“One minute! This whole building will be crawling with cops soon!”
I felt a line of sweat dripping down my back. An angry insect was buzzing away, somewhere in the weeds behind us.
“They’re beating down the door! You idiot!”
Another pin. Hold the tension. Not too hard.
“Bam! Hear that? Bam!”
I closed my eyes. I held myself completely still. I let up on the tension bar, one millionth of a millionth of an inch.
“We’re totally fucked now! They’re all over the place!”
Three more pins. Two more.
“It’s too late! Run, you fool! Run!”
One more. I felt it give. The whole thing turning. I pulled the tools out, and it took everything I had not to smack the Ghost right in his pale stupid fucking face.
“That took a while,” he said, eyeing me coolly like he hadn’t spent the last minute and a half screaming at me. “I’ve never seen somebody hold a pick quite the way you do, either. I don’t know who the hell taught you to do it like that.”
He was back to rummaging around on the workbench. He started a small avalanche of washers and nuts and bolts.
“Of course, lock pickers are a dime a dozen these days. You can find them anywhere.”
When he finally found what he was looking for, he picked it up and tossed it to me. It was a combination padlock, but not a cheap one.
“Simple three-cam lock, right? What do you do with it?”
I pulled the shackle out and started turning the dial, feeling for the sticking points. The usual routine, finding the last number and then using the number families to narrow down the possible combinations.
The Ghost watched me as I did this. Last number 25, so start with 1, super-set the second numbers and start cranking them out.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I looked up at him. What do you think I’m doing?
“You’re not seriously going to cheat the numbers, are you? You think you can get away with that on a good lock? They don’t use those patterns like they do on cheap pieces of shit, for one thing. For another thing… I mean, God damn, how much of an amateur are you, anyway? Don’t you have any sense of touch at all?”
He didn’t wait for me to respond to that. Not that I had any answer. He grabbed the lock from my hand and started to spin the dial.
“You have to feel it, okay? There’s no other way to do this. I mean, shit, if you can’t do that on a fucking padlock…”
He took one quick glance at the dial. Then he put the lock near his left ear for a moment and kept turning. He closed his eyes.
“Either you can feel it or you can’t. Okay? It’s that simple.”
He opened his eyes and started spinning the dial in the opposite direction.
“I can do this in my sleep, hotshot. I mean, literally. I can do this while I’m driving a car. While I’m talking on the phone. While I’m having sex.”
He turned the dial a little more, stopped, changed direction one more time.
“Do you understand what I’m saying? I can do this while I’m not even thinking about it one little bit.”
He pulled the shackle out and tossed the now open lock back to me.
“Sit down here and work on it. When you can open it like a real boxman, let me know. In the meantime, I’m going to lunch.”
Boxman. That was the first time I heard the term. It rang in my ears as he left me there alone in that green-shaded back lot, in the middle of those great iron safes.
A real boxman.
The sun was going down when I finally left that place. I had the lock in my pocket. My first piece of homework was to keep spinning the dials until I could feel the cams lining up the right way. Until I could open the damned thing purely by touch, without cheating.
I should have gone straight home to practice, but instead I rode back to the Marshes’ house. Every window was dark when I pulled into the driveway, but I could hear music coming from somewhere inside. I opened the front door and peeked inside. The stereo was blasting “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys. Mr. Marsh’s favorite band, I remembered. It was loud enough for a party, but the lights were all off, and I didn’t see anybody.
I went into the living room. The big aquarium cast an eerie glow. Then I saw a thin line of light under the door to Mr. Marsh’s office. I went upstairs first. I opened Amelia’s door and flipped on the light. She still wasn’t there.
I turned her light off and left. I went downstairs. There were a few seconds of silence as the song ended. Then another Beach Boys song came on. “You Still Believe in Me.” I went to the office door and pushed it open. The music got louder.
The first thing I noticed was that the giant stuffed fish was gone. The second thing I noticed was that it wasn’t so much gone as just taken down from the wall and rammed through the window. The back half was still inside, the front half outside.
The third thing I noticed was the desk chair, facing away from me. I saw an arm hanging down one side. I stood there for a few seconds, waiting for some sign of life.
Then the chair turned. Mr. Marsh was slumped down with a drink in his other hand. He looked up at me without the slightest hint of surprise.
“Good to see you,” he said. “Make yourself a drink.”
I saw a legal pad on his desk. I grabbed it, along with a pen, and started writing. Where is Amelia?
When I gave it to him, he held the pad out in front of him and then started tromboning it back and forth to make it come into focus.
“She’s gone.”
I took the pad back one more time. Where did she go?
That one seemed to deflate him. He closed his eyes for a while. So long I thought he might have drifted off on me. Then he cleared his throat.
“I sent her away. Somewhere safe. I think she wanted to call you, but… well, it’s kind of hard to do that, you know?”
He drained the rest of his drink and then put his glass down on the desk. He did it carefully, like it was something that took every ounce of his strength and skill. I couldn’t help but remember the very first time I saw him sitting in that chair. The overtanned man in his tank top and shorts, with the perfect teeth, the flashy wristwatch, the fifty-dollar haircut. Lots of attitude and big words then, but today he was so scared he could barely keep his hands from shaking.
“If I talk to her, I’ll send her your, you know… I mean, I’ll put in a good word for you. I’ll tell her you’re helping me. And that she’ll be able to come home soon.”
I walked over to the great tail fin of the fish. The way it was stuck there in the shattered window, it looked like it was trying to escape this place. A completely understandable feeling.
“Besides, you need to focus right now,” Mr. Marsh said. “I need your absolute best effort here. Are you with me?”
I didn’t even look at him. I turned away and walked to the door.
“They will kill me.”
I stopped.
“I need you to believe that, Michael. They will kill me for sure. Or if they think I’m more useful to them alive… they may hurt Adam. End his football career.”
His voice was flat, devoid of all emotion.
“Or Amelia…”
No. Don’t even say it.
“I don’t even want to think about what they might do to her.”
This is not happening, I thought. This is worse than a bad dream.
“It’s a terrible thing to put on you,” he said, “but I don’t have a choice.”
He didn’t say anything else to me.
He didn’t have to.
Twenty-two
Ohio
September 2000
The Ghost had made it clear to me. I knew the rule. When the red pager goes off, you call the number as quickly as a human being can pick up a phone and call a number.