by Peter Craig
“So?” said Colette. “What’s the deal?”
Jerry stared ahead. The dog was hidden entirely in weeds, her movement only visible by her rustled wake. Perch stopped playing to pick the nettles from his arm.
“We’re not through negotiating yet.”
“You’ve been in there forever, Jerry! Should I pitch a tent?”
“If you got any sense at all, Colette, don’t give me shit right now.”
Perch tromped back, holding the pale side of his forearm upward.
The boys walked over and sat in a growing ledge of shade by the fence. The air, spun with dirt and pollen, had hit the hour when it seemed to have a dreamlike quality, quiet and luminously white, the sun coming slantwise through heat haze, the first afternoon shadows sprouting underfoot.
Colette whispered to Jerry, “Are those kids going to put back whatever he doesn’t want—”
To interrupt her, Jerry raised his voice to Perch, “Well, let’s get this over with so we can get on with the party.”
Perch lowered his neck when he spoke. Jerry was a full head taller, but something about the little man’s coiled movements, the stalking quality to his steps now, made him seem as aggressive as a mongoose hugging the ground. Perch said he could use the musical equipment, the washers and dryers, some jewelry—he had a person for that, and for cut ice—and he could take the electronics: stereos and speakers, Commodore 64s, ColecoVision, and the IBMs … “Now here’s the bad news. I don’t know how much I can do with the furniture, clocks, antiques, stuff like that. All this right here around the driveway. It’s nice—don’t get me wrong. But the man I know who deals with this kind of stuff, he’s out of commission—”
Colette said, “Why didn’t you say that before they took it out of the truck?”
“I like her, Jerry. She’s quick. Must have kidnapped her right off the honor roll. No, this stuff is going to be hard for me to do much with. But some good news: I can probably strip down this truck and use a lot of it. I mean this is—what?—probably a six-cylinder engine in there.”
“Jerry? If he takes the truck, he has to take everything.”
“Shut up for a second, Colette.”
“What? We’re going to carry the rest of it out of here on our backs?”
“I understand it puts you in a bind,” said Perch. “But really, if I bought the rest, I’d just be doing you a favor by taking it off your hands.”
“That’s an eight-thousand-dollar area rug,” said Colette. “You’re not taking it off our hands.”
“Well, I don’t do flying carpets, darlin’. So you can crawl back in your little genie bottle and let the boys work it out.”
“This is ridiculous,” she said, standing and brushing off her jeans. “We should’ve gone to a fucking pawnshop at this rate.”
Jerry paced toward the warehouse and said, “Colette, come here. I want to talk to you for a second.”
“I have a right to my say, Jerry. I worked harder than anybody for this.”
“I want to talk to you. Come here.”
“Don’t order me around like a dog! If you want to talk to me, I’m right here.”
“In private! Now. I’m starting to lose my temper.”
“You don’t want him to lose his temper,” said Perch. “Trust me.”
“Oh, great. Advice from his prison bitch.”
Jerry seized her by the arm and, in one snake-quick motion, twisted it behind her back. He grabbed her under the shoulder with his free hand. As she grunted and stooped forward, Jerry muscled her ahead through the door. Just as Kevin sprang up from the grass, Perch snatched his wrist. “Let them have it out, kid. Everybody’s excited. Let’s calm down. Let ’em have a second. Ain’t our business.” He spoke like it was a far greater emergency than Kevin had first thought.
“Maybe it’s none of your business, you stupid midget.”
Perch clamped down on his wrist with his fat hand, each fingernail a hard yellow carapace over a bruise of grease. His tiny eyes opened wide, his jaw flexed, and he looked so ferocious that Kevin recognized within three racing heartbeats that he had misread the man, the place, and maybe the nature of his own life. A cloud passed in front of the sun. Kevin looked to the boys, who were all lounging indifferently with their hats or shirts over their faces. Perch leaned close to Kevin’s ear and his breath was a burning field. “You little babies come in here and run around like it’s the county fair—okay. Have a good time. But don’t think I’m going to take one second of bullshit. I know your old man a lot better than you do. I’ve seen him do shit that would give you nightmares for the rest of your life. You want to insult me—now that we’re man to man, go ahead. Insult me. But I’ll show you the real world, kid. Do we understand each other?”
“May I please go get my skateboard?”
“Yes, you may. Because you asked nicely.”
Kevin tried to skate off the queasy feeling in his stomach, but he hated how Perch stood there smirking at him; so he popped his board up to his hand and climbed into the front cab of the moving van. Ten minutes passed on the dashboard clock. He listened to Perch’s boot heels in the dirt and the threshing sound of Sputnik in the grass. At first he was worried that Perch would follow him into the cab; then, after his heart had slowed and his stomach settled, he was more afraid that Perch might go into the warehouse. Kevin was fairly sure that his father wouldn’t hurt Colette under normal circumstances, but this little man had brought out the worst in everyone, somehow turning everything he touched into a cheap commodity; and so Kevin waited by the window, temples throbbing, and planned to stop Perch if he approached the warehouse door. There were pipes by the wall inside; there were knives on the table.
He saw Colette stomp back outside. Because of a faint wind swinging her hair, he couldn’t see her face right away, only her hands tucked into fists beneath her sweatshirt sleeves. She chewed her lip and ignored something Perch said to her. She saw Kevin in the mirror, and she joined him in the cab, climbing up behind the steering wheel as he moved to the shotgun seat. He was so relieved to see her unhurt and only more defiant that he wanted to grab her and kiss her, press his face against her freckled cheek. She was furious, gripping the wheel and shaking her head and starting a tirade about how she’d get back at Jerry, and Kevin was so overwhelmed by her fretful and beautiful profile that he could barely hear what she said, wanting to wrap her hair in his fists and smell it. She said, “If he wants to be an asshole and grandstand for that creep, he’s going to regret it, I’m going to get him where it hurts. I’m being shoved out of this deal when I did everything. Can you please tell me what the hell I have to do for a tiny bit of respect here? These boys’ networks—I swear to God. I’m like the Sally fucking Ride of con men.”
Kevin took a shivering breath that lifted and sank his shoulders. She was perplexed by the gesture, and studied his face for a moment.
“Did you fall off your skateboard again?”
“No,” he said. “But I would have killed him if he laid a hand on you.”
She sat up straight in her chair and narrowed her eyes. “Who? The hobbit?” She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve. “Or your father?”
In the glaring mirror, they watched Perch argue with the teenagers, one side of his face glowing so that he looked like an overexposed photograph. “I would have cut his throat and left him bleeding in the dirt.”
“Kevin, sweetheart. Let’s calm down a little bit, okay? It’s not a war, it’s just a negotiation. I don’t like it, I’m pissed off—but nobody needs to kill anyone for my sake.”
“I need to tell you something.”
“Don’t tell me anything right now, okay? I’m still upset about this.”
“I’m in love with you.”
“Oh, Kevin. Please. I love you too, of course—you know I do, but I don’t want to play this game while they’re out there wrangling over a dinette set.”
“You’re miserable with him. Every day of your life. He’s killing
you and it doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’m not miserable. I’m frustrated. There’s a big difference.”
“We could leave. Together. You and I—we could strike out on our own, Colette. There’s no reason why we couldn’t. You’ve got all the personality and the style, and I’m an evil genius with the details. We could make a thousand times more money than this. We could go anywhere in the world—fucking Monte Carlo. You want to sit on the Riviera? You got it.”
“Kevin, you’re fifteen years old. What are you going to do? I don’t want to drive this big truck out of here—do you? I don’t even think I could back it up. Come on, be realistic. You haven’t had your superstitious breakfast and you’re delirious.”
“What would I have to do for you to believe in me?”
“Stop this. Right this second. Your father is right over there and he can hear us.”
“That creepy little dude is right, isn’t he? You’re like seventeen. If we were in school together, everything would be completely different between us. I could walk right up to you and ask you out.”
“No, Kevin, don’t try that—because if we were in school, I’d have a thirty-five-year-old criminal boyfriend, and you’d be a freshman whose lunch smelled. You would have less chance with me than the janitor. Forget it. And personally, I’m a little upset that you would choose right now to lay this whole tragic confession on me. I’m surrounded by testosterone.”
Then his father came to the door and said the deal was made. Everyone could relax; the numbers were good. They’d borrow a car and buy some groceries. Champagne and caviar. Good cigars. As he retreated, Colette yelled out the window that she wanted a decent room for once in her miserable life.
Jerry returned and said right into her face, teeth bared, “Yes, Your Majesty, whatever your greedy little heart desires.”
That evening, when his father sent him out for groceries with four hundred dollars, telling him to grab everything expensive and impractical, Kevin had a plan to pocket at least three-eighty. Jerry was at the liquor store across an asphalt plaza; and Colette stayed back at the room, cutting her hair over the bathroom sink. Kevin first went to the general store beside the market and bought a needle and thread. Back in the market, he loaded two huge bags of dry dog food into the cart, and partially cut open the tops. With his hands hidden behind walls of toilet paper, he stuffed everything into the bags that looked like a luxury item—Camembert, andouille sausage, imported bubble bath—throwing handfuls of shedding dog food behind medicine and cereal boxes. He burrowed in travel magazines that showed exotic beaches, chalets, gondoliers navigating sun-glossed canals, and restaurant guides from Paris to Prague. For good measure he threw in a few women’s magazines, with captions like What He’s Really Thinking and Seven Signs Your Man Is No Good. He could find only lumpfish caviar, which, in a section amid salmon eggs and phosphorescent cheese, seemed to have been mistakenly categorized as bait; and in his quest for anything lavish, he was demoralized by aisles of pigs’ feet floating in brackish water, massive bins of gumdrops, and whole expanses of Spam and canned pineapple that seemed more intended for a bomb shelter than a celebration. He nestled into the bag the only bottles of wine over ten dollars (Colette had once cautioned him about Blue Nun); he stabbed in Swiss chocolate bars, inexplicably overpriced salamis, a brood of little pink game hens; any crackers and cookies with the Union Jack on the box and all of the coffee from France. He resewed the bags while pretending to read a skateboard magazine, then checked out with two giant bags of dog food, a postcard, and six jumbo packs of toilet paper. The cashier smiled at him, didn’t try to lift the bags, but simply called in a price check and rang them up. She asked him how many dogs he had.
“Two,” he said. “But they’re always hungry.”
UNDER THE KNIFE
When Kevin woke under a spotlight, he could hear surgeons talking calmly through their masks about him. Around an open panel in blue sheets, they worked down into his chest, gloves and equipment covered with blood. He could see the respirator tube running outward and, in the periphery, hanging vinyl bags of blood and clear liquid. Everything was dreamlike in the bright lights, and though he could see the doctors rooting down into him, he felt detached from his body. It seemed stretched out across the room, as long as an afternoon shadow. He heard the whirling sounds of suction and irrigation as they were exhuming something from him. He closed his eyes and saw seagulls hovering over a landfill, felt rats burrowing through his clothes.
Rhythmically a blood-pressure cuff inflated and deflated on his arm, and when a nurse stooped down beside his heart monitor and announced his blood pressure, he perceived a current of exasperation and alarm moving through the room. He thought that he was controlling this readout with the images that floated through his mind, sewers and subway tunnels; but then, as if he had willed them into existence, he saw several cops walking outside the glass windows, sipping coffee, moving in a pantomime of a friendly argument. One of the surgeons was talking about infection, and the nurse replied, “He went swimming in something.”
“Do we have any idea who brought this guy in?”
“Some girl,” said another nurse behind the row of faces. “Hair all wet, clothes all dirty. Then she just took off before the police got here. See ya.”
“Can we get the LAPD to stop gawking in the windows?”
The nurse said, “Aw, what did you do, you poor kid? Yeah, look at him. He’s listening.”
“His blood pressure is really erratic.”
The surgeon stood up, glanced down at Kevin’s eyes, his blue mask shielding his face like a bank robber’s handkerchief. He studied the heart monitor and shook his head. “Look at his pulse. He’s going to have to calm down now. Hey, down there? Don’t start thinking you’re going to get up and run. Okay?”
“Jesse James. I wonder what he did?”
“Some drug deal that fell apart,” said the oldest surgeon with the gravelly voice.
“Five dollars says he’s a murderer.”
“Naw,” said the nurse. “He’s just another crazy kid, I think.”
“A good boy who got himself shot. Probably dove into the sewers.”
“Dr. Hollins doesn’t like working on a John Doe.”
“Let’s have a little less chatter, please.”
A few hours later Kevin lay in the tangle of tubes, breathing through a respirator, in a recovery room beside an empty bed. In the room there were two uniformed policemen, two men in blazers, a doctor, and a nurse. It was the loud nurse from earlier, her face familiar, as if from a dream, and she called the doctor when Kevin’s eyes opened. He was the younger of the surgeons, and as he approached, he was laughing at something one of the detectives had said.
“Okay. We’ve got a lot of people anxious to talk to you, but we’re going to get them out of here for a while. I don’t think it’s safe to take you off the respirator yet. But so far, you’re responding well. You’re in stable condition and the surgery went well. I’m going to explain your injuries to you. I want you to shake your head if there’s anything you don’t understand.”
Kevin desperately wanted to know if he had been shot in his front or his back.
“You’re one lucky kid—whatever your name is. The bullet fractured your fifth rib, went through both lobes of your right lung, and then lodged in the seventh rib. But the bullet didn’t fragment, and you didn’t have little pieces in there. By the time you were brought in here, the wounds had sealed themselves, so no air got into the chest cavity. Otherwise, you’re a victim and not a suspect.” He looked up at the officers and said, “Isn’t that right? Officers, can we please clear out for just a minute?”
When he faced Kevin again, he added, “We had to remove the bottom portion of your right lung. But if there aren’t any septic complications—any infection—you should be able to live a perfectly normal life.”
“In prison,” said one of the retreating cops.
As everyone left, the nurse came back into the roo
m and gave him instructions about raising and lowering the bed. She showed him the paging button to use if his pain grew too severe. As she was talking, one of the cops returned, leaning over the bed and waving his badge over Kevin’s eyes like the talisman of a witch doctor. He said, “Okay—he’s got it. Kid, I’m Detective Daniels, Rampart Division, LAPD, and I got the unbelievably fucking exciting job of making sure you don’t creep out of here like a snail. Lucky me, huh? You can’t talk yet, I realize, but we’re putting you into police custody anyway. So basically, here goes: you have the right to remain silent …”
BOOK TWO THE APPRENTICES
1984
NINE
At the end of April the Denver Post printed a short article in the Metro section about a family of three running scams on furniture, electronics, and department stores from Maryland to Colorado. The leader was in his early forties, between six-foot and six-foot-two, with “light brown hair, blue eyes, and a muscular build.” Colette read this aloud joyously in the motel room while Kevin claimed that his father hadn’t done a push-up in ten years. “The woman is reportedly in her late teens to early twenties, described as ‘attractive and talkative,’ roughly five-foot-seven to five-foot-nine.” She looked up from the paper and said, “Hear that? I’m a knockout.”
While Jerry and Colette remained in that blurry region of general features, Kevin’s description was so specific that it made him dizzy. “The third member is a young man in his mid to late teens, with dark features, his height approximately five-foot-ten, but difficult to determine accurately because of his curly black hair. He wears strong cologne. He has been seen carrying a skateboard. He sometimes wears designer suits, ripped at the knees and elbows. In larger stores witnesses state that he often plays with computers and other electronic devices. He appears to be most interested in technical gadgetry and may ask for help as he studies items in the store. Other witnesses describe him as being intense and inquisitive, with fewer social skills than the others.”