by Ian Bull
“I sure hope so.”
Kath stares at him and then at the hole, not trusting.
“I’m an Eagle Scout. Our motto is ‘be prepared.’”
Kath sits on the ladder, hooks her foot in the knotted loop, lowers her feet through the hole in the ladder, grabs the rung with her hands and drops down. Sam pulls the rope taut and lowers her slowly.
“Hold onto the rope now,” Sam says as her head disappears inside the hole.
Kath grabs the rope and Sam lowers her down by inches until she’s on the warehouse floor.
Kath looks around. Rows of metal and plywood shelves line the big open warehouse. The overhead lights are off, and the only light comes from the exterior lamps in the parking lot shining through the high windows on the building.
“Hey,” Sam whispers in her ear.
Kath jumps and that electric tingle shoots from her feet right up to the back of her neck again. She punches him in the chest. “No one said you could come down yet,” she says.
“You want me to set up an exit for you, don’t you?”
“Do whatever you’re going to do, just stay out of my way.”
Kath pulls out a small penlight and heads off into the stacks. Paul set up this job, he picked the warehouse, he promised the alarm system would be off, and he told her where the display monitors would be. There’s nothing as easy as an inside job, she thinks, and so far, it’s been as smooth as promised, even with Sam around. Not that she’d ever tell him that.
Sam watches Kath walk away and shakes his head. He doesn’t want to be here either, but he’s worked for days taking every precaution he could imagine, then trying to imagine more. He doesn’t want to go back to San Quentin, especially for this Spider Woman with the poison mouth. He calms his beating heart by concentrating on prepping the exit.
She finds the third row of shelves, just like Paul told her, and starts looking for thin boxes of expensive crystal display monitors. These are the color display monitors that are now common on every device, but in 1980 they are still rare and more expensive than their weight in gold, which makes them worth stealing.
Sam finds a hallway alongside the south wall, and an office with six-foot-high windows. An exit here will put them closer to the hole in the fence he carved two nights ago. He grabs a chair and stands on it and examines the window. A strip of electrical security tape runs in a pretty square on the inside of the glass. It's silver and decorative, but it's also metallic and conducts electricity, completing a circuit that will cease if someone opens the window or breaks the glass, thus setting off the alarm.
Sam reaches into his pockets with his yellow latex gloves and pulls out a long strip of plastic-coated electrical wire with an alligator clipper on each end. He clips one end onto the spot where the silver tape runs onto the window, and then the other end where the decorative strip leaves the glass pane, creating a new circuit loop that bypasses the window.
He twists the handle and pushes open the cantilever window – and no alarm goes off. He steps off his chair and pushes a desk up against the window and then puts the chair on the desk and admires his work. They have a way out. Sam looks at his watch and exhales. He moves back into the warehouse.
Kath is not doing as well. She’s made her third loop through the shelves, and the monitors are not out where they are supposed to be. She stops in front of a locked metal cabinet at the end of the middle row, convinced the display monitors are inside. Someone saw them out on a shelf and must have locked them up again, she thinks. She doesn’t want to leave here empty-handed and have Paul force her to do this again. She shakes the locked metal cabinet like a kid shaking a vending machine trying to loosen a hanging candy bar.
What she doesn’t realize is that the heavy, locked cabinet has a motion sensor attached to the back. It’s designed to go off whenever someone moves it, in case someone tries to steal the whole cabinet. That silent alarm has begun to ring.
She takes off her left glove and lays it on the shelf and pulls out a picking tool from her backpack and tries to jimmy the tiny metal lock. She almost breaks the tool and then stabs herself in the hand. The rhythm of the night is changing, and she’s getting the terror sweats now.
“You can’t open a lock?” Sam asks, making her jump again, but with no tingle this time.
“If you’re so smart, you open it.”
Sam runs his hands along the top of the cabinet and finds a key hidden along the outside edge and unlocks it. He opens the metal doors and reveals a cardboard case of sixty super thin crystal display monitors in unopened boxes.
“That’s cheating,”
“Isn’t that the point?” Sam asks. “We should get out of here.”
“Go ahead, Chuck Roast, leave if you want to,” Kath says, and starts shoving boxes of LCD monitors into her empty oversized backpack.
Sam goes back to the office and paces in the weak light coming in the window until the noise of a car engine makes turn on his heel. He climbs up on the desk and sees an Ace Security Service car drive by. He’s already halfway out the window when he freezes. He eases back inside.
Kath closes the metal cabinet and zips up her bag just as a side door to the warehouse opens. She ducks just before a flashlight beam hits the wall above her. Two voices whisper as Kath scurries on her hands and knees down between one set of shelves and then another, and then rolls onto a bottom shelf and hold her breath as a set of uniformed legs walks past.
She closes her eyes and prays to God, whom she only remembers only during her worst "foxhole" situations. Like all the times before, she promises the Lord yet again that if she gets out without getting caught she'll change her whole life, handle her debt to Paul somehow, while still taking care of Bella. She'll become a nun, even.
Then she thinks she’s so horrible that even the nuns won’t take her and that she doesn’t deserve rescue. She’ll never get out now anyway, since she doesn’t even know where her escape exit is. She was too busy being cruel to Sam to worry about it, and now she wishes she hadn’t called him a chuck roast and told him he could leave if their situation went south.
A hand grabs her arm while another hand goes over her mouth. It's Sam, lying on his belly on the floor, motioning for silence. He pulls out a handful of small marbles from his pocket and rolls them across the open floor, and when they hit the far wall they make enough noise to make the uniformed legs and whispering men to run towards it – and Sam pulls Kath the other way.
They scurry across the floor and dart into the far office. Sam lifts her off the floor, but Kath needs no help. She yanks herself away from Sam, flies up on the desk, onto the chair and leaps for the window like a high jumper leaping to get over the bar. She slides through the opening – until her ass gets stuck in the window.
Sam stares at her peach-shaped bottom wrapped in black denim, amazed at a sight he hasn’t seen up close in two years. He wonders if he has permission to touch, but when he hears the shoes in the hallway behind him, he seizes both cheeks and pushes her the rest of the way through, tosses her backpack out next and then dives out himself, head first.
Sam rolls across the asphalt like a paratrooper and pops to his feet, grabs the backpack, grabs Kath’s hand and yanks them into a dash for the hole in the fence.
A warehouse door bangs open behind them.
“Stop! Or we’ll shoot!”
They get to the fence as an explosion rips the blackberry bushes next to them. Kath ducks and runs through the hole, with Sam right behind. They tear through the grass, down across the railroad tracks, while the two faceless men behind them scream and give chase. Sam and Kath reach another fence and Sam throws the backpack over.
“Don’t throw them, you’ll ruin them!” Kath yells.
Sam rips off his jacket and throws it so it lands on the barbed wire on top. He climbs and throws his leg over, reaches down and grabs Kath’s hand and pulls her up so easy it’s like he’s pulling a fish out of the water.
She gets half her body over the fence
when one of the guards reaches them and grabs her foot. He's not a cop, but he's dressed in blue pants and a white shirt with a shiny gold badge on the front pocket. Kath grabs the top of the fence with both hands and tries to tumble over, but the barbed wire slices her left palm open because she's only got a glove on her right hand.
Sam spots the other guard, back by the railroad tracks. He’s too overweight to chase them, but Sam sees a glint of metal in his hand. He’s the one shooting, and he’s moving closer. Sam tumbles over and tries to pull Kath with him.
Kath hangs halfway over the fence with her head upside down, but she can't shake off the guard pulling on her leg. The guard lets go with one hand and grips the fence for balance, and when she spots his fingers looping through a square in the cyclone fence and she bites hard on his knuckle. He screams and lets her go. She tumbles the rest of the way over, pulling Sam's jacket off with her.
She lands on Sam, knocking him to the ground. He pulls them both up, she grabs the backpack, and they run. Sam and Kath must run across railroad tracks, but a slow-moving train is coming.
“I can’t make it!”
“You have to!”
The fat guard gets to the cyclone fence, aims through a space and pops off three more shots, which zing by Kath’s head. It gooses her speed, and she and Sam dart in front of the rumbling train. The light blinds their vision and the horn blasts out their hearing. They get across the rails in time, but the front edge of the train catches a tiny edge of Kath’s boot heel, which sends her spinning like a kid’s toy top. She collides with Sam and takes him down. They lie on the gravel of the railway embankment and stare up at the stars and the bright line of jets lining up above them. The mile-long train rumbles on past, six feet from their heads. They gasp, catching their breath.
Sam lifts his head and looks at the length of the train.
“I’ve got a Ford Fiesta parked five hundred yards south of here,” Sam gasps. “But let’s lie here for another ten seconds.”
Kath gasps for air and nods.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A foghorn blasts. Sam and Kath lean against the hood of the blue Ford Fiesta, which he parked on the steep part of Bryant Street, right under the massive cement and steel superstructure of the Bay Bridge. There's a dirt slope with broken bottles and debris that leads up to the bridge on one side of the street, and darkened warehouses on the other, but in front of them they can see the lights of Red's Java House on empty Pier 30 down below. The Bay Bridge above them stretches across the water to the twinkling lights of Oakland.
Sam places large Band-Aids, alcohol, and Neosporin out on a towel on the hood of the car, and gets to work on Kath’s hand.
“Good thing there's an all-night Walgreens," Sam says, and then pours alcohol on the wound. Kath winces and inhales through her teeth. Sam dabs the cut dry with the corner of the towel, adds a spot of Neosporin and then stretches a large Band-Aid across her palm. She flexes her fingers, but the bandage stays in place. She pulls her leather jacket tight around her and shivers.
“You want to get back in the car?” Sam asks.
“I hate that car. Fiestas are junk.”
“They’re anonymous. That’s why Paul got it for us.”
“They give me the creeps. Bad memories.”
“You hate Chevy vans, you hate Ford Fiestas. Why? It’s just the getaway car.”
She looks at her hand, then at the bridge, avoiding the question. She asks one instead.
“Why’d you come back for me?” Kath asks.
“You would have done the same for me,” Sam answers.
“No, I wouldn’t have. I already told you that.”
“Maybe I just want you to admit I’m not such a bad guy after all,” Sam says.
Kath looks at the twinkling lights across the water so she doesn’t have to look at him.
“Why don’t you leave town? Paul will be after you if you stay here.”
“I’d ask for a transfer to another city, but it’d break my parole officer’s heart,” Sam says. They stay quiet for a moment. Sam can hear the dull roar of the cars streaming onto the Bay Bridge far above them.
“Something is keeping you here. Why else would you go through all this?" she asks, and looks him in the eyes, waiting for an answer.
“Not something. But maybe someone.”
Sam leans forward to kiss her. Kath lets his lips come within a half inch of hers, and then pulls away. She puts her hand on his chest. “Back off, Romeo.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t date losers.”
“Yet here you are with one, all the same.”
“And I wish I were anywhere else in the world but here.”
“We all wish for a lot of things.”
“True. But wishes never come true,” Kath says, with a sad defeat in her voice.
“It’s the wishing that matters, not whether they come true or not,” Sam says.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Kath says, trying hard to make him hate her.
“Is it?” Sam asks, and he reaches into his inside jacket pocket and pulls out the two Lazzaroni cookie wrappers from the restaurant. He rolls each up each tissue into a cylinder and places them on the asphalt in front of them. He reaches into his other pocket and pulls out a book of matches.
“A wish is just a spark of hope. Can you still make a wish? Or is there no more spark left in you?” he asks.
Kath stares at him as if deciding whether to insult him or play along. She finally blinks and nods. “Okay, I have my wish.”
“That one's yours, this one's mine," he says, nodding at the two cylinders of paper on the ground in front of them. Sam kneels, strikes a match and lights the top of each paper.
Each cylinder lights up with a blue flame that descends in a ring down the cylinder of paper, illuminating the green Lazzaroni printing as it blackens. When the flame reaches the bottom, the burning cylinders rise off the ground and float into the sky. They touch ten yards up, their red lights go out, and the embers float away on the salty breeze.
“What did you wish for?” Kath asks.
“I can’t say. If I did say, it’d be a lie anyway.”
“Why is that?”
“If you tell the truth about your wishes they never come true.”
Sam stares at her without blinking. She stares back. He leans in for a kiss –
“Let’s celebrate!” she says, pulling away. She opens the car door and hops into the passenger seat.
“You couldn’t keep up with me,” Sam says. He opens the driver’s door, slides behind the wheel and starts up the Fiesta.
Sam bangs a U-turn and heads through the South of Market neighborhood. In two minutes, they find the Hotel Utah, which has a bar that hosts a live band. It then takes them twenty minutes to find parking, which they finally do, six blocks away.
“’It's better to be lucky than good,' as my mother used to say," Sam says as he parallel parks his tiny toy car. Within ten minutes they get past the security guard, order drinks and are listening to Stark Naked and the Car Thieves thrash their country-punk music on the tiny stage in the corner.
Kath doesn’t wait for the drink Sam is ordering. She hits the dance floor and pogos in the minuscule mosh pit with four other punks to the song I Ain’t Gettin’ Any. Kath is thinking three things – she's thrilled she got away with most of the LCD monitors intact, she's terrified that Sam is going to hit on her again, and she hopes that if she dances all night, she can exhaust him into giving up.
Meanwhile, Sam is thinking three things as well – he’s thrilled he got away with most of the LCD monitors intact, he hopes he gets lucky with some girl soon, because two years without sex is too long for any man under eighty, and he’d love to have a real drink.
“Jack and Coke, please,” he tells the bartender, and pays his two dollars and takes a long sip of the sugary alcohol. A lonely barfly sits on the corner chair and stares at the six dancers pile-driving up and down in front of the screa
ming band. Sam can see him focusing on Kath, one of only two girls in the mosh pit. He’s a young blond guy with acne scars and muscles, cauliflower ears and he’s missing a front tooth, which tells Sam everything – he’s bad with girls, he’s angry about it, and he makes up for it by getting into fights. He met plenty of dim bulbs like him in prison.
“That bitch can dance. Is she yours?” the barfly asks, confirming Sam’s assessment.
“She’s here with me, if that’s what you mean.”
“Damn, that bitch is hot, you lucky SOB. Do you nail that ass on a regular basis?”
“Nope.”
“How about I take her from you then? Let me borrow her for a few hours? I could teach her a lesson for you,” the barfly says, then points at Sam and slaps the bar, laughing hard at his own hysterical joke.
“She needs it, let me tell you!" Sam says, laughing even louder. He laughs so loud he must gasp for air and slaps the barfly on the back. He trips and almost yanks the barfly off his stool but pulls himself up by yanking on the barfly's lapels instead. “Sorry, dude. How about I buy you a drink first? Then you can hit on her.” Sam says.
“Now you’re talking! Buy me another vodka and grapefruit and give me your woman!”
“Bartender! A vodka grapefruit for my new friend and bring us a bottle of champagne! On ice! With three glasses! He's stealing my woman!" Sam holds up a credit card.
The bartender is an older guy with a paunch and grey hair who’s been working four nights a week at the Hotel Utah for a dozen years, and the dull stare he gives Sam proves he hates the Saturday night crowd the most. He prepares Sam’s beverage request.
“Thanks, pal. You’re all right. I may not kick your ass now,” the barfly says.
The barkeep plops the drink down on the bar, sending a small wave of sour alcohol spilling out the top and onto the wood. He then smashes an ice bucket down on the wooden bar with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot inside. “There you go, boys. The best we got.”
Sam hands the bartender a credit card, then pours three glasses of champagne and holds up a glass of bubbly for Kath to see.
Kath spots his offer at the peak of her pogo leap, ponders it as she slows, and then moves towards the bar. She figures free champagne is too good to pass up, even coming from Sam. She did feel that tingle up her spine when he was swinging that ladder around like a baseball bat, but she won’t allow that tingle of attraction to turn into a fully flowing electrical charge. One sip is all she’ll allow herself, just to be polite. Maybe two, but that will be it.
