“What’s the trick?”
He asks like he thinks it’s clever. Like this is a card game and I’ve got the ace up my sleeve.
“You sure it’s clean?”
I give him a look. Cold. Dead weight.
Clean enough.
This ain’t a fairy tale. You want a payday, you take the filth. The stink. The stain that follows you home and crawls in bed with you. You want clean? Buy gloves. Burn ‘em after.
It’s a track job.
No heat, no glory.
Just alleyways, back doors, and the sound of your own breath bouncing off concrete.
We’re not robbing saints. We’re scraping crumbs off the edge of hell’s dinner plate and hoping the devil’s too drunk to notice.
Lou says, “What about after?”
There is no after.
There’s the job. The moment. The grind of now.
And then there’s nothin’.
You think ahead, you get sloppy.
You get sloppy, you get caught.
You get caught, they beat your name outta you and bury what’s left in a shallow hole. Or worse—they let you walk. And you spend the next ten years waiting for someone else to bury you.
You ever sit in your car at four A.M., no radio, no lights, just you and that hum of your own damn thoughts?
Wonderin’ if you’re still alive, or just a ghost too stupid to lie down?
That’s what after looks like. Cold. Empty. You and your regrets trading punches in the dark.
I don’t plan.
I don’t dream.
I move.
You stop movin’, you’re meat. Tag on the toe, name spelled wrong, cops callin’ the wrong number.
Nobody shows up to claim you.
You want clean? There’s a laundromat on 3rd and Main.
You want out? There’s the door. Don’t let it hit you.
But no one walks.
They run.
They run ‘til their lungs rip open and their shoes melt, thinkin’ they can outrun the rot.
They don’t see it.
The shadow.
It follows.
It’s got eyes.
A name.
A grudge that don’t fade.
You forget the face, but it don’t forget yours.
You think freedom’s a key?
It’s a trick. A razor-thin wire stretched over a pit full of fire and teeth and old sins with your fingerprints on ‘em.
One misstep and you’re charcoal.
So we move.
Quiet.
Sharp.
Ghosts in the static. Whispers in a thunderstorm.
'Cause the trick ain’t the score.
Ain’t the run.
It’s not even the lie you tell that one person you might’ve loved before you burned their name off your tongue.
The real trick’s in the silence.
When it’s over.
When the noise dies, and all that’s left is your heartbeat, loud like a hammer.
That’s when the ghosts show up.
Not in white sheets. In memories. In names. In every second you thought you got away with something.
They don’t knock.
They just crawl in.
And they stay.
That’s the real trick: dealing with it after.
That’s the game.
And baby—
It’s a black-and-white world soaked in red.
And nobody walks away clean.