Caught Stealing - Charlie Huston [86]
—Where’s the alarm pad?
The boss nods.
—Right next to the office door in a locked case.
—Where’s the key?
—On the ring in my pocket. It’s the small silver round one.
Ed slips his hand in the boss’s pocket and pulls out the keys.
—How do we activate the alarm?
—Eight-four-five-one. Then press “cycle.” You have thirty seconds to leave and lock the door with the biggest key on the ring before the alarm goes off.
Ed walks very close to him.
—Tell me again.
—Eight-four-five-one. Cycle. Thirty seconds.
The boss tries to cower away from Ed, but Ed slips an arm around his shoulders and pulls him close.
—I’ll kill you both. I’ll come back from the dead and kill you both.
—Eight-four-five-one cycle thirty.
Ed backs out of the room and I close the door and lock it. He helps me carry the money to the elevator. We go down, get Paris, activate the alarm, lock the door behind us, throw the money in the trunk, get in the Caddie and drive away. Ed pulls the bandanna from his face and looks at me.
—See, we got it covered.
We’re in the apartment they grew up in.
—Roman got the Chink, and your boss got Bert, and Russ got Ernie. So who got Russ?
Their mother died some years back, never having reconciled with her hoodlum sons. A cousin got the lease and the brothers arranged for the apartment to be maintained as a hideout. Ed told me about it as we drove out here to Queens. Paris listened and added nothing of his own. I watch Bud lap milk from a little blue bowl on the linoleum kitchen floor.
Paris is sitting at the Formica-topped kitchen table, surrounded by the cash, tapping out numbers on a calculator and scribbling them down in a yellow legal pad. Ed and I sit on a beat-up couch with plastic covers. He’s drinking a Heineken. I’m drinking ginger ale.
—I got Russ.
Paris looks up from his figures and Ed nods his head.
—No shit?
—No shit.
—What’d you get ’im with?
—A baseball bat.
—Fuck.
I’m squeezing little dents into my soda can, then popping them out. Pop, pop, pop, pop.
—Well, Russ was a OK cat, but I guess he kind of screwed us all. Damn, a baseball bat?
—Uh-huh.
—I’m tellin’ you, Hank, watchin’ you, it’s like watchin’ a egg get all hard-boiled. No shit.
Paris clears his throat and Ed looks over at him.
—Well?
—Four million five hundred twenty-eight thousand.
—No shit?
—Yep.
—How ’bout that? Only twenty-two K short. Let’s hear it for Russ keeping his fingers out of the till.
I take a swig of my soda.
—Except for trying to rob it all.
—Well, yeah, but the man wasn’t exactly made of steel, ya know?
—I know.
—Great thief, though. Great fucking thief.
He and Paris raise their beers and drink a toast. My stomach churns as I think about the pulpy dent I put in the side of Russ’s head. I sip more ginger ale and look out the tiny slit window, which lets no light into the basement apartment. I get up off the couch.
—I need to use the can.
Ed has gone over to the fridge for another beer.
—Down the hall on the right. Hold the lever down for a second or it won’t flush all the way.
I put my soda can on the coffee table, grab my bag and walk down the shag-carpeted hallway.
—Don’t take forever. I want to make that call.
The walls of the hallway are lined with photographs, each one marking the passage of another year. The first is of a handsome young couple with their newborn, a chubby little Paris. The next one is the same: the couple is on the plastic-covered couch, Paris between them getting bigger. Ed arrives in the third photo and sits in his big brother’s little lap. They grow, Paris a shy beanpole and Ed, small and intense, always wearing the outfit his brother wore a few photos back. At the tenth picture, the father disappears. There are six more. In each the boys edge toward one end of the couch and their mother toward the other, until in the final picture