Steve Hamilton - The Lock Artist

I also bought a pair of sunglasses with the lightest lenses I could find, so I could wear them all of the time. Combined with the short hair, I truly looked like a different person. I didn’t feel any different, but some things you just can’t change that easily.

I bought a new pair of jeans, a new shirt, a new coat. I threw the clothes I had been wearing into the Dumpster. I knew I had to watch my money, but a man needs to wear something, right? And it’s not like I was shopping at Saks.

I packed up everything I owned. A few more pairs of underwear and socks. An extra pair of shoes. A toothbrush. A half tube of toothpaste. A bar of soap and a mostly empty bottle of shampoo. My practice safe lock. My leather wallet filled with tension bars and picks. A thick folder of every drawing I had done while sitting alone in that room above the restaurant. That was it. That was everything.

Oh, and my pagers. I packed the white pager, the red pager, the blue pager, the green pager. I was tempted to leave the yellow pager right there on the windowsill. Let it beep away all it wanted, until the batteries finally ran out. Or hell, maybe some new member of the Chinese family would find it, would call the number on the little screen, speaking in Mandarin or broken English. Maybe the rank amateur on the other end of that call would cancel his operation, and end up not getting his head blown off his body.

But no. In the end, I took that pager with me, too. I packed everything up and caught a cab downtown to the Port Authority. I paid for my ticket in cash, waited for the bus, got something to eat. I got on the bus, and as it pulled out I said good-bye to the city. You’d think I would have been glad to be rid of it. That I would have sworn I’d never step foot in the city again. But I actually felt a pang of regret to leave the place. As miserable as it had been, I had survived it. I had proven that much to myself. That I could make it on my own if I had to.

The bus kept going, all through the night. I slept on and off. In the morning I saw cornfields and trucks and billboards. In the evening I saw cows and red dirt. The miles rolled by.

By the end of the second day, I was in Los Angeles.

It was a hell of a long trip, but this was the white pager we’re talking about. These were the guys that the Ghost called money in the bank. True professionals. The best of the best. I figured it was the ultimate lucky break for me, that they’d be the guys beeping me next, after the yellow pager disaster. I was ready for something to go right for a change.

The man on the phone who had given me the address in L.A. told me it was a nice, clean motel up in the Glendale area. He told me the man at the desk would be expecting me. That I should indicate to him that my name was Stone and he’d show me to a room on the back side of the building. He and his associates would come for me at the motel and knock on my door. At which time the details of the operation would be shared with me.

It all worked out exactly as he said. I got off the bus, wrote down the address, and gave it to a cabdriver. He rolled out onto the expressway, which was already jammed with midday traffic. We bumped along for almost an hour until we got up to the motel. I paid the man and got out. It was a dry, sunny day in Los Angeles. An even seventy degrees, everything looking brown and dried out. There was a slight sting of smog in the air.

The motel was a double-decker, not too cheap-looking but not exactly the Ritz, either. The pool looked clean, but nobody was swimming. The parking lot was half full. I went in and wrote down one word on a piece of paper, Stone , the name the man had given to me. I gave it to the man behind the desk, and that got him right off his chair.

He insisted on personally showing me the way around the parking lot to my room. It was up on the second floor. He opened the door, showed me where the phone was, the towels in the bathroom, everything else that I could have found myself quite easily. He gave me the key and told me not to hesitate to call him if I needed anything. I’m not sure that he even noticed I hadn’t said a word to him the whole time.

When he was gone, I sat on the bed for a while, wondering how I’d gotten there. On the other side of the country, with nothing to do but wait for a stranger to knock on the door.

On the other hand, this was a step up from the room above the restaurant on 128th Street. There was a television, a clock radio, clean towels. Hell, a bathtub! I couldn’t remember the last time I had had a hot bath. Even at Uncle Lito’s place, I only had the shower stall.

I went into the bathroom and started running the hot water. I looked out the window at the parking lot and the scrubby-looking palm trees. When the tub was full I took my clothes off and got in. It felt good after all those miles on the bus.

When I was done, I dried off and sat on the bed wearing just the towel around my waist. I counted what was left of my money. I turned on the television. Then I got out some paper and started to draw.

I caught up with my ongoing story. The second trip to Connecticut. How it all fell apart and how I was the only one to make it out alive.

If Amelia ever reads these pages, I thought, what the hell is she going to think of this?

I waited for two days. Watching television, drawing, spinning my lock. Walking down the street to buy some food and bringing it back to the room. The third morning, I heard a knock on my door.

I had been wondering all along what these guys would look like. This small band of professional thieves, supposedly the best of them all.

It was time to find out.

The first face I saw when I opened that motel room door was a woman’s. A very attractive face, actually. Young, Hispanic. Full lips and big dark eyes. She was smiling, like someone else had just said something funny. As soon as she saw me, the smile faded.

Then I saw another face. A man, just as young as the woman. Maybe even younger, but still a few years older than me. Stubble around his chin. Sunglasses. Curly hair that looked sort of like mine, at least back when I had hair.

“Are you the Young Ghost?” he said.

“He’s a little kid,” the woman said. “He’s, like, still wearing diapers.”

They stepped past me into the room. They were both wearing black leather jackets. I was about to close the door, but the receiving line wasn’t over yet. Another man came in, also in black leather. Rail thin. He was just as young, but from the scars on his face you could tell he’d seen a lot more hard miles. He had a tattoo of a spiderweb on one side of his neck.

Then the fourth. Another young woman, in even more black leather, with even more hard miles on her if that was possible. She looked tired and strung out, with one eyelid slightly closed. A chipped tooth. Yet she wasn’t ugly. I mean, there was just something about her. Like a raw animal beauty that couldn’t be erased, no matter what she did to herself.

These were four bizarrely attractive human beings, all right, and not one of them looked older than a college undergrad. This could not be the White Crew that the Ghost had been raving about, could it?

“You said this place was nice,” the first man said to the second. He looked out the window at the tired palm trees.

“It’s just fine,” the second man said. He walked in a tight circle around me, looking me up and down.

“My name’s Julian,” the first man said. He was obviously the leader of this outfit, whoever the hell they were. “That’s Gunnar.”

“Charmed.” He slid off his jacket to reveal a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He had absolutely no body fat on him whatsoever. You could see every muscle, every tendon.

“That’s Ramona,” Julian said, indicating the young Hispanic woman. She nodded once to me and then sat down on the bed.