A mile in Harpie Sharpie's shoes;

From Harpie Sharpie's point of view, I am the "House," in the Biggest Casino in the solar system. All he has to do to make a profit is hit the long shot. He makes his own evaluation of my system. Curiously enough, he freely attributes the Bearer Bond to be his own, and merely needs to assess the cost benefit of liquidating it at the Bank of Five Finger Discount.

1. The cost of a Wolf 7000 is $1200 new, but you can rent one at a heavy equipment store for $75.00 an hour. There is a bulk discount rate on hours if you rent for more than 8 hrs, but the total capital investment is higher; there is a 24 hr minimum.
2. The security guard is a dead loss. He's too poor to afford alcohol, too portly to interest women, and all he ever wants to talk about are the latest developments in the game of Tetris. He knows Harpie Sharpie on sight, so it's actually quite inconvenient.
3. A bulldozer to access the "physical plant," is a possibility, but to have it delivered, he would have to feign construction, and overhead would quickly become prohibitive.
4. Explosives have been a traditional shortcut to open a vault, but the only thing that gives explosives force is _containment_. To use the vault against itself you had to drill a hole in it, and this was just as easily used against the tumblers.
5. A cutting torch was a possibility; again the heavy equipment rental was open, with an acetylene tank etc, but he suspected that the perishable nature of the Bond in question would be more delicate even than diamonds.
6. A long (holiday) weekend would give him time to work his magic with the sandpaper, but this was not as reliable as his admirers made it sound, and the payoff was not an hourly rate for the time employed to withdraw his deposit. $100,000/72 hrs was an IMPRESSIVE hourly rate, but he knew from experience that you can only hit at BEST one K&S AR15 a quarter; the investigative heat lingered so. $400,000 a year WAS a tidy sum, but the prison sentence involved was prohibitive; no career advancement the whole duration, boredom and a stir-craziness that drove men mad were but the lesser KNOWN problems of the Prison Criminal Education System. Being socialized differently, and re-oriented sexually were also possibilities. Then there were the problems of explaining himself to McGehee, the tax man. Even if he was successful, found plenty of soft-targets AND eluded McGehee for two years, the $800,000 would NOT finance 2 years of Vegas Hotels, gambling and fee based female companionship.

Bus Drivers DEFINITELY had it better... if it wasn't for Rembrandt, he'd give up crime voluntarily!