by John L. Monk
Staring down Danny’s key-in-knob lock and the Schlage deadbolt above it—likely fitted with mushroom pins—I found myself missing my lock pick set, but only a little. With luck, my ring of bump keys would suffice.
The purpose of a bump key is to pop the specially cut teeth into the bottom pins of a cylinder lock so they slam the top pins. Pop the pins past the sheer line and the lock will open. There’s a bit more to it, but the rest is prep work. Your key has to fit in the hole, it has to be made correctly so it doesn’t get stuck, and the teeth have to be the maximum length possible for the lock you want to bump. I’d made my keys by hand and tested them on numerous occasions. And I’d brought a variety of sizes for the most common range of locks. But every lock was different, so you couldn’t call it a sure thing.
I pulled the keys from my backpack and selected a likely five-pin key and popped it in. Happily, it went in all the way. Next, I took a butter knife I’d nicked from the restaurant and positioned it like a hammer, then gently retracted the key until it clicked once. Using my thumb, I applied pressure to the bottom rim of the key and then banged it into the lock with the heavy end of the knife. As expected, the key turned partially to the right, then stopped abruptly in a false set.
Mushroom pins are delicate little things designed to thwart picks and bumps, which jam in the cylinder before ever touching the top pins. Other than slowing me down as I worked out the right tension, they’re barely worth the extra expense. Two minutes later, I cleared the false set and the lock popped open.
After that, because Danny hadn’t bothered locking the knob, I strolled right in.
The kitchen was dark, but I could still make out the ultra-modern appliances gleaming in the meager light. A big room, it had a large granite-top island in the middle with electric burners. The rest of the room screamed money, with fine-crafted cabinets and a huge fridge with stainless-steel doors and shiny double-stacked ovens straight out of a Lowe’s catalog.
I got out a penlight and narrowed it to a tight beam, then passed the beam along the wall between the window and the door, grinning when I found a key hanging from a brass hook. I tested it on the door and it fit both the knob and the deadbolt. I put the key back and searched the room in an orderly fashion, opening every drawer, and found a second key in a drawer full of miscellaneous hardware.
My plan was to come back another night—this was just a recon mission. A quick test showed the second key fit, so I put it in my pocket. I couldn’t very well go hammering away on a bump key in the middle of the night, now could I? And speaking of that, the door had groaned when I’d opened it. That wouldn’t do at all. The ideal solution was a couple of squirts of WD-40, but a packet of mayonnaise would also work because it was 100% fat.
Carefully, I worked the mayo into the grooves of the hinges and moved the door back and forth. Soon the groaning sound vanished, and the hinge was now officially tastier.
There was a closed-circuit alarm installed over the back door. Standing on a chair with the light between my teeth, I removed the cover on the jamb-side contact. Then I cut the wires and completed the circuit in front of the end-of-the-line resistor using a cold heat solder and stripped Ethernet strands I’d brought along for that express purpose. This way the control box wouldn’t detect the short and start screaming it’d been bypassed. I was lucky the Bahamian security company used big door contacts with easy access or I’d need a Dremel and a tube of superglue. Sure, when I returned I could always disarm the system using the front door keypad, but why risk Danny hearing the loud deactivation beep?
Done with the door, I dipped into my magic backpack and withdrew the one item I’d worried might not make it through the baggage check.
My shortwave-infrared night-vision goggles with the built-in IR illuminator were a lot of fun, and incredible in a dark house. After slipping them on, I made my way forward into a swanky TV area, trying not to bump into anything. From there, I followed a short hall to the right. I found two doors on the left and one on the right, each to a bedroom furnished with enough bare essentials to say they weren’t empty. At the end of the hall was a bathroom and a set of double doors that surely led to the master bedroom.
I slowly edged open one of the doors and found the room empty—of people. Here were the plush furnishings I expected to find after seeing the kitchen. The bed was king-sized with silk sheets. The rug was a thick shag imported straight from the seventies.
There was nothing under the bed. I checked the closet and found something nasty and rubbery hanging from a hook. It made me wish I’d added a bottle of luminal and a black light to my bag of tricks so I’d know what not to touch.
Running out of options, I peeked behind the two ugly paintings he had, but didn’t find anything.
“Where the hell is it?” I said.
The living room was a waste of time. I don’t steal TVs or stereos. The other bedrooms had nothing under the beds or in the closets. Back the other way, at the far end of the house, I found a room with a nice telescope, a computer desk, and a giant massage chair that plugged into the wall and looked about as tacky as I’m sure it was comfortable.
I edged past it and began poking around.
The closet was filled with boxes of junk, which I took the time to remove, and that’s when I noticed the floor had a cut-away patch of rug someone had put back at the wrong angle. When I peeled it back, I found a steel plate nestled into the concrete floor. Careful not to pinch a finger, I tugged the plate out by the holes and felt my jaw drop at the Dean Eclipse series floor safe lurking an inch below the concrete. Heavy as it was, it must have cost a small fortune to import.
Dean made good safes, but their floor safes didn’t go beyond a B4 burglar rating, and couldn’t stand more than fifteen minutes of drilling. I couldn’t drill it without tools—even if I knew Danny’s schedule, which I didn’t. Blowing it up with explosives or torching through it like they did in the movies might have been fun, but it’d wake up the whole island, not to mention stink up the place. And it wasn’t necessary. I was going to open it in a way ridiculed by people who thought they knew better but really didn’t know anything. Just not today.
After I got everything back the way I’d found it, my phone began to buzz. I had a momentary start when I saw it was Ted’s number. Then I remembered: Anna was there.
“Hello?” I said, edging back to the living room to keep an eye out for Danny. If he arrived, I’d arm the alarm, slip out the back, and lock up behind me with the spare key.
“Bo?” Anna said. “Is this a bad time?”
It wasn’t so much a bad time as the wrong time.
“Anna,” I said. “Hey, how are you? Listen, when I got off the plane I was so tired I went to sleep. After I got up, I thought it was too late.”
I bit my thumb, hating myself for not calling her like I said I would.
“It’s cool,” she said. “I figured you’d be tired. I just wanted to see how you were doing, that’s all. You sure it’s not too late?”
It was just after 9 p.m. At this time of year, the Virginia sky would have been dark for about a half hour.
“Not at all,” I said. “I just had dinner and I’m about to head back. So, how are you doing with the, uh…?”
“The shakes? You can say it, I don’t mind. I’m watching TV and drinking lots of water. This isn’t my first detox, you know. Also, seeing you again … it helps.”
I smiled in the darkness. “I get that a lot.”
Anna’s voice took on a familiar and steely hardness. “So what’d Debbie say when you talked to her?”
“Oh yeah. Debbie. She’s pretty cool, huh?”
Anna snorted. “She’s a slut is what you mean. But yeah, she’s cool. So, what did she say about me?”
I watched as a truck passed, the only vehicle I’d seen so far.
“All she said was she was worried about you,” I said.
“Whatever. You know you’re totally getting laid, right?”
Christ.
“Uh … are you really okay?”
“I would be if you’d stopped asking me that. I’m just looking out for you, okay? If you get herpes they last forever.”
“Thank you,” I said, smiling. “I appreciate it. We outcasts gotta look out for each other.”
A moment passed where I thought we’d disconnected, then Anna said, “Why do you always say that? Call yourself an outcast? It’s sort of weird.”
I wanted to end the call, so I didn’t tell her how I’d been tossed from home to home until the state found a strange old rich woman who hadn’t blinked at finding me alone on the roof in the middle of the night. And anyway, what was I doing trespassing in someone’s vacation house if I wasn’t a total outcast?
“Just me being me,” I said, hoping she’d drop it.
“Bo,” she said cautiously, not dropping it, “what’s with thief stuff? I never understood that. Mrs. Swanson loves you so much, she’d do anything you asked her—send you to school, get you training in something…”
Offer me a job in her private spy agency.
I chose my words carefully. “She did send me to college. Whenever I was in class, surrounded by all those normals, following their rules… It’s like I’ve left this crummy path set for me before I was ever born. Watching those idiots strut around, secure in their perfect nuclear families, smugging up the world…” In the darkness of Danny’s house, I shook my head. “If you think about it, I’m the one who should be strutting. I broke free of all that.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” Anna said. “How free you gonna be in prison? Everyone’s got problems, Bo, and you always act like you don’t have any.” She snorted. “It’s clear to me you’ve got some pretty big ones.”
“At least they’re pretty,” I said.
A white compact car pulled into the drive, blinding me with its headlights.
“You know what?” Anna said. “I think—”
“Hey, can I call you back in the morning?” I said. “They just called my reservation and I have to go inside.”
“You’re eating again?”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said, and hung up.
She’d been right about one thing—there was nothing less free than prison. And with prison in a Third World country parked just outside, I needed to move.
Retreating quickly to the kitchen, I slipped out the door and locked it from the other side with the second key.
Too late, I remembered: the burglar alarm was still disarmed!
Seconds later, the lights in the house turned on. I waited outside in the darkness, not looking conspicuous at all in my night-vision goggles. Through the open window, I saw Danny head to the fridge and grab a beer. Either he’d re-disarmed the alarm and not realized it or forgotten he’d set it in the first place. Happens all the time, why not have a beer?
A while later, a black girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, came in for something and left. I wondered if she was Alvita. Then I wondered if her parents knew where she was.
I waited a few minutes, then slipped through about forty feet of trees and caught the road at a slant, overshooting the bike by about ten yards. The goggles worked great—I saw every pit and branch. Before stepping onto the road, I took them off and marveled at the absolute darkness around me. With no streetlights and no moon or pollution to bounce back the lights of Nassau, I could see every star in the sky—something I’d experienced only once before, on a camping trip to West Virginia with a church group a year after my dad was killed. When I told my foster mother—Mrs. Ellis—how two boys cornered one of the kids and made him “do things,” they thought I was lying. After the cops picked me up, sometime after midnight trying to hitchhike, the state found another family to take me.
The ride back was great. The island had been warm, if muggy, but it had cooled down considerably since I’d left the hotel. And with the breeze from the ride, it felt almost chilly. Rather than head back and call it a night, I took a detour through the south side of the island. Adelaide Road turned into Carmichael Road, with lots of nice foliage and houses. I wasn’t in a hurry, so I took a random turn into South Beach Village, followed by another that landed me in a scarier place called Nassau Village. I found rundown shacks with yellow porch lights, graffiti on transformers and fences, and young people in groups listening to music.
One of them pointed at me and yelled, “Boo!”
His friends laughed and waited to see what I’d do. I tried not to stare and hoped the fashion would catch on. A few minutes later, I found the way out and scootered back to the hotel.
When I got to the lobby, I told the guy at the desk where I’d been.
“You shouldn’t go there, sir,” he said with a concerned frown. “Not at night. They know you don’t live there.”
I thanked the man and went to my room.
Chapter 11
Growing up, other than becoming a master thief, having a do-over past was the only fantasy I ever had. It would have been neat to have a brother or sister or cousins, like other people. And definitely grandparents—they gave out money, and you could count on them for the big-ticket items on birthdays and Christmases.
Back then, we lived in a trailer in southern Virginia, just Mom and me. She and Dad weren’t married, but he always came to see us. When he did, they’d laugh and drink and carry on like kids together. When I close my eyes and see their smiles, those are the smiles I see. Then I imagine other smiles that had never happened: Mom smiling in the morning when I came down for breakfast, or Dad smiling over another great report card. Because it’s a fantasy, I leave out how Mom eventually ruined it, yelling and throwing things a week or so into his visits until he couldn’t stand it anymore and left.
A period came in third grade when Dad stopped coming around. Later, I learned he was in prison for something, though I never found out what. Those were hungry times, with Mom simply gone for weeks at a time leaving me to fend for myself. It’d be fun to say I launched my criminal career then, but all I did was play with the other kids in the park on the off chance one would ask me home for dinner. I recall staying with different families and having a lot of first days of school. But every time I got comfortable somewhere, strangers would come and return me home to Mom, cleaned-up and acting like she hadn’t been missing.
Despite my dad’s flaws, there are times I can’t stop wondering what he was like. Not in an adult/kid way but in a man-to-man way. I have a small photo album of all of us together, so I never lost what he looked like. If I could remember his voice it’d be almost perfect.
When Dad got out of prison, Mom told the cops he expected things to be the same, and she made sure he knew they weren’t. I was nine at the time. The day it happened, she said he tried to take me away with him, forcing her to stop him the only way she could—with a gun that had somehow found its way into the trailer. She didn’t know how it got there, it just got there. I told the social workers Dad and I used to shoot beer cans off the fence with that gun and how I got to be pretty good. They didn’t like that much, but the prosecutor seemed happy about it.
The police testified that Dad had been out of jail for several months, that he and Mom had been seen together all over town in the weeks leading up to the shooting, and that they’d found the rusted-out school bus my parents had converted to a meth lab. Which meant Dad’s presence in our trailer that day hadn’t been a surprise to anyone.
The most damning evidence against my mom was from Dad himself, bleeding to death with his arms around me, his shot-up back facing the door. When a passerby heard the shots and came to lend a hand—carrying his own gun, oddly enough—he told anyone who’d listen my dad’s dying words were, “She tried to shoot Bo.”
To this day I don’t know who to believe. Every way I look at it hurts differently. If my mom was telling the truth, I’m supposed to hate my dad. If the police and the passerby were right, Mom was a psycho who wanted me dead. I don’t remember anything from that day except blue and red lights and a lot of adults being real
ly nice to me. After that, I recall more first days of school and a lot of rules I needed to follow.
Only, I never could.
***
When I woke up, I saw someone had slipped a newspaper under my door. Normally, I can’t stand the news unless it has an angle I can work. Current events are for normal people, but a headline for a story in the full-color entertainment section caught my eye: “Isabella reserves Michael Jackson Suite for a week!” Underneath was a small picture of a beautiful, young, olive-skinned brunette wearing a fortune in diamonds.
I folded the paper and took it with me to breakfast.
Eggs, bacon, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and johnnycakes fixed up my day perfectly. And coffee. Afterward, I flipped the paper open like an ordinary Joe and read the story about the woman with all the diamonds:
“Yes, it’s true—our own Isabella Rhodes is returning to Nassau in imperial splendor. What do you do when you settle your lawsuit against the world’s largest diamond mining company? Why, you party, of course! Isabella may have been a thorn in the side of the Rhodes family, after her spectacular divorce from Griffin Rhodes of De Beers fame, but that’s all over now. Not only is she keeping the name, she’s living up to it! Staying in the ritzy Poseidon Royal Suite overlooking the Marina at Poseidon, she’ll be performing for charity at the Poseidon Theater next week for five nights only…”