The Lock Artist

by Steve Hamilton

  “She says that you’re a very good artist, and that you shouldn’t be spending all your time digging in our backyard. Those were her exact words.”

  I started breathing again.

  “You surprise me every day, Michael. That’s all there is to it. I mean, you’ve already proven your loyalty to me. After all that hard work… after not giving up your friends like that. By the way, I apologized yesterday, right? Did I already apologize?”

  I nodded.

  “I was so upset about what happened. What you boys did. You and those Milford High School punks.”

  He cut himself off with a visible effort. Then he put his hands down on the desk.

  “But that’s no excuse for abusing you like that. I’m just trying to explain where my head was. Okay? You understand? And you forgive me, right?”

  I nodded again.

  “Thank you, Michael. I appreciate that. Seriously. Why aren’t you drinking your Coke?”

  I took a sip, feeling the bubbles go up my nose.

  “So here’s what we’re going to do now. First of all, I meant what I said. Your days as pool digger are over. Okay? No more digging. Instead, well, I thought maybe if you’re such a great artist and all…”

  He paused for a moment, leaning back in his chair. The huge fish just above his head.

  “Amelia had this little friend… Zeke. Ezekiel. Whatever the hell his name was. You probably saw him around here, right? Anyway, I guess he’s history now. Can’t say it breaks my heart. I mean, his family has a lot of money and all, but he’s just a little too weird for me. Anyway, now that he’s gone… well, I know Amelia always likes to have somebody else around to do her art stuff with. So I was thinking… do you see where I’m going with this?”

  No, I thought. I absolutely do not see where you’re going with this. Because there’s absolutely no way that you’d seriously be offering me this chance.

  “Amelia has had a really tough time of it. I mean, since it’s just been the three of us here. Hell, the two of us now, with Adam gone. She spends way too much time alone. I just don’t know how to reach out to her sometimes, you know?”

  No way. There’s no way you’re going to ask me this.

  “So what I’m saying is, if you could come here and instead of digging… If you could spend time with her, while she’s drawing, or whatever you guys want to do. It would make me feel a lot better, to know she had somebody to be with. To talk to. I bet you’re a great listener, am I right?”

  Yes. Yes I am.

  “Now, if you’re worried about the probation officer…”

  No. I’m not worried about the probation officer.

  “I’ll just tell him you’re doing some other jobs for me. Down at the health club. I’ll make sure that’s covered, is what I’m saying. I’ll make sure you’re covered here. Totally covered.”

  The catch is coming. There has to be a catch here.

  “I’m having a little barbecue tonight. You think you could stay for it? There’s somebody I’d like you to meet. His name is Mr. Slade. He’s my partner, actually, at the health club. Along with some other stuff. We’ve got a lot going on these days. I think he’d really enjoy meeting you. Whaddya say?”

  That’s the catch? I have to meet your partner?

  “And maybe… I don’t know. Maybe if we have a problem that you could help us solve sometime? You think maybe that would be a possibility? You helping us out, I mean?”

  Okay. Here it is.

  “I’m just saying. You have a lot of skills. In fact, I bet Mr. Slade would be very interested to see them. You think you could show him? Maybe even tonight, after the barbecue?”

  That’s when I heard the footsteps. I looked up and there she was, standing in the doorway. She had jeans and a simple white shirt on, untucked. Beads around her neck. Her hair tied up in a ponytail.

  “Tell you what, you just think about it,” Mr. Marsh said to me. “You think about it, and we’ll talk later.”

  “What’s he supposed to be thinking about?” Amelia said.

  “Just an adjustment to our work agreement,” Mr. Marsh said. “I think everybody will be a lot happier. You included.”

  She didn’t look convinced. I’d find out soon just how well she knew him. For as much as she loved him, the only parent she had left, she knew he was full of shit at least half the time.

  “You guys run along,” Mr. Marsh said. “Go do some art stuff or something.”

  “He doesn’t have to dig today?”

  He smiled at his daughter. Then he gave me a little wink.

  “No. Not today.”

  I don’t know if I realized it yet, but he had me. Before I could even get out of the chair. I had no idea what he’d ask me to do. Or who he’d ask me to do it for. All of that would come later.

  But for now… yes. He’d played the Amelia card, and he’d played it perfectly.

  He had me.

  Eighteen

  Los Angeles and Monterey

  Early 2000

  I was still in L.A. when I turned eighteen that month. February of 2000. Lucy had asked me for my birthday. Just out of curiosity, I thought. I had no idea they were planning anything. But on that day, Julian and the gang put a blindfold on me and took me out to the street. They took the blindfold off and there it was. A Harley-Davidson Sportster with a big red bow on the seat. The most beautiful motorcycle I had ever seen, even better than that old Yahama my uncle had given me.

  I had already moved into the little apartment that was attached to the garage. It didn’t take long to bring in all of my stuff, which at that point could still fit into the two luggage bags from my old bike. Julian apologized to me about how small the space was, but damn… after setting out on my own, figuring I’d be living in motel rooms or God knows where else… this was as close to a real home as anything I could have hoped for.

  I still had a lot of questions about these four people. The White Crew. First of all, you can only spend so much time stealing money from rich people. What else did they do all day?

  As it turned out, Julian had grown up in a family of wine snobs, so he took that background and he turned it into a business. He had a storefront in Marina del Rey, not far from the docks. There was a climate-controlled wine cellar beneath the store with well over a million dollars’ worth of bottles. The very finest, most expensive wine in the world. The kind of stuff that only a very rich person would even think of buying. That’s how he made many of his first contacts in this community of obscene wealth, mostly from the people who’d dock their yachts in the harbor. At the same time, it gave him a way to launder some of the money he made from the robberies.

  There was a kind of symmetry to my life now, if you think about it. A man who sold cheap liquor took me in when I needed him most. Now, it was a man who sold overpriced wine.

  Ramona spent most of her time at the store, too, along with members of her extended family, especially her three sisters. Like her, they were ridiculously attractive Hispanic women who could charm you right out of your undershorts. The few times I was around the store, I’d hear them talking Spanish to each other at a million miles an hour, and it would often disintegrate into shouting matches. By the end of the day, they’d make up. It was a tight family. They loved each other like crazy and would kill for each other, I could tell. I was envious of that.

  As for Gunnar, he was a tattoo artist. He had a little shop right there in Santa Monica. When he wasn’t there, I often saw him working out in the backyard. Even now that he was hooked up with Julian and had some money in his pocket, he still liked to use junkyard equipment like cinder blocks and tire chains.

  He didn’t talk to me much. Then again, the more I hung around the more I noticed that he didn’t really talk to anybody. I mean, he lived in the same house with these people. He had dinner with them almost every night. When it came time to put a big job together, he would literally entrust these people with his very life. But he was different from them. That much was clear. There a
lways seemed to be a subtle undercurrent in the room, with Julian especially, and now me. Like there’s no way on this earth he’d be spending so much time with us, if it weren’t for our one common interest.

  Lucy? She was the one member of the gang who hadn’t found her daytime calling yet. She’d worked a number of jobs since getting out of rehab, but nothing had seemed to stick. Her latest kick had apparently been painting. Some of her work was hanging around the house, and Julian had arranged for some pieces to be shown at one of the local art galleries. Most of her work was these almost psychedelic paintings of birds or dogs or even jungle animals that I’m sure she’d never seen in person. It was good, I thought, but she didn’t make many sales.

  Because she was the one with the most free time, I’d often end up hanging around while she was painting or cooking or whatever else. One day, she caught me drawing a picture of her on my pad of paper. Nothing much, just a quick pencil sketch, but she took the paper from me and looked at it for a long time.

  “One more reason to hate you,” she said as she flipped it back at me.

  They still had the safe in the back room. For the rest of that month, she kept trying to open it. I’d watch her, and I’d do whatever I could to show her exactly what I was feeling when I got to the shorter contact areas, but I knew there was no way to make her feel it. It would either come to her or it wouldn’t.

  No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t feel it.

  Julian made me throw away my fake New York driver’s license. He told me he’d find me a real fake identity. So I was no longer William Michael Smith.

  A friend of a friend of his had a young neighbor who hadn’t gotten his California driver’s license yet. In fact, he would have had to lose about two hundred pounds before he could even think about trying to fit behind the wheel of a car. So for a certain amount of cash delivered to his door every month, he agreed to “loan” me his identity. I could open up a bank account in his name if I wanted to. I could even use his Social Security number if I wanted to go out and get a real job.

  That’s how my new fake name became Robin James Agnew.

  I still had the pagers with me, of course. One day, the green pager went off. This was the one that had been silent for years, according to what the Ghost had told me. He didn’t even know if anyone still had the number.

  Well, apparently someone did.

  I called the number on the screen. The man who answered asked me if I was the Ghost. When I didn’t answer, he asked again, swore a few times, then hung up.

  So much for the green pager, I thought. I kept it anyway. I made sure the batteries were fresh, just like in all the others. They sat in the shoebox under my bed, and I checked them every day.

  On the first day of February, the yellow pager went off again.

  I thought about ignoring it. I finally went to a pay phone down by the marina and dialed the number. It rang twice, and then I heard the voice.

  “Is this Michael?”

  He knows my name, I thought. Yet he doesn’t seem to know I can’t answer him.

  “This is Harrington Banks,” he said. “Harry. Do you remember me? I met you at that junk store in Detroit.”

  Yes. I remember you. You came in and asked a few questions. I saw you the next day, in your car. You were just sitting there. Watching.

  “Is there someplace I can meet you, Mike? I think we really need to talk.”

  He got his hands on the yellow number. I wonder if he can tell I’m calling him back from L.A.? Hell, maybe he’s tracing the number right now. Right down to this exact pay phone next to the docks.

  “I think you might have gotten yourself in way too deep,” he said. “Are you listening to me? I think you’d better let me try to help you.”

  I hung up the phone and left. I rode my motorcycle back to the house. When I went back inside, I could hear the yellow pager beeping again. It was the same number.

  I was two seconds away from smashing the stupid thing. No matter what would happen to me if the man in Detroit found out about it. Instead, I just took out the batteries and left it lying there dead in the box.

  Gunnar was getting restless. He didn’t wear it well.

  “Julian only knows one way to do this,” he said to me. We were sitting at the dining room table. Julian and Ramona and Lucy were in the kitchen. “It takes him like six months to set up a score. Six months. Everything’s gotta be just right, you know? We gotta know every single last detail about the guy. If he gets up in the middle of the night to take a piss, we gotta know about it.”

  He drained the last bit of red wine from his glass.

  “Meanwhile, Julian gets to play around in his wine store and him and Ramona get to go out with all these big shots. Wine and dine them. Me and Lucy, we just sit around waiting. Until it’s finally time to do something. Then I get the grunt work, of course. I’m the guy who sits in the fucking closet for six hours. You saw that. And Lucy, either she doesn’t get to do anything because Julian can’t trust her, or else she ends up being the bait for some horny old guy.”

  He picked up the bottle and started to fill up his glass again. He got a couple of tablespoons’ worth, then nothing but a dribble. He put the bottle back down on the table with a loud thump.

  “Life’s too short for this, know what I mean? We could be out there hitting people. As long as you move fast, you can take a little chance now and then. You don’t have to wait so goddamned long. Be such a fucking yellow-ass pussy all the time.”

  I don’t know why he was confiding in me like that. I was the new member of the gang, after all. But hell, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. You can tell me just about anything and be pretty sure I’m not going to repeat it.

  But no matter how anxious Gunnar got, Julian never wavered from his approach. He made his contacts. He developed them. Slowly. Carefully. He got to know everything he could about his marks. Until he would finally see the right opportunity. If it came at all.

  Only one time had he ever miscalculated. He had picked the wrong mark, at the wrong time, and it should have gotten him killed.

  Instead, he got the Ghost. Then me.

  “Your man in Detroit,” Julian said to me. “This is how I first met him.”

  It was a few nights later. After another big dinner, just me and Julian and Ramona sitting there with two empty wine bottles on the table. Gunnar and Lucy out riding around somewhere. Julian was telling me this story now, finally, like it was the most important thing he’d ever tell me. It probably was.

  “I knew he was a heavy hitter the moment he walked into the store. You’ve seen him. You know what I’m talking about. I mean, he’s not the biggest man in the world, but it’s like, he takes up more space than anybody else. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded. Yes. I know.

  “This was a couple of Septembers ago. What he does, apparently, is he leases a big yacht, gets some other really serious guys together, and they start up in Oregon, play some golf up there, work their way down the coast, stop at marinas every couple of days, come ashore for a while, play some more golf, maybe run over to Vegas when they’re here in L.A. Sounds like a pretty fun trip, right? A nice little pleasure cruise?”

  I thought back to the two times I’d met the man. It was hard to imagine him golfing or sitting on the deck of a boat. Or doing anything remotely human.

  “It’s all just a warm-up. They push off from here and head down to Mexico, and on their way they start playing poker. No limit hold-’em. Seven, eight guys. Half-million-dollar buy-in. No credit. Strictly cash. So they’ve got like four million dollars sitting on that boat, Mike. Can you imagine what I was thinking when he told me that? I mean, here he is, standing right in my store, sharing this with me like it was no big deal. This man I’d never even seen before. Anyway, he said he came in to buy some more wine for the boat, but I’m thinking, the universe woke up this morning and decided you’ve got way too much money, sir. That’s the only reason why you’re here.”

/>   Ramona was sitting next to him. She smiled and shook her head.

  “I wasn’t quite sure how to make the play,” Julian said. “It was such a short window of time, you know? He was heading back to the boat. They’d be leaving the next day. All that money on its way to Mexico. I was thinking, hell, I don’t know… what could I do? He seemed so open and candid about everything. At least if I could spend a little more time with him, maybe I’d see an angle. So I told him I’d get together the best wine I had, some really nice bottles, bring them all out to the boat personally. And he was like, that would be very kind of you. Come on out, I’ll show you around the boat. The whole thing, you know? Really friendly about it. Which should have been a red flag right there. But I was stupid! Four million dollars. It makes you lose your balance.

  “So I go out to the marina. He’s got the boat there. Biggest boat in the place, by far. Just dwarfs everything else. It wasn’t his, remember. He just leases it for the month. Complete with crew, I’m sure. Anyway, Ramona and I are both there, we’ve got a few cases of wine with us. Ramona’s put together some nice flower arrangements. Some cigars. The whole thing, right? We’re walking all this stuff up the gangway, Ramona’s wearing her bikini top, flirting with Mr. Bigshot there. Everybody else is still on shore, so the rest of the boat is pretty much empty. I figure I can take a little walk around the cabins, right? Take some flowers with me? Open up a few doors, see what’s inside. If he sees me, I can just play it off, say I was putting some flowers in the cabins, being a nice guy. Going the extra mile for him. I mean, it’s not like I expected the money to just be sitting out there in a pile or anything, but if I could figure out where it was… at least we might have a shot, right? If it was all in a safe, maybe Lucy could open it, I was thinking. She’d been working real hard on it back then, and I was just hoping, if the safe wasn’t a great one…”

  He stopped to think about it for a moment. Ramona’s smile had disappeared.

  “It was really dumb, I know. To just improvise like that. I totally lost my head. Of course, the whole thing turned out to be a setup, anyway. I’m poking around in the cabins, and I actually find the safe. It’s right there in one of the cabins. Not a great-looking safe, either. I was pretty sure Lucy could open it. So I’m excited now. When all of a sudden I hear this voice from behind me. I turn around, and there’s this other guy there with a gun pointed at me. Some guy I didn’t see before. Real strange-looking. You ever meet him? He’s got this lazy kind of face, like he’s half-asleep all the time?”