This room was also lit by strip lighting, but there was enough light to see it was filled with art and gold fixtures. They had to move things to clear a path to the safe door on the back wall, including paintings and what looked like an étagère. Edie would later think how amazing it was that Frances’s adrenaline kicked in like it did. She looked strong, like the twenty-something Frances had been instead of the frailer, sicker one.
“Breathe,” Frances whispered to her.
“I’m trying,” Edie said. Her heart was hammering in her chest, her hands were shaking. She took out her earpiece and put in Joan’s hearing aid. She shoved the small notebook and pen at Frances, then put the stethoscope in her ears. She held her breath and turned the locking wheel five times to the right. “Five,” she said. Frances jotted it down.
Edie slowly turned the wheel back until she heard it park. “Seventy-two.” And on it went, her straining to hear over her own heart and Frances’s ragged breath. When she counted five clicks, she tried the wheel. It did not move.“Shit!”
“Take a breath and go again,” Frances urged her.
Edie pressed her forehead to the door. What made this safe unbeatable? She’d practiced on a door from the same manufacturer. In that one, between each lock of a wheel, the rotations decreased. It occurred to her that maybe the opposite was true here, which would make it almost unbeatable, because who would expect that? “Three,” she said.
“Seventy-two,” Frances told her.
Edie rotated the wheel. “Four.”
“Twenty-six.”
And so they went, Edie turning the wheel, Frances telling her the next code, until she heard the last wheel lock into place. She turned the big handle, and to her amazement, it opened.
Frances gasped. “She’s in,” she said into her mic.
Edie looked up at Frances. Frances grabbed her, and they hugged each other, jumping up and down like schoolgirls for a moment. Edie pulled the door open all the way, and there waiting for them were canvas bags packed with cash and ready to be transferred.
Edie put her earpiece in again, just in time to hear Irene utter, “Oh no. My feed just shut down. They know something is up.”
“Move, move, move,” Frances said frantically. She grabbed two of the heavy canvas bags and dragged them to the vault door. She flung that door open and propped it there with one of the bags.
Edie followed suit. They were struggling—the bags were heavy—but they each managed two at a time.
Joan and Irene arrived moments later with the industrial cart and began to toss the bags into it.
“The lights just came on,” Marcy reported. “I’m getting out.”
“I lost access to the cameras,” Irene said, her gaze on her burner phone. “We have to go.”
The four of them looked at the cart. There was still room. “Wait,” Edie said, and darted back to the safe. Frances realized what she was doing and ran after her.
“Are they crazy? They are crazy,” Joan said, and bolted after them. The three of them grabbed six more bags.
“No more!” Irene cried. “Let’s go!”
Together, the four of them pushed the cart out of the vault hall and into the larger basement area, and to the service elevator. The guard, Edie noticed, was gone. She waved Rocco’s badge atthe card reader. It flashed red. “They’ve disabled it!” she said, gasping. “They know his card was used. We’re done.”
But Irene pushed her aside. She took out another badge—Edie noticed it was the groundskeeper’s badge they’d found when they first arrived in Vegas. Could that have only been days ago?
Irene waved it in front of the elevator door and it opened. They struggled to get the cart in while Joan lit more smoke bombs and threw them behind them. But the cart took up so much space only three of them could squeeze in. Frances was standing outside the elevator doors, her eyes wide.
The door above opened and they could hear an army of officers coming down the stairs.
“Get in the cart, Franny!” Joan begged her.
Frances took one of the canvas bags, presumably to make room.
“Over here!” a male yelled.
Edie realized that the smoke was too thick—the officers couldn’t possibly see them all—but Frances didn’t know that. She looked at the three of them. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything.” She pressed one hand to her heart, kissed her fingers and blew them a kiss, then punched the button to close the elevator door. It suddenly lurched upward.
Edie, Joan, and Irene stared at each other in stunned silence. “What just happened?” Edie whispered. “Are we leaving her?”
