The day after school let out for the summer, Granddad and I packed our suitcases and a few other bags into a rental car and drove to a motel twenty miles south of the Canadian border. When we checked in, the fat woman behind the reception desk asked how long we expected to stay. Granddad said we weren’t sure. He told her we were visiting his sister, who was ill. The woman clucked in sympathy.
When Granddad went outside to move the car, she eagerly asked me what was wrong with the sister. I just shrugged. She frowned and didn’t bother pressing for more details. Granddad told me later that he envied teenagers, being able to get away with shit like that.
We stayed in the motel for a week. A few times each day, at different hours, we drove north on I-5 toward the border. We varied our route but always wound up on the same access road off the freeway, cruising smoothly past the same large buildings.
In the early-summer heat, we could drive with the windows rolled down. The white-noise hum threatened to make me drowsy. But I stayed sharp.
It was my show this time out.
Every evening we stayed in the motel room and watched TV, or went out to a movie, or played cards. Granddad preferred canasta, while I liked poker. We’d switch games each time we played.
On one of the daytime drives, we turned down a different road, parked the car, and put on rubber boots to take a hike through the wide, marshy forest behind the buildings. The forest was thick. We stopped behind a large tangle of blackberry bushes, fifty yards out from one particular warehouse.
It was a larger structure than the others along the access road. Four stories tall, with walls made of silver corrugated steel between green I-beams. Around the front there was a blue sign with the warehouse name in script two feet high, but here by the back doors the name was painted in plain black right on the steel, the narrow letters waving with the ripples in the metal. I knew what it said, even though most of the words were obscured behind forest. A. J. CARLSON BONDED WAREHOUSE AND TRANSFER.
The blackberry branches had thorns half an inch long. Carefully, I pushed one aside with my fingertips to see more. I could make out stick-insect outlines of workers hurrying around on the warehouse loading dock. That far away through the brush, Granddad and I were probably the next thing to invisible, but we still kept our movements to a minimum.
I looked at the dock through Granddad’s good set of 10×50 binoculars. The workers were busy wheeling hand trucks on and off a large panel van, filling it with boxes.
“How’s the height of it?” Granddad said.
I sized the loading dock against the panel van and the workers. “Looks like a standard four feet. There’s a ramp.” I focused the lenses past the open loading-dock door into the warehouse. “And I see a forklift inside. A little Hyster three-wheeler.”
I could hear the smile in his voice. “Good. The truck I’ve in mind for us has enough load capacity for an elephant and his lunch besides. We can drive the damned forklift right into the back.”
I laughed and kept looking. Behind the forklift was the end of the first massive row of racks. Each rack in the warehouse was twenty feet tall, stacked with crates and pallets of merchandise waiting for processing. Some intended for export to Canada, others on their first leg of distribution within the States. Granddad had told me the warehouse handled everything from liquor to lumber. Almost every bit of it had passed or would pass through the Peace Arch crossing at the border in Blaine.
Like the biggest open bank vault in the world.
I suddenly noticed that my breath was coming really fast, and realizing it made me feel dizzy. I let the binoculars hang from my neck and closed my eyes, not opening them even when one of the thorns poked into the side of my hand. The sharp pain of it steadied me a little. I knew Granddad was watching me.
When I opened my eyes again, he was looking at the warehouse.
“When I was nineteen—this was when your grandmother, Fionnuala, and I were still in Belfast, mind, before your own mother was born—I needed some extra money for the holidays. So I put my eye on a pub owned by a man named Hargen. Nasty bastard. Which was part of the reason I picked his place, I suppose. Anyway, I was sure that Hargen kept his weekend earnings at least a day too long, and I thought I’d visit one Monday night and lighten his burden.”
Granddad’s accent came out when we worked. I liked it.
“So I thought on it for a week or so. When Monday came along, I waited all night in the alley across from the place. I mean all night. The sun came up, and there I was, standing like I was waiting for a bus to come along.”
I was confused. Maybe Granddad was hinting at something I hadn’t seen yet. I quickly raised the binoculars and trained them on the building.
“The pub didn’t look right?” I said, hoping for a hint.
“It looked just fine. It was me that wasn’t right. That’s why I couldn’t move a step from that alley.”
“You were nervous.”
“I was, sure. But I was always nervous. I’m nervous now. We’ve talked about that.”
We had. Nerves were okay. Granddad had given me a whole speech before he’d taken me on my first run with him, right after my twelfth birthday. Just a simple house job, and I’d had nothing to do but keep an eye peeled. Even though the nearest neighbor was a hundred yards away and out for the night. I could’ve yodeled and not gotten us into trouble.
Still, my stomach had been as knotted as a kinked garden hose. I’d puked up my cheeseburger after we’d arrived safely back home.
Since then Granddad had brought me on another score at least once every other month. Businesses and houses alike. Sometimes not so much for the money as the practice. Different places had different rules and different tools. By my count we’d stolen a hundred or more cars as well, driving most of them eight or ten blocks and abandoning them again, just to get the feel of it.
Over time he had started having me case our targets and letting me grease the doors or the alarms, too.
Nothing as big as A. J. Carlson Bonded Warehouse and Transfer, though. Not nearly.
“So if it wasn’t nerves,” I said to him, eyes fixed firmly on the loading dock, “why didn’t you go into Hargen’s pub?”
“Well, I believed it was because I’d thought too much about it. I cursed myself for having feet of clay. Swore I’d come back the next week, strip that villain down to nothing.”
I’d heard a lot of Granddad’s lessons. Enough to know there was a twist coming. I tried to guess.
“You saw something,” I said. “And you didn’t even really know you saw it, right? But it still made you stay away.”
He laughed, and I lowered the binoculars and looked at him. The evening sun was behind his head, and his dark hair stuck out like the bristles of the world’s rangiest bear.
“I’d love to have that particular magic power,” he said. “What is that thing that your man in the comic books has?”
I knew what he meant. But I hadn’t read comics in like two years, since before that first house job, even. I’d tossed them all, not long after Granddad came back from County. “Spider sense,” I said reluctantly.
“Spiders. Lovely.” He was laughing hard now, but I realized it wasn’t at me. “No, it wasn’t any such thing. And I hadn’t thought about Hargen’s place too much. I hadn’t thought about it enough.”
He took the binoculars out of my hand, put them back in their case, and slung the case over his shoulder. “I hadn’t done my schoolwork, you see. The place might have an alarm I didn’t know about. Or some friend of Hargen’s, bedded down in the back room after a fight with his wife. Or a fucking dog. I hadn’t thought about any of those possibilities. And the fact I hadn’t thought about them meant the whole thing was a bad idea, and my guts were telling me that.”
He put his big hand on my shoulder. “Forget the money. What are your guts saying about the risk?”
I thought about it. We knew the place and its people. We knew its alarm system.
“We’ve done the homework,” I said. “Almost.”
I instantly felt better.
Later that night one of the businesses nearby had a rock thrown through its front window. The police response took four and a half minutes.
On the next day, we took it easy. We went to a matinee. Dono napped while I watched Jackie Chan beat up everybody in sight. Late in the afternoon, we took one more pass, just to make sure nothing around the warehouse had changed.
“Go?” Granddad said.
I looked at the parking lot, at the way the workers went about their day. “Yeah.”
He smiled and nodded.
Seven hours later we were high on the roof of A. J. Carlson’s. Revving up the circular saws.
Chain saws would have been faster, but their grinding howl would also carry a lot farther than the whine of the eighteen-volt cordless Makitas. We cut through the upper layers of roofing and insulation, gouging a shallow six-foot crater. Sweat trickled down my forearms into my cotton work gloves. We tossed aside scraps of asphalt shingle and felt, until piles of it littered the smooth white moonscape of the roof around us.
Soon only a thick sheet of plywood separated us from the interior of the warehouse below. We pried at one end of the sheet with crowbars until the screws popped. Granddad wedged it open, far enough for me to saw off a couple feet at the end. We tossed the wood on top of the rest of the scraps.
Light boomed out from the new hole in the roof, stretching toward the sky like a weak searchlight for a movie premiere. The light attracted bugs. A mosquito whined in my ear, and I slapped at it. One big-ass moth flew into the gap, into the upper reaches of the warehouse. I had an instant’s terror that the alarms would start ringing.
Dumb, sure. We knew the types of alarms inside. They were good, but not so delicate that an insect would set them off.
Still, it reminded me that the roof was only the first hurdle.
Granddad reached into one of the bags and took out a thin tarp, which he draped over the hole to block the light. There were four bags. Rope, power tools, hand tools, and a smaller one for Granddad’s burglar kit. We’d had to make two trips up the ladders from the parking lot to get all the gear onto the roof.
“Go take another look around,” he said.
I jogged to the nearest edge of the roof and gazed down at the wide expanse of parking lot in front of the warehouse. All the lampposts were dark. The automated timer turned them off at midnight, we’d learned. But the blue warehouse sign shone bright enough to let me see all the way to the access road at the far end of the lot.
Farther out I could see the ribbon of white and red lights on I-5. Traffic was steady going north, even at three o’clock in the morning. The last stretch before the border, six miles up the freeway.
A car was coming along the access road. I instinctively stepped back, even though it was probably impossible to see me from two hundred yards out. As I watched, it turned in to the parking lot of the warehouse. A white car, with a blue-and-red shield insignia on the door.
A security patrol.
I made myself breathe. This was good news. The security passes at the warehouse were infrequent, limited to a single driver making a slow roll through the parking lot of each business along the road. He’d take a look and then go on his way. We’d probably be clear for another two hours.
As I peered over the edge, the car made a wide circle, cruising past the entrance and continuing on to the opposite side of the lot. Where he stopped.
Oh, shit.
I turned and waved frantically at Granddad. My eyes adjusted, and I could tell he was standing, watching me. I spun back to the security car.
Still stopped. And now the door was opening and the driver was stepping out.
No reason to freak, I told myself. We hadn’t touched a thing out front. Even if he came around back, our big moving truck would probably look like any other vehicle the warehouse might use. He’d think everything was all cool.
Unless he saw our ladder.
Or we’d already triggered an alarm somehow. Maybe the cops were on their way right now.
Oh, shit.
The security guard left the door of the car open and walked to the side of the parking lot.
Where he unzipped his pants.
Not taking a look. Taking a piss.
I made myself breathe—again—and by the time I’d stopped huffing like a buffalo, the guard was in the car again and driving out of the lot.
I walked back to Granddad.
“We’re clear,” I said, and told him about the security guard.
Granddad shook his head and sighed. Maybe at me, maybe at fate. He tossed the tarp aside.
Past the yawning hole was the huge interior of the warehouse. Silent and echoing all at once. The roof beneath my feet suddenly felt fragile, like it might collapse at any moment and send us both tumbling into the pit below.
Granddad had been unpacking the rest of our gear while I’d been busy with the guard. He picked up a small winch and used a power drill to secure it with bolts near the edge of the hole. He fed the end of the rope through the winch and handed the rope to me. I began tying the rope to a bosun’s chair that Granddad had bought the week before at a marine salvage store. The chair was a simple rig, just thick blue canvas over a base of rigid plastic for the seat, forming a triangle shape with a few straps and D-rings attached.
It would let me sit in relative comfort while Granddad lowered me into the pit.
Within five minutes I was strapped into the chair while he cranked up the last foot of slack in the rope.
“Check the brake,” I said. I’d seen him lock the winch. But I was about to be dangling a long fall away from a concrete floor.
He twisted the brake an extra millimeter. “It’s set. Don’t forget, now. If we have to meet later—”
“I know.” If there was trouble, if I screwed it up and set off the alarms, Granddad would be gone. Down the ladders and through the forest, two miles away to where we’d left the rental car. If I couldn’t find my own way out of the warehouse and back to the car, I’d be busted.
He was a convicted felon. I was a juvenile. No question.
“Let’s go,” I said. Granddad nodded.
I took a deep breath and knelt down to grip the edge of the hole with my gloved hands. I stepped backward off the roof into the hole, lowering myself slowly, like I was doing a pull-up in reverse, until the bosun’s chair took my full weight. Its canvas creaked, and the safety straps tightened around my thighs.
I let go, and the chair swung lazily. My head was level with the cut edge of the plywood sheet. I could smell the singed wood and glue, still hot from the saw blade.
Only twenty feet from where I hung was the front of the warehouse. To my right I could see the top of the interior office space, and near that was the first gigantic row of storage racks.
We were here for something specific, but seeing those racks, loaded with huge wooden pallets of everything from food to furniture, made me feel like it was Christmas. I slapped a hand against the side of the chair. Giddyup.
Granddad passed me the bag of hand tools, and I clipped it to the D-ring at the side of the chair. He gave me the smaller bag, the one with his burglary kit. I cradled it in my arms.
Granddad tapped the kit. “You remember about the alarm?”
“The phone line first, then the battery,” I said. I was sure I could get by with just doing the battery, but I’d told Granddad—after we’d argued about it for an hour—that I would take the precaution of bypassing the phone line beforehand.
He nodded. He reached over to ease off on the winch brake and turn the handle. Smooth as honey, I started sinking.
The clicks of the winch echoed in the gloom as I ratcheted down. It was like being on a trapeze. Without a net. Cool.
When I was halfway down, I held my hand up and Granddad stopped cranking. The chair spun, slowly. I had to keep turning my head to see the front of the warehouse.
On the wall above the office, there was a bank of passive infrared sensors, about twelve feet off the floor. The sensors were angled downward, covering a wide swath of floor near the office and front entrance. I knew the brand. Their effective range was fifty feet.
Knock the infrareds out and I would have clear passage to the office. And the main alarm box inside it.
I knew this because Granddad had bought inside knowledge about the warehouse’s security from a guy I’d never met in person. One of Hollis’s many buddies. Granddad must have trusted him, though, or at least believed Hollis when he vouched for the guy’s creds. So far his information about the alarms was spot-on. I wondered if he was an employee of the warehouse. Maybe even the owner.
I frowned at myself. Better get my head in the game.
I unzipped the little burglary kit and looped its carrying strap around my neck.
“Okay,” I said. My voice sounded loud in the big metal cavern.
Granddad reached down and yanked hard on the taut line. The tug started me swinging in a short arc that got wider as I leaned into it. Five feet. The heavy bag of hand tools bumped against my leg with each swing. Ten feet.
In one more pass, I was close enough to reach out and grab one of the wooden planks that made a broad reinforcing stripe every few feet on the corrugated metal wall. My weight tried to pull me back, and for a moment I hung by one arm like a gibbon. The corners of the raw wood bit into my palm, even through the glove.
Granddad gave me slack on the line until I could get a foot on one of the wooden planks and stand. Face-first against the wall, midway between the floor and the ceiling. The bank of infrared sensors was four feet below my shoe.
From the burglar kit, I took out a multifunction wrench and a set of wire cutters. I looked down at the infrareds and grinned.
Time for the fun part.
I took two deep breaths and heaved with my arms and legs to twist myself around until I was almost upside down on the wall. I shoved my sneakered feet into the gap between the wooden planks and the wall, jamming them painfully but immovably.
The chair tried mightily to pull me back upright. To stay where I was, I had to tense every muscle in my gut, like doing crunches in gym class. But doing them while blood rushed to my head and with my feet feeling like they were trapped in a vise. Then it got a little worse, when one of the straps started putting pressure on my balls.
I almost laughed. Granddad would have hated this. No wonder he let me take point.
But the infrareds—those were easy, even hanging head down like a bat. Pop the screws on the housing with the needle-nose pliers of the wrench and cut two wires. Dead meat.
“All set,” I called to Granddad as I gratefully clambered right side up. He eased off on the brake, and I let go of the wall and swung like Spider-Man—no Spidey-sense necessary, now that the alarm was toast—down to the warehouse floor.
I unstrapped myself from the chair and let it fall.
“Take your time,” Granddad said. His voice rebounded off the floor and walls of the huge interior. Time-ime-ime. The echo helping him get a few last reminders in.
From my new vantage point on the floor, the place was spooky, no question. The racks were like monoliths to some ancient pissed-off god. The warehouse behind them looked like it stretched on next to forever.
I took out my penlight and walked up the short flight of stairs to the door of the interior office. It was locked. I fished Granddad’s snap gun out of the burglar’s kit and had the lock picked in under a minute.
The alarm was right on the wall, directly across from the door, a box about the size and shape of a small medicine cabinet. Painted egg yellow, with the security company’s logo in police blue. The padlock on the box was so tiny I used the wire cutters to snap it and reach the control panel.
Three minutes later I had the heavy twenty-four-volt brick battery connected to the alarm’s power lines and I’d greased the phone line around the alarm connection. Just in case I screwed up somehow with the battery and the alarm tried to dial out. I knew it wouldn’t.
But I still held my breath as I cut the alarm’s power.
No blinking lights on the panel. No sirens. The alarm fed off the battery and never knew the difference.
We owned the place, right down to the coffeemakers in the break room.
I checked my watch—3:34 now. We had less than ninety minutes to take what we wanted and clear out, leaving a safety margin of a full hour between our exit and the first guys on the 6:00 A.M. shift straggling in. One more hour after that, we were scheduled to meet Hollis back in Seattle. We had to be on time. Granddad had been very clear on that point.
I jogged across the wide stretch of floor to the loading bay. Two Hyster electric forklifts sat against the wall, plugged in to their sockets like chained mastiffs. A rubber-coated button on the side of the door was obvious enough. I pressed it, and the heavy metal door began to rise with a loud hum.
Granddad was standing on the loading dock outside. Behind him was the dark forest of trees, with no lights in sight, except for stars, and no people for at least half a mile.
“So?” said Granddad.
“Cake,” I said. I could see that he’d opened up the back of our moving truck and set the loading-bay ramp in place. It was a big truck, over a thousand cubic feet of capacity.
Granddad took the duffel bag from me and tapped the burglar’s kit. “I’ll find the goods. You get the forklift ready.”
He meant disabling the warning light and beeping when the machine was in reverse. It only took a minute, and I was unplugging the forklift from the wall just as he came walking back.
“I found two,” he said. “Follow me.”
I pushed the button to start the forklift—the electric engine made a loud stutter—and I got used to the feel of steering it as I trailed Granddad slowly along the rows. We stopped at the end of a long row of large cargo on wooden pallets.
Granddad slapped the closest pallet with one gloved hand. “These.”
Pall Mall cigarettes. They didn’t look like I’d imagined. The cases were covered with a big sheet of protective plastic wrap that bound them to the pallet. The whole thing the size of a wide refrigerator.
The cases had been shipped straight from the manufacturer to the warehouse. Since the thousands of packs inside were intended as export products, they had not been stamped for Washington State taxes.
Unstamped packs were like gold. Any smuggler could slap on his own fake tax stamps, to match whatever country he wanted, and sell the cartons as if they were legit. The packs could even be sold under the table in the U.S., without any stamps at all. A lot of people were happy as clams to buy their smokes at almost half price.
Fifty cartons per master case. Forty master cases on each large pallet. Four pallets here in the warehouse, according to Granddad’s source. At thirty bucks per carton retail in the States, that was almost a quarter of a million bucks here, a little less overseas.
Granddad would clear somewhere around a hundred grand for the four pallets, I guessed. Once I learned how much, I wanted to figure out what it came to per cigarette. Maybe it really was better than gold, if you compared the weight.
“Load ’em,” Granddad said. “I’ll find the other two.”
Driving the forklift was a blast. It wasn’t my first time, and I’d handled heavier equipment before, but these little machines hauled ass. After I unloaded the first pallet of master cases onto the truck, I took an extra loop around the rows, just to feel it corner.
I was dropping the second pallet in the truck when Granddad came out onto the loading dock.
“We’ve a problem,” he said, turning and walking back inside.
I stopped the forklift and walked quickly after him. His long legs ate up the ground a lot faster than mine, even though I was only five inches shorter.
He stopped at a row not far from the warehouse office and pointed up at a higher level. “There they are,” he said.
The two pallets rested on the third level of racks, maybe eighteen feet above the floor. Someone had cut off the thick plastic wrapping that protected the other pallets, but other than that they looked the same.
“Okay,” I said. It made some sense that the warehouse might store the cigarettes up high. As cargo weight went, cigarettes were lighter than most things. Easier to put on a top shelf than lumber, at any rate. “I saw a hoist over on the other side. We can get them down.”
Granddad shook his head. “That’s not it.”
“We’ve got enough time. Twenty minutes, I’ll have them on the truck.”
He shook his head again.
Whenever he went silent like this, I knew he was testing me. It really pissed me off.
I looked again at the pallets. And finally saw what Granddad saw. Not only was the plastic wrap gone, but the master cases had been moved and then restacked on the pallet. On the untouched pallets I’d loaded into the truck, the Pall Mall logos on every case lined up neatly in the same direction. These cases were jumbled around, some backward, some not. And the only reason I could think of for unwrapping and shuffling forty cases was …
“They’ve been opened,” I said.
“And look,” said Granddad.
He led me over to an area to the far right of the first rack. A large blue machine was bolted to the floor near the wall. A short conveyor belt made the short part of the machine’s L shape, while the long arm looked like some combination of a table saw and a printing press.
“A stamping machine?” I said.
“Yep,” said Granddad. He sounded a little amused. “Every case opened and every damn pack inside marked with a Washington tax stamp. We don’t even have to take them down to know that. These cases aren’t going over the border. They’ll be sold around the state.”
“So why are they here? Why send them to this place if they aren’t being exported?” I caught the whiny tone in my own voice and hated it.
“Convenience, I suspect. The tobacco company just sends one big shipment. Half for inside the state, half for export.”
“And your guy didn’t know that? Was the idiot guessing or what?”
“He knew the cigarettes were coming in. That was all.”
“Shit. Shit.” I fumed and glared up at the cases, twenty feet off the floor, wishing them with all my might to go back to their original state. “How much can we still get for them?”
“Twelve to twenty years.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“But that’s what they’re worth, boy. I don’t know if our buyer will want them with the tax stamps. And we sure as sin don’t want to keep eighty cases in our garage, now, do we?”
“Somebody will buy them.”
He waved a hand, like brushing away a fly. “Somebody, somewhere, sometime. If you don’t have a buyer you can trust for shit like this, you leave it alone.”
I fumed. Looked at my watch—3:58. “Okay. No cigarettes. What else do we want? Half the stuff in here is valuable. There’s televisions over there. And appliances.”
“Same deal. Just stones hanging around your neck.”
“You must know somebody who’ll take them. Three weeks of work and you’re good with making … what, maybe forty grand out of it?” Granddad could clear that on a decent house job.
“Some people work a year to make less.”
“We’ve got a whole empty truck. We’re just going to walk away? Fuck that.”
Granddad’s face darkened, and he took a step toward me. I flinched.
He wasn’t a hitter. Not to me anyway. He’d never done more than swat me on the ear when he thought I was being especially dumb. Then again I’d never argued with his decisions right in the middle of a job before either.
But he didn’t raise his hand. He took a long breath. Stared at me. I could feel the blood going out of my face. The stare was almost worse than getting hit.
“All right,” he said. “I told you it was your job. Your call.” He looked around at the warehouse. “So tell me. What’s it to be?”
I looked around. The warehouse seemed even larger than before. We hadn’t even glanced at ninety percent of the place. Which racks held the best stuff? Was there anything even more valuable than the cigarettes?
Screw it. There wasn’t time to search every rack hoping for something better. “Maybe those laptops?” I said, pointing to a stack of two dozen slim boxes. Granddad shrugged. “I might be able to sell them. A hundred apiece, maybe.” He sounded bored.
I scanned the racks nearby frantically. Spotting a familiar logo, I ran over for a closer look.
“Here!” I said. “Canadian Club. Cases of it!”
“You’ll hide the bottles in your locker at school, I suppose?”
“We don’t have to hide them. They can go straight to the back room at the bar, right?”
Granddad leaned against the forklift and folded his arms. “So let’s say we’re willing to risk losing the bar forever to save Albie spending a few dollars per bottle. The government can seize a business, you know, if they think it’s involved in smuggling. But put that aside. How do we get the cases there?”
“Well, we’ve got the truck,” I started to say. And then stopped. We had to drop the two pallets of unstamped cigarettes off with Hollis first. That was set for seven o’clock. Then we’d have to take the truck—the stolen truck—through downtown during the morning rush hour and park it right in back of the bar to unload every case—every stolen case, clearly marked NOT FOR RESALE—by hand ourselves. And then we’d still have to get rid of the damn truck.
“This sucks,” I said.
“The hard choices usually do,” said Granddad.
“I can’t believe there’s nothing in this whole fu—stupid place that’s worth the trouble to take.”
“Don’t think of it like something you’ve lost. It’s a successful job. We’re in the black. Provided”—he nodded toward the open loading bay—“that we get our asses out of here.”
So we did. I went outside, still steaming, and made three trips up and down the ladders to load all our gear off the roof and into the annoyingly large empty space in the back of the truck. Granddad secured the pallets and closed the loading-bay doors—but not before, I would bet, having a look at the office to double-check my handiwork on the alarm.
By the time I was done putting the ladder into the back and locking down the rolling door, my temper had cooled down. Granddad was in the driver’s seat of the truck, warming up the engine. He’d turned the fans up high to clear the fog off the windshield. The moving air felt cold, and I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my work glove.
“Did you get the rope and chair?” he said.
I nodded. “Everything.” I handed him his burglar kit. He set it on the box between our seats, and I noticed that the box was a case of the Canadian Club. I looked at him.
He smiled softly. “We may not sell it. That’s not to say I can’t enjoy some for myself.”
I laughed. “What about me?”
“I’ll buy you a soda.”
“Can I have a cell phone instead, Granddad?”
In the bluish dashboard lights, his broad hands looked like a marble statue’s as he put the truck in gear, each vein standing out in sharp relief.
“Call me Dono,” he said.