by Blake Crouch
On the wall beside Christian’s desk, she let her eyes fall upon a painting between two framed diplomas. She inevitably found herself staring at it during some point of each weekly session. It was a print of a Romantic masterpiece—a man standing in a dark frockcoat on the edge of a cliff. His back is to the viewer, and he’s gazing out over a barren, fog-swept waste. The landscape looks so hostile and unforgiving it could be another planet.
Christian turned in his swivel chair and glanced up at the wall.
“You like that painting.”
“What’s it called?”
“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.”
“Nice.”
“What do you like about it?”
“I like the man’s fear.”
“Why do you say he’s afraid? You can’t even see his face. I think he’s exhilarated.”
“No, he’s afraid. We all are, and this painting says that. It says we’re not alone.”
“You’re not alone, Letty. If you’d take my advice and join a group, you’d see that.”
“NA isn’t for me.”
“Sobriety is a group effort.”
“Christian, the only time I never used was when I was working. When I had a job.”
“You mean stealing.”
“Yeah.”
“You still messing around with that?”
She smiled. “You know what they say. You can take the girl out of prison...”
“That’s just another form of addiction, Letty.”
“I get that.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I want to stay clean. For me. For my son. But I don’t see the world like you do.”
“What do you see?”
Her lips curled up into something that could almost be called a smile. She pointed at the painting.
3
Letty left town that evening with her entire life, such as it was, in a suitcase.
Clothes.
A framed photograph of Jacob at four years old smiling from the top of a slide.
Laptop.
Phone.
And 5K in cash.
With a thermos full of French roast, she drove all night.
Slept at a truck stop in Arkansas the next day.
She got off the interstate where she could and stuck to back roads. Something more therapeutic in driving her Honda Civic beater down a two-lane highway than anything she’d experienced in rehab. A tangible sense of the life before falling behind her like so many stripes of faded yellow.
She didn’t push herself. Some days she only clocked a hundred miles. Oregon was the final destination, but she made no effort to take a direct course. She meandered, and in the beginning, didn’t think about a thing. Just let the landscape scroll. Whole chunks of time when her mind was a bright blue cloudless sky. Where she was so completely out of herself that when she snapped back into the moment, she couldn’t even remember driving. She’d be in a new state. On a different road. She wanted more time to pass like that. She lived so rarely in the present, her existence neatly boiled down into two equal parts.
The depression and regret of her past.
The fear of what was to come.
Her two plains of consciousness.
And it was driving on the plains of eastern Nebraska on a late summer afternoon when something like an epiphany struck her. She would always remember the moment, because out the windshield her stretch of prairie was sundrenched and golden with late light.
When I’m high and when I’m on a job—I’m not plagued by the sadness of the past and the fear of the future.
That’s why I use.
Why I steal.
Those are the only times when I live in the moment like a free human being.
# # #
She checked into a motel on the eastern desert of New Mexico on her fifth or sixth day. It was after ten p.m. and in the west the sky was getting raked by an electrical storm that was too far out for the sound of its thunder to reach her.
She pulled a chair out onto the concrete balcony.
Sat watching the sky light up, thinking how nice it would be to get high. It wasn’t much of a desert town, but she’d driven past a roadhouse on the outskirts. She could take a shower, put on something slinky, head down there and score. She could almost taste the smoke. Gasoline and plastic and household cleaners and Sharpies and sometimes apples. Oh yes, and nail polish. She hadn’t dared to paint her toes in the last six months for fear the odor alone would set her down the bad path.
Challenge the thought to use.
You do it tonight, when you start to come down you’ll feel so bad you’ll have to go again. And again. Cycle repeats. Then you’ll have lived in this motel room for three weeks and eaten nothing but convenience store food. You’ll be frail and sick, right back where you were last fall.
But the urge was still there.
So how do you cope?
If she went back into the room, she knew what would happen. She’d take a shower under the guise of distracting herself. But then she’d get out, suitcase dive for something sexy, and head down to the bar.
So how do you cope?
Stay right where you are.
Do not move.
By midnight, she could hear the thunder and smell the threat of rain in the sky like a closed-up attic. She didn’t go inside. Not even when the rain started.
It came down in curtains. The temperature fell. Almost instantly there were pools of standing water in the empty parking lot. The lightning touched the desert a quarter mile away, and the ensuing noise was louder than a shotgun blast at close range.
Still, she didn’t move.
Her clothes were drenched and she was shivering.
The storm passed.
Stars appeared.
She could hear the quiet roar of I-40 a mile away.
It was 3:30 in the morning.
Struggling to her feet, she pulled open the sliding glass door and walked into the frigid air-conditioning. She stripped out of her wet clothes and climbed naked into bed. The need was still there, just no longer screaming in her face. Now she pictured it as the embodiment of an emaciated woman, crouched in a corner, whispering madly to herself.
4
She stopped the next afternoon in the red desert waste of Arizona. It had been twenty-four hours since she’d eaten, something in the ache of an empty stomach that she found useful in fighting the urge to use. If hunger was on her mind, crystal meth wasn’t.
But now she was dizzy and lightheaded, feared her driving was on the cusp of becoming erratic.
She got off the interstate past Winslow and headed south through a landscape of buttes and exposed rock. A world stripped down to its bones.
She felt so lightheaded it was becoming difficult to focus, but a quick glance in the rearview mirror cut through the fog.
The black Tundra that had been trailing her for the last hundred miles, perhaps more, had taken the same exit.
Am I being paranoid because I’m famished?
She pulled into the visitor’s center.
Walked up to the drab brick building and paid the admission fee.
Inside, the air-conditioning was set to blizzard.
She pretended to peruse the gift shop card rack while she stared out the window that overlooked the parking lot.
The driver side door of the Tundra was open. A black man climbed out.
He wore khaki shorts and a white t-shirt without logo or slogan.
Letty threaded her way through the tourists and slipped out the exit. She followed the observation path through the desert until she stood on the rim.
The depression was gaping. Nearly a mile across. Five hundred feet deep. She could see people the size of ants on the far side, walking the trail that circled the crater. The heat radiating off the ground was tremendous.
A hole in the ground. Yay.
Turning, she studied the visitor’s center—no sign of the black man from the Tundra.
You’re
imagining things. Go eat something.
# # #
She ordered a foot-long veggie at the Subway in the visitor’s center and claimed a booth.
Crazy hungry.
Didn’t even come up for air until she was halfway through and nearly choked when she did. Because that man was sitting across from her, smiling. It was a beautiful smile. Broad and bright. But there was something malicious and knowing in it which she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Like the man wasn’t smiling at her, but rather at something he knew about her.
Letty put her sandwich down, wiped her mouth.
“By all means,” she said. “Please join me.”
The man unwrapped his sandwich—a meatball sub—and dug in.
“You followed me here,” Letty said.
He nodded as he chewed.
Through a mouthful, he said, “Picked you up in Gallup.”
“What do you mean ‘picked me up?’“
He just smiled.
“There something I can help you with?” she asked.
“Damn, girl. Can I eat my sub first?”
They ate in silence, watching each other. He was thirty-something, Letty figured, but closing in on forty. Her age possibly. No trace of stubble. Brown eyes. Movie-star handsome. Shredded.
They finished their sandwiches without a word, and then he washed his down with a long hit of Coke through a straw that sucked his cheeks in.
He said, “Ahhhh. Can’t believe they had a Subway. That’s just bonus. You look thoughtful. Lemme guess. You going through all the people you ever wronged, trying to figure out who’s come back to settle a score. Yeah?”
Letty made no acknowledgement, but he was right.
“This ain’t about none of that,” he said. “Ain’t here to hurt you. This got nothing to do with anything in your past. All about the future.”
That unnerving smile again.
Letty drew in a long breath. Her head was clear now, and she was afraid.
“How’d you find me?”
“Friend of mind in Charleston put a TrimTrac on your ride. Know what that is?” She shook her head. “Little device that lets me track your location using GPS. I heard you was coming west, thought we should meet.”
“Why?”
“We’ll get to that.”
“I have a phone. Just calling would’ve been less creepy than this by a factor of a hundred.”
“I’m more persuasive in person.”
“Have we met before?”
“No, but we share a friend.”
“Who’s that?”
“My man, Jav.”
“Javier sent you after me?”
“Not after you. To you. With a proposal.”
“I hope you weren’t counting on Javier’s name to facilitate whatever the hell you thought was going to happen here.”
He reached his hand across the table. “Isaiah.”
She didn’t take it.
“Damn, that’s cold.”
“I want you to get your tracking device off my car and leave me alone.”
“Why you hatin’ when you ain’t even heard what—”
“Does Javier want something? Is that what this is about?”
“No, I want something.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He recommended you to me.”
“For what?”
He grinned. “What do you think? A job.”
Letty leaned back against the seat.
“I did some work with Jav last fall,” Isaiah said. “He’s an interesting—”
“He’s a psychopath.”
“Be that as it may, he knows a lot of people. I called him last week. Told him about this thing I got going. This bind I’m in. Told him the kind of person, kind of skill set I needed, and he said I had to have you.”
“No, I’m done with all that.” Even as she said it she tasted the lie. “Do you know why I’m driving across the country, Isaiah?”
“No.”
“To see my son.”
“For real?”
“For real.”
“And what? You ain’t seen him in a while?”
She shook her head.
“What happened?”
“Right. I’m going to tell the guy who’s been spying on me for the last week about my private affairs.”
“You ain’t gotta be this way, Letisha. I ain’t coming at you with negativity.”
She sighed. “What do you want?”
“Javier tells me you the best.”
“The best what.”
“Best liar he’s ever worked with.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“And that you got scary-fast hands.”
“So.”
“So that’s exactly what I need.”
“I think I already gave you my answer.”
“You don’t even want the pitch?”
“Nope.”
“So you out, huh? Gonna go be Miss Respectable Citizen? Get a nine to five. Pay taxes. All that shit?”
“I’m gonna go be a mother to my son.”
Isaiah’s eyes didn’t exactly soften, but his body language changed. Like someone had let a little air out of the tires.
“That’s cool then. I feel that.” He crumpled up his Subway wrapper, slid out of the booth. “Good luck to you, Letisha.”
“You too Isaiah. Hope the score’s big and you don’t get caught.”
His laugh was low, booming. “Never.”
# # #
She watched him walk out of the restaurant.
Felt suddenly cold.
Alone and empty and void of anything approaching hope.
Here it came, right on cue—the crushing need to use.
Challenge the thought.
When I’m high and when I’m on a job—those are the only times in my life not plagued by the sadness of the past and the fear of the future.
So, tonight you can either be high in some motel room, taking that first step toward running your life into the ground once again.
Or...
5
Letty caught Isaiah in the parking lot, crouched down beside her car, prying the tracking device off the undercarriage.
He looked up, grinning.
She said, “I was thinking.”
“Yeah?”
“You wanna walk around the crater.”
# # #
It was God-awful hot, Letty already sweating.
Isaiah moved slowly along the footpath. They had to keep stopping to let the tour group up ahead gain distance.
“Ever hear of a man named Richter?” he asked.
“What thief hasn’t? The rock star grifter we all want to be. But he’s just a myth. Urban legend.”
“Actually, he’s not.”
“You’ve met him?”
“I’m doing a job with him.”
Letty felt a pulse of energy ride up the bones of her legs into her stomach, like it had come from the ground beneath her feet.
“Where’s the job?”
“Four and a half hours from where you stand.”
She stopped.
Shielded her eyes from the sun as she stared up at him. He was smiling but his eyes were hidden behind a pair of aviator sunglasses.
“Vegas?”
“Fabulous Las Vegas.”
She said, “A man I respect very much once told me that of all the jobs in the world, the only one I should never touch was a casino. Said ‘there’s all this money floating around waiting for us just to reach up and grab it. Why rob it from the pit of hell?’“
They walked again.
“I’m part of Richter’s ten-man crew,” Isaiah said.
“What’s your superpower?”
“Brute force. Weapons. I was Force Recon back in the day. So the vault in one of the major casinos is having its security system overhauled this coming weekend. We don’t know if it’s Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.”
“I’m not going into any goddamn vault. I’ll jus
t tell you that right now.”
“Me and you both, sister. Here’s the cool part. They don’t trust nobody. Not even the security company personnel. Two hours before the install, they box the cash up and cart it from the vault area into a room in the hotel. Of course, the money is still guarded by its own private army, but at least there’s no vault to break it out of.”
“And what? Richter has a guy on the inside?”
“Exactly. At some point on Friday, twenty-four to thirty-six hours from now, Richter will get a call or a text from his contact. They’ll tell him when the security install is happening and which room in the hotel will be housing all that cash. Richter’s plan is ingenious. The crew gains access to the room directly underneath. We go through the ceiling, set up an ambush, and let the money come to us.”
“You have blueprints of the hotel?”
“No. Too many variables and possibilities. We’ll have to finalize our game plan once we see the room they’ve chosen.”
“Sounds super risky.”
“For sure. But the probability of success is much greater than if we had to go through a vault, grab the cash, and fight our way back out through the casino. No amount of money could get me to sign up for that shit.”
“I guess I’m just confused. I mean, the idea of working with Richter sounds intriguing. But I’m having a hard time seeing where I fit into all of this. Your plan sounds solid. What do you need me for?”
“Jav said you could be trusted.”
“I can.”
“You wouldn’t be working with Richter.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Richter put the crew together, but he’s doing one thing in this whole deal. He’s giving us the room number and the time. It’s his contact at the hotel. I give him that. But he ain’t gonna be anywhere near the hotel room when the half-dozen armed guards roll in with the money.”
“His contact, his show, right?”
“He’s taking half. Other nine of us are splitting the rest. And it’s like we should be grateful for the privilege. That sound right to you?”
“Not so much.”
“So I’m thinking, sure Richter’s a legend, but fuck him.”
“How exactly?”
“I’m running a shadow crew. Brought in Jerrod and Stu, two of my boys from Iraq. We’re going to take down this money. Estimate is thirty-eight to forty mil. Split that four ways, including you, we’re talking possibly seven zeroes apiece. You know what I call that?”
