He had a set of picks hidden under the spare tire in his trunk. The state of New York frowned on the possession of burglar’s tools, but sometimes they came in handy in his line of work. So he kept them out of sight.
He tucked the small satchel into his pocket and trotted back up the driveway. As he went past the house, he glanced at it to make sure Dwayne didn’t happen to be looking out the back window.
Once he was hidden beyond the corner of the garage, he went down on one knee so he could be at eye level with the lock. He set the satchel on the ground and drew out two picks. The lock didn’t look very challenging, and he thought he could defeat it in two to three minutes.
After three minutes, he concluded it wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d first thought. But some locks were like that. Maybe this one would take him six.
Cal was so focused on what he was doing, and so confident he was out of sight, that he had failed to notice Dwayne standing down by the front end of his pickup truck.
“I thought you were going for a crap,” Dwayne said.
Cal’s head turned abruptly.
“But then I happened to look out the living room window and saw you going to your car, and I wondered what the hell you were doing.”
Cal withdrew the picks, put them back in the satchel, and stood. He offered no apology as he looked his brother-in-law in the eye.
“What’s in the garage, Dwayne?” he asked.
Dwayne walked slowly up the side of the truck, past the corner of the garage, and stopped when he was no more than a foot away.
“What’s it to you?” Dwayne asked.
“I know where you got the pizza money, and it wasn’t from Walmart.”
“What?”
“The guy at the printing shop. You met him earlier, got paid, and then made a pickup at the shop.”
The muscles in Dwayne’s neck tightened. “You’ve been following me?”
“I saw you in the alley, taking the money,” he said. “Then I followed the other guy.”
“You fucking son of a bitch. Who are you working for? Or did Celeste put you up to this?”
Cal shook his head, ignored the questions. “Just open the garage.”
“It was Celeste, wasn’t it?”
“No. But she is worried about you. She says you’ve been gone a lot. Sometimes at odd hours. She senses something’s going on, but she doesn’t know what.”
“Whatever’s going on is between her and me.”
“No,” Cal said. “She’s my sister. If you’re into something bad, Dwayne, it could blow back on her. Open the garage.”
“I’m not opening the garage. You need to get in your car and get the fuck out of here and take that freaky little kid with you.”
“Does Celeste know what’s in here?”
“You’re not hearing me, Cal. Get off my property.”
“I suppose you could call the cops and have me arrested for trespassing.” Cal reached into his pocket for his phone. “You want to make the call or you want me to do it?”
Dwayne’s eyes blinked. “You’re sticking your nose in where it don’t belong,” Dwayne warned. “Something bad could happen to you.”
Cal smiled and closed the gap between them by a few inches. “You seem to be under the impression that I give a fuck. Everything bad that can happen to me has already happened. Open the garage.”
Dwayne slowly shook his head, dropped his chin down to his chest in defeat. He dug into his pockets and withdrew a set of keys. In addition to the big remote for the truck, there were half a dozen others.
“Just gotta find the right one here,” he mumbled, moving in front of the door. He’d settled on a key, had it ready to slide into the lock.
Cal saw it coming, but he was too late to stop it.
Dwayne turned abruptly, ran a fist straight into his gut. Cal doubled over and collapsed into the weeds and grass surrounding the garage foundation.
“Really sorry about this, man,” Dwayne said, making another fist and driving it straight into Cal’s head.
This time, Cal went down all the way. Didn’t even feel the sharp edges of gravel jabbing into his cheek.
Now Dwayne unlocked the garage door, and dragged Cal inside.
THIRTY-FIVE
BRANDON Worthington had definitely heard what his ex-wife’s stupid old neighbor was hoping he hadn’t heard. When he’d said he thought Sam and Carl “might have gone camp-”
Well, it didn’t take Stephen Hawking to figure out what he was about to say was “camping.” And the more Brandon thought about it, the more sense it made.
Back when they were first going out, and even after they’d been married awhile, they’d gone camping. They even did it a few times after they had Carl. Camping was about as cheap a vacation as you could take. No airline tickets, no expensive hotels. You just found a patch of land and pitched your tent.
Not that there weren’t some costs. He and Sam didn’t usually strike off into the middle of some woods somewhere. Fuck that. They tried that once, and it was no fun, unless your idea of a good time is hanging your bare ass over a log when you’ve got to do your business.
So after that experience, when they wanted to go away for the weekend with the tent, they’d find a licensed campground. KOA or something like that. At least then you had some facilities. A big restroom with toilets and sinks and even showers. Brandon didn’t mind cooking and sleeping under the stars, but when he had to deal with his morning constitutional, he wanted an honest-to-God toilet, thank you very much. He hadn’t exactly grown up roughing it. His father, Garnet, had worked in the financial industry his whole career, and his mother, Yolanda, had inherited money-a pretty good chunk of it, too-when her parents died.
Which made it all the weirder when he decided to rob banks. Although, the way he looked at it, it wasn’t all that weird. Once he and Sam were married, and living on their own, Brandon had just assumed his parents would buy them a house-and not some shitty starter home, either-and a decent car, maybe even a place on the Cape they could drive to on weekends in the summer.
Who knew his father was going to cut him off, insist Brandon make it on his own?
“You gotta have that fire in your belly,” his dad liked to tell him. “You’ll never get anywhere in life if I just hand everything to you.”
Not that Yolanda didn’t try to do an end run around her husband. Whenever she could, she’d slip her son a hundred dollars, sometimes two hundred, sometimes even more. Always cash. She knew her husband reviewed all the checks she wrote, but she skimmed where she could.
But it wasn’t enough. Not enough to live the way he expected to live.
Sam, however, wasn’t troubled by living in a small apartment. She hadn’t come from money, and she hadn’t been left much after her parents died. Her father had been a midlevel manager at a big-box hardware store, and her mother had worked in a high school cafeteria.
“We’re good. We’re okay,” she so often told him. “We’ve got each other. You’ve got a good job.”
Seriously? Working for the post office?
His perpetual anger and resentment poisoned the marriage. Brandon became abusive. He never actually beat her, but there was the time he shoved her a little too hard and she crashed into their piddly entertainment unit, knocking one of the small speakers off the shelf.
Landed right on her fucking toe.
If she hadn’t walked around the place barefoot, she’d have been fine.
So now and then, Sam would move out for a few days at a time, taking young Carl with her, bunking in with a girlfriend. Brandon would apologize and swear it would never happen again and talk Sam into returning. He became convinced that if he had enough money, he could buy them a better life.