Get up. Get up and keep moving.
He tried to push himself up. His arms trembled. A pins-and-needles sensation attacked his fingers.
I’m. . not trapped.
He squinted at his watch. 9:49.
Not. . trapped.
He collapsed to the floor.
50
Sprawled on the cold floor, shrouded in mist, eyes glazed, Corey saw not the walls of the freezer and the frozen boxes on the racks, but an eighteen-year-old and his older friend. .
Leon picked the house on that sunny April day as he always did: on the spur of the moment. His impulsiveness thrilled Corey, and when he found himself having doubts about his friendship with Leon, when he asked himself when he was going to go straight and find a job somewhere, or go to college, like Grandma Louise was always telling him he should do, he remembered that rush, that charge of adrenaline that came only from Leon picking the house to hit and not wasting any time about it-doing it right then and there.
“I cruised past it last week, man,” Leon said. They crawled past a neatly kept, brick bungalow in Leon’s Cutlass Supreme, Corey riding shotgun. A Public Enemy track boomed on the Alpine stereo, “Rebel without a Pause,” the ceaseless trumpet glissando piercing Corey’s brain.
Leon sneered. “Guy who lives there, shiny-headed, Humpty Dumpty, fried-pork-skin-eating motherfucker, he had a white Cadillac parked out front. He was waxing it like it was some bitch’s luscious ass.”
“Why didn’t you hit it last week?” Corey asked. Leon sometimes pulled house jobs without Corey. The revelation that he’d gone solo always left Corey feeling a strange mixture of disappointment and relief.
Shrugging, Leon took a drag on his Newport and exhaled a thread of smoke, a gold watch glittering on his wrist that complemented the scalloped chains around his neck.
“I didn’t feel it then, you know I have to be in the mood, the golden gut has to be talking to me, C-Note-but I feel like doing the old one-two punch on his crib right now.”
For no reason at all, Corey’s stomach clenched. He was always a little nervous before a break-in, but nothing that felt like this. He had big-time butterflies.
Corey cracked his knuckles. “Maybe we should come back later. Or go somewhere else.”
“Fuck that.” Leon glared at him. “It’s one o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday, no one’s gonna be in there, you’ve got to respect my instincts, if I worked on the New York Stock Exchange I’d be a motherfuckin’ billionaire, Dow Jones Junior, respect the hustle, hombre, or drag your black ass back to church and holler hosannas with Nana and pass the collection plate, you dig?”
Corey recognized that feverish look in Leon’s eyes that made it clear he would not be denied, that look that said he was going to go through with it whether Corey was down or not. But if he backed out, Leon would never let him hear the end of it. He would be branded a punk, he would lose respect, and Leon would spread the word that he’d let his boy down, and among their crowd, there was no worse label to wear. No one wanted to deal with a punk except other punks, and who cared what they thought?
“All right,” Corey said.
Leon flashed his gap-toothed grin. “That’s my homeboy.”
Leon swung around the corner and parked in the shade of a sycamore, across from an elementary school. Children at recess pranced and skipped on the playground in the afternoon sunshine, looking as if they would be innocent, young, and carefree forever.
Corey found himself wishing that he were one of them.
“Pass the piece, chief,” Leon said.
Corey sighed, looked away from the school. Two rumpled nylon book packs lay on the floor beneath his feet, one red, one blue. Corey handed the red one to Leon.
It contained a Glock 9 mm with a scratched off serial number. The blue one, which Corey picked up, held a crowbar and other tools. Both knapsacks bore ID tags with someone else’s names on them. It was Leon’s idea. His theory was that if they ever had to cut loose from the scene, they could toss the bags in the bushes somewhere, and the items they contained would be linked to someone else.
“Let’s act like we’ve got a purpose, my man,” Leon said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Time to get money.”
Bags strapped over their shoulders, they strolled back to the house, walking confidently, as if they were high school students who lived in the neighborhood. Leon always said that was the key to not getting caught: act like you have every right to be wherever you are, and no one notices you. It’s the skittish ones that get nabbed.
They swaggered right up to the front door of the chosen home. While Leon did look-out duty at the end of the walkway, Corey rang the doorbell, and knocked three times.
No one answered. No dogs barked.
He levered the forked end of the crowbar into the doorjamb. In half a minute, he had pried the door open.
“Let’s do this,” Leon said, coming up behind Corey and slapping his shoulder. He withdrew the Glock and went inside.
Corey hesitated on the threshold. He thought about those children in the school yard, playing in the sun. Suddenly, he felt on the brink of tears.
Moving deeper into the house, Leon glanced at him over his shoulder. “You see someone coming?”
Lips pressed together tightly, Corey shook his head.
“Then get in here. You know the drill, C-Note, seven minutes to win it.”
Corey pushed back thoughts of the children. He dug the stopwatch out of his sack and pressed the button to start the timer.
Seven minutes inside. That was their rule. Leon had made it up. He said that seven was a lucky number, so if they measured all of their break-ins by the seven-minute-rule, they would never go down-universal law would be on their side or some other metaphysical weirdness that Leon always seemed to be talking about.
Corey crossed the threshold and shut the door behind him.
The shadowed house was cool and silent. The living room was modestly furnished, but clean and orderly, the residence of someone who’d worked to turn a house into a home.
Leon marched down the hallway, headed straight for the master bedroom, where the jewelry would likely be, and where cash could often be found, too, tucked between pages of a Bible, secreted underneath a mattress, hidden in a nightstand drawer, or concealed in a shoe box in the closet. Corey followed. His gaze scanned across the photographs clustered on the end tables and walls.
A man, woman, and little girl appeared in many of the pictures. They were smiling, happy. And the man looked very familiar. .
No, Corey thought, cold perspiration beading his forehead. God, no.
“Come on!” Leon yelled from the bedroom.
Corey hustled into the room. Leon had found a jewelry box on the dresser and was dumping the glittering contents into his bag.
“Check the closet,” Leon said. “I’ve got a feeling about what might be in there.”
“Wait.” Corey wiped the sweat from his brow. “I know the guy who lives here. He was one of my high school teachers.”