The Lock Artist

by Steve Hamilton

  Big enough, apparently. For what that was worth. The closing act was when I got taken over to a private table, separated from the rest of the restaurant by a folding partition. There were three couples sitting at the table, but there was no mistaking who was in charge of the evening. It was the man I’d met exactly one time before. The dark eyes, the thick eyebrows, the long cigarette hanging from his lips. That same aroma in the air, the smoke mixing with his cologne and whatever else, the combination vaguely foreign and powerful and different from anything I’d ever smelled before.

  That smell, by itself, would have told me everything I needed to know. Like the Ghost said, this was the man you do not fuck with.

  “It’s good to see you again,” he said to me. “I knew I had a good feeling about you.”

  I didn’t move.

  “A man who doesn’t talk. What a beautiful thing, eh?”

  Everyone else at the table nodded at this. Two other men in suits. Three women in diamonds and dressed out to here.

  “If you see Mr. Marsh, tell him I’m sorry to hear that his partner Mr. Slade is still missing. He should be more careful who he does business with.”

  That brought some laughter from around the table. Then I was dismissed. Sleepy Eyes ushered me away and pressed a wad of bills into my right hand. When I got outside, I opened my fist and saw five crumpled hundred-dollar bills.

  I still had the pagers in the motorcycle’s back compartment. I was wondering what would happen if I were to take them back into the restaurant. If I were to place them on that table and then walk away. I was trying to picture exactly what might happen, when I heard Sleepy Eyes calling to me.

  “Over here,” he said. He gestured me over to the long black car, the same car I’d seen parked in Mr. Marsh’s driveway.

  “The boss wanted me to show you something,” he said. “He thought it might be… what’s the word? Beneficial?”

  Sleepy Eyes took a quick look around, then opened the trunk. As the light popped on, I saw the lifeless face of Jerry Slade, Mr. Marsh’s partner. The trunk lid got slammed back down before I could register anything else. How he might have died, or if the rest of his body was even intact.

  “I don’t make a point of parking in the middle of a city with something like that in the trunk,” Sleepy Eyes said, “but we finally caught up to him today, and well… it seemed like good timing. Do your little test tonight and make a lasting impression, all at the same time.”

  I kept standing there. My mind couldn’t make my muscles do anything yet.

  “Welcome to real life, kid.”

  He smacked me once on the cheek and went inside, leaving me there alone in the dark.

  I went to school for two more days. That was it for my entire senior year of high school. On Thursday night, the blue pager went off. I called the number. The man on the other end had a thick New York accent. He gave me an address in Pennsylvania. Just outside of Philadelphia. He told me I’d be expected in two days’ time. I sat there for a long time, looking at the address.

  I’m going to need a note, I thought to myself. I’m going to need a note, excusing me from school tomorrow so I can go to Pennsylvania and help some men rob a safe.

  The next morning, I bought a pair of luggage bags. They hung over the backseat of my motorcycle, one on each side. I came back and put as many clothes as I could fit inside them. Toothbrush, toothpaste, the usual things you need every day. I packed my safe lock. I packed the pages that Amelia had drawn for me that summer. I packed the pagers.

  I had about a hundred dollars of my own saved up, plus the five hundred the men had given me after the fake robbery. Minus the thirty bucks for the motorcycle luggage. So about $570 in total.

  I went to the liquor store, going in through the back door in case Uncle Lito was taking one of his morning naps. When I went through to the front, there he was slumped over the counter, his head resting on his forearms. If someone walked through the front door, he’d snap awake in a half second and try to act like he hadn’t been sleeping.

  I slipped around him and stood in front of the cash register. I pushed the magic button on the register and the drawer popped open. I did a quick count. There wasn’t much, and what there was, I put right back. I couldn’t take it. When I closed the drawer, Uncle Lito came to.

  “What? What’s going on?”

  I put my hand on his back. Not my usual thing to do.

  “Michael! Are you okay?”

  I gave him the thumbs-up. Never better.

  “What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be at school?”

  He looked old today. My father’s brother, this man who felt responsible for what had happened to me, who had taken me in despite having no aptitude whatsoever for taking care of another human being.

  But he tried. Right? He tried.

  And he gave me one damned fine motorcycle.

  I hugged him for the first and last time. Then I went out the door.

  Here is the part that kills me. I had one more stop to make. The antique store down the street. I went inside and waved to the old man, the very same old man who had sold me my first locks, way back when.

  I wasn’t buying a lock today. I went to the glass counter and pointed to a ring. I didn’t know if the diamond was real. All I knew was that I had seen it before, and that I had liked it. And that I had enough money to buy it. It was only a hundred dollars.

  When I had the ring in its little box, tucked inside my jacket, I rode over to Amelia’s house. The place was empty. Mr. Marsh was off at the health club or wherever else he went during the day, now that I’d earned his life back for him.

  Amelia was at school, of course. Like any normal seventeen-year-old.

  The front door was locked. I went around to the back. That was locked, too. One more time, for old times’ sake, I took out the tools and opened that door. It made me remember that first time, when I had broken into the house with the football players. Then the time after that, when I had broken in just to leave a picture in Amelia’s room.

  I didn’t regret any of it. I still don’t, to this day.

  When I was inside, I went upstairs and sat on her bed for a while. Amelia’s bed, officially the greatest square footage on the planet Earth. I sat there remembering everything, and then for the last time that day, I tried to talk myself out of it.

  You can go get her right now, I thought. Go get her out of school, give her the ring in person. Take her with you. You love her, you can’t live without her, you’ll find a way to make it work. Why else would you feel this way? Why do you even have a heart inside you if it tells you that this is the person you want to be with for the rest of your life and you can’t make that happen?

  And so on. Until the truth finally came back to me. As clear as sunlight. As clear as that look on her face when those men came to the house, with her father in the backseat.

  I can’t take you with me, I thought. I can’t let this touch you. Any of it. I can’t even tell you where I’m going.

  I stood up. I took the ring box out of my jacket. I put it on her pillow.

  I did all of this for you, Amelia. And now I have to do one more thing.

  Twenty-six

  Los Angeles

  September 2000

  Gunnar was in. Of course. It was his crazy idea to begin with.

  Julian and Ramona were out. No surprise there, either.

  “I told you before, it’s suicide,” Julian said. “You know it is.”

  “It’s foolproof,” Gunnar said. “We hit, we run. We have our tracks covered. Four million dollars.”

  “You don’t think they’re gonna know in two seconds who took the money? You might as well draw a big fucking neon arrow from that boat to this house.”

  “No,” Gunnar said. “You don’t get it. I told you, I’ve got another contact on the boat.”

  “Who’s this contact you keep talking about? Give me a name.”

  “You don’t know him. His name won’t mean anything to you.”
/>
  “How did you meet him?”

  “I was doing a tattoo on this one guy who knew this other guy who was gonna be going on this big boat, he said. Being a bodyguard. So I followed up on it. You know, the same thing that you do all the time.”

  “You’re insane,” Julian said. “You’ve totally lost your mind.”

  “You just don’t want to face the fact that I was the one who set this up. For once, it’s me who puts together the perfect score, and you can’t take it.”

  Lucy watched them going back and forth. She was as silent as I was. Eventually, she went upstairs and didn’t come back down until the evening. By then, it had come down to one simple declaration. Anybody else in the house was welcome to join us, but if we had to, Gunnar and I would do it alone. I knew it was a bluff and Julian and Ramona probably knew it, too. But in the end… they were in.

  It was just too much money to turn down.

  And if you thought about it long enough, you had to admit… if we did this just right, we might actually get away with it.

  So the next few days were all about preparation. Putting the goods together, first of all. The wine, the cigars. Everything. Julian had done this once before, of course. He had delivered it all as part of his repayment to the man from Detroit, in exchange for being allowed to walk off that boat without a bullet in his head. Now he just had to come through again, with a little help from the rest of us.

  It wasn’t expected, mind you. No official promise had been made. Still, it was a reasonable cover story. It was a way to walk right onto that boat like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was also a card to play if everything fell apart and we were asked what the hell we were doing there.

  We cased out the marina itself. Even though Julian already knew the place, he wanted nothing left to chance. He wanted to know the exact slip where the boat would be moored. The exact schedule. Who would disembark and when, where they’d go, how long they’d be there. So we could put together our plan, choreograph every last movement, down to the second.

  We went over it again and again. Until everybody knew exactly what they had to do.

  Now all we had to do was wait for the boat to arrive.

  Lucy was acting strange. After what had happened between us… that one single afternoon… she was distant to me. She wouldn’t come over in the afternoons to hang out anymore. At dinner, she barely looked at me. I started to worry about her. Is she really ready for this? Will she be able to carry off her part of the operation?

  The night before the big day, Julian was walking back and forth from one end of the house to the other, muttering to himself. Ramona didn’t want to be alone, but she didn’t want to talk, either. She spent the last hours putting together the gift baskets, with all of the expensive goodies spread out on the table. The wine, the single malt whisky, the Cuban cigars, the Dunhill cigarettes. She wouldn’t let anyone help her. God help you if you came within three feet of that table.

  Gunnar was doing a light workout in the yard. Alone in the darkness. Lucy sat in a chair with earphones on, listening to music.

  Me? I spent the time drawing, of course. I was trying to capture everything about that one last empty evening. The way we all looked as we were getting ready. For better or worse, nothing would ever be the same again.

  Midnight came. We tried to sleep.

  Then the next morning… Gunnar got the call from his contact. The ship had changed its plans. It wasn’t docking at Marina del Rey, after all. It was heading directly to Mexico.

  “Four million dollars,” Gunnar said. “Four million dollars on that fucking boat and it’s not coming to shore? Can you fucking believe this?”

  “Maybe they got tipped off,” Julian said. “They know something is up.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. These guys are smart, but they’re not psychic.”

  “Maybe the card game’s getting serious,” Julian said. “Maybe they just want to skip all that other shit. Coming ashore and golfing, or going to Vegas…”

  “We should just get our own boat,” Gunnar said. “Something fast. Ride out there and take them down, right on the ocean.”

  “Yeah, that would work. That’s a great idea.”

  “I’m serious, Julian. I’m not fucking around.”

  “You go ahead, give that a try. They’ll cut you in half and feed you to the sharks.”

  “I’m glad we’re not doing this,” Lucy said. She had taken her earphones off. It was the first time she had spoken in two days. “I had a bad feeling about it.”

  Gunnar stared her down for a long moment. Then he picked up one of Ramona’s carefully wrapped gift baskets and threw it across the room. It exploded against the wall, filling the room with cigars and crinkly green tissue paper and the warm scent of whisky.

  After that, everyone drifted off in their own direction. Nobody ate dinner together.

  Just before he went to bed, Gunnar got the second call. The boat would be stopping in San Diego in the morning, his contact said. At one of the marinas in Coronado, at the north end of San Diego Bay. If we were there bright and early, we just might catch it.

  Julian drove. Ramona sat beside him in the front seat. Gunnar and I were in the back. Lucy was between us. The sun was just starting to come up.

  “This will work,” Gunnar said. “They’ll never see it coming. It’s just like you always say. Hit ’em where they ain’t looking, right? Eight heavy hitters with a half million each? What will they be worrying about? Pirates at sea? The banditos in Mexico? What’s the one time they’ll have their guard down? On a spur-of-the-moment stop! Their last stop in America!”

  “We’ve never even been down here,” Julian said. “We have no idea what we’re getting into.”

  “For once in your life,” Gunnar said, “you have to improvise a little. You move fast, you’re in, you’re out. Then you’re gone. We can do this.”

  “What do you think?” Julian said to Ramona.

  “Now you’re asking my opinion? While we’re already on our way down there?”

  “Yeah. Now I’m asking.”

  “My opinion is we go make our deliveries. If it doesn’t feel right, we can bail out. Nothing lost.”

  “Four million dollars,” Gunnar said. “That sounds like a hell of a loss to me.”

  “How about your life?” Ramona said. “How’s that for a loss?”

  “It won’t happen.”

  “You’ve never met this guy,” she said, turning to face him. “You’ve never looked him in the eye like I have.”

  “Everybody stop talking,” Lucy said. “Just stop right now.”

  They did. They all stopped talking and joined me in the tense silence. Julian kept driving. For all of his doubts, he was the one taking us there at a mile a minute.

  The sun broke over the San Marcos Mountains just as we got close to the northern end of San Diego Bay. From one moment to the next, the ocean was suddenly glittering in the sunlight. We took the bridge to North Island. As we pulled up near the marina, we could see the yachts all lined up in a row. We parked at the service entrance. Julian popped the trunk, and we started carrying our load down onto the dock. The crates of wine. The gift baskets.

  We were all in our game day outfits, of course. Julian, Gunnar, and I in identical black pants and white golf shirts. Looking as nondescript and interchangeable as possible. Like every other faceless man who spends his working day waiting on people.

  Ramona and Lucy, on the other hand, stripped down to their short shorts and bikini tops. For maximum distraction.

  We walked out onto the long dock, each of us with our arms full. As we walked by each ship, we saw crew members hosing off the decks. We saw rich people with tanned ankles and docksiders, sitting high above us, enjoying their breakfasts while the seagulls screamed for handouts. We kept walking.

  “I don’t see it,” Julian said. “Where’s the fucking boat?”

  Down toward the end, there was a long gangway leading up to the biggest boat of al
l. It had to be two hundred feet long. It was parked facing out, with a gangway leading up to the stern’s second deck. There were two men standing there at the foot of the gangway. Both large, both dressed in black. Both doing a professional job of looking unfriendly.

  “This isn’t it,” Julian said. “This isn’t the boat.”

  “It has to be,” Gunnar said. “Let’s check it out.”

  Gunnar went up to the two men, slipping into his role. A not so bright delivery man, just trying to get rid of his packages.

  “Hey, guys, what’s up? Is this the boat we’re looking for, I wonder?”

  One of the men raised an eyebrow.

  “We might be looking for another vessel,” Julian said, stepping into his role. “These guys were on the Skylla.”

  “That was last year,” one of the men said. “This is the new boat. Excuse me, the new ‘vessel.’ ”

  The two men exchanged a look. Then they started noticing Ramona and Lucy, and everything tipped in our favor.

  “We’ve got all this stuff to set up on the boat,” Gunnar said. “If you don’t mind…”

  “Yeah yeah,” the man said. “Go ahead. Take your time.”

  Gunnar went up the gangway. Julian and I followed while Ramona and Lucy lagged behind for a little extra face time. There were a few feet of clearance between the dock and the back of the boat, so I couldn’t help noticing when we were directly above the water. The gangway trembled beneath my feet with every step. When we were finally on deck, we put our crates down on the bartop.

  “I don’t know this boat,” Julian said. “This might be a problem.”

  “So what the fuck,” Gunnar said. “It’s gotta be the same setup, right? We just find the safe.”

  Ramona and Lucy arrived on the deck.

  “One hell of a boat,” Ramona said.

  “It’s even bigger than last year’s,” Julian said. “Just remember to split up when we start going back.”

  Julian and Ramona stayed at the bar, taking their time unpacking the wine and keeping a lookout at the same time. Lucy, Gunnar, and I went down the hall to the staterooms. Lucy pushed open the first door and set down her gift basket. The room was small but comfortable. One bed. A television. Everything done in fine wood and polished brass.