The Devil's Code

could have walked on it without bending it at all.
    “The thing is, the safe is starting to move,” she said. “The concrete is cracking up. I can hear it, but I’ve got so much pressure on it, that when it breaks free, it’s liable to come flying out of the hole.”
    “Jesus.”
    “It won’t fly far—but it’ll hit like a ton of bricks. They’d hear it all over the building. I gotta stand right next to it while you pump.”
    So I pumped the handle of the come-along and she stood next to the safe, watching the concrete deform. “Starting to crumble . . . crumbling . . . crumbling. Stop.”
    I stopped, and she peered at the safe.
    “Give it a little punch.” I gave it a little punch, and suddenly, the safe came free.
    “All right, all right . . .”
    Working as hard and quietly as we could, it still took ten minutes to work it the rest of the way free. When it finally came out, I staggered backward with it and dropped it on a couch.
    “No way I can get that down the elevator,” I said. “The goddamn thing’s gotta weigh two hundred pounds. It’d pull me right off the cable.”
    “We can’t just let it sit here . . . we’ve almost got it,” she said urgently.
    “LuEllen, the goddamn thing is like a two-hundred-pound car battery—I can haul it, but it’s got too much weight in too small a package.”
    “Well, goddamnit, Kidd . . .” She walked around it for a minute, then said, “Wait,” and walked out of the room, turning toward the back of the apartment.
    A minute later, she was back, carrying a black satin sheet. “Let’s get the safe. I’ll help.”
    “What’re we gonna do?”
    “Just help.”
    We wrapped the safe in the sheet, so we could pick it up by the ends. LuEllen is strong as a horse, and she tied a loop in one end of the sheet so she could get it over her shoulder, and then led me back through the apartment, and out a door onto the balcony.
    “What’re we doing?” I whispered.
    “This way.”
    “Oh, no.”
    “Yeah, we can do it. From right exactly here. It’ll go right straight down into soft dirt.”
    “Aw, man.” I was scanning the dark golf course. “Somebody’s gonna see us.”
    “Small chance.” She was grinning at me; this was what she lived for, and what might send her to jail someday. “C’mon, Kidd, be a good sport.”
    “Ah, fuck.”
    Before I became a sport, I called Green: “Anything?”
    “Not a peep.”
    “Drive by and see what you can see.”
    “One minute,” he said.
    We waited one minute and he came back, “Man reading a magazine.”
    “Get out of here,” I said.
    “Ten-four.” He wasn’t quite laughing.
    I picked up the safe, groaning, leaned over the railing, got centered, and let it go. A couple of seconds later, it hit the ground eight stories below with a dull thud, like a small car hitting a wooden phone pole.
    We stood absolutely still, listening. An intake of breath? A cry of surprise? Nothing but a car accelerating in the distance.
    “No problem,” LuEllen said.
    W e would have been safer, probably, going down the elevator shaft again. LuEllen convinced me to go over the side of the building. “There’s nobody on the balconies. We’re good,” she whispered.
    “Jesus.”
    “Ten seconds from now, we’re gone.”
    Not ten seconds, exactly. I insisted on a last look around the apartment, staying away from the computer but tracking more grease around. We packed up the black bag, and went over the edge on the climbing rope. On the ground, she gathered in the climbing rope and took the bag, while I tried to take the safe. I managed to carry it a hundred yards or so, before I had to stop. Thenwe wrapped it in one of the sheets, made a couple of handles out of the knots, and in ten minutes got it to the corner.
    I sent LuEllen to get the car, with the sheets. She spread them on the backseat, and when she pulled up next to the fence, I threw the safe over, crawled over after it, then picked it up and humped it over to the car.
    No problem.

 18 
    L uEllen always gets cranked when she’s been inside a place she’s not supposed to have been. Dealing with her was like handling a hyperactive child: you try to keep her under control, slow her down. Tonight, she wanted the car, the safe, and the tools.
    “Where’re you going?”
    “Back to Shreveport,” she said. “If I give him the tools back, he’ll cut the safe for free.”
    “We don’t want it blown up or anything.”
    She rolled her eyes.