Never Going Back

by Sam Wiebe

  I decided that might be a good thing.

  The taxi dropped me on the corner near the Ajax office. I paid with some cash I’d found in Dean’s office. Technically this was stealing, but Dean would understand.

  The currency exchange was in an old gray concrete building three stories tall. Through the large glass windows I could see black bulbs on the inside walls. Security cameras.

  Ajax Credit had a small sign in a window on the second floor. The blinds were shut, and the lights were off.

  I walked past the building without looking in the window, keeping my face partly turned away.

  On the corner I looked up. A light was on in a room on the third floor, directly above Ajax. The blinds were half-open. I could see the back of a head, a pair of shoulders. Another figure moving around the room.

  I stepped backward into the street to get a better view. The shoulders were large and broad, and the head was egg-shaped with a fringe of dark brown hair. The person was facing away from the window.

  But it was Dean. I could tell.

  I couldn’t see who the second person was. I saw movement near the edge of the window.

  A loud horn blasted, a sound like flonnn! I turned my head and saw a car heading straight toward me. I jumped up onto the curb as it passed, spraying water at my legs.

  Dean was in that room. He hadn’t moved. Maybe he was tied up. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it was him. He needed help.

  On the side of the building was a short staircase. I climbed it and tried the door. Locked. Through the glass in the door I could see an elevator at the end of a short hallway. Above the elevator was another black security-camera bubble. I could maybe pick the lock, but I’d be caught on camera while doing it.

  I backed away from the door. There didn’t seem to be another entrance. Maybe in the alley?

  But the alley was a no-go. Two old men gathered bottles from a nearby dumpster. The building’s exit door had no handles or keyhole. It opened only from inside.

  There weren’t any good options. I thought of phoning Phil Kushida. He wouldn’t be happy to know I’d done the opposite of what I’d promised him. I would call him if I couldn’t rescue Dean myself.

  Maybe Dean was up there willingly, I thought.

  On the other hand, maybe the person keeping him there had a gun or knife. I wasn’t a fighter. I was a thief.

  No, not anymore, I reminded myself.

  I wasn’t going to steal. I wasn’t even going to break in. All I was going to do was get a little exercise.

  I waited until there were no cars coming down the street, then walked up the stairs and stood to the left of the door, where the camera couldn’t see me. A scrolled concrete arch hung above the doorway. By standing on that, I could probably reach the ledge of the third-floor window.

  If I couldn’t? It would be quite a fall.

  My shoes were cheap and had no tread. I took them off, along with my socks. The concrete was cold and wet.

  I jumped and caught hold of the lip of the arch. I put the ball of my foot against the building and slowly, carefully, climbed up. I rested on the top of the arch for a second, looking down. The drop was fifteen feet. I’d been up much higher before, but not in a while.

  Headlights shone at the end of the street. A taxi turned and cruised by. I lay flat against the wall and hoped the driver wouldn’t look my way.

  The lights grew small and disappeared.

  I stood and felt along the wall. The building’s surface was rough, but there were no handholds. Nothing to step on. The window ledge was seven feet above me and two feet to my left. I’d have to jump.

  There wasn’t much room for a running start. I got ready. Took two quick steps and sprang, stretching my arms out, watching as my left hand slapped the ledge and gripped onto it.

  My right hand missed.

  For a second I was falling, and then my left hand took my body’s weight. My arm began to burn. I flung my right arm onto the ledge, my feet trying to run up the wall. I pulled myself up until I could throw one leg onto the ledge, then the other.

  The ledge was narrow. Looking down made me dizzy. It had been a while since I’d done any serious climbing. Usually I had rope. And proper footwear.

  Looking through the window, I saw Dean seated in a wooden chair. His arms were tied behind his back with wire. Something was wrapped around his head. He was struggling.

  I dug my fingers into the edge of the window and pulled. The glass slid open a little. It wasn’t locked, but it probably hadn’t been opened in a long while.

  When I’d worked the window open enough to squeeze through, I crouched and swung my body feetfirst into the room. Hearing noise behind him, Dean tried to turn around. He was shaking his head, rocking the chair beneath him.

  It was an office suite, empty except for the chair. The carpet was gray and soft. I untwisted the wire around Dean’s wrists. A handkerchief had been taped over his mouth. As soon as I ripped it off, he said, “You shouldn’t be here, Ali. You gotta get out right now.”

  “Some thanks,” I said. “I’m here to rescue you, Dean. But if you’d rather stay tied to the chair for the rest of your life—”

  “You don’t understand,” Dean said. “They planned it. They wanted you to find me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Before he could answer, I heard clapping, loud and slow. The door opened. A man in a gray suit entered, holding a gun. Behind him was Lisa Wan.

  “You’ve still got the skills, Ali,” Lisa said.

  FIVE

  LISA LOOKED THE same as ever. Her clothes were black and well-tailored. Her hair was cut short. Platinum bracelets adorned her arms, and a platinum chain hung around her neck. Her smile looked like a wolf’s. With Lisa Wan, there was no question who was in charge.

  “You deserve a better party for getting out of jail,” she said. “But there will be plenty of time to celebrate once we’re done.” She turned to the man with the gun. “Ali and Dean are old friends of mine, Max. You don’t need to point the gun at them. Unless they try to leave.”

  The man in the gray suit nodded. He tucked the gun inside his suit jacket.

  “What happened to Monster?” I asked.

  “An unlucky accident,” Lisa said. “He’ll be away for four more years. Max is doing just as well. That was him you talked to on the phone.”

  Max smiled at me. His hair was gray, and his eyes light blue. He looked much older than Lisa. I wondered how he’d come to work for her.

  There were red marks on Dean’s wrists, but he seemed to be all right. “I need to get my brother home,” I told Lisa.

  “Soon enough. Let’s talk for a while. You can sit down, if you like.”

  “I’m not talking with you,” I said. “We have nothing to say to each other.”

  “We have so much,” she said. “Like your brother’s debts. Let’s talk about those to start.”

  “Dean doesn’t have any debts. His credit line is at zero.” I turned to Dean. “Right?”

  Dean looked down at the floor.

  “He owes me $17,000,” Lisa said. “To be more accurate, he owes Ajax Credit $17,000. Can you pay that debt for him?”

  “How is that even possible?” I asked.

  “It’s my fault,” Dean said. “I had some bad luck, and I made some bad decisions.”

  “Your brother is quite the gambler,” Lisa said.

  Dean still wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I don’t know how it all happened,” he said. “I got a tip to bet on this race. I was winning, and I thought I could buy a new stove and fridge for the restaurant. Then I started to lose. I don’t remember much after that, but when I woke up, I saw the paper I’d signed.”

  Lisa pulled a paper from her pocket and unfolded it. “A promissory note,” she said. “Dean Kidd agrees to pay the sum of $17,000 to Ajax Credit.”

  “It’s a scam,” I said. “A trick.”

  “No,” Lisa said, “it’s a legal document.”

  Dean h
ad never gambled, as far as I knew. Someone working for Lisa must have tricked him. I’d seen it before. A man offers you a tip on a horse race. A sure thing, he says. You bet a few dollars, something small. Surprise, surprise, you win. Your five dollars is now a hundred. When the man comes back, you trust him enough to bet large.

  That is how they get you.

  Still, Dean would never have bet as much as $17,000. As far as I knew, he’d never even seen that much money. Lisa was an expert at making people do things they wouldn’t normally do. Somehow she’d convinced Dean to bet money he didn’t have, and to think that it was his own fault.

  Lisa folded the paper and put it back in her pocket. “It doesn’t matter how it happened,” she said. She always seemed to know what I was thinking. “All that matters is your brother owes us.”

  “They’re going to take the restaurant,” Dean said. Tears were forming in his eyes. Kidd’s wasn’t just his business or the place he’d grown up. It was his childhood, it was Aunt Jessie, it was where he felt comfortable.

  “No crying now, Dean,” Lisa said. “We don’t want to take Kidd’s from you. We don’t want to see you or your sister out in the street. Nobody wants that, do they?” She looked at me.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Nothing unreasonable, Ali. I just want you to come back to work.”

  As much as I hated her at that moment, I had to admit that Lisa Wan was a genius. A sick genius, but a genius nonetheless.

  She knew I would never work for her again without a compelling reason. The only way was if Dean was in trouble. Ajax Credit was an even better front for her criminal business than the pawnshop.

  Dean and I could try to fight it. Refuse to pay and take Ajax Credit to court. But Dean had signed the paper, and the court wouldn’t care how he’d built up a gambling debt of that size. We might lose the case. Or we might win, but the lawyer fees would cost us more than the debt.

  I thought of calling Phil Kushida, confessing everything. He’d been after Lisa Wan for years. I trusted Phil. But I couldn’t trust him to outsmart Lisa or to make sure Dean wasn’t harmed in the process.

  Lisa had planted evidence to put me in jail. Now she was telling me she wanted my help. In both cases I had no choice. I had to look out for my brother. If there was another solution, I couldn’t see it.

  Or maybe I didn’t want to.

  “What’s the job?” I asked.

  “A piece of art. A photograph.”

  “That doesn’t sound so hard.”

  Lisa smiled. “It’s impossible, Ali. Why else would I come to you?”

  A few days after I’d started my sentence in prison, Lisa told me, an elderly woman came into Lisa’s pawnshop with a box of old photographs and postcards. Lisa paid the woman five dollars for the whole box. She put the box of photos in a corner, wrote $1 each/3 for $5 on the front of the box and went back to her desk.

  Six weeks later a man came in. He was blond and handsome, though his nose had been broken before, and he was missing some teeth. He looked around the store and started sifting through the box of photos.

  Lisa was thinking about other things. She didn’t worry too much about the man. The next person to enter was a beautiful woman, who walked over to see what the man was doing.

  “Find anything, Ty?” she asked.

  “Maybe.” The man was trying not to sound excited, but Lisa could tell he was fascinated by the box. He was too careful with the photos, treating each one like it was precious.

  “Ty, I want to go,” the woman said. “I’m hungry.”

  The man took his time walking to the counter. “Three for five, huh?” he said to Lisa.

  “That was the old price,” Lisa said. She didn’t know what the box was worth, but the man was too interested in the photos for them to be junk. She decided to overcharge him, then look up what the photos were worth much later. “New price is $500. All or nothing. Take it or leave it.”

  She knew she’d made a mistake when the man smiled.

  “Deal,” he said, slapping five $100 bills on the counter. He walked out, happy, with the box under his arm.

  “What’s so special about a bunch of old pictures?” Lisa heard the woman ask him. The two were holding hands as they left.

  “These are Jane Brick photos,” the man said. “Originals. They’re beautiful—and worth a lot of money.”

  I didn’t know anything about photography—or painting or anything else—but I’d heard of Jane Brick. She’d done wonderful photos of city streets in the 1960s and ’70s. Now her photos fetched high prices, were featured in museums and private collections, and were sold as posters and greeting cards. She’d had a very sad life and passed away young.

  Lisa explained that Jane’s mother had talked about a “missing” collection of Jane’s photos. Ten shots taken around her home. When Jane’s mother passed, a distant cousin cleaned out their house. She was the one who had sold the box to Lisa. She hadn’t known or cared what they were.

  Lisa had made $495 on the box without doing anything. But she talked about it like the man had stolen millions from her.

  The man who’d bought the box was named Ty Collins. He was thirty-four years old and retired. A former hockey player, he’d won the Hart Memorial Trophy and made the playoffs twice. Now he collected art. Photographs mostly.

  COLLINS SCORES IN OVERTIME WITH PHOTO FIND read the headline in the local paper. Collins had paid to have an expert look at the photos to verify that they were taken by Jane Brick. The reporter mentioned Collins’s “remarkable eye” for spotting the similarities between the pictures and Brick’s other work.

  Collins was having each photo framed. They would be displayed in his penthouse suite for one year, then donated to the city’s art gallery. “I’m just happy to bring these photos to the world,” he was quoted as saying.

  Lisa Wan was furious.

  “That dumb ape got lucky and cheated me,” she said.

  “Let me get all this straight, so I understand,” I said. “He bought these from you for a hundred times what you paid, and now you want me to steal them back?”

  “That’s only part of it,” Lisa said. “I want the photos, yes. But I want him to be embarrassed. He needs to know he’s not smarter than me.”

  “So you don’t want me to steal the photos?”

  “You’re not just going to steal them,” Lisa said. “You’re going to replace them.”

  SIX

  WHAT LISA WANTED wasn’t impossible. Not for me anyway. But it was closer to impossible than I’d ever been before.

  “You’re going to take his photos,” Lisa said. “We’ll copy them and replace them with fakes. When it’s discovered, he’ll look like an idiot for buying them. Then the originals will magically show up in my shop.”

  “All of that work just to fool someone who paid you a lot of money fair and square?”

  “He’s a lucky fool,” Lisa said.

  Max had left the room. When he returned he was holding my socks and shoes. They were wet from the rain. I put them on anyway.

  “You haven’t lost your skills,” Lisa said. “You managed to find us and get to your brother with no problem. All you have to do to rescue him is complete this job.”

  “And you’ll erase his debt?”

  “Completely. I promise.”

  A promise from Lisa Wan wasn’t worth the time it took to hear it. But there were no choices open to me.

  Dean sighed. “I’m sorry, Ali,” he said.

  Lisa ran a hand through his hair. The emerald ring on her finger gleamed. “Don’t be sorry, Dean. Your sister was meant to do this. And you want to know a secret? Secretly she wants to.”

  I pulled her hand off my brother’s head. “Don’t talk to him or touch him,” I said. “From here on out, you leave my brother alone.”

  Lisa’s face flashed anger. She calmed herself and sighed. “All right.”

  “I will look at the job,” I said. “If I think it can’t be done, I’m walk
ing away.”

  “You would do that? The Great Ali Kidd admitting defeat?”

  “I’m retired,” I said. “These are special circumstances.”

  Lisa smiled. “Whatever you say.”

  Before she let us go, Lisa gave me $300 for expenses. Not only was I breaking all my promises, but I was even taking money from the person who had sent me to jail.

  In the taxi ride home, Dean said, “You don’t have to do this, Ali. We can tell Phil what happened. Maybe he can help.”

  “It’s our word against Lisa’s,” I said. “She has your signature on the note saying you owe her money. Even if Phil could prove she did something wrong, he couldn’t protect us. Lisa would set fire to the restaurant or hurt us or something. She’s smart. She’s covered all the angles.”

  “Do you really think you can pull off that job without being caught?”

  I didn’t answer right away. There were a number of factors that would make it difficult. I listed them in my head.

  1. Ty Collins was rich. He’d have the best security system money could buy. That was no problem really. I’d handled high-tech security before.

  2. Collins was not only rich but also famous. People paid attention to him. His home would be designed to keep strange people away.

  3. I wasn’t a professional forger. Photos were probably much easier to forge than paintings. But it would still be a difficult process. If Collins could tell that the pictures were taken by Jane Brick, he might be able to tell an original from a copy.

  4. I wouldn’t just have to break in. I’d have to break in twice. Once to take the photos to copy them, then again to sneak back in and replace them. Either that or carry the copying equipment in with me.

  5. Now that I had a criminal record, the police and security would pay extra attention to me. I would get no breaks. Not even from Phil Kushida. As much as I liked Phil, as much as he was my friend, I was going to have to stay away from him until this was over.

  There they were. Five good reasons not to do the job. Yet all of them were less important than reason number six.