Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  Big Danny might not always have been big, but I only known him since he was. He’s almost six foot, up over two hundred pounds, all in the neck and shoulders, since he lifts. He’s got a gut to him too.

  He eats for real. I seen him eat half a pig once. Two feet. Legs. Most of the side of it. It was a small pig, but still. Backyard roast, homemade barbecue sauce. He couldn’t help himself.

  But he’s not interested in anything other than leaving now, the way he’s standing by the door, in front of the dimpled yellow glass, looking at me but not looking at me. Rooster sent him. It’s definitely time.

  The song’s winding down with some horns, and then REO Speedwagon’s on just after. The dance floor empties. What it is, is “Take It on the Run” as a break. After this song, they’ll play the stuff the kids want. Rap. Club music. It’s a good time to leave.

  Leya knows I’m about to go too, the way her hands drop off me when she sees Big Danny hanging out. She gets how that was our last dance.

  I kiss her, good but quick, and drop her off at the middle table with her parents and sister. I push Felix’s headphones back a little to kiss his head and then slide them back forward. I say my goodbyes while everybody’s trying to throw guilt my way, take one last picture with my niece in her wide pink dress, and then I’m gone.

  7

  The 710’s good at night going south. Fast. It feels like in no time we’re on the 47 and those harbor lights and cranes are throwing themselves at us, in reds and blues and yellows. I prefer them to the flashing ones inside Bateman Hall. I like them better when they’re still, not moving, not trying to get crazy.

  Me and Big Danny, we don’t talk on the ride. Neither of us is the type. He chews gum. I look out windows. It’s what we do all the way there.

  Big Danny pulls up on First Street in San Pedro into one of the resident spots that got cleared out for us. He gets the bag with Rooster’s 10 percent, the ninety-two gees, out of the trunk, and we go to the door of the apartment building that’s about to be given up.

  Next to that door is a guy smoking. A guy I recognize.

  “Gafas,” he says to me. Sometimes people call me that.

  “Hector,” I say back.

  He puts his hand out, not to shake. To hand me a key. I take it. It’s wet from his sweating palm, warm too.

  Late twenties and already he’s got a belly on him like he’s eight months pregnant. The rest of him’s skinny. Almost twelve years I’ve known of him and he’s never looked this sick, just bloated out. Bags under his eyes from not sleeping. Skin looking a dirty-milk pale from never going outside during the day.

  He’s never been the same since he got back from Mexico. I get why too. The work he was doing down there would turn anybody into a zombie.

  I mean, even looking at him right now makes me almost chuck my birria up, and all he ever did was tell me a story about barrels when he got back. Barrels, and what gets put into them.

  I tripped out on it. And what’s worse is how it’s stuck to me. I get nightmares about it. Leya says I scream sometimes in my sleep.

  I take some antacids out of my pocket and chew on them. My stomach’s been messing with me lately. Some type of flu prolly.

  Me and Hector don’t have time to talk and that’s good with me. The door opens without Big Danny needing to knock.

  They’re waiting for us. Four of them. Long Beach is there. Watts is there. Wilmington. And one I don’t recognize too. Santa Fe Springs, prolly. I make a note in my head to check. The others have already been and gone.

  We go in and say our hellos the same to all of them, real respectful. The safe’s open, almost full. Seems like it’s three quarters of a refrigerator down there, all big in its spot that’s chiseled into the concrete foundation like a little grave.

  I sit at the foot of it, on my knees. I don’t like doing it like this. I never like it, but I do it. I put the money in, one stack after the other until it’ll be almost all flat to the door.

  Big Danny’s got my back. In this life, you trust people, but you don’t trust people. Sometimes, you can’t help it. You have to.

  And then, it’s about doing it as fast as you can and getting up out of it. My stomach still don’t feel good. It won’t until we leave.

  I mean, there’s a lot of juice outside this room making sure this goes right. A lot.

  What this is, is the sixth safe I’ve done like this. We do about one a year, sometimes two. It depends. But the looks on faces are always the same when it goes down. It’s a weird feeling being in a room where almost every fool is being professional but still is day-dreaming at the same time.

  Thinking about that money, what they’d do with it if they had it all, how good it’d be. It’s like they’re here and not here at the same time.

  When I’m done, I test the door to make sure it’ll close. It does, so I lock it. I snap them out of it with that. I put the key in my pocket, for later, to give to Rooster. That’s when everybody starts breathing normal again.

  Big Danny wipes for prints and we say our goodbyes one by one and then we go. As we’re walking out, a vacuum goes on. I say bye to Hector on the way to the car and tell him to keep looking after his mother. He just nods.

  There’s always that one story. The warning story that happened to somebody that everybody knows, and it keeps other fools from getting the smart idea of stealing.

  For stuff like this, it all comes down to this fool named Cuco.

  Everybody knows Cuco now. He’s cautionary, a super special example.

  What happened was, he used to work for a South Gate crew. Back in the day, he ran a house for them. First it was for pimping girls, but then he moved up to a little spot on the edge of Cudahy and it was mostly drugs, but some guns too.

  So this fool Cuco, he gets it in his head one day to rob the safe after everybody’s put their money in the pot. He thinks he’ll do it when everybody’s gone.

  This is how Cuco got to be the reason we have to sit people on families and girlfriends now. You know, as insurance until everything’s settled.

  So it gets late and Cuco’s only there with one other lil fool that he sends out for food, which is never how it should go down, but the little one don’t know any better, so he goes.

  After that it’s just Cuco and no combination for the safe, since you can’t be leaving people around it that know how to open it. So this dumbass, he drives a forklift that he’d been hiding down the block into the garage, and he picks the safe up and puts it in a truck he had stashed from before.

  I don’t even remember how much was in that safe. Maybe a hundred gees. Not more than one twenty. Low numbers. Nowhere near what we put in now.

  But anyway, this fool gets in his truck and drives it over to his girlfriend’s spot and they decide to celebrate there.

  Just real quick, you know? Little bit of perico for heisting it right. Never mind that he hasn’t opened anything, hasn’t even got anything real in his hands yet. Or that he didn’t even tie his loose strings up.

  Back at the spot, the lil homie walks into an empty house holding a bag of food. Nobody’s there. Not in the kitchen. Not in the back room. And definitely not in the garage.

  He saw all the money go into the safe, so he knows something bad happened, but he don’t know it’s Cuco that did it. For all he can tell, somebody rolled in, kidnapped Cuco, and took the safe, so he makes a call.

  That lil homie was Hector, the smoker outside, the one with the gut. Being quick for calling got him a good promotion for a while too. Before he got deported back to Mexico anyway.

  Like lightning, some hood detectives from various clicks swoop down to see what’s up. Any gang that put money in that safe sent somebody.

  They start looking around too. A guy from Bellflower notices how there must’ve been a big truck parked out back in the alley, from the tire tracks in some dust.

  What was supposed to be tactical, the garage facing the alley and making it easy to roll up and load or empty the safe an
d go quick, got shown as a big weakness right then. Especially when there’s a abandoned forklift sitting right there too.

  Neighbors get asked about a truck after that, and somebody’s seen one, a moving truck. Word goes out. Everybody tells everybody to be on the lookout.

  What the first stop is after that, is Cuco’s girl’s house she shares with her cousin. There’s a truck there fitting the description. And it’s locked too.

  So some homies show up with snippers and get that lock off and the truck gets opened. There’s a safe in it. Our safe. With our money.

  So those same homies go in the house by the back door then. It’s locked but that’s nothing to people that want in.

  And they come through too. Four of them. And they find Cuco in his girl’s bed since everything ended up getting bigger than one little celebration.

  But he’s sorry. He’s crazy sorry. He was just, like, messing with us. Exposing a security problem, yeah. And it’s not like he opened it. Not like he ever could have. So it’s all good, right?

  He got told to shut up. The girl got told if she wanted to live, if she wanted her cousin to live, she had to go into that gross-ass kitchen nobody ever cleaned and get the biggest knife she had in there to cut his throat up.

  Cuco’s face right then, people say it was like he died a death right there just looking in her eyes, knowing she’d do it to him.

  Prolly this’s why it’s not a good idea to be with a girl that hustles. A girl that knows odds. A girl that survives by nature. She’ll do you. If she has to.

  And she did too. Of course she did. She got up, went to the kitchen, came back with a knife. When you hear this story get retold, it’s a butcher knife, some six-inch, super sharp thing you can buy from TV.

  Man, it wasn’t. It was a small little steak knife. Four inches, if that. One of those thin ones with a black handle was all she had in the spot. Serrated edge with the tip broken off. Wasn’t even clean.

  I mean, Cuco tried to run first. But, see, he got pinned down. A knee on the back of the skull will do that to you. And she went into him.

  She didn’t look, but she sure stabbed him up. Did it until it bent and broke, that little blade. Right there on the floor. On the raggedy brown carpet with cigarette burns in it, and a patch that turned yellow from bleach put on it years ago.

  She got beat after that. Choked. Not just to do it, but to give her a story. For the Sheriffs.

  She did time for sorting out Cuco. Voluntary manslaughter. No contest. Mitigating circumstances being that she was a domestic abuse victim and all.

  She got time served, plus her sentence reduced to one year at Sybil Brand. Got out in eight months, right before they closed it down due to earthquake damage.

  She did that time right too. Kept her mouth shut. Never said nothing to nobody.

  Now she’s back in Lynwood, working four days a week at El Paisas on Long Beach. She has a kid. They both get taken care of. She’s doing real good. Staying clean.

  I should know too. I still roll through. I still say what’s up to her.

  Neither one of us ever mentions that I was in the room, that I had to watch all of it, or that I was the one that told her she had to do it. We’ll both be taking that weight to our graves.

  Ghost

  Sunday, September 14, 2008

  Late Morning

  8

  I’m on the road and I’m settling. Like, I was a Jarrito, all shook up and fizzy while two DEA jackets came back and logged the safe’s contents and bagged it without saying shit about any of it, because of course they wouldn’t. I’m trusted. Now I’m out and I’m driving, and I’m letting the bubbles I had trapped inside me out in a big-ass yell as I take my foot off the gas and cruise down the far side of the Vincent Thomas Bridge with my windows open. One of the best rides in all Los Angeles.

  The port’s on both sides of me with cranes like long-legged dragons all lined up in rows above oil tankers and container boats from China. Up this high, I can see where most of America first gets its everything. Where the big metal boxes land and sit before getting driven off to Iowa or Washington or Fresno.

  Driving’s a gift, man. Freedom is what it is. I get to go where I want, when I want, and I love that because the times when I never had nothing still stick to me. Like concrete between my ribs. Because those heavy spaces never forget being hungry. Never forget L.A. potholes on a bouncing bus. Shit, the bus is like being in a room with a bunch of people you’d never wanna hang out with but you have to, and the driver’s driving at his pace, on his schedule, and the route is the route. It doesn’t change. Not even if he wants it to.

  Up ahead, the stoplight pops red on Terminal Island and I push the brake in real easy as I roll up my windows and get the air going. It doesn’t help, though.

  I’m smelling smells again.

  I try to ignore it. I swipe at my nose hard like that’s going to do anything, and I end up just looking like a coke head to the lady in the car next to me. I laugh when I catch her glance at me real quick out of the side of her bug-eye-looking sunglasses, because it’s not like that’s untrue. Long as I got this body, I’m an addict. That’s how I’m programmed. That doesn’t change.

  The light goes green and I let her beat me off the line. Speeding happens all the time on this stretch. I don’t do it because it’s a hassle. CHP know better than to stop me, but Port Police don’t. They don’t see blank black plates much, I guess. I never get ticketed after the lights go spinning behind me. I just got to pull over and jaw. That’s a Frank word. He jaws with people, and now I do too.

  Because if you get pulled over with nothing plates that need explaining, you got to jaw and show ID and then trade a story about the time we opened a safe in Compton and besides drugs and cash, it had a bunch of unexpected old Playboys in it because some young gangster was a serious collector. They were all from the seventies, all pristine and in little plastic bags. Sheriffs didn’t feel bad opening the bags because they said there might be evidence in there, but all there was were little bookmarking receipts from where they got bought. Maybe you leave out the bit about how you heard later that the kid that owned them was second-generation gangster and his dad had died in the cracked-out eighties, and the only thing left of the old man was this collection. The kid kept it perfect, like his dad might be back home any minute. It’s the family stories that always kill me.

  Nearly all the stuff coming out of safes I bust for law enforcement is MDMS: money, drugs, metals, and stones. The first two and the last one speak for themselves. It’s the metals that are interesting, usually. You got your golds, your silvers. I’ve never seen platinum on its own in a bar, but I’ve seen platinum-plated handguns, platinum teeth grills and jewelry and watches, even a platinum-and-gold abacus out in Monterey Park. No shit. Been seeing more metals lately. Maybe because people think the economy is going to go full meltdown and it’s better to have the real stuff to back it up.

  Weirdest thing I ever found: some dildo made of horn. Like, animal horn. Rhinoceros or antelope or something. I was glad I had my gloves on for that. The agents in the room that day still tell that story. If you can’t see it coming, nearly all of them end with some joke about being too horny or how the only antidote to being horny is horn, and then everybody listening laughs louder than they’re supposed to. That’s kind of how it is in this life. On both sides, you take funny where you can get it, and you don’t question it.

  I put the accelerator in and leave T.I. behind, climbing up the Desmond Bridge toward Long Beach. This side’s not as pretty as the Pedro side. More gas stuff. More buildings. Fewer dragon cranes. The engine of the loaded-down semi in the lane next to me is grinding pretty hard as he downshifts, and I push past him, get in the middle lane.

  Saddest thing I ever found, and this was back when I was still apprenticing for Frank, was a pair of baby booties knitted with alternating blue and white thread, straight Dodger colors, all looking like somebody’s abuela put serious love into making them. Each one
like a little reminder that gangsters got kids too. That even if you’re on the hustle, you don’t stop fucking or making more humans. Just maybe you do it faster than folks with plans ever do, because in that life, there’s only go, go, go.

  Anyways, these booties weren’t bigger than my palms when I picked them up. But that’s when I saw that there were these spots on them. Little brown-red dots on the white, and little brown-purple dots on the blue. It could only have been blood.

  I remember I said, “Oh, fuck,” when I saw that, and then, “Excuse my language please, Frank.”

  Frank didn’t say anything.

  Out of anybody, he knows what having a dead kid is about. And you don’t push a man when you can see he’s thinking about things he’s been through.

  Of course, those dots don’t mean the baby is dead or anything, but that’s sure the feeling I got holding them. They were heavy in my hands, heavy like rocks, so I put them back all gentle, and I tried not to think about them being in an evidence lockup somewhere.

  It took a while, but me and Frank talked a lot about those booties afterwards. Maybe that’s why we asked around about them to anybody we did freelance for. Tried to match up any crimes or deaths of minors to that address. Never came up with anything. It ended up being a mystery we had to get comfortable with. Because that’s life. You can’t know everything. Only some of it. Only the parts that ever find you.

  So we speculated how it might’ve went down, how they ended up in a safe. The short answer is because they’re precious, and whoever put those there wanted that tiny little piece of that baby’s life to stay safe forever, sealed up, nearby. And that always made me think of Rose. How her one regret was never being able to have kids. That was my regret too, not for me, for her. Because goddamn, the world is going to be better off without any more of me in it, but it sure could have used a lot more of her.

  I’m smelling sunscreen again. Coconut and leaves and glue. Hawaiian Tropic. The oddness of it is, I never wore that sunscreen. Never wore any kind. Show me a junkie that ever did and he wasn’t any kind of junkie. I still don’t carry any in my Jeep, but that’s besides the point. The point is, now I’m smelling it. So strong it’s like someone’s holding it under my nose. And I’m smelling the sea with it too. Like, salt air. And they’re mixing together inside me while I stare at this goddamn scented cutout of a tree on my rearview that I just put on this morning, and it promises me it’s Pine Fresh, but all I smell is Rose wearing her sunscreen and I’m thinking about us at the beach for the first time, and I’m speeding up on the 710 North, passing the hauling semis, going fast, but that’s just stupid. I know I can’t outrun the smell. I know it’s inside me. I know she’s still inside me, and it’s shit like this that makes me feel like she’s still here, even a little.