Rachel St. Sebastian stood off to the side, trying not to draw any attention to herself, in her black suit, black sunglasses, her large black rimmed sunhat. She lifted her coffee cup to her lips and took a long sip as she watched the service go on ahead. The priest read from the bible, the few people who showed up looked sad, yada yada yada, the usual funeral stuff. Rachel had been to so many funerals at this point that nothing really felt different, except...this one was different. This was a funeral for the death of a woman she'd been directly involved with. She'd helped cause this. And the thing was...the guilt was eating her alive inside. Once the service ended and people started to disperse, Rachel walked up to the headstone and let out a long exhale.

"I'm so sorry," she said, "I didn't know it would go this way. If I...if I had, I don't know that I would've let her go into that apartment with you. I know it doesn't mean shit now, but I am sorry, regardless."

The newly etched name into the stone, Kristin J. Whetworth, shone back at her. Rachel St. Sebastian shook her head, then took another long drink of coffee before adjusting her large sunglasses.

"For what it's worth," she added, "...she's going to pay for it eventually. I can promise you that."

Meanwhile, while Rachel headed back to the morgue, Allie was seated in a bistro downtown, a very old, very forgotten bistro. The place she used to go to see Sunny to get her medications. The kind of place one goes to have shady business dealings. She twiddled her thumbs and felt her stomach churning. She didn't want to agree to this meetup, but it had been so many weeks now, she figured she didn't have a choice. She watched as a father and son, the son looking to be in his late teens, entered and approached the counter, and she wondered what that must be like. To have a family who wanted to spend time with you. To not be so completely alone. She heard the chair across from her pull out, scraping its legs against the floor, and turned back, face to face with Claire Driscoll, who just smiled at her.

"Hiya Meers," she said, "it's been a while."

                                                                               ***

"Why are we at the library?" Benny asked, "the library makes me feel weird. Like I'm...I'm late to turn in a book report."

"We are here, because," Molly said, as she knelt in front of the bottom row of a section and started looking, "I need to back up my theory before I can qualify it with confidence. I think I know how Jackson Strange does what he does, but I wanna confirm it first."

Benny leaned against the shelf and put his hands in his coat pockets, then looked down at Molly, who was sifting through each book individually. He smiled to himself and chuckled, shaking his head. After a few minutes, Molly popped back up and held a book in her hands.

"You know," Benny said, "this might come as a surprise, but back when I was first starting out, I would do this exact thing. Come to the library and find books about magic, study everything I could, every different trick and technique. I wanted to just be the absolute best at it. I don't seem the studious type, but here we are."

"You might not seem the studious type, but you're certainly the dedicated type," Molly said, making Benny blush, his eyes widen a bit as she added while flipping through the book, "and that's the thing, that's what's admirable. You're driven, determined, dedicated. That's why I like you."

Benny smiled, approached her and kissed the side of her head, making her smile too as she finally stopped on a page.

"Right here," she said, pointing at it with her finger, "this is it. This is what I meant that night at his show. This is how Jackson Strange does what he does. Harry Houdini."

                                                                            ***

Zoe was standing outside of Tony's office, waiting. She'd met with the agents the previous day, and now, was here to fulfill her duty. As she tapped her foot anxiously, the door to the office opened and Raindrop, along with Tony, came walking out. Raindrop stopped and looked at Zoe, who looked immediately back at the floor, intimidated by her for some reason. Raindrop stopped after putting some papers in her bookbag and turned to face Tony.

"He'll want to see you soon. A meeting is inevitable," she said, "and I suggest you bring some evidence of success that makes him happy. He is a benefactor after all."

"I...I know," Tony said, "I know, yes. And I will. Just tell me when and I'll show up. Until then I have other business to attend to."

With that, Tony grabbed Zoe by the arm and tugged her into his office, shutting the door hard behind them. She stood there, perplexed, as he walked back around to his desk and poured himself a drink, shaking his head, clearly exhausted from his meeting with Raindrop. Zoe, after a moment, turned her focus towards him as he pulled out his desk chair and plopped down within it, putting his feet up on the desktop as she gently sat down across from him on the opposite end of the desk.

"What was that all about?" she asked.

"Never enter into an ongoing business agreement," Tony said, sipping from his glass, "it ain't worth it. No matter what they promise you, kid, it ain't worth it. They'll suck ya dry until you're a husk of your former financial self. Every businessman is a goddamn loan shark. It's much better to try and manage and finance yourself, trust me on that."

"I don't disbelieve you, for what it's worth," Zoe replied, shrugging.

"Anyway, what're you doin' here?" he asked, shaking his glass at her, the ice within tinkling against the sides, "you want a drink?"

"Oh, no thank you sir," she said, "um, I'm here because we're having an issue with the theater. There's some structural integrity of the pillars, specifically around the stage and front row. I don't think it's safe to continue doing shows until it gets looked at, and probably repaired. Thankfully I've outlined the exact issues and even drew up a rough estimate of what it would cost to fix and you'll be happy to learn it won't be much, at least if we start now before it gets worse."

"Everything is fucking money," Tony said in a hushed voice, shaking his head and standing up, looking out the window behind his desk while he continued drinking; he sighed and continued, "...ya know, if I'd known all the trouble opening a second casino would bring me, I wouldn't have done it. I only did it so I could maybe make more so my family could live more comfortably. My kids, they deserve the best, because I didn't have the best growing up and I wanna make up for that to them. But this entire place, it's just been one nightmare after another. Well, at least you're bringing me something I can easily fix. We should take a walk down there and see what-"

The door opened and his secretary popped her head in.

"Sir?" she asked, "you're needed out here, there's an altercation on the main floor."

Tony sighed again, set his glass down on the desk and walked past Zoe.

"We'll go when I get back, it'll only be a few minutes," he said. As soon as he left, Zoe sprung into action. Agent Siskel had given her a small, almost watch battery sized device that she was to place underneath his desk somewhere to record audio in the room, and she wasn't going to squander this chance now. She got on her knees and crawled beneath the desk, pushing his chair aside, pulling the device from her pocket. She looked around for a minute for the right spot, somewhere he would never look, and then pushed it against the wood grain hard, watching it stick. She grinned, satisfied in her efforts, then started to climb back out. However, as she exited this position, she knocked the desk, and his now empty glass fell. Zoe scrambled, reached out, and grabbed it before it hit the floor. She took a long breath then set it back on the desk exactly how it had been, before taking her seat once more. Minutes later, as promised, Tony came back. Together, they went to the theater to investigate its issues, and Zoe couldn't help but silently congratulate herself.

Sleight of hand had always been something she'd been somewhat of an expert at.

                                                                           ***

"You sure you don't want anything?" Claire asked, biting into her sandwich, as Allie shook her head slowly; Claire shrugged and spoke while she chewed, "your loss I suppose. Food's excellent here. So how you been?"

"How have I been?" Allie asked, "How have I been? Seriously? Well let's see, the last time I saw you we were in an empty apartment where I killed a perfectly innocent woman, all because she MIGHT have gone back to her boss. So, that's twice now I've...gotten rid of someone, rather against my will, so I'm not doing exactly great."

"You get used to it," Claire said.

"I don't want to 'get used to it', I don't want something like that to be so normalized in my day to day life that I no longer feel bad about it," Allie said through clenched teeth, leaning a bit across the table, "don't you live with any fear, any guilt?"

"Not particularly," Claire said, shrugging, "but that's because we're aiming for a bigger prize. I'm going into that vault with you."

This took Allie by complete surprise.

"You...you're...excuse me what now?" she asked, "you most certainly are NOT. I'm not strolling illegally into a casino vault with a convicted serial killer. That's, like, triple the law breaking. If anything, I think the space we've granted one another is good. We need people to not think we're associated. Why would you even wanna get in there?"

"Allie," Claire said, wiping her mouth on a napkin and then cupping her hands on the table, "think about the amount of money that's down there. We're sending these people to prison, right? That's the goal here. Why can't we Robin Hood a little? Take care of ourselves. We take a fair portion, we leave town, not necessarily together, and we start new lives. Let's face it, Vegas hasn't been good to either one of us."

"Vegas has actually been great to both of us, the problem is we fucked it up," Allie said, "I'm doing better now than I've maybe ever done."

"Okay, well, look at it from my point of view. I lost everything. I...don't wanna go back to what I was like. What I was doing. I realize this might sound contradictory from my statement earlier, about you getting used to killing people, but what I meant was that the more often something happens, the more normal it becomes to you. I'm not in any way suggesting you keep doing it. I don't even want to do it anymore. I want to take some of that dough and leave town, once and for all. Now look, I've helped you a LOT, I figured the least you could do is give me this send off."

Claire had a point, she had indeed helped a lot. She hated admitting that, but it was true. Allie sighed and leaned back in her chair, running her hands over her face. Claire exhaled and blinked a few times, then looked down at the table.

"I like you, Allie," Claire said, "I wouldn't betray you, of all people. I still think we're two sides of the same coin. I just want us both to come out of this even, you know? After all we've both been through, don't we deserve a chance to be happy?"

"You murdered people and stuffed them in walls," Allie said flatly.

"I know what I did, I don't need a reminder," Claire said sternly, "How come people who are drug addicts, alcoholics, how come they get the benefit of the doubt? You were a painkiller addicted, gin swilling mess and yet people believed in you, that you could change, that you deserved to be better. Why aren't I allowed that same kindness? Just because I did what I did I'm somehow irredeemable? That doesn't seem fair."

Allie looked at Claire, who looked genuinely hurt.

"Nobody wants to give convicted criminals, regardless of the crime, even the slightest hope that they might get better. Sure, I did horrible things, but how is that any different from the horrible things these men are doing? It's all crime, regardless of the format."

Claire, once again, had a point, and Allie hated that. She hated how often Claire made sense of the senseless. Allie sighed and sat back upright.

"Alright," Allie said, "...if you're coming, we need to set some ground rules. And you should probably come talk to someone with me."

"Who you have in mind?" Claire asked, sipping her drink.

"A former magician by the name of Mr. Magic," Allie said.

                                                                             ***

"This..." Molly said, as she and Benny sat at a table in the library and she pointed at something on the page before them, "is the plate glass box. As the book clearly states 'the escape from a box made of sheets of plate glass in interesting is that it was performed by both Houdini and Mrs. Houdini and shows the performer visible from every angle. The box is held together by metal and heavy bolts kept in place through holes in the glass. The cover of the box lies flat and is hinged to one of the long sides. The front of the box has two hinged clasps at the upper edge with the top of the box having two metal staples projecting at the front edge. Once the performer is inside the box, the cover is closed and heavy padlocks are connected through the staples.'."

"So Strange just stole the idea outright and performed it on a more public scale?" Benny asked, "god he's an even bigger hack than I thought."

"It goes on to say 'The secret of the escape lies in the hinges. Each bolt in the back of the box has two portions, the hollow bolt and the bolt-head, provided with a small screw-bolt. When the bolt-head is screwed into the hollow end of the bolt, the result is a solid bolt that exactly resembles the real bolts. From inside the box, the performer can unscrew the bolt-heads with a flat key hidden amongst the 42 bolts, push the bolts out of the holes, lift up the cover with the hasps acting as hinges, and escape. After escape, the heads are easily put back in place either through use of a string from inside the box or unlocking the padlocks to release the front cover, replacing the bolts in the hinges. The cover may then be closed and relocked'. Don't you see? He called himself an illusionist one time, and now I get it. I didn't realize until that night you and I went that he'd lifted it directly from Houdini, and I knew I'd seen it somewhere before."

"How did you even know to recognize this?" Benny asked, sounding impressed.

"When I was little, I had this aunt and we used to watch a lot of documentaries," Molly said, "one night, she fell asleep and I watched this thing about Harry Houdini, and I guess it just stuck in my brain, but I'd forgotten about it until now. But seeing Jackson perform it, it all clicked back into place for me."

"So what do we do? Now that we know how it's done, how do we implement it to our plan, to the...to the architecture of the vault?" Benny asked.

"We don't," Molly said, grinning as she slammed the book shut and looked at a rather confused Benny, "not entirely. The faux wall is ready to go, and is being installed tomorrow. But it isn't going to be the main attraction, or the only way we succeed, because someone's already going to be inside."

"They are?" Benny asked, "someone's gonna be IN the vault, waiting for us?"

"Can't be a magician without an assistant," Molly said.