Steve Hamilton - The Lock Artist

I nodded. Yeah, sure.

“All righty then. I guess we’re good for today, eh?”

Couldn’t be better, I thought. I shook his hand and left the probation office. Got on my bike and drove down to Detroit for another day of safecracking school.

I kept working at it. I spent so many hours in the back of that store, it started to feel like home to me. One day, the Ghost left me alone for a few hours. He said he had to go run some errands, and that if anybody came into the store, I should just stay in the back until they gave up and left.

A couple of hours passed, just me and the safes. Until I looked up and saw a man standing there, watching me. He was tall. He had dark hair that looked slicked back against his head, like he had spent a fair amount of time that morning getting it just right. He was wearing a blue suit, with a white shirt and a wide red tie.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. Even though I was sure I had shown no sign of being scared.

“I’m looking for the owner. Is he around?”

I shook my head.

“What’cha got here, anyway? A bunch of safes?”

I took my hand off the dial. I sat up straight in my chair.

“These are some beauties.”

He ran his hand down one of the smooth metal sides.

“You sell these? You should have them out front.”

I looked around. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. Something about this man, the way he had walked all the way back here. Through the darkness, down the hallway… it wasn’t the kind of thing most people would do.

“My name’s Harrington Banks,” he said. “Most people call me Harry.”

He stuck out his right hand. I hesitated for one beat and then shook it.

“You don’t mind me being back here, do you? I figured it was part of the store.”

I kept looking up at him. He was already tall enough without me being way down here in my rolling chair.

“You’re not in charge here, right?”

I shook my head.

“Of course not. You’re way too young.”

He slapped his hand on top of the safe I was sitting next to.

“Well,” he said. “Maybe I should let you get back to, uh…”

There was a whole world in the space between the words, as he looked from one safe to the next.

“Back to work here, huh?”

He backed away one step.

“I’ll stop by again. Maybe I’ll catch the owner next time. Your name was…”

I didn’t move.

He raised his right hand, as if to grab my name from the air. “I’ll get that next time, too. Right? Until then…”

He stood there nodding to himself for a while. Then finally turned to leave.

“See you later. Have a good day.”

Then he left. I would have let the Ghost know about the visit, but I swear, I completely forgot about it because of the other strange thing that happened that same afternoon. The Ghost was still gone, and I was back in my chair, feeling especially frustrated because I still wasn’t getting anywhere. That’s when I heard the beeping noise.

I sat up and looked around. It was just loud enough to hear, a constant string of beeps. I tried to ignore it and go back to the safe, but the sound kept distracting me. I got up and looked around the backyard, heard it getting a little louder when I went down the hallway, louder yet when I got into the back room. There were only about seven thousand items in the room, so I had to narrow it down gradually, until I came to a shoebox on the desk. When I opened it, the beeping doubled in volume.

Now, you have to remember, this was 1999. Not every single damned person in the world had a cell phone yet. Some people still had pagers. I don’t think I’d ever actually held one, until I picked up that pager from the shoebox. It was still beeping away like crazy. There was a little screen on top, with ten bright little red numbers. A phone number, I assumed.

Before I could even think about what to do with it, the pager stopped beeping. I put it back in the box with the others. There were five in total. All of them black, but each with a piece of tape on it, in different colors. Red, white, yellow, blue, green.

The Ghost finally came back about an hour later. I picked up the box and showed him the pager that had gone off. It was the one with the red tape on it. He grabbed it from me and read the number. I didn’t think it would have been possible for him to get any paler than he already was, but it happened. He ran over to the phone and called the number, waving me away when he saw me watching him. I went back to the safes.

When he came back out a few minutes later, the Ghost looked like he had seen a ghost. “I’ve got company coming over,” he said. “So you’d better get the hell out of here.”

I got on the bike and started for home. It felt strange to be out of there in the middle of the day. I drove by Amelia’s house. Just because. The grass looked so long now you could have made hay out of it. Which I’m sure the Lake Sherwood neighbors were real thrilled about.

There was another car in the driveway today. A red BMW. It looked vaguely familiar to me. I could see somebody sitting in the driver’s seat. I sat there and watched for a while, waiting for something to happen. Finally, the driver got out of the car. It was Zeke. Good old Zeke.

He was holding something as he walked to the door. A red rose? Yes. A single red rose. He went to the door and left it on the mat. He reached into his back pocket and took out a piece of paper and put it down next to the rose. A heartfelt letter, no doubt. Maybe an overwrought love poem.

He didn’t knock on the door. Meaning he must have known that Amelia was gone. Hell, maybe he made this same trip every day now. Maybe this was a ritual for him.

As he came back to the car, he saw me sitting on my motorcycle. I flipped my visor down and took off. I didn’t bother to see if he was following me.

Then when I was close to home-when I was about to make that last turn onto Main Street-that’s when I saw the flash of red in my rearview mirrors. I turned around and saw the BMW convertible, closing fast.

It was him.

I made the turn and took off down Main Street. If you know anything about motorcycles, you know that even a midsized bike will out-accelerate anything on four wheels. I left him far behind me, pulled off and waited a while, then looped back into town.

After so many empty days… with no sight of Amelia. No luck with the safes. So much time frustrated and alone, with nothing to show for it except this. I avoided getting run over by Amelia’s ex-boyfriend. That’s it.

I didn’t think he’d be waiting for me. I mean, really. But as I took the turn off Commerce Road, there was his car, parked at the gas station. He came out in a blur and surprised me. I gunned it down Main Street again, but it’s not like it was an open road or anything. One little bobble and I would have ended up on somebody’s hood or plastered all over the sidewalk.

He was right behind me as both vehicles came to the railroad bridge. I slowed down just enough to avoid the embankment. Zeke slowed down just enough to avoid death, but not enough to avoid the sickening sound of the entire left side of his car being scraped away on the concrete. Sparks flew and the car came wobbling out of the turn, air hissing out of his left front tire.

I paused for one brief moment, watching the car finally stop a few yards away from the liquor store. I pulled the bike into the parking lot and sat there, waiting for whatever was going to happen next.

The driver’s side door opened. Zeke came out, looking unsteady on his feet. There was a thin line of blood running down the left side of his face. When he saw me sitting there on the bike, he found his legs and he came at me like a bullet. I hopped off the bike, threw off my helmet, and met him somewhere in the middle, ducking under his wild swing and then waiting for him to try a few more. He finally clipped me over the eye, but that was good, it was beautiful, because I wanted him to hit me. After everything that had happened, I wanted to bleed a little bit and to mix my blood with his.