Forty Thieves (7 page)

She set the rifle on the work table with the bolt still back so Ed would see it that way when he was ready to clean it. The Hoyts were an old-fashioned couple in most ways. They had both grown up in parts of the country where men and women generally kept their places. There was no more mystery to it than knowing whether you were looking at a cow or a bull.

Nicole could strip, clean, and oil a weapon better than Ed could, with her smaller, nimbler, uncalloused fingers, but the man cleaned the guns. She shopped and cooked, and God knew she did most of the housecleaning. Ed did the
outdoor stuff, took care of the cars, and lifted anything that weighed more than forty pounds.

She heard him come into the mud room from the garage, and she went to join him. “Did you call to say what happened?”

“Yeah,” he said. “He’s fine with it.”

She watched as he stepped out of his running shoes, let his jeans and shorts drop, and pulled one leg out and shook the other leg out of them. As he pulled the long-sleeved T-shirt up over his head and the shirt came off and joined the rest of his clothes on the floor, she pretended she hadn’t been looking. She stepped forward. “Give me those clothes, and I’ll wash everything right now.”

Ed bent to snatch up the clothes from the floor and held them out in a bunch with his left hand so she had to step close to take them. As she reached for them he spun her around and gave her a sharp smack on the ass with his free hand before she could get away.

“Jesus, Ed!”

“Couldn’t resist,” he said. “I’m only human.”

“Barely.” She stepped into the laundry room, tossed his clothes into the washing machine, turned it on to fill it while she added detergent, and then stripped off her own clothes and tossed them in too. There probably wasn’t anything much on his, but there would be traces of powder and heavy metals on hers, because she had fired the rifle.

Nicole padded through the house bare, not concerned about anybody seeing her. They had neighbor-proofed the house before they moved in. There were blackout curtains on all the windows.

When Nicole reached the master bedroom she could hear the shower already running. She glanced in and watched
Ed for a second. She had read in a women’s magazine a few days ago that the type most American women preferred was a tall man without much body fat who drove a black pickup truck. In other words, American women lusted after Ed Hoyt. She had laughed, and thought about telling him, but after a few seconds the impulse faded. He was hers, and she hadn’t wanted to add to his temptations.

She might have considered getting him to put a tattoo on him that said her name, but their profession made that a stupid idea, and Nicole was not stupid. People like them could not afford to have unnecessary identifying marks on their bodies. There were other ways to make sure he stayed.

She walked up to the glass door of the shower, opened it, and said, “Got room in there for me?”

He pulled her into the shower and let her get wet, and then held her in his arms and kissed her. After a few minutes she felt warm and clean. Then she wriggled herself free of his arms, sank to her knees, and did one of the things that made her pretty sure he wasn’t going to go looking for women who liked him more than she did.

After that, Ed took her to the bedroom and made all of the choices and decisions for a while. His attention made her feel very desirable. Ed Hoyt was not a romantic, but he had an intensity of interest and focus that left a woman feeling no doubts about herself.

He got up and walked into the bathroom while she lay there feeling limp and catching her breath. Then he came back. “I’d better go clean that rifle and put it away. I forgot about it.”

“Oh hell, Ed. Don’t bother with that. Stay here with me.”

He gave a small exhale, almost a laugh. “It won’t take long.” He stepped into a pair of sweat pants and a fresh T-shirt.

“I’ll go get us something to help us sleep.” She crawled to the end of the bed and got up, then put on some pajamas and walked back into the kitchen. When she got there he already had the bolt out, and the cleaning brush reaming out the barrel to the muzzle. He was smiling to himself as he worked.

She almost asked him what he was smiling about, but then realized she shouldn’t. She preferred to believe he was remembering some part of what they had just done—what he had just done to her, really—something that made him feel happy just to picture now. If it was something else, that would be okay, but she hoped it wasn’t. Sex was a very big deal to Ed Hoyt.

Nicole went to the counter, opened a cabinet, and took out a bottle of cognac. She set it on the counter and then went to the cupboard to get some glasses.

She turned to look back at Ed. He still looked the same way he had nine years ago when she had spotted him at the Training Command summer camp in Tennessee. Men didn’t age the same as women. Women started to go soft, to sag a little here and there. Men seemed to dry out and harden, to look more and more like they had been carved out of wood. She gave herself a sidewise appraisal, looking at her reflection in the glass front of the cabinet beside her. Not yet. Still pretty good.

She set down the glasses and poured Ed about two fingers of the deep amber cognac, took it to him, and set it on the table.

“Thanks, babe.” He took a cautious sip.

“It’ll relax you,” she said. She went back and poured about half as much into the second glass and carried it back to the table.

He said, “You got in a good shot tonight—wham, and he comes to a full stop.”

She shrugged. “I just hope the customer isn’t unhappy about it.”

“We kind of can’t miss. If they’d caught up, we’d have had to kill them. This way, nobody knows anything.”

“I was thinking that maybe we should have taken them out,” she said.

“We may regret not going ahead sometime down the line. But for the moment, I don’t want to do things the customer hasn’t asked for. It doesn’t make them think you’re being intelligent and strategic. They just think you’re crazy and dangerous, and that can turn into a big problem.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said.

“Even if we’re wrong, then making things right might earn us some more money.”

He finished the cleaning and they were deep asleep in twenty minutes. They were still asleep when the job phone rang. Nicole jumped out of bed and snatched the phone up before the second ring. When she touched the screen the time appeared—7:00 a.m. The job phone was a cell phone that was assigned to this client only, so she had no question in her mind who was going to be on the other end. “Hello,” she said.

“Good morning.” The voice was his, all right. “I’m calling early because I know you’ll want time to plan your day. Can you meet me at nine?”

“Where?”

“The same place.”

“All right. We’ll see you at nine.” She pressed the button to end the call, and then switched off the power. She didn’t want to wonder whether the call hadn’t disconnected and the client was still picking up her next conversation.

Beside her Ed rolled onto his back, his forearm covering his eyes. “Did I hear you say nine? Nine a.m.?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s two whole hours. He wants to meet in the same place.”

Ed slowly sat up, swung his legs off the bed, and sat there staring at his feet. “Does he know we were up nearly all night?”

“I won’t tell him what we were doing if you don’t.”

Ed said, “Seriously.”

She headed for the door. “I’ll start the coffee. Don’t go back to sleep.”

An hour and a half later they were dressed and ready to leave. Ed was wearing a pair of jeans and a Hawaiian shirt that hung down to cover the gun he was carrying. Nicole tried on a couple of outfits, and in the end decided to wear her new light blue shorts, flip-flops, a tank top with her oversize Ray-Ban sunglasses, and to carry her compact .380 Beretta Pico in a small shoulder bag. It was important to look the right way for the place where they were going. While Ed was waiting for her she stood between the two mirrors and approved the way her body looked in the shorts and the tank top. Once in a while it didn’t hurt to have Ed see another man’s eyes linger on her for a little too long.

On the way out, Ed set the alarm system. They had signs in the yard and decals on the windows that gave the name of a fictitious security company, but the alarm was real. It sent a silent phone signal to their cell phones to let them
know a breach had occurred. What would happen after that was up to them.

They got into what Nicole called the invisible car, a Toyota Camry with windows tinted as dark as they could be without having the police pull the car over. It was impossible for an observer to see the Hoyts inside unless he was a few feet in front of the grille. The car was a dark gray that was close to the dusty asphalt color of a California highway. The car had a V-6 3.5 liter engine instead of the standard 4-cylinder model, so it was nearly as fast as Ed’s black pickup.

Ed drove to the parking lot at the end of the long entry road at South Weddington Park near Universal Studios. The park was a big L-shaped stretch of grass in a flat valley below the parking lot for the subway station on Lankershim Boulevard. Around the largest section of grass was an oval track ringed by tall old trees, and beyond the parking lot was a fenced baseball field. Ed pulled into a space between a tall SUV that made their car hard to see, and a couple of small Japanese cars that made it hard to remember.

Ed and Nicole sat for a moment looking ahead at the baseball field. It was a Wednesday, so the field would be empty for at least six hours, until the Little Leaguers would arrive for evening practice. Vincent Boylan had chosen the park as a meeting place, and the Hoyts had agreed because it had the right combination of open space and steady traffic that included pedestrians. Sometimes cab and limo drivers parked in this lot in the shade while they waited for their next pickups. The entry road would be lined with food trucks catering to the studio workers in a couple of hours, but for the moment, there were only a few people walking dogs or jogging.

“There he is,” said Ed. “That’s him in the bleachers. Third base side.”

“I see him. Let’s go.”

They got out of their car and walked around behind the backstop to the bleachers on the other side. Boylan was sitting on a bench about halfway up the bleachers, so his body wasn’t high enough to present a silhouette. Behind him was a stretch of grass and then the twelve-foot brick sound wall that separated the park from the Ventura Freeway. The wall was screened by a long line of trees so it didn’t look like what it was. Boylan wore a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and a baseball cap, so he didn’t look like what he was either. He was gazing out over the infield as though he were watching remembered players running the bases and fielding balls. Ed and Nicole climbed up and sat on either side of him.

He turned to Nicole. “Is there room in that little purse for this?” He produced a thick envelope from the marsupial pocket in his sweatshirt.

“I’ll make room.” The envelope disappeared into her bag. “Do we need to count it?”

“No. It’s fifty thousand.”

Ed said, “What’s it for?”

“It’s a down payment on a new part of the job. I want you to be sure when we leave here that you’ll always get your pay.”

“I already was sure,” said Ed. “A person would have to be brain-dead not to pay us.”

“Don’t be rude, Ed,” said Nicole. “Just say thanks.”

“Thanks,” Ed said.

Ed Hoyt’s expression gave Boylan a chill. It was the eyes, he decided. They were wide open, unblinking, watchful, but they didn’t change the way human eyes did. They revealed
nothing. “It’s okay. Ed’s right to be puzzled. I don’t usually give you a pile of cash we haven’t talked about. But I wanted to ask you to do something right away, and I didn’t want you to think I was trying to put it on a tab.”

“What do you want done?” asked Nicole.

“The man and woman you were following last night. The Abels. They need to be taken out.”

“It would have been easy to do then. Now, it’s not so easy,” said Ed.

“We just got the go-ahead a couple of hours ago,” Boylan said. “I called you as soon as I knew.”

“Do you know anything about them that we can use?” asked Nicole.

“Pretty much what you already know. They’re both former LA cops, working as a two-person detective agency. They’re very well known. As soon as the client found out who they were, the Abels got added to their list.”

“The price of being very well known,” Ed said.

“This needs to be quick before they find out anything.”

“What’s there to find out?”

“If I knew that, there would probably be somebody else here hiring you to kill me,” Boylan said. “I’ve got to assume it’s this thing the Abels offered the reward on. This guy that got killed a year ago.”

“It’s all right,” said Ed. “We’ll manage.” He stood up and began to make his way down the bleachers.

Nicole got up too. “We’ll let you know when it’s done.”

When they got home, Ed said, “I don’t think their post office box is going to be a good enough address after last night.” He went into the den to call his contact at the boiler room sales service. The operation consisted of a big room
over a furniture store with long tables where men and women sat and cold-called people, then read scripts trying to persuade them to buy things. Their biggest customer was a contractor who got people to sign contracts for kitchen remodeling, took a deposit, and never came back. The contractor’s business name changed about once a month, but he paid the phone sales service without fail.

The phone sales service worked with a computer program that they would set for an area code and a three-digit prefix indicating a smaller area, and it dialed the last four numbers in sequence, one after another. When the computer dialed the number and the call connected, its screen would display the name and address, so the script reader could ask to speak with that person.

Ed turned on his phone browser and looked up the numbers the Abels supplied for their reward then dialed the number of the sales service manager. “Hi, Ron,” he said. “This is Ed Hoyt. I’ve got a phone number for you.” He read it from the Abels’ ad.