“I thought we’d maybe throw an eighth to Roy. For hookin’ us up,” Virgil said.
Roy said, “I knew you were a stand-up guy, soon as I saw you.”
Roy got his cut and Virgil tucked the baggie away. They talked about the local altered-consciousness scene over a couple more beers and Richard spoke earnestly about his paddleball game. Before they broke up, Richard gave Virgil a half pack of orange Zig-Zags, and they all parted friends.
Cattaneo called thenext morning. “I might have found something for you,” he said. “There’s a couple of guys who’d like to come over and talk to you. About diving.”
“Well... I’m here,” Virgil said, and from behind him, Rae shouted, “He wants the job.”
“Be twenty minutes or so,” Cattaneo said. “Half hour.”
Virgil called Lucas,who said, “We’ll be across the street.”
“Be careful. They might already be out there, watching to see if anybody comes in.”
“We’re careful,” Lucas said. The “we” were Lucas and Andres Devlin, another marshal, who’d been recommended by Rae. She’d told Lucas, “Devlin’s a tough guy. Smart. He reads nonfiction books with world maps in them. I know because I looked.”
When Lucas rangoff, Virgil got out the Zig-Zags and rolled a slender joint, fired it up, inhaled, and passed it to Rae. “This is so fuckin’ illegal,” she said, taking a toke.
“Like traffic-ticket illegal,” Virgil said. “Don’t tell me you don’t speed. Blow some of that smoke into my hair.”
When they’d given the room and themselves the necessary ripeness, Virgil shredded the joint and flushed it, all except the last quarter inch. That, he fired up again, snuffed it between his thumb and forefinger, said, “Ouch,” and put the roach for safekeeping on a Dos Equis bottlecap and put the bottlecap on a windowsill, where it might be seen.
Twenty-five minutes after Cattaneo called, Lucas called and said, “We’ve got two guys coming down the sidewalk. They’re Sansone people, a step down from Cattaneo. Names are Matt Lange and Marc Regio. They’re looking at addresses.”
Virgil got abeer from the refrigerator, took a swig, swished it around his mouth, swallowed and poured most of the rest of it down the sink, sat on the couch and put the bottle on the floor by his feet. Rae shoved her .40-caliber Glock under a pillow at the opposite end of the couch, turned the TV to aSpongeBob SquarePantsrerun, and then laid back on the gun pillow and put her bare feet on Virgil’s leg, flashing her bloody-red toenails.
She asked, “What do you think?”
“You could scale palm trees with those nails,” Virgil said. ‘They’re perfect.”
The two guys knocked, and after some shouting around, Virgil answered the door. “You Jack’s friends?”
“We are,” said the bigger of the two big guys. He waved his hand in front of his face. “Jesus Christ, I’m getting a contact high.”
“That’s from the previous occupants,” Rae called, a barefaced lie told without shame.
“Yeah,” said the smaller of the two guys. He said his name was Marc, the bigger guy was named Matt. Matt was carrying a plastic-backed notebook.
Rae asked, “You guys got last names?”
Marc said, “Regio,” and nodded at Matt: “And Lange.”
They looked like they shopped in the same menswear boutique: Regio wore a burnt orange Tiger Woods golf shirt, beige no-iron slacks with an Indian-weave belt, cordovan loafers, and a beige linen sport coat. Lange went with stretch jeans, a button-up Tommy Bahama short-sleeve shirt worn loose, and boating shoes. They both were fleshy-faced and sunburnt.
They checked the apartment and the four Porsche wheels lined up along one wall, but didn’t mention them. Lange looked at Virgil and asked, “What kind of diving you done?”
“All kinds, but mostly divemaster stuff. I made sure nobody drowned. Some instruction in night diving and navigation. I worked off a dive boat taking guys out to the Channel Islands.” When the two looked blank, he added, “You know. LA.”
“You ever do any recovery?”
“Some. I mean, a boat would sink out there about once a week, sometimes they wanted to get the fishing gear off it, or personal stuff. Four rods and reels, for those movie guys, that could be five or six grand. I did that a few times, but I gotta tell you, I don’t do ships. I don’t do anything with an overhead. That scares me.”
“What’s an overhead?” Lange asked.
“Caves. Old shipwrecks or boats where you go inside. Stuff where you can’t get straight back to the surface. I don’t do that shit,” Virgil said.
“He’s a little claustrophobic,” Rae said. “Lock him in a closet and he cries like a baby. Tries to kick the door down.”
