The Copper Thief by Matthew O'Brien

Jesse discovered the body during the apartment check. All the other areas were clear, and the walls, ceilings, and piping were intact, but the last space he entered—the back bedroom—contained the corpse. Exhaling a thin veil of marijuana smoke visible only in the beam of his headlamp, he felt the weight of his backpack: the six-pound sledgehammer, hacksaw, utility knife, wire cutters, and work gloves. A bottle of tap water fit snuggly in a side pouch, and a black-and-white bandana was looped around a strap. The backpack of his partner Sean, who was serving as lookout on the far side of the boarded-up window they’d opened with a crowbar, cradled the same items. Three loud coughs were the warning signal.

A knee-high mound of clothes rose a few feet away from Jesse’s scuffed, dusty boots. When he’d kicked it, his foot met something solid, and he cleared the top layer, revealing the pale, pitted face. Like Jesse, the man had a goatee and appeared to be in his forties. His mouth and eyes were open. He seemed to be staring at Jesse and Jesse stared back.

The room reeked of must and marijuana, but not death. The man had not been there long, Jesse concluded.

He hit the roach a second time and kept the beam of the headlamp, which was strapped to a logo-less black baseball cap, focused on the dead man’s face. He was not imagining this, he decided. It was not a hallucination brought on by the meth he’d smoked earlier that day. Pinching the roach, he clasped his hands in prayer, closed his bloodshot brown-green eyes, and bowed his head. “RIP, brother,” he whispered.

Jesse and Sean were casing an abandoned apartment on East Harmon Avenue, not far from the Hard Rock Hotel. Copper was selling on the streets of Vegas for three dollars a pound; no other material or metal, including aluminum, mattered to the two men. Also, they didn’t have a car or truck, and space in their backpacks and on their belt loops was limited. They’d hump the stripped copper wiring and fragmented pipes to a discreet nearby location and call their contact, an Ethiopian man they knew only as Mel, who’d weigh the haul in the back of his van and pay them in cash. (He’d later transport the load to California and sell it there for three times as much.) Jesse and Sean had been scrapping together nightly for six months, averaging three hundred dollars total for four to five hours of work. They would then buy meth and smoke it in the underground flood channel where they lived, freshen up and change clothes, and go to a small-stakes casino to gamble and drink until they ran out of money or the sun came up.

Jesse—tall and thin with long, wavy hair tied into a ponytail—kept the beam trained on the man’s face. The man appeared to be missing some or all of his teeth, and his eyes were green or brown. He looked familiar. Did I know him from the streets? thought Jesse. Did we serve time together? With his sharp nose and broad chin, the man resembled Jesse’s younger brother, who had a home and a steady job and who he had not spoken to for several months. He saw his own face framed by the wrinkled clothes—and flinched.

He considered alerting Sean to the situation, but he knew how he’d react. “Fuck the body! Let’s get the goods and get outta here!”

Jesse had been homeless in Las Vegas for two years and done things he’d promised himself he’d never do. For example, panhandle and eat out of a dumpster. But even at rock bottom, he had a conscience. Certain things remained sacred. It’s OK to be a thief, he believed, if that’s what you have to do to survive, but never steal from your friends or family. And he thought, continuing to stare at the man, don’t disturb or disrespect the dead.

Jesse had an intimate relationship with death. He’d survived two heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery. He’d OD on heroin at a house party and had to be revived by his drug buddies. Just a few months ago, his camp in the tunnels went up in flames—with him in it; he rolled on the concrete floor, found his way to his feet, held his breath for more than a minute amid the dense smoke, and somehow felt his way downstream to a pocket of fresh air. (He swore someone set his camp on fire in an attempt to kill him. Sean and his other neighbors said he fell asleep while smoking a cigarette, after staying up for three days straight doing meth.)

On top of all that, his friend and neighbor Grace drowned in a flash flood, an old running mate from the streets committed suicide by stepping in front of an eighteen-wheeler on Tropicana Avenue, and his dad died of a brain aneurysm when Jesse was just twenty-three years old. Squeezing his son’s hand, a respirator tube jammed down his throat, his garbled last words were “I can’t breathe.”

Jesse himself was suddenly short of breath. Five years ago, following his heart surgery, a doctor told him he had only one or two years left—if he took care of himself. He was lucky to be alive—or unlucky, he’d thought, in tough times—and he acknowledged that he and the dead man could’ve easily traded places. He could be buried beneath a pile of soiled clothing in an abandoned apartment in the shadow of the Strip.

He felt the pocket of his faded jeans for his flip phone, which he had charged that afternoon at McDonald’s. He considered calling 911, but balked. It was forbidden in his world, and he’d have to physically fight Sean to place the call. He took another tug off the roach and thought about Mississippi. The last time he spoke to his little brother, he said he’d buy Jesse a bus ticket if he wanted to come home. For years his mom, now in her mid-seventies and battling lung cancer, had been pleading with him to move back to Vicksburg and help her out around the house. His friend and ex-bandmate Slim offered to let him sleep on the couch in his recording studio, along the old Highway 61, if he worked for him as a session guitarist. Music saved my life before, mused Jesse. Maybe it could do it again.

The weed had worked its way into his brain, because he briefly considered if he could make things right with his ex-wife and kids. The ex is a lost cause, he conceded; some things can’t be fixed. But he allowed himself to believe he could reconcile with the kids. They were teenagers now—tall and thin and faces covered with acne—and may better understand why he left and never came back. Why he didn’t call, even on their birthdays. Why he’d seen them grow up in pictures forwarded to him by a sympathetic ex-sister-in-law who’d battled demons of her own.

“All clear?” inquired Sean impatiently through the window.

Jesse took a final hit off the roach, stubbed it out on the leg of his jeans, and placed it into the folds of his wallet. He kicked clothes back over the dead man’s face. He then retraced his trail, erasing his footprints with a tattered T-shirt. Finally, he clicked off his headlamp and climbed out of the window.

“It’s been hit already,” he said, as he passed Sean without looking at him and started down the walkway. “There’s nothing left.”

“Where you going?” said Sean, shouldering his backpack.

Jesse didn’t respond. Continuing down the walkway, as if he had somewhere to be, he removed the phone from his pocket and began to punch in a number.