I took my second designated juice box from Roxie’s little cooler, jabbed the sharp end of the straw into the little foil circle, and gave it to Gus. While he let his tears tumble down onto his snow pants and drank his juice, I thought about what in the world we were going to do. How to help. How to make this right. How to undo what had been done. How to fight back.
Then, just as I was putting the lid back on the cooler, I saw it. The Lost and Found desk. All manner of things lined the shelves. And right in the center, I saw a cardboard box, marked on the side with the word GLASSES.
The rage subsided just a little. Magenta gave way to more of a rose pink. I pulled Ruth and Roxie into a huddle. “I’ve got an idea,” I said.
And so, with Ruth and Roxie beside me, I marched over to the Lost and Found. It was manned by a great big guy reading a magazine with a muddy truck on the cover. He was bearlike, in a plaid shirt that was so tight across his chest that the fabric puckered around the buttons. He reminded me very much of Smokey Bear. “Help you?” His voice was deep and booming. And sort of scary.
“Yes,” I said, swallowing my fear and lifting my chin. I hadn’t lied a whole lot in my life; it made me feel a little wobbly. But I held on tight. For poor, sweet, half-blind, snot-bubbling Gus. “We’ve lost some glasses.”
“All of you?” said Smokey. He narrowed his eyes, glaring at me especially. It was my first lesson in being the front woman; even then, I knew it didn’t matter how scared I was. All I had to do was seem like I was fine. Next to me, I heard Roxie make a gulping sound, and Ruth gripped my hand a little tighter.
“Just me,” I said. “I lost my glasses.”
“And it takes three of you to come ask about them?” He set down his magazine and studied us. “What do these glasses of yours look like?”
I began squinting, peering around, as if I really was unable to see. “Very thick,” I said. “I can’t remember. Brown. Or black.” I let go of Ruth and Roxie’s hands and pawed out in the air. Fortunately, I had a little bit of experience with this shtick; due to occasional paralyzing stage fright that rendered me totally unable to speak, I had been cast as Helen Keller in our school play. I had the blind flail down pat. “I’ll know them when I touch them.”
Smokey shook his head and turned the page of his magazine, without looking at the images. “Girls. If you can’t describe the lost item, I can’t show you what we’ve got. Rink policy.”
Like paper dolls attached at the hands, the three of us shuffled aside and convened in another huddle around the corner, in a dimly lit cinder block hallway that smelled like wet socks. I remembered that in the Helen Keller play, Roxie had been cast as my sister, who occasionally fainted for no reason at all. She’d been really good at it; every time she did it, the audience would let out a big, dramatic, “Oooooh!”
“Roxie,” I said. “Do your fake faint. Distract him.”
“Definitely,” she said. “No problem. I practice it every week in church.”
“Ruth, you help me look through the glasses,” I said.
Ruth nodded. “They were bifocals. Like the lunch lady wears, but thinner. I remember them exactly.”
I took a deep breath and steeled myself. And then I did something I’d never done before or since, but it just seemed like . . . the thing to do. I extended my left hand, palm down, in the middle of our little triangle. Roxie put her hand on mine, and Ruth did the same. Suddenly, we weren’t three sixth graders at an ice rink. We were the ThunderCats, we were Jem and her crew. We were the Three Musketeers in pastel parkas. We were invincible.
We were awesome.
“All for one!” I whispered as our mittens and gloves crinkled.
“One for all!” whispered Roxie and Ruth together. And all three of us raised our hands at once.
Again, we approached the desk. Smokey lifted his eyebrow and shifted his chew from one cheek to the other. “Back again.”
I pawed around on the countertop. “Is there a phone I can use?” I manhandled a stapler and a roll of tape. “Or maybe you can just dial my dad at work for me? I’m pretty sure about the number. We might have to try three or four before we get him, though.”
“You know . . . oh gosh,” Roxie said, swaying slightly. “I don’t feel so . . .” And then Roxie toppled over. She went right down into a pink-and-purple heap on the rubber mats. It was magnificent. The man behind the desk dropped his magazine and rushed around to help her. It was time for Ruth and me to make our move.
We bolted behind the desk and grabbed the glasses box. Ruth began looking methodically through them one by one, but in the thrill and excitement of it all, I took a different approach and began shoving them all into my pockets. Kids glasses, adult glasses, sunglasses. A pair of safety goggles. Everything. Ruth followed my lead, and we took all that we could carry, jamming them into our parkas like kangaroo pouches.
By the time we got back to Roxie, she had her eyes open but had one hand to her forehead and was making swooning noises. “Do you have a Fruit Roll-Up?” she asked. “Strawberry, maybe? Or grape?”
The man looked from me to Ruth and at our lumpy pockets. At first, he looked really mad. Right then, I was sure we were goners. They’d probably cart us off in a paddy wagon. McGruff the Crime Dog had made that much pretty clear. I had no idea at all what would happen after the paddy wagon came, but I was pretty sure I’d enjoyed my very last juice box. Jail had to be skim milk only.
The man looked over at Gus, who clutched his broken frames. A big wet splotch of tears and snot darkened his parka sleeve.
Smokey scratched his beard, filling the air with a grating sound. He glanced at my jacket pockets and at Ruth’s. He’d been crouching low, but now he sat up slightly so he was at eye level with us. As he did, his flannel shirt shifted on his forearm. There I saw something I didn’t understand then. It was a tattoo in the shape of a spade.
And one day, not so long after, I’d learn that it was the mark of a thief.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said, mostly to me. “Bring your friend over here. We’ll see if any of those glasses help him. The rest go back in the box.”
Ruth, Roxie, and I all nodded in terrified unison.
The man exhaled slowly, then looked at each one of us, very slowly and meaningfully. “Listen. I’m no career counselor, but I’m gonna tell you something for nothing. If you’ve got to steal ever again, I want you to follow three rules. You hear me?”
That time, I couldn’t even nod. I was too scared to do anything but blink.
Smokey lifted his eyebrow and counted on his fingers, starting with his thumb. “One, be smart. Two, do it for a damned good reason. And three”—there he paused, staring me hard in the eye—“never take more than you need.”
12
NICK
The text I’d received proved the age-old theory of the Karmic Shithammer. Just when I was feeling my best, like I had with Stella, wham—some shit-ass decision from the past came back to hit me right in the balls.
Hands down, the shittiest decision I’d ever made was breaking into the trunk of a Mercedes when I was sixteen years old, and it hadn’t even been my goddamned idea. I’d been working as a mechanic’s assistant at a seriously sketchy garage near where I lived with my dad. The sort of place where you could get your tires rotated and your VIN scratched off with a screwdriver. In spite of the sketchiness, I loved it. I loved working on cars and always had. But one day, when I was just about to clock out for the afternoon, a Mercedes had rolled in on a flatbed and the owner of the shop had said, “Norton. Open that trunk,” handed me a pick set, and walked away.
I’d never picked a lock before in my life. I had zero idea what the fuck to do. A couple of the guys in the garage did, though. And they were more than happy to teach me what they knew. Teach me they did. One of them slapped me on the back and said, “There ain’t no training like on-the-job training, son.”
That was where it all started.
Here’s the thing about lock picking: it isn�
��t really a skill. It’s an art. It takes patience, grit, and so much stubbornness that it might be a serious character flaw. Mercedes trunks are an infamous pain in the ass—warded and bolted—so the old cons in the garage had me work up to it. They started me on less difficult locks—a Buick trunk, a Chrysler glove box, the bathroom door. I got obsessed with the locks—with the way the pins move and that last shift of the bolt. Such a goddamned rush. After a few days of learning and getting blisters from the picks and the wrenches, I turned my attention to the Mercedes, which the old cons had planned to drill out. They said they were too fucking old to waste their time on it. But I could try first. I spent hours on that fucking thing, determined to do it.
And goddamn it, I did.
The second that motherfucking trunk popped open, revealing assorted stolen shit and half a dozen bricks of coke, word got around. The kid Nick Norton had picked the trunk of a Mercedes.
Nick Norton had the touch.
It was a turning point for me. Before that day, I was just a poor kid with a shitty dad and no mom. After that day, I started to get a reputation. And I started to be somebody for the first time in my whole fucking life. I fell in with guys who knew the trade and wanted to teach me what they knew. I got hooked on the rush and on the power it gave me to pass through barriers, real and imagined. It was the way I yanked myself up by my bootstraps when I saw no other way.
But I hadn’t wanted to be a criminal. Crime isn’t a life anybody strives for—it’s the one they fall into. Me included. I did try to do better for myself; I made a pretty serious stab at turning my love of cars into a career. I went to school for it, I took it seriously, I had plans. The cash I’d made picking locks paid for school. Eventually, I wanted a garage of my own. That dream was out there, not so far out of reach. When I got my certificate, I got a job at a different garage, this one out in the sticks in Rio Rancho. It had seemed safe enough, out with all the prefab minimansions and churches as big as barns.
But here’s a riddle for you. How many half-decent garages in New Mexico run a legal operation?
Answer: Damn near none.
So no matter what I did, the lock picking stayed with me. Half the cars I serviced belonged to upstanding people; the other half came in with hotwired engines and upholstery that smelled like bleach, driven by guys with wallets thick with cash and no moral compass whatsofuckingever. They’d roll in, raise their eyebrows at me, and say, “You Norton?”
Christ.
It’s like old alcoholics say; hang around the liquor store, eventually you’re gonna buy some booze. Sure enough, making minimum wage fixing carburetors became less and less appealing when I realized I could make an easy five hundred with my pick set in the amount of time it took to listen to a song by Nirvana. Eventually, I got into picking locks hard-core. Over time, and thanks to a drug dealer’s repo’d Escalade that was found out in the desert, I also discovered I had the touch with safes. All sorts of safes. I never met a safe I couldn’t crack. And that word got around too.
And then one day, I cracked a safe that seemed empty. But in the false bottom, I found my first haul of jewels. Two rough-cut yellow diamonds, ugly as sin. But worth a fortune.
From that moment forward, gems became my thing. They were the gold standard of criminal currency. They’re hard to trace, easy to move, and retain their value on the black market. They’re easy as hell to hide and way fucking safer than guns and drugs.
But moving jewels made me cocky. I did bigger jobs, took bigger risks. And because I got so cocky, I made the second-shittiest decision I’d ever made: putting five grand down on an underdog at the Kentucky Derby, a horse named Sure Thing.
The only sure thing about that horse was that it gave me the gambling bug. And soon enough, I wasn’t moving jewels to get ahead—I was moving jewels to pay my debts. A grand here, a grand there; fucking quicksand. I was in the gambling sinkhole and could not stop.
Prison was a shit-ass place, but there was one thing I could say about it. It’d scared me straight. I was done gambling.
But my gambling debts weren’t done with me. And neither was the Karmic Shithammer.
Pony Up was a strip club on the edge of town, freestanding with plenty of parking. Wilted dandelions grew up from between the cracks in the pavement, and a pair of stilettos sat in the middle of the parking lot, like one of the girls had kicked them off when she got in her car and forgotten to grab them before she left.
The sign, which was affixed to a thick steel tube at the edge of the lot, was of a woman riding a rearing stallion, pouting as she adjusted her ponytail. Black background, white details, outlined in pink neon lights. The sign said it all, because Pony Up wasn’t only a strip club. It was also an offtrack betting shop, the only place where a guy could bet on a horse for miles around. Which I had. Repeatedly.
I parked my bike on the far side of the dumpster, away from street view. A few feet away was a white Cadillac. The license plate said TEXAN, and attached to the front grille was a set of longhorns, white and dappled with gray and shiny with spray-on varnish. The Caddy and the horns belonged to a four-hundred-pound guy who was like the living incarnation of a 1980s mullet. Semirespectable up front, and super shady in the back.
The Texan.
I pounded on the entrance of the club, making the double doors bounce on their locks. No answer at first, until a weary-looking girl in a fuzzy pink hoodie poked her head through the velvet privacy curtain on the other side. It took me a second to place her face since it wasn’t all dolled up with fake lashes and makeup. Now she looked kind, tired, and young. Amber was her stage name. She’d once told me it was really Alice. “Oh, hi!” she said, her voice dampened by the glass. “Nick, right?”
I gave her a nod. I had mad respect for strippers and always had. They took a big risk for an uncertain payout; it took way more balls to get up on a stage than most dudes would ever have. “How you been?”
She leaned back behind the curtain and reappeared with a huge key ring in her hand. She unlocked the deadbolt and the pins at the top and bottom and opened the door. “Same old, same old. Haven’t seen you here in a while.”
“Been a little busy.” It was another way to say in the joint, and Alice nodded with a sigh. “He here?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes, the way people did when their septic tanks backed up again. “Yep. In the back. Eating lunch.”
The club smelled like piss, bad decisions, and cheap cologne. I passed the stages and the bar and went down the back hallway. Which was when I heard it.
The sound of him chewing. The motherfucking crunching.
I pushed open the door marked PRIVATE and found him sitting behind his desk, fatter than I remembered him, his double chin now so thick it made him look like he was hiding something underneath it.
His real name was Bill Lafayette, and he wasn’t from Texas at all, but somewhere outside Baton Rouge. Digging into his fat, fleshy armpits and man boobs were the straps of a shoulder holster, and I could make out the butt end of a pistol tucked in among the folds. And everywhere, I mean everywhere, was evidence of the source of that goddamned crunching. Cheese curls. Or puffs. Or whateverthefuck they were called.
He crunched down on one and scowled at me. Nearsighted by a mile. A fine dusting of cheese residue covered everything on his desk, like fingerprint powder. He had cans of the things stacked up behind him like ammo squirreled away for a siege. I took a step closer, out of the shadow of the hallway and into his office.
“Well I’ll be goddamned,” he said, sending a puff of cheese spraying across the already cheese-flecked paperwork on his desk. “Nick Norton.” He shoved another huge handful of cheese puffs into his mouth and crunched away on them. They sounded like Captain Crunch without the milk, and whenever I was around him I found myself wondering what those things must have done to the roof of his mouth. He reached across his desk for a little remote and poked at the top button with a fat orange finger. As he did, a huge industrial AC window unit off to the left
shuddered to life, creating a powdery storm of orange around him like a haze.
At least he hadn’t changed. If I’d come in here and found this motherfucker a hundred pounds lighter and doing the downward dog in a room cooled only by a desk fan, I’d have had to walk back into the bar and slug back a fifth of vodka without using a glass.
Even though I hadn’t seen him since I’d gotten out, I was sick of him already. From my wallet, I took all the cash tips I’d gotten, plus some of the honest money I’d kept aside before I went away. It came to about five hundred, give or take, and I put it on his desk. He wadded it up and stuck it in his desk drawer, then sniffed and peeked into the cardboard can where his cheese puffs had been. Finding it empty, he tossed it aside onto a heap of identical cans scattered around his wastebasket like bowling pins after a strike. He shuffled through the papers on his desk and pulled out a shiny brochure. On the front was a huge diamond, square-cut and beveled on the edges, coming to a point at the bottom. As big as a golf ball. I didn’t need any explanation, but the brochure gave one anyway. In fancy museum-style letters was the heading, THE NORTH STAR: ON DISPLAY FOR THE FINAL TIME.
“What you know about this?” asked the Texan, unfurling the trifold brochure.
I knew damn near everything about the North Star. It was 589 carats. VVS1 clarity. A single blemish in the center, visible only from the top of the pavilion. A Royal Asscher cut; high crown, seventy-four facets. “Not one fucking thing.”
He snorted and coughed on what was surely a whole bunch of residual cheese puff dust stuck in his flabby throat. “Don’t lie to me, Norton. Makes you sound like a pussy.” He adjusted the gun under his man boob and cracked the knuckles of his right hand by pushing on his straightened fingers with his thumb. With his other hand, he held out the brochure for me, and it flapped in the AC.
I didn’t take it, because I knew what it said already. Any jewel thief worth the name knew about the North Star. One of the biggest diamonds in the world. Unfenceable because of its size; inconvenient, risky, but the job to beat all jobs, money-wise. If that thing were to be cleaved, even by someone with a shaky hand, whatever it yielded would be enough to disappear on for good. Underneath the cover photo of the diamond were the words, DO NOT MISS THIS CHANCE TO SEE ONE OF THE LARGEST DIAMONDS IN THE WORLD BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS INTO PRIVATE HANDS FOREVER!
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