NICK
The text I’d received proved the age-old theory of the Karmic Shithammer. Just when I was feeling my best, like I had with Stella, wham—some shit-ass decision from the past came back to hit me right in the balls.
Hands down, the shittiest decision I’d ever made was breaking into the trunk of a Mercedes when I was sixteen years old, and it hadn’t even been my goddamned idea. I’d been working as a mechanic’s assistant at a seriously sketchy garage near where I lived with my dad. The sort of place where you could get your tires rotated and your VIN scratched off with a screwdriver. In spite of the sketchiness, I loved it. I loved working on cars and always had. But one day, when I was just about to clock out for the afternoon, a Mercedes had rolled in on a flatbed and the owner of the shop had said, “Norton. Open that trunk,” handed me a pick set, and walked away.
I’d never picked a lock before in my life. I had zero idea what the fuck to do. A couple of the guys in the garage did, though. And they were more than happy to teach me what they knew. Teach me they did. One of them slapped me on the back and said, “There ain’t no training like on-the-job training, son.”
That was where it all started.
Here’s the thing about lock picking: it isn’t really a skill. It’s an art. It takes patience, grit, and so much stubbornness that it might be a serious character flaw. Mercedes trunks are an infamous pain in the ass—warded and bolted—so the old cons in the garage had me work up to it. They started me on less difficult locks—a Buick trunk, a Chrysler glove box, the bathroom door. I got obsessed with the locks—with the way the pins move and that last shift of the bolt. Such a goddamned rush. After a few days of learning and getting blisters from the picks and the wrenches, I turned my attention to the Mercedes, which the old cons had planned to drill out. They said they were too fucking old to waste their time on it. But I could try first. I spent hours on that fucking thing, determined to do it.
And goddamn it, I did.
The second that motherfucking trunk popped open, revealing assorted stolen shit and half a dozen bricks of coke, word got around. The kid Nick Norton had picked the trunk of a Mercedes.
Nick Norton had the touch.
It was a turning point for me. Before that day, I was just a poor kid with a shitty dad and no mom. After that day, I started to get a reputation. And I started to be somebody for the first time in my whole fucking life. I fell in with guys who knew the trade and wanted to teach me what they knew. I got hooked on the rush and on the power it gave me to pass through barriers, real and imagined. It was the way I yanked myself up by my bootstraps when I saw no other way.
But I hadn’t wanted to be a criminal. Crime isn’t a life anybody strives for—it’s the one they fall into. Me included. I did try to do better for myself; I made a pretty serious stab at turning my love of cars into a career. I went to school for it, I took it seriously, I had plans. The cash I’d made picking locks paid for school. Eventually, I wanted a garage of my own. That dream was out there, not so far out of reach. When I got my certificate, I got a job at a different garage, this one out in the sticks in Rio Rancho. It had seemed safe enough, out with all the prefab minimansions and churches as big as barns.
But here’s a riddle for you. How many half-decent garages in New Mexico run a legal operation?
Answer: Damn near none.
So no matter what I did, the lock picking stayed with me. Half the cars I serviced belonged to upstanding people; the other half came in with hotwired engines and upholstery that smelled like bleach, driven by guys with wallets thick with cash and no moral compass whatsofuckingever. They’d roll in, raise their eyebrows at me, and say, “You Norton?”
Christ.
It’s like old alcoholics say; hang around the liquor store, eventually you’re gonna buy some booze. Sure enough, making minimum wage fixing carburetors became less and less appealing when I realized I could make an easy five hundred with my pick set in the amount of time it took to listen to a song by Nirvana. Eventually, I got into picking locks hard-core. Over time, and thanks to a drug dealer’s repo’d Escalade that was found out in the desert, I also discovered I had the touch with safes. All sorts of safes. I never met a safe I couldn’t crack. And that word got around too.
And then one day, I cracked a safe that seemed empty. But in the false bottom, I found my first haul of jewels. Two rough-cut yellow diamonds, ugly as sin. But worth a fortune.
From that moment forward, gems became my thing. They were the gold standard of criminal currency. They’re hard to trace, easy to move, and retain their value on the black market. They’re easy as hell to hide and way fucking safer than guns and drugs.
But moving jewels made me cocky. I did bigger jobs, took bigger risks. And because I got so cocky, I made the second-shittiest decision I’d ever made: putting five grand down on an underdog at the Kentucky Derby, a horse named Sure Thing.
The only sure thing about that horse was that it gave me the gambling bug. And soon enough, I wasn’t moving jewels to get ahead—I was moving jewels to pay my debts. A grand here, a grand there; fucking quicksand. I was in the gambling sinkhole and could not stop.
Prison was a shit-ass place, but there was one thing I could say about it. It’d scared me straight. I was done gambling.
But my gambling debts weren’t done with me. And neither was the Karmic Shithammer.
Pony Up was a strip club on the edge of town, freestanding with plenty of parking. Wilted dandelions grew up from between the cracks in the pavement, and a pair of stilettos sat in the middle of the parking lot, like one of the girls had kicked them off when she got in her car and forgotten to grab them before she left.
The sign, which was affixed to a thick steel tube at the edge of the lot, was of a woman riding a rearing stallion, pouting as she adjusted her ponytail. Black background, white details, outlined in pink neon lights. The sign said it all, because Pony Up wasn’t only a strip club. It was also an offtrack betting shop, the only place where a guy could bet on a horse for miles around. Which I had. Repeatedly.
I parked my bike on the far side of the dumpster, away from street view. A few feet away was a white Cadillac. The license plate said TEXAN, and attached to the front grille was a set of longhorns, white and dappled with gray and shiny with spray-on varnish. The Caddy and the horns belonged to a four-hundred-pound guy who was like the living incarnation of a 1980s mullet. Semirespectable up front, and super shady in the back.
The Texan.
I pounded on the entrance of the club, making the double doors bounce on their locks. No answer at first, until a weary-looking girl in a fuzzy pink hoodie poked her head through the velvet privacy curtain on the other side. It took me a second to place her face since it wasn’t all dolled up with fake lashes and makeup. Now she looked kind, tired, and young. Amber was her stage name. She’d once told me it was really Alice. “Oh, hi!” she said, her voice dampened by the glass. “Nick, right?”
I gave her a nod. I had mad respect for strippers and always had. They took a big risk for an uncertain payout; it took way more balls to get up on a stage than most dudes would ever have. “How you been?”
She leaned back behind the curtain and reappeared with a huge key ring in her hand. She unlocked the deadbolt and the pins at the top and bottom and opened the door. “Same old, same old. Haven’t seen you here in a while.”
“Been a little busy.” It was another way to say in the joint, and Alice nodded with a sigh. “He here?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes, the way people did when their septic tanks backed up again. “Yep. In the back. Eating lunch.”
The club smelled like piss, bad decisions, and cheap cologne. I passed the stages and the bar and went down the back hallway. Which was when I heard it.
The sound of him chewing. The motherfucking crunching.
I pushed open the door marked PRIVATE and found him sitting behind his desk, fatter than I remembered him, his double chin now so thick it made him look like he was hiding something underneath it.
His real name was Bill Lafayette, and he wasn’t from Texas at all, but somewhere outside Baton Rouge. Digging into his fat, fleshy armpits and man boobs were the straps of a shoulder holster, and I could make out the butt end of a pistol tucked in among the folds. And everywhere, I mean everywhere, was evidence of the source of that goddamned crunching. Cheese curls. Or puffs. Or whateverthefuck they were called.
He crunched down on one and scowled at me. Nearsighted by a mile. A fine dusting of cheese residue covered everything on his desk, like fingerprint powder. He had cans of the things stacked up behind him like ammo squirreled away for a siege. I took a step closer, out of the shadow of the hallway and into his office.
“Well I’ll be goddamned,” he said, sending a puff of cheese spraying across the already cheese-flecked paperwork on his desk. “Nick Norton.” He shoved another huge handful of cheese puffs into his mouth and crunched away on them. They sounded like Captain Crunch without the milk, and whenever I was around him I found myself wondering what those things must have done to the roof of his mouth. He reached across his desk for a little remote and poked at the top button with a fat orange finger. As he did, a huge industrial AC window unit off to the left shuddered to life, creating a powdery storm of orange around him like a haze.
At least he hadn’t changed. If I’d come in here and found this motherfucker a hundred pounds lighter and doing the downward dog in a room cooled only by a desk fan, I’d have had to walk back into the bar and slug back a fifth of vodka without using a glass.
Even though I hadn’t seen him since I’d gotten out, I was sick of him already. From my wallet, I took all the cash tips I’d gotten, plus some of the honest money I’d kept aside before I went away. It came to about five hundred, give or take, and I put it on his desk. He wadded it up and stuck it in his desk drawer, then sniffed and peeked into the cardboard can where his cheese puffs had been. Finding it empty, he tossed it aside onto a heap of identical cans scattered around his wastebasket like bowling pins after a strike. He shuffled through the papers on his desk and pulled out a shiny brochure. On the front was a huge diamond, square-cut and beveled on the edges, coming to a point at the bottom. As big as a golf ball. I didn’t need any explanation, but the brochure gave one anyway. In fancy museum-style letters was the heading, THE NORTH STAR: ON DISPLAY FOR THE FINAL TIME.
“What you know about this?” asked the Texan, unfurling the trifold brochure.
I knew damn near everything about the North Star. It was 589 carats. VVS1 clarity. A single blemish in the center, visible only from the top of the pavilion. A Royal Asscher cut; high crown, seventy-four facets. “Not one fucking thing.”
He snorted and coughed on what was surely a whole bunch of residual cheese puff dust stuck in his flabby throat. “Don’t lie to me, Norton. Makes you sound like a pussy.” He adjusted the gun under his man boob and cracked the knuckles of his right hand by pushing on his straightened fingers with his thumb. With his other hand, he held out the brochure for me, and it flapped in the AC.
I didn’t take it, because I knew what it said already. Any jewel thief worth the name knew about the North Star. One of the biggest diamonds in the world. Unfenceable because of its size; inconvenient, risky, but the job to beat all jobs, money-wise. If that thing were to be cleaved, even by someone with a shaky hand, whatever it yielded would be enough to disappear on for good. Underneath the cover photo of the diamond were the words, DO NOT MISS THIS CHANCE TO SEE ONE OF THE LARGEST DIAMONDS IN THE WORLD BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS INTO PRIVATE HANDS FOREVER!
“It’s a no-go. Stick to your cheese puffs.”
“Cheese curls, Norton,” he said. “Curls, far superior to puffs.” He looked longingly at the North Star with greedy, beady eyes, and back up at me. He lifted one of his great big bushy eyebrows. In the months I’d been gone, the left one had turned mostly white, while the right one hadn’t. It made him look pretty much nuts.
Dropping the brochure on his desk, he glugged his Diet Dr Pepper as the AC whirred. The bottle hissed when he pulled it from his mouth. “Welcome back to the free world, Norton. You want me to call one of the girls up for you? Get you a little”—he set down his can and made a finger-boinking gesture—“action? On the house. A welcome-back-to-town present. No charge.”
Boink, boink, boink went the demo, paired with a matching wiggle of his nonmatching eyebrows.
The finger fuck was the last straw. I’d had it with all his shit. I couldn’t take one more second of the beady-eyed stares, or the cheese powder blizzard, or offering up women like a round of drinks. I couldn’t take being tied to this asshole for one second more.
So I made a split-second decision. I pulled my keys from my pocket and began to take my motorcycle key off the ring. I thought about how right it had felt to have Stella on my bike with me; I thought about how much I’d miss doing that again. But I was determined to do this thing with her the right way, and my gambling debts had no place in that. For myself, for my future, for the sake of a clean slate, the new Nick Norton was starting the fuck over, even if he had to Uber home to do it. “My bike’s outside. Worth at least as much as I owe you. Take it, and we’re done.”
The Texan exploded with a roar of laughter that sent crumbs spewing from his mouth, pelting me with cheesy buckshot. He slapped his desk and whacked the remote by accident, turning the AC from meat locker to off.
The room went silent. No crunching, no AC, no knuckle cracking. Just the slow creak of the Texan, leaning back in his undersize and bottom-of-the-line office chair. He clasped his chubby hands over his enormous gut and said, “You owed me twenty, Norton. But that was seven months ago. So unless your bike is worth a hundred large, you’re gonna have to do a fuckload better than that.”