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Because. It had all been too easy, and I hate that.
I don’t know why that is. It just is. If it’s too easy, I always feel like it’s got to be a trap, or I made some stupid mistake, or—hell, I don’t know. I just don’t like things to be too easy. And in spite of the cold, this had been a stroll through the fucking park on a summer day. It was done, and I had the money to prove it, and now all my nerves were standing up and vibrating like somebody was whacking at them with a dull machete. Mom had an expression for this feeling. She’d say, “Somebody’s walking on my grave.” And right now, I had the Boston Marathon stomping all over mine.
Usually I get over that feeling pretty quick. This time, it stayed with me. I drove for half an hour, thinking about why that was. Nothing came to me. I put on the radio, spun the dial, and found Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime.” I like that song a lot. That made me feel even meaner, like somebody was bribing me to cheer up.
I pulled off at a transfer point I’d set up. It was a deserted spot on a country road, well hidden by a screen of trees. That’s why I’d picked the place, because it was totally isolated. I’d left another car there, along with a change of costume. I peeled off the false scar on my face, and then my admiral’s costume. I dropped it all into the back seat of the car I’d arrived in. Beard, hat, shoes with four-inch lifts. It all went in. From my bag in the trunk of the other car I pulled out a jar of thermite. I took it to the first car and poured the whole thing onto my costume.
I changed into a charcoal-gray suit and brown oxfords. Hand-tailored shirt, silk tie, gold cuff links, and a Movado Museum watch on my wrist. I tossed a little box on top of the thermite, got into the new car, and pulled back onto the road. I was half a mile away when I heard a muffled WHOOMP behind me. In the rearview mirror I watched a cheery glow climb up above the trees, and for a few minutes I was at least satisfied, if not really happy. The fire was the real end to the job. It wiped away the last link to the admiral, and to the guy who gave the statue to the thugs. It’s one way I stay successful. On every job, I make sure nobody—nobody—knows what I look like.
Starting with the identities I wear to work. So, thermite and the first rental car exploding, all that. There would be no trace left by the time I hit I-94. Not a scrap that anybody could connect to the guy who stole the statue. More important, not even a microscopic trace of my DNA. I didn’t have to check. I’d done this enough times. That identity was totally destroyed, nothing but ashes—and goddamn it, that had been easy, too. And now I was right back into feeling mean and antsy.
I drove back toward Chicago. I found a radio station playing really old oldies. Lovin’ Spoonful, Paul Revere, even the Nightcrawlers. Really good background music. It helped me think. By the time I got to Windsor Long-Term Care Nursing Home, I’d figured out why I felt shitty. The thing was, everything had been too easy lately. Everything I tried worked perfectly, the first time. I was just too damn good. Does that sound conceited? It’s not. It’s the plain damn truth. I am the best there is—maybe the best there ever was—and I hadn’t missed since I was sixteen and tried to steal a cop car.
The last couple of years, almost everything I did had gone like clockwork. No matter how stupid-hard something looked, it never was. It wasn’t that I wasn’t giving myself any serious challenges. I was pulling off stuff that looked impossible—like stealing a twelve-and-a-half-ton statue—and making it look routine. But I just wasn’t finding anything that tested me, and there’s always a tremendous danger that comes from that: a danger of getting stale, smug, so that sooner or later I really would make a mistake. In my line of work, mistakes have very big consequences. Like, life in prison is actually the best one. So the answer was obvious, even if it looked kind of stupid.
I needed to find something I couldn’t do.
Find a heist that was beyond impossible, something ridiculous, unthinkable, stupid, totally out of the question. And then I needed to do it.
Sure, absolutely, why not. I parked the car a few rows back from the nursing home’s front door and sat there for a minute thinking about that. And then I thought, what the fuck, that was a stupid idea anyway. I put it out of my mind and went into Windsor Long-Term Care.
It took me a little less than an hour to make the arrangements to have Mom moved. The nurses were all sad to see her go. After all, most of their patients sit and complain all day, shit in their pants, and wander off. Mom always behaved beautifully, the perfect patient. She was no trouble at all. Mom had been in a coma for years, what they call a persistent vegetative state. No wonder the nurses loved her.
I did, too. For different reasons. I gave her a kiss on the forehead and told her that. Maybe she could hear me. Probably not.
When Mom was loaded into the ambulance and on her way, I drove on to the airport, O’Hare. Seeing Mom hadn’t made me feel any better. I used to think she could get better if I just found the right doctor and threw enough money at him. I don’t believe that anymore. But I still throw a lot of money at keeping Mom alive. And at keeping her near me, wherever I have a job.
I turned in my rental car and took their shuttle to the terminal. I breezed through security, no problem, and to the gate for my flight out. I fly commercial right after a job. I mean, even before this particular payday I could afford a private jet. But that attracts the kind of attention I like to avoid until things settle down a bit.
So I drank a cup of coffee until it was time to board. I settled into my seat, pulled the in-flight magazine out of the pocket in front of me, and opened it at random. I glanced at a full-page picture. Then I looked harder.
Time stopped. I just kept looking.
The article was nothing. Just a simple, dumb-ass puff piece, like all the stuff in those mags. Stuff to do in far-off cities, other stuff to take your mind off the fact that you’re rocketing through the sky at four hundred miles per hour, and if one little piece of the plane stops working, you’re going to drop like a rock.
But this article was titled “Coming to America!” I didn’t even need to read it. All I had to see was the picture, and I knew. This was it.
I had found something impossible.
I read the article, and I was sure. It absolutely could not be done, not ever, and I had to do it. I studied the picture some more. I’d never seen anything like it. It was so beautiful it made my teeth hurt. I had to see it for real. And then I was going to steal it.
When the plane landed in New York, I bought a seat on the next flight to Tehran. And I was smiling as I boarded.
* * *
—
Denny Kirkaldi was nervous. He’d done his job and hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d protected the crowd instead of the statue, sure—but who could figure somebody would just take the fucking thing like that? And those were important people, too. He knew he’d done the right thing. But the FBI guy had a way of just looking at you that made you feel guilty even if you weren’t. It made you want to tell him stuff, whatever he wanted. So Kirkaldi tried. “Like I said,” he told the Fed, “I was moving the crowd back. I never even saw the guy ’til he went up the rope into the chopper.”
“Cable,” Greer said. “He went up a steel cable.”
“Whatever. Thing is, I didn’t see him. So . . .” He trailed off. The FBI guy was looking away, over at the hole in the ground whe
re the statue had been.
“The uniform was authentic,” Greer said. “Coast Guard admiral.”
The Fed went down on one knee beside the hole to look at a sheared bolt, but he still didn’t say anything. That made Kirkaldi even more nervous. “Lookit, Mr.— Uh, hey, what do we call you, anyways?”
