Her fourth peephole opened on a dark corridor closer to the hostesses’ “lounge.” It was quieter here. She sighed; the tension went out of her shoulders. But then something squeaked and she slammed the portal shut. Several long moments passed while she knelt alongside the terrace, panting like an asthmatic, before she realized it had probably been a mouse. A mouse, and not the squeak of a wheelchair. Of course not.

A fifth angle, chosen to show her the teller cages, greeted her with the deafening screech of a saw blade on metal and an incandescent fountain of orange sparks. It scared the shit out of her. Mollie flinched, eliminating the portals. She waited again in case the sound of power tools in Kazakhstan drew attention to her hiding spot behind the hedge in India. When nobody came running across the campus to investigate, she reopened the twinned doorways, but this time even smaller.

Four goons, more of Baba Yaga’s hired muscle turned entrepreneurial spirits in the burgeoning field of abandoned casino wealth redistribution, were trying to cut their way into the abandoned teller cages. The tellers turned cash into chips and vice versa; the casino’s daily gambling take hadn’t been rotated into the vault when everything went to hell. So the money was just sitting there, unclaimed. Apparently the thugs couldn’t get the keys, or didn’t know where they were stored. Or, more likely, they didn’t want to risk breaking into Baba Yaga’s private rooms to look for the key in the first place. Mollie didn’t blame them.

She might have waltzed through a portal inside the cage. But the thugs would see her, and they’d get royally pissed off when they saw her emptying the money drawers. Money they’d already decided was rightfully theirs. For one thing, these guys were armed up to the eyebrows. For another, and judging from the way the steel mesh rattled when they kicked it, it wouldn’t be long before they made it inside. And she did not want to be inside the teller cages when those hormone cases broke through, not for a second. She needed to get rid of those assholes.

Actually, she could solve two problems at once. And it was a fucking awesome way to clear the obstacle, if she did say so herself.

Be smart. Be safe. Be quick.

Well, two out of three.