Strip

by Thomas Perry

  Tonight Kapak wanted to maintain the impression of trust. He had been around long enough to know that some people could be trusted. But he did have a precise sense of what each of his associates could understand, remember, and do. He had an approximate sense of what their financial thresholds were and tried hard not to exceed them. He could be confident that Corona and Guzman would guard his thirty-eight thousand dollars, transport it, and get it into the night deposit of the Bank of America branch, even if St. Michael and all the angels stood in the center of Ventura Boulevard swinging fiery swords to stop them. But he would never have asked Corona and Guzman to deposit five or six hundred thousand. He would not have asked Jerry Gaffney to deposit any money with his brother, Jimmy. They could never be counted on to watch each other. They were a conspiracy from birth.

  He walked out with the three men and stood by the doorway to watch them get into Jerry Gaffney’s car and drive off. He could see that the majority of cars still in the lot belonged to his employees. The rest belonged to young men who didn’t see any need to hurry home. He could remember being young and feeling that way. Even boys who were good at arithmetic couldn’t quite get themselves to believe that there would be thousands of other nights just like this one, so they could afford to stop and let the girls go home.

  It didn’t seem necessary to stay around here while the bouncers herded the last few customers out and the rest of the staff finished cleaning the place up. They knew enough to lock the doors. Kapak got into his black Mercedes and started the engine. As he pulled away from Siren, he saw the front door open again and the last group of customers file out. The big lighted sign high on the pole above the flat-roofed brick building went out and the door closed, but the floodlights on the parking lot would stay on until dawn. At 6:00, Harkness the day manager would be in opening things up and preparing the building for the morning deliveries: liquor, soft drinks, linens, bar napkins, food. By 9:00, they’d have the place restocked, and the cooks would start preparing for the lunch crowd. The first of the dancers would arrive around 11:00 to limber up and put on their costumes. Most of the early shift had kids they took to school in the morning. They arrived with no makeup and hair either in ponytails or under scarves, carrying cups of coffee. They left in the early afternoon, out the back door to the lot to pick up the kids. Then the sequence of evening shifts would begin again.

  He drove along Vanowen Street at forty, not taking a chance that a cop would pull him over, search the trunk, find the money he was going to add to the take at Siren, and think it was his lucky day. When Kapak drove late at night, he always saw cars driven by people who appeared to be drunk, nearly all of them young men. He supposed he deserved the risk because he was one of the bar owners who made them that way.

  The drinkers in their twenties who were his main customers didn’t bother him. The generation now in their thirties and forties were different. They were the first Americans he hadn’t liked. They drove around in their ridiculous fat SUVs with phones clapped to their ears talking about things that couldn’t possibly amount to anything, and they didn’t care if driving a vehicle they couldn’t even steer with one hand made them kill you. When they were on foot they demanded to be first in line, to get theirs first. They sincerely believed in their own importance. The men were loudmouthed and pushy, trying to be intimidating when they didn’t get what they wanted, but most of them had never felt a serious punch or heard a shot fired. The women were self-obsessed and lazy. They were greedy for money and wanted to dress like movie stars. They neglected their children, hired immigrant women to raise them, but wanted other adults to refer to them as “moms.” Seeing them grow up had been like watching a disease arrive and take over a herd of cattle. All he could do was hope that they died off before the disease spread further.

  Kapak liked the young ones best—the teenagers and the ones in their twenties. For some undetectable reason, most of them were good, steady, serious people. Maybe it was because life had steadily gotten harder as they had grown up. It wasn’t just the girls, either. It was inevitable in his business that the dancers were young. But he found the boys to be hard workers too. He hired young people for nearly every job that became vacant.

  He drove toward Temptress. It was exactly 3.3 miles along Nordhoff Street. He loved the broad, straight boulevards of the San Fernando Valley. They were relics of the period when he had arrived in Los Angeles over thirty years ago, when people were still optimistic about the place they were building and believed it had to be planned on a grand scale. After closing time, these streets were nearly empty. If he picked the middle lane, he could sometimes drive the whole way without deviating an inch, timing the lights all the way so his foot barely touched the brake. It was what he imagined driving a train would be like.

  He thought about Marija and the kids for the second time in an hour. Marija could easily have died by now. She had been only two years younger than Kapak, and he was sixty-four. The women in her family were pretty but delicate, and didn’t live long. John would be thirty-eight by now, and Sara, thirty-six. It seemed impossible, but those were the numbers. Whatever they were going to be, they were by now. He hoped—but it didn’t matter what he hoped. It was done. She had given herself to another man, and he had not gone to claim his children. His life had gone another way. There had been many nights when he lay in bed in his big, expensive house and wished that she could somehow have seen him—what he had accomplished, what he had. Every time he had thought about that scene, he had tried to picture her repentant and regretful, but the vision was cloudy and insubstantial. If she had really been there, she would have been bitter and contemptuous. After ten years or so, he had stopped thinking about her very often. She wasn’t even a person anymore, just a word and a faint, faded picture in his memory.

  He drove into the parking lot at Temptress and surveyed the cars in the lot. They were all ones he had seen here many times: the manager Dave Skelley’s green Chevy Malibu, the head bouncer Floyd Harris’s blue Kia, the white Volvo that Sherri Wynn had bought a couple of years ago. Kapak felt affection for that car. Sherri needed to keep up the payments, so she’d had to become the best waitress in the place to get enough tips. He could tell there were nights when she was considering selling it so she could get the pleasure of being moody and hostile, but she hadn’t yet.

  He parked close to the building under the lights, took the briefcase from his trunk, and walked to the front door. He knocked, and Floyd Harris opened the door and stuck his head out to be sure there wasn’t anyone lurking behind Kapak outside the range of the security camera. Floyd’s face was set in the expression that kept order, but it changed as he pulled the door open and held it. “Hi, Mr. K.”

  “Hello, Floyd.” As Kapak entered, he held his head high and his chest out and looked around him with a hawklike glare, his eyes going everywhere, as though there were things that someone was scurrying to hide from him. He strode into the bar area looking at the two bartenders cleaning up, and then into the main room, and stopped. The three busboys looked up from wiping off tables and mopping, so he nodded his head once and smiled at each of them and turned on his heel to enter the kitchen. The big industrial dishwasher was humming as it sterilized the racks of glasses. The kitchen floor man had emptied the garbage cans, steamed them, and replaced the plastic liners, and was just completing his last floor-mopping of the night.

  Kapak said, “Everything looks good, guys. But take a close look before you go, because the inspectors would love to find something wrong.” He always said that.

  Kapak moved on. He had planned to catch a few of his employees sitting down somewhere instead of working, but he had seen nothing of the kind. He had only one more stop. He walked across the bar area between the rows of small, heavy steel tables with their chairs upside down on them and into the manager’s office.

  Dave Skelley was standing at his big, empty desk finishing the evening’s count with Sherri Wynn. Skelley had opened the top of his white shirt and tossed his black
uniform jacket on the couch, but Sherri’s waitress uniform was cooler—a satin vest, black briefs and tights, and high-heeled shoes. Skelley looked up. “Hi, boss.”

  “Hi, Dave. Sherri. What sort of business did we do?”

  “Nineteen thousand six hundred forty-two dollars. No fights, no breakage to speak of, no wear and tear on anybody tonight.”

  Sherri smiled in a way that could only be called professional. “And how are you tonight, Mr. Kapak?”

  He suspected she was hoping to get something—a small raise, a bonus, a present that would take the pressure off her to come up with the car payments for a while. She would always remind him that she was there and smile a little when she talked.

  Kapak said, “Who’s going to make the deposit tonight?”

  “Harris and I and the Russian,” said Skelley.

  “Is he around? I didn’t see him.”

  “He called a few minutes ago. By now he’s waiting in the lot.”

  “Three guys. Good,” said Kapak. “And this goes to the Wells Fargo branch in Simi Valley. I’ll make out the deposit slip.” He set his briefcase on the desk, took out a deposit slip, read the total again from Skelley’s tally sheet, added twelve thousand dollars to it, and then took the twelve thousand dollars of Rogoso’s drug profits from his briefcase and added the stacks of bills to the ones on Skelley’s desk. He took his briefcase and stood up to watch Skelley putting the money into the canvas deposit bag.

  Kapak walked out with Skelley and watched him get into the Russian’s big Toyota Sequoia with Harris the bouncer, then watched the car go out to the street. He considered getting into his own car and driving off, but instead turned around and went back to Skelley’s office. Sherri was still there in her waitress costume, sitting on the desk and swinging her feet. When she saw him she slid off, looking a bit embarrassed.

  “Still here, eh?” he said.

  “Yeah. I didn’t know if you needed anything else, so I thought I’d stay and see.”

  “You’ve been doing a good job, Sherri,” he said. “The reason I came back is that I’ve been meaning to give you a little bonus.” He reached into the bulging pocket of his sport coat and pulled out a stack of bills marked “One thousand.” He had been planning to include it in the bank deposit, but for some reason he had changed his mind. He handed her the money.

  “Wow, thank you,” she said. She looked at the money, then at him. She cocked her head. “What do I have to do for this?”

  “Nothing. At least nothing you haven’t already been doing. It’s been nice to have somebody around who smiles.” He stepped backward, toward the door.

  “I can do that,” she said. She took a quick step toward him and placed a kiss on his cheek before he opened the door and went out to his car.

  He sat in the car, started the engine, drove out to the edge of the parking lot where there was a little dip to the street, and stopped. He stared into the darkest spaces he could see—the shadowy alley between a warehouse and the little factory where they customized car parts, the narrow strip of weedy land where the disused railway tracks disappeared at the back of a strip of stores. Joe Carver could be out there right now, watching for his chance.

  9

  JEFF TURNED THE BLACK Trans Am off Ventura Boulevard into the huge lot that ran from the Vons grocery store, past the CVS pharmacy, the Gap store, and past a dozen other stores and restaurants all the way to the chain-link fence that separated it from the two-story strip mall. Even though it was late at night, there were plenty of lights. The pharmacy and the grocery store were open twenty-four hours, so there were a few other cars on that end of the lot, and Jeff pulled to a stop among them.

  He got out of the car and so did Carrie. She started walking toward the lighted glass wall of the pharmacy. “Not that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction. “The bank is back that way.”

  “I want to go through the drugstore,” Carrie said. “I need a couple of things.”

  “Not now.”

  She stopped walking. “I won’t be able to stop on the way back, will I?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “One of the things is condoms.” She stared into his eyes, watching his resolve weaken. “Maybe you’ve had enough pussy for one day. It’s okay with me.” She took a step in the direction of the bank.

  He reached out and held her arm. “Maybe we could go without protection one time.”

  She frowned. “Just because we’ve done it a couple of times tonight doesn’t mean I want your baby, much less anything you caught last week and don’t know about yet.”

  “There’s nothing like that. I’m monog—” He tried to gulp the last two words back in, but she raised an eyebrow.

  “Sure you are. Do you even know what ‘monogamous’ means?”

  He was desperate to save himself. “Sure. I just meant I don’t sleep around. I saw you and you’re just so beautiful that I couldn’t resist. It was like you’re the girl I was always supposed to meet but didn’t until now.”

  She smiled and patted his cheek. “You’re right. I always needed a really hot, stupid guy, but never knew it until tonight.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “You can go in and get what you need.”

  She stepped off toward the pharmacy and said, “I’m not buying condoms. If you want them, you get them.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “I changed my mind. Now it’s up to you.”

  Jeff followed her in the door, but she pretended to be shopping alone. He went to the aisle near the pharmacy counter at the back of the store and picked up two boxes of condoms. He couldn’t go home to Lila with an opened box.

  He walked up to the cash register at the front of the store. He had to wait in line behind a man paying for a prescription, then watched Carrie pay for nail polish, an emery board, and hand lotion. She walked off, still pretending she didn’t know him. When he went outside, he found her waiting at the car. The man with the prescription drove away, and the lot was deserted. Jeff unlocked the trunk and they placed their purchases inside, then walked together down to the end of the parking lot, onto the strip mall where there was a pedestrian-size opening in the fence, and then to the rear of the parking structure behind the Bank of America.

  They sat down to wait on the low concrete wall that enclosed the parking structure. Jeff glanced at his watch. It was 2:40. If Siren and Temptress closed at 2:00 and cleared people out on time, then it would take until around 2:45 or 3:00 to count all the money and get it ready to transport to the bank.

  “It should take another fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  Carrie opened her purse, took out a cigarette, and lit it.

  “If you see anybody, hide behind this wall and don’t leave the butt here either. I saw a show on TV where they got somebody’s DNA from the filter.”

  “There’s an ashtray right there with, like, fifty or sixty butts in it. Are they going to test all of them?”

  “You think Bank of America doesn’t have the money?”

  After an interval that indicated she was ignoring him, she put out the cigarette, then wrapped the butt in a tissue and put the tissue in her purse. That action seemed to remind her that she had a gun in there. She lifted the gun, looked down the barrel, removed the full magazine, and slid it back in. Then she handed the gun to Jeff. “Pull back that slide thing for me, will you? I don’t want to break a nail, and I need to crank a bullet into the chamber or it won’t work.”

  “You don’t need a round in the chamber. We’re not shooting anybody.”

  “Just do it, will you?” She held it out by the barrel.

  He took it, chambered a round, and handed it back gingerly. “Just keep the safety on and be sure it doesn’t go off.”

  “Thank you.” She put it back in her purse, took out another cigarette, and then pushed it back into the pack. She slid off the wall, moved quietly to the side of the bank building, and flattened herself against the wall. Jeff didn’t know whether she had seen someone
or was just too excited to keep still.

  A car pulled up and stopped by a parking space in front of the bank. Three large men got out of the car. They all wore dark suits, the kind that security people or pit bosses in casinos wore—work clothes for these men, tight-fitting and all the same. Two of the men were stocky Hispanics in their late twenties, with shaved heads and mustaches. The other was taller and less muscular, with red hair. He carried a maroon canvas bag like the one Jeff had taken from the older man a month ago, but this one was bulging as though it held more money than the last one. That was probably why there were three of them. His heartbeat began to speed up.

  The two stocky, bald men turned toward the boulevard and scanned the sidewalks. When they did, Jeff could see that the backs of their necks were tattooed with some curly, unreadable writing. They backed up to flank the red-haired man as he approached the front of the bank building.

  Jeff whispered in Carrie’s ear, “Stay here. I’m going around to the other side.” She nodded and whispered something back, so he set off around the building. He was already ten steps away from her before he realized what she’d said. It was “I’ll cover you,” just like in the movies. What did that even mean? He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t have time to guess. He had to be around the building before the three men put the canvas bag in the steel door contraption built into the wall of the bank.

  Jeff reached the front corner of the building, tugged the ski mask over his head, then peeked around the building. The tall man had his arm extended, reaching for the handle of the night deposit door.

  “Hold it,” he called. It was just the right sound level, because they all turned their heads toward him in a single motion. They saw he had his gun in his hand aimed in their general direction.

  The red-haired man stared at him with a fierce watchfulness but lowered his hand away from the night deposit. He shifted the canvas bag from his right hand to his left, to free his gun hand.