Forty Thieves (35 page)

She had read once that a long stretch in the middle had no local ambulances, or hospitals to drive them to, so if you were in an accident on Interstate 15, the people who would eventually come to pick you up were inmates from a nearby prison. The idea had not made her less nervous, but it had suggested to her that if she ended up in prison, that sort of volunteer work might be a worthwhile way to pass the time.

Nicole leaned back in her seat and let Ed do the driving. She and Ed had spent a whole extra day in Las Vegas before they had managed to pull themselves together and get out on the road.

When Ed had told her that those jewel thieves must be hiding in somebody’s house, she was so impressed with him that she had spent most of the afternoon fussing over him
and fooling around with him in their suite. And then, before she thought much about it, she realized that they should not have been drinking in the middle of the day, because they were now both too far under the influence to drive back to Los Angeles that day. One thing Nicole really had not wanted to do was to get them pulled over along Interstate 15 by the Highway Patrol.

She knew if that happened, Ed was certain to do his best to kill the cop and drive away. She also knew that Ed would be too slowed down and sloppy to do the job well. He might get the two of them killed. Even if he managed to accomplish the simple task of bringing his pistol up to the window and squeezing the trigger, and then kept his thinking from getting stupid on the long trip past the other cops looking for them, what would it be for? He wouldn’t have arrived home in any shape to rob a bunch of foreign jewel thieves that night. There was no point.

Instead, Nicole decided to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening keeping Ed occupied and amused. That had turned out to be quite a project. Ed was a man with big appetites, and he was in a manic mood. He’d had a couple of drinks in the room, a couple more during the enormous lunch he’d ordered in the restaurant at the Aria hotel, sitting under the colorful hanging butterflies with their four-foot wingspans. He seemed to be inspired by a gang of Chinese men at the big round table beside them, who appeared to have ordered everything on the menu, and were eating their way through it.

Ed had looked over his shoulder at their table and said, “That looks good.” Of course it looked good. They were eating lobster with one hand and steak with the other, and
eyeing the chicken and fish on the next plate. Ed had ordered as though he wanted to outdo them, and certainly had vanquished at least a couple of them—individually, not as a group.

Ed had gotten them a taxi to Mandalay Bay. The early evening was a blur of casinos and bars, and then a return to the pool at the Bellagio, where Ed decided that the best way to sober up was to swim laps.

Nicole had put on her wrap and walked along the patio stones above him and a few paces behind, keeping an eye on him to be sure he didn’t drunkenly hit his head and drown, or get into some dumb altercation with one of the men who stood still in the water like fashion models.

Watching him swim had probably been a mistake for her. Even when he was drunk he was a surprisingly strong, graceful swimmer. He looked great with those big shoulder muscles flexing to pull him along. And now that he’d spent a few days in Las Vegas lying around in the sun he was tanned and healthy looking. He had strong, even teeth like a horse, and they were bright white because he didn’t like coffee and had never smoked. When he saw her on a turn and grinned, she felt her knees weaken and she was smitten again.

That led to the next set of distractions for Ed, chief among them Nicole’s body. Then there were more drinks, more food, and more Nicole before they both collapsed and slept for about twelve hours.

Today she had gotten him into the car and they headed back toward Los Angeles. Nicole was exhausted anyway, and slept another hour or more on the trip home, but Ed showed no sign of wear today. When Ed drove he didn’t listen to the radio and he didn’t talk much. He just kept the
car aimed between the lines and stared off at the vanishing point, moving ahead like a coyote trotting across a desert at midday.

As they came into the semicivilized margins of San Bernardino around Glen Helen park, more and more cars flowed into the channel of traffic on both sides of them. She broke the silence. “At least at this time of day the traffic into the city won’t be as bad as the traffic going out.”

“No,” he said. “We’ll be there in good time. We can get some dinner and maybe take a little nap before we go to work.”

She reached up and rubbed the thick knot of muscle beside his neck. “You getting tired, baby? I’ll be happy to take a turn driving.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Just keep it in mind.”

He said nothing, but she knew it didn’t require an answer. She always felt a little bit bad when she reached this part of the trip. The desert was so immense and clean and empty, and from here on the world was a stew of crowds and brand names and ugly buildings and moving steel.

Nicole began to think about what they were going to do tonight. In most ways, it wasn’t smart. She and Ed already had plenty of money in their duffel bags, and they had a few safe-deposit boxes in other cities and a few bank accounts. It wasn’t anything like the amount a gang of jewel thieves probably had in diamonds, but it was a lot, considering what she’d started with.

She and Ed hadn’t done some of the talking that they should have by now. They still had a house. It wasn’t a very valuable house, because it was in a sort of crappy area that was half rural
and half not, and it wasn’t fancy. But they should do something with it—sell it, or rent it out, or walk away—only they hadn’t discussed the house yet. Most of it still belonged to the bank, and it was in a pair of false names, so she supposed it wasn’t such a big deal if they chose to walk away.

A bigger issue was when they took their fair share of the diamonds from the Euro gangsters, meaning whatever they could take from them, where were they going to go? Since she had met Ed Hoyt, she had always accepted the likelihood that they were going to be on the run someday. It had been such a constant possibility that she had sometimes formed fantasies about it. The problem was that her fantasies had always taken place in Europe. She and Ed would hit a big score, and the scene would change to their hotel room in Paris or Barcelona or Prague or Amsterdam, depending on which was the city she’d last seen in a magazine layout or an online travel ad. But now that they were about to rob members of a huge European crime network, Europe was not going to be a good place to start a new life. If they were recognized, they’d be dead.

She could anticipate that this was not going to be an easy conversation. Ed would just shrug and say, “We’ll go over the border to Mexico.” But she really didn’t want to go to Mexico. The whole country was full of drug cartels with armies of killers, and the extra killers who were temporarily out of work made a living kidnapping people. Everybody else in the country was willing to swim rivers, climb steel walls, and crawl through deserts to get out of it. She would have to offer Ed an alternative right away, before he got too attached to Mexico. What was it going to be—Canada? She needed to think.

And then there was the problem of the diamonds, which were the whole point of this job. She had read in the papers, just as Ed had, that diamonds were a good way to move big money. They could be recut or broken up to seem like new diamonds, moved from one country to another, reset in different ways. But she and Ed didn’t have any connections for selling diamonds in any other country. And even in America, the few times she and Ed had taken anything in the course of a hit and sold it, the price they could get for it was about a quarter of what it was worth. Diamonds had to be a whole lot harder to sell, and dealing in some foreign country with strange foreigners had to be worse than risky. She sighed, and then looked at Ed.

He seemed to be fully occupied by the act of driving, still staring ahead, moving the car along. As she had many times, she envied him. He seemed to be able to turn off whole sections of his brain for periods of time, and think about one simple thing. He seemed to live in the present just doing whatever task he’d been presented with just then, and not fretting about something else three spots down the list.

When they reached Glendale they stopped at a parking lot near the Alex Theatre and walked to a restaurant on Brand Boulevard. Even without the antique theater, this part of Glendale had always struck her as something out of another time—family-run restaurants with small pink-and-green neon signs in the front windows, streets with cars parked nose in to the curb. She remembered blocks like this from when she was a teenager in small-town Arizona. Evening in Glendale was a bit of relief to the senses, and she began to feel revived almost immediately.

They got back on the freeway, drove to Universal City, and checked in at a motel where they could back their car up beside their room and Ed could swing their duffel bags from the trunk to the room without moving his feet. They slept for a time and woke at midnight.

They dressed in dark clothes and shoes, loaded and hid their pistols under their jackets, and moved their MP5 rifles and extra ammunition to the tops of their duffels, where they could reach them easily. They moved the duffels back to the car and cleaned the room, but didn’t check out. They got into the car and drove.

Ed drove along Ventura Boulevard to the west, through Studio City and Sherman Oaks. When he turned left at Dixie Canyon toward Valley Vista, Nicole said, “So you think they’re hiding in Vince Boylan’s house?”

“I don’t know,” Ed said. “There’s a lot to be said for the place. It’s away from the main streets, but not far away. It’s upscale, it’s private, and it’s in an area with lots of trees and stuff, so it doesn’t stand out much. And there are a few places where the panthers could park cars around there.”

“Do you think there’s enough room for that many people to sleep?”

“Upstairs there were at least four bedrooms, right? And there’s a den downstairs, and at least two couches in the living room. And they probably don’t all sleep at the same time. I wouldn’t. I’d have people up on three shifts waiting for something like us to come along.”

Nicole was resigned to letting Ed decide. No matter what, they were probably going to have to check both places, because the jewel thieves could be somewhere else, maybe out of the country already. But Ed had a right to give his theory a chance.

Ed parked their car around the last bend before they reached the house, so that if the panthers had posted lookouts, they wouldn’t see the Hoyts arrive. Even driving past the place before they parked might alert them.

Ed and Nicole opened their duffels, took out their MP5 rifles, and hung their slings around their necks to hold them, then covered them with their Windbreakers. In the event that some ordinary person saw them, he might think they were just a nice couple walking home from a neighborhood party. They moved off the road just before the curve and walked upward into the steep sloping yard of a neighbor. When they were in the backyard above the house on the hillside, they began to alter their course again toward Boylan’s, still climbing a bit so they would have a better view of the second-floor windows.

Ed and Nicole crossed behind four houses before they had a sight of Boylan’s. They found a spot behind a thick old sycamore tree that had small shrubs planted in a circle around it, and sat down.

There were no lights showing in any window at Boylan’s. The only lights were from a fixture above the garage door and another set into the overhang above the front door. Both fixtures were controlled by light sensors that switched them on at dusk and off at dawn. Ed and Nicole watched and waited for any movement inside the house, any kind of silhouette at a window. After about twenty minutes there had been none.

At the hotel Nicole had installed the night scope on her rifle. She turned it on and raised the rifle to her shoulder. She looked down the scope at each window in turn, trying to make out anything resembling the shape of a body through
the white wispy curtains that Boylan’s wife had hung on the second floor. The view she had at this angle didn’t reveal anybody.

“See anything?” Ed whispered.

“Not from here. We’ve got to get in closer. How about up that way?”

Ed stood and began to move farther up the hillside, angling a bit toward the house. Nicole scanned the yard around Boylan’s in case a lookout appeared, but nobody was visible to her. She followed Ed. When they reached a spot where she could use her scope to look downward into all of the rear and side windows of the second floor, she stopped and braced her rifle on her knee and looked again. The beds were visible in two bedrooms. “Nobody’s in there,” she whispered.

“Let’s get closer.”

They stepped closer and closer to the house, and as they went, Nicole was more convinced that the panthers were not using the house as a hideout. Nothing moved, nothing looked human, nothing seemed to be in use, and nothing had changed since she’d been here before.

As they walked along the side of the house, Nicole identified her feeling. Boylan was dead, his wife was dead, the house was dead. She whispered. “They’re not here. I’m ready to go.”

Ed whispered, “I want to see if they’ve been here and left, or never came at all.”

Nicole knew that mattered. If they’d been here and gone, it would mean they’d recovered already, split up, and initiated whatever their plan B was. They would have left Southern
California already, and by now they would be on their way to some other country. But if they hadn’t come here to hide, then they had gone somewhere else to hide.

Ed went to the back door, stared in the window at the kitchen, and spotted the alarm keypad. “It looks like nobody turned on the alarm.”

“That’s because they’re dead.”

“I meant the cops.” He flipped open his knife and jimmied the door.

As he did, some part of Nicole’s brain waited for a shot or a ringing alarm. There was nothing. He stepped inside and she followed.

She looked into the refrigerator to see if there was fresh food, but found only some gray meat, a couple of unopened cartons of almond milk that probably wouldn’t spoil until the end of time, some things that were hard to date, like beer and frozen food, and some tomatoes that looked like the skin of a mummy. She felt the oven, but it was cold. There were no dishes in the dishwasher, and none of the lingering dampness that would have indicated a recent use.