The Lock Artist Read Online Free PDF

the time he got there, the car was out of sight.
    He turned back to me. There was so much adrenaline pumping through his body by now, he was practically vibrating.
    “What the hell is wrong with you?” he said. “What in goddamned hell . . .”
    He sat down, right there on the floor, breathing hard. He stayed there until the police showed up. He kept looking at me, but he didn’t say anything else. So many questions in his mind, I’m sure, but why bother asking them when he knew he’d get no answers?
    I sat down next to him, to keep him company. I felt a tentative hand on my back. We sat there and waited, sharing the silence.

New York City
Late 1999
     
----
    It seemed like the last place on earth to me, this little Chinese restaurant on the ground floor of an eight-story building on 128th Street. The family who ran the place had a lease for the first floor only, and the top floors were supposedly locked up tight and scheduled for renovation by the owner at some undetermined point in the future. So naturally, those boards that were blocking the stairwell got taken down and a number of people ended up living upstairs. Extended members of the family first, the cousins and second cousins who came over to America to work ninety hours a week in the restaurant. Then the occasional outsider who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut, and who could pay the family a certain amount of money every month. In cash, of course.
    I was passed along to the family, after the man who sold me my new identity passed me along to this other guy he knew, who in turn passed me along to somebody else. My room ended up being on the third floor. That was about as high as you wanted to go. Any higher and the heat from the first-floor kitchen wouldn’t quite get to you. Plus nobody had an extension cord that was long enough to reach to the fourth floor. So it was dark and freezing cold, and on top of that the rats had already claimed those floors as their own.
    I hadn’t thought to change my appearance yet. That would come later. But I figured being officially on the run from the State of Michigan, a violator of my terms of probation, and having done my first real money job . . . No turning back now, right? Hence the New York driver’s license with the made-up name of William Michael Smith and the made-up age of twenty-one. I didn’t use it to get into bars, though. Believe me. I stayed inside as much as I could, because I was convinced that every police officer I saw wasactively looking for me. Even in the middle of the night, when I’d hear a siren down on the street . . . I’d be convinced that they had finally found me.
    It was getting colder every week. I stayed inside and I drew and I practiced on my portable safe lock. I ate the food from the restaurant that the Chinese family gave me. I paid them two hundred dollars a month cash to stay in the upstairs room they didn’t own, and to use the bathroom and shower in the back of the kitchen. I had one lamp that I had plugged into the extension cord. I had paper and art supplies. I still had my motorcycle bags with all of my clothes in them. I had my safe lock and my lock picks.
    I had the pagers.
    There were five of them, all in a beat-up shoebox. One pager with white tape on it, one with yellow, one with green, one with blue. Then the last with red tape. The Ghost had told me, if any of the first four pagers go off, you call the number on the little screen, you listen to what they say. They’ll know that you can’t speak in return. If they don’t seem to understand that, it’s a good sign that the wrong person is on the phone and that you should hang up. Assuming they’re on the level, you listen to what they say, and then you go to meet them at the location they indicate. If everything still feels right, you go do the job with them. You handle your business the right way and everybody wins. They’ll take care of you because they know if they don’t, you won’t be picking