by Alex Irvine
She listened. That was one of the things he really liked about Hope. She was an excellent listener. That was a rare thing. Everyone always wanted to talk. “You didn’t even have a choice,” Darren said. “He never believed in you. It’s a shame what we had to do, but he forced us to do it, didn’t he? But we shouldn’t be angry; we should be grateful. Because his failures as a mentor, as a father, forced us to spread our wings.”
He was being utterly sincere, but at the same time he was testing Hope a little. If she was angry or feeling guilty about the way Darren had manipulated her father’s work—while keeping it secret from him—Darren had to know. He knew she’d talked to him after the presentation that morning, and although he would never ask her, Darren was burning to know what they’d said.
But most important, he had to know she was on his side.
“You’re a success, Darren,” Hope said with a dazzling smile that stole his heart once and for all. “You deserve everything coming your way.”
She understood, Darren thought. Good. They would move forward together. Hank Pym’s faults and failures didn’t have to doom them, too.
Scott tried every way he could think of to make the math work. If he took the income from a minimum-wage job, subtracted rent, child support, and all the other debts still hanging over his head from his time in prison… according to what Maggie had said that afternoon, in a little over a year she would let him start having visitation with Cassie.
More than a year.
No, he thought. I can’t handle that. I’ve already missed too much.
But what else could he do?
When he got back to the hotel room, Luis and David were playing a video game. Kurt was of course glued to his laptop. “Stop cheating,” David grumbled as Scott headed for the fridge.
Luis heard Scott come in, and called out, “Hey, what’s up, hotshot?”
“Maybe he didn’t hear you,” David suggested when Scott didn’t answer.
“How was the party?” Luis said, a little louder.
Scott had found a drink in the fridge. He popped it open, took a long swig, and said, “Tell me about that tip.”
“Wha?” Luis dropped the game controller and stood up.
“I wanna know about that tip,” Scott repeated.
“Oh, baby, it’s on!” Luis shouted.
“Hot dog!” Kurt added. The expression sounded weird in his thick accent.
Luis looked like he might be about to explode from the excitement. “It’s so on right now!”
“Calm down, all right?” Scott was all business. This was one of the most important decisions of his life and he needed to know every detail about it before he took the final step. “I just need to know where it came from. It’s gotta be airtight.”
“Okay,” Luis said. He took a deep breath, and Scott knew he wasn’t going to get the short version of the story. “I was at a party with my cousin Ernesto. And he tells me about this girl Emily we used to kick it with. She’s working as a housekeeper now, right? And she’s dating this dude Carlos from across the bay and she tells him about the dude that she’s cleaning for. Right? That he’s, like, this big-shot CEO that is all retired now, but he’s loaded. And so Carlos and Ernesto are on the same softball team and they get to talking, right? And here comes the good part.”
About time, Scott thought. He’d already lost track of who was saying what to whom, or what he was supposed to be getting from the bit about the softball team.
Luis caught his breath and went on, acting out the different parts as he told the rest of the story. “Carlos says, ‘Yo, man. This guy’s got a big safe just sitting in the basement. Just chillin’.’ Of course Ernesto comes to me ’cause he knows I’ve got mad thieving skills. Of course I ask him, ‘Did Emily tell Carlos to tell you to get to me what kind of safe it was?’ And he says, ‘Naw, dog. All she said is that it’s, like, super legit, and whatever’s in it has gotta be good!’”
Luis beamed at the end of the story. Scott, completely lost, just said, “What?”
“Old man have safe,” Kurt said helpfully.
“And he’s gone for a week,” Luis said.
“All right,” Scott said. One of the keys to a good operation was knowing which details to keep and which to throw away, Scott thought. But with Luis, you always got everything all in a big avalanche and had to pick through it first to figure out what was important. “There’s an old man, he’s got a safe, and he’s gone for a week. Let’s just work with that.”
CHAPTER 6
Once Scott had all the details, putting the job together wasn’t that hard. Scott was among the best in the world at removing things from houses without their owners knowing. Luis and Kurt and David were also good. As a team, they thought of themselves as the Avengers of burglars. So they figured out a plan, got their roles sorted out, and within a couple of days they were good to go. David was driving, Luis was handling communications, and Scott would be going into the millionaire’s house after the safe.
Kurt, as usual, was glued to his laptop, checking on the team’s preparations. “Landlines cut, cell signals jammed. No one will be making for distress call tonight,” he said.
“All check,” Scott said into the earbuds they were all using. Luis, Kurt, and David answered. They were all looped in.
“If the job goes bad, you know I got your back, right?” Luis said to Scott once the van was in position on the street outside the millionaire’s house. It was on a street of fancy houses on the hill near San Francisco’s famous Coit Tower.
“Don’t worry, it’s not gonna happen,” Scott said. He hopped out of the van and moved quickly toward the house.
“I love it when he gets cocky,” Luis said.
Scott vaulted the wall and climbed the outside of the house to a second-floor balcony. He attached an alarm bypass to the house’s power panel. “Alarm is dead,” Scott whispered through the comm channel. Ten seconds later he was inside. “All right, I’m moving through the house.” He found a set of keys on a table inside the front door and took them downstairs. The safe was supposed to be in the basement.
The keys got him through the first door, but inside was another. And this one didn’t just have a mechanical lock. “There’s a fingerprint lock on the door.”
“He’s got a what?” Luis said. “Ernesto didn’t tell me nothing about that. Aw, man, are we done?”
“Not necessarily,” Scott said.
People left fingerprints all over their houses. Often you could lift one if you had the right stuff. A piece of clear tape to get it off a good surface, like a doorknob; then some glue to pour over the lifted print; then a little heat to make the glue set and keep the print firm for pressing against the scanner. After five minutes in the house’s kitchen, Scott had a rubbery circle of glue with a perfect print in the middle of it. He skipped back down the stairs and took a deep breath before pressing the print on the scanner.
It beeped and the light on the panel turned green. Scott opened the door. “I’m in.”
“No alarms have been triggered,” Kurt said. He was monitoring every electronic item in the house, courtesy of some custom surveillance gear he had built on Luis’s kitchen table. “He’s in like the Flynn.”
“Oh, man,” Scott said when he saw the safe.
“What is it?” Luis sounded nervous.
“Well, they weren’t kidding. This safe is serious.”
“How serious we talkin’, Scotty?”
“It’s a Carbondale. It’s from 1910. Made from the same steel as the Titanic.”
“Wow,” Luis said. “Can you crack it?”
“Well, here’s the thing. It doesn’t do so well in the cold. Remember what that iceberg did?”
“Yeah, man,” Luis said. “It killed DiCaprio.” He was referring to the movie, not actual history, but Scott let it go.
“Killed everybody,” David added.
“Man, not kill the old lady,” Kurt pointed out. “She still throw the jewel into the oceans.”
“What’re you doing?” Luis asked.
“I poured water in the locking mechanism and froze it with nitrogen,” Scott explained. “Ice expands, metal doesn’t.”
A minute later, Luis asked, “What are you doing now?”
“Waiting.” Groaning noises came from inside the safe. “Waiting…”
A bolt popped out of the safe and shot across the basement into the air mattress. In the next few seconds, ten or twelve others followed… and then the safe door tipped forward and crashed to the floor. “Nice,” Scott said. Just like he’d planned it. He might not be very good at real life, but he was very good at cracking safes.
He hopped over the fallen door and into the safe, which was the size of a walk-in closet. It was lined with shelves and a small table stood against its back wall. “What is it? Cash? Jewels?”
“There’s nothing here,” Scott said. Other than a couple of jars on the shelves and a strange-looking leather suit and helmet on the table… Who would want any of this stuff? he wondered.
“What’d you say?” Luis sounded incredulous.
“It’s a suit.”
“What?”
Scott picked up the helmet. It had little antennae on it but otherwise looked just like a custom motorcycle helmet. The suit was silver and red and covered in dust. “It’s an old motorcycle suit,” he said, disgusted.
“There’s no cash, no jewelry, nothing?”
“No.” He slammed the helmet back down. “It’s a bust.”
“I’m really sorry, Scotty,” Luis said. “I know you needed a score.”
What the heck, he thought. He took the suit and helmet, just so he hadn’t come for nothing.
CHAPTER 7
Back at the hotel, in the bathroom, after he’d washed his face and gotten over his disappointment, Scott looked at the suit and helmet. There was a belt and some other weird gear with it, and little vials of red fluid in the belt. “Why would you lock this up?” he wondered out loud. “So weird.”
He decided to try them on. Why not? They must be valuable or they wouldn’t have been in the safe. That was a rule of human nature. Nobody put things in safes unless they were valuable.
Once he got the suit and helmet on, he looked around. Things didn’t seem much different. The helmet’s visor kind of restricted his peripheral vision, but other than that it was just like wearing a fancy cycling suit—with a weird belt and gloves that had red buttons on them, at the base of each index finger. Right where it would be easy to push them with your thumb.
He heard the front door slam, and Luis called, “Scotty, what’s up, man?”
Scott didn’t want Luis to see him in the suit. He jumped into the bathtub and pulled the shower curtain closed. “I wonder…” he said to himself, looking at the buttons. “What is this?”
He pressed one. Nothing happened.
He pressed the other one. A lot happened.
Suddenly Scott was falling through space, a giant open space with a vast white floor below. After falling for a long time he hit the floor hard. When he got to his feet he looked around, wondering where he was… and then he figured it out.
He was still in the bathtub. Only the shower-drain plug was the size of a boxing ring. The washcloth lying on the other side of the tub was the size of a basketball court.
No, that was wrong. They weren’t bigger.
He was smaller.
“The world sure seems different from down here, doesn’t it, Scott?” a voice said in his ear.
“What? Who… who said that?” Far above him, Scott saw Luis come into the bathroom and pull the shower curtain aside. “Luis!” he shouted. “Luis, I’m here!”
Luis didn’t hear him. He bent toward the faucet. “It’s a trial by fire, Scott,” the voice in the helmet said. “Or in this case, water.”
The water from the faucet was a flash flood, sweeping Scott up and flinging him straight to the other side of the tub. He rode the crest of the water up and into the air, then tumbled over the edge of the tub and smacked down onto the tile floor—which cracked at the impact. “Guess you’re tougher than you thought,” the voice commented.
Scott had other things on his mind. Namely, Luis undressing. “Oh, I don’t want to see this,” he said, and dodged Luis’s clothes as they fell to the floor. But he wasn’t looking where he was going, and he fell through a crack in the floor… then punched straight through the next floor, which slowed him down enough that when he landed on the turntable in the party room downstairs, he didn’t even break the record. He spun around, screaming. The grooves in the vinyl record were big enough for him to hold on to—no, he was small enough to hold on to them. But the needle hit him and knocked him to the floor. The bass from the music practically bounced him around, and Scott ran through the party, dodging feet the size of battleships.
He screamed again as one of them stepped on him—but he wasn’t hurt! Amazed, he kept running. He tripped on the edge of a heating grate and fell down through the duct. When he came out, he landed on a rug just in time to be vacuumed up with a bunch of dust. The vacuum shot him up into its bag so fast that he punched through the top of it. He ran through a crack in the wall, thinking maybe he’d be safe for a minute…
And there was a mouse the size of a brontosaurus. It chittered at him and lunged. Scott ran and jumped ahead of it onto a loaded mousetrap. His weight sprang the trap and he was catapulted through the hotel wall and out over the street. He landed on a car below and, even though he was still the size of a BB, the impact of his body left a dimple in the roof.
A moment later, he felt a surge and all of a sudden the world shrank back into place. No, he grew back to his regular size. Panting and terrified, he lay there spread-eagled on the roof of the car, trying to figure out what had just happened to him.
“Not bad for a test-drive,” the voice in the helmet said. Scott slapped at it and the mask popped up. Rain fell on his face. “Keep the suit. I’ll be in touch.”
“No, no,” he panted. “No. No, thank you.” Nothing in the world would convince him to keep the suit if it meant he might go through that again.
Scott did the only thing he could think of: He broke into the house again and put the suit back that same night. Then, when he vaulted back over the wall and landed on the street, ready to go home, lights flashed everywhere and Scott was immediately surrounded by police. “You are under arrest!” one of them shouted, gun drawn.
“No, I didn’t steal anything!” Scott said. “I was returning something I stole.”
Oops, he thought. That was the wrong thing to say.
Sitting in jail later, Scott looked up to see Paxton on the other side of the bars. “You know you almost had us convinced you were going to change your ways? They were really rooting for you. This is going to break their hearts.” He looked at Scott and Scott wished he could disappear.
Well, no. He’d just done that and it was terrifying.
Another cop came up to the bars. “You have a visitor.”
“Who?”
“Your lawyer.”
“My lawyer?” Scott hadn’t called a lawyer.
The cop led him into a room where an older guy with a neat goatee and wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit sat at the table. “I told you I’d be in touch, Scotty,” he said, and Scott recognized the voice. This was the guy who had talked to him inside the helmet. “I’m starting to think that you prefer the inside of a jail cell. Sit down
.”
Scott did. “Sir,” he said, “I’m sorry I stole the suit. I don’t even want to know why you have it.”
“Maggie was right about you,” the man said. Scott shut up. How did he know about Maggie? “The way she’s trying to keep you away from Cassie…” he went on. “The moment things get hard, you turn right back to crime. The way I see it you have a choice. You can either spend the rest of your life in prison or go back to your cell and await further instructions.”
“I don’t understand,” Scott said. He’d never said anything truer.
“I don’t expect you to,” the suit’s owner said. “But you don’t have many options right now. Quite frankly, neither do I. Why do you think I let you steal that suit in the first place?”
“What?” He’d been set up? How? And more important, why? All of a sudden Scott was wishing he was back at the ice cream shop.
“Second chances don’t come around all that much. So next time you think you might see one, I suggest you take a real close look at it.” The suit’s owner got up and left. Scott didn’t see the ants clearing away from the lens of the surveillance camera.
CHAPTER 8
You are my bestest friend!” the weird rabbit said over and over again as Cassie snuggled down with it into bed.
Maggie sat on the side of her bed and finished tucking Cassie in. “Are you sure you don’t want a different toy?”
“No,” she said firmly. “I love this one.”
“Okay.” She didn’t have much else from her father, Maggie thought. No wonder she clings to this. “Well, get some sleep, then. I love you.”
“Mommy,” Cassie said before Maggie got up from the bed.
“Hm?”
“Is Daddy a bad man? I heard some grown-ups say he’s bad.”
How did you explain Scott Lang to a little girl, Maggie wondered. He was complicated. Too complicated to stay married to, good-hearted but prone to doing dumb things. But bad? “No,” Maggie said gently. “Daddy just gets confused sometimes, you know?”