Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  Collins should know who Katsidis is, we’ve talked about him before, so I give the big man shit about it. “You know I catch all them Katsawhatsit fights. That dude is can’t-miss television.”

  Collins gives a sour little laugh before saying, “All right, what’s his name?”

  “Michael Katsidis. Former lightweight champ.” I get to say former because Diaz just took his belt the Saturday before last.

  “That’s it.” Collins nods. “That’s him.”

  “Oh, I know it’s him, and you know what? The twentieth century’s long gone and Jack Dempsey doesn’t fight anymore. You don’t always have to go in for the white fighter, you damn racist.”

  It’s a good little verbal jab, and it rocks Collins back on his heels before he shoots forward at me.

  “What? Fuck off with that!” He punches me pretty good on my shoulder, but he doesn’t know I let him.

  Turning and slipping it would’ve made him look bad in front of his guys. And I can’t be having that. Not if I want them to keep calling me.

  I get down on the living room floor next to the kitchen counter where some guy marked the safe for me with a chalk-dust circle. I can’t see much, so I start yanking up the carpet.

  “You telling me Diaz won? I thought Katsidis threw harder punches,” Collins says, “and he bossed the late rounds. The split decision was harsh.”

  That’s who Collins is. He says shit like bossed. He loves punchers, this guy. He loves guys without any subtlety at all. This, he thinks, is more honest fighting somehow. No guard. Just go. He doesn’t know life’s not like that for most people, especially if you’re not a white dude with a degree and a regional DEA command. The rest of us are too used to getting matched up with bigger, stronger, faster opponents. And those advantages have got to be balanced out. You have to beat them with your mind and skill and will. Nothing else.

  Me? I think going in with your hands down so you can trade power punches is the way to fight stupid and die young. That’s why I like boxers more than punchers. They’re in and out. It’s about technique. Feinting. Footwork. Hit and don’t get hit. That’s the art of it. The only art.

  “You’re crazy,” I say to Collins as I tear back the carpet to the point that I can see how these gangsters chiseled into the foundation to make room for the safe. Looks like someone trying to tunnel out of prison. “Katsidis never throws a jab. Can’t win like that.”

  “He doesn’t need to. Doesn’t matter when you hit that hard.”

  I try not to make a face like that’s the dumbest shit I ever heard, and I think I do okay by turning to look at the carpet again. Still, I can’t resist saying, “If you can’t judge a fight the right way with punch stats, multiple angles, and slow-motion replay, I worry about you.”

  He laughs at that. I do too.

  He thinks I’m kidding him. I’m not.

  I get back to yanking at the carpet, but in my head I’m thinking, It matters. It always matters. One day you run into someone who hits just as hard or harder than you and right then is when you’ll need to work a jab to keep him off you so you can figure out what to do next. See, jabs are offense that is actually defense. They’re multipurpose. They set up combinations. The jab is the least fancy, least understood, most important punch on earth.

  I’ve got the carpet all the way back now. Me and Collins take a look. First thing I notice, it’s big. Real big. Like a refrigerator that got shrunk in the wash. It’s a key-lock safe with a twist handle. Old, too. Maybe an antique, but I won’t be able to tell unless it’s out of that hole.

  I say, “I need this hoisted up and flat on this floor before I can see what I’m dealing with.”

  Collins nods, turns, and gives the order.

  Rudolfo “Rudy” Reyes, a.k.a. Glasses

  Friday, September 12, 2008

  Morning

  3

  Getting everybody in the car first thing before the bank opens is this huge production, man. I’m outside putting my one-year-old in his car seat, but my boy don’t want to be in it. Felix is squirming, bouncing off the side walls of it.

  Right now, he’s not about being good. And I feel that. I’m angry about having to go too. We’re two peas, me and him.

  He’s my first kid. My little me. A soft little knucklehead always trying to stir himself into some business.

  Right then, Felix proves it too. He does this duck-and-dive thing before I can get him buckled between his legs. He flops himself face-first onto my shoulder and giggles. I freeze for a second.

  I wonder how this would’ve gone if I wasn’t there to catch him. I don’t even want to think about that. I get my breathing back and lock him in. I test the latching twice. He’s still fighting the belt, but he’s not gonna go anywhere.

  This’d be funny if it didn’t suck so much.

  It’d be better if we had a garage so no neighbors could see. If we had a legit house, and not some rented back house on somebody else’s lot. If we could show even a little money instead of staying on the same block, six streets over from where I grew up, sticking with the appearance of no money and never gonna have it.

  That’s how Rooster does things. When you work for him, you got to be invisible. One ant in a colony. One tiny speck among a million other ones.

  I can’t give anyone a reason to look at me. For anything. Which is why this whole bank thing’s throwing me off. My father-in-law, he has a mortgage I cosigned on. And that means nothing can go wrong on it. Ever.

  So getting that phone call about a missed payment and a collections service made me lose it. Made me figure we’re not calling them back. We aren’t calling the credit union where the payment should’ve come from in the first place. We’re not dealing with no middleman. We go to the source, the bank. Straighten it out person to person.

  My wife’s out the door behind me, weighed down with a bag for Felix. It’s got extra diapers. A picture book that don’t even make sense, about a dinosaur egg getting hatched in the future. His stuffed yellow duck. There’s a bottle too. And some guava juice he didn’t drink from earlier. And a little green hat with a brim and two frog eyes on it.

  And sunscreen. Which only makes sense to her. We’re going inside a lobby with no sun and she needs sunscreen for his face.

  I swear, Leya gets like a white lady with him. All overprotective. Sometimes, Felix has coughs and wakes himself up. He had them all last night. Leya stayed awake with him. Allergies, the doctor said. Pollen. Mold. What he’s allergic to is everything you can’t see.

  Leya always stays up when he gets like that, since he almost died inside her. One of those twisted-cord things. But he’s fine now and his brain is fine. We’re super lucky.

  When everybody’s in the car, I go three blocks to Leya’s dad’s house, pick him up, and hit Atlantic Boulevard, then Martin Luther King.

  I got the radio going. Nobody says nothing the whole way to the bank. Not even little Felix. We’re all some combination of nervous, anxious, and unhappy, hoping it can get worked out today and just be done.

  What this bank is, is two big redbrick squares and gray horizontal lines of concrete. Inside, it smells like newspaper and old cigarette smoke, like people used to be able to smoke in this building and then they couldn’t, but it never stopped smelling.

  I sign the signing-in form and we wait to get called. Leya has Felix in his little hat already. She’s worried about him getting cold from air-conditioning. We sit for twenty minutes.

  Felix won’t take his sippy cup of juice from me even though I’m trying, and my father-in-law’s just staring into the parking lot like he wants to be back out there and done with this.

  That’s when I’m done with waiting. I go up to this guy’s desk that’s nearby and not doing a thing but being on his computer.

  “I need to see your loans manager, please,” I say in my super polite voice.

  He don’t even look at me. No respect. He says, “Did you sign in?”

  In the world sitting outside these doo
rs, a guy like this should be scared of talking like this. There’s consequences around here for trying to act above it, the type of things that come up behind you in the dark when you’re walking to your car after work and staring at your phone. It happens so quick you don’t even know what hit you, or from where.

  I feel myself getting heated but I smile since I don’t teach those types of lessons to random fools anymore. Not even when I want to.

  “Yes,” I say, trying to keep it all polite still, “but there’s nobody else here. I’d appreciate if—”

  “Excuse me,” a voice comes from behind me, “perhaps I can be of assistance?”

  I turn and see a light-skinned black girl in a real tight blazer. Skirt to the tops of her knees. Red heels.

  She puts an arm out beside her to show me her open office door. On the glass beside her, it says MIRA WATKINS, BANK MANAGER.

  I’m looking at her, but subtle, trying to drink her in. Almost looking at her without looking at her since I can’t have my wife seeing me see her like that.

  This Mira Watkins isn’t what I expected a bank person to look like. She’s built like maybe she hustled a bit. Like maybe this wasn’t always her career. There’s something I can’t put my finger on about her, so I don’t trip, I get everybody into the office and shut the door.

  She’s sitting behind her desk, behind her gold MIRA WATKINS nameplate, in a tall black leather chair like some type of queen.

  She’s staring at me, looking me right in the middle of my forehead and not in my bad eye. It’s cool. I can tell she’s just assessing. Seeing what I’m about. I’m wondering then if she can tell how real I am. If she has any clue.

  Prolly not, I’m thinking. I’m just one more raza dragging my family in, needing help. Nothing more. There’ll be twenty more of me through that front door today.

  Mira Watkins kicks it off by saying, “What can I do for you all?”

  What I do when I tell her the story is, I start with my father-in-law’s name and account number so she can get to tapping on her computer before I explain the situation and how we got here. I say about the mortgage payment that got missed, the one we didn’t know about. We got a call yesterday from the bank, a person with collections, saying my father-in-law’s behind in his mortgage payments and had been for a couple months.

  That tripped him out. Me too. We’ve never been late.

  So I tried to check the payments with his credit union by phone, but they’d closed by the time I got off work. What I did then was try to figure it out myself by looking online. And I wondered what was going on since he’d just made a payment.

  I mean, I’d just made a payment, but she don’t need to know that.

  And I was confused to see that I had a record of the payment this month and last month, but not the one two months before. That’s where the missing payment was. I’d pushed SEND on the online credit-union form just like every month, but that one had never gotten there. I tell my father-in-law in Spanish to take the check out and hand it to her.

  “It’s for the missing mortgage payment,” I say, “and we can pay any late fees too, right now.”

  She takes the check. Of course she takes the check. But then she gets up and says she has to go check on some things. “There’s only so much I can see on my computer.”

  What this prolly is, is BS, but I’m trying to think of what she wants to check and where. I watch her go. Her ass in that tight skirt. Her shoulders back. Looking like she means to handle something.

  Felix has his hat off and he’s swinging it around in his hand like he’s gonna shake the eyes off it. Leya lets him.

  Hey, she begged me to cosign on this loan. It gets paid on time, all the time. I can’t have nobody in my business. It’s not safe that way.

  Mira Watkins, you better not be messing with me. You better be fixing this. If you don’t, things can happen. People I know can show up late at night where you live. They don’t ask you to fix stuff then. They tell.

  When she comes back, it’s like she’s a different person. Less businessy. Friendlier. On our side. Prolly she wants me to think that anyway.

  She has a folder in her hand, a bunch of papers she’s flipping through. She’s frowning doing it too, but a good frown. “Six years and no late payments. Very impressive. We can take care of this for you, Mister Reynoso.”

  That’s my father-in-law’s name. What Leya’s last name used to be.

  Mira Watkins hands me a late-fee form I have to sign. I make my father-in-law write another check for the $95 fee. It sucks, but it’s not like it’s his money. It’s mine.

  “Things are a little crazy right now,” Mira Watkins says. “I do apologize. I hope you understand how we need to be vigilant.”

  Vigilant? She sees me hate her last word the second it comes out of her mouth and she softens. She lets her shoulders go, leans forward.

  “I’m so sorry this happened.” She says it to me, with feeling, and then she says it down the line, to Leya, and Leya’s dad too, topping it off with a half-decent accent on her “Lo siento.”

  Then she says, “Too many bad things are happening to good people right now. Clerical craziness, that’s what I call it. You get a computer involved and anything can happen. You’ve never missed a payment before, and yet we jump all over it and send it to collections. I’ll look into how that happened, and I’ll make a note in your file that it was taken care of promptly, and maybe we should just give you a phone call next time instead of escalating it right away.”

  There’s a tiredness to how she’s saying it. Like this has happened a lot before, and she’s had to give this speech before, but she seems real with it. There’s shame in her cheeks. A double wrinkle in her brow too, like a bent metal hanger you used to be able to pop car-door locks with.

  She means it, I think. I look at Leya and Leya looks at me. We agree with a look. We believe her.

  I turn back and say, “Can I get something in writing today that says it’s paid and you’re calling off your collection services?”

  She claws long fingernails at me in the air, like she’s catching my words, right before she moves her hands back to the keyboard to start typing. “I’m all over it.”

  And she is. And that’s good. For us. But for her too.

  Ghost

  Sunday, September 14, 2008

  Morning

  4

  By the time the safe is out and up where I can get at it, the dope is already bagged, sealed up, and on its way to evidence somewhere. Flat on its back, the thing is sitting in the middle of the living room. It’s got a layer of concrete dust all over it from where it got pulled out of the floor.

  DEA’s clearing out. They’re giving me a wide berth. They left an outlet up for me, though, which is always good. I plug in and drill a few holes in the safe’s door with a diamond tip that goes dull while I’m doing it, so I grab another one and plow through so I can see the mechanism I’m dealing with. Two tumblers, it looks like. I’m scoping it. Yeah. Two tumblers. Maybe.

  I unscrew the anchor for the handle and take it off, thinking for just a second about all the hands that must’ve turned it through the years. I clamp my vise grips to the stump that’s left over and give it a jar just to see if it’ll hold. It does.

  Collins hovers nearby. He wants a status update so he can make a decision about what happens next. He sees it’s keyed but he’s seen enough of this now not to ask if a bump will work. Because it fucking won’t.

  “Antique and weird,” I say, pressing my eye closer to the scope and adjusting the light. “Foreign. Got to be.”

  The safe is beat to shit. No markings on it. It’s a straight-up contraband safe. The kind that gets passed around from gang to gang when deals go down. That happens sometimes. Don’t ask me why. I’ve opened a safe before and there was no use taking it in for evidence so we left it. A couple years later I found it again, in a different part of town, all patched up, so I cracked it again.

  When Collins takes a step towar
ds me, a little chunk of concrete shoots from under his foot like a pebble and goes skidding over the carpet. “Where do you think this came from?”

  “Could be anywhere.” I take my eye off the scope and look up at him. “Probably off a boat from just over there.” I nod towards the port.

  He huffs. “ETO?”

  That’s estimated time to opening. Pretty sure that’s not official. It’s just something I’ve always heard him say.

  “Depends what it’s lined with. If it’s a fire safe, it could be a lot of things.”

  “Just a number, Ghost.”

  I shrug, but my heart’s beating fast. This is where I have to sell it. Where he has to believe me. So I don’t look at him. I stare at the safe instead.

  “Forty minutes? I see two tumblers, but there might be three.”

  Collins waves the information away. He doesn’t need to know it. But it’s me covering my ass. He looks at me for a solid few seconds and then gives the order to round up the troops, grab up their gear, and ride.

  “Call when it pops.”

  “Yes, sir. Always do.” I don’t have to, but Collins likes it when I call him sir.

  So that’s how it works. They leave me alone, and when I bust it, I call. I stay till somebody comes so as to preserve chain of custody, then I’m gone. It’s not always like this, but this is how it goes down more often than you’d think.

  Nobody that works outside the profession ever believes it. They think it’s like TV where everybody gets watched like a hawk at all times. It’s not.

  I’ve been working scenes for eleven years on my own, and four before that with Frank. Eleven years means I’m long since trustworthy. I’m solid. And the fact is, DEA doesn’t need to be wasting man-hours babysitting me while I crack. They got paperwork just like everybody else. Evidence to inventory. Maybe even pursuing more warrants. They might even be hitting another spot while they got their crew together. I don’t know. It’s possible.