Steve Hamilton - The Lock Artist

“I’m having a little barbecue tonight. You think you could stay for it? There’s somebody I’d like you to meet. His name is Mr. Slade. He’s my partner, actually, at the health club. Along with some other stuff. We’ve got a lot going on these days. I think he’d really enjoy meeting you. Whaddya say?”

That’s the catch? I have to meet your partner?

“And maybe… I don’t know. Maybe if we have a problem that you could help us solve sometime? You think maybe that would be a possibility? You helping us out, I mean?”

Okay. Here it is.

“I’m just saying. You have a lot of skills. In fact, I bet Mr. Slade would be very interested to see them. You think you could show him? Maybe even tonight, after the barbecue?”

That’s when I heard the footsteps. I looked up and there she was, standing in the doorway. She had jeans and a simple white shirt on, untucked. Beads around her neck. Her hair tied up in a ponytail.

“Tell you what, you just think about it,” Mr. Marsh said to me. “You think about it, and we’ll talk later.”

“What’s he supposed to be thinking about?” Amelia said.

“Just an adjustment to our work agreement,” Mr. Marsh said. “I think everybody will be a lot happier. You included.”

She didn’t look convinced. I’d find out soon just how well she knew him. For as much as she loved him, the only parent she had left, she knew he was full of shit at least half the time.

“You guys run along,” Mr. Marsh said. “Go do some art stuff or something.”

“He doesn’t have to dig today?”

He smiled at his daughter. Then he gave me a little wink.

“No. Not today.”

I don’t know if I realized it yet, but he had me. Before I could even get out of the chair. I had no idea what he’d ask me to do. Or who he’d ask me to do it for. All of that would come later.

But for now… yes. He’d played the Amelia card, and he’d played it perfectly.

He had me.

Los Angeles and Monterey

Early 2000

I was still in L.A. when I turned eighteen that month. February of 2000. Lucy had asked me for my birthday. Just out of curiosity, I thought. I had no idea they were planning anything. But on that day, Julian and the gang put a blindfold on me and took me out to the street. They took the blindfold off and there it was. A Harley-Davidson Sportster with a big red bow on the seat. The most beautiful motorcycle I had ever seen, even better than that old Yahama my uncle had given me.

I had already moved into the little apartment that was attached to the garage. It didn’t take long to bring in all of my stuff, which at that point could still fit into the two luggage bags from my old bike. Julian apologized to me about how small the space was, but damn… after setting out on my own, figuring I’d be living in motel rooms or God knows where else… this was as close to a real home as anything I could have hoped for.

I still had a lot of questions about these four people. The White Crew. First of all, you can only spend so much time stealing money from rich people. What else did they do all day?

As it turned out, Julian had grown up in a family of wine snobs, so he took that background and he turned it into a business. He had a storefront in Marina del Rey, not far from the docks. There was a climate-controlled wine cellar beneath the store with well over a million dollars’ worth of bottles. The very finest, most expensive wine in the world. The kind of stuff that only a very rich person would even think of buying. That’s how he made many of his first contacts in this community of obscene wealth, mostly from the people who’d dock their yachts in the harbor. At the same time, it gave him a way to launder some of the money he made from the robberies.

There was a kind of symmetry to my life now, if you think about it. A man who sold cheap liquor took me in when I needed him most. Now, it was a man who sold overpriced wine.

Ramona spent most of her time at the store, too, along with members of her extended family, especially her three sisters. Like her, they were ridiculously attractive Hispanic women who could charm you right out of your undershorts. The few times I was around the store, I’d hear them talking Spanish to each other at a million miles an hour, and it would often disintegrate into shouting matches. By the end of the day, they’d make up. It was a tight family. They loved each other like crazy and would kill for each other, I could tell. I was envious of that.

As for Gunnar, he was a tattoo artist. He had a little shop right there in Santa Monica. When he wasn’t there, I often saw him working out in the backyard. Even now that he was hooked up with Julian and had some money in his pocket, he still liked to use junkyard equipment like cinder blocks and tire chains.

He didn’t talk to me much. Then again, the more I hung around the more I noticed that he didn’t really talk to anybody . I mean, he lived in the same house with these people. He had dinner with them almost every night. When it came time to put a big job together, he would literally entrust these people with his very life. But he was different from them. That much was clear. There always seemed to be a subtle undercurrent in the room, with Julian especially, and now me. Like there’s no way on this earth he’d be spending so much time with us, if it weren’t for our one common interest.

Lucy? She was the one member of the gang who hadn’t found her daytime calling yet. She’d worked a number of jobs since getting out of rehab, but nothing had seemed to stick. Her latest kick had apparently been painting. Some of her work was hanging around the house, and Julian had arranged for some pieces to be shown at one of the local art galleries. Most of her work was these almost psychedelic paintings of birds or dogs or even jungle animals that I’m sure she’d never seen in person. It was good, I thought, but she didn’t make many sales.

Because she was the one with the most free time, I’d often end up hanging around while she was painting or cooking or whatever else. One day, she caught me drawing a picture of her on my pad of paper. Nothing much, just a quick pencil sketch, but she took the paper from me and looked at it for a long time.

“One more reason to hate you,” she said as she flipped it back at me.

They still had the safe in the back room. For the rest of that month, she kept trying to open it. I’d watch her, and I’d do whatever I could to show her exactly what I was feeling when I got to the shorter contact areas, but I knew there was no way to make her feel it. It would either come to her or it wouldn’t.

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t feel it.

Julian made me throw away my fake New York driver’s license. He told me he’d find me a real fake identity. So I was no longer William Michael Smith.

A friend of a friend of his had a young neighbor who hadn’t gotten his California driver’s license yet. In fact, he would have had to lose about two hundred pounds before he could even think about trying to fit behind the wheel of a car. So for a certain amount of cash delivered to his door every month, he agreed to “loan” me his identity. I could open up a bank account in his name if I wanted to. I could even use his Social Security number if I wanted to go out and get a real job.

That’s how my new fake name became Robin James Agnew.

I still had the pagers with me, of course. One day, the green pager went off. This was the one that had been silent for years, according to what the Ghost had told me. He didn’t even know if anyone still had the number.

Well, apparently someone did.

I called the number on the screen. The man who answered asked me if I was the Ghost. When I didn’t answer, he asked again, swore a few times, then hung up.