Hollis Brant whacked the throttle with the heel of his broad hand. The Francesca, his fifty-foot Carver cruiser, responded with a mounting rumble and Hollis and I leaned forward to counterbalance as the bow rose from the water. He turned the wheel a few easy degrees, pointing us in a direct heading away from his marina at Shilshole.
“Not so long ago, you’d have pissed all over the idea of cracking a safe,” Hollis said over the noise. “And maybe all over Mickey O’Hasson for suggesting it.”
We stood on the flybridge at the top of the boat. The waters ahead were clear and about as flat as Puget Sound ever got. To our stern, a couple hundred vessels ranging from speedboats to schooners crowded the shoreline. Pleasure craft, hell-bent on enjoying the long Independence Day weekend. If half of their owners touched a helm more than twice a year, it would be a shock. Sailing close to land was like navigating a freeway crowded with student drivers. And no lanes. Hollis liked a little distance from the chaos.
“Tell me about O’Hasson,” I said.
Hollis’s bowed legs, about the same length as his apelike arms, meant that he had to jump a little to reach the tall pilot’s seat. The wind pushed his tight orange-white curls to and fro. “Dono was never much for running his mouth. Look who I’m talking to. You know that. But he hadn’t worked with O’Hasson before. And Nogales was a long way from home.”
“So who put them together?”
“Jimmy. It’s why I invited him along this morning.” Jimmy Corcoran was down below, using the head. Probably as a receptacle for whatever he’d eaten for breakfast. Corcoran’s face had been paler than usual, even before I’d cast off the Francesca’s lines at the dock.
“The job in Arizona, that I remember something about,” said Hollis. “Dono had to drive back to Seattle with a few paintings in his car, and he picked my brain about ways to hide them.”
Hollis was a smuggler. Anything that seemed low-risk for moderate reward, which left out the kind of contraband that law enforcement declared wars against. To my knowledge, Hollis had never been arrested.
He spun the seat around to reach for his coffee cup. “Dono told me afterwards that the job was so fast, he never bothered to stay overnight in Nogales. They drove in. The house was where and how O’Hasson said it would be. They took the paintings. That was that.”
“So O’Hasson did all the casing? He was reliable?”
“Dono was happy with the results, I can say that much.”
The thump of the cabin door sliding open on the lower deck interrupted us. Under the thrum of the engine came an equally steady stream of curses.
“Y’all right there, Jimmy?” said Hollis with a wink to me.
“—can’t believe you talked me into—Yes, you shithead, I’m just great.” Corcoran came up the ladder to the flybridge, carefully taking each rung in turn. His hairless head and light eyes gave him the look of an especially pallid eel. An angry one, a moray ready to bite some careless skin diver’s hand off. Jimmy C. was brilliant with electronics. A virtuoso. Maybe all that talent had stolen bits from the rest of him, with charm and courtesy being the first to go.
Corcoran pointed to the bottle of Baron Otard cognac that Hollis had used to strengthen his coffee. “Give me that.”
I didn’t question his choice of remedy. Corcoran snatched the bottle from me and downed a gulp large enough to distend his throat. He gasped.
“Fucking ocean,” he said.
“Talk quick and maybe Hollis will turn us around.”
“It’s a good day,” Hollis protested. He spun the wheel and knocked the engines to idle. The Francesca settled into an easy drift. “Look, calm as a sleeping babe.”
“Spare me,” said Corcoran. “What’s this shit with Mickey O’Hasson?”
“He wants me in on a job,” I said.
Corcoran’s eyebrows furrowed, and his characteristic sneer edged up to try to meet them. “Ha. Suddenly you’re not the white knight. What’s wrong, you burn through your pension from Uncle Sam?”
The Army wouldn’t have handed me a pension unless I’d served a full twenty, and I guessed that Corcoran knew that. But he wouldn’t pass up a chance to needle me about my career choices. To Corcoran, any straight job was a sucker’s job.
“Hollis says you vouched for O’Hasson with Dono, twelve or thirteen years ago,” I said.
“Cutting right to it.” Corcoran eased himself down onto the all-weather vinyl cushions. He took another small swig. “I didn’t know O’Hasson, but I knew guys who’d worked with him. He was a house burglar, mostly. No tough-guy shit. You seen the man in person, yeah? Can’t blame anybody the size of a damn peanut for sticking with the soft approach.”
“Was he any good?”
“He had chops. You think I’d have spoken for him if I wasn’t sure of that much?”
“Nobody’s calling you a liar, Jimmy,” said Hollis.
I held up a hand against the glare off the water. We were a couple of miles out, closer to Bainbridge than Seattle. A freighter trundled past, two hundred yards off our starboard, pushing with deceptive speed south toward the piers. Business in progress, over long, long distances.
“How did the connection start?” I said. “Who called who?”
Corcoran shrugged like it was obvious. “O’Hasson had reached out to some people in Seattle. Asking if they knew a safecracker. They knew me and I knew Dono.”
Hollis frowned. “Why would O’Hasson want a box man from all the way up here?”
“Maybe every professional he knew in L.A. was connected,” I said. “Their bosses would want a big cut. Or just take it all.”
“An outsider.” Corcoran nodded. “That’s the word I remember being kicked around.”
Hollis took the bottle of cognac from Corcoran and poured half a shot into his mug. “So O’Hasson was an independent. Like Dono.”
“I didn’t watch a fricking biography on the runt. He steals shit. I dunno who he steals it for, or why.”
I had been wondering that myself. Why a dying man would spend his last days chasing dreams of gold.
“Thanks for the background,” I said to Corcoran. “I owe you.”
He snorted. It was apparently the wrong thing to do, because his face went the color of a hard-boiled egg left out in the sun. He lunged for the ladder, shouldering me aside in his haste.
When the cabin door had slammed again, Hollis sighed. He stuck a finger in his coffee and stirred it absentmindedly.
“You need money this bad?” he said.
I had been granted a deferral on property taxes the previous year, after Dono’s death. Those were now due, and this year’s on top. On Friday, the assessor’s office had turned down my application for a second deferral. Plus there was the looming cost of rebuilding the house. A bank loan was out of the question. After ten years in the Army, most of it overseas with no real property to my name, my credit rating was low comedy.
During the afternoon hours yesterday on my newest part-time gig, dull seasonal work packing boxes in the warehouse of an outdoor supply company, I’d run the numbers in my head. The taxes amounted to four months of earnings, assuming the work stayed steady. And if I didn’t need to pay rent. Or eat.
My silence was enough answer for Hollis. “I could scratch up a few dollars, if it’ll keep the wolves away,” he said.
“Thanks. But no.”
“I supposed not. You’ve made up your mind about O’Hasson, then?”
“Six times in the last hour,” I said. “I didn’t think the house meant so much, until I saw the land without it. It looked like—it felt like—a tooth had been torn out at the root. That place was the last thing left of him. Of Dono.”
“Except yourself.”
“Not what I mean. He’s dead and gone. His bar belongs to somebody else. But our house—he left that to me. I lived in it for less than a month before it burned down, and all of his things with it.” I exhaled. “Dono didn’t give a shit about what he owned, I know. Every dollar he earned from a score, he’d sink fifty cents into setting up the next one.”
“Your man cared more about having his own rules,” said Hollis.
“And to hell with everyone else. Jesus, I heard that philosophy enough times.” I put the coffee mug down harder than I’d intended. It banged off the metal catch-rail and a chip broke from the base.
“It’s nothing,” Hollis said before I could apologize.
I turned my back to the sun and gazed at the city in the distance. Only the very tops of the tallest buildings were visible over the hills. As the Francesca bobbed on the water, rays of morning light would bounce off the glass and steel, giving the skyscrapers glittering crowns.
“Screw it,” I said. “If I had the money, I’d rebuild. But I don’t, and I won’t steal to get it.”
“You don’t need to convince me.”
“I’m convincing myself, Hollis. I’ve broken a lot of laws since coming back home. Maybe this thing with O’Hasson is a kick in the ass to remind me where to draw the line.”
Hollis picked up the shard of broken coffee mug from the dash and examined it. “I might not be the most impartial judge, but Lord knows you’ve had good reason to bend the rules.”
“Better reasons than just paying my bills. Or wanting some last hurrah, which is what I suspect is driving O’Hasson.”
“Could be that.”
He began to clean under a fingernail with the sliver of ceramic. I looked at him. He remained intent on his inexpert manicure.
“You want to show whatever card you’re hiding up your sleeve?” I said.
“Sorry.” He coughed. “Just making some decisions of my own.”
He opened the chart locker and took out a slim manila folder. “I’ve a fellow who works for a private dick in Los Angeles. He’s not a bad sort, for a citizen. When you said you were looking for background on O’Hasson, I took the liberty and had my friend pull whatever public records he could on short notice.”
I smiled as Hollis handed me the folder. “Have you got a friend in every town?”
“And a lady in every port. Keeps me young.”
I opened the file. Tightly spaced columns of text on the first two pages covered the long criminal history of Michael John O’Hasson, age fifty-eight. I’d taken him for older than that. Mileage outpacing the years. He’d been busted a lot for petty crap as a youth, less often as he gained experience and also spent a few idle seasons behind bars. O’Hasson’s latest stretch of seven years had been the result of a larceny conviction and an eight-to-twelve sentence. His third fall.
Printed on the third page was a screen capture of a County of Los Angeles birth certificate. Cyndra Ann O’Hasson, born at Kaiser Bellflower. On the line for Full Name of Mother it read Lorelei Michelle Eaton. Michael O’Hasson was listed as the father.
Cyn. Twelve years old, on her last birthday. She must have been about five when O’Hasson was put away.
The next document I recognized instantly, before I’d read a word of it. It was the summary cover page from a foster child’s record of temporary guardianship. Cyndra Ann had gone into the system at age six. The following pages showed that she’d bounced around, four different families in three different towns. Her latest family was listed as the Tyners, in Reseda. There was no mention of what had happened to Cyndra’s mother.
Dead center on the final page was a black-and-white photocopy of a color picture, two inches on each side, like a passport’s. Cyndra’s face, long and snub-nosed with big light-colored eyes. Blue, maybe, like her dad’s. She had straight brown bangs and the rest of her hair was pulled into a tight ponytail. The photo was out of date. Probably taken when she’d gone to the Tyners at age ten. She was pretty in the way that all kids are before adolescence starts to wreak havoc.
“I considered tossing the pages to the seagulls,” said Hollis.
Cyn’s expression in the photo was resigned, with a dash of hostility. Or maybe that was just me, projecting.
“But I figured you’d want to know,” Hollis continued.
I returned the papers to the folder and walked across the bridge to set them down on the dash. Much more deliberately than I had the coffee mug.
“So,” I said. “We know why O’Hasson’s got a head of steam. He wants to leave something behind for the kid.”
Hollis made a thoughtful hum. I glanced down at the folder. Caught myself before I picked it up again.
“It explains the guy a little,” I said. “It doesn’t change anything.”
We both drank some coffee and watched the water. Whenever the wind picked up an extra knot, the top of each gentle swell shimmered and rippled, like the wavelets were trying to break free.
“Maybe this whole situation is a gift,” Hollis said, toasting me with his mug. “Whatever’s inside O’Hasson’s safe is just a penny lying on the sidewalk.”
I made myself smile. “Finders keepers?”
“It’s one perspective. I need a refresh. You?” I shook my head. He climbed down the ladder, agile as a gibbon, and disappeared into the cabin.
I watched the boats and the water and thought about Cyndra O’Hasson. Twelve years old. County shelters and foster families for half of that. Her father in prison since she was in kindergarten. If she’d seen him at all since then, it had been in a visiting room.
I knew exactly what that was like. No physical contact. Nothing passed between visitors and inmates. Even emotions were tamped down to the minimum.
“Lucky penny,” I said to myself.
Granddad turned the key and nudged our front door open with his boot, and I swear the air rushing out made a sound like when they open the mummy tombs in movies. The door hinges even creaked a little.
“Home,” he said.
It was. I was so stoked to see it, I didn’t care how creepy it suddenly felt.
The four digits Granddad tapped into the alarm keypad were the same code I remembered. Which made sense. Neither of us had been around to change it, or the clock on the glowing display. It read half past eleven, and for sure we’d passed midnight while having burgers at Beth’s.
Daylight savings time, I realized. Since Granddad had gone to jail, there had been two falls back and only one spring forward.
He walked down the dark hall just as if all of the lights were on. I peered into the shadowy foyer and the front room. They looked the same as when I’d last seen them. Didn’t smell the same. The air was hot and it stank like peat moss.
“Damn that woman,” Granddad said from the kitchen. I guessed he meant Paula. Paula had been Granddad’s girlfriend or whatever when he’d been busted. I dropped my bag and his leather jacket—mine now, by rights, since I’d kept it the whole time he was away—and went to join him. After turning on the hallway light.
He was hunkered down, looking at a white trash bin I didn’t recognize. I was still getting used to how much jail had changed Granddad. His chest and arms strained at his shirt now, because of all the weight lifting in jail. Mostly it was his beard, ashy black and unkempt, like one of the pirate captains he was always reading about.
I was still wrapping my head around everything tonight, really. Granddad had picked me up from the Rolfssons’ just a couple of hours ago. A complete surprise, I hadn’t even known he was out. The past couple hours felt a little like a dream I was going to wake up from and be bummed that it wasn’t real.
A ragged hole had been gnawed through the corner of the trash can.
“We’ve mice,” Granddad said. “Check your room for droppings.”
Ugh. And also, cool. I could snag one as a pet. Never had a pet before, but maybe the rules had changed and I could keep a cage for it in my room.
My room. Not just a place where I crashed every night, shared with other foster kids or even with babies put up by the same family. Mine.
I ran upstairs.
It was weird. The same, but weird. Maybe weird because it was the same. The square card table I used as a desk was covered in stuff, like little rocks, and a baseball I’d sawn in two to see if the inside really did have poisonous gunk in it, and a bunch of padlocks, two of which I had also taken apart—more carefully than the baseball—to check out how they worked. All of it looked just like I remembered. Except that I’d also forgotten about all of it while I was away. That was a strange feeling.
We definitely had mice. The bottom edge of my Ken Griffey Jr. poster had been gnawed halfway into the words the kid, which meant the rodents had been running around on my dresser.
I opened the drawers to look for mouse crap or other damage. My clothes looked okay. Well, unchewed. But embarrassing. I still had an Animaniacs t-shirt, which I wouldn’t wear to school now for a thousand dollars.
Speaking of. I pulled my chair over to the closet and stood on it to loosen the bulb cover screws with my fingertips. The glass cover was dusty, but everything in the house was dusty, so who cared? I set the cover aside and reached up to find the wad of money in the hole in the ceiling. When I’d last been here, the woman from Social Services had been watching me like a dog on a pork chop, making sure I didn’t put any knives or guns or frickin’ TNT in my bag, whatever she was imagining. So the money had stayed. At least I had managed to pass off Granddad’s jacket as mine. I’d worn it almost every day, to keep it safe.
Thirty-three bucks. Sweet.
Downstairs, Granddad was probably checking his own hiding places. He had shown me how to open the one behind the shelves in the pantry—it was deliberately tricky—but there were others that I knew about, and I was pretty certain that Granddad didn’t know that I knew. Like behind the kitchen baseboard, where I once found a pump shotgun, and under the eaves outside, where he kept his burglary kit.
“Strip the beds,” he called from downstairs. “Nobody’s touched the linens in a year.”
“I thought Paula was looking after the house,” I hollered back.
“She had been.”
“Did she ever visit you?”
“Get the sheets.” Which meant Don’t push it.
I yanked my blue flannel bedclothes and the pillowcases off and dumped them by the stairs on my way to Granddad’s room.
His room was the largest of four on the second floor, and the one in which I’d spent the least amount of time. I wasn’t allowed inside at all when I was a little kid. It still felt like I was committing a felony just stepping through the doorway, even though Granddad had just told me to.
Not that his room was at all cool. In the spare rooms we had loads of tools and interesting junk that wouldn’t fit in the hobbit-hole garage carved out of the hillside below the house. Granddad’s room just had a wardrobe (kinda okay, but nothing in it but clothes) and a closet (more clothes and more junk) and a TV (channels preset to soccer—sorry, football—and news, same as he watched downstairs) and a stupid amount of books. Not like stories, but history and stuff. Some of the books were so old they were from when he was in school. I knew because he’d use them to show me how words were spelled in Irish, and then of course he’d quiz me.
I guess part of the reason Granddad made me stay out was because of the pistol that was usually in his nightstand, but even as a kid I knew to stay far away from that, and he kept it unloaded anyways.
Thumps of Granddad’s steps down in the front room, and musical scrapes of furniture being moved. Maybe he was settling into his favorite leather chair after so long away.
It would be safe for me to have a quick look in the drawer. I inched it open.
No gun. Good. Granddad had been busted—and jailed—for having a gun in our truck, which as a convicted felon he can’t do without catching some serious shit.
The phone rang downstairs. It took me until the second ring to recognize the sound. We only had one phone, the green one hanging on the wall in the kitchen, and hardly anybody called us on a landline anymore.
I slipped out to the top of the stairs to listen. The wooden planks had creaky spots, but I knew where to step. Crouched where I wouldn’t be visible from the ground floor. The springy phone cord was long enough that Granddad could walk as far as the foyer if he chose.
“Yeah, I’m out,” I heard him say into the phone.
I couldn’t tell whether the caller was a man or a woman.
“No,” said Granddad. Then after another moment, “I don’t give a damn what he said.”
Now I could hear that the caller was a guy. I faded back an inch, thinking Granddad was coming closer. But no, the guy was just getting louder. Insistent.
“You’re a fool,” Granddad said. Cold as anything. His Belfast accent came on stronger when he was mad, or especially pleased. He wasn’t pleased.
The voice lowered—Granddad had that effect on people—but kept talking. I heard him pacing the kitchen and into the dining room.
“Shut up,” Granddad finally said. The voice seemed to obey. “You won’t go there again. And you sure as God’s own hell won’t take him there. If there’s anything to be done, I’ll decide. You follow?”
A very short moment of quiet. Maybe the guy on the other end of the line was holding his breath, just like I was.
“Lose this number,” Granddad said.
His footsteps traced a line to bang the phone back onto its hook, and then out the back door. I stayed very still.
I had forgotten that during the past year and a half, too. Just how scary Granddad could be.
Better get the sheets done. I gathered up the pillowcases from his room and brought the armful of linens downstairs. Our washer and dryer were in a closet behind the kitchen, so I had to tiptoe past the big window that looked out onto the backyard. Granddad stood on the wooden steps leading down from the porch, his back to me, apparently staring at the lawn and the bushes. Which were so overgrown and weedy now it was hard to tell where one became the other.
I stopped to watch. He didn’t seem to be looking for anything. He wasn’t smoking. He didn’t really smoke, not since I was real small, but when he had smoked Granddad would hang out in the same place on the porch, which made me think of it. Tonight he just stood there, a big dark shadow blocking other big dark shadows behind him.
“I have to go out,” he said. Knowing all along I was there behind him. Jeez.
Wait, what?
“We just got here,” I said.
He didn’t reply. I dropped the laundry on the floor and went out to join him on the porch. He’d left the back door wide open, so I did too.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“It won’t be long.”
“But we need to clean.”
“You know how to run the machines. I’ll be home before the sheets are dry.”
“We just got here.”
“A mhaicín,” he said, fixing me with a stare. Boy. He calls me that, and I know the next thing coming is trouble.
“Fine.” I walked back into the house and grabbed the wad of laundry and went to stuff it all into the washing machine. Fuck the different colors. The powdered soap had crusted solid. I banged the box on the washer until a chunk of it came loose and tumbled to explode into granules against the center post. I let the lid fall with a clang—much louder than the slamming phone had been—and twisted the start knob so hard that it popped off and I had to force it back on.
Granddad walked out through the front door. I heard his boots clomp down the stone steps to the street, before the washer kicked in.
Was he working? This soon? He’d told me earlier tonight he was going to take it easy. Nothing big or risky, so we could stay together. Did he have to start now?
Had he taken a gun?
I ran to the pantry. Paula or somebody must have tossed all the food before it spoiled. I didn’t have to move any cans or flour sacks aside to twist the support and move the bracket and open up the little hidden door cut in the drywall.
No gun. Some ID cards and a cheap cell phone still in its plastic blister pack, but no gun. Granddad must have taken it.
He promised.
Wait. There weren’t any boxes of ammunition, either. There would have to be some bullets left around if there had been a gun, right? Maybe Granddad had played it safe and had Paula remove every gun in the house, even the hidden ones, in case the cops came through with a metal detector or a gun-sniffing dog or something. I didn’t know what they could do.
Okay. Granddad was angry, and it was for sure he wasn’t just going out to buy beer. But he wasn’t carrying. That was good.
I had asked him, over the burgers at Beth’s—the first meal we’d shared since my tenth birthday—if we could work together. Told him that I’d been training myself with locks, which was true. I’d have to learn more.
The green light on the alarm panel blinked. That was tempting. I could try bypassing it; I’d seen Granddad do that with other systems, and this one couldn’t be too different, right? No matter what improvements he’d made?
Of course, if I did it wrong, the whole neighborhood would suddenly learn that we’d come home.
I checked that the washer wasn’t overflowing and went upstairs. To my room. Sat at my table, with my things. Picked up one of the stripped padlocks. It was an older Yale, five pins, springs a little soft from use. Easy for me now. The Brinks discus lock would be tougher.
The picks I had crafted last year out of hacksaw blades were still under my shirt, in their cloth eyeglasses case. I’d kept the case taped behind a drawer at the Rolfssons’. While packing my stuff earlier tonight, I’d stuck the little packet to my ribs. Just in case anybody checked my bag.
I laid all the lockpicks out in one neat row on my table and started practicing.