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Detroit and The Kid Gabe Delahaye ©2003 Chapter One On the day of the biggest heist in Detroit’s career, Governor Comstock declared a statewide bank holiday, and Detroit’s heart momentarily stopped beating. He knew what this meant for him, a safe man, a lock magician, what it would do to the hands he’d always prided himself on. They required a certain income to keep their delicacy. Detroit was not the only person who left the house to verify what he’d heard. The streets were crowded with curious disbelievers, out to verify that the sky was still blue, the ground still hard, the banks still open. Even if Detroit decided to pass the Guardian Trust—which he would never, not the day before a hit—it wouldn’t have been necessary. There were plenty of smaller banks he passed on the way, each with a little sign taped up in the window. BANK HOLIDAY declared for the next eight days, minimum. Eight days. It was worse than prison. At least on the inside you had someone you could blame, someone to rail against. Even if all the banks reopened with polished brass handles and waxed mustaches on the 22nd, a heist isn’t the kind of thing you can just move down the line. You don’t postpone a heist. “What a day,” said an old man who was missing a piece of his nose. There was a gash from the top of his eyebrow to the bottom of his chin. He was shaking his head and absently keeping pace with Detroit. Detroit looked at the old man. “What a day, of all days, Valentine’s Day!!” The man howled. Detroit looked around for a diner, somewhere he could get a cup of coffee, sit, and gather his thoughts. Up ahead he saw a sign, Copper Penny. He fell in through the Detroit and The Kid - Gabe Delahaye 2 door and sat himself at the counter. A woman dressed in maroon walked over and poured a cup without him even having to ask. The diner was packed busy, mostly jobless men, sharing the day’s grand news, buying breakfasts on credit. They seemed happy, like a weight had been lifted off their shoulders. The burden had been shifted to America in general. See, they seemed to want to say, it’s not me. Fucking reds, damned out of work shits, Detroit thought. With a shudder he realized he was among them. Detroit had been transformed from a sophisticated man of delicate artistry into a common, petty thief. He would have to start selling apples on the street and knocking over old ladies for their handbags, hoping their husbands had sent them out to cash their veteran pensions. Not even that, because there was nowhere to cash them. The weight of his overcoat seemed to be the only thing keeping him in his seat. When the ceiling disappeared—like the ground beneath his feet—then he would just keep floating until his body burnt up against the sun, or withered away in space. The coffee gave Detroit courage. Still, he wished he were dead. Detroit and The Kid - Gabe Delahaye 3 Chapter Two It was now the last days of summer. And from the smell of fat that reached even into Detroit’s underground room, it was Thursday. Beth always made bacon on Thursday. “You’ve got two full days work to go before the weekend,” Beth would tell her husband, Dick, “I want you to have enough energy to make the most of them.” Dick worked in a law firm in the County Building on Cadillac Square, and they still had enough clients to afford everyone a comfortable chair to sit in, and bacon on Thursdays. After Dick left for work, Beth would begrudgingly sneak Detroit one strip of bacon, and a biscuit or slice of bread. “I’m not here to let you starve,” she would say, “but I can’t give you what Dick works so hard to get, either.” Detroit used to take care of Beth for years after their father died; their mother was only sober for one meal a day, whichever came between waking up and finding her way to the loose brick behind the stove. He walked her to school, helped keep her clothes clean enough not to notice the wearing of the second-hand fabrics, cooked what he could. Now he slept in the sepulchre of his sister’s basement, and spent his time hating her husband. Beth owed him this kindness, but when she married Dick, she had hoped to enter the marriage contract untarnished by the sins of a family she had no part in choosing. Detroit did as much as he could to honor that wish: he did not attended the wedding, and told Beth early on that she had his permission to say her older brother had died in a terrible accident on the docks. But, after he lost everything, well, “family is family is family,” he had said the first night he came knocking on their heavy oak door. Detroit and The Kid - Gabe Delahaye 4 In the cool and dim basement tomb Detroit admired himself in the scrap of broken mirror on the wall. He still tried to keep an appearance, with short trimmed, dirty blond hair that accented his sharp, diamond-cutter eyes. His cheeks and chin were peppered with goldenrod stubble, longer than he liked, but razors were in short supply, and he could only afford to shave once a week. His worn blazer still kept its shape well enough, in a way. His shirt was basically white. Detroit took a thin metal chain—that his father had given him two nights before putting a gun into his mouth and giving his brains some fresh air—from the card table next to his bed and looped it over his neck. He tucked it under his shirt and stared into the glass, running fingers through his hair, and along the wound on his face. He had a deep, dark scrape that ran between his eyes down to the tip of his pug nose and a split upper lip. Three nights earlier, he picked the lock on a pharmacy, just to keep his hand in the game, his chops up. If he had known that the pharmacist lived with his wife in an apartment just over the shop he would never have even bothered, would have just gone back to practicing on the door to Beth’s house and working over Dick’s safe. For that, he had the perfect system. Every time he got the safe open, he would leave it that way, gaping wide. Dick would go into a rage, as if Detroit wanted any of the two-bit souvenirs his brother-in-law kept in there—some tie clip the mayor gave him at a charity function, a useless bar of gold—and curse Detroit up and down. But Dick also changed the combination on the safe, providing Detroit with a new challenge. Three days earlier, Detroit had eased the door to the pharmacy open when, before he could close it again, a redwood of a man, thicker than a drunk’s tongue, came lumbering down the stairs at the back of the shop and bulldozed towards him. Detroit ran Detroit and The Kid - Gabe Delahaye 5 as fast as he could, and made a decent enough escape, but slipped in a pile of dog mess at the end of an alley and went face first into the gravel. Beth gave him a cold compress and he told her he had been chased down by a negro who was trying to stick him with a knife. She smiled thinly, a touch of disbelief in her creased brow, as she dabbed iodine along the oozing scrape that was his nose. Dick waited until Beth had gone back to bed and told Detroit his face looked like a split open vagina. “Oh yeah,” Detroit said, “pull down your trousers and let me see.” Dick took a swing at him that went wild and his hand connected with the hard wood of the icebox. Detroit wanted to get him a good one in the kidneys, but he was a man who liked to throw himself out, lest he land on his ear. Detroit climbed the cellar stairs up to the kitchen. Beth was standing over the stove watching the bacon crackle. Dick sat at the table, reading the newspaper, working hard to ignore him. “Mornin’ Sis,” Detroit called out. She turned to look at him, and he could see the subtle wince when she remembered his broken face. It was only four steps to the front door but he barely made two before Beth called to him. “Where are you going?” Out, he told her. “Beth, let the man go. It’s probably hard for him to sit around watching us eat breakfast like human beings. Let him go,” Dick said from behind his paper. Beth looked at Detroit, her eyes holding hope that he would stay for his slice of bacon. It was important for her, he knew that. Even if it was nothing, it was the only nothing she felt she could spare. But Detroit was sick of her impoverished hospitality, and sicker of Dick, and sick of Detroit. On the front step, he tipped his hat, then pivoted on his toe and was gone. Detroit and The Kid - Gabe Delahaye 6 It would have been a quick ride on the Division tramway, switch to the Brush tramway, and then off at Grand Circus park, but Detroit preferred walking.

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