“It’s good to see you again,” he said to me. “I knew I had a good feeling about you.”
I didn’t move.
“A man who doesn’t talk. What a beautiful thing, eh?”
Everyone else at the table nodded at this. Two other men in suits. Three women in diamonds and dressed out to here.
“If you see Mr. Marsh, tell him I’m sorry to hear that his partner Mr. Slade is still missing. He should be more careful who he does business with.”
That brought some laughter from around the table. Then I was dismissed. Sleepy Eyes ushered me away and pressed a wad of bills into my right hand. When I got outside, I opened my fist and saw five crumpled hundred-dollar bills.
I still had the pagers in the motorcycle’s back compartment. I was wondering what would happen if I were to take them back into the restaurant. If I were to place them on that table and then walk away. I was trying to picture exactly what might happen, when I heard Sleepy Eyes calling to me.
“Over here,” he said. He gestured me over to the long black car, the same car I’d seen parked in Mr. Marsh’s driveway.
“The boss wanted me to show you something,” he said. “He thought it might be… what’s the word? Beneficial?”
Sleepy Eyes took a quick look around, then opened the trunk. As the light popped on, I saw the lifeless face of Jerry Slade, Mr. Marsh’s partner. The trunk lid got slammed back down before I could register anything else. How he might have died, or if the rest of his body was even intact.
“I don’t make a point of parking in the middle of a city with something like that in the trunk,” Sleepy Eyes said, “but we finally caught up to him today, and well… it seemed like good timing. Do your little test tonight and make a lasting impression, all at the same time.”
I kept standing there. My mind couldn’t make my muscles do anything yet.
“Welcome to real life, kid.”
He smacked me once on the cheek and went inside, leaving me there alone in the dark.
I went to school for two more days. That was it for my entire senior year of high school. On Thursday night, the blue pager went off. I called the number. The man on the other end had a thick New York accent. He gave me an address in Pennsylvania. Just outside of Philadelphia. He told me I’d be expected in two days’ time. I sat there for a long time, looking at the address.
I’m going to need a note, I thought to myself. I’m going to need a note, excusing me from school tomorrow so I can go to Pennsylvania and help some men rob a safe.
The next morning, I bought a pair of luggage bags. They hung over the backseat of my motorcycle, one on each side. I came back and put as many clothes as I could fit inside them. Toothbrush, toothpaste, the usual things you need every day. I packed my safe lock. I packed the pages that Amelia had drawn for me that summer. I packed the pagers.
I had about a hundred dollars of my own saved up, plus the five hundred the men had given me after the fake robbery. Minus the thirty bucks for the motorcycle luggage. So about $570 in total.
I went to the liquor store, going in through the back door in case Uncle Lito was taking one of his morning naps. When I went through to the front, there he was slumped over the counter, his head resting on his forearms. If someone walked through the front door, he’d snap awake in a half second and try to act like he hadn’t been sleeping.
I slipped around him and stood in front of the cash register. I pushed the magic button on the register and the drawer popped open. I did a quick count. There wasn’t much, and what there was, I put right back. I couldn’t take it. When I closed the drawer, Uncle Lito came to.
“What? What’s going on?”
I put my hand on his back. Not my usual thing to do.
“Michael! Are you okay?”
I gave him the thumbs-up. Never better.
“What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be at school?”
He looked old today. My father’s brother, this man who felt responsible for what had happened to me, who had taken me in despite having no aptitude whatsoever for taking care of another human being.
But he tried. Right? He tried.
And he gave me one damned fine motorcycle.
I hugged him for the first and last time. Then I went out the door.
Here is the part that kills me. I had one more stop to make. The antique store down the street. I went inside and waved to the old man, the very same old man who had sold me my first locks, way back when.
I wasn’t buying a lock today. I went to the glass counter and pointed to a ring. I didn’t know if the diamond was real. All I knew was that I had seen it before, and that I had liked it. And that I had enough money to buy it. It was only a hundred dollars.
When I had the ring in its little box, tucked inside my jacket, I rode over to Amelia’s house. The place was empty. Mr. Marsh was off at the health club or wherever else he went during the day, now that I’d earned his life back for him.
Amelia was at school, of course. Like any normal seventeen-year-old.
The front door was locked. I went around to the back. That was locked, too. One more time, for old times’ sake, I took out the tools and opened that door. It made me remember that first time, when I had broken into the house with the football players. Then the time after that, when I had broken in just to leave a picture in Amelia’s room.
I didn’t regret any of it. I still don’t, to this day.
When I was inside, I went upstairs and sat on her bed for a while. Amelia’s bed, officially the greatest square footage on the planet Earth. I sat there remembering everything, and then for the last time that day, I tried to talk myself out of it.
You can go get her right now, I thought. Go get her out of school, give her the ring in person. Take her with you. You love her, you can’t live without her, you’ll find a way to make it work. Why else would you feel this way? Why do you even have a heart inside you if it tells you that this is the person you want to be with for the rest of your life and you can’t make that happen?
And so on. Until the truth finally came back to me. As clear as sunlight. As clear as that look on her face when those men came to the house, with her father in the backseat.
I can’t take you with me, I thought. I can’t let this touch you. Any of it. I can’t even tell you where I’m going.
I stood up. I took the ring box out of my jacket. I put it on her pillow.
I did all of this for you, Amelia. And now I have to do one more thing.
Twenty-six
Los Angeles
September 2000
Gunnar was in. Of course. It was his crazy idea to begin with.
Julian and Ramona were out. No surprise there, either.
“I told you before, it’s suicide,” Julian said. “You know it is.”
“It’s foolproof,” Gunnar said. “We hit, we run. We have our tracks covered. Four million dollars.”
“You don’t think they’re gonna know in two seconds who took the money? You might as well draw a big fucking neon arrow from that boat to this house.”
“No,” Gunnar said. “You don’t get it. I told you, I’ve got another contact on the boat.”
“Who’s this contact you keep talking about? Give me a name.”
“You don’t know him. His name won’t mean anything to you.”
“How did you meet him?”
“I was doing a tattoo on this one guy who knew this other guy who was gonna be going on this big boat, he said. Being a bodyguard. So I followed up on it. You know, the same thing that you do all the time.”
“You’re insane,” Julian said. “You’ve totally lost your mind.”
“You just don’t want to face the fact that I was the one who set this up. For once, it’s me who puts together the perfect score, and you can’t take it.”
Lucy watched them going back and forth. She was as silent as I was. Eventually, she went upstairs and didn’t come back down until the evening. By then, it had come down to one simple declaration. Anybody else in the house was welcome to join us, but if we had to, Gunnar and I would do it alone. I knew it was a bluff and Julian and Ramona probably knew it, too. But in the end… they were in.