“What happened to your girlfriend?”
“Nothing. She told the police we’d broken up ’cause I was jealous and could be violent. She said she thought that’s why I did it. To get back at her for breaking up with me. She showed them emails. I mean she even got on my laptop and sent herself emails from my account. She pretended to be me. The emails were rants, mean as shit, saying I was gonna ruin her life. It looked bad. I told the cops that I hated writing emails. I hate typing. I just text. I couldn’t remember the last time I emailed somebody. So I never checked it and I sure as fuck didn’t check my sent folder. But, of course, the cops didn’t believe that. The people that ran the old folks’ home were on her side, too. She didn’t get fired or even reprimanded and she was the one who told me what to steal out of which rooms. She used to do inventory of the old fuckers’ stuff. She hated those old people. She really did. . . . One day I’ll get back at her. I mean what type of person would do that?”
“But you robbed old, sick people.”
“I guess,” he said. “But most of them couldn’t even remember their names. What are they gonna do with a watch or a phone or a gold ring? Plus, all that shit’s insured. Everything in the van I took was insured, so why should anyone really care?”
They came to a stoplight and Lynette wiped the inside of the windshield with a rag. “We got robbed once when I was fifteen,” she said. “It was between Christmas and New Year’s, so I was home on break. My mom was at work. I was in the basement, asleep. I woke up to my brother screaming. He’s developmentally disabled. He had headphones on in his room and was watching a movie. Two guys broke in. They climbed in through a window and stole our TV and a portable stereo and they ransacked the living room and kitchen. You’d think I would have heard it, but I didn’t. They went through my mom’s room. Everything in her dresser drawers they threw on the ground. Then they went into the back bedroom and found my brother in bed watching TV. My brother was so scared he started screaming. He got out of bed and tried to run, but they threw him against the wall. I’d woken up by then and ran up the stairs. I didn’t know what was going on, I just knew something was wrong. I could hear all the different footsteps on the floor and as I got to the kitchen I could hear men’s voices. I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. Nothing like that had ever happened in our house. Jesus, I was scared. And then I saw them, they were bums, and they were in our living room grabbing all the stuff they could carry. They were both on bikes with those little yellow trailers behind them. The kind people put kids in. They put our things in there. I just watched them do it. I didn’t do anything. I was too scared to try to stop them. None of the stuff we had was any good, I mean they couldn’t have made much off it. But it ruined us for a long time and was really hard on my brother. He couldn’t be alone for months after, but the truth is, I didn’t like being alone in the house either. We were both scared. Even when summer came, when it was hot out, we kept the windows shut and locked until our mom came home. We got an alarm system even though we had no money. My mom had to call up my aunt and ask her for a loan so we could get it. But we didn’t know what else to do. Me and my brother were alone at home most of the time and my mom was too scared about that without an alarm. I remember when the cops came to talk to us about the men, they showed us the window screen the guys cut and how they jimmied the window open. It was awful. . . . My brother was so scared. He doesn’t like men anyway, and after that it was twice as bad. For a while he’d get really agitated at any man we saw that looked like them. Those fuckers made our life really hard and probably didn’t get more than fifty bucks for all of it combined.”
“You have renters insurance?”
“No.”
“You should have had it. Then you would have gotten new shit. Those guys would have done you a favor then.”
“That’s not the point.”
“And you should have had your windows locked better.”
“Fuck you,” said Lynette. “Those guys made it so my brother couldn’t be alone for months. He had to sleep next to me and he wakes up every hour. My mom had to borrow money to get us a new TV. We were that broke.”
“Why are you on my ass? I didn’t do it.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’ve just never liked thieves.”
“Well, I only rob people where there’s shit I could actually sell and make money. But like I said, I don’t do that anymore. Anyway, don’t fuck with me. I’m helping you.”
11
From the time he got out of the car on Belmont Street, Cody kept his hoodie up and his eyes on the ground. In the elevator he put on a pair of latex kitchen gloves from the restaurant and followed Lynette into Gloria’s apartment. He stood hunched over like an old man and waited with the hand truck in the living room. Lynette walked through the apartment and called out Gloria’s name. She checked each room and came back to Cody and nervously whispered, “There’s no one here.” They didn’t speak again and she led him to the bedroom. They moved the safe out of the closet, set it on the hand truck, and wheeled it to the main room. Cody took two towels from the bathroom and covered the safe with them and they left. They were inside Gloria’s apartment less than three minutes.
There was no one in the hall or in the elevator when they went down and Cody never once looked up or spoke. Outside it was still raining and no one was on the street. They wheeled the safe to her car a block away and not even a single car passed. Together they lifted it into the trunk, but the safe was too big for the lid to shut, so Cody found a pair of jumper cables and tied the lid down. They put the hand truck in the back seat and got in the car.
Lynette’s hands shook as she put the key into the ignition, and the car started on the third try. She turned the headlights on and drove up Belmont Street. Cody took off his gloves and put them in his hoodie pocket, and they kept silent until she turned south on 82nd Avenue.
“I feel like I’m gonna throw up,” she said.
“But it’s a good rush, isn’t?” said Cody and lit a cigarette.
“Maybe. I don’t know. I feel horrible, too.”
“It’s too late to feel horrible,” he said and blew out a line of smoke through the crack in the window. “Now we just gotta hope there’s something in the safe.”
Lynette wiped the inside of the windshield with the rag. “I’ve never really stolen anything before.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I used to like it. Especially before I was eighteen and had been busted. But I’m over it now,” he said and coughed.
They fell silent again and then Cody told her to turn down a side street and then another and finally he threw his cigarette out the window and told her to stop. He pointed to a two-story Craftsman house at the end of a road.
“There’s a gravel drive to the left of that fucked-up-looking house,” he said. “The house is his, but I’ve never been in it. He spends all his time in the pole barn behind it.”
“How do you know him?”
“In high school I lived a couple blocks away from here. For a while he worked on my mom’s car, but my mom got scared of him. He also sold weed and he’d buy kids in the neighborhood beer if we paid him enough. Ten bucks a twelve-pack plus the cost of the beer.” He coughed again and rolled down the window and spit. “He’s a weird fucker, so let’s talk to him before we get the safe out of the trunk, okay?”
“Okay. But how’s he weird?”
“He’s just an old-school tweaker, so we have to see what kind of mood he’s in and how long he’s been up. Like I said I haven’t seen him in a while, but if he’s in the wrong sorta mood we’ll just leave and figure out somewhere else to take it. If he seems alright, then we’ll bring it in.”
“I’m starting to get scared,” she said and looked over at him. “Are you sure we should go there?”
“No, not really,” he said, “but I can’t think of anyone else and I can’t take it back to my place. I’m on parole.”
“You’re on parole?” s
aid Lynette with growing worry.
He nodded. “Can we take it to your house?”
“No.”
“You could always leave it in your trunk and figure some other way later. Give me my five hundred and drop me back at the Dutchman. It’s your call.”
“But tomorrow my friend will know.” Lynette wiped the windshield with the rag and looked out.
“Fuck it, I want to see what’s in there,” Cody finally said. “Let’s just drive down there and we’ll see how it goes.”
The derelict house was white in color but hadn’t been painted in decades and was half covered in blackberry bushes. Steel bars lined the windows, even on the second floor, and cardboard was taped to the inside of the window glass, keeping out any light. Lynette drove past the home and came to a large gravel turnaround and a weathered lime-green shop. The car’s headlights shone on a dented roll-up door that read in faded red paint JOHNSON CREEK AUTO REPAIR.
When she turned off the ignition, they were in complete darkness and the only sound came from rain beating down on the hood of the car. Cody used the flashlight on his phone so they could see their way as they headed down the side of the building. A ten-foot chain-link fence ran along the left edge of the property. Dogs barked frantically from the house next door. Lynette’s feet were numb and she was beginning to have trouble breathing.
They came to a small, single light bulb that hung over a metal door and Cody knocked. It took two minutes before a thin man with dyed blond hair opened it. He smelled of gasoline and wore stained gray mechanic’s coveralls. He didn’t speak, he only waved them in. His right leg buckled with each step as he backed up. He shut the door behind them and they walked into the light of the shop to see that more than half of his face was covered with psoriasis. Bursting red blisters ran from the back of his neck, around his left ear, and completely engulfed his left eye and forehead. He was young, in his twenties, but his teeth had gone bad and his eyes looked pushed into his head like he was an old man.
Sets of fluorescent lights hung over a ten-foot-long workbench where a large, overweight man, in the same type of gray coveralls, stood next to a woodstove. The walls were lined with shelves of used car parts and in the back of the shop a red pickup truck sat on a lift six feet off the ground.
“Hey, Kansas,” Cody said. “Long time no see. How you been?”
“Why is she here? I didn’t say you could bring her” was the first thing the large man said. His voice had a high-pitched grate to it, like something in his voice box was broken. His tongue was pierced. There was a large silver stud in the middle of it that he played with when he talked. He had a black-and-gray beard and a red bandana covered his head. He walked to a battered refrigerator and took out a can of Hamm’s beer while the man with the blond hair grabbed a spray bottle full of gasoline from the workbench, squirted some into a dust mask, and put the mask on his face.
Cody backed up toward the door. “You didn’t say not to, so I thought it would be alright. She’s the one that knew about the safe. But if it’s too much, man, we’ll just get out of here.”
“Where is it?” asked Kansas.
“In the trunk of her car,” said Cody.
“What kind is it?”
Lynette stood behind Cody and in a near whisper said, “I took some pictures of it. All it says on it is SentrySafe.”
“Did you see a model number?”
“No.”
“So it’s in your car?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then let’s get it,” he said and pointed to the door. The man with the blond hair limped to it and opened it. Kansas went out first, followed by Lynette. He smelled of beer, body odor, and gasoline. He didn’t say anything and they walked in near darkness. When they came to the car, he untied the jumper cables and the trunk opened. He leaned over and picked it up. He grunted in short bursts and began to wheeze but got the safe in his arms and stumbled back to the shop. Inside he dropped it on the concrete floor near the workbench.
“What’s in it?” he gasped.
“I don’t know,” said Lynette. “But like Cody told you, I’ll give you five hundred dollars for opening it, but whatever’s inside is mine.”
“Then give me the five hundred now,” said Kansas. “I don’t want to get involved with anything else. As far as I know it’s your safe and you forgot the combination. Good enough?”
Lynette nodded and took five hundred dollars from her front pants pocket and set it on the workbench. Kansas counted it and put it in his pocket. From the back of the shop he brought out two four-foot-long crowbars and went to work on the safe. He made grunting noises as he jammed a crowbar into the edges of the door, trying to bend it. After five minutes he had both crowbars inside the safe and bent the door until it popped open.
From inside the safe he took out three rubber-banded stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills, a large plastic bag of what looked like cocaine, three diamond rings, two silver dollars in cases, an antique gold necklace, two antique brooches, a manila envelope of papers, and stacks of personal and family photos.
12
Kansas laid it all out on the workbench and Lynette knew, just by seeing the things in the stark bright light, that the man would change his mind. She rushed to the table and began shoving Gloria’s things inside her purse, but the man with the blond hair cried out in the voice of a boy, “She’s stealing it.”
Kansas yelled at her to stop, but Lynette kept going until everything from the safe was inside her purse.
“I paid you the five hundred I owed you,” she said nervously while backing up. “That was the deal.”
Kansas moved toward her and pointed at the purse. “Put the stuff back on the table.”
“But that wasn’t what we agreed,” said Lynette. “You can take the drugs if you want. But I have to give back her personal stuff and the extra money. I just want what’s mine. I already paid you for opening it and you’re the one who said you didn’t want anything else to do with it.”
“Give Cody the drugs,” said Kansas. “That’ll be his cut.”
“His cut?” said Lynette.
“Jesus, man, I don’t want them,” said Cody. “They piss test me and I’ll end up doing it if I take it. I just want my part of the money and half of the jewelry. Let’s count it and see how much there is. She says eight grand is hers. I just want my cut of that and I’ll take the rings and the silver dollars.”
The blond man yelled, “Let me count it, let me count it!”
Kansas ripped the purse from Lynette’s hands and threw it to the blond man. He took the money from it and began counting. Minutes passed and then through the dust mask he cried, “Seventeen thousand dollars.”
“Whose safe is it?” asked Kansas.
“You don’t need to know,” said Lynette.
“It’s a woman,” said Cody and lit a cigarette. “She’s got a condo over on Belmont. I don’t know the address, but I could get it.”
“Fuck you, Cody,” said Lynette.
Kansas took another can of Hamm’s from the refrigerator, opened it, and said, “I’m taking everything that’s in the safe. That’s it.” Under the fluorescent lights Lynette could see that his nostrils were caked in dried blood and his eyes were bloodshot. He took the five hundred dollars she had given him from his coveralls pocket and dropped it on the workbench. “You can have this back. I’ll give Cody the drugs, the silver dollars, and the jewelry. I’ll let you leave, but before you go I want to know whose safe this is. I want to make sure it doesn’t come back on me.”
“Like Cody told you, it’s just a woman and I know she won’t bother you.”
Kansas picked up a four-foot-long crowbar off the ground. He looked at the man with the blond hair and snapped his fingers. “Lock the door because I’m gonna kill her.” The blond-haired man ran to the metal door. It was a key-bolt lock. He turned it, took the key out, and put it in his pocket. He placed a metal security bar across the door.
“Don’t kill her, man,
” cried Cody. “What’s the point of that? I mean, I just got out of prison. I can’t get involved in anything like this.”
Kansas grabbed Lynette by the hair and forced her to the ground. He pushed her until she was on her back and then he straddled her and sat on her chest. “We’ll bleed her in the utility sink and put the rest of her in the acid drum.”
Cody moved farther back toward the woodstove and said nothing.
Kansas looked at the blond man. “Get my Buck knife from the drawer and the blanket covering the motorcycle. Put the blanket underneath her neck to soak up the blood. I’ll cut her throat right here. As soon as I do, get the empty blue drum. We’ll drain her blood into it. After that, clean out the concrete sink and make sure to have a strainer over the drain. And take off the mask. We can’t have you passing out.”
The Night Always Comes Page 7
