The Lock Artist (16 page)

“I’d like to see
you
drag it out.”

“Boys,” Ramona said. “Behave.”

They didn’t have to tell me what to do next. I was already on my knees in front of the safe. As I did this, Lucy, who hadn’t said one word since we rode back to the house, got down on her knees right beside me. When I reached out my hand to touch the safe, she looked like she wanted to stop me.

“It’s all right, Lucy.” Julian came over behind her and started to rub her shoulders. “It’s okay. Just watch.”

Gunnar pushed Julian away from her. I realized that the whole dynamic
between these four people was wound tighter than piano wire, and something I’d probably never quite understand.

“Did you really work with the Ghost?” Lucy said to me.

I nodded.

“At that place in Detroit? With the eight safes?”

Yes.

“I was there, you know. He tried to show me how to do it. I worked so hard at it . . .”

Yes. I know how hard it is.

“This is the safe we’ll be breaking into,” she said, touching the handle. “The exact model. We don’t leave anything to chance.”

It made perfect sense. My first indication that these seemingly insane people really knew what the hell they were doing.

“So can you do it? Can you really open this safe without breaking her?”

Her, she said. She really did study under the Ghost. Or at least she tried.

“Show me.”

I took a deep breath and started. I turned the dial, clearing the wheels so I could count them. She watched me carefully. I knew she knew everything I was doing. It was a strange feeling for me, and yet comforting. She knew.

Four wheels. Park at 0. Go to the contact area. My familiar rhythm now. She watched intently, but as I closed my eyes and felt for the slightest tiny difference, I knew I was leaving her behind. There was no way she could see this part.

I kept working my way up the dial, finding the short contacts. All the way to 100, then back again to verify them and to narrow them down to the exact numbers.

I made a writing motion. She gave me a piece of paper and pen.

There were tears in her eyes as I wrote down each number. I was sure she knew the combination. She had probably set it herself. She also knew that, at this point, finding the numbers was all that really mattered. Getting the right order was the easy part.

She grabbed the paper from me and crumpled it into a ball.

“Does he have it right?” Gunnar said.

“Yes.”

He nodded, didn’t say anything else.

“You can’t show me how you did that,” she said to me. “It’s just something you can do. Or can’t do.”

I just kept looking at her. At that moment, I honestly wished that I
could
show her.

“Okay,” Julian said, his voice quiet now. “That’s why Michael is here. Lucy, you know you’re here for a reason, too. You know that, right?”

She didn’t respond. She got up and left the room.

He shook his head slowly. Then he looked at his watch.

“If we’re going to do it this week,” he said, “then now’s the time. We all need to get into character.”

He reached out a hand to me and pulled me up from the floor.

“I’m glad we called you,” he said to me, taking me over to one of the maps on the wall. The whole city of Los Angeles, laid out before us.

“Welcome to the City of Angels,” he said. “Let me show you which piece of it we’re going to own tonight.”

So there I was. Sitting in the back of a police car. I had a shiny pair of handcuffs on. For the first time ever. They didn’t lock them behind my back, so I could sit there and study them, wondering how hard it would be to get them open.

Once the two cops had given up on me telling them anything, they had put me in the back of the car and had tried to recite me my Miranda rights. You have the right to remain silent, et cetera. When they got to the part where I had to acknowledge that I understood them, things got interesting. I nodded my head, but one of the cops told me that wasn’t good enough. I had to give them a verbal acknowledgment. Instead, I just gave them a long string of sign language, even with the cuffs already on my wrists, hoping they’d get the idea.

“He’s deaf,” one of the cops said to the other. “What do we do now?”

“He has to read his rights and then sign a statement that he understands them. I think.”

“So give him your Miranda card. Let him read that.”

“I don’t have it. Give him yours.”

“What? I don’t have one. How could you not have one if you just read it to him?”

“I didn’t read it. I have it memorized.”

“Oh shit,
now
what are we going to do?”

“Just take him down to the station. They’ll know what to do with him.”

I was going to try to convince them I wasn’t deaf, but then I thought, what the hell. Maybe they’ll stop talking to me. By then, another two police cars had already pulled up. Everyone from the party across the street was gathered around now, watching us.

They took me to the Milford station on Atlantic Street, just around the corner from the liquor store, in fact. It was after midnight now. They stuck me in an interview room for what seemed like another hour, until finally the two cops who had arrested me came into the room, along with two other men. One was a detective, and as soon as he saw me, he looked very confused. The other man was a professional sign language interpreter, who looked like he had just gotten dragged out of bed. One of the arresting officers started talking while the interpreter did his thing, signing to me that I was in the Milford police station, which I had obviously already figured out myself, and that they had to make sure I understood my rights before we went any further.

When it was my turn, I dusted off just enough sign language to convey the one important message they all had to finally understand. Point to self, put hands in front and draw them apart like an umpire signaling safe, one finger to right ear, then both hands, palm out, coming together.

“I am not deaf,” said the interpreter. He was speaking for me, automatically, before he even realized what I was saying.

“You’re Mike,” the detective said. “Lito’s nephew, right? Over at the liquor store?”

I nodded yes.

“He can hear just fine, you clowns,” the detective said to the cops. “He just can’t talk.”

That led to some general embarrassment and a dismissal of the now pissed-off interpreter. The detective read me my rights and had me sign a statement that I understood them, while the two cops kept looking at me like I had made a special point of tricking them and making them look bad. Then the detective gave me a blank legal pad and asked me if I wanted to say anything. I wrote a big
NO
and slid the pad back to him.

They fingerprinted me. They gave me a breathalyzer test, even though I was pretty sure I was stone cold sober at that point. Then they had me hold up a little sign with my name and case number as they took two pictures of me, one facing front, one sideways. Then they put me in a holding cell by myself while they called Uncle Lito.

I sat there in the cell for another hour or so, until I heard some footsteps at the end of the hallway. There was a door there with a little observation window in it. I saw Uncle Lito’s face appear behind the glass, his eyes wide and his hair sticking up like something out of a cartoon. Another half hour passed. Then a cop came to my cell and took me to another interview room.
There was a woman waiting for me. It had to be two o’clock in the morning by now, but this woman was wide-awake and very well dressed.

“I’ve been hired by your uncle to represent you,” she said to me as I sat down across from her. “We need to discuss a few things before you’re released. First of all, do you understand everything that’s happened to you so far?”

She had a legal pad ready for me. I picked up the pen and wrote
Yes.

“I understand you have not given the police any written statements yet? Is that true?”

Yes.

She took a deep breath. “They want to know who else was involved in this,” she finally said. “Are you willing to tell them?”

I hesitated, then I started writing.
What happens if I don’t say anything?

“Michael, you have to understand something here. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me everything that happened. I need to know who was with you.”

I looked away from her.

“Are you going to tell me?”

I want to go home and sleep, I thought. Figure this all out tomorrow.

“I understand that there was a party going on across the street from the residence you broke into. I’m sure the police are talking to everyone who was there.
Somebody
will have seen your . . . friends running away.”

One friend, I thought. One friend and two other people I couldn’t care less about. But I couldn’t see how to give up just the two of them without Griffin getting pulled into it. Even if he was already in Wisconsin by now. They’d find him and bring him back.

“Your car,” she said. “It’s parked down the street from the Marshes’ house?”

I nodded.

“Do you even know the Marshes? I’m sure there’s a reason you drove all the way over there,
all by yourself
, if you expect anyone to believe that, and broke into their house.”

I closed my eyes.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow. I’m going to go get you released now so you can go home and get some rest.”

Another half hour of waiting, and then I was out of the holding cell. The lawyer drove us home. Uncle Lito sat in the front seat, not saying a word. I was in the backseat. When we got to the house, he thanked the lawyer and got out. I slid out and followed him. I kept waiting for the big blow-up. What the hell got into you, what the hell were you thinking. Something like
that. Maybe even some physical confrontation. For the first time ever. But he just opened up the front door and let me in.

“Go to bed,” he said. “We’ll deal with this in the morning.”

I went to my room in the back of the house and got undressed. As I lay down and turned off the light, I saw his silhouette in the doorway.

“Do you have any idea how much this lawyer is going to cost?”

I stared at the dark ceiling.

“I didn’t realize it was this bad, Michael. I mean, I know what you had to go through . . .”

No. You don’t know.

“I thought you were getting over that now. I thought you were doing okay.”

He closed the door and left. As I went to sleep, I saw the aquarium shatter again. The water running onto the floor. The fish lying on the floor, mouths gaping in surprise.

The next day I woke up late, expecting the worst. I figured by the end of the day, I’d be hauled off to prison, or to some special place where they send juvenile delinquents. What I didn’t know was that the county prosecutor was already working on his second headache of the morning.

“Okay, here’s where we are,” the lawyer told us, as soon as we were both sitting in her office. “The police believe that the Marsh residence was entered around ten thirty last night,” she said, reading from her yellow pad. “By Michael and some unknown number of accomplices.”

“I want the names,” Uncle Lito said to me. “Do you hear me? You’re going to write them down and you’re going to do it now.”

“Hold that thought for a moment,” she said. Then she went back to her pad. “According to the police, various witnesses at the party across the street reported as few as two and as many as five young men fleeing the scene when the squad cars arrived. It’s not uncommon to get differing accounts from different people. In any case, several witnesses state that one of the young men was very large.”

She looked at me, measuring my reaction.

“That leads them to believe that a Milford student named Brian Hauser may have been on the scene. Apparently, he and Adam Marsh have some history. Is any of this ringing a bell yet, Michael?”

I didn’t move.

“As far as the charges themselves go,” she said, “there were no apparent signs of forced entry. Which leads the police to believe that the back door was unlocked. A lucky break for whoever wanted to get in.”

Nothing about the safety pin, I thought. Or the screwdriver. The police had taken them from me when I was arrested, but I guess it didn’t even occur to them that I could use those things to open the lock.

“A large aquarium in the living room was shattered, apparently by a fireplace poker. That resulted in a fair amount of water damage to the carpeting and furniture. Although the fish themselves were found unharmed in the kitchen sink. I suppose, what, you broke the aquarium and then felt bad about the fish? Or was the whole thing just an accident?”

I could really feel Uncle Lito staring a hole through me now.

“A large banner was left in Adam Marsh’s bedroom. Something to the effect that Milford High School kicks ass. Aside from that, there were no further damages, and nothing was reported as stolen from the house.”