Ben looked at his phone on the edge of the table, tilted the screen toward himself so that it woke. His stomach was heavy with dread. He hoped the other guys at the table couldn’t sense it. There was still nothing from Andy. He’d remembered the reverence in her voice and the hardness in her eyes when she’d told him not to go off script. His message to her, mentioning Luna, had been burning a hole in his brain all that day, was searing there now as he tried to pay attention to Matt’s scrawlings on the paper in front of them. Matt’s cellar yawned around them. He could hear Donna playing Taylor Swift somewhere above them in the kitchen.
“This is Borr Secure Storage, it’s one block down from Rockefeller Center. You know, where the FedEx place is.” Matt drew a box in the middle of the paper, then added another identical square on top. “It’s a two-story place. Level one: foyer, small office, and the boxes. Level two: more offices. Next door, here, on the right, we got an office-supply company. On the left here we got an Italian restaurant. Cristobel’s. Two floors each.”
Matt added blocks to either side of his original column. Engo leaned over and looked at the three columns of squares, two high.
“I feel like I’m there!” Engo said. “I can smell the cannelloni!”
Jake snickered.
“The safety-deposit box we’re interested in is on the first floor of Borr’s, back corner, right-hand side, about chest height. It’s box 408.” Matt tapped the first box he’d drawn with the pen, his eyes sharp and moving over their faces. “I want you all to have that number burned into your fucking minds from now on. Four oh eight. I want you saying it in your sleep.”
“Four oh eight, Engo.” Ben nudged him. “That’s just about how tall you are, isn’t it? Four foot eight?”
“It’s my dick size,” Engo said.
“Ah, yes. Thing’s like a carpet python. Long and thin.”
“Scaled for her pleasure.”
“We want our entry into the facility to be completely organic.” Matt’s voice was getting edgy. Ben settled in his seat. “So we’re gonna come through the restaurant.”
“How?” Engo asked.
Matt leaned forward, his pen on the restaurant’s first floor like he was pinning the imaginary doors shut. “We call in a gas odor. We respond. We’ll arrive on scene and find our multi-gas monitor is faulty. We’ll order a whole-building evac as a precaution while we wait for the 98s to come in with their monitor. While all that activity is going on out front, you’ll be round the back, Engo.”
“Doing what?”
“Pumping the restaurant full of LPG.”
Engo laughed. “Nice.”
“We’re gonna blow the restaurant?” Jake’s eyes were wide. “Jesus, fuck. What’s on top of it?”
“Apartments,” Matt said. A hush fell over them all. Ben looked at his phone, fiddled with it, didn’t want to be the one to tap out first. When Jake spoke up, Ben felt a wave of pride. For all the crap they gave Jake, the kid had morals.
“We can’t do that. We have rules,” Jake said.
“Everybody will be out,” Matt continued. “We’ll make sure they’re out. We have all the time in the world to clear the apartments.”
“Well, we don’t have all the time in the world,” Engo said. “The 98s are gonna want to know why we didn’t vent the restaurant as a precaution.”
“We’ll work it out.”
“We can’t blow up a restaurant that’s underneath an apartment building!” Jake yelled.
“Jake, he’s not talking about a nuclear-level blast here.” Engo tapped the line that separated the Borr Secure Storage box from the Cristobel’s restaurant box. “We just want an explosion that’s big enough that it’ll blow out this wall and give us access to the storage facility, the lockboxes.”
“It’s not going to collapse any of the overall structure.” Matt followed the lines connecting the restaurant and the storage facility. “This is double brick. This is concrete. This is steel.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what, Jake?”
Jake looked at Ben.
“Variables.” Ben shrugged. “Millions of variables. How are we going to contain the force of the blast? What’s to say it won’t just blow out the front and back and leave the wall to Borr Storage intact?”
“The only reason I’m thinking a blast is what we need,” Matt said, “is because I’ve been into Cristobel’s, okay? I’ve seen the restaurant, seen the layout. The room is divided in half right down the middle, with the back door—where we’ll be pumping the gas—right here on the same side as the storage facility. So our half of the first floor will fill up with gas first.” He shaded half the Cristobel’s box, the half touching the Borr Secure Storage box. “Plus, along this same wall at the back here? You got the freezer room. The coolant tanks in the freezer in there will explode. Then you got the bar. All those fridges at hip height will also blast out. This whole wall is going to come down, leaving the safety-deposit-box room right there, open to us.”
“This is going to be a big fire,” Ben said. “It’s a restaurant. You got tablecloths. Curtains. Carpets. Wooden furniture.”
“Yeah.”
“It’ll be bigger than the fabric store.”
“No it won’t.”
“Yes it will.”
“I’ve thought about this. I’ve made all the necessary calculations. An LPG blast is going to be big enough to crack the wall, and damage the boxes on this side of Borr Storage, but not the ones on the other side of the room.” He shaded the paper, circled, his pen strokes becoming steadily more exaggerated. “So 408 and all those boxes will be perfectly intact. With nothing taken from the damaged boxes, and nothing taken from the unopened boxes, it’ll fit our story.”
“But a blast that size will—”
“We’re talking about LPG, we’re not talking about napalm!” Matt barked.
“I don’t care if it’s methane. It’s right underneath an apartment building,” Ben said.
“An empty apartment building!” Matt’s neck was growing red. “You’re not hearing me! Open your fucking ears!”
“We’ve never done this before,” Jake said quietly. “The fabric store, that was commercial buildings on either side. Whenever there’s been residential places near our jobs they’ve been small fires or false callouts only. A big blast near civilians? I don’t know.”
“It’ll be fine. In fact, we should consider something a little heavier than LPG, though, if we’re getting technical.” Engo tapped the paper with his damaged hand. “It’ll take half an hour to fill that space with LPG and you’re crossing your fingers it’ll bring that wall down. If we used acetyl—”
“No.”
“If we used—”
“I said no,” Matt snapped.
“You’re not even letting me finish! Acetylene gas would get in there quicker, it’d have a bigger—”
“Why would a restaurant be full of acetylene gas! They’re cooking spaghetti, not welding copper!”
“It won’t matter! Your guy on the arson investigations team will—”
“Engo. Matt,” Ben said. “Just stop. Stop.”
They’d both half risen out of their chairs. Ben and Jake were like two guys outside the tiger enclosure at the zoo, wondering what the hell they were going to do if the jungle savagery they were witnessing spilled through the plexiglass. Nobody spoke for a solid minute.
“So.” Engo turned to Matt like nothing had happened, pointed to the restaurant. “You’re out front coordinating. Ladder 98 are on their way to support. Ben and Jake are knocking down the fire. I dash in here, open up box 405, take the cards.”
“It’s 408, you motherfu—”
“I’m fucking with you, Matt, I’m fucking with you. I know it’s 408.”
“Don’t fuck with him, please!” Jake begged.
“Box 408 will survive the blast, like I said.” Matt exhaled long and hard. “It’s on this wall. Opposite the blast zone. There’s no way any of these boxes will be damaged. It’s too far.”
“So we’ll need a key,” Engo said.
“Keys,” Ben pointed out. “Those safety-deposit boxes, they need two keys. One from the owner, and one from the facility. So you’ll be digging around at the front of the store trying to find the key for 408.”
“They’re in cabinets marked by number. It won’t take long.”
“But it’ll take time,” Ben insisted. “And who the fuck knows how we’re going to get the old man’s key.”
“The lawyer,” Matt said. “I’m working on it. That’s the next phase. We’re in this phase now.” He stabbed the paper a bunch of times with the pen, peppering the boxes with jagged dashes. “There are phases, you dumb pricks!”
“I got a question.” Jake raised his hand and Matt’s nostrils flared. Ben set his legs, in case he had to throw himself on top of Jake to stop him from getting choked out. “Where the hell’s Andy during all this?”
“Crowd control,” Matt said. “I’ll keep an eye on her.”
“But what if she—”
Matt snapped the pen in half with his thumb. Jake slid his chair back.
“No, really, though,” Engo said. “Where’s Andy? It’ll look weird if she’s not in there.”
“We could make sure she doesn’t come along.” Jake shrugged. “Keep her busy with something at the station.”
“You could bang her so hard the night before that she can’t walk straight and has to call in sick.” Engo nudged Ben in the ribs.
“Jesus, man.”
“It’s not bad, though,” Jake said. “Get her to call in sick. If you put Visine in someone’s food—”
“Oh, here we go. I wondered how you lost your virginity.” Engo nudged Jake now.
“It doesn’t knock you out, it just glues you to the toilet.” Jake rolled his eyes. “We did it to a guy at the academy.”
“You stupid fucks are trying as hard as you can to make sure this doesn’t go down.” Matt was gently trembling all over. Ben thought of buildings before they collapsed, the way they shivered and swayed. “If you had any brain cells to rub together, you’d realize that this job is the perfect last job.”
They watched Matt grapple with the monster turning inside him. After a few moments, he pointed to the ceiling, beyond which Donna was clattering pots and pans to a song about broken hearts.
“That’s my last wife,” Matt said. “That’s my last kid. This is my last job.”
Ben felt Jake stir beside him. The probie’s throat had tightened, his Adam’s apple shrinking against his collar. Matt noticed the reaction.
“Yeah.” He nodded, knowing. A disappointed judge handing out his sentence. “Sucks to be you, Jake. But you had enough time to put together a proper stash, like the rest of us. You should have been stacking notes away all this time somewhere nobody would ever suspect. The last ever place you’d have anything to do with. A nice old nest egg. The fact that you blew it all on bad dogs and lame horses and rigged poker games is not on me. It’s not on any of us.”
Jake didn’t answer.
“We’ve all got rainy-day money.” Matt pointed the Finger of Death around the circle, let it hover over Ben. “This tight-ass here probably has the biggest haul among us. Ben was raised by junkies and foster carers so he’s a trained scavenger. I’ve seen him tuck a quarter into his wallet. He’s like a squirrel. Look at him. He hasn’t bought anything new in a decade. His clothes are older than some of my kids.”
Ben looked at his own shirt.
“You’ve been an idiot,” Matt went on, lining Jake up with the Finger. “You got one job left. This one. And I say this with all the love I can possibly muster for you right now, Jake. Do not go solo. You’re too stupid. You’re not built for it.”
“You’ll try to rob a bodega, slip on a banana peel, and get jacked up,” Engo agreed. “You’ll try to roll on us to save yourself, and Matt will have to bury you under his pool.”
“I’ll feed you to Donna,” Matt sighed. “That woman ate a cake this morning for breakfast.”
“A cupcake?”
“No, a whole cake.” He gripped an imaginary dinner-plate-sized object. “Baby shower cake she’s supposed to take to a party tomorrow. Sat at the counter. Cut it into eight slices. Ate them all, one at a time.”
Ben’s phone rang on the table. He put a hand on it, but Engo’s was already on the device. Electricity charged through Ben’s veins, his whole arm and shoulder spiking with panic, the lightning cracking through his chest.
“Oh, ho!” Engo yanked the phone out from under Ben’s hand. “Look who it is.”
They all stared at the screen. Andy’s name pulsed and flashed, reflected in the deadly black orbs of Matt’s eyes.
“You should answer it on speaker, Ben.” Engo held the phone aloft, pushed Ben in the chest as he reached for it. “I want to hear you talk dirty to her.”
“No, no, no. Give me the fucking phone, Engo!”
“I’ve been waiting days now for the nudes.” Engo laughed, stood up. Ben came after him. “Not one. This time of night, you think if we answered on FaceTime we might get lucky?”
Ben knew his raw, trembling panic was showing on his face, that it was twisting something curious in Matt. The big man at the table cocked his head in that awful way he did when devils were whispering in his ears and the cauldron in his mind was boiling mischief. Ben punched Engo in the sternum, hard, then grabbed the phone when his arm came down. All the breath left Engo’s chest. The older man coughed, had to steady himself against the wall by the pool table.
They all knew the hit was too hard and Ben’s voice was too high as he pleaded for the phone. The very veins in his arms and neck were standing too taut on the surface of his skin. He’d blown it. Matt put his hands flat on the tabletop.
The phone stopped ringing. Matt pushed the drawing of the heist aside and pointed at the device.
“Call her back,” Matt said. “Put it on speaker.”