Safe

by Ryan Gattis

The tone he’s got makes me worry. He has family from Michoacán too.

  I say, “What type of something?”

  “A grenade attack.”

  I still got a aunt there in the capital, my uncle that got deported, my cousins, my grandparents. My mind goes to them, to their faces, to the time I got to visit and eat roast-pork tacos in a dusty backyard before I got my record and couldn’t travel. I got a pain in my chest now too. A bad one.

  “Seven people dead. They don’t know how many hurt, maybe a hundred.”

  “But it’s Independence Day,” I say.

  “Yeah. Whoever threw those grenades waited until a crowd was in la Plaza de Armas for the grito too.”

  I feel sick at that, a hot type of sick. My voice’s high and angry, coming out of me so fast I can’t stop it. “So somebody planned throwing grenades at innocent fucking people?”

  “Yeah.”

  I don’t have words for a second. I’m just staring at the street ahead of us, the red lights stacking up.

  I’m biting my lip so hard I’m drawing blood, but I’m liking the pain, since it’s something for how I’m feeling inside. I got Felix in my head now, how his hair smells like peanut butter sometimes, and I put the back of my hand up to my face like the way he does when he sleeps.

  “Kids,” I say from behind my hand. “Did it kill any little kids?”

  “Too early to tell.”

  “Who did it?” I want to know. I need to know.

  “Looks like one of the cartels. Nobody’s sure which yet.”

  “Well, if there’s maybe a who, then there’s prolly a why, right?”

  “Calderón’s from Morelia,” Lonely says. “There’s a theory on how attacking there might force him to rethink how he’s doing his drug war.”

  Felipe Calderón, pinche president of pinche Mexico, is who Lonely means, a target sitting however many miles away in DF when it happened. This type of thing, it wasn’t aimed at his body. It was pointed at his heart, his soul, not just his, but at all of ours, and it still hit.

  I say, “This was some terrorist shit.”

  We stop at another red.

  “Yeah,” Lonely says after a while.

  Hey, this right here, it’s a line that just got crossed. I feel it. Innocent people? In public? On purpose? That’s straight out of bounds. It’s the type of thing I prayed would never happen, but now we’re here. It happened. The world’s different now.

  You put people in barrels long enough and get away with it, eventually you must get to thinking that you can do whatever, whenever, wherever, to whoever, and that won’t matter to anybody. Fuck.

  The whole world just stepped over a line it never should’ve crossed, and I feel it moving me over one too, just the opposite way. I got Lonely’s words from earlier bouncing around nonstop in my brain. It was too late to turn back then.

  I’m feeling that, since I can’t turn back now either. I can’t go back to being a double agent or whatever it is when both sides think you are one. I can’t set this all back up again.

  Can’t wait for new houses to come back up and be moving product again. Can’t keep doing it like I’ve been doing. I need out.

  I need the money unfrozen right now and making that happen means making Collins happy. I need to give him all I can give him and be done. There’s no other way to be out. But I already know something else needs to happen first.

  I need to make sure Ghost does what he says he’ll do, for my sake, and then I’m gone for good. I have to be.

  Ghost

  Tuesday, September 16, 2008

  Early Morning

  61

  Food from Norms comes without anybody asking me what I wanted. There’s all sorts of stuff. Burgers, mostly. The turkey. The Cowboy BBQ. Those go quick. There’s quesadillas, even a couple green chile and chickens, but all those go too before I can pick one. I’m last, which makes sense. I get stuck with the ultimate meat loaf and I don’t even like the mushrooms it’s topped with, so I scrape them off, but fuck it, what am I going to do? Complain? At least it’s still halfway hot.

  Glasses is the one who brings it over to me as I’m scoping out the safes, and he’s got this look on his face like if it were up to him, I’d starve, but Rooster comes with him, so he keeps his mouth shut. It’s just the three of us. Away from the others eating off hoods of cars and trucks.

  Rooster didn’t grab a container. A guy like that, he doesn’t eat Norms, I’m thinking. He’s above it. When he eats a steak, it’s Dal Rae or something. It’s Pacific Dining Car. Maybe even San Franciscan if he’s into prime rib. A guy like that travels all over town. You can tell. To wherever the good shit is. It’s not like how it used to be, growing up in the same eighteen blocks and never going anywhere. Now the city’s wider, and if you got the money, it’ll give you whatever you want.

  “I know I don’t got a right to ask anything else of you,” I say to Rooster, “but this bad-loans shit that’s coming down, it’s going to wipe a lot of people out. A lot of families. It’s a tidal wave coming.”

  Keep talking, Rooster’s look says, but I might be misreading it.

  I go on anyways, with Glasses staring at me, not blinking.

  “Pay off some houses for folks.” When I say folks, I’m hearing in my head how it’s a Frank word too. “It might only be a few thousand here or there. I’m hearing a lot of shit will go into foreclosures and you can scoop it up cheap. But, just, if you could, help the people that need helping. That deserve it. The others? Just be watching because a lot of people are about to drown.”

  Glasses is staring at the ground now like it’s about to jump up and run away. Rooster shifts his weight from one foot to the other. I overstepped. I feel it.

  I mean, Rooster’s face is stone and it’s making that real clear. It’s telling me I had a right to negotiate when it was about me, and he let me, but this, talking to him about his business, suggesting he do something like charity without getting something in return, is just plain stupid.

  “I’m not saying it’s for free, just—”

  Rooster looks to Glasses and they both make the same frowning face before Rooster turns and waves his hand at a figure standing over by the truck lights where everybody’s eating.

  “All right,” I say to the back of his head, as a way of saying, This is me shutting up now, because I get it. I tried to give him a heads-up, and he’s not taking it, and that’s okay. That’s up to him.

  The silhouette becomes a person when it gets closer. And it starts looking familiar too. It’s a guy. And when he’s about fifteen feet away from us, I can tell it’s the little homie from the first house me and Blanco hit earlier tonight. The one getting down with the girl. When he’s a few feet away, I can still see zip cuff marks on the kid’s wrists.

  He sees me seeing them and nods at me, like, Yup. Like, That’s where we know each other from.

  Rooster knows this. This is him giving the kid an opportunity to redeem himself.

  And this close, with the two of them standing side by side, I can see the resemblances. They’re obviously related, probably cousins, not brothers, and the kid is about twenty years younger than Rooster. A younger, handsomer version with sharper cheekbones and some greenish eyes.

  “We need a little one of you running around, safecracker,” Rooster says to me. “This is Lil Tricky. Teach him up.”

  My first thought is Hell no. Mainly because it’s impossible to learn to do what I do in a day. I mean, even if I knew how to explain it, I couldn’t teach it. My second thought is I’m not going to, because that’s not the deal I shook on.

  Rooster doesn’t care about any of that, though. Because he’s already walking away with Glasses, the two talking for a few seconds before Rooster gets in a car. It pulls out right afterwards. He’s getting the hell away from here, which is smart.

  And I’ll never see him again. I know this.

  But his word is his word.

  And I’m going to have to trust on it to somehow get w
hatever I pull out of these to Mira at our drop-off.

  62

  When everybody’s done eating, the linebackers take turns going Q*bert and climbing up onto the pyramid, putting their whole weights behind safes and pushing them off the top row, smashing them straight onto the ground. Three-hundred-plus pounds coming down with sharp edges from four or five feet high. Yeah. That’ll bust your concrete up pretty good. Each one landing is loud too. Car-crash loud.

  But then again, it’s not my floor. And whatever fall guy they got listed on this paperwork is about to get sued for this, but Rooster’d never care. This kind of shit doesn’t touch him. The rental agreement is definitely in someone else’s name. A guy like Rooster is too careful for that. He doesn’t even carry his own phone.

  When a safe is down, the linebackers both fight it out of the divot it just made, place the door facing up to the sky, and go get another one to line up next to it.

  This is how it goes.

  When it comes time to get to work, it’s like my brain is thanking me, because I don’t have to think. I can just let my hands go. Get relaxed. Get into a rhythm. Not worry about what comes after. Just do the work.

  Thirty-one safes are in two side-by-side storage spots.

  I can’t believe it myself.

  Twelve of them got fucked up so bad by terrible crack jobs that they’re completely inoperable. Frank word. Work done not just by amateurs, but by idiots. Making it obvious Rooster had somebody try to crack them. Nobody any good, though.

  But I guess it makes sense. There wasn’t even an Internet giving advice on shit like this to anybody that could read in ’92. Still, there are haphazard holes all up and down the sides, trying to drill hinges, and that’s just on the old ones—before safe designers got smart and put them all on the inside. The worst ones, though, are the ones that got blowtorched. Got one safe looking like a dalmatian dog it’s got so many damn spots on it, but the worst is from when they took the torch to some mechanisms and basically got the tumblers so hot they all melted together. Oops. Maybe you can get in by blowing them, but I’m not about to be that guy, especially with Collins finding explosives in a safe door not all that long ago. So like I said, inoperable. Forever. Dumbasses.

  Nineteen left to see what I can salvage.

  Ten of these are drop safes. That means they have little drawers or slots at the top so you can deposit money into them. You close the drawer or the door and the money drops, down a hole into the locked safe. It’s possible these came out of restaurants, but are more than likely from bars. Two are old as hell, good old U.S.A. steel from the 1950s or ’60s.

  I do these first. Not showing this little Tricky kid shit. I pop six of them when I’m asking him to get a random tool for me before he figures out I’m actually waiting till his back’s turned to do it. I just mix it up afterwards. He’s hyped about it. Going back and forth. Always asking to use my scope to see in, but even when I let him, I don’t tell him what he’s looking at. It’s what Frank used to do to me. To test me. To see how much I could actually pick up on my own. I had three years of that.

  Glasses does inventories and runs math. He types it all up in his phone.

  From the first six we get more jewelry than I expected. Weird for drop safes. Lots of stone necklaces and rings. All of it looking old. None of it looking like anything I can shift to Mira. One is nothing but cash and gold coins, though. And that alone makes this worth it. I make the coins easy for Glasses. Out of every five, I get two. The take on that is four hundred gold coins in their little plastic containers. I don’t know enough about pressings and whatnot to fight for certain years, so the ones Glasses parcels out just go in my Jeep. The cash take on all six of these safes is damn good at $632,000, nearly half of it in little paper-banded $1,000 bundles. It was a little more but I just told him to round up to the nearest whole. Of that, I get $252,800, which is more houses.

  And even better, that’s me nearly paid off to Rooster.

  The next two are gun safes. Stand-ups. Six feet. They aren’t easy, which is good. Because I make a show of it. I blow through six drill bits on those, and the punches never take because I’m too busy making sure they don’t take. Last, do no harm. I’m not about to hand these fuckers a bunch of untraceable guns, so I spout about the kinds of locks they are and get real technical. I also get frustrated and loud. I make it clear how I hate wasting time when I could be popping the littler ones. Eventually, even Glasses agrees that I should just open the others.

  When that’s decided, I rest.

  Six down. Two gun safes I messed up on purpose so no one else can ever open them. Eight done total.

  Everybody else breaks then too. The safes are all lined up. Breakfast food is coming by, but I don’t need any.

  What time it is, I got no idea. Past four in the morning, probably, because I’m sitting on the hood of my Jeep and lying back flat and watching the sky going that kind of color where black is letting go of the night and what you’re left with is just this dark gray hugging onto purple. And I’m so tired I’m a little sick to my stomach, and my eyelids are heavy, man.

  I could sleep. Right here. Right now.

  But something inside me is saying, Nope. Saying, Don’t you dare. You got to be down by that ocean, it’s saying.

  And I’m up again, and I’m taking the coffee Lil Tricky brings over with too much cream in it, and I start hitting a flow then.

  I mean, I’m just on.

  Like, I walk up on one and just Jedi the shit out of it. I must punch it in under two minutes all by myself. Everybody’s staring at me from the cars, faces full of food, or mouths hanging open, but they don’t know I’ve popped a Sentry just like it probably a hundred times, and I know the guts of it by feel. I can picture how it’s built exactly inside my head, and I know where the little moats around the mechanism are, and I just go right into it and make my space and then, bam, I’m making miracles happen.

  Glasses puts his English-muffin sandwich down, comes over, and does numbers on the phone.

  The rest are the rest. When they go, it feels like they’re falling like dominoes, one going down just gives me momentum into the next one, and the next, and the next.

  And my arms and legs are so tired from putting all my weight on my drill that I don’t even know how I can stand up anymore, but I’m in this zone, and magic just keeps happening. And the office safes are done, and the drop safes are done, and the gun safes are staying fucked, and there’s nothing left except for a bunch of openmouthed safes lined up in a row like dead whales on a beach.

  Out of one comes papers, old letters. Years and years of tax forms. Basically, a whole lot of nothing.

  Out of another comes something that looks like maybe it’s cash at first, but it’s really old-looking stock certificates and U.S. Treasury bonds. I try to fight Glasses on these, but he sees me coming and lets me know. No. Only cash and gold. And he’s right. That wasn’t the deal, and it burns, but that’s how it is.

  Out of another the linebackers grab out a mess of seashells. Obviously sentimental. But there’s cash in it too.

  And the final tally’s coming in. Glasses is double-checking it. Carrying 1s and tapping at the phone’s calculator as purple is coming through in the sky, poking big holes in the gray, taking it over.

  And every time I see green paper coming out of metal mouth after metal mouth, I’m thinking, More.

  Every time I see that verde, I’m thinking, ¡Más, chingón!

  For the people about to be homeless by Christmas, the ones that don’t deserve it.

  For them.

  For their houses.

  Their families.

  And for the home I never even really had growing up.

  For the city housing I got booted out of.

  For the foster home I got booted into and never stopped running away from.

  For everything I ever been through.

  For all the bad shit I did.

  For Harlem Harold.

  And all the
people I hurt.

  Especially the ones I can never say sorry to now.

  More.

  Glasses

  Tuesday, September 16, 2008

  Early Morning

  63

  The drill goes and goes. Ghost moves between looking down this thin little microscope and punching holes into the doors. It has a rhythm to it, so I stick close since I’m on notes duty, checking everything in the safes, tapping it all in.

  This’s supposed to go to Rooster, but I’m not exactly sure if we’ll be seeing each other again, so I take notes on whatever comes out of all these metal things with their doors open in case it’s gonna be useful to Collins or me down the road.

  It’s a weird sight. All these secrets and hidden things coming out in one big swoop. I know I’ll never see anything like it again, and I wish I had a picture of it, but that’s never happening.

  As I go from safe to safe, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a mess of time capsules, that with each one we’re bringing something back to life that maybe should stay buried. I even smelled the air in one right after it got opened to see what it smelled like twenty years ago. What it smelled like was paper and stale cigarette smoke.

  Ghost just pops, looks in, and then he’s on to the next. But I log everything. The numbers are looking crazy too. I focus on those instead of how bad I want to call Leya and make sure she’s okay and that my little peanut-butter boy is okay too.

  I know I prolly could do it now with Rooster gone, but I hold off since it’s not 100 percent good to talk here. I don’t want to take any chances of any homies hearing me, so what I do is, I log. I check and double-check numbers.

  In one real old-looking safe with a twist handle, we find a fake drawer with a sliding bottom to it that has some weird family secrets inside, like photos of two different families with the same dad looking the same age in both sets of photos.

  Lil Tricky was yapping around like a puppy when I pulled them out, and he said how they might be identical twins, but then we took them over to look at each one under the light and we couldn’t see any differences in the faces, not even little details, so we think it’s one guy being shady. I wonder where those families are now.