Spoonbenders

Frankie was pushed out onto a small side deck close by the glittering water. The paddle wheel churned away to their left, but the sound was almost drowned out by laughter, buzzes, bells—the jangling roar of a crowded casino. A large red-and-white motor launch bedecked in Christmas lights idled at the lip of the deck in a cloud of gas fumes. At the wheel was a man in a white shirt and black vest who looked like he should have been dealing blackjack. Other duties as assigned.

“Get him to the garage,” the manager said. “And don’t let anyone see you.”

“Wait, garage?” Frankie said. They shoved him forward, and he stumbled into the boat and sat down hard on a bench. The janitor and the other man climbed in. “Where are you taking me?”

The janitor said, “Shut up or we gag you.”

Frankie shut up. A coldness filled his stomach. He held on to the bench as the motorboat surged around the back of the riverboat’s paddle wheel and pointed toward shore. They weren’t heading back to the brightly lit loading area where he and Buddy had boarded the boat, but south of that, where a sporadic line of streetlights marked the edge of the river.

They’re getting me away from the crowds, Frankie thought. Away from witnesses. In this “garage” they could do anything to him. All his life, Teddy had told stories about gangsters he’d known, mooks with knuckledusters, gun-carrying henchmen, molls with switchblades tucked into their garters. Movie characters. Teddy was the hero of these stories, a trickster with fast hands and a faster mouth. Frankie had longed to be that guy, the smooth-talking confidence man, but by the time he grew up, they weren’t making movies like that anymore. All that remained were secondhand tales, you-shoulda-seen-it stories, and badly edited highlight reels.

So here he was, a failed casino cheat, in a boatful of mobbed-up thugs…and he couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. He was going to die, whimpering, with his own blood smearing his shirt.

The boat charged toward a dimly lit pier. At the last moment the driver threw the boat into reverse, spun the wheel, and brought them alongside the wood with the slightest of thumps. Frankie decided that maybe he was a boatman first, blackjack dealer second.

The janitor gripped the back of Frankie’s neck, and leaned in to his ear. “You’re going to talk now, asshole.”

The floor boss climbed up on the pier, then turned to pull Frankie up. A pair of headlights snapped on, turning the casino employee into a silhouette. A loud voice said, “We’ll take it from here, boys.”

A huge figure appeared in the lights. He waved a badge in the general direction of the floor boss, and then looked down in the boat.

The janitor’s hand tightened on Frankie’s neck.

“Who the hell are you?” Frankie said.

The man laughed. “Are you really choosing them over me?”

That was a good point. Frankie knocked aside the arm of the janitor and levered himself out of the boat.

The big man said, “I’m Agent Destin Smalls,” and extended his hand.

The name rang a faint bell. Frankie shook the hand, and handcuffs appeared on his wrist like a magic trick.

“You’re under arrest,” Agent Smalls said.

He drove toward his father’s house with the air-conditioning blasting into his face. “Embrace life,” he said to himself. Embrace the fact that Matty had quit on him, forcing him to either give up on the heist or learn to do everything himself. Embrace the two weeks he’d spent trying to open locks with his mind, and failing to open a single one. Embrace his inability to get the safe dial to turn a centimeter.

Failure to accept reality led only to frustration, and frustration to rage. What did rage get you? A grown man picking up a safe in his arms and attempting to throw it down onto the concrete, before his back gave out. Rage got you a safe crashing into the hood of a Toyota Corolla that still had two years of payments.

Okay, forget about that. What’s done is done. That’s life. Embrace it.

But Frankie was after something more. And he very much needed to explain this to Matty.

At home the garage door was open and Teddy’s Buick wasn’t there, thank God. Irene’s car was gone, too. Frankie marched up to the front door and its ridiculously tiled front step. A new fire extinguisher had been installed next to the door, the bracket screwed right into the brick. Why put a fire extinguisher outside the house? Who the fuck knows. That was Buddy. After all the crazy projects, maybe he was planning on burning the place down. If this was Frankie’s house he would have kicked his brother out months ago.

It was cooler inside the house, but only marginally so. Teddy, the cheap bastard, had never installed central air, and had put a window air conditioner in one room: his bedroom. “Matty?” he called. No one was in the living room or the kitchen. Then he heard a noise from downstairs.