A Naked Singularity: A Novel (69 page)

“Many. Are all of the buildings from 402 to 408 the same height.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Except for the gap we can practically fly between 410 and 402.”

“I hate the gap.”

“Fuck the gap, no big deal.”

“So how do we get to 402? How do we get out of there when we’re done?

“We have to decide that.”

“How do we get past those two guys on the roof twice?”

“We have to figure that out as well but what do you think about the plan in general?”

“I think it’s good, or at least our best bet, but our success seems really contingent on the accuracy of DeLeon’s information, to a degree I’m not entirely comfortable with.”

“How so?”

“Well for example, how do we know that Ballena will be the only guy on the second floor? That’s a huge issue too. It seems to me you would want more than one person protecting that kind of money.”

“We know because you heard DeLeon. Escalera does it the same way every time and he’s not about to change now. Ballena is always alone in a separate, nearby location or room until they weigh and test the drugs. Then they radio him and he brings the money over.”

“But this is a big deal.”

“But not a risky one from their perspective. The last thing they expect is a move on that money. From who? A guy about to get it anyway?”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“I am right, DeLeon’s right.”

“So how do we get by the roof guys?

“I think we might need to create a distraction.”

“That’s the last thing I think we should do,” I said. “Any distraction we create artificially might have the opposite of the intended effect. If I’m sitting there all complacency and suddenly something out of the ordinary happens, the first thing I’m going to do is safeguard what’s at risk.”

“That’s a risk, no doubt.”

“On the other hand, we might have the perfect built-in distraction.”

“What’s that?”

“Well what’s that house going to look like at exactly three a.m.? Think about it. At exactly that time the Nova will pull up to the garage. The north side roof guy at least will be watching the car from the roof to assure that it arrives alone and with only one occupant. The three guys in the basement will be watching the door open, checking the car, unloading the chest. The three on the second floor will first be looking out the window then waiting in anticipation for their cohorts to come up. In short, that seems as good a time as we’re going to get to go in there undetected.”

“Not bad and what I like is that since we know Escalera is a stickler for time we can time it to a tee.”

“Exactly. If we do it right, the first time Escalera will discover something has gone wrong is when he asks Ballena to bring down the dough. When do you think that will be?”

“Well let’s think it through. Three o’clock she gets there. Couple of minutes to get the trunk out and bring it up the stairs. Now they unlock it, spread out its contents and begin the weighing and testing. Remember this is a lot of shit. It’s going to take a while to test it all. Remember also what DeLeon says about Escalera and testing. Escalera is thorough to the point of paranoia. He tests and weighs extensively from every portion of the shipment. This stems from an incident when he got beat, on a minor deal, because he only tested the top and bottom of the stuff and not the middle.”

“What happened to his fascination with the middle?”

“Maybe that was the genesis of it I don’t know.”

“So lots of testing.”

“Yes and Ballena will not be summoned until it is all complete”

“Bottom line?”

“I’ll say fifteen to twenty-five minutes.”

“Those field tests are pretty quick.”

“Yeah but it all has to be weighed and remember that every single portion is being tested. The unknown factor is how the stuff will be packaged. The more individual packages there are the longer the testing.”

“Is there any way it could be less than fifteen minutes.”

“No I don’t see how.”

“So let’s assume the worst case scenario and say we have fifteen minutes to get in there, get the dough and get the hell out of that area before those guys flood the street looking for us.”

“I think that’s right.”

“So what have we established so far Dane?”

“We’ve established that we’re going to use swords, that we’re going to begin at 402, that we’re going to enter 410 through the roof, that we’re going to exit through that same roof and go back to 402. Most importantly, I think we’ve also established that we are two avaricious, insane fucks who refuse to be marginalized by a society that exalts the acquisition of wealth above all else.”

“Okay, I’ll take your word on that last one. That still leaves a lot left to decide. I’m thinking of these things. I made a list while you were talking:

    When do we get to 402?

    How do we get there?

    How do we leave the scene with the dough?

    How exactly do we get past the rooftop watchers?

    How do we deal with Ballena?

    How do we keep him from notifying the others in the house?

    Exactly how big is this guy that he warrants being called Whale yet isn’t fat?

There it is off the top of my head. I’m flying Friday morning so between tonight and tomorrow we need to decide these questions to a high degree of certainty.”

“No, to a perfect degree.”

“So?”

“So did you watch The Beastly Burden Channel at all today? They had this Kodiac bear—”

“I don’t have cable.”

“This fucking bear—”

“As I’ve been saying, I think one of the keys is to minimize greatly the amount of time we’re engaged in clearly culpable conduct. For that reason, I think we should arrive at 402 as close to three a.m. as possible.”

“Fine but given that the three o’clock time is a strict go time we don’t want to cut it too close either.”

“Let’s say 2:30 at 402 meaning that an hour later we should be well on our way home with the dough.”

“I like it Casi.”

“How do we get there?”

“How do you get anywhere in this city? Subway I guess.”

“Subway might be okay for getting there but leaving there is still a getaway right? We’re going to make our getaway on the subway where any flatfoot can decide to ask us what’s in the bag?”

“On what basis?”

“So we’re going to rely on their understanding of and respect for the U.S. Constitution now?”

“You should’ve seen this bear man.”

“The getaway please.”

“So we’ll drive, we’ll leave the car a couple blocks away.”

“What car? Not mine obviously.”

“Why not? You’ve said repeatedly that you want to minimize the length of innocently-inexplicable conduct. What’s more explicable than being in your own car?”

“Let’s table it for now.”

“Fine.”

“Here’s the main thing. Focus on the time between when we’re on the roof of 408, say 2:58 a.m., until we get out of the side door of 402. How do we do that?”

“Listen we do have a week. I don’t think too much of the plan should come together all at once. That seems dangerous to me, sloppy and precipitate. I mean we’ve got all day tomorrow. You’re not going to work tomorrow right?”

“I’m not but we don’t have all day because I’m also meeting with Toomberg.”

“I thought you were meeting with him tonight.”

“Yes and tomorrow night as well.”

“Man alive, you need to be entirely focused on this.”

“I am. This isn’t brain surgery, I can do other things simultaneously. Besides you’re the one who wants to stop tonight, I want to keep going.”

“That’s because I’ve given it a lot of thought and I think the planning stage of this, to be optimal, has to proceed at a certain pace. Perfection is never a matter of indiscriminately spending copious time. I’m fully confident that everything we’ve decided to this point is unequivocally correct but I would lose that confidence if we proceed too quickly. That’s so because once we decide something I never want to have to revisit it. That would not be a perfect allocation of time or mental resources. In these situations, things must develop at their proper rate, a delicate balance must be achieved, so that the participants, you and I, have just the right relationship to the plan.”

My relationship to the plan was dysfunctional. Dane evinced so little doubt about its eventual efficacy, about its perfection and our ability and need to properly carry it out, that the whole thing became something more than real yet somehow still distant. If reality is sometimes so intense and bizarre that it feels like bad, unpersuasive fiction, then this was a fiction so powerful it outrealized reality. The whole thing scared me in a way that made me involuntarily cognizant of my every cardiopulmonary move; the ways a body keeps itself alive. I resolved to take two possibly wholly incompatible steps in response. I wanted to throw every cell of my being into the formation of the plan but I thought I would eventually back out, maybe by intentionally creating some impediment. I had too much doubt, I thought, to successfully carry it out.

“I think I need to keep working on this,” I said. “I don’t feel comfortable yet and Toom won’t be here for a while.”

“All right we’ll break it down. It’s 2:59 a.m. and we’re on the roof of 408 immediately adjacent and above the roof to 410. Any problems to that point Casi?”

“No there shouldn’t be any problem. By the time I get back from Alabama you’ll have left the stuff in 402 right?”

“Right.”

“And you’ll be very careful doing so right?”

“Naturally.”

“What if some crackheads go in there to smoke or something and find our swords et cetera?”

“I thought of that but no. The key I’m going to make is really the only easy way in there and I think that easy-way-ins are the only thing we have to worry about in this context.”

“Are there any imminent plans, by the city or others, to deal with that abandoned building?”

“No, six months and counting with no plans.”

I had to give this to him. I don’t think Dane had ever answered
I don’t know
to any question that involved the acquisition of information.

“And I never will,” he said. “Because all the homework is already done. The only thing left to do is some reasoning by our two brains and of course any factual research that may arise as a result.”

“Okay so 2:59 now what?”

“Seemingly two major options. We can allow Heckle and Jeckle on the roof to see us but somehow incapacitate them in such a way that they can neither stop us nor use their radios to notify the others of our presence or we can get on the roof and under without them detecting us. I don’t see any other option, do you?”

“No.”

“So what’s it going to be then, eh?”

“You’re saying, Toom, that you saw no one as you were coming up?”

“No one, why?”

“Never mind.”

“Have you been working?”

“Yes.”

“And you think?”

“I think I remember the day Gold was walking around looking for volunteers trumpeting
unprecedented autonomy
and
priceless experience
. Remember? He said there was this organization in Alabama that devoted itself to assisting death row prisoners and they were looking for attorneys willing to work pro bono. I think about how I really should have stayed seated in my swiveling chair but how instead I tracked him down and signed up on that little clipboard he was carrying. I think about how even though that happened months ago, It wasn’t until last week, with the literal
deadline
approaching, that I truly understood the enormity of what I’d agreed to.”

“A man’s life.”

“That but also the paucity of actions taken on the kid’s behalf to this point.”

“It
would
seem that quite a few mistakes, of both commission and omission, were made before we became involved.”

“The trial was a joke.”

“Yes.”

“Look at this transcript. I’ve done fucking hearings on sales that were longer than this!”

“I know but—”

“Not to mention the excruciatingly long list of things I would not have thought could possibly happen here, at this time, but that nonetheless somehow all manage to exist in this case, which was assigned to us allegedly at random.”

“I know.”

“I’m talking, in order, about the fact that Alabama does not have a fucking public defender’s office. So that Kingg’s lawyer at trial, this prick Bennigan, was assigned at random by the judge on the case, a judge whose concern with the efficacy of defense counsel we can surmise from his later actions.”

“Good point.”

“How this worthless shithead Bennigan was a solo practitioner whose practice consisted almost entirely of exchanging bank checks for deeds with the occasional petit larceny thrown in. How he was paid roughly the amount that a well-situated soda machine takes in in a week. How this grossly unqualified individual proceeded to put on the single most somnambulant, almost apologetic, performance I have ever had the misfortune of being exposed to. How even the slightest contact between Bennigan and his client should’ve sufficed to convince him he was representing a near-vegetable cloaked in a human epidermis costume yet he failed miserably to adequately convey this to the jury. How despite all this, God amazingly took time off from his busy schedule, as if to say that here
finally
was something that offended even his sensibilities, reached into that jury room and, like a master of puppets saddled with a group of particularly inexpressive marionettes, returned a verdict of life in prison rather than death. How at that point that empty, hollowed-out, prick of a trial judge Pearson overruled the jury and sentenced Kingg to death without so much as suggesting a reason. How this is perfectly permissible under Alabama’s death penalty statute but is impermissible in all but one other state and has never been done there.”

“All true.”

“How, and this is a great one, how this same Bennigan, who I wouldn’t trust to properly water my lawn, is then incredibly assigned to perfect Kingg’s appeal where the most meritorious issue, thanks in no small part to Bennigan’s own failure to preserve a single legal issue for appeal, was the ineffective performance of Bennigan himself. And in such a way is the guard entrusted to keep himself prisoner so that predictably Bennigan files this aptly named brief, a more turgid and unpersuasive collection of prose being difficult to envision. And since then what? Since this awe-inspiring series of events what action has been taken on Kingg’s behalf? Nothing.”