Criminal Karma (2 page)

“Aw, thanks, Rob,” he said, and gave me the big, bright smile that was his best feature. “Hey, look what I got!”

He pulled the magazine, something called
Riviera
, out of an ancient Batman backpack he carried and opened it to Evermore’s picture. The full-page photograph showed her at a ritzy Christmas party in Santa Monica, wearing a scarlet gown and the pink diamond necklace.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Ozone said softly, gazing at the picture.

There was something sad about the guy, beyond being unemployed and homeless. He had to be in his late teens or maybe even his early twenties, but he was still as fascinated as an infant by shiny things and pretty pictures. He had a little pouch of plastic gold coins he played with underneath a palm tree on the beach where he hung out when he wasn’t begging, and a brightly colored photograph of a woman he would never meet filled him with religious awe.

“Sure, she’s beautiful,” I had said to Ozone, even though my attention was locked on the glittering stones fastened around the woman’s slender neck.

I wondered what he would do if he were with us now, seeing her in the flesh in front of the Oasis Palms, looking down pensively at her red-sandaled feet.

While I watched her, thinking that, yes, she really was beautiful, she looked up from her thoughts toward a bellboy in a braided maroon uniform who was hurrying toward the Lincoln, pushing a brass-trimmed luggage cart. He was about the same age as Ozone, and he bobbed his head as he passed her.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, ma’am,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at the biceps behind him.

“Everyone was so surprised to see Mr. Rodriguez,” he said to the driver as he began loading the Samsonites onto the cart. “We didn’t know he was staying at our hotel.” It was a fine point whether he was fawning or cringing, but I could sense his fear from thirty feet away. As he leaned over and stretched to get the last piece of luggage from the back of the trunk, the driver glanced around and then kneed him viciously in the ass, knocking him into the Lincoln’s capacious body receptacle.

“What the hell?” the bellboy squeaked, red-faced and trembling, after he scrambled back out.

“I’ll give you sumpen be surprised at you make Miz Evermore wait again,” the driver said in an expressionless voice. He had a long narrow head, and he barely moved his lips when he spoke. The ones who showed no emotion always worried me.

Rodriguez was graciously signing a last autograph. He looked about thirty-five, in great shape and with a good attitude.

“Who’s he, a movie star or something?” Reggie asked.

“He’s a professional golfer. Favored to win the tournament.”

“Big deal.”

“Top prize is seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Reggie turned his head and looked at me with his eyes stretched wide open, eyebrows near his hairline. It was the look he used to express surprise. “Why don’t we roll him after the game?”

“Good thought,” I said, “but I’m sure they pay by check or wire transfer.”

By the time a valet got around to us, the lady had disappeared through the double doors that opened into the lobby. The Oasis is a four-star, four-diamond resort, and each door was a massive slab of plate glass, five feet wide by fifteen feet high, trimmed in brass. The tough guy had driven off in the Lincoln without tipping anyone.

“Nice car,” the valet said as he opened my door. “Is it an Eldorado?”

“Seville,” I said. “Eldorados are coupes.”

“Oh, right! I should know that.” He had the blond crew cut and permanent tan of a surfer working through the winter so that he could spend next summer sliding down green waves in the surf between La Jolla and Malibu. “Can I get your name, sir?”

“Peter Blake,” I said, using an alias that I had decided on a few days before.

Some criminals use the same alias over and over, which helps the cops if they get interested while investigating a crime or series of crimes. Once they figure out that Andy Anatello is just another version of Anthony Antonio, the element of disguise is lost, while a false sense of security remains. I never used a fake name more than once. There was a driver’s license, a nonfunctional Visa card, and a couple of miscellaneous ID cards with the Blake name in my wallet. The license and cards had cost me six hundred dollars in the back room of a souvenir shop on the Venice boardwalk, but they would be snippets of plastic in a public trash container when this job was over. Which I expected would be soon. With any luck, we would be back in Venice with the jewels in time to catch Leno’s monologue.

My real name is Robert Rivers. Most people call me Rob, a pleasant irony. I tried going straight once—got clean and sober, worked as a carpenter, got married, had a kid—a beautiful little girl we named Sheila. But it wasn’t me. I drifted back.

Being a criminal was my karma, and I wasn’t complaining. The hours were flexible, the money was good, and freebooting was way more interesting than swinging a hammer or sitting on a numb ass in front of a computer screen eight hours a day.

There were some moral issues, for sure, but I’d dealt with most of them. What I did hurt people sometimes, but so did the actions of most other professions, one way or the other. Bankers with their loan-shark interest rates and foreclosures, lawyers with their sharp practices and subpoenas. The worlds of business and government were packed like a college student’s Volkswagen with crooked connivers who, unlike me, topped their sundae of sins with the pickled cherry of hypocrisy. I knew I was a bad guy, and tried to be as nice about it as I could. They thought they were good, which gave them license to be ruthless as hell.

There was danger, too, of course. The claustrophobic specter of prison, where I had spent a couple of memorable years in my early twenties, was a lurking nightmare. I’d been shot at three times, hit once, and I’d killed one person. To be fair, he deserved it.

Did I ever wake up at 3 a.m. horrified at the texture and trajectory of my existence? Sure. But I don’t think that kind of dark-night-of-the-soul despair is unique to stickup guys. Everyone in contemporary society carries a layer of anxiety under their bullshit and bluster. With some it’s fear of getting fired and losing the house in which they’ve invested their identity.
Others are afraid that Barbie will find a fatter wallet or a bigger schlong to suck, or that Ken will take off with an intern who wears a thong over skin as smooth as satin. Old ladies are afraid that a less-deserving size sixteen will be tapped to sing the solo in the church choir, or that the neighbor’s daughter will get married first.

“Are you checking in, Mr. Blake?” the valet asked. Built like a compact welterweight who lacked reach but made up for it with inside punching power, he had the outlaw aura common to dedicated surfers, with hard eyes and a marijuana leaf tattooed on his right forearm.

“No, we’re here for dinner,” I said.

“Call us on a house phone a few minutes before you are ready to leave and we’ll have your Seville waiting.”

“Thanks.” I traded him a ten-dollar bill for a claim check. “Take good care of it.”

“You can count on it, sir,” he said, giving me a little salute. “And thank you, sir.”

It’s so easy to make people happy. If I had given him a dollar, it would have been emotionally neutral, a routine transaction. Two dollars would have given his heart a little lift. A ten-dollar bill, which was nothing to me in pursuit of a quarter million, made him happy. It was just a piece of paper, but it put a spring in his step and made him feel a little bit better about himself, his job, and the human race. If a conflict of any kind broke out between me and another guest, he would be on my side.

“Little prick better be careful or he’ll run out of ‘sirs,’” Reggie said as the kid wheeled the Caddie crisply out of the line of parked cars, squealing the tires just enough to show he knew where the edge of the power was.

A dignified old
doorman grasped the brass handle with a white-gloved hand and swung one of the glass slabs open with a whoosh, air-conditioned atmosphere pouring out into the desert afternoon.

“Welcome to the Oasis, gentlemen,” he said in a B-movie baritone.

When I was a kid, most of our family vacations consisted of driving five hundred miles through the summer swelter of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to stay with my grandmother for a week or two in her big boxy frame house by the railroad tracks. On the rare occasion when we went someplace besides a relative’s house, we stayed in the kind of roadside motel where you park in front of your room and the amenities consist of a phone and a shower stall. Even after several years of patronizing them as a crook and customer, doing my part for the GDP by putting stolen money back into circulation, luxury hotels still gave me soul satisfaction, made me feel like I’d accomplished something that my father never did.

Reggie gave a whistle as we entered the marble-floored lobby. Ahead of us, two wide stone staircases curved down around a fountain to a lounge half as big as a football field with scattered groupings of couches and armchairs upholstered in expensive fabrics. Above us, an atrium rose eight stories, ringed at each floor by a continuous balcony, polished maple with vines hanging over. Beyond a three-story glass wall at the far end of the lounge, the turquoise Jell-O of a swimming pool jiggled in the slanting light.

“Pretty fucking fancy,” he said.

Standing at the railing, looking down at chattering groups of vacationers laughing and drinking wine and cocktails in the lounge, I felt a pulse of ecstasy pass through me. The thrill meter had been turned up to three as we followed the Lincoln out Highway 60, powered by thoughts of diamonds, deception, and theft. When we arrived at the sparkling resort, it edged up to five. Now it jumped all the way to ten, banging against the peg, as the whole happiness of the crime descended on me like a blessing, sharpening my eyesight and hearing, bringing adrenal clarity to my mind.

This was what I lived for.

It was a busy Friday afternoon at the peak of the season in one of the nicest hotels in the Coachella Valley. There was wealth all around me—in the expensive shops that lined the upper lobby, in the pockets and on the wrists and fingers of the guests, in the registers behind the front desk, and in the hotel safe—and I had the guts and know-how to take whatever I wanted.

Dressed in Italian walking shoes, brown gabardine slacks, and a finely woven silk shirt—tan with ivory buttons—I blended into the environment so perfectly that I was functionally invisible, which was, of course, my goal. None of the people walking through the lobby, smiling and nodding, could tell by looking at me that I was different from them. Not one of them would have guessed at the gear I had in the black leather bag slung over my right shoulder.

Reggie was getting scruffy again, his inner biker emerging in the hiatus between the barbershop visits he had such strong resistance to. But his clothes were up to par—new khakis and a dark-blue aloha shirt the fortune-teller on the promenade had given him the previous week—so he blended in, too, sort of.

He wasn’t an ideal partner for this kind of job—no luxury-resort manners, and too apt to freelance something on the side that might interfere with the main plan. But he had criminal virtues, too. Besides being a
skilled driver, he was a good mechanic, a decent alarm guy, and a tricky, explosive street fighter. They didn’t come any tougher when there was blood in the water.

He’d shown up at the right time in my personal Kabuki play, too, motoring out from St. Louis on a broken-down trike eight months before, just when Switch, my former partner, decided to get out of the high life, swayed by a beautiful young Mexican woman who was about to give birth to their first child.

And Reggie was fun to be around when he wasn’t fucking up. Coming up on fifty, with a droopy bearded bloodhound face and sizable gut, he still exerted the same old mysterious pull he always had on the opposite sex. For as long as I’d known him, women had been drawn to his gruff, monosyllabic charm like lookie-loos to a car wreck. The fortune-teller was sub-par, chubby and in her forties, but she was constantly buying him gifts and cooking him meals and doing his laundry. In between banging surfer girls he picked up on the Venice boardwalk, he afforded her a casual fuck every week or so to keep her cheerful, putting about as much into it as a big-leaguer playing catch with a kid at a charity event.

After craning his head to look up into the atrium and swiveling it to take in the expanse of the upper lobby, Reggie shrugged. “What’s it cost to crash in a dump like this?” he asked. Part of his code was never letting anything impress him—unless he was flattering you to get something he wanted—and now he was trying to retract the admiring whistle and the tone of his earlier comment.

“High season, rooms start around three hundred and go up to five grand.”

“Five grand! People must be fucking crazy. You could buy a cherry scooter for that.”

“I know,” I said and smiled. “They’ve got more money than they know what to do with.”

The lady was standing in line at the front desk, off to our right. I didn’t see the ex-con.

“Get a cup of coffee and sit where you can see the entrance and front desk,” I told Reggie. “Keep an eye out for the driver. I’ll go see what room she’s checking into.”

“Coffee?”

The lobby bar was next to the coffee shop. “All right,” I said. “Have a beer. But keep your eyes open. I don’t want that muscle-bound prick
sneaking up behind me. And take this.” I handed him the black leather shoulder bag, which was the size of a large briefcase and heavy as a concrete block.

At the front desk, I joined the line next to the one the lady was standing in. Up close, she was spectacular, with flawless, lightly tanned skin, delicate features, and thick, silken blond hair that was cut straight all the way around. She had lovely hands, with perfectly manicured nails the same red as her outfit and lipstick. It crossed my mind that it would be nice to have those soft, strong sportswoman’s hands gripping the shaft of something other than a golf club. The thought surprised me because I’m not usually attracted to older women, and I believed her to be somewhere between forty-five and fifty, five to ten years older than me. Her red lips were parted, showing the tip of her pink tongue. While I watched her without appearing to watch her, she turned and looked around the lobby with a anxious air.