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Chapter 51

When the ragged warehouse door screeched back on its tracks, Mike raised an arm against the light, though the pale dusk glow was far from bright. He’d been inside the dingy warehouse for seventeen hours, trying not to obsess over the limitless ways the plan could go to shit.

Given the low sun at his back, Shep was a perfect shadow, one arm extended, his hand hooked on the handle of the rolling door.

‘’Bout time,’ Mike said.

Passing the day alone had been torturous. The smell of damp concrete had lodged as a taste in the back of his throat. Empty cans of SpaghettiOs rolled at his feet. The deserted warehouse was cavernous, which made the emptiness resonant, living, gothic. Bats in the rafters. Cobwebs. A rusty faucet dripping into a wide, paint-stained basin.

In the middle of the cracked floor was the pallet of heavy crates that Bob and Molly had delivered the previous day. Though Mike sat leaning against the boxes, he hadn’t so much as popped a lid; he knew better than to handle Shep’s gear. Pulling himself to his feet, he set a foot on McAvoy’s wall safe, a game hunter posing over vanquished prey.

Shep stepped inside. ‘Cops grilled me all day.’

‘What’d you say?’

‘“What?” mostly,’ Shep answered with a faint smirk. ‘I did nothing wrong. I was in a casino, minding my own business when I got manhandled. The bigger concern was my association with Mike Wingate. But of course that’s all years in the past.’ He rattled the door closed behind him. ‘I’d never hang around with the likes of you now.’

‘So that’s it? They just let you go?’

‘As promised, Two-Hawks lined up a pricey Injun lawyer for me.’ Shep produced a taupe business card and flicked it, showing off the fine stock. ‘Plus, it seems that the Shasta Springs Band of Miwok Casino bought a few new squad cars for the Susanville PD last year. For once in our lives, we were on the right side of a favor. With no Graham riding in to pull rank, they released me.’

‘And Bob and Molly?’

‘In the clear. Probably back in Reno by now.’ Shep circled the pallet, appraising the boxes. ‘Not that we haven’t become “persons of interest,” as they like to say. You are one wanted man.’

He started opening crates, unpacking equipment, most of which had been wrapped in moving blankets. Strings of flood-lights hooked onto T-bar stands, which in turn plugged into a generator he had Mike wheel over from the rear of the pallet. With the click of a switch, the center of the warehouse was as bright as day. Shep positioned the floodlights around the wall safe, so it was lit up like some sort of industrial sculpture. Stepping this way and that like a finicky film director, he adjusted the floodlights to reduce glare. Watching Shep work brought Mike back to studying SAT vocab words while Shep whaled away on that wall safe from Valley Liquors, the Couch Mother bellowing down the hall. Not your traditional Hallmark moment, but still, the memory was a comfort.

Shep walked a few paces toward the safe and sat cross-legged, confronting it. ‘We can’t use explosives, since we’re dealing with paper in there, not coins or gold bars.’ His eyes were closed. ‘The overpressure and detonation would torch the photographs.’

Mike said, ‘Right.’

Shep lay flat on his belly and propped his chin on his fists, staring at the safe like a kid watching TV.

‘Don’t you know how to break into this brand of safe?’ Mike asked.

‘It’s custom,’ Shep said.

‘What’s that mean for us?’

Shep crawled forward and put his face flat against the metal door. ‘It means we have to listen to it.’ He fingered the combination dial. Fondled the thick handle. Knocked the walls, cocking his head at the dull ring.

Mike watched and stayed out of the way, trying not to worry about Shep’s fussing and his troubled expression.

After twenty or so minutes of this, Shep said, ‘The fact that it’s a custom safe means it could be booby-trapped to destroy its contents if it’s messed with. So there’s that.’

‘Okay…’

‘It has at least three locking lugs. But I’m not sure where. And carving around the frame to guess would be risky business. Could set off that booby trap. Or fuck up the photo negatives.’

‘So what are we gonna do?’

‘We’re gonna try to bypass the lugs altogether.’

‘How?’

But Shep was already on his feet, digging around behind the circle of lights. From a footlocker he removed a futuristic-looking tool with the handle and motor of a chain saw and a white-silver circular blade emerging from a mouthlike guard.

‘Looks like something out of a snuff film,’ Mike said.

Shep held the tool out, his forearms cording. He’d donned eye protection and looked mildly deranged, which contributed to the effect. ‘Rescue saw, used by fire departments. The blade here’s tipped with industrial diamonds. Steel doesn’t like it much.’

‘I thought you said it’s too risky to cut into the safe.’

‘I said it was too risky to carve around the frame searching for the lugs. But if we can get the handle to turn, the camming-lever action will retract the lugs for us.’

Mike tried to hide his impatience. ‘So how do we get the handle to turn?’

‘The combination has three numbers, right? Each number corresponds to a disk inside the tumbler assembly. Each disk has a groove. And those grooves have to align to release the locking block and allow the door handle to turn. What I’m gonna do’ – he revved the motor, the jagged blade morphing into a smooth blur and then back again – ‘is cut away the locking block and skip all that other bullshit.’

‘How do you know where to cut?’

‘Experience. Feel. Instinct. It’s like hitting a curveball. Sometimes it all aligns and you catch up to it.’

‘And if you don’t?’

‘Then I mangle the tumbler assembly and we don’t get in.’

After a few more adjustments to the floodlights, Shep braced himself and leaned in, blade biting into steel with a scream that made Mike’s teeth throb in his gums. In the space between the combination dial and the door handle, Shep made three small equidistant cuts, no more than an inch deep. Mike was up, pacing, his hands laced at the back of his neck.

Finally Shep set down the rescue saw and wiped the sweat from his brow. He gripped the handle firmly and twisted. It rotated fully, giving off a dull thud.

Shep exhaled. Risked a glance at Mike. Then carefully turned the handle back into place.

‘It’s open,’ Mike said.

‘No. It’s unlocked. We don’t want to open it yet.’

‘Right. The booby trap.’ Mike blew out a breath and cracked his knuckles, his fingertips tingling with apprehension. ‘I guess if it was easy, everyone would do it.’

Shep headed back to the pallet and, after protracted clanking, returned with a power drill fitted with a thick, carbide-tipped bit. Centering the bit on the roof of the safe, he set his full weight behind the handle and drilled down. This went on for ten minutes, then twenty. Every so often he’d stop and blow steel dust from the hole, the powder turning white when he hit a layer of concrete. Finally, he stopped to rest.

His lips tensed, that crooked tooth poking into view. Sweat and bits of shrapnel sparkled in his buzz cut. ‘There is nothing better than this.’

Mike raised his eyebrows.

‘Taking a hard nut to crack and cracking it,’ Shep continued. ‘Making it spill its secrets, nothing left but the light of day. Doesn’t matter how much money you come from, how much security you pay for, what kind of custom safe you build. Any lowlife can grind past all that to the promised land. All it takes is focus and determination. Stamina, the great fucking equalizer. And when those doors swing open for me? Man. The release – the triumph.’ He shook his head and whistled a single note. Mike had never seen him so alive. ‘Half the time I don’t even care what the take is. It’s about the challenge, not the shit inside.’

‘But tonight,’ Mike said, ‘it’s about both.’

‘Tonight’s nothing. The nut isn’t the safe. It’s Brian McAvoy and Deer Creek Enterprises. Money, connections, power – they’re the guys sitting behind all those doors that’ve been closed to us all our lives. But if we apply the right pressure at the right time, make the right incisions’ – a nod to the cuts in the steel face – ‘pull the right levers, we’re gonna crack those mother-fuckers wide open.’

He resumed drilling, leaning on the handle, going through a second drill bit and then a third. At last, the resistance gave way, the drill chuck free-falling three inches to slap against the top of the safe. Shep blew the hole clear, then uncoiled a fiber-optic camera and fed the black wire through into the safe.

‘You see the negatives?’ Mike asked, the words coming in a rush. He had done his best to forget that every risk they’d taken was based on a hunch: that McAvoy had parked the photo negatives in the safe. Now they were inches away from knowing.

Shep studied the green footage on the tiny attached screen. His mouth drooped a bit, and then he leaned over the drill hole, sniffed a few times, and cursed under his breath.

Mike had the sensation of losing his stomach for a moment, a roller-coaster dip. ‘They’re not in there,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Shep said. ‘They are.’ But his expression stayed dire.

Mike looked on the tiny monitor. All he saw were a few brittle papers and – thank God – the thin stack of film negatives. Then he noticed it – a stripped wire rimming the safe’s interior. If the walls were tampered with or the door opened, the end of the wire would be pulled into contact with a bare wire loop. ‘If those exposed parts touch-’

‘They’ll ignite,’ Shep said.

‘So how did McAvoy get in?’

‘If you open the safe the right way, then the weight of the locking mechanism pins down the slack wire, moving it out of reach.’

‘But you destroyed the locking mechanism,’ Mike said.

Shep sat back on his heels, his hands resting on his stained jeans.

Mike wouldn’t let himself fully acknowledge Shep’s expression of defeat. ‘So we’ll just be ready to throw water in the minute the door opens,’ Mike said.

Shep grabbed the back of Mike’s collar and moved his face down toward the drill hole. ‘Smell.’

An acrid scent singed Mike’s nostrils.

‘That’s cellulose nitrate film,’ Shep said. ‘They made movies with it in the thirties and forties. But amateurs used to cut it down and use it for still photography.’ He pushed the fiber-optic camera in farther, moving the lens right above the strip of negatives. ‘See the horizontal dashes between every fourth sprocket hole?’

‘How do you know this? What are you, the Professor from Gilligan’s Island?’

Shep didn’t smile, which heightened Mike’s alarm. He just poked his tongue into his lip and said, ‘If you find it in a safe, odds are I’ve come across it. That shit is highly flammable – basically the same as flash paper. If it catches a spark, it’s up in a puff.’

Mike exhaled and let his forehead bang against the safe. Those photo negatives were a foot away, sitting behind an unlocked safe door that he couldn’t swing open. To have gotten this far, only to be undone by two lengths of stripped wire.

He swore sharply, a shout that echoed around the warehouse, rustling the bats in the rafters. Then he leaned back, spit into the darkness beyond the lights, and gave a bitter laugh. ‘I’m never going to see my daughter again, and it’s because some botanists from Stanford used cheap film eighty years ago.’

‘There’s no way I could’ve known.’ Shep’s voice was too loud, and his hearing had nothing to do with it.

‘I know that,’ Mike said. ‘I’m not blaming-’

‘I mean, of all things, cellulose nitrate-’

‘-you. I’m just grateful-’

‘-that shit’s so flammable it burns underwater.’

Mike bolted upright, Shep’s head snapping up. Mike jogged off into the darkness, shouting, ‘Get some light over here!’

He found the faucet near the wall by feel and cranked the handle, water drumming the wide basin below. Shep directed one of the T-bars of floodlights over, nearly blinding him.

Mike said, ‘We gotta drown the circuit. No oxygen, no spark.’

Shep came over, and they watched the rust-colored water slowly turn clear. ‘And if the water ruins the negatives?’

Mike found a crusted rag and used it to plug the drain. ‘We’re out of options.’

As the water rose, he spread several moving blankets out on the floor beside the basin and angled a set of floodlights directly down onto them. ‘We have to peel them apart right away.’

When Mike cut the water, the silence was pronounced, every plink from the faucet reverberating off the high rafters.

They crossed to the safe and lifted it from either side, careful to keep the door clamped shut. With some effort they carried it over and rested it on the lip of the basin. Shep’s eyes were shiny and excited. ‘Ready?’

They slid the safe over, and it hit the water with a slap, a wave rolling back and splashing their thighs. A spike of two-by-four gouged the underside of Mike’s forearm, but he held tight, settling the safe gently on the bottom.

He stepped back and shook his arms, spattering the concrete with drops of blood and water. Shep stayed put, elbows resting on the edge of the basin, a dugout-railing lean. After testing that the blankets had warmed beneath the floodlights, Mike went to Shep’s side, mirrored his position, and peered down. Bubbles streamed from the drill hole in the top of the safe. They made the faintest sound when they hit the surface, like guppies feeding.

Mike tried not to think of the water seeping into those photo negatives. He tried not to think about what would happen if they got ruined, if the wires sparked when the door opened despite the water, if they weren’t the negatives Two-Hawks was looking for. His knee vibrated up and down, a nervous tic.

They waited, watching the safe slowly fill.