The Lock Artist (21 page)

“You’re late,” he said. “Come with me.”

Yeah, yeah, I thought, back to the pool. Just tell me that your daughter will be home again today.

“I want you to meet somebody.”

He led me around to the back of the house. There was a man there, kneeling by the door.

“This is Mr. Randolph,” Mr. Marsh said. “He’s a locksmith.”

The locksmith stood up and adjusted his baseball cap. “Mr. Marsh tells me you opened this lock,” he said. “I don’t see a scratch on it. So I’m calling bullshit.” He had a slight Eastern European accent, so bullshit came out as “bullsheet.”

“How about it?” Mr. Marsh said. “You want to show us how you did it?”

I put my hands up in surrender. No, I don’t.

“It was open,” the locksmith said. “Am I right? This door was open so you walked right in.”

I should have let it go. Instead I shook my head and made a gesture like I was picking an imaginary lock in the air.

“Come off it,” the locksmith said, sneaking a wink at Mr. Marsh. “There’s no way you could pick this lock. It would take me quite a bit of work to do it myself.”

“Let him prove it,” Mr. Marsh said. “Let him put his money where his mouth is.”

The locksmith started laughing. “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars cash. Real American money, right here on the spot.”

“You’re not taking my money today,” Mr. Marsh said. Then he turned to me. “But I’ll tell you what, Michael. You open that lock, and I’ll give you the day off. Okay? You up for that? Open it right now and you can go home.”

“Here, you can even use my tools,” the locksmith said. He pulled out what looked like a large wallet and handed it to me. “Best in the business.”

I unzipped the leather case and opened it. I stood there for a moment looking at the contents. I had never seen such a beautiful collection of tools.

“You know how to use them, don’t you? Come on, show us your stuff.”

There were at least a dozen lock picks to choose from. Three different diamond picks, two ball picks, one double ball pick, at least four or five hook picks. I didn’t know their names yet. I wouldn’t learn that until later.

“Okay, make that a thousand dollars,” the locksmith said. “I’ll give you ten to one odds.” He was about to take the case back from me, but I turned away from him and took out one of the hook picks. There were four different tension bars, so I knelt down next to the lock and tried to guess which size would work best. I had never had to make such a choice before. It had always been whatever hunk of scrap metal I had on hand.

I took out one of the tension bars. Not the smallest, not the biggest. I slid it into the bottom of the keyhole. I put one finger on the right side and pushed it ever so slightly. Then I took the hook pick and felt along the line of tumblers. I had already done this lock before, of course, so I knew exactly where to go. It was a very basic setup, six pins, one tight combination in the back but otherwise nothing too tricky. It had taken me all of three minutes with a screwdriver and a bent safety pin. With these perfect tools—hell, it wouldn’t take me more than thirty seconds.

“He seems to know what he’s doing,” Mr. Marsh said. “You don’t suppose . . .”

“No freaking way,” the locksmith said. He wasn’t smiling now. “I promise you.”

I popped the back pin, worked my way carefully past the fifth. With the good tension bar, it was so much easier to keep the last pin engaged. I felt that satisfying little click with each pin as I made my way to the front. I could feel that I had it halfway done. With the mushroom pins, I knew I had to go back and do them all one more time. There were just the tiniest slivers of metal standing in my way now. Six little notches on six little pins, and then the whole thing would turn free.

The two men were quiet now. I worked my way through the pins again, back to front. I was about to pop that last pin when something made me stop.

Think about this, I thought to myself. Do you really want to prove to these guys that you can break into this house whenever you feel like it? Into
any
house? Is that the kind of thing you want everybody to know?

“Is that it?” Mr. Marsh said. “Are you giving up already?”

“Playtime’s over,” the locksmith said. A sneer on his face. “Remember this the next time you feel like shooting off your mouth.”

Not the right thing to say to me, I thought. I looked the locksmith in the eye as I tapped up that last pin. I turned the knob, opened the door, and gave him back his tools.

Then I put my gloves on and went into the backyard to start digging.

I could hear Mr. Marsh and the locksmith having it out as I picked up the shovel and got to work. Within a few minutes, the locksmith was gone and it was just Mr. Marsh standing there watching me. He had a drink in his hand now. I filled my first wheelbarrow of the day, then rolled it to the woods to dump it. When I came back, he was gone.

It was a little hotter today. I went to fill up the water jug at the faucet. When the water stopped flowing, I could hear Mr. Marsh yelling into the phone again, just like he had done the day before. It may seem like an obvious point, but it was something I realized that day. Do not trust anyone, ever, if you hear them yelling into a telephone.

I spent the next two hours digging and rolling the wheelbarrow and wondering if I’d be able to make it through the day. I felt weaker than the day before. There was no way around that. I knew it was a simple matter of biology and physics. Eventually, I wouldn’t be able to do this anymore. It wasn’t even a question of pacing myself. I mean, you can only save so much energy when you’re digging a hole. Anything less than the basic minimum effort and you’re not even digging anymore.

Everything started to turn yellow again, my eyes too tired or too burned by the sun or God knows what. I kept the water jug full and kept drinking as much as I could.

You will collapse, I told myself. This will happen as surely as the sun rises in the east. You will collapse, and they will come and revive you. After a few days of recovery, you’ll go to that juvie farm Mr. Marsh was talking about. They won’t work you as hard there. Hell, they wouldn’t work you this hard
anywhere.
But it’ll be so much worse in so many ways. On top of everything else, you’ll never see Amelia again.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

I turned around and saw her standing there. That same place on the edge of what would someday be her swimming pool. Today she was wearing cutoff denim shorts that went down to her knees. The same black tennis shoes. White shins and ankles in the bright sunlight. A black T-shirt with some sort of cartoon machine gun on it. It was way too hot to be wearing anything black today.

I stopped digging and wiped my face.

“You’ll never dig this whole thing. It would take you a year. Even if you did, so what? You think we’re ever going to use a pool back here?”

Extra motivation for me, I thought. Thank you so much. But God you are so beautiful.

“Adam’s away to college already. I’ll be gone after one more year. Who the hell’s going to use it?”

I stood there while she looked around and shook her head and then finally got to the point.

“So are you going to talk today, or what?”

I pushed the shovel into the dirt so that it could stand on its own.

“I’m calling your bluff. Okay? I know you can talk if you want to. So say something.”

I reached around to my back pocket and took out the pad of paper and pencil. I know you probably think this was a normal thing for me, having something to write on at all times. Seriously, though, I hardly ever did it then, and still don’t. I just don’t like writing impromptu notes to people in lieu of real conversation.
I’m sorry, I cannot speak, so I’ll write down everything I need to say to you right here on this handy notepad that I carry with me for just such an occasion! & Thank you for your patience as I make you stand there with a slightly bemused look on your face while I carefully write down each word so you can then read it and pretend that we’re communicating like two normal human beings.

To hell with that.

But today was different. I had the pad in my pocket just in case I got into exactly this situation. I opened the pad and started writing.

I really cannot talk. I promise you. Really.

I handed her the piece of paper. She took two seconds to read it, then held her hand out for the pencil. Which didn’t make any sense, of course, because there was no reason for the writing to be anything other than a one-way process. I gave it to her anyway.

She held the paper down against her thigh and started writing on it.

“Amelia!”

A voice from the house, interrupting her writing as I watched the way her hair hung down as she bent over. Mr. Marsh, no doubt, on his way out to warn me off again.

But no. A younger voice. He was approaching from the house, someone our age, wearing an Oriental jacket, baggy pants. Ridiculously way too hot for this weather. Long hair tied together in the back, not just a ponytail, mind you, but with enough ties to make it look like a braid. Smug know-it-all face. A total good-for-nothing prick, I knew it from the first second I saw him. The next second bringing the sick realization, like a horse kicking me right in the stomach, that this was Amelia’s boyfriend.

“What are you doing back here?” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be staying away from the criminal?” No genuine worry in his voice. More a double-edged insult, that I was a criminal but a criminal not worth taking seriously. I was already fighting the urge to hit him in the face with the shovel.

“I was just asking him a question,” Amelia said. “I thought you were at the gallery.”

“It was just boring today. Is anybody home?”

“I don’t know. I think my dad went out.”

“Is that right?”

“Don’t get any ideas. He could be back any second.”

“His car’s loud enough. We’ll hear him.”

“I told you, Zeke . . .”

The conversation stalled for a moment. This intimate back and forth I was forced to listen to, and on top of that now the utter ridiculousness of his name. Zeke!

“Come on,” he said. “Leave the miscreant to his digging.”

“His name is Michael,” she said.

“Whatever.”

She crumpled up the piece of paper she had been writing on and threw it toward me. Then she walked off with him. She paused to look back over her shoulder at me, until Zeke put a hand on the small of her back. When they were gone, I picked up the paper. She had crossed out my words. Below them she had written her own.

When’s the last time you tried?

______

That was a hard day. It really was. I mean, aside from my hands hurting and my back hurting and feeling like I was two minutes away from heatstroke. I was digging a rich man’s pool, working like a slave behind the kind of house I’d never live in. And Amelia . . . who made me ache. If only there was some way to get through to her. To make her see that I wasn’t really a criminal. Or a freak.

There’s only one way, I thought. I have to draw something for her. No matter how hard I have to work at it, it’s my only chance.

Somehow, that thought gave me the energy to keep digging for that last hour. I rolled the last wheelbarrow over to the woods, rolled it back by the hole, which was actually starting to look like a real hole now after eight total hours on the job. I put the shovel in the wheelbarrow and went around to the front of the house. That’s when I got my first look at Zeke’s car sitting there in the driveway. It was a cherry red BMW convertible. The top was down, so I could see the black leather seats and the stick shift gleaming in the sun. Then, just a few feet away, the old two-toned Grand Marquis with the rust along the edges.

When I got home, I didn’t go into the liquor store. I didn’t want Uncle Lito to see me and start threatening to call the judge again. I went right into the house. I took a shower. I ate something. Then I sat down to draw.

I had failed so miserably the night before. Trying to capture Amelia on a piece of paper . . . it seemed impossible.

You were trying too hard, I thought. You were turning her into the Mona Lisa. Just draw her like you’d draw anyone else, like she wasn’t someone who made you sick whenever you looked at her.

I was still going at midnight. I was so tired, but I was so close now. Maybe that’s what I needed, to be so wiped out I could barely see straight. To have to do it all by gut instinct. Just move the pencil and let it come out.

In the drawing, she was standing on the edge of the hole. She was wearing her cutoff shorts and her black tennis shoes and her black T-shirt with the machine gun on it. Her hair all over the place. One arm across her body, holding her other arm near the elbow. Her body language a mixed signal. Her eyes slightly downward. Looking at me but not really looking.

Yes. This was better. I was getting her now. More importantly, I was getting how I
felt
about her. How I saw her in my mind’s eye. This was almost passable.

Now all I had to do was to figure out how to get it to her. Could I roll it up, keep it in my pants somehow? Or maybe if I put it in a big envelope, keep
it flat. No matter what, I had to have it right there with me, ready to give to her if I saw my chance.