“Like what?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. This robbery thing, this house thing, is the best gig I’ve ever had.”
* * *
—
COX THOUGHT about that for a moment, then said, “I want enough that I can go back to LA and live like a star for a few years. That’s all.”
“The cops got your prints.”
She shrugged. “So, they pick me up, I tell them everything I know about the three of you, which isn’t anything they don’t already know, and I tell them I was fuckin’ Marion for money. That I didn’t know you guys were crooks. That we ran out of the house in Altadena and you dropped me off in Pasadena, and that was that.”
Cole, who was biting his thumbnail, nodded. “Could work. I’d be a little pissed if you hung a lot of it on me. But if you hang it on Marion and Deese, I’ll be okay with it.”
“I can do that,” Cox said. “Hey! Harrelson’s place is coming up.”
* * *
—
THEY ALL CRUISED Harrelson’s place, which was tucked behind tan adobe walls and a gate. Cole had asked Larry O’Conner how he’d managed to get inside, to cruise the house, and O’Conner admitted that he hadn’t. What he’d done was, he’d gotten Harrelson’s address and then spotted the house on a Google satellite image.
O’Conner had called up a map on his laptop, then the satellite image, and they considered the neighborhood of upscale houses, almost all with pools, only one or two without. Almost all the houses had multiple pitched roofs covered with red tile. Though large, houses were still crowded together, only a few arm’s lengths between them, separated by thin screens of foliage.
Harrelson’s house backed up to the exterior wall of the subdivision. A pool was set just inside the wall, so they couldn’t cross in the middle of the lot, they’d have to cross between his house and the next one to the right. There was scrubby brush growing along the outside of the wall, so they’d have some concealment after Cox dropped them off.
“We could be seen from either house, so in and out fast as we can,” Beauchamps said. “I don’t know if they have armed security in there, but they could have.”
“We’ll have guns,” Deese said.
“Yeah, but we don’t use them unless it’s to save our lives. Damnit, we need more time. If those marshals weren’t here . . .”
* * *
—
WHEN THEY got back to the house where Beauchamps and Cox were staying, they agreed that they’d have to make some changes in the usual routine. If they even suspected that they’d been seen crossing the wall or in the yard, Cox had to be hovering nearby to make an instant pickup. If they got caught inside the wall, running would be virtually impossible—if they ran, Cox wouldn’t know where to get them, and the place would be crawling with security and cops within minutes.
“If we spot Harrelson’s car at the bar, after dark, we gotta go straight back to his place. We cross the wall and we hide there. In the brush. Geenie goes back to the bar and calls us when he’s leaving,” Cole said. “That way, we don’t have to follow him back, there’s no chance he could spot us.”
“You know, if we’re hiding in the yard and Harrelson’s old lady should come outside to the pool, we could grab her then and start taking the house apart. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to go up against Harrelson himself,” Beauchamps said.
“Larry said Harrelson carried money in his car,” Deese said. “We’d miss out on that.”
“Well, if we have a chance to grab her, I’d say we do it,” Cole said. “Then depending on what the take is, we either get out of there or we wait until Harrelson gets back. We don’t make the decision until we see what’s what.”
Deese: “What the man said.”
Beauchamps nodded. “Sounds logical to me. That bar’s got a big parking lot, Geenie could pull in there and sit for as long as she needs to.”
That, they decided, was what they’d do.
* * *
—
AND IT WORKED perfectly, up to a point. They started cruising Tina’s Wayside at nine o’clock, and Harrelson’s yellow Porsche Cayenne was already there. “Can’t be two of those,” Beauchamps said. The Porsche was painted the precise tint of a Yellow Cab.
They headed back to Harrelson’s house. The perimeter road didn’t have much traffic after dark. They waited until there was a gap, then Cox pulled behind Harrelson’s house. The three men, all dressed in dark clothing and wearing driving gloves, scrambled out and squatted behind a screen of eucalyptus trees. They carried with them a black backpack with guns in it, duct tape, ski masks, Geenie’s book-marking butcher knife, a fifteen-foot chain with four padlocks, and three flashlights. They wouldn’t need the battering ram because they wouldn’t be knocking down a door.
They waited in the trees for five minutes, and then, during another carless interval, they crossed the five-foot wall. They landed in more generic landscaped brush on the far side of the wall, waited there for an alarm, a motion light to go on, a dog’s bark, a questioning voice, and, when there was nothing, made their way slowly between the houses, with Harrelson’s to the left. There were lights on in the house, but Harrelson’s wife was apparently deep inside and they never saw her or even a shadow behind a curtain. They stopped behind a clump of decorative grasses next to Harrelson’s garage door. Beauchamps opened the pack and passed out the ski masks and the guns and zipped the case back up.
O’Conner had told them that Harrelson usually had an early golf game in the summer and wouldn’t linger at Tina’s. He was correct.
Beauchamps’s phone buzzed at nine forty-five. Cox was on the other end, and she said, “He’s on his way. He’ll be there in five or six minutes, if he doesn’t stop.”
“Stay way back behind him, don’t try to get close,” Beauchamps told her.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I’m not dumb.”
* * *
—
FIVE MINUTES LATER, she called again. “He’s turning in at the gate. He’s only a minute away.”
Cole said to Deese and Beauchamps, “Get ready, he’s here.”
Beauchamps: “I’ll lead. Clayton, you follow. Cole, you know the routine: you watch behind us, me’n Clayton will take him.”
“But easy,” Cole said, for Deese’s benefit.
* * *
—
“LIGHTS,” Beauchamps muttered. “Here he comes.”
They saw the Cayenne pass under a streetlight. The yellow finish was unmistakable. The car slowed, and Beauchamps said, “Ready?”
Then Cole asked, “What the fuck is this?”
They watched, dumbfounded, as the garage door of the house across the street went up. The Cayenne pulled in and the door started down again. No chance they could get there in time to confront Harrelson.
“That fuckin’ O’Conner got the address wrong,” Deese said. “I’m gonna cut his fuckin’ nose off.”
“Not fuckin’ O’Conner, fuckin’ Google,” Cole whispered. “I saw the map and they marked this house. You gonna cut Google’s nose off?”
“We gotta get out of here,” Beauchamps said. “Jesus H. Christ. We gotta get out of here.”
* * *
—
THEY GOT BACK to the house without incident, fuming but sometimes laughing about it. Deese had thought it over and finally told Beauchamps that he was dealing with Roger Smith on a possible payoff that would see him out of the country.
“I’m telling you but not them other ones. If I get the cash, I’ll give you enough to get you anywhere you need to go and get set up again.”
Beauchamps shook his head. “Cole is my friend. I’ll take you up on the offer, but I’m going to tell him it might be coming.”
“Well, shit . . .”
Beauchamps said, “Clayton, something you never learned—being a killer instead
of a robber—that to be successful, you sometimes have to trust people. I trust Cole.”
Beauchamps told Cole and Cox about the possibility of getting money from Smith and that they’d get a cut, if only a small one, and Cole bobbed his head, said, “Terrific,” and Cox said to Deese, “That’s nice of you,” the insincerity clear in her voice.
Later that night, when they were all in their separate rooms, Deese got a call on his burner. Roger Smith. He spoke low, and pool balls clicking in the background told Deese exactly where Smith was. Deese rarely yearned for anything other than money, cocaine, and sex, but he was suddenly overcome with yearning to be back in his old haunts in Louisiana, the green-baize pool tables, the smell of chalk, the squeak when twisting it on the tip of a cue. He pushed the yearning away, and asked, “You get my message?”
“Yes. I’m gonna do this, but I want to make a point plain. It’s a lot of money. If you take it and don’t hold up your end of the bargain, to leave the country, I’ll find the best talent I can and hire them to kill you. You understand?”
“Man . . .”
“You understand?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Don’t be bullshitting me, bon ami,” Smith said. “New Orleans is now off-limits for you. If you get the idea in your head of coming back here to put me down, you won’t get two feet inside the city before I know it. We won’t set no dumbass Lugnuts on you. So take the money and run and have a happy life.”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
As the Gang of Four was doing reconnaissance and making the aborted run at Harrelson, Lucas, Bob, and Rae were pulling together what they’d learned in Las Vegas.
They’d planned to start the day by checking local hospitals for anyone who’d paid cash for a leg injury before the robbery at the Wrights’ place; Bob and Rae would do that. Lucas would get together with Las Vegas’s Sergeant Mallow to interview local fences about the missing jewelry.
“Here in Las Vegas, they’ve probably got a Yellow Pages listing,” Rae said. They were sitting in the hotel’s café, eating pancakes.
“When was the last time you saw the Yellow Pages?” Bob asked.
“This place is so wired up. It’s like methamphetamine lighting. Makes me jittery. Gotta be more neon here than anywhere in the world,” Rae said. “At night, the whole street out there looks like a slot machine.”
“Not by accident,” Bob said.
“You know what I’ve noticed?” Lucas asked. “Everybody looks so normal. You expect these hard-faced women and burnt-out guys and sleazy gamblers. But when you look around, it’s like every state in the U.S. sent a couple thousand residents here, dressed like they dress back home. Not even like the airport, where people dress up a little bit. They’re all dressed exactly like they do in Podunk.”
“Except they walk down the main drag here drinking out of martini glasses,” Rae said. “You don’t see that in Podunk.”
* * *
—
AS THEY ATE, they were looking at Bob’s printed-out maps to local emergency rooms when their planning session was temporarily derailed by a call from Earl, the FBI phone guy. He said that the phone they’d been watching had popped up again, and repeatedly, at several locations off West Chicago Avenue.
“I checked it out on a map and it looks like they were walking up and down an alley, like they were going back and forth between a couple of different places,” Earl said.
“Did you check the numbers they were calling?”
“Yeah, but they’re all to other burners. Not a full-time phone among them.”
“Huh. Don’t know what that means,” Lucas said. “Watch those other phones, too. Something’s going on here.”
Bob to Lucas: “Me’n Rae could go over there while you hook up with Mallow.”
Lucas shook his head. “I want to take a look. Let’s all three run over. You can drop me back if we don’t see anything promising.”
* * *
—
CHICAGO AVENUE turned out to be part of a neighborhood beneath a thousand-foot-tall observation tower that hung overhead like an enormous chess queen. When they turned down the block, Lucas said, “Goddamnit,” and Rae said, “Yeah,” and Bob said, “Well, now we know for sure that they know we’re here.”
They all recognized the neighborhood as a place you’d unload your burners if you thought the cops were watching and you hoped to confuse them. “Probably tossed them out the window,” Bob said. “Free phones for your local dealers.”
And it was not a neighborhood where Deese and the gang would be hanging out.
“Back to the original plan,” Lucas said.
Rae: “Groan.”
* * *
—
BOB AND RAE would focus on emergency rooms west of I-15, the north-south interstate highway that split the city right up the middle. They did that only because the Wrights thought the getaway car had gone west.
“It’s weak, but it’s what we’ve got. Everything we know about them has come from west of I-15,” Lucas said.
Lucas would meet Mallow, who had a short list of fences where the Wrights’ jewelry might be held.
* * *
—
LUCAS FOUND MALLOW waiting outside a Dunkin’ Donuts on the east side of town. Mallow had said he wanted to walk to the first place they’d visit and the donut shop was nearby. He had a bag in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other and was wearing a loose, bright yellow shirt with its tail over his slacks. Lucas got his iPad out of the Volvo, left the car in the parking lot, and walked around to the front of the shop.
“A flatfoot at a donut shop,” Lucas said. “You got no self-respect . . . You get an extra?”
“Hey, Cargo shorts and drivin’ a Volvo, let’s not talk about self-respect,” Mallow said, tipping his coffee cup at Lucas’s knees. There was a trash can outside the door. As they left, Lucas took the last donut, a double chocolate, and Mallow threw the bag into the can.
“You got me on the Volvo,” Lucas said. “Where’re we going?”
They were going down the block to a low stucco building with a red neon sign that said “Alvin’s Gems & Jewelry” and a door with an electronic lock. As they walked up, Mallow said, “Ring the doorbell. There’s a camera aimed at the door, they know my face. I’m gonna hang back.”
Lucas rang the bell and a moment later was buzzed through the door. He held it for Mallow, then led the way down a short hallway to the main room, where a woman was sitting behind the jewelry counter, looking at a television set.
Mallow said, “Miz Alvin. Ray around?”
Mrs. Alvin resembled some of the weeds that overgrew Las Vegas’s vacant lots—thin, dry-looking—with yellow-white hair atop a puckered-up face. “Nope. He’s up to the ranch.”
“Didn’t know you had a ranch,” Mallow said.
“Did since Ray’s dad died. It’s north of St. George. He’ll be back tomorrow,” she said. “What do you want him for?”
“The marshal here wants to show you some pictures,” Mallow said.
Lucas called up the photos of Toni Wright’s jewelry on the iPad and spun it around to show Alvin. She looked at them carefully, then said to Mallow, “That’s way high-end. We wouldn’t handle that. Of course if we did, we’d want a good provenance. There’s so much fake Loloma out there that you can’t sell it if you can’t prove where it come from.”
Mallow said, “Right,” letting the skepticism ride on his voice.
“Don’t believe me?” Alvin said. “Look at the stuff we handle.” She rapped on the glass top of the jewelry counter. “Most expensive thing in here is five hundred and forty-nine dollars, and we could be talked down. We don’t handle no twenty-thousand-dollar Loloma.”
“How about that princess necklace?” Mallow asked.
“Shoot. We didn’t handle no princess necklace.”
<
br /> “Well, I know you did, and you know I know. You sold it to that Fitch guy up in Denver and he sent it along to Baltimore. What’d you take out of that? Fifty K? Is that where the ranch came from?”
She sneered at him, a rim of ragged teeth showing beneath her thin top lip. “You must not have checked the real estate market lately. You don’t buy no Colorado ranch for no fifty K.”
It was starting to sound like a lover’s quarrel, so Lucas jumped in. “Mrs. Alvin, I’m a U.S. Marshal and I’m trying to track down a killer. That cannibal from Louisiana, you probably heard about him on television?”
She said, “Maybe,” which meant yes.
“He’s with this bunch who stole the Loloma jewelry,” Lucas said. “If it turns out you or your husband handled it, and if you lie about it and we find out we’ll put you in prison. We’re not talking about thirty days for handling a stolen bracelet. We’re talking about being an accessory to murder, which is the same as murder, and that’s life in prison.”
She twitched, maybe showing a little fear. “I’m telling you, we never saw that stuff. I’d know and we didn’t.” To Mallow she said, “You know who’d handle it, if anybody did.”
Mallow said, “We’re going there. We’re watching your phones and theirs. If you call them, we’ll be back. Like the marshal said, we’re talking murder here, Louise.”
“I hear ya.”
* * *
—
LUCAS FOLLOWED MALLOW to the next stop, five minutes after the first, at a dusty storefront called Loco’s Consignment & Furs. “This isn’t the place Louise was talking about, that’s next,” Mallow said. “Thought we might as well stop since we’re going right past it. Loco does some light fencing.”
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