Tempted by Trouble (3 page)

I went back inside the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and ignored their moans.

Before every job we all stayed in the same space, remained interdigitated until the money had been divided. That was part of the ritual. Maybe it kept us from having a snitch. Or fostered camaraderie, like soldiers before a big mission. Whatever the reason, it kept us safe. Maybe it made us more like family than thieves. We’d sat up and planned and ate and watched DVDs. We always watched the same DVDs.
Snatch. Reservoir Dogs. Two Hands. Boogie Nights. Raising Arizona. Pulp Fiction. Heat. Dog Day Afternoon. Inside Man. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.
Everything we watched kept us attached to the realities of a grubby, violent, and dangerous world. I took a deep breath. The last of the panic attack, the last of the stress, hadn’t abated, and the claws of anxiety were raking their fingernails up and down my spine in a way that let me know that it would return. I rubbed the last of the dampness away from my eyes.

When I stepped out of the bathroom, Rick was sitting up, yawning and rubbing his eyes. He looked like JFK Jr. with blond hair. His hair was naturally black, but he bought dye and colored his mane for each job. It was red for the last job. And now with the blond hair, he thought he looked like a California-born movie star and all he needed was Angelina Jolie at his side. He frowned and tsked as he used his thumb to motion at the hallelujahs coming from the bedroom, then he shook his head.

I shrugged and moved on toward the kitchen. “Second night in a row. All night long.”

“Sammy must be on Viagra, Enzyte, a handful of L-arginine, and two cans of Red Bull.”

“Probably.”

Rick turned the television to CNN. Northside United Methodist Church had been robbed. Someone had stolen the safe and gotten away with one hundred grand.

Rick whistled, shook his head, and said, “Geesh.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s an inside job.”

“Has to be.”

Rick moved from the floor to the sofa, where I had slept, and pulled the coffee table closer. He took his gun out, a .38, then opened a kit and started cleaning his weapon. I went into the kitchen and looked over my diagrams, the streets of L.A., the primary getaway route highlighted in yellow. I took my executive suit out of the closet, pulled on my slacks, did the same with a fresh Hanes undershirt, then pulled on a starched and crisp white oxford shirt. After I put my cuff links on, I took a deep breath and leaned against the counter and listened to the broadcast on CNN. Newscasters used faux concern to talk about the high unemployment rate, but the words that stuck with me were the fact that 40 percent of the unemployed had been out of work for over two years.

I asked Rick, “Did you ever tell me how you ended up in the bank withdrawal business?”

“Thought I already bored you with that long story. I know I bored Sammy with it a dozen times.”

“Not that I remember. I’m not one to ask a lot of personal questions. But I’ll tell you this, and this you already know. What a man tells me, this is the end of the line. So far as whatever conversation we have, or have ever had, the buck stops here.”

“I had a business.” Rick said that and looked out at the city, his lips turned down, as if heaviness was rising from his heart to his mouth. “It was an import and export business. Long story short, my business partner died all of a sudden. Heart attack and he hadn’t made it to age thirty-five. Over two dozen creditors sued me. Not to mention the fact that my business partner had failed to pay the taxes on the business for three years. Between Uncle Sam and the creditors, the phone never stopped ringing. I was in over my head. I had a family to feed.”

“So you did what you had to do.”

“Did what I had to do. After I cashed in my stocks at a huge loss, I understood how people become homeless. I’d come here to Los Angeles and gone to meet with this guy who ran some cons. Guy named Scamz. I went to this pool hall to meet him, only to find out he had been killed the night before. Sammy had come here for the same thing. We put our heads together. So there you have it.”

“You met Eddie Coyle along the way.”

“Yeah. We met him along the way. Right after he had been kicked off the police force for taking bribes. He was working with his brother, this guy nicknamed Bishop, and they were hitting banks down south. We linked up with them and ran a four-man crew for a few jobs. Had a lot of fun.”

“Robbing banks, a vocation that can get you up to twenty years behind bars, is fun?”

“Was being facetious. I never really cared for Eddie Coyle and thought less of his brother. But Eddie Coyle handles his business.”

My mind drifted back to that night I’d stood in the cold on I-94. I said, “That he does.”

“We can’t all like who we work for, or work with, but so long as at the end of the day the checks clear and the bills are paid. . . . The bottom line is all that matters.”

“That’s what Eddie Coyle told me.”

“That’s what Eddie Coyle told us all.” Rick checked his watch. “I noticed that you’re cooking a lot, but you’re not eating much.”

“I eat when I’m hungry.”

“Stress will put you in the ground.”

“Nothing I can’t handle. Stress is nothing new, not in my world.”

“You’re a real good guy, Dmytryk. Real good guy. Now, Sammy, don’t get me wrong, he’s my buddy, and I love and trust the man, but he’s not worth a bowl of muddy cornflakes. But you, you’re a real good guy. Maybe you don’t belong here in this hustle.”

I smiled. “But I’m here. Therefore, here must be where I belong.”

He smiled in kind. “You going back to the Midwest after this job?”

“Yeah. I’m going back home.”

“Why?”

I searched for a lie, but the truth came out. I said, “My wife might come back.”

It was his turn to pause and become deadly serious. “You heard from her?”

“Not as of yet.”

He pushed his lips up into a thin smile. “When did you say she disappeared?”

“After that job we did in Pasadena, Texas.”

“That Wells Fargo on Spencer Highway was about six months ago.”

“About, give or take a few hours.”

“We’re taking bets that you killed her.”

I laughed a little. “Put me down for twenty. I’m betting I killed her too. I killed her and blocked it out of my mind. Better yet, put me down for forty.”

He laughed for a moment, then rubbed his chin and became serious.

I smiled. “You okay, Rick?”

“So things were bad between you and the wife.”

“We had ugly moments.”

“Rihanna-and-Chris Brown ugly?”

“Mine wasn’t like that. But things were said. We both did things that left us with a lot of collateral damage. Losing jobs, a lot of psychological changes come with that.”

“I went through that with my wife too.”

I said, “Losing your job is like having your identity stolen, like having what defined you run through a paper shredder. After a while the despair gets you, and it gets you good.”

Rick nodded. “Yup.”

“Financial problems led to stress.”

“Me and my wife had it bad for a few years.”

“Stress led to desperation and that spiraled into depression.”

Rick nodded. “So, your wife was depressed.”

“Me too. I was depressed too.”

“I bet.”

“Cora wasn’t working a real job and my part-time gigs didn’t do much more than cover the mortgage and put food in the refrigerator.”

“She left you right after we did that job in Texas.”

“Maybe Cora had wanted to leave before she vanished, but she couldn’t afford to leave.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Dmytryk. You did what you could to make it work.”

I nodded. “So did she.”

Rick paused. “It’s been half a year, Dmytryk. She hasn’t reached out to you. Your address is the same. She’s moved on. So maybe you should just let the wife go.”

“Would you let your wife go? Would you, Rick?”

“Well, we have three kids. Like it or not, when you have kids, it’s a different ball game.”

“Married is married, kids or not.”

He yawned. “You said that the jobs in Detroit are gone and not coming back, at least not the same jobs.”

“I did.”

“Some women are like those jobs. Gone and not coming back.”

The reality of his words put cracks in my wall of denial, added a hundred fissures to my heart. We sat on those words for a moment. I knew that Rick meant well. I respected his every word. As we paused, moans seeped into the room. Then the bed rocked and Jackie sang.

Rick motioned toward the bedroom. “Sammy is killing Jackie in there.”

I smiled. “Like I said, we all kill what we love. We kill what we hate too.”

Rick yawned again. “You all cleaned up?”

“I showered last night. Didn’t want to hog the bathroom this morning.”

“You’re not going to shave?”

“I never shave before a job. Always shave after.”

“Right, right. Your ritual.”

“You could say that. Some people wear the same socks. I refuse to shave.”

“We all have rituals. I clean my gun before every job. I’ve never had to use it, don’t plan on ever using it, but I still clean it and carry it. Sammy, well, he’s doing his pregame ritual right now. He’s been through more women than I can count. They’re all disposable to him. As disposable as used condoms.”

“Except his wife.”

“Yeah, and I’ve had my share of one-nighters. Takes the edge off being married, if you ask me. But I’d never do like Sammy. I’d never get into anything serious. I’d never compromise my marriage.”

The sun started to rise and erase some of the shadows. I went to the kitchen table and studied the layout of the streets once again, playing it in my mind the way I had rehearsed and driven those streets the last seven days. By lunchtime this would be over and the anxiety and stress would lessen.

Rick came and stood next to me, looked down at the maps and checked the routes.

He said, “You’re a decent man.”

“Thanks. I feel the same way about you, Rick. You’re a real good guy.”

“I have to leave and handle one more job down south.”

I looked at Rick. “Room for me on that job?”

“Sorry. The crew’s been set for a while.”

“Is something changing that will open a door for a man such as myself?”

“After breakfast, I want to sit down and talk with you.”

I asked, “What about?”

“Just me and you. We’ll talk then. You’ve become like a brother to me.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“Look, let’s talk later.”

I was confused. His tone was grave and shaky, unsettling, but I shrugged. “Sure. We can talk.”

“Just me and you.”

“The buck stops here.”

Rick grabbed his toiletry bag, his suit pants and starched white shirt, then he went inside the bathroom. He wanted to get in there before Sammy’s mistress went to shower. She would use up all of the hot water. The shower kicked on. I thought Sammy would come out of the bedroom, but I heard Jackie’s soft voice pleading, telling him she needed more. She begged him for more. Said that he hadn’t given her as much as he had promised. Not long after that, the moans started again.

While I was surrounded by noises that blended in with the bad news on CNN, I turned on my laptop and did my other ritual. I went to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tagged, Hi5, Google, and a dozen other Web sites. I entered my wife’s name, her social security number, her driver’s license number, searched morgues and hospitals, pulled up missing persons sites, looked in the eyes of the living and the faces of the dead. Like a man obsessed with living in the epicenter of his own pain, I searched for my wife. While I scoured the Internet, Rick finished his shower, came out and put on his shoes, then grabbed his Marlboros and lit one before he gathered the garbage and headed out the front door. Jackie emerged from the bedroom, cellular phone in hand, deep in the middle of a hostile conversation.

“It’s not right,” she snapped into the phone. “How do you keep a child from her mother? How do you even sleep at night doing something like this? I don’t need to talk to your attorney, I’m talking to you.”

She had a white robe wrapped around her body, but her left breast was exposed to the nipple. The robe was short, barely hit below her backside and candy store. She was a tall woman. She had a small waist and plenty of very nice curves, a dark-haired, full-figured woman with a youthful girl-next-door face but a complexion that had noticeable acne. Her skin had a radiant glow, was actually shining while she held her cellular up to her face and argued with her ex-husband about their ongoing custody battle. She had a kid who she was fighting to see.

Sammy’s mistress ended the call, then closed her cellular hard and shot me a nasty frown.

She asked, “Did you lose something?”

“You really should dress appropriately in an apartment this small that is filled with men.”

“I’m not a daisy chain kind of woman, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“I’m just saying take into consideration that other men are present and be mindful and respectful. Despite pretending that you’re Sammy’s wife, you’re not his wife and this isn’t your honeymoon suite.”

“Screw you.”

“That’s Sammy’s task, not mine.”

“I hope you enjoyed the show.”

“I’ve seen better on YouPorn, but that’s not the point.”

“In case you didn’t hear me the first time, screw you.”

She broke her stare and headed inside the bathroom and showered, then came out about twenty minutes later, the scent to her perfume leading the way, her hair wet, wearing pink Reeboks, tight jeans, and a SOY LATINA IN THE EEUU T-shirt. Sammy had given her that T-shirt as a gift, had bought it for her two days ago in Santa Monica.

She was part Latina but couldn’t speak or understand more than a handful of words in Spanish. Sammy told me that she had grown up ashamed to be Latina. The woman had many issues. She had put makeup on top of her acne, had piled it on so thick her oval face looked as pallid as a ghost.