The Lock Artist (46 page)

So that feeling mixed with the triumph of knowing that yes, I really could open up a safe in this kind of environment, using only my ears and my fingers and my mind. I could really do this.

Mixed with oh shit, this safe is fucking empty and these three guys are about to go insane. It may not be my fault exactly, but I’ll still have to deal with it.

That’s as far as I got. Two or three seconds of that before it all fell apart. The next sound we all heard was the distinctive sound of four tires leaving four black marks on the pavement just outside the door. Followed by Tall Mustache swinging open the back door and running out into the night like he had been shot out of a cannon. The last part of that chain reaction was Sleepy Eyes climbing over the front counter, slamming his whole body into the front door, fumbling with the latch and getting it open remarkably quickly, and then falling out onto the sidewalk.

That left me, an empty safe, and a long shadow in the back doorway.

I made a break for the other door, thinking it would be a real good idea to follow in Sleepy Eyes’s footsteps.

“Stop right there or I’ll shoot you right in the fucking back.”

I stopped.

“Turn around.”

I turned. The man was in his sixties maybe. With a rough face. The kind of man who clearly hadn’t taken a lot of shit from anybody in the past and wasn’t about to start now. He was wearing a black leather jacket that might have been a little too young for him, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem was the very real gun in his right hand.

It was a semiautomatic. It looked like the gun my uncle had under his cash register. It was pointed right at my chest.

“Your friends are all gone.”

His voice was perfectly calm. He took a step closer to me, right into a thin beam of light that came into the room, filtered through the front window. I saw his face more clearly. He had a big nose. He had red cheeks. He was badly in need of a shave.

“I think you need new friends,” he said, taking another step closer. “Don’t you agree?”

No arguments there.

“You’re just a kid, eh? So how about this, I’ll make you a deal. You tell me who those other guys were and I won’t put a bullet in your head.”

I didn’t move. He came closer.

“Come on, kid. Don’t be dumb. You think any of those guys wouldn’t have given you up in two seconds? Just tell me who they are.”

That’s going to be a problem, I thought. I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you here.

The man shook his head and smiled. It looked like he was going to step away, but in the next instant he was right on top of me. He grabbed me by
the front of the shirt with one hand. With the other he pressed the gun right into my neck. I smelled the cigar smoke on him. It took me right back to my bedroom in Uncle Lito’s house. A million miles away.

“It’s a little rude not to answer my question, don’t you think? Are you going to tell me or what?”

This is it, I thought. This is it right here.

“Who are they?”

The gun barrel pressed harder into my neck. He had it angled upward. The bullet would go right up through my brain.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Maybe you don’t know their names. Is that it? Huh?”

He’s going to kill me.

“Just tell me where you know them from. Can you do that? Who set you up with these guys?”

My last minute on earth. It’s right here.

“Say
something
, kid. Tell me something right now or I swear to God, I will pull this trigger.”

Worse things could happen.

“Three seconds. Talk or die.”

Worse things than having to live like this.

“Three.”

Maybe it’s the only way out.

“Two.”

Even if it means never seeing Amelia again.

“One.”

I wished I could have said good-bye to her, at least.

“Zero.”

A few seconds passed, the gun still pressed into my neck. I kept breathing. From outside, I could hear a car pulling into the lot. The headlights came through the open door and swung across the room.

The man lowered the gun. He wrapped one arm around my head and pulled it against his shoulder. For one second I thought he was going to break my neck.

But no. He was hugging me.

“Okay, kid,” he said. “Okay.”

Fishing Hat came in through the back door. Followed by Tall Mustache. Followed by Sleepy Eyes.

Followed by the Ghost.

“I told you guys,” the Ghost said. As pale as ever, and he seemed agitated and totally out of place here. “Did you think I was making a fucking joke? The kid doesn’t talk. And he wouldn’t rat you out, even if he could.”

“You were right,” the man with the gun said. He must have been the owner of this place. Doing somebody a favor by letting these guys use it for a theater, and getting into the act himself.

“I told you he’d be able to open the safe, too. Did I not?”

“Correct again.”

Looking back on it, the whole thing did seem a little too choreographed. But at least I had passed the test, right? Local kid makes good, proves himself to criminals.

They took me back to the restaurant in Greektown. The Ghost didn’t come inside with us. He stood in the parking lot and said good-bye to me again. For real this time.

“It’s official,” he said to me. “You own the franchise.”

He got in his car and drove off. The other men took me inside and got me a drink from a bottle I recognized from my uncle’s shelves. I choked down a swallowful.

“Sorry if we were riding you a little hard,” Fishing Hat said, grabbing me by the back of the neck. “We had to see how you handled it, you know? Make sure you could handle your business. See how big a pair you had if it all went to shit on you.”

Big enough, apparently. For what that was worth. The closing act was when I got taken over to a private table, separated from the rest of the restaurant by a folding partition. There were three couples sitting at the table, but there was no mistaking who was in charge of the evening. It was the man I’d met exactly one time before. The dark eyes, the thick eyebrows, the long cigarette hanging from his lips. That same aroma in the air, the smoke mixing with his cologne and whatever else, the combination vaguely foreign and powerful and different from anything I’d ever smelled before.

That smell, by itself, would have told me everything I needed to know. Like the Ghost said, this was the man you do not fuck with.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said to me. “I knew I had a good feeling about you.”

I didn’t move.

“A man who doesn’t talk. What a beautiful thing, eh?”

Everyone else at the table nodded at this. Two other men in suits. Three women in diamonds and dressed out to here.

“If you see Mr. Marsh, tell him I’m sorry to hear that his partner Mr. Slade is still missing. He should be more careful who he does business with.”

That brought some laughter from around the table. Then I was dismissed. Sleepy Eyes ushered me away and pressed a wad of bills into my right hand. When I got outside, I opened my fist and saw five crumpled hundred-dollar bills.

I still had the pagers in the motorcycle’s back compartment. I was wondering what would happen if I were to take them back into the restaurant. If I were to place them on that table and then walk away. I was trying to picture exactly what might happen, when I heard Sleepy Eyes calling to me.

“Over here,” he said. He gestured me over to the long black car, the same car I’d seen parked in Mr. Marsh’s driveway.

“The boss wanted me to show you something,” he said. “He thought it might be . . . what’s the word? Beneficial?”

Sleepy Eyes took a quick look around, then opened the trunk. As the light popped on, I saw the lifeless face of Jerry Slade, Mr. Marsh’s partner. The trunk lid got slammed back down before I could register anything else. How he might have died, or if the rest of his body was even intact.

“I don’t make a point of parking in the middle of a city with something like that in the trunk,” Sleepy Eyes said, “but we finally caught up to him today, and well . . . it seemed like good timing. Do your little test tonight and make a lasting impression, all at the same time.”

I kept standing there. My mind couldn’t make my muscles do anything yet.

“Welcome to real life, kid.”

He smacked me once on the cheek and went inside, leaving me there alone in the dark.

I went to school for two more days. That was it for my entire senior year of high school. On Thursday night, the blue pager went off. I called the number. The man on the other end had a thick New York accent. He gave me an address in Pennsylvania. Just outside of Philadelphia. He told me I’d be expected in two days’ time. I sat there for a long time, looking at the address.

I’m going to need a note, I thought to myself. I’m going to need a note, excusing me from school tomorrow so I can go to Pennsylvania and help some men rob a safe.

The next morning, I bought a pair of luggage bags. They hung over the backseat of my motorcycle, one on each side. I came back and put as many clothes as I could fit inside them. Toothbrush, toothpaste, the usual things you need every day. I packed my safe lock. I packed the pages that Amelia had drawn for me that summer. I packed the pagers.

I had about a hundred dollars of my own saved up, plus the five hundred the men had given me after the fake robbery. Minus the thirty bucks for the motorcycle luggage. So about $570 in total.

I went to the liquor store, going in through the back door in case Uncle Lito was taking one of his morning naps. When I went through to the front, there he was slumped over the counter, his head resting on his forearms. If someone walked through the front door, he’d snap awake in a half second and try to act like he hadn’t been sleeping.

I slipped around him and stood in front of the cash register. I pushed the magic button on the register and the drawer popped open. I did a quick count. There wasn’t much, and what there was, I put right back. I couldn’t take it. When I closed the drawer, Uncle Lito came to.

“What? What’s going on?”

I put my hand on his back. Not my usual thing to do.

“Michael! Are you okay?”

I gave him the thumbs-up. Never better.

“What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be at school?”

He looked old today. My father’s brother, this man who felt responsible for what had happened to me, who had taken me in despite having no aptitude whatsoever for taking care of another human being.

But he tried. Right? He tried.

And he gave me one damned fine motorcycle.

I hugged him for the first and last time. Then I went out the door.

Here is the part that kills me. I had one more stop to make. The antique store down the street. I went inside and waved to the old man, the very same old man who had sold me my first locks, way back when.

I wasn’t buying a lock today. I went to the glass counter and pointed to a ring. I didn’t know if the diamond was real. All I knew was that I had seen it before, and that I had liked it. And that I had enough money to buy it. It was only a hundred dollars.

When I had the ring in its little box, tucked inside my jacket, I rode over
to Amelia’s house. The place was empty. Mr. Marsh was off at the health club or wherever else he went during the day, now that I’d earned his life back for him.

Amelia was at school, of course. Like any normal seventeen-year-old.

The front door was locked. I went around to the back. That was locked, too. One more time, for old times’ sake, I took out the tools and opened that door. It made me remember that first time, when I had broken into the house with the football players. Then the time after that, when I had broken in just to leave a picture in Amelia’s room.

I didn’t regret any of it. I still don’t, to this day.

When I was inside, I went upstairs and sat on her bed for a while. Amelia’s bed, officially the greatest square footage on the planet Earth. I sat there remembering everything, and then for the last time that day, I tried to talk myself out of it.

You can go get her right now, I thought. Go get her out of school, give her the ring in person. Take her with you. You love her, you can’t live without her, you’ll find a way to make it work. Why else would you feel this way? Why do you even have a heart inside you if it tells you that this is the person you want to be with for the rest of your life and you can’t make that happen?

And so on. Until the truth finally came back to me. As clear as sunlight. As clear as that look on her face when those men came to the house, with her father in the backseat.

I can’t take you with me, I thought. I can’t let this touch you. Any of it. I can’t even tell you where I’m going.

I stood up. I took the ring box out of my jacket. I put it on her pillow.

I did all of this for you, Amelia. And now I have to do one more thing.