IQ(46)

Isaiah took the right side of the storeroom, going up and down the aisles, looking for items on the shopping list. His ski mask itched, his glasses kept slipping down his nose, and the flashlight beam was going up and down like the needle on a seismograph. In horror movie cuts he saw reptile sand scoopers, grapeseed oil, smoked pig ears, feline toothpaste, wild birdseed, and duck confit dog food but nothing on the list. Some of the boxes were upside down or the back was facing out or only showed a code: LT SN 67J9990 100PC, R997 SMPGTR LG 10PC. Isaiah was slipping into panic mode, breathing like a swimmer swimming in sweat, the adrenaline screaming through his veins, the siren putting fault lines in his skull. The f*cking sunglasses were so fogged up he couldn’t see. And the time. Four minutes gone already. He couldn’t think. He didn’t know what to do. There was nothing but the siren. I can’t take it. I can’t take that f*cking siren. He was about to call it quits when his flashlight found a label: F.C.E. INC FRONTLINE PLUS DOG 4588 LB/3 PACK 20PC. A stack of small cartons were on a top shelf. He’d gone past them twice. “I got the Frontline,” he said like he’d discovered a gold seam. He stood on a lower shelf and pawed the cartons to the floor. He shook open a garbage bag and tried to put them in but the bag wouldn’t stay open. “What are you doing?” he hissed. He got down on his knees and stuffed the cartons into the bag one at a time, stopping again and again to push the glasses back up his nose.

Dodson came hustling down the aisle, all business, holding two full garbage bags. “The f*ck you doin’ down there?” he said as he went by. “You see the time?”


They drove out of the alley yanking off the ski masks and breathing like they’d come up from a dive. “Oooh shit,” Dodson said. “That plan was meticulous, son, I was working it. Hey, slow down, the f*ck you doing?”

Isaiah sat ramrod straight, his hands choking the steering wheel, his eardrums reverberating like rung bells. He cracked open a window. The cool air felt lifesaving.

Dodson was talking like he’d scored three touchdowns in the Super Bowl. “You see me in there?” he said. “I was Ocean’s 11, 12, and 22. Them bully things? I grabbed a million of them muthaf*ckas. Hard to believe there’s that many bulls running around dickless. Wasn’t but three of them fences left but I got a whole box of them epilepsy things. What was the price on them?”

“I don’t remember,” Isaiah said in a sticky whisper.

Dodson smiled. “I seen you running around all crazy,” he said. “Shit got real for you, didn’t it?”

“I had a couple of problems. No big deal.”

“Is that what was happening? I’d hate to see you if you was scared. You wanna pull this off, Isaiah? You need to find your inner gangsta.”

They snuck the goods into the apartment and piled the boxes up on the living room floor. Dodson looked at them, his grin as wide as his face. “What do you think?” he said. “Three, four thousand dollars’ worth?”

Isaiah shrugged. “Yeah, around in there.”

Isaiah sprawled on the bed where Marcus had slept, replaying what happened in the storeroom, feeling what he felt as he ran up and down the aisles, his pulse rising and falling as he saw each part of it, sweating even as he lay there. A tidal change was rolling over him. His heartache, pain, and sorrow were ebbing away and in their place, the roar of adrenaline, the thrilling shock of fear, and the cool clear ecstasy of getting away.





CHAPTER ELEVEN


Lucky


July 2013

Skip clustered his shots on the black guy’s crotch, the .22 match-grade long rifle ripping the plywood target to shit. That f*cking smart-ass with all his f*cking questions. How did the dog get out? What unit were you in? Skip slapped another clip into the Buck Mark and blasted away. He liked the gun for work because it had less recoil than a .9 or a .45, and killing somebody was all about placing the bullet and penetration, not stopping power. An added bonus: the small round bounced around in your cranium so it was harder to match it to a gun.

The black man’s crotch was kindling and Skip switched to his everyday gun, the .40-caliber Colt Delta. He blasted some more targets. A cop, a zombie, a snarling woman with a knife. That f*cking IQ had made him feel small and stupid and ashamed like he had all his life. One way or another he’d get that smart-ass prick.


Back in high school, Skip was a long list of nots. Not an athlete, not an honor student, not in drama club, not a banger, a doper, a techno-geek, a hipster, a surfer, and he was definitely not cool. What he was, was anonymous. A fringe kid that walked the hallways pretending he had somewhere to go and laughing while he talked on his cell phone to an imaginary homie. He told the other kids he surfed at First Point in Malibu and that his girlfriend was a cheerleader at another school and that his dad, whom he’d never met, got a Purple Heart in Iraq. None of it helped and neither did his name. Magnus Vestergard. What else could his nickname be besides the Maggot? He often thought his life would be completely different if he had a regular name like Jeff, Brian, Bill, or Skip. He liked Skip. It sounded friendly and cheerful. And a different last name. Less foreign and more American. Miller, Parker, Goodman, Hanson.

Everything changed when he saw a video on YouTube. A dork just like him stuck a Roman candle between his butt cheeks and galloped around his driveway with sparks shooting out of him, his friends laughing themselves stupid. It got a quarter of a million hits. A quarter of a million.