The Lock Artist

Twenty

Los Angeles, Arizona

July, August, September 2000

As the summer came to Southern California, everyone was back in their holding patterns. Julian and Ramona were selling fine wine and looking for the next mark. Gunnar was doing his tattoos and grumbling about how slow and careful Julian and Ramona were being. Lucy had given up her painting by then. She tried to learn to guitar for a while. Then after maybe one week of that, she started spending a lot more time with Gunnar down at his tattoo parlor. She had finally decided to learn the craft herself. So I was on my own a lot more during the day. I’d either spin my locks or draw. Or I’d get on my bike and go out riding around in the city.

Then I got another call on the green pager. The last time around, they had asked for the Ghost, remember, and had freaked out when I didn’t say anything. So I wasn’t expecting much this time. But when I called the number, the man on the other end gave me an address in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was less than four hundred miles away, a straight shot down I-10, so I got on my bike and hit the road. Five and a half hours later, I was sitting outside a gas station on Indian School Road, drinking as much water as I could physically get down my throat. I finally got off the bike and sat down with my back against the hard brick wall. When I woke up, the sun was in my eyes.

I waited around for another hour or two. Until the temperature had once again climbed over 110. Then I got on the bike and headed back to Los Angeles.

Six more hard hours on the road, and when I got back I could feel the tension in the air. Julian and Gunnar had been fighting again.

“Oh, and this guy,” Gunnar said when I walked in the door. “This guy gets to go out and do freelance jobs any time he wants! He gets a call, and boom, he’s out of here! Opening up a safe for somebody else, making money. While I have to sit here playing with myself, waiting for you to put something together.”

It was a bad day to hit me with that line. I didn’t care if he could kill me with his bare hands, I went right up to him, took out my wallet from my back pocket, and took out whatever money I had. A few twenties. A hundred bucks, maybe. I slapped the money against his chest and walked out.

The next day, I went out to the backyard and picked up one of Gunnar’s low-tech barbells. It was a metal pipe with sandbags tied to each end. I tried curling it a few times. Then I saw Gunnar come charging out of the house. I put the barbell down, figuring I’d just earned myself a hard lesson in keeping my hands off other people’s property. Instead he picked up the bar and gave it back to me.

“Didn’t anybody ever teach you to do this the right way?”

He showed me the correct form for a biceps curl. Feet hip-width apart, chest out, abs tight, back straight, elbows tucked into my sides. Keep the elbows still, pause and contract at the top. Inhale on the way down.

“It’s about damned time you worked out,” he said to me. “I need you to keep up with me when we’re out on a job.”

Then he made me reverse with the triceps. Everything in balance, he told me. From that day on he became my personal trainer. He started killing me in the backyard every other morning. I mean absolutely killing me. I think it’s safe to say he enjoyed it.

Until that one morning…

I was doing bench presses with his iron pipe, cinder blocks chained to each end. The pipe a little too thick to grip properly and the cinder blocks threatening to swing over and bash me in the head. Why he never got real weights, I’d never know. God knows he had the money now.

In any case, he was spotting me and I was working hard. I was getting toward the end of my set. We had our shirts off in the morning sun. The bench was nothing but a wooden plank set on more cinder blocks. He hardly ever talked to me when we were working out, but today was the exception.

“I suppose Julian told you the story about the man from Detroit.”

I was breathing hard, holding the pipe just above my chest and getting ready to lift it again.

“He told you how he met him? How they went out on his boat? Checked out the safe and everything? What did you think of that?”

I squinted as I looked up at him. What the hell was he talking about?

“Think about it. This guy comes through with four million dollars cash in his safe. Julian goes on board and gets busted trying to case out the boat, right? Guy puts a gun to his head, makes him piss in his pants? Takes all his wine and cigars? Does that seem a little funny to you?”

I couldn’t get up. Not with the weight on my chest. I was trapped there until he finished his pitch. Every last word of it.

“You know what we could do, Mike? When that boat comes back through this year… you and I could sneak on board and take all of that fucking money. What do you think?”

I started shaking my head. No. You’re crazy. No.

“I know this guy owns you, Mike. I know that. I know he’s supposed to be real scary, too. I’m just saying… if somebody would finally grow a set of balls around here, we could take this guy down.”

I kept shaking my head.

“I’m not afraid of him,” Gunnar said. He finally pulled the bar off my chest. “I’m not afraid of anybody.”

I sat up and started to put my shirt on.

“What if I told you I’ve developed another contact on the boat? Somebody who could help us.”

I stopped.

“Somebody who works for one of the other players. I know Julian thinks he’s the only one who can put these things together. Like the rest of us aren’t smart enough. But this guy, I’m telling you… he’s in the same position we are, you know? Always having to answer to somebody. He gets tired of it. Just like you do, I’m sure. So when we got talking, it was like, hey, maybe we can work something out. Something that’ll be great for all of us.”

I stood up and walked away.

“Just think about it,” he said. “We’ve got some time. Just think about it.”

There was nothing to think about. It was insanity. It was suicide. But Gunnar wouldn’t let it go. He kept hitting me with it, whenever we were alone.

“He treats you like a dog,” he said to me once. Talking about the man from Detroit, of course. Like he could see the image I’d always had in my mind. Me being the dog with no place to sleep, who nevertheless had to come running whenever the master called.

“Maybe for once in your life you should think about biting the hand that feeds you.”

____________________

Around the end of that month, the green pager went off again. I walked down to that same pay phone and called the number. Even though I was expecting the same clowns who had made me ride all the way out to fucking Scottsdale, Arizona, for nothing.

But no, it wasn’t them this time.

“Michael, it’s Banks. Are you there?”

What the hell?

“I know you can’t speak. I apologize, I didn’t know that last time. I didn’t know anything about you. Now I do, and you’ve got to listen to me.”

I was standing on Santa Monica Boulevard. Traffic crawling by me on a hot summer night.

“The men who called you on this number before… They’re out of the game now. For good. The same thing’s gonna happen to everybody, sooner or later. Are you hearing me? If you trust me, I can get you through this. I’ll do everything I can to help you. I know you must feel like you don’t have a choice anymore. But you do.”

The half-dirty air coming in off the ocean. The sound of the cars. My own heart beating hard in my chest.

“Your uncle is worried about you, Mike. Your uncle Lito. I talked to him. He wants you to come home.”

I pressed my forehead against the glass.

“I’m in California now, Mike. I know you’re here, too. Let me give you an address.”

I hung up the phone and walked back to the house.

The summer went by. September came, but the heat didn’t break. There was one day… one slow, hot afternoon. Gunnar was at the tattoo parlor. Lucy was in my apartment, watching me draw. She seemed a little rattled, which probably meant she had gotten into another fight with Gunnar. She liked to hang out with me whenever she was upset, because she knew I wouldn’t start peppering her with questions. Or with advice on how to improve her life. She kept watching me for a while. Then she asked me if I had any drawings I could show her.

I didn’t want to show her the pages I was still doing for Amelia every day, but I had plenty of other stuff, including some more drawings of herself and the rest of the gang. She sorted through them one by one, looking at each one carefully.

“How do you do this?” she said. “You just get us all so perfectly here. I mean, look at this.”

She pulled out a drawing I had done of Gunnar, right after he had been working out in the backyard. Every muscle and tendon standing out in the sunlight. The scar above his lip. The spiderweb tattoo on his neck. It was one of my better spontaneous drawings, I admit.

“This is the best drawing of him I’ve ever seen,” she said. “I mean, it’s better than a photograph. It’s like it’s just… it’s him. How did you do that?”

I had no answer for her. She kept looking at the drawing. When she finally put it down, she went through a few more, finally picking out a drawing of Amelia. I hadn’t even realized it was in there.

I had an urge to take it from her. To tear it right out of her hands. Then in that very next moment I realized how useless it would be. It was just scratches on a piece of paper, after all. A faint representation of someone I’d never see again. Someone I’d lost forever.

She looked at the drawing for a long time.

“This is her,” she said. “The girl you love.”

I nodded.

“It hurts, doesn’t it? Wanting something so much.”

She looked at me. Her hair a complete wreck, as always. The one eyelid slightly heavier than the other.

“You know that painting of the lion I did? The one Julian hung up?”

I remembered. It was probably her best, because it wasn’t a cutesy fuzzy lion like some people would do, or a proud and noble lion, either. It looked ragged and half starved. A lion that would rip your face off in a second.

“When I got off the drugs… I mean, I kicked it, but I knew it wasn’t gone for good. Julian always makes it sound like I got clean in one day and me and Gunnar just joined up with him and Ramona and everything’s been a big party ever since, but he doesn’t realize how hard it is. He doesn’t know what it feels like, when it’s still out there, all the time, just waiting for me to come back to it.”

She put the drawing down.

“Did you ever see two lions having sex?”

I shook my head. Slowly.

“It’s violent.

It’s dangerous. It must feel good, but at the same time you might get yourself clawed to death.”

I was watching her lips as she talked.

“Imagine if a lion loved you too much. If it wanted to have you too much. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what it would feel like.”

She reached out to me. She put her hand on my throat.

“What’s inside you, anyway? Why won’t it let you talk to me?”

I swallowed hard, feeling her cool fingers against my neck. I closed my eyes.

“Let me see you try talking.”

I can’t do this, I thought. I tried so hard for Amelia. I couldn’t do it. Not even for her.

I pushed her hand away and stood up. A second later she was behind me, so close I could feel her breath on my neck.

“What’s her name?” she whispered. “Tell me the girl’s name.”

When I turned she kissed me. She was so unlike Amelia in every way, a different creature entirely. So much more like me really, all broken and fucked up but she was right here and her arms were around me and I could feel her heart beating in her chest. When she took her clothes off… her body looked even more naked than Amelia’s had. More pale and vulnerable. I saw the tattoos that Gunnar had given her. A Chinese symbol on her left shoulder blade, a black rose on her right ankle, and finally Gunnar’s name itself, not in big bold letters but in letters so small I could barely see them, in the small of her back. He had literally marked her with his name to claim her forever, yet here she was with me in my little borrowed apartment in the backyard on a late afternoon and I had no idea what I was doing. It felt good and yet not good and it was all over too quickly. Then as we lay there afterward I heard the faint beeping from under my bed.

“What’s that noise?” she said.

I got up and pulled out the shoebox. Another call from my good friend at the FBI? Just what I needed.

No. This one was for real.

“Who is it?” she said, looking into the box. “Who’s paging you?”

I picked up the red pager.

It’s the master calling, I said to her in my mind. If you’ll excuse me, I have to run barking all the way home.