Free The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton Page A

grabbing for the shells and reloading. Down the stairs, on the edge of falling with every step. A great pool of blood at the bottom, the Ox’s torn-apart body in the middle of it. Then another mind-shattering blast, ripping through the chandelier and raining down glass all around me.
    I was through the open door. Into the cold air. That’s when something came swinging at me from out of view. The arm of the other gray-jacketed man, hitting me across the neck like a branch from one of those trees I could see in the distance.
    I was on the ground now. Looking up at the sky, which seemed to be spinning counterclockwise. It made me think back to the only other time in my life I had been captured like this. Only I had no reason to fear for my lifethen. I had no reason to wonder if they’d stand me up against a wall and rip me apart with a shotgun.
    I felt myself being turned over, the handcuffs being slapped tight on my wrists.
    “We’ve got you now,” a voice said. “You ain’t going nowhere.”

Seven

Michigan
1996 to 1999
     
----
    There was an antique store a few blocks down from the liquor store. They had a few old locks there, and the old man who owned the place seemed to already know about me, so I didn’t have to break him in with the whole pantomime routine. I found the locks, some with keys, some without, took them all to the counter, and the owner looked them over and charged me five dollars total.
    I took the locks apart and put them back together again. I practiced using my makeshift tools to open them. I had four picks now, and two tension bars, all of them just thin strips of metal I had filed down into different sizes, all of them stuck into rubber erasers that I could use as handles. I was learning by trial and error, and it didn’t take me long to figure out it was all a matter of touch. How much tension you put on the lock, and how you lift each tumbler, one by one, until the whole thing turns free.
    I got damned good at it. I really did. That was my summer. Me and a pile of rusty old scrap metal.
    Then the day came. The Wednesday after Labor Day. They were just about to start fixing up the high school around then, so you’re going to have to trust me to paint the right picture here. Start with a main building that hadn’t been touched in forty or fifty years. Tired gray bricks, windows that were too few and too small. Surround the whole thing with concrete and fencing and tall light poles. Then spread a dozen trailers all over the place, as if dropped at random. Those were the temporary classrooms to handle the overflow of students.
    Or let me put it another way. The day I came to this prison I’m sitting in right now, the day I stepped out of the Corrections Department van and took my place in line at the processing center—I was ready for it. I wasready because I had been through something pretty similar once before. The way it looked that day, the soul-crushing
grayness
of the place. Above everything else, the way my stomach turned inside out at the thought of spending so much time there, unable to leave.
    Yeah, I’d been there. All on that Wednesday after Labor Day, when I stepped off the bus and took my place as a member of the incoming freshman class at Milford High School.
    The first thing I noticed was the noise. After those five years at the institute, to suddenly find myself surrounded by over two thousand kids with healthy, normal voices. That main hallway was as loud as a jet engine, everyone talking and shouting on that first day of school, some of the boys chasing each other, pushing each other into the lockers, aiming sharp-knuckled punches at each other’s shoulders. I felt like I was walking into an insane asylum.
    There were a lot of other new freshmen, of course. Most of them probably looked as overwhelmed as I was, and probably didn’t say much more than I did, either. Even so, it didn’t take long for me to stand out. Every class I was in, the teacher would make a big deal