Dead Boys (7 page)

“Is that right?” I reply.

“It is,” he snaps.

“Can you do this?” I ask, flashing the Vulcan salute from
Star Trek
.

He laughs and says, “Make it so.” Picking up the remote, he turns on the stereo. Strange music fills the apartment, layer upon layer of squealing guitars over a flat
chunk chunk
drumbeat. It sounds like a factory coming apart in a hurricane. Belushi’s fist keeps time, pounding against his knee. There’s a poster on the wall of the pope marching with Nazis.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Belushi says, gesturing at the TV and guitars and everything, “but I need this money as much as you.”

“I understand,” I reply, and I guess I do. There’s more than one kind of miserable.

“I’m going to miss you when this is over,” he says.

This blindsides me, but I nod and say, “And I’ll miss you.”

I
CARRY MARIA
’s coffee in to her, set the cup on the dresser while she’s getting ready for work. She smiles at me in the mirror when I crouch beside her and rest my chin on her shoulder. I run my hands up under her nightgown and cup her breasts. Turning my face to her neck, I tongue the beauty mark there and inhale deeply. I need to memorize it all in case something goes wrong.

“You have dark circles,” she says. “Still not sleeping?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

The big day is finally here. I could be rich by nightfall, or dead. What a wide-open feeling. I can’t put my finger on it.

Sam is sitting on the living room floor in front of the TV, a bowl of cereal in his lap. His eyes are locked onto the screen, where a cartoon spaceship goes down in flames.

“Invader X neutralized,” he declares, imitating the voice of some hero in a visored helmet.

I remember the joy of losing myself like that as a child. What a gift it seems now. I resist the urge to pick him up, to intrude, and instead sit on the couch and love him from afar.

The three of us leave the bungalow together, and I walk Maria and Sam to the Sentra. She’ll drop him off at kindergarten on her way to school. I kiss them both and wait to make sure the car starts, because the battery hasn’t been holding a charge lately. It’s hard to let them go this morning. Tears sting my eyes as the car crests the hill in front of our complex and pops out of the shadows and into the ravenous sunlight.

T
HE PLAN IS
to meet at three o’clock in the parking lot of a minimall a few blocks from the bank. Until then it’s business as usual. The Guatemalans are already up on their ladders when I arrive at the house in Los Feliz. El Jefe steps out of his BMW and watches me unload my truck. He’s smoking a cigar and drinking from a quart carton of orange juice.

I’m painting up under the eaves this morning, which is nice because it keeps me out of reach of the sun, but hell because of the spiders. If this was my job, I’d have sprayed the webs down with a garden hose yesterday and let the wall dry overnight, but El Jefe’s not much for prep, so I use a brush to sweep the webs away. They’re as thick as cotton in places, and studded with dried-out flies that jump and crackle. The webs wrap around me when they fall, cling to my face with ghostly tautness, and slither into my lungs on the current of my breath. And the monsters that spun them! Fat black spiders drop like poison rain. I swat them away when they scrabble over my arms, my neck, but it’s too much. I have to take a break, sit on the lawn with my head between my knees.

After lunch I begin to work myself up to sticking my finger down my throat. That’s how I’ll get away, by vomiting and telling El Jefe I’m too sick to keep going, maybe blame it on a spider bite. I’m prying open a new can of paint when my phone rings. It’s Maria. There’s worry in her voice. Sam has fallen at kindergarten and may have broken his leg. She can’t leave school right now and wonders if I can pick him up and drive him to the hospital. No problem, I say. Relax. Everything’ll be okay.

“Jefe!” I yell, approaching his car at a run. “I’ve got to go. It’s an emergency.”

He rolls down the window. Chilled air breaks over me like a wave. “I’m not paying you for today, then,” he says. “You have to work the whole day to get paid.”

“Do Whatever you want. I’ll pick my shit up later.”

It’s not until I’m driving away that I think to look at my watch. Quarter after one. I’m supposed to have a gun in my hand and a bulletproof soul in less than two hours.

S
AM IS LYING
on his back on a cot in the school nurse’s office. He stares at the ceiling, afraid to move, his face pale and sweaty.

“I’m hurt,” he says, “but not bleeding.”

He whimpers when I scoop him up, cries for his shoes, which the nurse has removed. She gives them to him, and he twines his fingers through the laces, clutching them tightly. I shield his eyes from the sun as I carry him across the parking lot. A bell rings behind us, doors open with a
whoosh,
and hordes of screaming children run for the playground.

He lies across the seat of the truck. The top of his head rests against my thigh. He looks up at me as I drive, his bottom lip held between his teeth. I know he’s in pain, but he doesn’t complain once, though every block seems to have a pothole that makes the truck shake like an unwatered drunk.

“Want to play music?” I ask. He’s not usually allowed, but I need to see him smile. I turn on the radio and say, “Go ahead.”

He reaches out tentatively, as if this might be a trick, and pushes one of the buttons, changing stations. When no scolding follows, he sets to work in earnest. We listen to snatches of some rapper, the Eagles, news, a Mexican station, and back again, and he laughs at the cacophony he’s creating. I feel awful for ever depriving him of this pleasure, for ever slapping his hand and shouting,
Knock it off
.

Meanwhile my partners are waiting, and the ticking of my watch grows louder with each passing second. If I don’t show up, they’ll call the job off, but I know Moriarty and his completion principle. He’ll just plan another, and that’s unacceptable. I want this to be over now. I want to be a citizen again. I want to spend my fucking money.

I lay my hand on Sam’s chest. His heart is beating as fast as mine.

“I’ll teach you a song,” I say.
“Oh, the monkey wrapped his tail around the flagpole . . .”

W
HEN THEY WHEEL
Sam off for his X-rays, I call Maria at school. Her phone is off, so I try the office. The secretary puts me on hold, then comes back on to ask if I’d like to leave a message, because Mrs. Blackburn is unavailable at the moment.

“This is her husband. Tell her I’ve got our son here at Kaiser in Hollywood.”

“Let me write it down,” she says. “You’re her husband?”

I don’t have time for this, so I hang up on her and call Moriarty. No answer, but I decide not to leave a message. You never know who’s listening. Then I try the school again. The same woman answers, and I slam the receiver down.

I’m clenching my jaw so tight, my teeth hurt. Any minute something inside me is going to burst. I lean against the wall, close my eyes, and breathe deeply, which only makes me feel worse, because the air in the corridor reeks of shit and medicine. There’s a TV on somewhere. A woman on it asks, “Do you love me?” and a man answers, “I don’t know right now.” “Do you love me?” the woman screams. I begin to pace, ten steps up the hall and ten steps back. The world narrows into a strip of snot-green linoleum over which I have complete control. It should always be this easy.

Suddenly Maria arrives, flushed and sweaty-palmed. Another teacher took over her class, allowing her to leave school early. She’d left her phone in her desk. The doctor informs us that Sam has a hairline fracture of the tibia. Nothing serious, but he’ll need a cast. It’s two-thirty. I can still make my rendezvous with Moriarty and Belushi if I go now.

“Hey, I left my stuff at the site,” I tell Maria. “I should probably pick it up before they quit for the day.”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“You’ll be fine here by yourself?”

“See you at home.”

I kiss her on the cheek and force myself to walk until I’m out of her sight.

B
OOM
!
HERE WE
go, rolling in out of the heat and noise and destroying the silky air-conditioned calm of the bank. Today it’s Mexican wrestling masks and happy-face T-shirts, party clothes to commemorate our final heist. “Get down,” I yell, “down on the floor,” showing my gun. There are one, two, three customers, and they drop like trapdoors have opened beneath them. Moriarty beelines for the security guard, who meekly holds out his hands to be cuffed. One, two, three customers, all secure. I wonder if the plants standing in the corners are real or made of plastic. Something tickles my neck. I reach up and snag it, a long black hair, Maria’s. I raise it to my lips as Moriarty hurdles the counter and makes his way down the line of tellers. No trouble there. They’ve been trained not to resist. Just push the silent alarm and back off. Well, supposedly silent. The signal zips up my spine like a thimble on a washboard, and all of my pores are screaming. One, two, three, old lady, fat man, vato. Each second is disconnected from the one that came before it, so that they bounce around like pearls cut loose from a necklace. Moriarty’s finished. He heads for the door, the bag slung over his shoulder. I follow him out to the car, dive inside, and Belushi slams his hand against the steering wheel and screams,
“Yes!”
He swings out into traffic and we’re gobbled up into the steaming maw of the city, where we disappear for good.

I
F IT’S TRUE
that the same God will judge both El Jefe and me, I want this added to the record: In the end, I didn’t lie to my wife. When she wondered about the money, I came clean. I hadn’t planned to, but I did.

“Where did you get it?” she asked.

“I robbed a bank. Lots of banks.”

She stiffened in my arms — we were in bed at the time — then rolled over to watch my face.

“Will they catch you?”

“No.”

It took the rest of the night to work through it. Maria felt I’d put the family’s future in jeopardy and wanted answers to a lot of questions I hadn’t dared ask myself before for fear that the answers would have pulled me up short, destroying the ruthless momentum that had enabled me to do what had to be done. I explained as best I could while she waffled between tears and outrage. Dawn found us silent and drained at the kitchen table, sharing a pot of coffee. The walls of the bungalow ticked and popped in the gathering heat, and the fresh light of the new day stumbled over the cracks in the plaster left by the last earthquake. Her decision was conveyed by a simple gesture. She reached across the table and took my hands into hers: We would go on.

I’
M SITTING ON
the couch, using a Magic Marker to draw a spaceman on Sam’s cast. He keeps leaning forward to monitor my efforts, and isn’t pleased with how it’s turning out.

“No, Papi, his body’s not right.”

The phone rings, and Maria picks it up in the kitchen. Another real estate agent. We’re driving up to Big Bear on Saturday to look at houses. Only a week has passed since the robbery, and already things are changing. So many options, so many decisions. To tell you the truth, it leaves me a little dizzy. I’m like a dog that’s finally managed to jump the fence and, rather than running like hell, sits in front of the gate, waiting for his master to let him back in.

Sam asks me to give him the pen so that he can finish the spaceman himself. I leave him to his work and walk into the kitchen, where Maria is making notes on a legal pad, the phone’s receiver pressed to her ear with her shoulder. I’m too big for the bungalow tonight. If I move too quickly, I’ll break something.

“I’m going out,” I whisper, motioning to the door.

Maria frowns and holds up her hand to indicate that I should wait for her to finish. When I come out of the bedroom after putting on a clean shirt, she’s still on the phone, so I just wave and go. Sam is busy with his drawing. He doesn’t hear me when I say good-bye.

I stop in at the Smog Cutter. There’s a country song playing on the karaoke machine, and old Fred is singing. I grab a stool and settle in to see if Moriarty will show up for his regular Thursday-night session at the pool table. We haven’t seen each other since the robbery, since Belushi presented us with our account numbers and the partnership was dissolved. For security reasons we agreed to go our separate ways from that moment on, but I just want to say hey and find out how he’s doing.

Because I can, I buy a round for the house, and I’m everybody’s best friend for five minutes. It makes me laugh to see how easy it is, and how quickly it fades.

Nine comes and goes, then ten, and still no Moriarty. He must have changed his routine. Hell, he may already be in Idaho. And Belushi’s not home either, or at least he doesn’t answer when I push the button for his apartment on the intercom downstairs. Well, fuck it, then. “Here’s to us, fellas,” I say, raising a pint of bourbon in the parking lot of a liquor store. The only good thing about the moment is that I’m pretty sure that as long as I live I’ll never feel this lonely again.

The shotgun Moriarty loaned me is locked in the toolbox in the bed of my truck, where I put it when Maria told me to get it out of the house that night. I’ve been meaning to dispose of it, and this seems as good a time as any.

I drive up to Lake Hollywood. The lights from the mansions in the hills circling the reservoir are reflected in its inky blackness. I press my face against the chain-link fence, then turn to gaze up at the stilt house that caught my attention on my earlier visit. Someone inside is playing a piano. Another belt of bourbon, and I swing the shotgun up and fire twice into the air. The blasts roll across the reservoir and back.

I toss the shotgun over the fence, where it plops into the water and sinks from sight. The piano is silent, and a shadowy figure crouches on the deck of the house, watching me. I stare up at him and tip the bottle again, hoping to spook him even more, but when I slink away, it’s with darkened headlights, so that he can’t make out my license plates.