<div class="floatleft">(https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/wikisuburra/images/8/8c/Lelemarchillisuburra.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180908174344&amp;path-prefix=it)</div><em>"That..."</em>Brett said, "<em>Sounds perfect... Now, we have a couple of hours before the nightlife really kicks off, shall we go find a place to crash first then come back looking for some... Entertainment?"</em><br/><br/>Gabriel smiled and nodded at his friend's enthusiasm for a little bit of B&E. "Great. So I was reading on a dark web blog that a twelve volt short on a five or eight ohm capacitor right next to the power uptake sub-system of a residential alarm number pad is almost guaranteed to knock it offline in a way that won't trip any tamper system. It's like it thinks that there's been a power surge from the transformer and the alarm puts itself into a kind of...." he trailed off. He was getting better at working out when he'd overstepped on 'geek' and where, had Brett not been his friend, he'd rapidly be heading for either a wedgie or a swirlie. Better, but not yet great. 'Great' would have been to have used his inside voice for the whole recitation of Popular Mechanics in the first place.<br/><br/>"Which roughly translated means I really want to try a new thing I read about taking alarms offline because I think it can really work. That better?"<br/><br/>Well, after a count of three and no swirlie being imminent, he would take that as a win.<br/><br/>"Okay, coz the Best Western freaking sucks dude."<br/><br/><div align="center"><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 14pt;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">~~~+~~~+~~~+~~~</span></span></strong></div><br/>They'd driven back the way they'd come into town, past the liquor store - Brett had suggested that if they did get into a house they should check it for booze before going out and buying their own supply - and were scoping out the houses overlooking the beach. The first two places had cars outside so were obviously out. The third place had cameras and a large retractable iron gate covering the road. Gabe was all for testing himself against alarm companies and local law enforcement types but would leave the Cali Cartel to someone else. He quite liked the skin he was in and didn't want to see anyone else making a jacket or a pair of cowboy boots out of it.<br/><br/>A little way past a gentle curve in the road - which made the rear of the next house difficult to see from either of the two surrounding houses - held a house that had no cars outside, had no cameras visible, and which didn't look like a safe house either for the cartel or the FBI.<br/><br/>"Pull in and lets take a look." Gabe suggested.  That they did, and when no one appeared from inside to ask them what the hell they were doing by just sitting there in their big ass car, Gabe got out. He pulled a small square battery from his pocket that had previously been inside the clock-radio in the Best Western. It still had the little snap-on connector attached and a black and red wire running from the connector that was the part that was going to generate the short. Before then though, they were going to make absolutely sure that the house was really empty. Gabe banged on the front door loud enough to wake the dead and when no one came out, he headed over the back gate and into the back yard.<br/><br/>"Would you look at........" he cooed appreciatively. The 'back yard' contained a twin level deck with a hot tub on the upper level that could be accessed from a French door to the upstairs bedroom and a pool that, while not quite Olympic sized, was large enough to get a work out in without getting fed up doing more changes of direction than strokes.<br/><br/>"Result!" He declared before the fairly involved job of killing the alarm had even been attempted.<br/><br/>More banging on the kitchen back door resulted in no screaming owner and so Gabe thought it safe to assume that the place was empty. Now all they needed to do was get inside. The front and rear doors looked pretty solid, but the French door to the upstairs bedroom was glass and much less formidable. He'd smashed the lock on the French door in his parent's place years ago by leaning his bike against the handle too heavily.<br/><br/>He bounded up the outdoor steps and started waggling the handle back and forth strongly and much more quickly than it was ever intended to have to cope with. Twenty seconds in and there was a 'snap' and the lock part of the handle gave way. After that all he needed to do was yank the handle up sharply and pull on the door. It slid aside just as it would normally do. There was a beeping coming from inside the house.<br/><br/>"Okay, okay.... I can do this. No pressure." He said, mainly to calm his own nerves. This was someone's house, their property, and he'd just broken in. "Okay, alarm pad is going to be next to the front door. I just zoom down the stairs, pop the case open and short it...." He realized that talking about what he needed to do was wasting precious seconds of<strong>actually doing</strong>what he needed to do. With an excited beam at Brett he was off through the bedroom and heading down the stairs to the front door.<br/><br/>"Okay, here's the pad... Now how do I get the cover off?" Maybe he should have thought of that beforehand? He fished a nickel from his pocket and shoved it in the seam where the front of the white plastic case met the rear of the alarm pad. A few strong waggles and one side of the case snapped open. The same deal on the other side and the whole case front came off exposing some wires, circuitry, and integrated circuits.<br/><br/>"Okay so this is where the power comes in...." he mumbled, looking at the exposed electronics and working out what he saw in comparison to what he'd read on the blog. He traced two lines before giving up on them as being too far away from what he was looking for. He was on his third line before finding what he wanted. He peered at it and saw a little printed number '8' on the ceramic barrel of the capacitor. "Bingo! Okay, now the game is afoot!" Dropping the front case of the alarm, he took the battery in one hand as he angled the red and black wires coming from it so that they were almost - but not quite - touching. Next he brought one wire up to the capacitor and pressed one wire against the metal leg on the right hand side of it. The next part was tricky because he needed to press the other wire to the leg on the left hand side without losing contact with the right hand leg. Hmmm, that was a bit.... He waggled the wire minutely back and forth a couple of times before there was a loud 'crack' and a faint smell of burning. The rapid beeping - which had started to freak him out quite a lot by this point - changed to a single loud beep and then silence.<br/><br/>"Okay, so if the alarm doesn't go off in the next ten seconds I reckon that we are in." He said to Brett. Perhaps the delivery of that could have been a little more definitive but this was kind of more art than science.<br/><br/>He counted down from ten in his head and then added another five for good measure. Nothing. "Ha! I love it when a plan comes together!"<br/><br/><div align="center"><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 14pt;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">~~~+~~~+~~~+~~~</span></span></strong></div><br/>The inside of the house was even more impressive than the outside had been. There was booze aplenty and some frozen steaks and other stuff in the freezer. No fresh stuff, obviously, but then that just led them to feel a bit more secure that no one was going to come back through the front door in the next ten minutes. There was a huge kitchen - all granite and brushed metal, a lounge cum dining room capable of hosting a full NFL squad, and three bedrooms, two of which had queen beds in them.<br/><br/>Gabe set some of the meat on one of the counters to defrost.<br/><br/>"We should head back to find ourselves some entertainment don't you think?"<br/><br/>...<br/><br/>The Half Shell was just a short way from the parking lot of the Best Western. They had checked out - the bastards had charged them for one night's stay so they could go fuck themselves if they thought they'd move the car from the parking lot for the time being - and they'd walked along the beachfront past the Eden House and a couple of other B&Bs and hotels. The Half Shell seemed to have some life in it in any case and they seemed less worried about carding people that sometimes was the case. Maybe it would change if they started causing trouble, but two nice young men who were evidently stone cold sober weren't going to be a problem so they got served.<br/><br/>Gabe chinked his Dos Equis against Brett's beer.<br/><br/>"So there's a couple of M's I'd LF if you know what I mean...." he said to his friend after scoping out Lauren and Monica (not that he knew those were their names of course at this point). The blonde one caught his gaze and caused Gabe to grin stupidly. Alarms he could do. Women.... Well, women was Brett's area of expertise.