The Lock Artist (32 page)

She still had the pencil in her hand. She twirled it in her fingers like a miniature baton.

“Five years ago exactly, at one o’clock in the afternoon. Give or take a few minutes. I was in school when it happened.”

She got up and went over to her dresser. She went through a stack of papers and drawings and pulled out a portfolio. I wasn’t about to tell her so, but this was the same portfolio I had looked through the night we had all broken into this house. It was the first time I had seen her drawings, the first time I had seen her face. I remembered there were some other drawings in there, too. Of an older woman. These were the same drawings I was about to see again.

“This was her,” Amelia said, putting each drawing, one by one, onto the bed. Her mother sitting in a chair. Then outside, on a bench. “I was twelve years old then. She was in this institution they sent her to for a while. I got to go visit her.”

I could see it now, in the drawings. The manicured lawn, the path running a straight line, in front of the bench. Everything in its place. These were some pretty damned excellent drawings if they were really done by a twelve-year-old.

“I was so happy, because I knew she’d be coming home soon. Three months later . . .”

She closed her eyes.

“Three months later, she sealed up the garage and started the car. By the time I got home from school, she was dead. I wasn’t the one who found her. I mean, my brother found her. He came home first and she was. I mean, she was there in the car. In the garage. This was at our old house. Before we moved here. Anyway, there was no note. No nothing. Just . . . checkout time.”

She started putting the drawings back into the folder. She didn’t look at me.

“It wasn’t the first time she tried something like that. Did you know that women are twice as likely as men to try to commit suicide? But most of the time they don’t actually do it. Men are four times more likely to actually kill themselves.”

She was talking a little too fast now. Like she didn’t want there to be any silence again.

“I looked that up last night, because I wanted to try to understand what happened to you. I mean, I know the general story. I know they called you the Miracle Boy.”

I saw one single tear on her face.

“It’s been five years for me,” she said. “For you, it’s like what, nine years? In all that time, you never tried to . . .”

She wiped the tear from her cheek, finally turned and faced me.

“I mean, is this it? Are you seriously never going to talk to me? Ever?”

I closed my eyes. Right there, at that moment, in Amelia’s bedroom . . . I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, and I told myself that this was what I had been waiting for. I had never had such a good reason to try before. All I had to do was just open up and let go of the silence. Just like those doctors had said, years ago. It was as true on this day as it had been then. There was no physical reason why I couldn’t speak. So all I had to do was . . .

The seconds passed. A minute.

“Some men came and took my father away,” she finally said. “About an hour ago. I don’t know where they were going. I don’t even know if they’re going to bring him back. Seriously . . . I mean, I thought it might be him when I heard you in the driveway.”

I reached out to touch her. She turned away from me.

“I am so freaked out right now, Michael. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Do you have any idea how much trouble my father is in these days? What if they—”

She looked up.

“God, is that him now?”

She went to the window and looked down at the driveway. When I stepped behind her, I saw the long black car, then the three men all getting out at the same time. One from the driver’s door. Two men from the backseat. Then finally, a few seconds later, another man. Mr. Marsh. He blinked in the bright sunlight and straightened his shirt. His face was bright red.

“Oh, fuck.” She turned and ran out of the room.

I followed her. Down the steps. Through the front door. She passed right by her father and went for the driver of the car. She took a wild swing at him.

“I’m calling the police, you fucking goons!”

Mr. Marsh tried to grab her from behind while the driver fended off her blows with a big stupid grin on his face. He was wearing a fishing hat of all things, and Amelia finally managed to knock it off his head. The grin disappeared, and he raised his open right hand as if to give her a good slap. That’s when I caught up and threw myself right into the middle of it.

One of the other men grabbed me by the collar. He was shorter than the other two men. He was ugly and his eyes looked half shut, and as he pulled my shirt tight around my neck, he put his face right up into mine.

“Do you have a death wish, son?” he said. “Or are you just incredibly stupid?”

“Let him go,” Mr. Marsh said.

“I asked you a question,” he said to me.

The third man was still on the other side of the car. He was tall, and he had a mustache that was too big for his face.

“Let go of the kid,” he said, “so we can get the hell out of here.”

The man with the sleepy eyes tightened his grip one more notch, enough to choke me. Then he pushed me away.

The driver picked up his fishing hat, tipped it to us, and got in behind the wheel. The other two men got in back, and as the doors closed we could hear them already arguing. The car shot backward onto the street, then roared off. As it did, I got one more glance at the man in the backseat. Those sleepy eyes on the other side of that window, staring back at me.

Not for the last time.

The three of us kept standing there in the driveway. Amelia was crying now. Not wailing away, just softly crying in almost total silence. She wiped her face off. She went to her father and stood before him. He reached out to her, just as I had tried to do. She knocked his hand away.

“You promised me,” she said. “You promised me you wouldn’t get into this kind of shit again.”

Before he could even try to answer, she turned and went back into the house, slamming the door behind her.

Mr. Marsh let out a long breath. He paced back and forth on the driveway a few times. Slowly, like a much older man.

“Look,” he finally said to me. “I know we started to talk about this the other day, but I need you to help me. Help
us
. Me and Amelia. Will you help us out? Please?”

I rubbed my neck, where the fabric had left a raw crease in my skin.

“I owe these people a lot of money, okay? I just . . . If you can just help me out here this one time . . .”

He reached into his pocket and took out a small slip of paper.

“I need you to go see somebody. Today. Nothing bad will happen, I promise. Just go see this man, okay? He’ll be expecting you. This is his address. It’s in Detroit.”

I took the paper. I looked at the address.

“You’ll know him when you see him,” he said. “They call him the Ghost.”

He wasn’t more than forty miles away, this man who would change my life. I didn’t want to get on the expressway with my motorcycle yet, so I worked my way down the secondary streets to Grand River, then took that straight into the heart of the city. From block to block, I could see every social class. The landscaping thinning out, the buildings going from glass and steel to gray cinder blocks and iron bars.

There were lots of stoplights. Lots of opportunities for me to change my mind. The lights kept turning green and I kept going forward. When I hit Detroit, I started to look at the street numbers. A couple more blocks and I knew I was close. I waited for a break in traffic, then swung the bike around to the other side of the street. The whole block reeked of desperation and wasted second chances. It was the west side of Detroit, just inside the border.

I counted down the addresses. There was a dry cleaners, then a hair salon, then a store that appeared to sell both discount clothing and music and small appliances out of an impossibly small space. Then an empty storefront. It was hard to tell exactly where my target was, because not all the buildings had numbers above the door. I finally narrowed it down to a business called West Side Recovery. It was twice as wide as most of the other businesses, with windows that could have used a good cleaning a decade ago. There was a
CLOSED
sign hanging inside the glass door.

I rechecked the address. I was sure this was it. I knocked on the door.
Nobody answered. I knocked one more time, was about to turn and leave when the door finally opened. The man who stuck his head out was about sixty years old, maybe sixty-five. He was wearing a sweater vest, and he had reading glasses hanging from his neck. He had thin, white hair and a complexion so pale it looked like five minutes of direct sunlight would kill him. He blinked a few times as he gave me the once-over.

“Am I supposed to be expecting you?”

I handed him the piece of paper Mr. Marsh had given me, with his address on it. He slipped his reading glasses on and gave it a look.

“Is that your bike I heard?”

I turned back to where it was parked, halfway down the block.

“So apparently you wish to have it stolen today? Is that your plan?”

I shook my head.

“Bring it over here, genius. You can pull it inside here.”

I went back and got the bike and pushed it down the sidewalk to where he stood, holding the door open. It was so dark inside the store, it was like rolling the motorcycle into a cave.

He closed the door behind us and kicked something aside. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, but when they did I saw a huge collection of scrap metal, old furniture, cribs and high chairs, a couple of refrigerators standing side by side. Basically it looked like a good portion of the city dump had been transferred here.

“This way,” he said. I kickstanded the bike and followed him back through the store. He traced his way down a mazelike path through the junk to another door, through which I could see the flickering blue light of a television set. There was a faint haze of dust in the air that I could almost taste.

“I’m closed on Mondays,” he said. “Reason the lights are off. I’d offer you a beer, but I’m fresh out.” There was a better selection of junk in this second room. Besides the television, there were probably a few hundred items stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves. A washboard, an iron, some old green bottles. Stuff like that. A few shelves on one wall were bulging with books. This whole place had so much more junk than the junk store back in Milford. I wondered why all the better items seemed to be hidden away here in the back room. But more than that, I wondered why I was sent here.

“They said you don’t talk much.” He was standing next to a desk that didn’t have one free square inch on it. There were a dozen lamps on it, along with cigar boxes and trophies and a three-foot-high Statue of Liberty. The man slid the statue in just far enough to give himself a surface to lean on.

“They call me the Ghost,” he said.

Yes, I thought. That makes sense. Just look at you.

“That’s the only thing you can ever call me. Are we understood? To you, I’m the Ghost. Or Mr. G. Nothing else.”

The dust and mildew were starting to get to me. That plus the fact I still had no idea what the hell was going on here, or what was expected of me.

“You really don’t talk. They weren’t kidding.”

I was thinking maybe it was time to ask the Ghost for some paper so I could write out a few questions, but he was ready to move on.

“This way. I’ve got something you might like to see.”

He pushed open another door. I followed him down a short hallway, squeezing my way past several bicycles until we came to yet another door.

When he opened it, we were outside. Or rather half outside. There was a makeshift awning above us, long strips of green plastic with gaps here and there that let the sun in. It ran all the way to the back fence, which was overrun with thick sumac and poison ivy.

“Here we go.” He pushed through a collection of old lawn mowers, past a rusted-out barbecue grill. He picked up an iron gate, something that looked like it came from a haunted mansion somewhere, and moved it aside. He was surprisingly strong for a pale old man who looked like a retired English professor.

He stepped aside and ushered me into this small clearing within the greater chaos. There, arranged in a perfect circle, were eight safes of various heights, their combination dials facing the center. It was like a Stonehenge of safes.

“Not bad, eh?” He walked the circle, touching each safe one by one. “Every major brand. American, Diebold, Chicago, Mosler, Schwab, Victor. This one here’s forty years old. That one over there is new, hardly ever been used. What do you think?”

I did a slow 360, looking at all of the safes.

“Take your pick,” he said.

What, he wanted me to pick out a safe? So I could take it home, strapped on my back while I rode my motorcycle?

He put his reading glasses on again. He tilted his head so he could peer over the lenses at me. “Come on, let’s see you do your thing.”

My thing, he says. He wants me to do my thing. This man actually wanted me to open one of these safes.