“I don’t want to.”
Jeff said, “Look. You’ve had guns pointed at you for ten minutes. Has anybody harmed or abused you in any way? No. Did we come in here and start shooting your toes off? When you said you couldn’t open the safe, did we shoot one of you and tell the other one to do it? No. We trusted you. Now it’s your turn. Give me the keys.”
“I still owe money on that car.”
“Then you’ll be glad to be the one I shoot.”
Voinovich reached into his pocket and produced the keys.
“Toss them near my feet.”
The keys landed between Jeff’s feet. He picked them up, then said, “Don’t take your eyes off either one of them.”
“All right, guys,” said Carrie. “Stand close together so I can see you both.”
The two men stood there with Carrie holding her gun on them. Then Jeff returned, uncoiling a rope as he came. “Okay, everybody out of the office and out here with me.” The others came out and stood with him near the steel door.
Jeff tied the rope around the safe and went to the door. “Everybody stand clear.”
He stepped outside, got into the Toyota Sequoia, and started the engine. The others could hear the engine accelerate. At their feet, the loose coils of rope snaked around on the floor like a whip, then went taut, vibrating like a harp string. There was a loud engine sound, angry and dangerous, now mixed with the screech of wood straining to pull free of nails, then wood popping and cracking. Carrie and the two men looked at the wall, which was beginning to cant toward them, dragged out of position by Voinovich’s big vehicle.
Carrie held her gun in both hands, using her left arm to steady it. She shifted her aim now and then from Voinovich, who was looking frantic about the fate of his Sequoia, to Jimmy Gaffney, whom she didn’t trust because his eyes were filled with guile. She didn’t like being in the room with them, and she didn’t like the fact that the office wall was moving, bottom first, toward the door.
There was a higher squeal of nails, a last bang of wood breaking, a shredding noise, and the wall fell inward into the office.
The safe skittered across the concrete floor to the doorway, hit the slightly raised weather-strip, tipped, and bounced end over end into the parking lot.
Jeff returned. “Okay, guys. Here’s the last bit of work we’ll need from you. Come out here and lift the safe into the back of this thing so we can be on our way.”
Voinovich said, “Don’t take my SUV”
Jeff said, “What choice do I have? Nobody else has a car that can even hold it.”
Voinovich turned to Gaffney. “Say something.”
“Don’t take his car. It’ll break his heart.”
Jeff said, “I’ll leave it in perfect shape on the street somewhere and call the club to tell you where it is.”
They walked out to the place where the safe lay, a few feet behind the SUV. Voinovich said to Gaffney, “If we had the combination, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“No shit,” Gaffney said. “I would have taken the money myself and be halfway to Rio.”
“You wouldn’t fit in there. Everybody is brown. You’d look like a freak. Help me lift this. And get it onto the carpet so we don’t scratch my bumper.” They squatted, lifted, and strained. “Use your legs, not your back.”
They lifted the safe onto the bed at the back of the SUV. Then they both sat on the bumper, breathing heavily and stretching their strained arm muscles. Gaffney looked at Jeff. “Jesus Christ. Getting robbed by you two is a lot of work.”
Carrie walked up with the two pistols that belonged to Gaffney and Voinovich, handed one to Jeff, and kept the other.
“Okay, guys,” Jeff said. “We’ve got to finish up and get out of here. Let’s head inside.”
“You’re not going to kill us, are you?”
“Not if you do as we say,” said Carrie.
They made their way past the fallen wall into the office. Jeff said, “Sit down on those chairs.” The two men did, and he wrapped duct tape around their wrists to bind their hands behind them, then taped their ankles together, then ran tape around and around them to keep them on the seats. He went to the desk, removed the batteries from their cell phones, then took the recorder from the security system.
“Well, good night, guys.”
They nodded sullenly. As Carrie was leaving, Gaffney said, “Would you really have killed us?”
“I’m still thinking about it.”
“Oh.”
Jeff and Carrie went outside, locked the steel door behind them, and stopped to look at each other for a moment. “What do you think?”
“I’m glad they don’t let strip clubs operate near residential neighborhoods. If they did, you couldn’t feel good about firing a gun. But here you could set off bombs.” She smiled up at him. “Can I shoot them?”
“What? Why?”
“Because I never have, and this is such a great opportunity. I really, really want to.”
“Get your car. I’ll follow you home.”
“How about just one, then?”
“We’ve got to go. The police come by these places regularly, just to check the doors.”
He followed her back onto the freeway, onto the exit ramp at Vineland, and up the hill to her house. When they arrived, she opened the garage door and he drove in. She threw an old folded tarp on the floor and covered it with two sheets of plywood. They slid the safe out onto the plywood so it wouldn’t chip the concrete garage floor.
She was beaming. “You know, tonight was even better than last night. Robbing a strip club. Holding hostages. Grand Theft Auto. And tomorrow, safecracking. I think I’m falling in love.”
19
JERRY GAFFNEY WAS only half asleep, because his mind couldn’t quite shut down. He was thinking about too many things, or rather, passing over each of them in a repetitive cycle. Words, phrases, images had to be revisited. He slowly rose toward consciousness. He was lying on the clean, crisp white sheet on the big California-king bed in an apartment in Manhattan Beach. He looked at the digital clock on his right side and it said 4:15 A.M. He looked to his left and in the dim light he saw the creamy back of Sandy Belknap.
It was a short, abruptly tapering back that started with lean but square shoulders that looked as though she did some kind of workout, and then narrowed quickly. The ridge of backbone near the top became a recess at mid- back until it flattened just above the dimple that announced the start of her perfect bottom.
Jerry felt reverence for the beauty he could see at this moment in the dim predawn light. He had no right to be with her, certainly no right to be naked with her in her bed. It was one of those sudden phenomena, rare and unexpected like hailstorms.
He had spent much of the day after his brother, Jimmy, left driving her around in a new sedan with dealer plates that she had borrowed from the car lot. They had gone from restaurant to bar to office building to apartment, talking to her friends. At each stop she’d introduced him as her cousin from St. Louis. Her girlfriends were all temptingly attractive.
But Sandy Belknap was not somebody who suffered from competition. She had been a cheerleader at the University of Missouri and had held some kind of national sorority office. She was not a genius, but she could speak fluently and confidently, and that probably was about as useful as high intelligence. She was beautiful in a blond, blue-eyed, Midwestern kind of way, but maybe not clever or single-minded enough to be what she so obviously must have wanted to be, an actress. All good-looking young women from other states wanted that, even if they didn’t do anything to accomplish it except present themselves in Los Angeles.
He lay in the bed feeling the subtle circulation of cool air from the grate over the bed and back into the intake in the hall ceiling at the other end of the room. The day had been one of those Los Angeles high-pressure summer days when the sky was a perfectly unvarying light blue bowl of infinity. The heat was the sort that radiated upward
