The Lock Artist

by Steve Hamilton

  Somehow these guys knew the pass code already, which is the simplest way of all. They might have had a connection inside the house. Either a housekeeper or a service man. Or else they had just watched the owner closely enough, with enough magnification to see the buttons as he pressed them. However they did it, they had the number, and it took Manhattan all of five seconds to turn the whole system off.

  He gave us the thumbs-up, and Brooklyn split off to keep watch or whatever else he was supposed to be doing. This was obviously routine for them. Something they felt totally comfortable with. Me? I was in my own little zone now. That warm little buzz, the way my heart rate would speed up until it was finally in sync with that constant bass drum inside my head. The fear I lived with every second of every day finally draining away from me. Everything peaceful and normal and in perfect tune, for just those few precious minutes.

  Manhattan gave me a little wave to follow him. We walked through the house, as perfect a house as I had ever seen. It was decorated more for comfort than for show. A huge television with chairs you could disappear into. A fully stocked bar with glasses hanging from a rack, a mirror, bar stools, the works. We went up the stairs, down the hallway, and into the master bedroom. Manhattan seemed to know exactly where to go. We ended up in one of the two big walk-in closets, rows of expensive dark suits on one side, expensive casual clothes on the other side. Shoes arranged neatly on their slanted platform. Belts and ties hanging on some kind of electric contraption. Press the button and they would all start rotating into view.

  Of course, we weren’t here for the belts and ties. Manhattan carefully slid some of the suits aside. I could see the faint rectangular outline in the back wall. Manhattan pushed on it and it popped open. Inside that door was the safe.

  He stood aside for me. Once again, my turn.

  This is where they really needed me. They could have gotten through that back door if they had really wanted to. It might have taken them a little longer, but these were smart, resourceful men, and they would have found a way. The safe? This was a different matter. It was one thing to find out the security code for the whole house, but the combination to the safe hidden in the master bedroom closet? No, that would live only inside the owner’s head. Maybe in the wife’s head. Maybe in one other person’s head, a trusted confidant or the family lawyer, in case of emergency. Beyond that… well, you could go ahead and find the owner, tape him to a chair and stick a gun in his mouth, but then you’d have a whole different kind of operation. If you wanted to do this clean, then you needed a boxman to get you into that safe. A bad boxman would probably end up cutting through the wall and dragging the safe right out. A better boxman would leave it in the wall and use a drill. A great boxman… well, that’s exactly what I was hoping to demonstrate.

  The problem was-and I was glad Manhattan didn’t know this-up until that point in my young life, I had never once opened a wall safe. I mean, I knew it was the same idea. It’s just a regular safe built into a wall, right? But I had learned on freestanding safes, where I could really get my body up next to them and feel what I was doing. As the Ghost had said so many times, when he was teaching me how to do this… It’s like seducing a woman. Touching her in just the right way. Knowing what was going on inside of her. How do you do that if every part of the woman except her face is hidden behind a wall?

  I shook out my hands and stepped up to the dial. I tried the handle first, made sure the damned thing was actually locked. It was.

  I could see the Chicago brand plate, so I dialed the two “tryout” combinations, the preset combinations that the safes are shipped with. You’d be amazed how many people never change them.

  No luck on either of those. This was a conscientious safe owner who set his own combination. So now it was time to go to work.

  I pressed myself against the wall, putting my cheek against the safe’s front door. I was already assuming three wheels, but it was my first time, after all, so I wanted to make sure. I found the contact area, that area on the dial where the “nose” of the lever was coming into contact with the notch on the drive cam. Once I had that, I parked all the wheels on the opposite side of the dial, then spun back the opposite way, counting all of the pickups.

  One. Two. Three. Then I was clear. Three wheels.

  I spun back, parked all the wheels at 0. Then I went back to the contact area.

  This was the hard part. This was the almost impossible, should-be-impossible part. Because of the fact that no wheel can be exactly, exactly round and no two wheels can be exactly, exactly the same size as each other, you’re going to have some imperfect contact when you pass over the open notches on each wheel. It’s just unavoidable, no matter how well the safe is built. So when you’re sitting over a notch and you go back to the contact area, it’s going to feel a little different. A little shorter as that nose dips down a little farther on the drive cam.

  On a cheap safe? You can feel it like a pothole on a smooth road. On a good safe? A good, expensive safe like the man who owned this house would have built into his closet?

  The difference would be so small. So tinier than tiny.

  I parked at 3. Then at 6. Then at 9. Going by threes to start out with, testing each time. Waiting for that different feel to come to me. That slightest shortening in the contact area. Such a fine difference that no normal human being could ever perceive it. Absolutely never ever in a thousand years.

  12. Yes. I was close.

  Okay, keep going. 15, 18, 21.

  I worked my way around the dial, spinning quickly when I could, slowing down when I needed to feel every millionth of an inch. I heard Manhattan shifting his weight around behind me. I put up one hand, and he was still again.

  24. 27. Yes. There.

  How do I know?

  I just know. When it’s shorter, it’s shorter. I just feel it.

  Or something beyond feeling it, really. That little piece of hard metal touches the notch a hair width’s sooner than the last time around, and I can feel it, hear it, see it in my mind.

  When I had finished the dial, I had three rough numbers in my head. I went back and narrowed those down until they were exact, moving by ones this time instead of threes. When I was done with that, I had the three numbers in the combination, 13, 26, 72.

  The last step is a little bit of grunt work. There’s no other way to do it but to grind right through them. So start with 13-26-72, then switch the first two, then the second and last, and so on, until you’ve worked your way through all six possibilities. Six being a lot better than a million, which is how many combinations you’d have to go through if you couldn’t find out those numbers.

  Today’s combination ended up being 26-72-13. Total time to open the safe? About twenty-five minutes.

  I turned the handle and pulled the door open. I made sure I was watching Manhattan’s face as I did that.

  “Fuck me,” he said. “You can just fuck me with a stick right now.”

  I stepped aside and let him do what he needed to do. I had no idea what he was hoping to find in there. Jewels? Hard cash? I saw him pull out about a dozen envelopes, those brown paper envelopes that are just a little bit bigger than business size.

  “We got ’em. We’re ready to roll.”

  I closed up the safe and spun the dial. Manhattan was right behind me with a white rag, wiping everything down. Then he swung the outer door shut and slid the suits back in place.

  He turned the light off. We retraced our steps down the stairs. Brooklyn was in the living room, looking out the front window.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said.

  “Right here,” Manhattan said, holding up the envelopes.

  “Are you shitting me?” He looked over at me with an odd little smile. “Is our boy here like a genius or something?”

  “Or something. Let’s roll.”

  Manhattan keyed in the security code to rearm the alarm system. Then he closed the back door behind us and wiped off the knob.

  This is
why they called me. This is why they waited around for a kid they’d never met before to ride halfway across the country. Because with me on the job, they leave absolutely no trace behind them. The owner of this house would come back the next day, open the door, and find everything exactly as he had left it. He would go upstairs, take some clothes out of his closet, turn the light back off. Only when it was time to go into that safe would he dial his combination and open that door and see…

  Nothing.

  Even then, he wouldn’t comprehend what had happened. Not right away. He’d fumble around for a while, thinking that he must be mistaken. That he must be losing his mind. He’d accuse his wife next. You’re the only person in the world who knows the combination! Or else he’d call the family lawyer, put him on the spot. We were gone for a week, eh? You decided to make a little visit to our house?

  Finally, it would dawn on him. Somebody else had been here. By that time, Manhattan and Brooklyn would be safely back home, and I’d be…

  I’d be wherever it was that I went next.

  I never did find out what was in those envelopes. I didn’t care, not in the least. I knew going in that it was a flat fee job. When we were back at the motor court, Manhattan gave me the cash and told me it had been a real pleasure seeing me work.

  I had some more money now, at least. Enough to eat for a while, to think about finding a place to stay. But how long would that money last?

  He peeled off the magnetic ELITE RENOVATIONS sign from each side of the van and put those in the back. He took a screwdriver and undid the Pennsylvania license plates and replaced them with New York plates. He was about to get behind the wheel when I stopped him.

  “What is it, kid?”

  I took out an imaginary wallet from my back pocket, made like I was opening it.

  “What, you lost your wallet? Go buy a new one. You’re flush now.”

  I shook my head, pretended to take a card out of that same imaginary wallet.

  “You lost your ID? Just go back to where you came from. They’ll give you a new one.”

  I shook my head again. I pointed to that invisible card in my hand.

  “You need…”

  Finally, the lightbulb went off.

  “You need a new ID. As in, a whole new fucking identity.”

  I nodded my head.

  “Oh, shit. That’s a whole different deal right there.”

  I leaned in close, put one hand on his shoulder. Come on, friend. You gotta help me out here.

  “Look,” he said. “We know who you work for. I mean, we’re gonna send him his cut, right? That’s how this deal works. We’re not gonna stiff him, believe me. So if you got a problem like that, why don’t you go back home and get it straightened out there?”

  How could I explain this to him? Even if I could speak? This strange sort of limbo I was in now. I was a dog who couldn’t go home, who didn’t have a place on his master’s floor. Or even in his backyard. I had to stay on the run, scrounging for scraps in the garbage cans.

  Until he finally called me. When the master stuck his head out the door and called my name, you better believe I had to go running back to him.

  “Look, I know a guy,” he said. “I mean, if you’re really in a jam.”

  He took out his own wallet, pulled out a business card and then a pen. He turned the card over and started writing on it.

  “You call this guy and he’ll-”

  He stopped writing and looked up at me.

  “Oh yeah. That might be tough. I guess you should probably just go see him in person, eh?”

  I took out the money he had just given me and started peeling off bills.

  “Wait, wait. Stop.”

  He turned around and looked at Brooklyn. They exchanged a couple of shrugs.

  “I’d ask you to promise not to tell my boss,” he said, “but somehow I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem.”

  I got in the back of their van. That’s how I ended up in New York.

  Three

  Michigan

  1991

  Back up a little bit. Not all the way back. Just to when I was nine years old. Right after it happened. By that time, I was pronounced more or less physically recovered, except for that one little oddity they couldn’t quite figure out. The not talking business. After being shuffled around to a few different beds, I was finally allowed to go live with my uncle Lito. The man who had such a studly Italian lover’s name, even though he was anything but. He did have black hair, but it always looked like he was one month overdue for a trim. He had long sideburns, too. They were turning gray, and from the amount of time he spent fussing with them in the mirror, he must have thought they were his best asset. Looking back, those sideburns, the clothes he wore… hell, the whole combination would have been impossible if he had ever gotten married. Any woman in the world would have blown him right up and started from scratch.

  Uncle Lito was my father’s older brother. He didn’t look anything at all like my father. Not even close. I never asked him if either or both of them had been adopted. I think the question would have made him uncomfortable. Especially now that he was the only brother left. He lived in a little town called Milford, up in Oakland County, northwest of Detroit. I’d never spent much time with him when I was little, and even when I did see him, I don’t remember him ever taking much interest in me. But after everything happened, hell, it had obviously changed him somewhat, even though he wasn’t directly involved. It was his brother, for God’s sake. His brother and his sister-in-law. And here I was, his nephew… eight years old then and officially homeless. The State of Michigan would have taken me away otherwise, put me God knows where with God knows whom. It’s hard to even imagine how my life would have worked out if that had happened. Maybe I’d be a model citizen right now. Or maybe I’d be dead. Who knows? The way it worked out, it was Uncle Lito who took me to his house in Milford, about fifty miles away from that little brick house on Victoria Street. Fifty miles away from that place where my young life should have ended. After a few months giving it a try, they let him sign the papers and he became my legal guardian.

  I know he didn’t have to do it. He didn’t have to do anything for me. If you ever hear me complain about the man, don’t lose sight of that bottom line, okay? Here’s the first problem, though. If you want to start your life over, you need to move more than fifty miles away. Fifty miles is not far enough to get away from your old life, or to avoid having everyone you meet still know you as the person you were.

  It’s not nearly far enough if you’ve already become famous for something you want to forget forever.

  And the town of Milford itself… well, I know it’s a yuppie little “exurb” now, but back then it was still just a working-class little hick town with a Main Street that ran cockeyed under a railroad bridge. No matter how many flashing lights and big yellow signs they put up, they probably averaged two or three accidents every month. Just from the drunken idiots who couldn’t negotiate that sudden little jog in the road that took you within inches of the concrete embankments. Hell, just my uncle’s customers alone… because his liquor store was right next to the bridge. Lito’s Liquors. On the other side was a restaurant called the Flame. If you’ve ever eaten at a Denny’s, just imagine that same dining experience except with food that’s about half as good. You’d think I wouldn’t have ever eaten there more than once, like most people, but because the Flame was so close to the liquor store, and because there was this one waitress my uncle had a thing for. Anyway, it sounds like an old joke, but if there was anything that would have ever gotten me to finally speak up, it would have been the food at the Flame.

  Beyond that, there was a park down Main Street with rusty old swing sets and monkey bars you’d be a fool to touch without a tetanus shot. The park sloped down to the Huron River, which was littered with old tires and shopping carts and stacks of newspapers still in their bindings. There was a bank against the river where the railroad ran over it, and that’s where
the kids from the high school hung out at night, blasting their car radios, drinking beer, smoking pot, whatever.

  I know, you think I’m probably exaggerating. If you saw Milford now, you’d think I was crazy, with all the upscale housing developments they’ve got there now, and Main Street with all its antiques and healthy sandwich wraps and salons. There’s a big white gazebo in the park now. They do concerts there in the summer. If you tried to smoke a joint under the railroad bridge now, the cops would be there in three seconds.

  It was a different place back then, is what I’m trying to say. A lonely place, especially for a kid just turning nine years old. With no parents. Living in a strange house with a man he barely knew. Uncle Lito had this little one-story thing behind the store, this sad little house with mint green aluminum siding. He took the poker table out of the back room, and that became my bedroom. “Guess we won’t be playing poker here anymore,” he said as he showed me the room for the first time. “But you know what? I was losing money most of the time, so maybe I should thank you.”

  He reached out his hand to me. It was a gesture I’d come to know well. It was like a playful slap or maybe the way you’d knock your best buddy on the shoulder. You know, a little horseplay between two guys, but more tentative, like he didn’t want to touch me too hard. Or like he was leaving open the possibility that I’d step closer and he could turn it into an awkward sideways hug.

  I could tell Uncle Lito was trying hard to figure out what to do with me. “We’re just a couple of bachelors,” he said to me on more than one occasion. “Living off the fat of the land, eh? What do you say we go to the Flame and get a bite to eat.” As if the Flame’s food qualified as the fat of the land. We’d sit in the booth and Uncle Lito would run down his day to me in great detail, how many bottles of this or that he sold and what he needed to reorder. I’d sit there completely silent. Of course. Whether I was really listening to him, it didn’t seem to matter much. He just kept up his end of a one-sided conversation, pretty much every waking moment.