by Don Winslow
“Every day,” Houghton says. “This economy, people are lookers.”
He says “lookers” with disdain.
“But no one in particular,” Lou says.
Houghton shakes his head. This is no mean feat—he has a big head with fatty jowls. His skin is as white as milk—again, no mean feat when your business is a few hundred yards from the beach.
“I want to see your security tapes,” Lou says.
They go inside and look at the tapes, which aren’t tapes at all anymore but, like everything else these days, a digital record on a computer. Houghton has cameras covering the front door, the inside of the store, and the back entrance, but nothing on the rear parking lot.
“Why not?” Lou asks.
“Because nothing ever happens there,” Houghton says.
Lou shrugs.
Something happened there.
Lou looks down and sees the cigarette butt. He looks up at Haddad. “Yours?”
“Does this have to go in your report?” Haddad asks.
Lou shakes his head.
He’s married, too.
McGuire slides into the passenger seat of Lou’s car. “Twenty bucks says Sammy lays those stones off in Brazil within six weeks.”
“Would we be thinking that if he weren’t Middle Eastern?” Lou might not be the only cop in SDPD who contributes to the ACLU, but he is the only one who’ll admit it. “You can’t tell me we don’t look at them harder.”
“Who knew about the delivery?” McGuire says. “Sammy, Haddad, Houghton. Could have been Houghton for all we know. He said it himself, business is bad. Maybe he tipped off the robbers, got a cut.”
“Robbers? Plural?” The theft rings don’t work this way, Lou thinks. They’re smash-and-grab. They literally smash in the courier’s car window, reach in, and take the merchandise. Half the time they beat him up, stab him, or shoot him.
They’re violent.
This guy gave back the cell phone.
“Don’t,” McGuire says.
“Don’t what?” Lou asks, even though he knows.
“Don’t do your Lone Ranger thing.”
Lou is by himself in thinking that there’s one guy pulling off a series of high-level jewelry heists.
Eleven jobs over the past four years.
Consistent—always on couriers or salesmen who are carrying value.
Efficient—in and out so fast even if there are witnesses who don’t know what the fuck they saw.
Patient—the merchandise doesn’t show up on the illicit market for months, if at all. So our boy is in no hurry to get paid.
Discreet—none of the usual fences know anything about him.
And clean—there’s been more blood spilled at a kids’ soccer game than in all these robberies combined.
At first no one thought the robberies were related. No one put them together because they were scattered over jurisdictions—San Diego, LA, Orange County, Mendocino—and no one shared the information.
The received wisdom was that it was a “ring.” (Prosecutors love rings. Rings make headlines, with a nice series of pictures on the front page.)
It was Lou checking insurance stats that put them together, Lou who introduced the theory that they were looking at one individual.
“A lone wolf,” his boss said when Lou first brought it up.
“If you have to,” Lou said.
“Bullshit,” his boss said.
If it was a ring, Lou argued, someone would have slipped up by now—bragged in a club, pissed off his old lady, or gotten busted on another charge and tried to trade up.
But one guy, keeping his own counsel, staying clean . . .
That guy’s not going to give you anything to help you catch him.
It’s Crime 101.
Lou is generally mocked for his “pet theory” about the Lone Gunman.
From his bosses, from the insurance companies, even the guys in his own unit bust his chops for having a “man crush,” a “bromance” with Robie “The Cat” after the old movie about the jewelry thief.
What was it called? Lou wonders now.
To Catch a Thief, that’s it.
Yeah, Lou thinks. To Catch a Thief.
Not thieves.
Thief.
Singular.
“Even if there was a real theft here,” McGuire says now, “and I’m not saying that there was, it’s probably Colombians. And I say this because it almost always is.”
“How do we know?” Lou asks.
McGuire hates it when Lou goes into his rabbinical mode. “How do we know what?”
“How do we know they’re almost always Colombians?” Lou clarifies. Then, as McGuire knew he would, he answers his own question. “Because they get caught.”
“So?”
So, Lou thinks, this guy doesn’t.
* * *
Davis walks into the Cliffs wearing a white dress shirt (tailored but not monogrammed), cuff links, and a black three-button wool gabardine Hugo Boss suit.
Black Church’s oxfords.
Davis owns few clothes, but they’re all good.
Classic.
Versatile.
A little retro.
Like Davis.
His brown hair is cut short, like pre-Beatles sixties, like he came out of a Kennedy campaign meeting or the Peace Corps.
Or a Steve McQueen movie.
Davis has seen every Steve McQueen movie ever made, most of them multiple times. Davis would be Steve McQueen except Steve McQueen already was Steve McQueen and there’s never going to be another one.
But to Davis, McQueen was the living definition of California cool.
If the 101 were an actor, it would be Steve McQueen.
The woman with the shoulder-length brown hair is the hottest woman in the restaurant.
Which is saying something.
All of the dozen or so women sipping white wines or dirty martinis at the bar of the trendy place are gorgeous and yoga, cross-trained, and spin-class fit because that’s how they get through the door.
Davis edges his way beside her and says, “It must be a lot of pressure, always being the most beautiful woman in a crowded room.”
She turns to him and answers, “Where have you been?”
“I made reservations here,” Davis says. “Is this okay, or would you like to go somewhere else?”
“How do you know I’m not waiting for someone?” Traci asks.
“I don’t,” Davis says. “I’m just hoping you’re not.”
“And if I am,” she says without a trace of rancor, “you’ll ask one of these other skinny bitches.”
“It’s just that I hate eating alone.”
A few seconds later, Derry, the manager, comes over and says, “Mr. Delaney, your table is ready. Good evening, Traci.”
Davis gives him a fifty-dollar handshake, and they go to their table.
Traci consumes an entire dinner made up of small appetizers—veggies, fish, chicken—nothing that would add an ounce of fat to that body.
“So where have you been?” she asks him with a stick of chicken satay perched on her lips. “It’s been . . . what, two months or something like that?”
“Something like that,” Davis answered. “I’ve just been out of town on a consulting job.”
“How’d it go?”
“Fine.”
Traci gets that Michael doesn’t like to talk about work. He likes to talk about music, films, sports, news, cars, art, surfing, yoga, triathlons, food, bicycles, but not work. So she switches it up to talk about the sprint Ironman she’s training for.
When the bill comes, Davis lays some twenties in the folder.
“Why do you always pay in cash?” Traci asks.
“I hate paying bills.”
“As much as you hate eating alone?”
“Almost.”
“Do you hate sleeping alone, too?” Traci asks, with a look in her eye that some guys would pay a thousand bucks to see just once in their li
ves.
Lou is glad to see that the Daily Grin is open.
Guy keeps irregular hours.
The hot dog truck, parked on a vacant lot on the corner of Lomas Santa Fe and the 101, is actually called the Daily Grind, but some joker removed the d, and the new name stuck.
Lou pulls his Honda Civic into the little lot.
His ride is the subject of constant ballbusting.
“Why don’t you buy a new car?” McGuire has asked on more than one occasion.
“Why?” Lou answered in return.
“Because it’s twelve years old,” McGuire said.
“So is your daughter,” Lou said. “Are you going to trade her in?”
“Lindsey doesn’t have two hundred thousand miles on her,” Lou said.
“Two hundred and thirty-seven,” Lou said. “And I think I can get three. I mean, you put oil in these things, they run forever.”
But it’s unseemly, McGuire has maintained, a San Diego police lieutenant driving a car that looks like it should have a Domino’s placard stuck on top. And the interior is no better—the seats are worn and sun-faded, crumbs from Lou’s many peripatetic meals (In-N-Out Burger, Rubio’s, Jack in the Box) are ground into the seams, and the dashboard is Neanderthal—no hands-free phone, no Sirius radio, no navigation.
“I’ve lived in San Diego my whole life,” Lou said. “I know how to get where I need to go.”
“What if you leave San Diego?” McGuire asked. “Go on a road trip?”
“In this car?”
Angie flat-out refuses to get into the Civic. They usually take her Prius on the odd occasions they go out together.
Now Lou walks up to the hot-dog truck and looks at the trivia question handwritten on the board.
“Alaska,” Lou says.
“Huh?”
“The answer to your trivia question,” Lou says. “State with the most surface water. What do I win?”
“Free mustard on your dog.”
“My lucky day,” Lou says. “One chili dog, angioplasty on the side.”
“Yeah, I never heard that one.”
“And a Coke,” Lou says. “No, a Diet Coke. No, a Coke.”
Because what the hell, right? He’s trying to keep the stomach down and was going to make it home for dinner when Angie called and told him she was going out with friends.
Lou gets his dog and steps over to the end of the truck where the condiments are. He smothers the dog with onions because, again, what the hell. He’s thinking this happy thought when the phone rings and it’s McGuire.
“You wanna grab a beer?” McGuire asks.
“Not tonight.”
“Lou?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t,” McGuire says.
“Don’t what?” Lou asks.
“You know.”
Yeah, Lou knows.
Just like he knows he’s going to.
Don’t do it, Lou tells himself as he drives down into Del Mar.
McGuire is right for once—don’t do it.
But he does. Turns off the 101 on Tenth Street and parks a little way down the street where he can keep an eye on the front door. Goddamn lawyers can afford houses in Del Mar. Cops with twenty-plus years on the job live in Mission Hills.
Del Mar, Lou reflects, is one of those California beach towns that tried to class up its true nature by putting up Tudor-style buildings, replete with hammerbeam roofs (sometimes with fake thatch), half-timbers, and cross gables.
Lou has always half expected to see plaques claiming that Shakespeare had once slept here. Anyway, it’s always amused him, although the time he went into one of the restaurants and tried to order spotted dick amused neither the waiter or Angie.
“How about bangers and mash?” Lou asked.
“How about acting your age?” Angie asked.
Which was hypocritical, because one of her standard complaints against him was that he acted too old—i.e., precisely his age.
Lou has a nice house in a nice neighborhood, but apparently not nice enough for Angie. Because her car, the fucking Prius she had to have, is out in front of the lawyer’s. She’s not even bothering to be discreet anymore.
He allows himself the fantasy of going up and rapping on the door, sticking his shield in the lawyer’s face, and asking him, What the fuck are you doing with my wife?—pun intended—but the last thing he needs in the world right now is a suspension and a letter in his jacket.
So he sits.
Lou has been on a hundred stakeouts.
Never thought he’d be on this one.
Angie comes out of the lawyer’s house at 10:10.
Lou makes a mental note of this, as if it mattered, as if he were going to have to testify in court in cop-speak—Subject exited the premises at 10:10.
He leaves some distance but follows her all the way east on 56 to the 163 and then Friar’s Road and finally home, pulling off a couple of blocks and waiting for her to get into the house for a few minutes.
Then he pulls up and goes in.
Angie’s sitting in the living room sipping a red wine and looking at a magazine when he comes through the door. He can’t blame the guy for wanting to bang her—she’s still a looker in her early forties—trim legs, nice rack, auburn hair.
She works out.
“How was your evening?” he asks, sitting in the chair across from her.
“Nice,” she says.
“Who were you out with?”
“I told you—Claire.”
“Yeah,” he says, willing himself to stay in the chair. “When did Claire move to 805 Tenth Street in Del Mar?”
She shakes her head. “Cops.”
That gets him out of the chair. He feels himself coming up as if a wave pushed him, and then he’s right in her face yelling, “What the fuck, Angie?!”
She doesn’t back down.
One of the things that attracted him to her a thousand years ago back at San Diego State.
She just sits there, looks him right back in the eye, doesn’t say a thing. What Angie should have been, he thinks now, is a hit man, because she’d be ice in the interview room. Seeing a video of herself whacking some guy, she’d look across the table and say, “So?”
“I watched you come out of his house,” Lou says.
“I’m sure you did.”
Like it’s his fault, right? Like he’s some schmuck making himself ridiculous sitting in his car while his wife cuckolds him. Which is exactly what he feels like.
“Do you love him?” Lou asks.
He can’t say the guy’s name. It would make it too real.
“I don’t love you,” she answers.
“I want a divorce.”
“No, Lou,” she says. “I want a divorce.”
Because she has to win, right? She can’t even give him that moment.
Traci gets up early and leaves.
A personal trainer, she has several clients who come in before they go to their offices, so her working day starts at 5:00 A.M. Davis kisses her goodbye and then goes back to sleep.
He gets up around eight, pulls on jeans and a hooded Killer Dana sweatshirt, grinds some coffee for the French press, then goes out to the little balcony to look at the ocean.
Opens up the iPad and sends all the surveillance pix of Haddad into the ether. Likewise the emails between Sam Kassem and John Houghton.
Davis hacked Sam’s email account months ago and tracked it the way a stockbroker follows the market, getting to know Sam’s business as if he were thinking of buying it. He learned that Sam routinely shifted merchandise from store to store, using his brother-in-law, Ben Haddad, as a courier.
Usually the deliveries amounted to more than a few thousand dollars in merchandise—thirty or forty grand at most—well below Davis’s risk/reward equation.
Davis has rejected scores of potential hits—the location was on a busy street, too close to a police station, too far from an available underground garage to stow the work car. The couriers c
arried weapons or used follow cars—the potential take wasn’t worth the risk.
Davis has criteria.
Standards.
Rules.
He never compromises them.
Crime 101: Laws are made to be broken, with rules that are made to be followed.
Crime 101: Get there before the other guy.
Davis drives north past Point Reef, El Moro Canyon, Corona Del Mar, Newport Beach, all the way up to Huntington Beach.
He finds a parking spot near the pier, sits and waits.
Davis always gets to meetings early. Never at the meeting point but near the meeting point. Near enough to observe the guy he wants to meet or a whole committee. He always parks where there are at least two routes out.
It’s a pretty view, the long stretch of beach and the pier that reaches out into the ocean. Quiet today—the surf isn’t going off, and there are just a few fishermen and tourists on the pier.
He watches Money walk onto the pier, go about halfway, and lean against the north railing. Davis scans the terrain behind and in front of him, sees no one follow him, no one look up, none of the tourists or old strollers who are more than they seem to be. Nobody speaks into his hand, into his collar, into a book or a magazine.
So Davis gets out of the car, walks down to the pier, and stands along the railing beside Money.
Money is tall, with sandy hair, an unlikely goatee, but neatly trimmed. Gray sport jacket over jeans. Blue shirt, no tie. They call him Money because that’s what he does—he takes the raw merchandise and converts it to money.
“Another day in paradise,” Money says.
“Why we live here,” Davis says. He slips the gem papers into Money’s jacket pocket. “One and a half mil.”
This isn’t just a matter of trust, although Davis has worked with him for years. It’s business—Money would never rip Davis off, because Davis makes him . . . money.
Money has only a handful of clients, each of them among the best thieves in the world. He’s impeccable about where he fences the merchandise, immaculate about the accounts.
Minus Money’s commission this score nets Davis one million flat.
Money is full-service: He fences the rocks, washes the proceeds, sets up overseas accounts under a variety of aliases. He doesn’t know Davis’s real name, where he lives, what he drives.
“I’ll be back to you in a few weeks,” Davis says.