His smile drained away. “What?”
“Yeah, forget what you see in movies. It’s not a quick thing.”
I put the headphones on, did my best to tune everything out, and got to work. This was a puzzle that wanted to be solved, I told myself. It was my job to set it free.
I turned the dial, charting the high points on the top half of my graph and the low points below. It was painstaking process, but by going in increments of three, I used the lock against itself. What seemed like twenty-four on the first round was revealed to actually be twenty-five the more times I started from a different position.
It took me more than an hour to map the numbers out, and I didn’t feel that confident about the four I’d settled on, but I was willing to cut myself some slack. It was my first attempt, and I hadn’t done a manipulation like this in a very long time. I would get better with practice.
I wrote down the four numbers with dashes between them. “I don’t know the order, so I’ll have to try different combinations until I hit the right sequence. But you can save us time and tell me if any of these aren’t the right number.”
Vance stared at my scribbled notes with an unreadable expression. Had he done it to disguise his fear? He didn’t say anything.
My heart fell to the floor. “Oh, shit. Are any of them right?”
He stood from his chair and put a hand out in a reassuring gesture. “Yes, sorry. I’m just impressed. Three of them are right, and the one that isn’t? It’s very close.”
“It’s twelve that’s wrong, isn’t it?” I studied my graph critically. “Eleven?”
He rubbed a hand on the back of his neck and nodded. “Eleven.”
“I was fifty-fifty on that one.”
He strolled toward me, plucked the grease pencil from behind my ear, and wrote the correct sequence of the combination beneath my graph. His numbers were printed nice and neat and far better than mine, and that made sense. He’d probably had classes in cursive and handwriting to go along with his etiquette training.
I turned off and put away my amp before dialing in the combination. When I turned the handle, there was no sound of the bolt sliding back, but that was due to the excellent craftsmanship. The door swung open.
“With practice, I’ll get better,” I said, peering in at the empty safe. “But I don’t know if I’ll get faster. There wasn’t any time pressure tonight, and I wasn’t worried about getting caught. So, that’s going to affect me, and it’ll make me second-guess everything.”
His voice was not unlike a coach to his star player the night before the big game. “The party will go on for hours, so you’ll have time. And until then, you’ll practice, and I’ll try to replicate the environment as much as possible.”
“Going in without my drills, with no backup plan . . .” My gaze sought his, making sure he’d see how anxious I was. “It’s terrifying to me.”
He took a deep, steady breath. “I know, but we won’t need a backup plan. I’m telling you, Emery. You’ve got this.”
I wasn’t able to practice every night. On the Fourth of July, Vance had a fundraiser event we needed to make an appearance at, and then later that week I had to stay overnight for a job in Atlanta. Otherwise, if I wasn’t at work, I was at the Hale house practicing.
I was getting better. And I was getting faster too.
On my ninth day, I manipulated the open in fifty-one minutes. Vance had been sitting in his usual spot—the tufted chair in front of the fireplace—while he watched and timed me. He bolted up out of his seat, grinning as he announced my new record.
I’d switched to a regular pencil and paper graph to save time. That way, I wouldn’t need to draw or erase evidence of my work on the safe. I also began wearing latex gloves, so I could get used to the feel of the dial, without leaving fingerprints behind.
But tonight, I was tired, and my knees hurt from kneeling in front of the safe, and it allowed negative thoughts to creep in. No matter how good I got, it wasn’t going to matter. The stakes on the night where I had to do this for real were impossibly high. I’d be on my own and in the dark—literally. In case anyone wandered by Lambert’s bedroom, it needed to look unoccupied.
Before I’d started tonight, Vance had turned off the lights, and I’d clicked on my headlamp, but now my mood matched the darkness surrounding me. Even though he was barely lit by the screen of his phone, he must have noticed.
“What’s wrong?”
I turned toward him but stared at his feet to keep from blinding him with my headlamp. “I’m off tonight. Like, nothing feels right and I’m all up in my head.” It wasn’t the full truth, and he deserved to know. “I’m scared I’m going to get overwhelmed by the pressure.”