by Peter Craig
Kevin assumed that the heart of this game, even if for mere pride, was to escape alone with the money. He found his own routes amid the old corridors and basement tunnels. When Kevin passed the front desk, he saw a young girl glancing at him with a fidgeting smile. She was either flirting or knew something—and either way he was curious. He talked to her for a while about her job, until she said, “How did you get the scar on your cheek?” reaching out and tracing it with her fingertip.
Kevin was studying her eyes closely, and he replied, “When was she in here?”
“Who?”
“The girl. My wife. About your height. Sandy-blond hair. Talks a mile a minute.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. She may be a good liar, but you’re not. What did she offer you?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
Kevin whipped out his wallet and flashed the phony Secret Service badge, then said, “You do if you want to avoid any jail time, honey. I’m Secret Service and I’m undercover in this operation. I need to know exactly what she told you.”
The girl laughed and replied, “Do you want to know what she told me? Or what the old man said? Because he said you’d be too cheap to offer me any money; and she said you’d claim you were with the Secret Service.”
“Were they together or did they come to you separately?”
“She also said you’d ask that. Separately. Oh yeah. She told me to say, ‘Stop worrying so much.’ ”
The night before the scam, Kevin and Colette lay awake on the foldout couch. Kevin couldn’t imagine what was going through her mind. She lay still, her head against his chest, and they both pretended to be sleeping. She had agreed to accompany Jerry as his backup during the exchange in the hotel room. She was a liar, she was a daredevil. She had taken his father’s bait—knowingly. But Kevin believed he was a more meticulous planner than the rest of them, and if this scam tomorrow was to become a test of skills, he believed that he could dazzle them both. In the past forty-eight hours he had studied the hotel’s dumbwaiters, the service and regular elevators, the switchboard, the maintenance room, the underground parking. He had pored over blueprints at city hall, studying the drainage and sewage tunnels dug into bedrock beneath the hotel. He had determined to handcuff Lenny to the bed to subvert any plot between him and Jerry; and, searching the hotel reservation records, he found an extra room that he believed Colette had rented in a phony name, Justine Case. The name was so silly that Kevin thought she must have intended him to find it.
Tuesday morning all three of them were up before dawn, sharing a pot of coffee in the dark kitchen. They drove to the hotel in silence, then set about their separate errands. Kevin found Jerry’s alternate getaway car by matching it with new parking permits issued through the front desk, and he disabled it by removing the distributor cap. Whatever his father wanted—to break up a marriage, pay back an ex-fling, reassert himself as the alpha thief—he’d see the real resourcefulness of his son. Jerry also had road flares in his car, and, because they seemed like suspicious props, Kevin stole them and burrowed them in the deep interior pockets of his coat.
As he entered the stairwell and headed upstairs, Kevin smiled at the thought of so many different plans converging on this one musty old hotel. If he was the winner, if he slipped out with the cash in hand, he wouldn’t wait forever—maybe just a few hours, long enough to make them agonize. He wouldn’t gloat. He wouldn’t vanish. He would simply ask for his due. He might even pay his father a small commission, say, 10 percent. A finder’s fee. A sin tax.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Two of the three marks arrived at the hotel a little before four o’clock in the afternoon. Believing that they were checking into a random room for the exchange, they were instead diverted to a prepared suite on the tenth floor by the sympathetic young woman at the front desk. While Jerry and Kevin tested the radio transmitter in another room on the seventh floor, the warning call came from the house phone in the lobby. Colette said that it was just the first two, without the money: the heavyset kid with the strained breathing and the bodyguard with the jagged Adam’s apple.
Hutsinger was complaining that his suit pants were too short for him. He had lost his phony badge. All afternoon they had made preparations in this one cramped room, now reeking with cigarette smoke and body odor, and Hutsinger had made himself too comfortable on the bed, eating sun-melted candy bars and surfing through TV channels.
A police scanner sat on the cabinet, broadcasting a sedate recitation of street names and other crimes in progress. Jerry secured a mike over his sternum with surgical tape, covering the brambles of gray chest hair. Buttoning his shirt and adjusting his blazer, he paced in the hallway and the stairwells and repeated, “Test, test,” until he began singing a Johnny Cash song.
Kevin heard mostly the rustling of clothes, like a flag in the wind, and the faint squeal of feedback. He leaned into the hallway and whispered, “Dad, keep your mouth farther away from the mike.”
When Colette joined them she was flushed from running up the stairs. She began fixing herself in the bathroom mirror, and Jerry called, “What do you think this is, the prom? Let’s go.”
“Hold on, Jerry. How does it look if I’m sweating?”
Jerry stalked across the room, kicking Hutsinger’s legs out of his way, and dialed the room number on the tenth floor. “Yeah,” he said. “They didn’t give me the room number, kid, I’m down in the lobby. All right, give me two minutes, I’ll be right up. Oh—and you know I’ve got backup with me. She’s checked out. Don’t worry.”
He put down the phone and clapped his hands together. “Okay, you bunch of sorry losers—let’s get this done.”
Just before they stepped out the door together, Jerry and Colette waited, smiling at each other with the nervous resolve of a circus act, and Kevin felt suddenly bitter about having to remain stranded in the room. As they crossed the hall and rode the clattering elevator, Kevin cupped his palm over the earpiece and listened to their conversation as if through a seashell. They spoke in hushed voices, most of the words lost in the movements of Jerry’s shirt.
“That’s pathetic,” said Colette.
From the breathing and scrambling sounds, Kevin figured they were crossing the long hallway.
Maybe they were waiting to steel their nerves, because clearly Kevin heard his father say, “… but you were the best thief I ever knew.”
“Don’t turn back into Svengali on me now, Jerry. Especially with Kevin listening.”
Jerry asked her something that was lost, and Colette, her voice in the midst of high-pitched frequencies, like a whale’s songs, replied, “If you even try to distract me with that, Jerry, the whole thing is off.”
“Just answer the question.”
“You’re completely different people. There isn’t any comparison.”
“… from the start … weren’t you? I know you kids were.”
“Oh, my God, Jerry. Why are you still thinking about this?”
“… not happy and you’ll never be happy, and he’s not either …”
“Not now, Jerry. We’re working.” Jerry’s shirt rustled loudly again, and Kevin panicked that it might be some physical contact. But he was relieved to hear Colette laugh and, in a wave of diminishing static, say, “Kevin, honey—if you’re listening. Your father is still a pig.”
Finally they entered the room and the fragments of conversation took on a businesslike tone. Jerry was bantering with the kids. It sounded from the rustling that the bodyguard was frisking Jerry and Colette. The other said, “Throw her into the deal, homes.”
“… gallantly than that,” said Colette.
Readjusting the scanner frequency, Kevin tapped into the phone call for the third mark, who sounded like he was pacing beside a busy street. It would be a few more minutes while they checked numbers. Through Jerry’s transmitter Kevin heard a modem connection, and he waited patiently through the muted conversatio
n, hearing as numbers were fed through the verification software.
“So far so good,” said someone.
Hutsinger was falling asleep on the bed, one limp arm hanging down. In the earpiece, Kevin heard, “Looks good, old man!”
Kevin pulled one set of handcuffs from his belt line and abruptly cuffed Hutsinger to the bedpost. After two feckless tugs on the chain, Hutsinger gave up, eyeing Kevin with a look of mere annoyance. “You’re just like your old man, kid. You people always got to make this shit complicated.”
“Just shut up and keep eating your candy bars.”
He tuned the scanner and heard the swimming, scattered frequencies of the phone call: “We’re good.” Through the earpiece he caught the wheezing kid announcing that the money was on the way up. Kevin checked his gun, loaded with blanks; he hung his counterfeit badge from his coat pocket; and he followed closely along the walls to the stairwell.
Thinking out loud, he whispered, “Which way are you coming up, kid? Stairwell, stairwell.” But on the earpiece he heard the third mark enter the room. Kevin shouted, “Fuck!” The money must have been somewhere close by, maybe on the roof.
Everything was fine, he repeated to himself: there were still a dozen other options in his plan. As he was moving up the stairs, holding his ear, listening as the money was checked, Jerry said, in a blast of hot air, “Now that’s a fucking nest egg.” He said it so loudly that a squeal of feedback trailed his voice. The screeching sound made Kevin throw the piece from his ear.
Kevin stood still on the landing of the ninth floor. He was lathered with sweat and his heartbeat pulsed in his temples. He tilted his head back and said, “Oh, no—Dad!”
Three muffled gunshots came from the floor above.
Kevin sprinted upstairs and pushed through the fire door and onto the faded red carpet. He crouched down against the wall, sliding ahead toward the room. The door was already open. Someone had fled in the other direction, toward the service elevator. But, as if the sequence of deafening sounds in his ear had cleared his mind, Kevin lost track of his plans and escape routes and could only think of the ongoing catastrophe. Every plan seemed a stupid piece of vanity now, pointless showboating; and he wanted nothing more than to torch the entire room while dragging out his father and Colette.
He knelt in the doorway and peeked inside the suite’s main room, making out the disarray of overturned armchairs and the scorched smell of gunpowder. From a momentary glimpse he tried to reconstruct the layout in his mind: at the base of chintz curtains there was a black piano, which faced the sturdy enclosure of a wet bar, lined with shattered decanters. Off to the left was the bedroom with salmon-colored walls. With his back pressed against the wall, Kevin rose up, then held the badge into the doorway. “Secret Service—this a bust! We’ve got backup on the way. Let’s get down on the floor.”
A gunshot burst at him, taking a chunk from the doorjamb. He dropped back down, breathing rapidly, and tried to figure out where it had come from.
He glanced around the door again, then fell back, fishing out his gun. There was the fireplace facade, a television playing a commercial without sound in the center of the carpet. Kevin’s ears were still numbed by the shot.
“Kevin?” Colette called from the bedroom. “Kevin?”
The fact that she would break out of character and use his real name was more alarming to him than the series of gunshots. He ducked down and scrambled into the room, diving into a spot behind the white couch. From behind the wet bar, someone fired another shot, which struck the piano in a dissonant crash of notes. Across the white carpet Kevin now saw a trail of sprayed blood.
“Kevin? Kevin, honey?”
“This is Secret Service—we’ve got LAPD backing us up on the stairs. Let’s put the guns down.”
After a long silence, a nasal voice came from behind the bar: “Yeah, right.”
As Kevin retreated into the cornered bedroom, in a crossfire, two, maybe three shots came from the bar and the bathroom. He slid across the carpet, behind the wall, where Colette was perched behind the cabinet with her gun drawn. The mirror of the closet door was angled so that she could see into the main room. Her face was red and her hair unraveled; she blew a strand out of her face and said, “Don’t fire too much or they’ll figure out we’re using blanks.”
“Where the fuck is my dad?”
“He did it. He got exactly what he wanted, Kevin—the piece of shit. I swear to God if we get out of this I’m going to cut him up and feed him to the fucking seagulls.”
A rapid series of gunshots blew apart the wall beside them, thudding into plaster like wet sand, ringing off door hinges and fireplace irons, blowing the television apart like cheap fireworks, until there came a pause filled with the sound of reloading clips.
Colette said, “It’s a hell of a trick. But he didn’t expect these punks to be so heavily armed.”
“What happened, Colette?”
She fired one blank shot into the room, the sound echoing, then she fell back, wiped her forehead, and said, “The bodyguard—the big Adam’s apple. I knew it, I knew there was something wrong with that kid. He was Jerry’s plant. They obviously had a deal worked out together. When everybody heard the reverb on the mike, the bodyguard just popped up like he expected it—took out a gun and in some ridiculous struggle dragged Jerry and the cash out of the room. It was a joke, Kevin. It couldn’t have fooled anybody but these two idiots. And they think they’re in a fucking video game.”
Kevin fired another meaningless shot through the doorway, then asked, “Well, what was your plan then?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Kevin. Will you look around for a second?”
A bullet whistled through the doorway and shattered a lamp across the room.
“I mean it,” said Kevin. “What were you going to do? Were you leaving me?”
Suddenly her face grew slack and her eyes looked sad. She touched him on the face and said, “No, honey, I wasn’t. What do I have to do to earn a little bit of faith here?” She fired two deafening shots through the open door.
He sagged against the wall and took a relieved breath of air, checking the cylinders on his revolver. “All right,” he said. “Then I don’t care about anything else. I’m through. I’m going to learn carpentry. Go to night school. I’m going to get my fucking GED.”
From outside there came the first distant sirens, and within moments, a helicopter traversed the sky. Kevin shouted at the main room, “All right—congratulations. You figured it out. We’re not cops and we all got ripped off. Hear me? So let’s stop firing and we can all walk out of here.”
“Fuck you,” yelled the kid in the bathroom, with the hysterical sound of tears in his voice. “You fucking liars.”
“This is all my fault,” said Colette. “That son of a bitch has been wanting to get back at me for years, and I let him distract me with all kinds of father-figure bullshit, and I’ll just never forgive myself.”
“Okay, I don’t want to talk about that right now, Colette.”
It was fifteen strides across the suite to the front door, and Kevin didn’t see how they could make it. To test his theory, he grabbed a pillow from the bed and hurled it into the main room. Both gunmen fired wildly, shredding the case and blowing goose feathers across the room.
“All right—we have to climb over the balcony.”
They moved across the bedroom and quietly slid open the glass door. The sun had fallen to just above the hills, glaring off the windows around them. A police helicopter now circled the building, and, farther out, news choppers were drifting inward from the pink and orange haze on the horizon.
The neighboring balcony was separated by about six feet, with a straight drop into traffic below; so Kevin nodded to the balcony overhead. “Okay,” he said. “You want to go up or down?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Up is safer. If the sliding glass door is locked, just bust through. We don’t have time. Now get on my shoulders.”
“This isn’t a trapeze act, Kevin.”
“Now!”
He stooped down as if for a game of leapfrog, and she kicked off her shoes. She climbed onto his shoulders and grabbed his hands, and—in a wobbling, precarious motion—he raised her upward. “Get both hands on the bars.” He could barely keep his balance as she stood upright, her heels wedged into his shoulders. Suddenly he felt her stabilize them by grabbing the rungs, and her feet lifted off him. When he looked up, she had wedged one bare foot between the bars and was hauling herself upward under a fray of drifting hair and hanging clothes. “I’m going to fucking kill that man!”
At last she was upright against the railing, as the helicopter sank downward behind them. She hung her hands down and he waved them away. “I’m going in the other direction.”
Over the din of rotor blades she called down, “Kevin? I have a room downstairs and an escape route.”
“I know! Just in case.”
She smiled and reached down to touch his outstretched fingers a last time, pulling away as the loudspeaker on the chopper began to call them with a muffled voice. When Kevin looked ahead at the closed portion of the glass door, he saw—behind his own reflection—the shadow of another man.
A shot punctured the glass, sending weblike cracks outward and changing the angle of light so that he could see the mark, standing just a few feet away. He was about Kevin’s age. His face was broad and flabby, his hair long and unwashed. He was an unlikely gunman, with his doughy arms and his asthma inhaler, but something in his black, lifeless eyes seemed less open to negotiation than any of the villains of his lifetime; for unlike them, he lacked even the simplest mercenary look of self-awareness. He watched Kevin only with curiosity; he savored the spectacle he had created. He grinned, raising his pistol, and, as if there were no other possible conclusion, pulled back the hammer. Kevin said, “You’re not going to last.”