LOS ANGELES
When you walk into a liquor store with a gun in your hand and a mask over your face, you rip the lid off the world. Time does real Einstein shit. It stretches; it shrinks.
One second through the door, before the first oh shit oh shit oh shit had passed through the clerk’s head, Nate had time to remember the night Polly had been born. He’d gotten a call from Avis, fear in her voice. She told him she was in labor. The baby was coming. Would Nate be there? Would he meet her at the hospital?
And Nate said he’d be there. He’d hung up the phone. Looked over to Nick in the driver’s seat. Nick had the pistol in his hand, his ski mask in his lap. He had that devil’s smile.
“Everything cool?” Nick had asked. And Nate hadn’t done a thing but nodded and slipped his own mask over his face.
That whole memory flashed through him in the time it took him to walk from the door to the counter. Nate waved the pistol at the clerk. The clerk fell back against the high-end booze behind him. Nate barked something slow-mo through the ski mask. The clerk moved. Nate figured the silent alarm had been triggered. It didn’t matter either way. It would be over soon.
The clerk popped open the register. He dumped the cash drawer on the counter. The loose change spilled down onto the chip rack. The clerk babbled some liquid language from god knows where. It was an intimate moment, this moment between robber and victim. A gun to the head made you naked.
Nate put the gun to the man’s head. He said, “Safe.”
The clerk pushed aside the boner-pill display. The safe revealed itself. The clerk keyed in the combination. He got it wrong. He keyed it in again. He got it wrong. One more wrong guess locked the thing for twenty-four hours. Nate lowered the pistol.
“Take three deep breaths,” he said.
The clerk gave him what-the-fuck eyes.
“I said take three deep breaths and then try it again.”
The clerk followed instructions. In through the nose, out through the mouth times three. The clerk punched in the code.
Click.
The safe door rolled open. Nate eyeballed the inside. He did cash stack calculations in his head. He called it two large. Worth it.
You can’t say that yet. Not until it’s over.
The clerk bagged the cash. Nate took it. Headed for the door. Time corrected itself as he hit night air. He came back to the city in all its heat and ugliness. Like any drug, the stickup rush had a major downside. It couldn’t last forever.
He got into the car, turned to Polly in the shotgun seat as he shifted into reverse. Her eyes glistened with life.
“That’s how you do it,” he said. She nodded. She smiled. Her smile scared him.