Shimmy Bang Sparkle(25)
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.”