She shrugged. “So, they pick me up, I tell them everything I know about the three of you, which isn’t anything they don’t already know, and I tell them I was fuckin’ Marion for money. That I didn’t know you guys were crooks. That we ran out of the house in Altadena and you dropped me off in Pasadena, and that was that.”
Cole, who was biting his thumbnail, nodded. “Could work. I’d be a little pissed if you hung a lot of it on me. But if you hang it on Marion and Deese, I’ll be okay with it.”
“I can do that,” Cox said. “Hey! Harrelson’s place is coming up.”
—
THEY ALL CRUISEDHarrelson’s place, which was tucked behind tan adobe walls and a gate. Cole had asked Larry O’Conner how he’d managed to get inside, to cruise the house, and O’Conner admitted that he hadn’t. What he’d done was, he’d gotten Harrelson’s address and then spotted the house on a Google satellite image.
O’Conner had called up a map on his laptop, then the satellite image, and they considered the neighborhood of upscale houses, almost all with pools, only one or two without. Almost all the houses had multiple pitched roofs covered with red tile. Though large, houses were still crowded together, only a few arm’s lengths between them, separated by thin screens of foliage.
Harrelson’s house backed up to the exterior wall of the subdivision. A pool was set just inside the wall, so they couldn’t cross in the middle of the lot, they’d have to cross between his house and the next one to the right. There was scrubby brush growing along the outside of the wall, so they’d have some concealment after Cox dropped them off.
“We could be seen from either house, so in and out fast as we can,” Beauchamps said. “I don’t know if they have armed security in there, but they could have.”
“We’ll have guns,” Deese said.
“Yeah, but we don’t use them unless it’s to save our lives. Damnit, we need more time. If those marshals weren’t here...”
—
WHEN THEYgot back to the house where Beauchamps and Cox were staying, they agreed that they’d have to make some changes in the usual routine. If they even suspected that they’d been seen crossing the wall or in the yard, Cox had to be hovering nearby to make an instant pickup. If they got caught inside the wall, running would be virtually impossible—if they ran, Cox wouldn’t know where to get them, and the place would be crawling with security and cops within minutes.
“If we spot Harrelson’s car at the bar, after dark, we gotta gostraight back to his place. We cross the wall and we hide there. In the brush. Geenie goes back to the bar and calls us when he’s leaving,” Cole said. “That way, we don’t have to follow him back, there’s no chance he could spot us.”
“You know, if we’re hiding in the yard and Harrelson’s old lady should come outside to the pool, we could grab her then and start taking the house apart. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to go up against Harrelson himself,” Beauchamps said.
“Larry said Harrelson carried money in his car,” Deese said. “We’d miss out on that.”
“Well, if we have a chance to grab her, I’d say we do it,” Cole said. “Then depending on what the take is, we either get out of there or we wait until Harrelson gets back. We don’t make the decision until we see what’s what.”
Deese: “What the man said.”
Beauchamps nodded. “Sounds logical to me. That bar’s got a big parking lot, Geenie could pull in there and sit for as long as she needs to.”
That, they decided, was what they’d do.
—
AND IT WORKEDperfectly, up to a point. They started cruising Tina’s Wayside at nine o’clock, and Harrelson’s yellow Porsche Cayenne was already there. “Can’t be two of those,” Beauchamps said. The Porsche was painted the precise tint of a Yellow Cab.
They headed back to Harrelson’s house. The perimeter road didn’t have much traffic after dark. They waited until there was a gap, then Cox pulled behind Harrelson’s house. The three men, all dressed in dark clothing and wearing driving gloves, scrambledout and squatted behind a screen of eucalyptus trees. They carried with them a black backpack with guns in it, duct tape, ski masks, Geenie’s book-marking butcher knife, a fifteen-foot chain with four padlocks, and three flashlights. They wouldn’t need the battering ram because they wouldn’t be knocking down a door.
They waited in the trees for five minutes, and then, during another carless interval, they crossed the five-foot wall. They landed in more generic landscaped brush on the far side of the wall, waited there for an alarm, a motion light to go on, a dog’s bark, a questioning voice, and, when there was nothing, made their way slowly between the houses, with Harrelson’s to the left. There were lights on in the house, but Harrelson’s wife was apparently deep inside and they never saw her or even a shadow behind a curtain. They stopped behind a clump of decorative grasses next to Harrelson’s garage door. Beauchamps opened the pack and passed out the ski masks and the guns and zipped the case back up.
O’Conner had told them that Harrelson usually had an early golf game in the summer and wouldn’t linger at Tina’s. He was correct.
Beauchamps’s phone buzzed at nine forty-five. Cox was on the other end, and she said, “He’s on his way. He’ll be there in five or six minutes, if he doesn’t stop.”
“Stay way back behind him, don’t try to get close,” Beauchamps told her.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I’m not dumb.”
—
FIVE MINUTES LATER, she called again. “He’s turning in at the gate. He’s only a minute away.”
Cole said to Deese and Beauchamps, “Get ready, he’s here.”
