As Bobby slid the box cutter down toward the final corner of his own canvas, he finally surveyed the room around them. “Off script” was an understatement. It wasn’t just the painting of the boat, and the one Richie was digging into; there were now a half dozen empty frames splayed out across the gallery, each beside a little pile of shattered glass. Some of the canvases were already rolled up and piled in a corner by the door, while others were still spread out near where they were working. Bobby didn’t have tubes to put them in, but he had plenty of tape and zip ties in his duffel bag, which was just outside the Dutch Room, in the second-floor hallway leading to the rest of the museum. Tubes would have been better—Christ only knew how much these things were actually worth—but the tape and the ties would have to do.

This wasn’t Bobby’s first art heist, though it was certainly his strangest, mainly because it wasn’t really supposed to have been an art heist at all. But he’d stolen paintings before, and he knew that art this old often went for millions. Then again, with paintings like this, it wasn’t so much about how much they were worth, it was more a question of finding someone willing to pay for them. Even the most eccentric billionaire couldn’t exactly hang a Rembrandt on his living room wall.

But a little after 1:00 a.m., dressed as a cop working a box cutter through the last few inches of the border of a four-hundred-year-old painting, Bobby didn’t concern himself with potential next steps. One of the benefits of acting on impulse was you really got to feast on the moment, and looking across the violated gallery, it was clear that Bobby and his partner had served themselves quite a buffet. Bobby actually felt bad for the feds who would undoubtedly try to piece together what was now a chaotic crime scene. To be fair, even before Bobby had deviated from the plan, none of it had really made much sense.

Case in point, the two security guards who had first let them in the side door after seeing their badges, who were now taped up and handcuffed in a boiler room three floors below. If it had been up to Bobby, he would have taken the box cutter to them first, because he was a pro, and pros didn’t leave witnesses. Then there was the amount of time they’d already spent in the museum; a quick glance at his watch told him they’d already been there an hour—an insane amount of time, though in this Bobby only had himself and his impulsive nature to blame. If he’d followed the plan, they’d have been in and out in minutes.