hanson

I was almost positive Puddin Joe had sold me bad intel, but when I tapped in the code for Arbister’s personal office, the door slid open in silky silence.

Stepping through, I ran straight into a diminutive woman wearing glasses so thick the eyes behind them looked like a pair of emerald fish too big for their bowl. She held one finger to her lips and the other pointed to the glowing security lattice crisscrossing the room before us.

I was taken aback by her presence, but I can also take a clue. Apparently, Puddin Joe had sold intel to this half-pint, too. I shut the doors behind me, clipping off the sounds of the party shifting into high gear down in the ballroom.

Short Stuff edged over to the security panel and typed in a lengthy subroutine on par with a novel in the Russian tradition. I stayed where I was, chewing on a wad of gum the size of a ping pong ball. When the lattice went dark, I assumed she’d set the cameras on a loop that did not include the two of us.

Only then did she snarl sotto voce, “Who the hell are you?”

“I was just looking for the loo,” I burbled around the gum.

“Can it,” she whispered back. “The patch will only hold for five minutes, during which I intend to get what I came for without some old lady interfering.”

Rather than play rock, paper, scissors over who got to steal Arbister’s proprietary secrets, I cut her legs out from under her with my cane and then dropped an arthritic knee into her solar plexus. I’m spry for an old lady.

But I’d underestimated the vertically challenged. She folded like a wallet, bringing her little legs straight up to jam her bladed boot tip into my shoulder. It hurt like the devil, but though my shoulder pads may be unfashionable, they make effective body armor.

I staggered out of range and swung my sparkly evening bag at her so hard the razors embedded in its seam nearly sheared off the tip of her ear. Credit where credit is due, she didn’t make a sound, even though her ear was geysering a DNA trail even a baby could follow.

While she stemmed the spray, I took the opportunity to locate Arbister’s laptop. I’d palmed his fingerprint earlier when I’d greeted him like the distant great aunt I was pretending to be. Jamming it onto the touchpad, I began searching for the ghost-wear file. Arbister’s latest wearable tech cloaked the user from electronic surveillance systems, rendering them essentially invisible. If I’d been wearing his ghost-wear, even his own security lattice wouldn’t have registered my presence.

Which is why a thief like me wanted it. Probably the same reason my nemesis wanted it. She’d opened the window and was standing there with her arms crossed and her vest, a snazzy little pinstriped number, now wrapped around her head in a turban. She looked like a mini-genie fresh out of the bottle. A very angry genie from a very small bottle.

Once I located the file, I plucked the flash drive out of the digital photo frame Arbister kept on his desk. With one eye on my small opponent, I began transferring the ghost-wear file onto it, suspecting my rival would try to grab it as soon as the transfer completed.

My problem was that all electronics had been confiscated at the front door by security guards who could have taught the TSA a thing or two. The same search would be conducted before we left Arbister’s, and the drive would show up on their scanners even if I swallowed it. To get it out of there, I needed two free hands to convert my clunky grandma necklace into a slingshot, after which I would embed the drive into the ball of Bubblicious I’d been working on and shoot it out the window beyond the perimeter of the estate.

When the transfer finished, I lashed out a hand, but Shorty Pants got there first, so I clamped my fingers over her wrist and held on like grim death. We glared at each other as the seconds ticked away. This was no way for a heist to go.

“Sixty seconds,” she hissed.

I tightened my grip. “You can’t get the drive past security.”

“I have my ways,” she said smugly. On cue, there was a soft thump at the window, and a ball of white fur strolled in even more smugly. A cat. I hate cats. I recoiled, and the tiny woman broke free, grabbed the beast, and tucked the drive into a slot in its collar. Then the furball leapt back out the window to streak away across the manicured lawns.

I sprinted for the doors and fell through them with five seconds to spare. Elbowing Tiny in the face, I took off. I could hear her behind me, little legs working like uneven pistons. The two of us plowed through that party like bowling balls through pins, me brandishing my cane and blowing air kisses in Arbister’s general direction, her singing out, “Lovely evening. Thank you ever so much.”

As soon as the security guards at the front door finished scanning us and returned our electronics, we took off down the drive like banshees. I gained the lead and found the cat hawking up a hairball outside the gates. I had just enough time to pry the drive out of its collar and slot in a folded stick of gum as a decoy before her fingers clamped down over mine.

Déjà vu, as they say, only this time, I feigned a heart attack, and Short Stuff took off with the cat and its collar.

Only she didn’t have the ghost-wear file. Rest assured, she won’t see me coming next time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurel Hanson is a writer who grew up traveling around the world until finally settling in Maine. She is intrigued by the possibilities that exist at the borders and edges of our world, where fantasy becomes science, where reality slips into unreality, and perhaps the greatest border of all, where yesterday transforms into tomorrow.

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