Strip

by Thomas Perry

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  “He agrees you’re good to go. But as I said, this isn’t how you get the job. If our boss thought I told you different, I’d be out there looking for a job with you.”

  “Can’t you help me? I’m the one being brave. I’m a shy person who works in a bank. If I do my act now for two strangers—two, right?—then I’ll be over the stage fright, and it’ll be easier to really audition.” She began to move her hips again in a silent dance.

  There was a soft scraping sound as though a hand were muffling a microphone, and then the microphone cleared again. “As long as you understand that we got nothing to do with hiring. We’re just, like, night watchmen. You got it?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “It’ll really help me. All you have to do is watch my act and give me whatever pointers you can.”

  She heard the sound of someone fiddling with the hardware on the inner side of the steel door. She shrieked “Yippee!” so Jeff couldn’t not hear it, then spotted his shadow near the corner of the building.

  The door swung open, and there was a smiling man. He was very tall and broad-shouldered, with thick, dark hair and green eyes. He wore the pants from a black suit like the ones the men wore last night at the bank, but without the coat. His white shirt had the sleeves rolled up and the collar open. “Hello,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Penelope,” she said.

  He bowed. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Penny.”

  “Penelope,” she said with drunken insistence.

  He turned to call to someone inside. “Jimmy, this is Penelope.”

  The other man came to the door and said, “Hi.” He stepped back a few feet. “Come on in.”

  She was sure now that there were only two of them. Now that she could see them both, she took a step, leaned drunkenly against the steel door to keep it wide open, and used the awkwardness of the move to cover the hitch of her shoulder to pull the pistol out of the back of her waistband. “Don’t move,” she said.

  “Shit,” said the tall man. He made a quick move toward her.

  She fired the gun high, so the bullet passed over his shoulder, and he stopped. She looked at the man behind him and said, “If you reach for it, I’ll kill you.”

  He raised his hands and looked at her. “Penelope, why don’t you put that away?” He saw Jeff slip in the door beside her. “Oh, boy” Jeff was wearing a ski mask, and he handed one to Carrie, who put it on while he held his gun on the men.

  “All right,” said Jeff. “Just shut up. We’re going to do this quick and easy. Both of you go up to face that wall, legs spread, hands out wide, and lean.”

  The two men obeyed.

  Jeff frisked the two men cautiously, keeping his gun on one of them every second. He found two pistols and tossed them out the open door.

  “We’re here because we’re sworn peace officers,” said Carrie. “But not like any cops you’ve ever seen. If we decide to kill you, no local cop is ever going to ask us why.”

  “Oh, feds,” said the big man.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Vassily Voinovich.”

  “And how about you?”

  “Jimmy Gaffney.”

  “All right. You should know that if we find out either of those are false names, you’re going to jail for a long time. If you interfere with what we’re doing, same thing happens. If you make either of us think we’re in danger, you won’t make it to jail.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We’re doing an audit of the money coming into this business. You’re going to get tonight’s take for us. Our office is going to look for particular serial numbers, do some chemical testing. If we don’t find anything, your boss will get it back. If we do, God help him.”

  “We can’t get the money for you. It’s in the safe.”

  “Show us the safe,” Jeff said.

  “It’s in the next room,” Voinovich said.

  Carrie pushed her pistol against his temple. “He didn’t say ‘tell us.’ He said ‘show us.’ Everybody comes along.”

  The room was a small, neat office, and Jeff could see this was where the two men had set up to spend the night. The security monitor where the two men had seen Carrie was mounted on the wall, and their coats were hung on the chairs. There were two hands of a gin game laid out on the desk face-down. It told Jeff that the big guy who had gone to the door probably had not known that the wily-looking redheaded Irishman would look at his cards. The safe was a small one—only about two and a half feet high, and two feet wide. There was an electronic keyboard with the numbers zero through nine on the keys.

  Jeff said, “Okay. We’d like you to open the safe for us.”

  The two men looked at each other in a silent inquiry that Jeff hoped was “Should we?” and not “I don’t know how, do you?”

  “We can’t.”

  Carrie said, “Do you mean you don’t have the combination, or you’re aware that if you don’t, we’ll kill you, and you’re willing to be killed?”

  “The first one,” said the big man, Voinovich. “No combination.”

  Carrie said, “That’s bad news.” She aimed her gun at his chest and kept opening and closing her fingers on the rubber handgrips of her big .45 pistol, trying to get the best hold on it to take the recoil.

  “Wait. Hold it,” said Jimmy Gaffney. “We honestly don’t have the combination to the safe. If you were Manco Kapak, and you had two guys guarding your safe, would you give them the combination?”

  “Looking at you, maybe not,” Carrie admitted. “So we’ll move on. First thing is that you guys are going to take the monitoring system apart. I want the recorder. Get started now.” She turned to Jeff. “If they seem to be near to trying something—even thinking about it, kill them.”

  She crawled under the table where the safe was and examined it, then tugged on it, trying to rock it. “It moves a little. It can’t be bolted to anything serious. Watch them while I look.”

  She went out the office door and around to the other side of the wall. She was gone a couple of minutes and came back. She had four nuts in the palm of her hand. “It’s four bolts through the wall, the nuts on them only hand-tight. There was a little cabinet in front of them.”

  Gaffney said, “Kapak wanted it that way so we could get it out in a fire. Nightclubs burn down all the time.”

  “If there’s anything else we need to know, you ought to tell us,” Carrie said. “It’ll go easier on you at your trial if you cooperate.”

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Where’s the recorder for the monitoring system?”

  “It’s over there in the cabinet.”

  “Get it.”

  Gaffney went to the cabinet and opened it, then pulled out a thin rectangular box. He unscrewed the video cables from the back of it and set the box on the desk. Carrie followed the cables along the ceiling back to the camera outside to be sure that was what the box was, then came back. “Okay.”

  Jeff said, “Take your cell phones out and set them on the desk.”

  The two men complied.

  “Now you’ve got one more thing to do for us, to get the safe out of here and into the trunk of the car.”

  The two men knelt beside the safe, but didn’t seem to be able to do more than rock it a little. Jeff tried too, to be sure they weren’t faking. “Why isn’t this thing moving?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gaffney.

  “Who owns the Toyota Land Cruiser out there?”

  “I do,” said Voinovich. “And it’s a Sequoia.”

  “Give me the keys.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Jeff said, “Look. You’ve had guns pointed at you for ten minutes. Has anybody harmed or abused you in any way? No. Did we come in here and start shooting your toes off? When you said you couldn’t open the safe, did we shoot one of you and tell the other one to do it? No. We trusted you. Now it’s your turn. Give me the keys.”

>   “I still owe money on that car.”

  “Then you’ll be glad to be the one I shoot.”

  Voinovich reached into his pocket and produced the keys.

  “Toss them near my feet.”

  The keys landed between Jeff’s feet. He picked them up, then said, “Don’t take your eyes off either one of them.”

  “All right, guys,” said Carrie. “Stand close together so I can see you both.”

  The two men stood there with Carrie holding her gun on them. Then Jeff returned, uncoiling a rope as he came. “Okay, everybody out of the office and out here with me.” The others came out and stood with him near the steel door.

  Jeff tied the rope around the safe and went to the door. “Everybody stand clear.”

  He stepped outside, got into the Toyota Sequoia, and started the engine. The others could hear the engine accelerate. At their feet, the loose coils of rope snaked around on the floor like a whip, then went taut, vibrating like a harp string. There was a loud engine sound, angry and dangerous, now mixed with the screech of wood straining to pull free of nails, then wood popping and cracking. Carrie and the two men looked at the wall, which was beginning to cant toward them, dragged out of position by Voinovich’s big vehicle.

  Carrie held her gun in both hands, using her left arm to steady it. She shifted her aim now and then from Voinovich, who was looking frantic about the fate of his Sequoia, to Jimmy Gaffney, whom she didn’t trust because his eyes were filled with guile. She didn’t like being in the room with them, and she didn’t like the fact that the office wall was moving, bottom first, toward the door.

  There was a higher squeal of nails, a last bang of wood breaking, a shredding noise, and the wall fell inward into the office.

  The safe skittered across the concrete floor to the doorway, hit the slightly raised weather-strip, tipped, and bounced end over end into the parking lot.

  Jeff returned. “Okay, guys. Here’s the last bit of work we’ll need from you. Come out here and lift the safe into the back of this thing so we can be on our way.”

  Voinovich said, “Don’t take my SUV”

  Jeff said, “What choice do I have? Nobody else has a car that can even hold it.”

  Voinovich turned to Gaffney. “Say something.”

  “Don’t take his car. It’ll break his heart.”

  Jeff said, “I’ll leave it in perfect shape on the street somewhere and call the club to tell you where it is.”

  They walked out to the place where the safe lay, a few feet behind the SUV. Voinovich said to Gaffney, “If we had the combination, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “No shit,” Gaffney said. “I would have taken the money myself and be halfway to Rio.”

  “You wouldn’t fit in there. Everybody is brown. You’d look like a freak. Help me lift this. And get it onto the carpet so we don’t scratch my bumper.” They squatted, lifted, and strained. “Use your legs, not your back.”

  They lifted the safe onto the bed at the back of the SUV. Then they both sat on the bumper, breathing heavily and stretching their strained arm muscles. Gaffney looked at Jeff. “Jesus Christ. Getting robbed by you two is a lot of work.”

  Carrie walked up with the two pistols that belonged to Gaffney and Voinovich, handed one to Jeff, and kept the other.

  “Okay, guys,” Jeff said. “We’ve got to finish up and get out of here. Let’s head inside.”

  “You’re not going to kill us, are you?”

  “Not if you do as we say,” said Carrie.

  They made their way past the fallen wall into the office. Jeff said, “Sit down on those chairs.” The two men did, and he wrapped duct tape around their wrists to bind their hands behind them, then taped their ankles together, then ran tape around and around them to keep them on the seats. He went to the desk, removed the batteries from their cell phones, then took the recorder from the security system.

  “Well, good night, guys.”

  They nodded sullenly. As Carrie was leaving, Gaffney said, “Would you really have killed us?”

  “I’m still thinking about it.”

  “Oh.”

  Jeff and Carrie went outside, locked the steel door behind them, and stopped to look at each other for a moment. “What do you think?”

  “I’m glad they don’t let strip clubs operate near residential neighborhoods. If they did, you couldn’t feel good about firing a gun. But here you could set off bombs.” She smiled up at him. “Can I shoot them?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I never have, and this is such a great opportunity. I really, really want to.”

  “Get your car. I’ll follow you home.”

  “How about just one, then?”

  “We’ve got to go. The police come by these places regularly, just to check the doors.”

  He followed her back onto the freeway, onto the exit ramp at Vineland, and up the hill to her house. When they arrived, she opened the garage door and he drove in. She threw an old folded tarp on the floor and covered it with two sheets of plywood. They slid the safe out onto the plywood so it wouldn’t chip the concrete garage floor.

  She was beaming. “You know, tonight was even better than last night. Robbing a strip club. Holding hostages. Grand Theft Auto. And tomorrow, safecracking. I think I’m falling in love.”

  19

  JERRY GAFFNEY WAS only half asleep, because his mind couldn’t quite shut down. He was thinking about too many things, or rather, passing over each of them in a repetitive cycle. Words, phrases, images had to be revisited. He slowly rose toward consciousness. He was lying on the clean, crisp white sheet on the big California-king bed in an apartment in Manhattan Beach. He looked at the digital clock on his right side and it said 4:15 A.M. He looked to his left and in the dim light he saw the creamy back of Sandy Belknap.

  It was a short, abruptly tapering back that started with lean but square shoulders that looked as though she did some kind of workout, and then narrowed quickly. The ridge of backbone near the top became a recess at mid-back until it flattened just above the dimple that announced the start of her perfect bottom.

  Jerry felt reverence for the beauty he could see at this moment in the dim predawn light. He had no right to be with her, certainly no right to be naked with her in her bed. It was one of those sudden phenomena, rare and unexpected like hailstorms.

  He had spent much of the day after his brother, Jimmy, left driving her around in a new sedan with dealer plates that she had borrowed from the car lot. They had gone from restaurant to bar to office building to apartment, talking to her friends. At each stop she’d introduced him as her cousin from St. Louis. Her girlfriends were all temptingly attractive.

  But Sandy Belknap was not somebody who suffered from competition. She had been a cheerleader at the University of Missouri and had held some kind of national sorority office. She was not a genius, but she could speak fluently and confidently, and that probably was about as useful as high intelligence. She was beautiful in a blond, blue-eyed, Midwestern kind of way, but maybe not clever or single-minded enough to be what she so obviously must have wanted to be, an actress. All good-looking young women from other states wanted that, even if they didn’t do anything to accomplish it except present themselves in Los Angeles.

  He lay in the bed feeling the subtle circulation of cool air from the grate over the bed and back into the intake in the hall ceiling at the other end of the room. The day had been one of those Los Angeles high-pressure summer days when the sky was a perfectly unvarying light blue bowl of infinity. The heat was the sort that radiated upward from the pavement to mid-thigh while the sun scorched the shoulders and back. Movement in the city was toward the ocean, like a tide that only began to subside around dusk as people moved inland to cool, dark bars.

  When Sandy had introduced him as her cousin from St. Louis, the girls she was talking to seemed to take it for granted that she was lying. He would find an excuse to leave them alone for a few minutes at each stop, and she w
ould confide to the other girl that she had an uncontrollable crush on Joe Carver and wanted him to have her address and cell phone number. She was even planning a party so he could show up without bothering to call or ask for a date.

  But something else happened during the day, a kind of slow current that was always working on them and changing their course just a bit. As they went from place to place in the searing heat, they would get thirsty. He would buy them a drink. Twice they got into traffic jams, sat motionless in the skin-cooling conditioned air blowing over them, and talked. The alcohol made them imagine they’d known each other longer than they had.

  In the evening they stopped for dinner at the Water Grill because the name sounded cool, and the fact that only fish seemed light enough to eat. They were already in a state of habituation from mere proximity, so many stops, so much talk, so many times when they had brushed against each other, breathed each other’s air. The dinner revived them, disguised the effect of all the alcohol, but it added to the talk and the familiarity.

  They made it into three clubs afterward—Wash, Stable, and The Room. The experience began to blur into one long trek past turning faces in a long, dark tunnel with music so loud he could remember feeling it rather than hearing it. Lights sputtered, wavered, and swept, and the young faces appeared for a moment and then drifted away.

  During the evening the talk that went on was between Sandy and her women friends in ladies’ rooms. At 1:00 A.M., Sandy got tired and he drove her to her apartment in Manhattan Beach. She warned him that she hadn’t been there in almost a week, and when they got there he had to help her carry a huge stack of unopened mail. A few letters slipped off her pile, and she bent to pick it up off the carpet and lost her balance. He steadied her, picked her up, carried her to her bed, and set her down gently. He assumed she would close her eyes and fall asleep instantly, but she didn’t. Instead she popped up on the bed, pressed her lips against his, and put her arms around him.

  He had the thought that he didn’t belong there with her, but it was only a passing sensation and not the most powerful at the time. It was like the acknowledgment he had made a few times that this or that money didn’t belong to him: it didn’t affect his behavior. He had been wishing for this moment since he had met her, without allowing himself to think about it in specific terms, and now he knew that something similar must have been in her mind too. It was different for her because she had known, of course, that all she had to do was signify willingness and it would happen. Now it had.