Isaiah told the redheaded girl they wanted to look around. They took a tour, Dodson not believing what people bought for their pets. “Keep your dog’s breath fresh?” he said. “You can smell your dog’s breath you standing too close-rat food? Is that what that says? Somebody needs to tell these people you don’t need no special food for a goddamn rat-oh Lord have mercy, that can’t be right. Monkey diapers? Monkey diapers? You got a monkey wearing diapers you went to the wrong delivery room.”
They went to the dog treat aisle. Isaiah took a clear plastic envelope off a display peg. In the envelope were three seven-inch leathery sticks that looked like Slim Jims but more irregular and dried out. “They call them bully sticks,” Isaiah said. “They’re dog chews. They make them from bull penis.”
“Lupita told me there’s people that eat the balls,” Dodson said. “Now I know what they do with the dick part.”
“Look. The package weighs two point six ounces and check the price.”
“Twenty-one ninety-five? Shit. I wouldn’t pay twenty-one ninety-five for something for myself to chew.”
“There’s what, twenty-five packs there? That’s five hundred dollars and you could put them in a paper bag.”
In the health aisle, feline epilepsy test strips were forty-six ninety-five. Four tablets of dog dewormer, fifty-five ninety-five. The flea medicines were in a glass case that a clerk had to open with a key. A six-month supply of Frontline came in a flimsy cardboard box no bigger than a paperback book and weighed three ounces. Seventy-two ninety-five. A wireless fence was almost three hundred dollars. There was nothing to it. A plastic transmitter, a collar, and some sensors.
“How’s that supposed to be a fence?” Dodson said.
“If the dog tries to go outside the yard the transmitter zaps him through that collar,” Isaiah said.
“I know some niggas should have that collar on,” Dodson said. He was getting the concept. Isaiah was targeting pricey items that were small and easy to carry. And Pet City had security but nothing like Radio Shack or Zales Jewelry. Who robbed a pet store?
They drove around to the alley side. Isaiah took a casual stroll past the back of the building and came back to the car. “There’s a floodlight and a bullet cam over the door,” he said. “The knob lock is ordinary but the dead bolt is going to be tough and there might be a sliding bolt on the inside.”
On the way home they stopped at a Foster Freeze and ate soft ice cream. “We have to think this through,” Isaiah said. “Be methodical. Make a plan.”
“I ain’t got nothin’ against plans,” Dodson said.
“No mistakes, nothing stupid that’ll get us busted.”
“I hope you not calling me stupid.”
“That’s not what I mean. You’re into that gangsta thing. Walk up and stick a gun in somebody’s face.”
“The gangsta thing ain’t a technique, it’s an attitude. You either make something your bitch or you gonna be the bitch.”
“Okay, but no guns. We clear?”
“Yes, nigga, we clear. Will you get on with it?”
They went home and talked some more, Isaiah figuring out detail after detail, making lists in a notebook. Dodson was impatient. Isaiah did all the figuring out and talked over any of his suggestions. They went shopping. Rite Aid, Big 5, the Goodwill store.
“What we gonna do with all this stuff?” Dodson said.
“Eliminate mistakes,” Isaiah said.
“Whatever the fuck that means. And what about the door? We gonna pick the lock or use a bump key?”
“The knob lock is easy but the dead bolt is an ASSA High Security model. Can’t be picked or bumped and you can’t drill it out unless you’ve got an industrial drill press.”
“How come you know so much about locks?”
“My brother. He knew everything.”
“So what do we do?”
“I was watching the news last night. Cops raided a crack house in Compton.”
“Yeah, so what else is new?”
“I think they’re onto something.”
They went to an army surplus store. Isaiah told the bald guy sitting behind a case full of knives what he wanted. The guy took them to the back and found it leaning against the wall behind a rack of petrified field jackets.
“Damn, Isaiah,” Dodson said. “You ain’t playin’ around.”
It was a little after eleven when they got to Pet City. Traffic was light but enough for cover. Dodson was more hyped than afraid. He was used to high-pressure situations, crack dealing was a high-pressure business. He shot Lil Genius, who was shooting at him. He was robbed at gunpoint twice, got busted twice, did a stretch at YA camp, and had a fight with a Cambodian or a Mexican every day. Some Locos chased him into a marsh near the Dominguez Channel and he hid in the nasty-smelling reeds for an hour and got chewed up by the mosquitos. He glanced at Isaiah. Yeah, uh-huh, Mr. Eliminate Mistakes looked like he was about to jump off a cliff, sweating and taking deep breaths. Yeah, I bet you wish you had some gangsta in you now.
Both of them had on button-down shirts and reading glasses with the lenses taken out. The Explorer was washed, had stolen license plates, and a UCLA decal on the back bumper. Just two nice college boys on their way home from volleyball practice. They drove past Pet City, turned the corner, and made another turn into the alley behind the store. “Remember,” Isaiah croaked, “we’re methodical, we’re following the plan.”
“I heard you the first four hundred times,” Dodson said. He could see the fear of getting caught in Isaiah’s eyes, hear it when he swallowed dry. “I sho’ hope we pull this off,” Dodson said. He shook his head, his brow crinkled with fake worry. “Last time I was in juvie camp some white boys caught me in the laundry room and tore my ass apart. I couldn’t walk for days.”
“Could we not talk, please?” Isaiah said.
Isaiah turned off the headlights and crept the car along, gravel crunching under the tires. The dark changed everything. Even Dodson was a little unnerved. The telephone poles were burnt trees, the dumpsters hiding places. It was quiet, peaceful even, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like the SWAT team was inside the store loading their Uzis and talking on their radios. Pigeon One and Pigeon Two are at the location. Do you copy? Isaiah parked the Explorer and sat there like he’d forgotten what was next. Dodson started to change clothes. “What you sitting there for, Cap’n?” he said. “Ain’t you gonna lead the charge?”
They parked behind the building and got out of the car. They were covered head to toe. Ski masks, sunglasses, long-sleeve shirts, latex gloves, and headband flashlights like coal miners wear. Isaiah stood there and cleared his throat. His mind was a blank. Dodson smirked, strolled up to the back door and a floodlight came on, lighting up half the alley. He drew the gas-powered pellet pistol they’d bought at Big 5, held it sideways, and shot out the light. “Take that, bitch,” he said, glass tinkling to the ground.
The battering ram they got from the surplus store was the same kind the cops used on that drug raid in Compton. Three feet long, shaped like a submarine with handles on it like a pommel horse. It weighed fifty-three pounds and needed two people to swing it. When Barry Bonds smashed a home run over the right-field fence into China Basin his bat generated eight thousand pounds of force. The battering ram hit with forty thousand. Isaiah and Dodson practiced at a construction site and bashed through a cinder block wall.
Isaiah couldn’t feel his hands and his throat was so dry he couldn’t speak above a whisper. “Ready?” he said.
“Shit,” Dodson said, “I been ready.”
They swung the ram like a pendulum. Back and forth, back and forth, getting a rhythm, tensing for the power stroke: Together, they said, “One-two-THREE!” The ram slammed into the lock set like a smart bomb, the knob lock and dead bolt ripped right out of their strike plates, the door torn away from the jamb. Isaiah was stupefied. It worked.