I found the two bikers in the large room that didn’t match the living room area. This one contained a nice maple desk and an expensive Asian area rug. A Remington bronze of a cowboy riding a bronc sat on the desk. Overhead, a Tiffany lamp hung from the ceiling. The room had been professionally decorated with a generous budget, money obtained through tyranny, extortion, pain, and blood. Tongue-and-groove knotty pine panels covered the walls, where pictures hung depicting Clay Warfield with public figures at dinners, charity events, and political rallies. The face, the figurehead, the leader of the SS International organization.
We were kicking a sleeping giant.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
I have little or no knowledge about safes. This one took up one corner of the room. A real monster, olive green with a double door. Older looking, with twin dials. A beautiful mural on the front depicted a stagecoach with a team of black horses at a full run fleeing masked gunmen on wild-eyed steeds.
Drago set both bags down by the safe.
“Is it the same safe?” I asked. “Is it in the same position as you remember?”
He looked at me as if he had not thought of that, took a step back, and reexamined the safe. He scratched his dome. He walked back to the door where we entered, turned, raised his hands, spread them wide, looking through them gauging the space, the same as a director of a movie. He carefully paced off the distance back to the safe. “Shit. I can’t tell for sure if it’s in the same place or not, but it is for damn sure the same safe. I’m absolutely sure of that.”
“You can’t tell for sure if it’s in the same location? You’re kidding, right?”
“Well, you asked me. I’m here to tell ya, I’m not sure. And come on, man, it was a long time ago. It does seem to me that the safe’s in the right place. But maybe…I don’t know, maybe it should be another two or three feet farther that way. That wall seems closer for some reason. But man, that can’t be right.” He scratched his head. “Since I got out, I’ve been goin’ a little crazy. I notice things from before, that in my head I remember different from this time around. I was in a small concrete cell for twenty-five years and everything to me feels bigger now, huge even. That concrete box really fucked with my perspective, man.”
Drago came back and shoved the solid maple desk out of the way as if it were constructed of balsa wood. His mood changed back to all business. “You watch these two assholes close, I’m serious.” He looked at the safe, appraising it, then down at the bags we’d brought in. “I’m not gonna need all these tools like I thought. This isn’t the model I thought it was. They call this one the butter model, cuts like butter.”
He opened the bag, took out a sledgehammer, raised it high and came down on the first dial. The dial broke off and skittered away.
Slim Jim said, “You’re insane-that’s Clay’s safe. You just committed suicide assh-”
Drago spun around, the hammer of Thor raised high overhead, ready to strike.
I stepped in front of the two idiot prospects to keep their mouths from killing them.
Drago’s eyes cooled. “Sit them down over there and tell ’em to keep their mouths shut, or I’ll cave in their little pea brains.” He did not bluster. I had no doubt he’d do it.
By the way Drago talked and acted, he didn’t like bikers much. I hoped that’s what was causing his overreaction to the situation, and not that he realized the safe might have been moved. Had the safe been moved even two or three feet, the doughnut, in all likelihood, would not have been used in the reinstallation, as it had not been needed in the first one to begin with.
Drago swung the big sledge in one fluid movement and knocked off the other dial. He went back into the duffel and came out with a unique device, an aluminum rack or frame attached to a huge drill. He looked back to check on me. “Hey, I’m tellin’ ya, don’t watch me, watch those two assholes. They’ll go on you, you give ’em half a chance. They have to. Like I said, they get their asses kicked now by us, or by the gang when they catch up to them. It’ll happen as soon as those two ass-wipes grow a pair of balls.”
Of course, he was right. I understood the primitive and archaic mentality. I just had difficulty comprehending anyone still employing it. I sat on the edge of the desk, facing the two biker wannabes who sat on the floor with their backs to the wall. They kept their eyes on me as the drill’s rpms whined and the bit cut into steel.
Their eyes filled with anger and, in some small way, smothered any hope I had for humanity.
Time did not play fair. It slowed to a pace akin to soldiers, exhausted, slogging along in two feet of sludge, mired in endless miles of mud.
The pitch of the drill changed as the bit broke through. The whine stopped. The lack of noise filled the room with an eerie silent echo. I fought the urge to watch what move Drago did next and asked, “How long?”
“I don’t know.”
My head jerked around all on its own. “What do you mean you don’t know? Haven’t you done this before?”
He smiled. “Hell, no, I’m a stickup guy, not some crotchety old yegg or cheesy little sneak thief who prowls the night afraid of his own shadow. I hate sneak thieves, hate ’em with a vengeance.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you never broke into a safe?”
“Cracking a safe. They call it cracking a safe, or peeling a safe, depending on which method you use.”
“How do you-”
“Chill, man. I had twenty-five years to study up on it. Enough time to earn eight college degrees in the subject. I got this. You’d better pay attention to your shit.”
I turned back just as Slim Jim and Roy Boy shot up from the floor in a unified attack. I buried my head in my arms and elbows. Their two cuffed hands grabbed my shoulders beside my neck. They’d been going for my throat and missed as I reacted. With their free hands, they pummeled me on both sides with rock-hard fists of youth. The blows rained down on my forehead and ears and neck with a burst of pain and bright lights. I expected a lion’s roar as Drago counterattacked. Surely, any second, Drago would dispatch them with his hammer. Smash and crush their bodies. Fling them up against the wall like so much human garbage.
But the counterattack didn’t come. The whine of drill started again. He’d warned me, and now I had to take care of my own error. Another biker mantra, “Take care of your own shit.”
The blows continued to fall. I turned numb.
While on the street as a deputy working South Central Los Angeles, I had been jumped twice, once by four suspects and another by five. Four and five were better than two to fight any day. With more in the mix, they got in the way of themselves and even struck one another. Back then I had covered up and picked my shots, making them count, meting out all takedown shots. When two of their cohorts went down hard, the momentum of the gang broke and they had fled.
Now in Clay’s office there were only two, who were younger and more motivated. I had to make a sacrifice. I opened up my right side in order to take a shot with my best stroke, a right uppercut. I made my move. Roy Boy came in with knuckles to my temple on the weak side that shook me to my heels and made the lights in the room flicker. My uppercut was already on the way, a short violent stroke that I put in everything I had left. My fist connected with the bottom of Slim Jim’s jaw. His head snapped back. His broken jawbone radiated through my wrist and up my arm. He went down as though I’d switched off a light. His cuffed hand pulled Roy Boy off balance just enough. I came around with a left hook, the diversion, and followed it up with the heat, a right roundhouse that caught him flat on the nose. He went down on top of Slim Jim.
Mack heard the ruckus and burst into the room just as it ended. He came over and propped me up. My knees wouldn’t cooperate, not entirely, and I had to sit on the edge of the desk. Mack asked Drago, “Hey, asshole, how come you didn’t help out over here?”