Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  I dodge a couple people going the other way before I know what to say about the holes. I think it’ll play, so I call in.

  Some secretary guy answers. I’ve never heard his voice before, so I just ask for Collins. When I get transferred to the man and he picks up, I tell him there’s something he should know about the safe if he don’t already know it. But first, I ask him what he knows.

  “A safe’s a safe,” he says. “You fill them, and we confiscate them.”

  That’s ignorance and arrogance is what that is, just a quick way to be wrong 100 percent of the time.

  I say, “This one had powder in the door of it. I don’t know how old it was but I’m told it can still blow. You’re super lucky it didn’t.”

  I turn the corner on Sixth and walk down it as I hear him put me on hold. He’s checking. This means he’s not sure if he believes me, or if he does believe me, he don’t know how he feels about learning it now and not before.

  If I’m telling the truth, he might jump to some type of conclusions about why it was there in the first place. He might wonder if we’re trying to kill him. This is a stupid thing to wonder.

  Rooster would never go that route, but if he did, it would look like a car accident, or something messed up and personal, like that sex self-choking thing, and if Collins is breathing right now it’s because we want him to. I think he gets that, since he comes back on the phone and confirms what I said.

  After, he says, “What’s the best way to deal with this?”

  Me and him, we have some separate business together. He’s asking since he thinks this might put other things at risk.

  “Call him in,” I say. “Put it in his face. See what he tells you about it. I’m sure he’ll be slick. If that don’t give you enough reason to take him off what he’s doing, then find one. Is he DEA?”

  “I can’t disclose that,” Collins says, but he says it in a way, like, Keep digging.

  I don’t need to dig. There’s only one other option.

  “So freelance then,” I say. “How about you call his boss and rat him out about messing up. Act concerned. Fish for a reason why he missed it. I bet they give you one. After that, cut him loose, but do it like it’s protocol.”

  “Does this endanger the wedding party?”

  That’s what Collins calls this thing I’m helping him out with. I don’t know why he picked something so stupid. I never bothered asking.

  “It could,” I say. “It could mess it up bad, but it won’t if you get him out of circulation.”

  That’s the end of the conversation. We don’t say goodbye. I’m right out in front of Mr. Cartoon’s tattoo shop when I hang up.

  I look in and there’s a guy reading at the front desk. Behind him is a big white poster of a smiling clown looking dangerous. Seeing it reminds me of peabrains and Rooster signing that at me, about this safecracker being one.

  But seeing this, this just reminds me that there’s different types of clowns, with different types of faces. Smart clowns put on masks for all sorts of reasons and prolly this safecracker is smarter than we think.

  Collins could make this whole thing easy. He could give us a name and a address. He won’t. That’s not how it works and that’s okay. I’m not even tripping. I’m turning and walking back to the car already dialing another number.

  This is me spreading the word. We know city and county workers up and down the ladder. We know dirty cops with databases.

  We know delivery drivers, postal workers, garbagemen. You know, people with daily routes all over the city. People that know addresses.

  We don’t know everyone but we know a few. If all it takes is six degrees of separation, Rooster likes saying we know four of them and can break into the houses of the other two.

  Hey, people aren’t needles in haystacks. They have phone numbers, a house or a apartment. They have connections. They live in neighborhoods and walk around.

  They buy groceries. They drink at bars that have bartenders, security, regulars. They get found since somebody will know somebody that knows them. This is why we will find out who he is and where he stays.

  We’ve got a description too. He’s five-seven or five-eight. He’s some type of brown, likely raza. He has no visible tattoos. His nose is a little bent.

  We would have more but he’s smart. He wore a hat and sunglasses. What we do have, is he drives a white Jeep with blacked-out plates. As big as this city is, there can only be one of those in it, two at most, and when we find it, we find him.

  This safecracker, he broke the rules. There’s no doubt to that. He’s guilty. How this is playing out makes me think of that movie Dead Man Walking, since that’s what he is now. It’s only a matter of when and how.

  That’s not on me either. That’s on him. He knew what he was doing. Putting that money in a bag and walking out like it was his? That was him putting a gun to his own head and pulling the trigger. It’s just suicide with a slow-motion bullet.

  Ghost

  Sunday, September 14, 2008

  Midafternoon

  16

  I’m on my way to an ulcer when I do my checkin, sign for my visitor pass, and get escorted down to meet Collins in the basement of the federal evidence lockup. It used to be all theirs alone, but because of budget cuts and a government building across town getting condemned for being the opposite of earthquake-proof, they share with another agency now.

  I get buzzed through a door and Collins is there on the other side of it, surrounded by metal shelfs full of all kinds of shit. I follow him down a row toward the back wall. It smells like mold and plastic baggies down here and not like grilled cheese, which I’m glad of. The mortar of the back cinder-block wall is going dark gray in places. Water always wants to get in. Always does get in, somehow. It’s why so few places got basements in Los Angeles. Too close to the water table or something.

  When we’re almost to the end of the row, we go by a stuffed big cat on the bottom of the shelf. It’s big and awkward and barely fits. You can tell whoever put it there had to take the shelf above off its pegs and remove it to make room. It’s, like, a cougar or something, and it’s creepy as hell seeing a frozen growly face and big-ass bared fangs bagged up in a clear sheet. Almost like it suffocated to death.

  Collins hears me slow down. “That’s crazy, right?”

  Careful to hide the bulges on my ankles, I kneel down slow and press the bottom of its nearest cougar tooth with a thumb tip and have to pull my hand away because it’s still sharp.

  When I’m down there, I scratch my ankle like it’s itching, but I’m checking the tape on my socks. It’ll hold. The money’s getting wet from me sweating, but this way was the only way. Couldn’t transfer it to the lockbox on the street or in the parking lot of a government building. That’d be stupid. Couldn’t pull over and do it earlier or I’d be late and I wasn’t about to give Collins anything to wonder about. So this was it. Me, walking through a federal facility with wads of cash taped around my ankles. Going in confident. Like it’s just another day, and I didn’t do shit.

  I give the cougar one last look, stand up, and say, “So, taxidermy’s illegal now?”

  “It probably fucking should be,” Collins says, “but no. There’s a crew running drugs in dead animals like this because the formaldehyde smell throws off the dogs. But if it’s freshly done and one of the baggies inside pops and soaks some up, it’s nothing but bad news for whoever ends up sniffing it. Sometimes those junkies just get sick. Catastrophe sick. Corrodes the upper gastrointestinal tract, apparently. Other times, they just die. This fucker’s got trafficking and murder charges on him now. No points for guessing which one the U.S. Attorney’s licking her chops over.”

  This is the irony of doing what I do. I’ve been clean so long, nobody knows I’m an addict. Nobody knows I got empathy. That junkies aren’t them or they to me. They are me. And dead is what I could’ve been many times over. I could’ve sniffed the wrong shit very easily. Or cooked bad stuff. I wasn’t w
hat you’d call discriminating early on. I’d do anything. I’ve dosed out three times in my life that I know of. I’ve blacked out twice that. Maybe more. That’s not the kind of thing you can know exact numbers of.

  We hit the end of the row and follow the back wall to a series of small rooms no bigger than closets. I’ve been here before, but only once. In the second small room, on the floor, is the safe, sitting on its ass with the door open toward us. As soon as we walk in, my relief almost knocks me over.

  Collins doesn’t know I took anything. He’s trying to show me something.

  And it’s the safe I cracked a couple of hours ago, the one I stole from. Two holes have been drilled into the top of its door, like a giant Dracula sunk his teeth into it. It’s not terrible for me, but it’s definitely not good.

  It means I fucked up.

  “On-site dusting didn’t come up with any explosives residue, as you know, or we’d never have you popping it otherwise. But it did come up positive here. And we noticed these.”

  He nods at the holes. “We’re guessing they’ve been in there a damn long time. That it’s been moved a lot and maybe whatever residue was on the outside got swiped off. Who knows?”

  He’s waiting to see if I’ll say something, but there’s no point now.

  I missed it. At the very least, I should’ve seen and reported it when I cracked it, but I didn’t. I was a little busy.

  “They put dynamite powder in there. Just like it was goddamn Looney Tunes.” He points to the spot where they drilled and packed it in, but he don’t need to. It’s obvious.

  I don’t know shit about explosives. I know what I’ve seen in movies. Like, vibration and heat are bad for them. Only reason why I can think of, is that this was a precaution to explode anybody trying to blow the safe door. I don’t do that stuff, I’m a drill-and-punch guy, but some other gang might not know any better and try to, if they knew where the safe was at.

  “Good thing you came from the bottom,” Collins is saying. “You know how lucky you are? Could have blown up that whole building.”

  He’s smiling when he slaps me on the back. “The fuckers that did this are never getting out of prison. Possessing explosives after nine-eleven? Man, that’s some special kind of stupid. We’re going to hit them with some terrorism shit now. They are stone-cold fucked.”

  All I can think about is how there’s nothing I can do about that. Some dude wants to spend his time drilling into the top of the door without any sense of how it might affect the lock mechanism, gets blind lucky he doesn’t hit anything and the door happens to be solid where he drilled and not pocketed, so he can dump some dynamite dust in there? I don’t know the odds of that, but I’m guessing he was probably more likely to blow himself up than me.

  Collins’s faced up to me now, angling his chin at me. “How’d you miss that?”

  I missed it because it was on the top of the door, and the door was sealed, concealing the holes. I missed it because I drilled up from the bottom. I missed it because I didn’t do an inspection on the door moat because I was down to steal everything in it that I could carry, but even if I did eyeball the moat, there’s no guarantee I’d have seen it, and even if I did, I might not have called in for backup or even thought to run tests, because who the fuck drills into their own safe door and dumps explosives into it? First I’ve ever seen or heard of it.

  None of these things will make Collins happy, though, so I decide on some version of the truth.

  “My girlfriend and I have been going through it,” I say.

  “I get it,” he says, and he does. Far as I know, he’s on wife number three. “But you got to be a pro. It’s not just you out there.”

  Well, I’m thinking, it is just me when you leave me on-site by myself.

  “You’re absolutely right,” I say. This sentence is one of the most useful sentences in the English language. It backs people off. It’s a jab that doesn’t seem like a jab. And I say it sincere too, so he thinks I mean it. And then, just to nail it in, I repeat it, “You’re absolutely right.”

  That’s a double jab.

  Collins stares at me to gauge how sincere I am and smiles when he thinks I’m still trustworthy. I don’t smile, though. I frown and look down at the floor to show him I’m still mad at myself for not catching this. It’s exactly what he wants to see.

  “Good,” he says, “because we both know this can’t happen again.”

  I tilt my head and nod. I don’t ask him how many times he’s seen it, because I’ve been doing this pretty solid for near eleven years and this is a goddamn first, but okay. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.

  Collins gestures toward the door and turns the light off behind us. “Sorry to hear about your girl, though. That’s rough.”

  “I think we gotta break up soon. Actually, I know we do.”

  He nods at that, all solemn.

  But then I say, “Her husband’s coming back.”

  And Collins damn near cracks a rib laughing.

  17

  I’ve got no hands. They’re full with the heavy gear I got from the Jeep. The only way to bring it up was in one go, not attracting attention—well, as little as I can, anyway. So I drag my kit boxes and a suitcase that’s got wheels on all four corners of its bottom. I push 6 on the elevator push pad, doors close, and I go up.

  What I said to Collins, it’s no lie. Not something I said to deflect and get out of there. Not completely. When I key into the hotel room door of 626, twist the handle, and kick it open with my foot, Mira’s there, red around her eyes and acting like she’s not just been crying.

  She gets like that after video chatting with her husband. He’s in Afghanistan till next month. Seventeen months he’s been there. She doesn’t do it much because it’s so hard to get the timing right. It’s like a twelve-hour difference and that’s if he’s back and safe at the base and not out doing maneuvers or whatever American soldiers are doing over there. Shooting terrorists, you’d hope. But it’s probably things like setting up offices and scheduling convoys and having dumb conversations with dangerous people that never go anywhere because they just want us the fuck out of their country.

  I don’t know what her husband does. Never even asked. That’s not something I’m allowed to talk about. She’s never said not to, but I feel it.

  The door’s on a spring and it’s swinging back towards me so I reach my hand out and bang my drill case into it because that’s all I can do to keep it open. Mira sees this and she’s up off her spot on the king bed quick, through the little hall, and grabbing the door so it won’t shut on me and pulling me in.

  I must be smirking or something because she says, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I say, but it’s something.

  A whole lot of somethings. I kick this wheely suitcase she got for me as a kind of going-away present toward her and it stalls on the carpet and tips. She sticks a foot out before it falls flat and catches it.

  I’m in then. I set my kits down on the bed and lock the door.

  She’s already got the luggage rack set up in the corner by the dresser, this thin-legged metal thing that looks like it’s going to bust when she puts my suitcase on it. It’s got everything I need inside. Socks. Shirts. Pants. A toothbrush. A comb. All the things I need to never go home again.

  This was always our plan: the moment I took anything, I’d go to places where no one who ever knew me would guess I’d be. And nobody I ever knew would look for me at the Crystal Casino hotel in Compton. Not Frank. Not Collins. Not anybody. I hate gambling. I can’t stand not being in control of the game.

  Now, being mobile like this, it’s even more important. Mira doesn’t know entirely why just yet, but she’s about to find out.

  “So?” Mira’s saying so, but she means, why are you late? How did it go? What happened? Why did you make me wait?

  I just look at her. I smile. She loves this and hates it at the same time.

  See, between Mira Watkins and me, it’s like th
is animal thing. I always know where she’s at in the room. Even if we are both looking at something else, it’s like I can feel her movements, you know? I zoom in on her, even without looking, and I know how she’s feeling about something.

  It’s not love. It never will be. It’s recognition. We see each other. We know we’re survivors. We know where the scars are. We get what made them.

  She’s in a T-shirt and jeans, and I know what’s underneath. Out of heels, Mira’s five-three. When she’s not eating celery lunches, she’s one-thirty with Cs, curvy like real women are, the best women. Soft in the right places, firm in the rest. Black hair hanging in a banker’s power cut, she calls it. It sways a little as she shakes her head at me for wasting up all of her time. It’s this short, sharp bob that frames her face and it’s clippered on the base of her skull like her hair’s afraid of her neck.

  “You don’t answer questions now?” She makes this squeaky tsk sound like she’s kissing her teeth at me.

  “Paciencia.” I open my tool kits on the bed. “It’s good for you. Makes you a better person.”

  She scrunches her face up. “Don’t be pulling that Spanish on me like it’s gonna work. I’m mad at you.”

  Mira never lied a day in her life. She is mad. And that’s okay. I like it. She can see I like it, though, so she crosses the room to me and stares me straight in the face.

  18

  Mira knows her name means look in Spanish. She abuses it. Growing up speaking Spanish and English, me meeting her was like meeting someone named Look. Of course I looked then. I paid attention like it was a command. And she’s worth looking at. Some women just are, commanding your eyes, promising secrets.

  Nobody would ever look at Rose twice, not when she was sick. I saw it firsthand. People would even try not to look at her even once. And I think somehow that that’s why she acted out. To be seen. But that girl, she could rearrange your whole soul with a look. Mira’s different. She’s natural. Just seeing her reminds me I’m still here. That I’m human. That I got needs.