Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  I got my mouth. I got my guts. I got a way of talking myself out of anything.

  Shit.

  I could’ve been dead in my Jeep if I didn’t pass Blanco’s Esmerelda test.

  I’m going to make this worth it, I tell myself. All the way worth it.

  But my heart’s still pounding up in my ears as Blanco goes first and I follow him up. Moving slow-slow over dirty tiles that stick to the bottoms of our shoes. The kitchen’s dark, but not so dark we can’t see. On the counter by the sink is a hot plate with a pan sitting on it, and some sort of melted pasta stuck to it. A minifridge is in the hole where a big fridge should be. Next to it is a trash corner piled up with empty beer-case boxes, tissues, and fast-food containers.

  To the right of that mountain is an open doorway into a hall that has blue and orange colors alternating in it. Flashing TV shadows paint white walls nobody ever bothered to do anything with.

  Above the doorway, stuck to the cottage cheese of the ceiling, are beer-bottle caps. There must be a couple hundred of them, all pressed in by hands. This whole place smells like stale beer.

  And it hits me then, I can actually smell it.

  My nose is mine again. For a minute at least. Not buried in memories.

  And that’s a weird feeling. Because it makes all this more real. More worrying. But also better somehow too.

  I mean, I haven’t gone in wild like this in I don’t know how long. For sure this isn’t a well-organized way to go in. It’s hit and hope. First time in years I haven’t gone in safe. But I kind of like it. That’s the crazy part. I’m getting back into it. Like finding an old rhythm I still know how to dance to.

  And there’s that old buzz of getting over, of being some place I’m not supposed to be, pumping up inside me. Running, no, stomping in my veins, getting pushed all the way down to my toes and back up. Hitting that sinking feeling I been having and wrestling it to see which one wins.

  I even smile a little when we step into the hall, Blanco and me. I look left and see a little room with only a chair, an almost-empty bookcase, and a monitor on top of that showing four outside angles of the house. My Jeep’s parked in the lower left one, just the nose of it peeking out. If someone had been sitting in that chair, that would’ve been it for us.

  Next door, the bass is getting louder. It’s shaking the nearest wall. And in the front room, the volume on the TV’s getting louder as we get closer. We can hear words from it now, two white people having an argument about some kind of stupid misunderstanding about coffee. A laugh track comes in right after.

  And it’s luck like this that’s making me feel like the old me. Like I already got everything inside that it takes to pull this. I just got to keep reaching down and keep bringing it up.

  This is me settling. Breathing. Getting balanced.

  Fuck sinking, I want to say. I don’t have time for that.

  But I still got these bees at the back of my brain, buzzing around, bumping into my skull, into each other. Doubts. And I’m hoping that I still got this nasty know-how in me somewhere. Buried, maybe, but still there. Because if I don’t, I got no ideas how I’m pulling this off.

  This is me, teeter-tottering. Up one moment. Then down. Thinking I can do it. Then sure I can’t. But maybe the thing is, I’m just scared that it is all still inside me. That flipping that switch means it can’t be unflipped. And the weirdest thing is what’s steadying my heart right now is that I’m looking at the back of Blanco’s bumpy head and thinking, I know he’s going to screw me. The second this goes bad for him, he’s throwing me under the bus.

  And it’s cool. Better to know it now and see it coming.

  Doesn’t mean I won’t go down swinging, always trying to get that more for the people Mira can help. That’s the anxiety that’s not going away. How to get that money to her. It’s the only goal I got now.

  The only one.

  We check the back room, the bathroom next to it, the bedroom with a closet and a safe inside it, but we leave it till we lock everything down first.

  At the end of the hall, we come to the front room. For me and him, there’s no point wearing masks. This’s my last ride, and Blanco is Blanco. Terrifying people is half the fun of it when you’re him.

  Blanco gets his body behind the near wall and pokes just a little bit of his head out so he can see. I’m blocked off. Unable to see what he’s seeing because I’m behind him, but this is exactly what he’s here for. Crowd control. And nobody’s ever done that better. I tense up when he whistles two quick notes. Like a bap-bap on a trumpet. Like he’s trying to get a parrot’s attention.

  Even with the bass and the TV, it’s just loud enough to be a distraction. And that’s all Blanco needs. He steams right into the room after that, gun up and ready.

  I hear somebody say, “Oh, shit!”

  And then a girl’s screaming and I’m running in behind with my gat up, and it’s obvious what my move is, because Blanco’s already got a young dude cornered and the kid’s holding his hands up in front of him, but there’s a girl in there too and she’s up, trying to bolt past me.

  That’s when I surprise myself.

  When old reflexes jump into me and I just react.

  Grabbing her by the throat and slamming her into the nearest wall, I hold the end of the gun flat against her ear so it’s not pointing at her skull, but out, to where her eyes are looking, up the hallway, out the kitchen, out the door, to freedom that’s just not coming now.

  This is me and not me, I’m thinking. Don’t hurt nobody smart enough to avoid it.

  John’s words are still in me too. Last, do no harm. And that means none. To anybody. And definitely not this girl.

  She’s got hair for days, thick and curly.

  I mash my face into it, smelling leafy shampoo and sweat. I whisper, “You cool it down and I can keep him from shooting you. You don’t, and you’re on your own.”

  I pull my face back and give her a look.

  I watch my words land and her eyes get big.

  Her mouth’s all knotted up and her brow’s furrowed as fuck but she nods at me.

  She’s tough, this one. And smart.

  Good.

  But I’m not worried about that. I’m worried if she’s going to stay that way.

  I let go of her throat. My gloves make a little noise when I do. I breathe out and realize when I step back that I’ve been holding my breath. I got the gun pointing at her chest now, and I point to the floor with my free hand. Like, Get down.

  She goes down flat real quick, with hands behind her head like she’s been asked to do this before.

  I turn and see Blanco’s got the kid facedown on the carpet. Ankles tied. Hands tied behind his back. A knee on his neck just because. I see Blanco’s look, how he’s doing this kid a favor catching him slipping like this. How if he doesn’t end up killing him, he’s saving his life. And that’s right about when I’m guessing that Blanco brought those zip cuffs from home since he didn’t have to ask for them at the pit stop. And when I’m trying to figure out how I feel about that, I follow Blanco’s eyes to the TV, and how it’s a rerun of that show Friends, and seeing that?

  Even I got to laugh.

  And Blanco’s nodding at me.

  “That’s right,” he says. “Get fucking loose!”

  39

  After that, it’s all business. The TV stays on, but gets muted. We don’t turn lights on. Can’t afford to. I go through the kid’s pockets and grab keys and a cell. The keys I hang on to. The cell I toss to Blanco and it goes in the mag bag. I’m about to do the same to the girl but I notice how she doesn’t have her jeans on. And I have to walk over to where the couch is and grab them off the floor. There’s nothing in the pockets but a mascara tube, though.

  It’s like I got my rhythm now. I’m in the moment. Not overthinking things. Just acting. Trying to take it one step at a time.

  I step back over to the girl, about to offer her pants back, but Blanco’s got her wrists and ankles tie
d already, so I just lay her pants down over her legs lengthwise to cover her up in case Blanco gets any ideas he can’t shake.

  To her, I say, “Where’s your purse?”

  She moves her head away from me, talks toward the wall. “I locked my shit in my trunk.”

  I knew she was smart.

  Right about then is when the kid decides to be the exact opposite and run his mouth. “We don’t got nothing.”

  Blanco’s response is another knee on the back of the kid’s neck. It gets kept there, just grinding, for so long that the kid’s drooling and kind of sputtering and coughing into the carpet.

  That shit is hard to watch, so I don’t.

  I’m grabbing my tools from the outside stoop and locking the back door with the deadbolt since the knob lock’s useless now. I drop my gear in the bedroom closet, next to the light gray box of a safe.

  It’s a Fire Fyter. About as tall as my knees. Combination lock. And I know the kid doesn’t have numbers to open it. That’s just not how this game works. Nobody guarding safes ever has the know-how to open them. Lowers the risk of stealing so much better that way.

  I’m about to get cracking, but I need Blanco’s help first, so I roll back to the front room to find him looking out the window. Up the street. Down the street. Checking. Being wary.

  “Hey,” I say to him, “you’ve got to help me flip this real quick.”

  He knows I mean the safe, but he needs two things from me first. We do one more sweep of the house. We find another cell in the bathroom, on the counter. It goes in the mag bag too. Shit, even a wireless router goes in the bag, just because Blanco wants it to. There’s no recording device connected to the outside cameras. We know because we looked for a solid two minutes for a VCR or for a computer it was hooked up to, but then I checked the back of the monitor and it was just four little cables running from a hole in the wall into a splitter in the back like it was 1988 or something.

  After that’s done, we walk the safe forward on the closet floor and then tip it onto its back. These kinds of safes, they’re meant for staying in one piece through fires. They’re not meant to protect against sincere force to the mechanism behind the combo wheel. Frank says it was a big oops in the overall design of these models. Almost like they’d never even talked to a safecracker before.

  Some rap is starting up next door, popular enough that you can hear drunk people shouting the lyrics too loud from the backyard.

  “One last thing,” Blanco says.

  I follow him back to the front room, where we lift the girl up onto the couch and lay her flat facing up. I put her pants over her again, and then we lift the kid on top of her. When we let him go, she makes a sound like he’s crushing her, but it’s not our problem. The dirty towel from the kitchen floor goes in the kid’s mouth after that. The girl has to deal with chewing on part of her sweatshirt.

  We cover them in the blanket they must’ve been under before and move the chair from the study room into the front room so Blanco can sit out of sight with a gun on the door.

  It’s a setup. We know we caught these fuckers on a break of some sort. No other way to explain it. That, honestly and most likely, the other one or two supposed to watch the house are next door drinking and being stupid, and in case they decide to come back over before we’re done, they’ll just think these two are doing it, and that’ll give Blanco all the time he needs to do what he does.

  This closet smells like mothballs and it reminds me of how Mrs. Piñeda’s mother’s room in their apartment used to smell—just, chemically.

  But I don’t mind it.

  I crack the combo wheel housing with a chisel and my baby sledgehammer. It comes off the face of the safe in two pieces. After that, I take a wide stance standing over the safe and drill in bursts, straight down through the wheel. I chew up one diamond tip, then I go again. This’s my thinking time, and my first thought is If I can do this fast enough, I can maybe grab what’s inside and be out the back door before Blanco even notices. I can leave him here, drive, and go meet Mira with whatever I pull out. It’s not the worst idea I ever had, but it’s not great. Just carrying my tools takes both hands, and even if I can stuff the money in the spaces I carved out of the cases, I know I’ll be making noise on the way out, it’s just a matter of whether he hears it or not, over the party music.

  I drill again. The housing’s getting eaten, but that doesn’t matter. All’s I need is a hole big enough to punch the mechanism off its track. And for that, I’ve got a half-inch-thick bit of rebar. I drill once more and try to widen the hole. But the rebar won’t fit. I go again, but I’m hearing something, so I stop.

  It’s voices.

  Voices close to the house.

  Coming closer, getting louder, voices passing by the bedroom window a few feet away from me. So fucking close.

  I stop dead.

  The voices fade a little as they go away from me, towards the front of the house. I drop my drill, grab up the gun, and move to the hallway, where Blanco sees me and smiles before scrunching his face up and nodding me over to a place next to the front door.

  We hear keys getting jingled on the other side, but I’m to where Blanco wants me in three quick steps, standing with the gun in my right, pointed towards the floor, and my left hand up, so the door doesn’t hit me if it swings in hard.

  No point unmuting the TV now.

  The door opens. But not enough to hit my hand. The voices come in just before the people do.

  As he’s stepping in, one says, “Oh, please, that girl’s nothing but a bitch, dude. Besides—”

  And the other must see the couch first, because he jumps in with “What the fuck, loco? You getting down?”

  Right then is when Blanco cocks his gun. For effect. Just letting them know they got got.

  And I close and lock the door behind them.

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

  Monday, September 15, 2008

  Early Evening

  40

  I’m not allowed to even say where Rooster’s house is, what it looks like, or what’s really inside it. This one is his house when he’s here anyway. He’s got others.

  I don’t even know whose names they’re all in. I’ll never know. I can say Lonely drops me at the curb since he’s not allowed in, and I go up the walk to the doorbell and ring it.

  Inside, I know the light’s flashing and I hear some running footsteps coming to the door before Jennifer opens it. She’s out of breath like she ran all the way since her dad must’ve said I’d be coming, and then she turns into a blur and a real good hug before she steps back.

  When she does, I can see how she got her hair cut a couple inches and there’s a wave to it now. My eyes get big as I look at how much she chopped off.

  She sees me staring at her hair and smiles since she’s happy I noticed but also happy she put me off-balance. I make a show of blinking and looking off to the side like I’m uncomfortable even when I’m not. She’s getting sick of me dragging it out, so she closes the door and locks it behind me.

  Jennifer lip-reads real well but that type of thing is for the outside world, man. That takes energy and commitment. What I do when I come into her house is greet her in her native language. I bring that respect.

  School, I sign, how is it?

  She laughs. There’s this breathy tee-hee type of sound that happens when she does it. It’s how it’s always been and I love it. It’s hers.

  I’m no type of expert, but deaf people are expressive with feelings in a way not so many hearing people are. I mean, I’m sure there’s plenty of shy people inside the community and I’m not saying they’re nothing other than human, with the same thoughts and problems and everything, but it’s just that it’s different when your whole body’s your speaking tool.

  It gets real important then to know yourself and represent yourself right, especially when most of the world isn’t really seeing all of what you’re about or even understanding a word of how you talk. Bein
g an outsider is no joke. It shapes you.

  She signs back, My new haircut, you’re not going to comment?

  On my face, I show her how shocked I am. I sign, Haircut?! Like I didn’t know she had one until just that moment.

  She slaps my arm in a way that says, Okay, you can stop messing with me. I smile and sign to her how pretty it looks, and I like how she’s not trying to hide her hearing aids in her hair anymore.

  She rolls her eyes, like, Yeah, yeah, not this again. She turns me around and leads me in through the foyer, past the big staircase, back towards the den.

  I know that’s where Rooster is, chilling in front of the big screen. The Dodgers must be on TV by now since he already told me they’re playing on the East Coast.

  I always told Jennifer be proud of yourself. Never hide. This has been our ongoing thing since she was about eight.

  I think the reason Rooster likes me around her is I’m different too. I know what it’s like for people to look at my eye and think there’s something wrong with my brain or that I’m less of a person.

  The school dance, I’m signing to her, you going? Your haircut is for a boy to notice? True?

  She makes a face and I know I hit a nerve prolly. Right then, I get a serious thought. I sign, Oh, I see, is he a hearing boy?!

  Jennifer don’t go to a deaf school. Rooster refused to put her in a place that would be different from how the whole world might treat her.

  She blushes all over and signs, No!

  His name, I sign back, what is it?

  She’s not telling me. She’s looking horrified and changing the subject, asking me if I want food. Dad barbecued!

  I sign, Yes, I love barbecue, and she heads off to the kitchen on a mission. I already know I’m in trouble. She’ll pile as much as she can fit on that plate.

  The thing about Rooster’s house is, there’s lots of reflective surfaces up to help Jennifer notice when people are around or needing to talk to her.

  I see him looking at me in one of the mirrors next to the TV that’s showing an outfield so green it hurts my eye a little. I blink. I nod at him.