by Don Winslow
“After that?”
“It goes into a safe in Shahbazi’s suite,” Sharon says. “There’ll be armed security at the wedding and the reception. Israelis.”
So there are two moments to do it, Davis thinks. When the courier is on his way from the airport to the hotel or inside Shahbazi’s room at L’Auberge, when they’re making the transfer.
But the armed guard is problematic—Davis doesn’t like the possibility of violence. He’s gone his entire career without getting hurt or hurting anyone else. It’s a point of personal pride as well as a professional mandate.
Crime 101: If you can’t do it without pulling a trigger, you shouldn’t be doing it.
So Davis is going to take a pass on this one.
Then Sharon says, “There’s something else—Shahbazi’s paying in cash.”
A little smirk comes across her lips. She knows what Davis knows—the seller doesn’t want the IRS finding out about the transaction.
“So he’ll have his own security,” Davis says.
Sharon shrugs. “We don’t insure the cash.”
So five and a half mil just became eleven mil, Davis thinks.
Half of it in cash—no need for a fence, no commissions, just three or four points to Money to launder it.
That’s a very nice house on the beach.
By the 101.
* * *
As it turns out, life by the beach is pretty good.
This is what Lou is thinking as he enjoys his breakfast burrito. It surprises him—first, as a devoted bagel-and-cream-cheese guy (“Is there a stereotype you won’t traffic in?” Angie had asked him one morning), he would never have heretofore combined the words “breakfast” and “burrito,” and he certainly wouldn’t have thought he’d enjoy the result.
But this is his new life, right? So a couple of weeks ago he wandered into the Solana Beach Coffee Company, just a block inland from his condo in a little strip mall flanking the 101, looked at the menu, thought, What the hell, it’s my new life, right? went way out on a limb and ordered the breakfast burrito.
Now he’s hooked.
Crisp bacon, scrambled eggs, lettuce, tomato and salsa, the goddamn things are delicious.
Who knew?
And the setting can’t be beat.
He’s now accustomed to getting his coffee and food and stepping outside into the little courtyard, which is bordered on three sides by two-story buildings that house, among other things, a climbing gym, a barre studio, a yoga place and a dermatologist who seems to treat only women who by all superficial (as it were) evidence need no treatment whatsoever.
Lou sits at one of the wrought-iron tables and lets the sun hit his face as he takes in the 360-degree view—there’s not a bad seat in the house—as the women come and go from their classes and appointments, many of them stopping into SBCC for a quick coffee or smoothie. The customers who aren’t beautiful women are mostly beautiful men—surfers, climbers or just workout junkies, although there’s one table of middle-aged men with bicycles who seem to use this as a morning meeting place, retired guys who have coffee and heart-healthy oatmeal here before they go off on their ride.
No, life on the coast is getting good to Lou.
At first the constant sound of the surf bugged him, but now it’s become a lullaby that soothes him to sleep. He’s come to like getting up in the morning and making that first cup of coffee, then stepping out onto his small balcony to look at the ocean.
Then he gets dressed and goes to the SBCC before he heads to work. There’s a newspaper rack in the strip mall, and Lou puts quarters in to buy an actual, physical newspaper, his beloved Union-Tribune, which he reads as he has breakfast and checks out the locals.
Sometimes he makes it home from work in time to catch the sunset from the balcony, and it’s—as the kids would say—amazing. If you can’t believe in God the Father, Lou thinks—and as a nonobservant Jew he doesn’t really know what he believes in—watching the sun sink over the ocean, you have to believe in God the Artist.
The weekends he dreaded as solitary, divorced, angst-ridden loneliness marathons haven’t been so bad. He usually starts them with a later, more extended session at the coffee place, then takes a walk up the PCH or over to the Cedros District, which has some interesting shops, more coffee places and a decent bookstore.
Or he walks on the beach.
Which is as surprising a development to him as the breakfast burrito.
Lou has never been much of a beach person. He doesn’t really swim, doesn’t surf, and the thought of “laying out” and tanning sounds like brain death.
“Jews are more of a desert people,” he’s explained to McGuire, who also spurns the beach because his Irish skin burns like . . . well, crispy bacon in a breakfast burrito.
“But they both have sand,” McGuire said. “Beaches and deserts.”
Lou wasn’t convinced.
But now the sand is just down a set of stairs outside his condo, so one day he walks down and finds he enjoys walking in the sand, smelling the salt air, feeling the ocean breeze on his face. And if he thought the people at the coffee company were beautiful, it’s mostly the same people on the beach except with a lot less clothing.
It’s not just the hard bodies.
Lou starts to like the whole scene—the blue water, the open sky, the families out there just having fun, the surfers, the Frisbees—the whole beach scene.
“You’ll be buying a surfboard next,” McGuire said.
No, Lou thinks now, but I might get a boogie board.
It looks like fun.
So the weekends aren’t bad. Actually, he starts to enjoy them. This stretch of the 101, from Via del Valle in the south to Cardiff Beach, starts to become his turf. He likes driving home on it at nights, on weekends he goes to Pizza Port, or Chief’s sports bar over by the train station to catch a game on television, and there’s always the hot-dog truck.
He misses Angie, but, to be honest, not as much as he thought he would. Yeah, okay, he’s a little lonely and Seaside Chateau is kind of a lonely place. Lou finds it fascinating that, since moving there, he’s seen a lot of cars in the subterranean garage but very few people in the actual complex.
They must be there, he thinks, because the cars are there, and they come and go, but he doesn’t see the people who should go with them. As far as he can discern, the residents fall into several groups: retirees who live there full-time, owners who apparently only come in the summers, and transients—some of them tourists, others transients who are between full-time homes and/or marriages, who have done just what he has—rented from a management agency.
Whoever they are—at least not the few of them he sees in this off-season—they don’t ever start conversations. They’ll nod hello if you pass them by the pool or in the garage, but that’s about it.
Lou finds it curious, but he doesn’t really mind. He’s kind of enjoying the anonymity in which to explore his new life. If you ever wanted to just get lost, he thinks, you’ve come to the right place at Seaside Chateau.
The one source of real unhappiness in Lou’s life is the Haddad robbery.
For which he does not have a single lead.
The case is as cold as an ex-wife’s heart.
Both Ben Haddad and Sam Kassem passed their polygraphs, so the idea of an inside job was out the window. Lou was just as glad—he didn’t want them to be implicated. John Houghton, the store owner in Del Mar, had volunteered to take a poly—because he was sick of the insurance company’s shit—and also came out clean.
Which left the insurance company on the hook for the money but also left Lou with exactly jackshit.
Lou is more convinced than ever that it’s one guy, the “101 Bandit,” and that the guy is very good and very careful. He pulled off the Haddad job in less than a minute and then simply disappeared. Like the earth swallowed him, as if there’s some kind of subterranean . . .
Parking structure?
He flashes back on the Solana
Beach Federal Correctional Institute.
If you ever wanted to just get lost . . .
Is that what his guy is doing? Making his hits, driving into a subterranean garage and switching vehicles?
Lou makes a mental note to check out the structures nearest Houghton’s jewelry store. Maybe someone saw something.
Maybe there’s something still there.
This is what Lou is thinking as he watches the woman get up from the table. He knows that she’s out of his league—she made that abundantly clear by blowing him off with barely a glance—but he also knows that he knows her from somewhere.
Old-school, Lou has a Rolodex in his head, and now he mentally flips through it. She’s not a friend of Angie’s (or she would have come over out of curiosity or to gloat), she’s not anyone he’s ever arrested or . . .
Questioned.
Yes you did, Lou thinks.
You interviewed her about a diamond job seven years ago. The woman who was taking diamonds to the house in Rancho Santa Fe, got a flat tire and was robbed of stones worth $645,000. This blonde wasn’t the store owner, she wasn’t the vic, she was . . .
With the insurance company, and you interviewed her to establish the value of the merchandise and the security precautions . . . but she wasn’t with the actual insurance company, she was . . .
A broker.
Sharon . . .
Carter.
No—Cole.
No—Coombs.
Sharon Coombs.
So who’s the guy? Lou wonders.
They seem to have just met, they had a five-minute conversation, and she picks up her healthy, fancy-ass latte and walks away. No exchange of phone numbers that Lou could see. Just another failed flirtation on the PCH, he thinks. They summed each other up, it didn’t pan out, and they moved on.
But there’s something in his gut—and it isn’t the breakfast burrito—that tells him he was looking at something else.
Because Lou doesn’t believe in coincidences.
Crime 101: There’s a word for a man who believes in coincidence: the defendant.
From the inside of his car, Ormon watches Coombs walk away and get into her Lexus.
Davis drives.
What Davis does.
When he needs to think.
Crime 101: If a job feels wrong, it is wrong.
He knows this, he knows it, but—
There are no buts, Davis tells himself, there are only the basics—Crime 101, but . . .
This job is his out. If you were going to make an exception to the rules, this job is . . . well, exceptional. It’s risky, Davis thinks, but is it riskier than turning it down and doing three or four jobs to make the same money?
Then he knows he’s going to do it.
As he drives past the big smokestack in Carlsbad, he knows that he’s going to break his rules and do this one, last job.
Now the question is how.
There are two moments I can do it, Davis thinks. One is in the hotel suite itself, when the courier is turning over the merchandise. There’ll be three people in the suite—Shahbazi, the courier and the security guard.
So you have to get into the suite (not a real problem) and cover three men. Then you have to take the jewels and the cash, and you literally don’t have enough hands to do that and hold a gun.
Think it through.
The courier will go in, make the exchange and come back out with the cash. You take him in the hallway, disable him, then go into the suite and take the stones. Either in the hallway or in the room, you’ll be one on two, depending on whether the security guy stays with the cash or the merchandise.
Better, but still not best.
Think.
What’s the critical flaw, what are you not thinking of? He’s all the way up in Oceanside before it hits him.
Don’t take the security guard, be the security guard.
The 101 always has the answer.
When Sharon steps out of her shower that night wrapped in a towel, a man is sitting on her bed. The little SIG Sauer 380 she keeps in her nightstand is in his left hand, resting on his lap.
“Don’t scream,” he says.
Her chest tightens. She feels like she can’t breathe. Her fingers touch her throat, and she manages to say, “I have herpes.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he says. “I don’t want what’s between your legs, I want what’s between your ears.”
She’s terrified, quivering, and she can see in his eyes that he likes that.
He taps the side of his head with the gun barrel and rubs it into his weird yellow hair. “You have something in there. Something of value. Something you shared with Davis.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’ll tell the police all about you,” he says. “You’ll do ten years minimum, and those dykes in the joint? They’re mostly Mexicans, and they’ll make a meal of a guera like you, oh, boy.”
I can’t, Sharon thinks.
I can’t go to jail.
I won’t.
Ormon smiles. “I know what you’re thinking, Sharon. You’re thinking you’ll bat those eyelashes at the judge and he’ll give an Orange County white woman like you probation.”
Pretty much what she was thinking.
“And if that does happen, Sharon?” he says. “If that happens, I’ll come back, and then I will really hurt you. I’ll make it so no man will ever give you a second look again. They’ll turn their heads.”
“Please . . .”
“You don’t have to beg,” he says, “you just have to make the smarter choice. I’ll pay you the same money Davis does. You won’t be out a penny, and you’ll keep that pretty face. So what’s it going to be?”
Lou decides to try yoga.
Which amused McGuire no end. “Yoga? Really? You’re about as flexible as a cinder block.”
“Which is why I’m going to try yoga.”
“And you have that gut hanging over your belt,” McGuire said.
“Which is why I’m going to try yoga.”
“What kind of yoga?” McGuire asked.
“There are kinds?”
“Sure,” McGuire said. “There’s like this hot yoga where they crank the thermostat way up and you sweat like a whore in church, there’s a yoga where they do the poses real fast—”
“There are poses?”
“—where you do them real slow,” McGuire said. “There’s meditation yoga, there’s street yoga, there’s even goat yoga.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” McGuire said, “and I don’t want to know. And you don’t want to do yoga, you just want to get laid.”
“There’s getting laid?”
“Any straight guy who goes to yoga,” McGuire said, “is going there to meet women and get laid. Any gay guy who goes to yoga is going there to meet men and get laid. In fact, the word ‘yoga’ is Hindi for ‘getting laid.’”
“No it isn’t.”
“Might as well be,” McGuire said.
“What about women?” Lou asked. “Do they go to yoga to get laid?”
“You better hope so.”
Actually, Lou’s hopes are a little less ambitious.
If he drops a few pounds in the process, good.
If he meets Sharon Coombs, better.
So now he shoves his ass up in the air doing something the instructor calls “Downward-Facing Dog,” and if yoga isn’t about sex, Lou thinks, you couldn’t prove it by Downward-Facing Dog, or Upward-Facing Dog, or any of the dogs.
To make it all the more so, the ass facing up and down directly in front of him belongs to Sharon.
Upward, Downward, Warrior I, Warrior II, Sun Salutation—Lou about dislocates his eyeballs trying to keep them off Coombs’s ass.
And decides that Lululemon should require a license.
By the time class is over, Lou is sweaty, tired and horny. And Coombs hasn’t even glanced at him. But when he’s coming out of the locker ro
om, fixing his badge on his belt, she gives him a first look.
Then a second.
And actually speaks to him. “Your first class?”
“That obvious, huh?”
“No, you did great.”
“That’s a very kind lie,” Lou says.
Now she takes a real look at his eyes and then asks, “You want to get a smoothie?”
“I want to get a pastrami on rye,” Lou says. “But I’ll have a coffee with you while you get a smoothie.”
“You don’t like smoothies?” Coombs asks.
“I don’t even like saying ‘smoothie.’”
Coombs laughs.
As they walk down the stairs together, Lou already knows that what she was looking at wasn’t him.
She was looking at the badge.
A few minutes later, they’re sitting outside Solana Beach Coffee Company, she’s sipping on some green concoction that looks to Lou like vomit run through a lawn-mower bag, and she asks, “So what do you do, Lou?”
“I’m a cop,” he says. “And I guess you don’t remember me.”
She looks at him blankly.
“It was a few years ago,” Lou says. “I interviewed you about a diamond theft.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “But did I do it?”
“You know?” Lou says. “I never found out who took those stones.”
“No?” she says. “That surprises me.”
“Why’s that?”
“You just strike me as the kind of guy who’s very good at what he does.”
McGuire was right.
Yoga is all about sex.
“You are good,” she says later, on her back on his bed looking out the window at the ocean.
“You said that about yoga.”
“I was lying then,” Sharon says. “I’m telling the truth now. How did your wife ever let you get away?”
“She liked a lawyer better.”
“Yuck.”
“Exactly my opinion.” They’re quiet for a few minutes looking at the great view and then Lou asks, “Hey, Sharon? Would you have dinner with me sometime?”
“I don’t know, Lou,” she says. “I mean, I’ll fuck you, but dinner . . . that’s pretty intimate.”