“What’s her problem with me anyway?” he went on, leering at me. “Too creepy for her or something?”

“Oh, yeah. She thinks you’re the fucking devil.”

He laughed. “I don’t blame her. Is it the menacing look I give others? Or does she just have a thing against Macedonians?”

“Nah, man, I think it’s your tats.”

The good thing about Marko was how understanding he was. While he had a vicious temper, reason always broke through. He was rational, level-headed, someone I could trust. He didn’t get shitty when people judged him. He knew he was scary to look at, so Allie’s disdain was natural to him.

“My snakes? Ah, man, she’s not the first. I’m devastated, though.” No, he wasn’t. He was used to being hated. I laughed at the exaggerated way he slumped his shoulders in mock despair. Fuckin’ Marko Aleksander Brankov. It was impossible hating him. I just needed Allie to see him in my eyes instead of the way she regarded him with suspicion.

“Just get the hell out of here,” I said. “We got shit to do, right?”

The humour left his face as he nodded. “Abso-fucking-lutely, man. You bought the sledgehammers?”

“Yeah, I bought the sledgehammers.”

With a wicked look in his eye, he replied, “Then let’s get the party started.”

Four

Heath

I’d driven past this house every day for a week. It was on a quiet street, the actual unsuspecting red bricked home on a cul-de-sac. There were no cars parked in the driveway. The blinds were closed, interior lights out. The porch light was on, and it’d been on during the day too. I knew it was a pathetic attempt at deterring anyone, giving the illusion there was someone inside.

There wasn’t. Marko and I had watched closely. He’d even taken days off just to sit out front. We detected no movement. This was made to hide the one thing we were here for.

I parked the car in the driveway and reached for the moleskin notepad I’d found in the duffel bag the day I’d killed Ricardo and counted the money. To anyone else, it was a notebook filled with gibberish; consisting of countless lines of random letters, it formed no words. But I knew these were codes the second I laid eyes on it. Once broken, I’d made sense of the gibberish.

Unlocked, it was a list of addresses with dollar signs next to them.

I always looked back on that moment I’d discovered the notebook. I was confused, surprised, and even eager. I was shaking with the need to find out the meaning to them because I knew if they were at the bottom of a money bag, they must have been important.

“What’re you doing?” Marko asked, sitting stiff as a bone next to me.

“Just making sure,” I answered.

“Making sure of what?”

“This is the exact address.”

“And?”

I looked over the line repeatedly, knowing for sure it was. We’d stalked this house for a week straight – the plan had been put in place for a lot longer. It was exactly the right address as it said in the book, but I was doing this to prolong the inevitable. Truth was, I was terrified on the inside. I was sure Marko was too. This was insanity.

“It is,” I muttered, shutting the book and throwing it in the glove compartment. I turned to him in the dark, barely making out his face. I stared at him hard, letting the silence dominate the space before I whispered, “You ready?”

Without hesitation, he returned with, “Yeah.”

I tossed him his mask – a black balaclava – and put on my own. “Grab the sledgehammers.”

“How do you know we’re going to even need them?”

Turning off the car, I didn’t answer that. Just like breaking the code, it was my own little secret. “Just do. Let’s go.”

We were swift, escaping the car and shutting it quietly behind us. We barely made any noise. These were the moments being a fighter paid off. We were light on our feet, hurrying to the front of the house without making any noise. Marko already had the lock picks out by the time I made it to the door. I kept my body turned to the street, standing behind him as he worked the locks with expertise – the kind that made you wonder what the fuck he’d done in his life to accomplish this.

The weekday had been the perfect time to strike. I knew it would be. It helped that on this particular night the clouds in the sky completely hid the moon and stars, making it particularly darker than usual.

“Got it,” Marko said with a grunt as he shoved open the door.

We hurried inside the house, leaving every light off. I pulled out a small flashlight from my pocket and aimed it at the walls as I went room to room. Marko followed after me, not saying a word, breathing just as hard as me. My adrenaline was through the damn roof. I knew nobody was coming, but the thought of it happening scared the fuck out of me. We would be unprepared and the unluckiest shits in the world.

Marko didn’t know what I was looking for, but he’d find out soon enough. I could feel his impatience as he trudged behind me, leaving one room after another.

It was the last bedroom that caused me to halt in my steps. I aimed my flashlight directly at the wall with a triumphant smile on my face. The wall was freshly painted over, standing out against the rest of the walls in the room. I walked over to it and brushed my gloved hand along the rough surface. It’d been painted over fast, some of the paint bubbles crunched against my fingertips as I pressed into them.

“Here,” I whispered to Marko, “this is where it is.”

“In the wall?” he shot back doubtfully.

“Yeah, man. In the wall.”

“How the fuck do you know this shit? First that book, now this.”

I chuckled lightly. “My own little secret, Marko.”

He studied the wall for a moment and sighed. “Jesus, this is gonna be loud, Heath.”

I nodded. “I know. That’s why we have to do this fast.”

I threw the flashlight to the ground and faced the wall again. Holding tight the sledgehammer, I said a little prayer to a god I wasn’t sure I believed in… and then I swung the baby straight into it.

*

Adrenaline.

Adrenaline.

Fuck, it was only adrenaline that pushed us forward. We tore through that son of a bitch with everything inside of us, taking no longer than ten minutes to get to the jackpot. Money stacked atop of one another in thick bags of plastic, lining the interior of the wall from top to bottom, looking like a giant canvas of green.