The Lock Artist

Ten

Los Angeles

January 2000

Before I went to the bus station that next morning, I cut off most of my hair. No more shaggy curls for me. I cut as close to my scalp as I could, going for as drastic a change in my appearance as I could manage. When I was done I looked like someone who had just finished his last round of chemo.

I also bought a pair of sunglasses with the lightest lenses I could find, so I could wear them all of the time. Combined with the short hair, I truly looked like a different person. I didn’t feel any different, but some things you just can’t change that easily.

I bought a new pair of jeans, a new shirt, a new coat. I threw the clothes I had been wearing into the Dumpster. I knew I had to watch my money, but a man needs to wear something, right? And it’s not like I was shopping at Saks.

I packed up everything I owned. A few more pairs of underwear and socks. An extra pair of shoes. A toothbrush. A half tube of toothpaste. A bar of soap and a mostly empty bottle of shampoo. My practice safe lock. My leather wallet filled with tension bars and picks. A thick folder of every drawing I had done while sitting alone in that room above the restaurant. That was it. That was everything.

Oh, and my pagers. I packed the white pager, the red pager, the blue pager, the green pager. I was tempted to leave the yellow pager right there on the windowsill. Let it beep away all it wanted, until the batteries finally ran out. Or hell, maybe some new member of the Chinese family would find it, would call the number on the little screen, speaking in Mandarin or broken English. Maybe the rank amateur on the other end of that call would cancel his operation, and end up not getting his head blown off his body.

But no. In the end, I took that pager with me, too. I packed everything up and caught a cab downtown to the Port Authority. I paid for my ticket in cash, waited for the bus, got something to eat. I got on the bus, and as it pulled out I said good-bye to the city. You’d think I would have been glad to be rid of it. That I would have sworn I’d never step foot in the city again. But I actually felt a pang of regret to leave the place. As miserable as it had been, I had survived it. I had proven that much to myself. That I could make it on my own if I had to.

The bus kept going, all through the night. I slept on and off. In the morning I saw cornfields and trucks and billboards. In the evening I saw cows and red dirt. The miles rolled by.

By the end of the second day, I was in Los Angeles.

It was a hell of a long trip, but this was the white pager we’re talking about. These were the guys that the Ghost called money in the bank. True professionals. The best of the best. I figured it was the ultimate lucky break for me, that they’d be the guys beeping me next, after the yellow pager disaster. I was ready for something to go right for a change.

The man on the phone who had given me the address in L.A. told me it was a nice, clean motel up in the Glendale area. He told me the man at the desk would be expecting me. That I should indicate to him that my name was Stone and he’d show me to a room on the back side of the building. He and his associates would come for me at the motel and knock on my door. At which time the details of the operation would be shared with me.

It all worked out exactly as he said. I got off the bus, wrote down the address, and gave it to a cabdriver. He rolled out onto the expressway, which was already jammed with midday traffic. We bumped along for almost an hour until we got up to the motel. I paid the man and got out. It was a dry, sunny day in Los Angeles. An even seventy degrees, everything looking brown and dried out. There was a slight sting of smog in the air.

The motel was a double-decker, not too cheap-looking but not exactly the Ritz, either. The pool looked clean, but nobody was swimming. The parking lot was half full. I went in and wrote down one word on a piece of paper, Stone, the name the man had given to me. I gave it to the man behind the desk, and that got him right off his chair.

He insisted on personally showing me the way around the parking lot to my room. It was up on the second floor. He opened the door, showed me where the phone was, the towels in the bathroom, everything else that I could have found myself quite easily. He gave me the key and told me not to hesitate to call him if I needed anything. I’m not sure that he even noticed I hadn’t said a word to him the whole time.

When he was gone, I sat on the bed for a while, wondering how I’d gotten there. On the other side of the country, with nothing to do but wait for a stranger to knock on the door.

On the other hand, this was a step up from the room above the restaurant on 128th Street. There was a television, a clock radio, clean towels. Hell, a bathtub! I couldn’t remember the last time I had had a hot bath. Even at Uncle Lito’s place, I only had the shower stall.

I went into the bathroom and started running the hot water. I looked out the window at the parking lot and the scrubby-looking palm trees. When the tub was full I took my clothes off and got in. It felt good after all those miles on the bus.

When I was done, I dried off and sat on the bed wearing just the towel around my waist. I counted what was left of my money. I turned on the television. Then I got out some paper and started to draw.

I caught up with my ongoing story. The second trip to Connecticut. How it all fell apart and how I was the only one to make it out alive.

If Amelia ever reads these pages, I thought, what the hell is she going to think of this?

I waited for two days. Watching television, drawing, spinning my lock. Walking down the street to buy some food and bringing it back to the room. The third morning, I heard a knock on my door.

I had been wondering all along what these guys would look like. This small band of professional thieves, supposedly the best of them all.

It was time to find out.

The first face I saw when I opened that motel room door was a woman’s. A very attractive face, actually. Young, Hispanic. Full lips and big dark eyes. She was smiling, like someone else had just said something funny. As soon as she saw me, the smile faded.

Then I saw another face. A man, just as young as the woman. Maybe even younger, but still a few years older than me. Stubble around his chin. Sunglasses. Curly hair that looked sort of like mine, at least back when I had hair.

“Are you the Young Ghost?” he said.

“He’s a little kid,” the woman said. “He’s, like, still wearing diapers.”

They stepped past me into the room. They were both wearing black leather jackets. I was about to close the door, but the receiving line wasn’t over yet. Another man came in, also in black leather. Rail thin. He was just as young, but from the scars on his face you could tell he’d seen a lot more hard miles. He had a tattoo of a spiderweb on one side of his neck.

Then the fourth. Another young woman, in even more black leather, with even more hard miles on her if that was possible. She looked tired and strung out, with one eyelid slightly closed. A chipped tooth. Yet she wasn’t ugly. I mean, there was just something about her. Like a raw animal beauty that couldn’t be erased, no matter what she did to herself.

These were four bizarrely attractive human beings, all right, and not one of them looked older than a college undergrad. This could not be the White Crew that the Ghost had been raving about, could it?

“You said this place was nice,” the first man said to the second. He looked out the window at the tired palm trees.

“It’s just fine,” the second man said. He walked in a tight circle around me, looking me up and down.

“My name’s Julian,” the first man said. He was obviously the leader of this outfit, whoever the hell they were. “That’s Gunnar.”

“Charmed.” He slid off his jacket to reveal a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He had absolutely no body fat on him whatsoever. You could see every muscle, every tendon.

“That’s Ramona,” Julian said, indicating the young Hispanic woman. She nodded once to me and then sat down on the bed.

“And that’s Lucy.”

She came up to me and stood a few inches too close. I could smell cigarettes and open road, and some kind of perfume that jogged a distant memory. She looked at me with her uneven eyes, put one finger under my chin, and pushed upward. Then she let me go.

“So, Young Ghost,” Julian said, “what’s your name?”

I took out my wallet and extracted the driver’s license. I handed it to Julian.

“William Michael Smith?” He held the license up to the window. “You’re kidding me, right? Could this thing be any more fake?”

Here I was, thinking it was a perfect forgery, but then what did I know? I went and took the license from him and pointed to the middle name.

“Michael. That’s your real name?”

I nodded. It was the first time anyone had called me Michael since leaving Michigan.

“So it’s true,” Julian said. “You really don’t talk.”

I nodded again.

“That is so fucking cool. Talk about meta. It’s just transcendent.”

Whatever you say, I thought. Then I figured it was time to get everything straight. Because I couldn’t quite believe what seemed to be happening here. I pointed to him, to Gunnar, to Ramona, to Lucy. Then I put both hands up. Like, who the hell are you guys?

Julian smiled at that one, looked at his friends, one by one, then turned back to me. “The first time the Ghost saw us, he was a little skeptical, too. Then when he worked with us… I mean, we ended up making him a lot of money. And that guy he works for… the guy you work for. Have you actually met him?”

I nodded. Oh yeah. I’ve met him.

Julian shook his body like some kind of cartoon character. Like a man seeing a vampire. “Is he not the scariest fucking human being you’ve ever seen? I mean, seriously. We made damned sure he got his cut out of anything the Ghost helped us with. I assume you come with the same tax? Or did he raise the rates this year?”

“How’s he gonna know?” Gunnar said. “We’re three thousand fucking miles away.”

“Please disregard my boy over there,” Julian said to me. “He hasn’t actually met your boss yet, so he doesn’t know any better.”

“I don’t care who this guy is,” Gunnar said. “And I’m not your boy.”

“So tell me,” Julian said, waving Gunnar away like a mosquito. “What exactly did the Ghost say about us? Did he tell you we were the best of the best?”

I nodded.

“What else? I’m dying to know.”

I shrugged. He said something about if I ever met them someday, I shouldn’t let their looks deceive me. Which I guess made sense now.

“Okay, but you were expecting some real straight-looking, serious fuckers, right? Clean and white and like, what was that guy’s name? Who played on that show?”

“Robert Wagner,” Ramona said.

“Yeah. It Takes a & Thief, right? Real smooth guy? Dressed up in a tux all the time? Playing baccarat and then sneaking away to steal the jewels?”

“You should wear a tux sometime,” she said.

“I might. You never know.”

“Can we get to the point?” Gunnar said. “Can this teenager here really open a safe?”

“It says right here he’s twenty-one,” Julian said, handing me back my license. “Seriously, dude, we gotta get you a better ID.”

“Cut the bullshit,” Gunnar said. “I mean, come on, look at him.”

“I told you what the man said. The Ghost should know, right?”

“I want to see him do it first. Then I’ll believe it.”

“Well, of course he’s going to do it first,” Julian said. “What do you think we are, a bunch of amateurs here? Come on, this dump is giving me the creeps.”

“He’s not riding with me,” Gunnar said. “You take him.”

“You know how to ride a motorcycle?” Julian asked me.

I nodded.

“I mean, a real bike?”

I nodded again.

“What do you think, Ramona? Can he take yours?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Come on, he’s our guest here. He came all this way. Are you gonna make him ride bitch?”

“Are you gonna make me ride bitch?”

“You used to love riding behind me, remember? Wrap your arms around me? Whaddya say?”

I knew this was way beyond reasonable. You don’t ask somebody to give up their bike. Was he testing her? Testing me?

Ramona looked at him for a long moment. I wondered which part of his body she’d take off first.

She stepped up to me and grabbed me by the shirt. “If you wreck my bike,” she said, “I swear I will kill you.”

Four Harleys were parked in the lot. There was one extra helmet, just for me. We mounted up and rolled out onto the street. If nothing else, it felt damned good to be on a bike again.

They took off fast. I had to really gun it to keep up with them. They pulled onto the busy street and started weaving their way through traffic. Lucy kept looking back, but the two men seemed to be racing each other now, like they had forgotten all about me. We went through West Hollywood, then Beverly Hills. Tall palm trees, big houses, brown grass. The whole city looked like you could light one match and burn it to the ground.

Just as we started to get close to the ocean, they pulled off onto a quiet side street. Another couple of turns and they were all stopping their bikes in front of a modest little house on Grant Street. The house took up most of the lot. The tiny front yard was all gravel, with a fence around the whole thing. Julian took off his helmet and opened the gate for us.

“How was the ride?” he said.

I gave him a quick nod and handed him my helmet. When we were inside the place, I could see that the outside was deceiving. There was a state-of-the-art kitchen, a big wine rack filled to the ceiling with bottles, lots of ultramodern spot lighting hanging from the ceiling. If these people were really thieves, they were making a good living at it.

“What can I get for you?” Julian said. “Wine? Cocktail?”

I passed on those, eventually accepted a cold beer. The first sip took me right back to that summer night in Michigan. The night I first got arrested. As I sat there and drank my beer, Julian kept watching me.

“You’re like a work of art,” he finally said to me. “I mean, look at you. You’re just perfect.”

Okay… thanks. I guess.

“And you’re just so… silent. You’re like a living Buddha or something. I can’t stand it.”

I took another hit off the beer.

“Ramona,” he said to her. “Come over here. Look into Michael’s eyes. What do you see?”

She came over to me. She bent down and put a finger under my chin, just like Lucy had done to me at the hotel. She looked into my eyes, and then she shook her head.

“La fatiga,” she said.

“Like he’s seen way too much already,” Julian said. “Even though he’s what, seventeen, I bet? Eighteen?”

“How old are you?” she said to me.

I put up ten fingers. Then seven.

“How did you get here?”

I kept looking up at her.

“Okay, us first,” she said. “Julian, tell him your life story.”

“Just like that,” he said, smiling.

“Yes. I think this is one man who can keep a secret.”

So he spent the next few minutes giving me the rundown. He had been born into money, had gone to private schools, was tops in his senior class and on his way to either Pepperdine or Gonzaga. He hadn’t made up his mind. Then he got busted for his second DUI, ended up spending a month in a youth program. Where he met Ramona, Gunnar, and Lucy, all of whom came from abject poverty, abusive parents, broken homes. He and Ramona had been together ever since. They stayed off the rap sheet while Gunnar and Lucy kept drifting in and out of trouble. Then finally those two got clean and reconnected with Julian. The four of them had lived here in his house ever since.

He didn’t tell me how they ended up working together on high-end robberies. Or how they had met the man in Detroit. Or the Ghost. That part of the story would come later.

“We should talk a little business at some point, eh? But first things first.”

He took me to a bookshelf on the back wall of the house.

“Okay, I swear to God,” he said. “This was here when I bought the place.”

He pushed on the shelf, and the whole thing turned like a revolving door. There was another room behind it. When I stepped through, I saw maps and photographs pinned to the wall. File cabinets. A computer and printer. And in the corner, solid, metallic… downright heartwarming… a safe, about four feet high.

“Welcome to the Bat Cave,” Julian said.

“You’re not being very careful,” Gunnar said. “I mean, with somebody we just met.”

“Ramona says he can keep a secret. So I trust him. Besides, you want him to prove he can open the safe, don’t you?”

“Just drag it out and have him open it in the living room.”

“I’d like to see you drag it out.”

“Boys,” Ramona said. “Behave.”

They didn’t have to tell me what to do next. I was already on my knees in front of the safe. As I did this, Lucy, who hadn’t said one word since we rode back to the house, got down on her knees right beside me. When I reached out my hand to touch the safe, she looked like she wanted to stop me.

“It’s all right, Lucy.” Julian came over behind her and started to rub her shoulders. “It’s okay. Just watch.”

Gunnar pushed Julian away from her. I realized that the whole dynamic between these four people was wound tighter than piano wire, and something I’d probably never quite understand.

“Did you really work with the Ghost?” Lucy said to me.

I nodded.

“At that place in Detroit? With the eight safes?”

Yes.

“I was there, you know. He tried to show me how to do it. I worked so hard at it…”

Yes. I know how hard it is.

“This is the safe we’ll be breaking into,” she said, touching the handle. “The exact model. We don’t leave anything to chance.”

It made perfect sense. My first indication that these seemingly insane people really knew what the hell they were doing.

“So can you do it? Can you really open this safe without breaking her?”

Her, she said. She really did study under the Ghost. Or at least she tried.

“Show me.”

I took a deep breath and started. I turned the dial, clearing the wheels so I could count them. She watched me carefully. I knew she knew everything I was doing. It was a strange feeling for me, and yet comforting. She knew.

Four wheels. Park at 0. Go to the contact area. My familiar rhythm now. She watched intently, but as I closed my eyes and felt for the slightest tiny difference, I knew I was leaving her behind. There was no way she could see this part.

I kept working my way up the dial, finding the short contacts. All the way to 100, then back again to verify them and to narrow them down to the exact numbers.

I made a writing motion. She gave me a piece of paper and pen.

There were tears in her eyes as I wrote down each number. I was sure she knew the combination. She had probably set it herself. She also knew that, at this point, finding the numbers was all that really mattered. Getting the right order was the easy part.

She grabbed the paper from me and crumpled it into a ball.

“Does he have it right?” Gunnar said.

“Yes.”

He nodded, didn’t say anything else.

“You can’t show me how you did that,” she said to me. “It’s just something you can do. Or can’t do.”

I just kept looking at her. At that moment, I honestly wished that I could show her.

“Okay,” Julian said, his voice quiet now. “That’s why Michael is here. Lucy, you know you’re here for a reason, too. You know that, right?”

She didn’t respond. She got up and left the room.

He shook his head slowly. Then he looked at his watch.

“If we’re going to do it this week,” he said, “then now’s the time. We all need to get into character.”

He reached out a hand to me and pulled me up from the floor.

“I’m glad we called you,” he said to me, taking me over to one of the maps on the wall. The whole city of Los Angeles, laid out before us.

“Welcome to the City of Angels,” he said. “Let me show you which piece of it we’re going to own tonight.”