Steve Hamilton - The Lock Artist

I nodded. Oh yes. We’ve met.

“I started giving him my excuse. ‘I was just putting some flowers down here, friend.’ But he’s not buying it. Hell, it sounded lame to me . So he gets me up on deck and there’s Ramona with Mr. Bigshot, and all of a sudden nobody’s friendly anymore. He sits me down and he asks me to give him one good reason why he shouldn’t just take me with them out into the ocean and dump our bodies there. I’m trying to think of something to say, when Ramona pipes up. ‘Because sharks don’t like Mexican,’ she says. Which gets the guy thinking. He says, ‘But your boyfriend here isn’t Mexican.’ And she says, ‘Who’s talking about him ?’ Which got this guy laughing, at least. But then he got real quiet, and he said, ‘Somebody told me you guys were good. So I had to see for myself. Is this the kind of scam you usually run? Wait until a rich man shows up on a boat? Go snooping around the cabins?’ And I’m like, ‘No, sir. Not at all, sir. And how did you even hear about us in the first place?’ Because at that time there was no way he could have known about us. I mean, no way . But he gets real close to me and he says, ‘I know everything. That’s all you have to remember.’ And I’m thinking, okay, this is it. We’re dead. The lazy-looking guy is getting ready to put a bullet in our heads.

“Then he let us go. Under two conditions, he said. Number one, well, thanks for all the wine and cigars and flowers. That was very thoughtful of you to deliver all of this stuff to the boat. And number two, here’s a phone number. ‘If you guys live long enough to learn how to do this right,’ he says, ‘then you’ll probably need a good boxman.’ We just have to remember to always pay him ten percent off the top. Which is how we got to meet the Ghost.”

“Lucy told you about going to visit him,” Ramona said. “About her trying to learn from him?”

I nodded.

“Things have a way of working out,” Julian said. “We got you instead.”

Yeah, things worked out, I thought. And here I am. Working with a guy who tried to set up the wrong target. The absolutely worst target in the world.

No wonder he’s so careful now.

____________________

About a month later, the next score finally came together. It was time to get back to work.

The mark was a smooth, suit-with-no-socks kind of guy who lived up in Monterey, apparently in some ridiculous house perched right on the ocean. He’d been coming down to L.A. every week on some sort of Hollywood-related business. He liked expensive wine, and he really liked women who were beautiful in unique, quirky ways. Which is where Lucy came in. She was playing the bait, just like Gunnar had told me.

So on a clear day in April, Julian got his car out of the garage and we drove all the way up the coast to Monterey. Six hours up the Pacific Coast Highway. We stayed overnight in a little hotel, and then the next day it was time to take down Mr. Moon Face. That was our pet name for him.

Julian, Ramona, and Lucy went to his house for dinner that evening. Mr. Moon Face fancied himself quite the gourmet, so he made some kind of poached sea bass or some damned thing and they drained a couple bottles of wine Julian had brought up with him. While the man was distracted, Julian took out a little razor blade and sliced a thin line through the electric foil that ran around the perimeter of one of the man’s seaside windows. All of the windows were foiled like this, of course, but now when the man activated his security system, the one window would show a disconnection in the closed circuit. When he looked at the window and found nothing wrong, he’d have to call the security company to get it fixed. Of course, if he was on his way out for a night on the town and a possible shot at sleeping with the young Lucy, the little chink in his security armor would get put aside until the next day.

When they finally left the house, it was time for Gunnar and me to do our thing. The house was close to the road and to some other ridiculous houses hanging on the cliff, so we only had one good way in. We took the car Gunnar had rented in town and parked down by the shore, at one of the observation points. We climbed down the rocks and made our way across the beachfront, finally climbing our way back up to the house. It was a longer climb than either of us had anticipated, and the weather was turning bad fast. The wind picked up. The waves below us were getting higher. It was dark and hard to see exactly where we were going.

The Pacific Ocean, right below me as I struggled my way up those wet rocks. One false step, I thought. That’s all it would take. Not the way I wanted to die today. Then in that very next moment I lost my footing and I felt myself starting to fall. I could already feel the cold water against my skin. The waves turning me over and dragging me to the bottom. How quiet it must be down there, compared to this violent roar on the surface.

Then Gunnar reached out a hand and grabbed me by the belt. He saved my mortal life right there. When I was back on the rocks, I shook it off and we kept climbing, until we finally got to the house.

Gunnar located the window with the deactivated foil, put a wad of modeling clay on the glass, and then started cutting a hole, just large enough for us to climb through. We obviously weren’t going for a clean in-and-out this time. There’s no way you can cover your tracks when you cut a big hole in a window, after all. Julian was confident we wouldn’t need it this time. Not with Mr. Moon Face. So we made the forced entry, and within two minutes we were standing inside the house. There was no infrared motion detector to worry about this time, so we were clear. Julian, Ramona, and Lucy would be sure to keep Mr. Moon Face out for another couple of hours, at the very least.

We walked in through the kitchen, past the remains of their fancy dinner. A half-dozen wine bottles sat empty on the table. We found the man’s office, where the safe stood tall and proud in the corner. No hidden wall safes for this guy.

I eliminated the tryouts first, then got to work.

Find the contact area, park the wheels, spin and count. Three wheels, check.

Back to 0. Find the area again, feel for the short contact.

3. 6. 9. 12. 15.

I started getting nervous around 30. Were all three numbers high on the dial? Most people don’t do it this way.

45, 48, 51.

Damn. Damn.

72, 75, 78.

I was starting to sweat.

93, 96, 99.

Nothing.

I stopped and shook out my hands.

“What’s the problem?” Gunnar said.

I shook my head. No problem, man. Everything’s cool.

I could hear the waves crashing on the rocks outside. I could smell the salt in the air. I started again.

This time, when I got to 15, I thought I was getting close to something, but the difference felt so faint to me. It was like tuning in a radio station from a thousand miles away.

I shook out my hands again. I tried to clear my mind. I didn’t even bother asking myself what the problem was, because at that point I knew.

I hadn’t been practicing enough. Simple as that. I hadn’t been spinning the dial enough on the safe in Julian’s house. I hadn’t been spinning on my portable lock. I just hadn’t been doing it. I had just assumed I could pick it back up again, any time I wanted.

So I had to spend the next full hour finding my touch again, while Gunnar paced back and forth and tried very hard not to strangle me. I finally narrowed the numbers down, and even then I wasn’t totally sure about them. My face was dripping with sweat now.

I’ll never take this for granted again, I promised myself. Just get this thing open and I promise I’ll practice every single day.