The Ducati helmet slipped from his hand and cracked on the floorboards.
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.’