You're Next

‘We’re gonna try to bypass the lugs altogether.’

‘How?’

But Shep was already on his feet, digging around behind the circle of lights. From a footlocker he removed a futuristic-looking tool with the handle and motor of a chain saw and a white-silver circular blade emerging from a mouthlike guard.

‘Looks like something out of a snuff film,’ Mike said.

Shep held the tool out, his forearms cording. He’d donned eye protection and looked mildly deranged, which contributed to the effect. ‘Rescue saw, used by fire departments. The blade here’s tipped with industrial diamonds. Steel doesn’t like it much.’

‘I thought you said it’s too risky to cut into the safe.’

‘I said it was too risky to carve around the frame searching for the lugs. But if we can get the handle to turn, the camming-lever action will retract the lugs for us.’

Mike tried to hide his impatience. ‘So how do we get the handle to turn?’

‘The combination has three numbers, right? Each number corresponds to a disk inside the tumbler assembly. Each disk has a groove. And those grooves have to align to release the locking block and allow the door handle to turn. What I’m gonna do’ – he revved the motor, the jagged blade morphing into a smooth blur and then back again – ‘is cut away the locking block and skip all that other bullshit.’

‘How do you know where to cut?’

‘Experience. Feel. Instinct. It’s like hitting a curveball. Sometimes it all aligns and you catch up to it.’

‘And if you don’t?’

‘Then I mangle the tumbler assembly and we don’t get in.’

After a few more adjustments to the floodlights, Shep braced himself and leaned in, blade biting into steel with a scream that made Mike’s teeth throb in his gums. In the space between the combination dial and the door handle, Shep made three small equidistant cuts, no more than an inch deep. Mike was up, pacing, his hands laced at the back of his neck.

Finally Shep set down the rescue saw and wiped the sweat from his brow. He gripped the handle firmly and twisted. It rotated fully, giving off a dull thud.

Shep exhaled. Risked a glance at Mike. Then carefully turned the handle back into place.

‘It’s open,’ Mike said.

‘No. It’s unlocked. We don’t want to open it yet.’

‘Right. The booby trap.’ Mike blew out a breath and cracked his knuckles, his fingertips tingling with apprehension. ‘I guess if it was easy, everyone would do it.’

Shep headed back to the pallet and, after protracted clanking, returned with a power drill fitted with a thick, carbide-tipped bit. Centering the bit on the roof of the safe, he set his full weight behind the handle and drilled down. This went on for ten minutes, then twenty. Every so often he’d stop and blow steel dust from the hole, the powder turning white when he hit a layer of concrete. Finally, he stopped to rest.

His lips tensed, that crooked tooth poking into view. Sweat and bits of shrapnel sparkled in his buzz cut. ‘There is nothing better than this.’

Mike raised his eyebrows.

‘Taking a hard nut to crack and cracking it,’ Shep continued. ‘Making it spill its secrets, nothing left but the light of day. Doesn’t matter how much money you come from, how much security you pay for, what kind of custom safe you build. Any lowlife can grind past all that to the promised land. All it takes is focus and determination. Stamina, the great fucking equalizer. And when those doors swing open for me? Man. The release – the triumph.’ He shook his head and whistled a single note. Mike had never seen him so alive. ‘Half the time I don’t even care what the take is. It’s about the challenge, not the shit inside.’

‘But tonight,’ Mike said, ‘it’s about both.’

‘Tonight’s nothing. The nut isn’t the safe. It’s Brian McAvoy and Deer Creek Enterprises. Money, connections, power – they’re the guys sitting behind all those doors that’ve been closed to us all our lives. But if we apply the right pressure at the right time, make the right incisions’ – a nod to the cuts in the steel face – ‘pull the right levers, we’re gonna crack those mother-fuckers wide open.’

He resumed drilling, leaning on the handle, going through a second drill bit and then a third. At last, the resistance gave way, the drill chuck free-falling three inches to slap against the top of the safe. Shep blew the hole clear, then uncoiled a fiber-optic camera and fed the black wire through into the safe.

‘You see the negatives?’ Mike asked, the words coming in a rush. He had done his best to forget that every risk they’d taken was based on a hunch: that McAvoy had parked the photo negatives in the safe. Now they were inches away from knowing.

Shep studied the green footage on the tiny attached screen. His mouth drooped a bit, and then he leaned over the drill hole, sniffed a few times, and cursed under his breath.

Mike had the sensation of losing his stomach for a moment, a roller-coaster dip. ‘They’re not in there,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Shep said. ‘They are.’ But his expression stayed dire.

Mike looked on the tiny monitor. All he saw were a few brittle papers and – thank God – the thin stack of film negatives. Then he noticed it – a stripped wire rimming the safe’s interior. If the walls were tampered with or the door opened, the end of the wire would be pulled into contact with a bare wire loop. ‘If those exposed parts touch-’

‘They’ll ignite,’ Shep said.

‘So how did McAvoy get in?’

‘If you open the safe the right way, then the weight of the locking mechanism pins down the slack wire, moving it out of reach.’

‘But you destroyed the locking mechanism,’ Mike said.

Shep sat back on his heels, his hands resting on his stained jeans.

Mike wouldn’t let himself fully acknowledge Shep’s expression of defeat. ‘So we’ll just be ready to throw water in the minute the door opens,’ Mike said.

Shep grabbed the back of Mike’s collar and moved his face down toward the drill hole. ‘Smell.’

An acrid scent singed Mike’s nostrils.

‘That’s cellulose nitrate film,’ Shep said. ‘They made movies with it in the thirties and forties. But amateurs used to cut it down and use it for still photography.’ He pushed the fiber-optic camera in farther, moving the lens right above the strip of negatives. ‘See the horizontal dashes between every fourth sprocket hole?’

‘How do you know this? What are you, the Professor from Gilligan’s Island?’

Shep didn’t smile, which heightened Mike’s alarm. He just poked his tongue into his lip and said, ‘If you find it in a safe, odds are I’ve come across it. That shit is highly flammable – basically the same as flash paper. If it catches a spark, it’s up in a puff.’

Mike exhaled and let his forehead bang against the safe. Those photo negatives were a foot away, sitting behind an unlocked safe door that he couldn’t swing open. To have gotten this far, only to be undone by two lengths of stripped wire.

He swore sharply, a shout that echoed around the warehouse, rustling the bats in the rafters. Then he leaned back, spit into the darkness beyond the lights, and gave a bitter laugh. ‘I’m never going to see my daughter again, and it’s because some botanists from Stanford used cheap film eighty years ago.’

‘There’s no way I could’ve known.’ Shep’s voice was too loud, and his hearing had nothing to do with it.

‘I know that,’ Mike said. ‘I’m not blaming-’

‘I mean, of all things, cellulose nitrate-’

‘-you. I’m just grateful-’

‘-that shit’s so flammable it burns underwater.’

Mike bolted upright, Shep’s head snapping up. Mike jogged off into the darkness, shouting, ‘Get some light over here!’

He found the faucet near the wall by feel and cranked the handle, water drumming the wide basin below. Shep directed one of the T-bars of floodlights over, nearly blinding him.

Mike said, ‘We gotta drown the circuit. No oxygen, no spark.’

Shep came over, and they watched the rust-colored water slowly turn clear. ‘And if the water ruins the