by CJ West
“Mint. He brought the keys.”
“Sweet. You know those keys cost me four hundred bucks?”
“Glad I got ‘em then.”
Crusher fanned a handful of hundreds and I took them without counting. Later I’d find he’d doubled the regular deal. I would have been happy with six hundred. With fourteen hundred in my pocket and the credit cards, I was due for some downtime.
“Wanna beer?” Crusher asked. “You earned it.”
“No thanks. I’ve got one more stop.”
Double perked up and jingled his keys. I gave him a thumbs-up, thanked Crusher, and headed for the BMW. I told Double I was headed for the hospital and he knew just where I meant.
“Nice ride you boosted tonight,” he said.
“You’re not doing so bad,” I said, meaning the Beemer.
He quieted down and focused on driving. I knew the Beemer belonged to Crusher, but I never knew it bothered Double until then. He lived with Crusher underneath the junkyard and had everything he really needed.
A mile later he said, “You think Cortez has it right?”
Cortez was the first Latino in the South Side Slashers. He worked nights in the hospital. He bought my plastic and resold it for extra cash. “Buying plastic? You ain’t into that?”
“No. I mean working for the man.”
I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. Double wasn’t a bad guy, wasn’t born to be a killer or anything, but he made his living by making two or three ten-minute drives a day. That and he ran errands for Crusher. I’d thought about nine-to-fiving a few times so I could buy a house and file taxes like a regular guy, but what could I do? Who would pay me enough to live on? If I couldn’t do it, Double had no chance.
“Why you want to do that?” I asked.
“Didn’t say I did.”
“Why you asking?”
“Just thinkin’.”
“Don’t you have everything you need living with Crusher? Why would you want to screw that up?”
He didn’t answer, but just hearing my own question I knew. “Who is she?”
He turned and drove for a few blocks before he said, “What about you? You ever think about going straight and settling down?”
He was twenty-eight. Girls were starting to ask him about settling down and having kids. Big as he was, it must have been hard finding girls. If they knew he’d probably never have a legitimate job it’d be even harder. He couldn’t have them sleeping in the basement at the junkyard.
I wondered if he’d been saving money like I had. My safe deposit box held enough cash for a down payment on a house, but I couldn’t tell a loan officer that I made sixty grand a year robbing houses. I could save enough to buy a house in cash, but the cops would be all over me then. I’d made my decision when I was fifteen. I’d spent the last five years becoming a world class housebreaker and that’s what I’ll always be.
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” I said.
Double was going to have to work out his woman problems on his own.
CHAPTER THREE
Double dropped me a block from the hospital. I wished him luck and called Cortez from the sidewalk. He gave me the usual about being busy and that he’d meet me at the regular place when he got his break. I didn’t care. My timing was good. The bars had closed an hour earlier and only a few stragglers wandered the streets. I adopted a far-away look and a casual walk on my way to the diner. Anyone who looked too awake at two-thirty A.M. was up to something. I wanted to look like I’d had a few, but not so many a cop would hassle me while I still had the plastic and the list of account numbers and passwords in my pocket. Once I dumped this stuff on Cortez, there was nothing to link me to the fat guy’s house.
The place was hopping when I walked in. The late night crowd was hungry for greasy burgers and breakfast food to sober up for the drive home. There were a few seats at the counter. The only open table, a booth right next to the door, was a little more private, but not much. I sat down and watched a guy sitting with three women in the next booth. He desperately needed a wing man to create a diversion. The blonde he was talking to was smoking hot and sloppy drunk. She kept bobbing forward and cupping his face in her hands. He kissed her a few times, but the friends kept reaching across the table and breaking them up.
The waitress interrupted. I ordered scrambled eggs, OJ, and French toast and went back to the scene in the next booth. Why did gorgeous women always have friends who couldn’t get a date on a bet? It had to be a safety thing. One of the women laughed like a mule. When the other turned, she might as well have been one. Wow. No sober guy would throw himself into the mix, not even for all the cash in my pocket. Nothing could keep those two girls from putting an early end to that guy’s night.
Cortez walked in. I shifted my eyes to him, but I was still thinking about the poor guy paying for four breakfasts in the next booth. We’d both had an exciting time and we were both going home lonely. Unfortunately for him, he was emptying his pockets while I was stuffing mine.
“Not bad,” Cortez said with a nod to the booth behind him. “Want some of that?”
“Don’t think I can deal with the complications.”
He tugged his uniform and said, “Too much for you?”
I meant the rabid guard chicks, but I didn’t like the challenge in his eyes. Like I couldn’t hold a real job. I was good at what I did. The best. I was invisible moving in and out of houses. Why couldn’t I do some weenie job in a white uniform?
“What’s so hard about what you do?” I asked.
“Nothing. Most of it’s just showing up and getting bossed around. I wheel sick people from place to place, deliver supplies once in a while. It’s cake. Especially at night.”
“And you think I can’t do that?”
“You’ll let someone tell you what to do day after day for eight bucks an hour?” My face must have gone slack. “That’s what I thought.”
“Why do you do it?”
He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a picture. I knew he had a kid, but never thought much about it. In the picture, the kid was on the floor surrounded by stuffed animals. She looked too small to ask many questions.
“What am I supposed to tell her?” Cortez asked.
“You think you’re some hero because you wheel toilet paper around the hospital?”
“To her, yes. She thinks I help sick people.”
Women, families, they screwed everything up. Would Double end up doing the same thing in a few years? Serving the man so he could go legit and pay the way for his family? Would it happen to me some day? No chance. No kids for me. This wasn’t some stage I would grow out of. I wouldn’t go straight for some skirt. Cortez and Double weren’t either. They were pretending, covering so the girls could hold their heads high. But they couldn’t make it working for the man. Never would. That’s why they had to meet me after midnight.
“What you got for me?” The question brought me back.
I took the cards from my pocket and slid them across the table.
Cortez took them one by one until he got to the bank card. “This is no good without the PIN.”
I pulled the sheet from my pocket. “Got a pen?”
He forgot about the cards and focused on the paper in my hands. I slid it to him and watched. His eyes got big when he saw the account numbers. This was going to be a great payday.
“Let’s have that back,” I said.
“Wait a second. What do you want for it?”
“Slide it back,” I said a little louder and he did.
“When’d you get that?”
“Two hours ago.”
“Anyone see you?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll give you five hundred.”
I couldn’t imagine it was worth that much. It might have been worth more, but I had no way to get rid of it and I wasn’t going to a bunch of ATMs and getting my face on camera.
“Deal.” The instant I said it, he walked out with the cards and
the password list. I knew where he was going so I didn’t chase him. My food came a minute later. I started on my eggs, picturing him running down the street to his favorite ATM. He paid some kids to keep the camera lens blacked out with spray paint. He was out there making the cards pay for themselves. We both knew it. The thing about free money was you can’t have it all. You have to share, but there was plenty to go around if you knew where to look. Cortez was getting the cards and the numbers for free. He’d have a profit after ten minutes work, and then he’d go online and start selling the credit cards over and over again. The accounts would be maxed in a matter of hours and a bunch of banks would take it on the chin, but bankers were worse crooks than either of us.
Cortez came back long enough to drop me six hundred twenty-five bucks and give me a line about his break being over. Neither of us said anything about the fresh bills and neither of us mentioned that he’d made more in his fifteen-minute break than the rest of his day. He’d be online soon making a bundle that was tax free and safe from his wife spending it on toys the kid would break and clothes she didn’t need.
The guy, the hot blonde, and her two ugly friends got up and walked out. I was twenty years old. What was ahead of me? Was I going to keep chasing chicks like the guy in the booth or was I going to slow down and start acting like Double and Cortez? Those two were lying to themselves, pretending to be something they weren’t to impress women. I knew who I was and that wasn’t going to change.
As I stood up and headed for the cash register, the overhead television was crammed with police cars in front of a big house all lit up with spotlights. I pulled a twenty from my front pocket. At once I realized that the fat guy was buying me breakfast and that the front of his house was on the screen. His name was Jeremy Whitehouse and he was the Suffolk County district attorney. All those years ago in the projects, Double taught me to keep out of trouble by keeping a low profile. Tonight I’d broken that rule in the most spectacular way. Lots of crimes went unsolved, including most of mine, but this one would be different. There were half a dozen state police cruisers there helping the Sherborn cops.
I was shaking as I took my change. The car was good. Crusher wouldn’t sell it for a long time and it wouldn’t see sunshine until then.
The cards were the problem. Cortez had already nailed the DA for six hundred at least. In an hour there’d be dozens of people using Whitehouse’s credit to buy all sorts of things. I tried to remember if his social security number was on the paper I sold Cortez, but it didn’t matter. They’d crucify me for the trouble I’d caused him. I left the diner looking for a deep hole to
disappear into.
CHAPTER FOUR
I counted four sirens rushing by that morning while I tried to sleep. I hadn’t been arrested in three years and I didn’t expect they’d be coming for me that morning, but the piercing sounds forced me to sit up and listen. They wouldn’t come for me with sirens wailing. And they couldn’t trace my work so fast. I knew it, but I also knew they’d pull out every weapon they had to get justice for the DA. It was lunchtime when I pulled the covers off. The DA’s credit cards were all maxed by then. If they hadn’t shut off ATM withdrawals, his bank accounts would be emptied by now, too.
Most of my crimes went unpunished, but the cops weren’t going to give up this time. If I didn’t feed them someone to bust, they’d arrive on my doorstep sooner or later. If I had a job it’d be easier to convince them I’d gone straight. They’d rather think that than realize I’d been hitting three houses a week for years and they just couldn’t catch me.
The sirens went away and left me in the room over the garage.
It was just a room. Not a palace like those places I hit out in the suburbs. The family that lived downstairs threw up a partition and added a bathroom, stuck a stove and an oven in the corner, and called it an apartment. They turned a little extra space into some extra cash each month. That’s what I lived on, the extra that people had lying around. From my place to my livelihood, I took what people didn’t really need. Mostly the world didn’t notice. I was just one guy. I didn’t need much to live.
You might think I’d have great stuff since I’m in and out of really fancy places three times a week, but the truth was, I didn’t allow myself any connection to the places I hit. When people were out of town, I could get away with couches and beds, silverware and glasses, but I didn’t use stuff every day that linked me to being dirty. Most of my furniture the Berniers put in here for me, the rest Double and I picked up on the side of the road. I kept some jewelry until it cooled off, but it was always hidden where no one could ever find it. I always keep myself looking clean. I had problems for a few hours in the middle of the night when I worked, but beyond that, I looked like a solid citizen with a lot of free time on his hands.
I cleaned myself up, put on some jeans, and went around the corner to Dunkin’s for breakfast—a large coffee and a Boston Kreme donut. I could never cook something this good. My mother never cooked so I never saw why it was important to try.
I headed down the block when I was finished. The guys were playing three on three in the park. There was a guy on the side who wanted to jump in, but hoop wasn’t my thing and I wasn’t into getting sweated up. The Red Sox were playing at seven and I thought I’d go to one of the bars around Fenway, have some fun, and chase a little action. Until then I planned to hang, people watch, and see who showed up in the park. I waved the guy off and sat down.
The game went back and forth. Several of the guys dumped in long shots, shots I knew were way outside my range. Some of these guys were here day after day. I wondered if they considered this work, like they’d go pro someday. I couldn’t help feeling bad for ‘em, knowing how unlikely it was some kid from West Roxbury would be bumped from obscurity to the pros. They had to know they were just killing time, but if they didn’t, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell them.
Every so often someone came off the street to watch the game for a few minutes. After the third short visit in twenty minutes, I realized the guy watching from half court was selling drugs out of his bag. The customers eyed me suspiciously as they headed for the sidewalk, but no one from the game hassled me. At least one player must have recognized me from the neighborhood. Not many white guys my age shaved their heads. It made me easy to spot, but that’s not why I did it. I learned about forensics watching cop shows on TV. If I didn’t have hair, I couldn’t leave it behind.
I was alone until a car pulled up and Melanie Michaud wiggled across the sidewalk to me. We’d had a fling a few months earlier when I was lying low. She liked the way I threw money around when I was flush from a big hit and I liked how friendly she got once she had a few drinks in her. Her timing couldn’t have been better. I hadn’t planned anything for the next week and I would have been happy to spend the whole time with her. My plans changed when I saw the nasty look in her eyes.
“Where you been?” she said, like I’d been hiding from her.
It was months since I’d seen her. I’d been busy working and she knew I wasn’t looking for anything permanent. I didn’t promise her anything but a week of fun. That was long over. I didn’t get why she was standing there with her hands on her hips until I saw the bulge at her waist. She shoved it out so I couldn’t miss it, but I knew it wasn’t my fault. Kids on the court kept score of how many girls they knocked up. Not me. I had lived that life and I wouldn’t put my kids through it. I’d been swiping condoms for seven years, even though I knew it was better without them. A lot better.
“What are you trying to do?” I asked.
“Don’t give me that. You better own up, boy.”
I stood up and stepped closer. “You looking for a husband?” I whispered. “Cause I ain’t playing that game.” If she’d talked to Double, she’d have known. “I was careful, very careful. I didn’t do that to you.”
“My father’s thinking different.”
The one girl in the neighborhood with a live-in father had to come and make trou
ble for me. “Listen,” I said. “You’re a hottie, Melanie. If I was going to get married, it’d be a girl like you. But that ain’t my kid in there. You know I’m careful. You tell your father, when he brings me the DNA test to show it’s mine, I’ll be there at the altar. You, me, and the baby.”
Melanie looked like she’d pass out.
I kissed her cheek and she hustled back to the car.
CHAPTER FIVE
I did go to Fenway that night after Melanie cornered me in the park, but every time I thought about chasing a skirt, I started thinking about what Double and Cortez were doing. That life didn’t fit for me and just thinking about it set me off. I left the bar alone and I spent the whole week walking around the neighborhood, watching the tube, and wondering if I was missing something by not settling down. I drank four or five beers the whole week and didn’t get laid once. Some vacation.
When Cortez called to say things were slow and ask if I could throw some plastic his way, I was more than ready to get back to it. I called a guy who toted bags in a fancy San Francisco hotel. He spent his whole day getting sneered at by rich people on vacation and he was only too glad to sell me the names of his nastiest, worst-tipping clients.
For fifty bucks he gave me three names and addresses in Massachusetts. The one that stuck out was in a great neighborhood in Westwood. When I got there I couldn’t believe how huge the place was or how thick the trees grew around it. None of the neighbors could see the house and once around back, I was invisible from the road. I had to cut through a glass door to get in without setting off the alarm, but then I had the run of the place without worrying about anyone coming home. I stayed two hours looking for, finding, and eventually cracking a basic wall safe hidden in the master bedroom. Inside the safe was the deed to the house, the titles to three cars, and some other crap that was useless to me, but I did find fifteen grand in cash and a serious diamond necklace.
