He wanted me to ask him about Mouse and the protection money, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “How did things go to shit?”
“We got old,” Arne said, sounding annoyed. “When you’re stealing cars and getting high at sixteen, it’s like an adventure. Hell, even when you’re twenty-two you can tell yourself you’re a hard and dangerous dude, out on the streets taking what you want. But as you get older, it changes. The life starts to go sour. Even I wanted a house, a wife, and a kid, Ray.”
I noticed he said wanted instead of want. “Caramella said someone had killed you.”
“Well, here I am,” he said. His tone was difficult to read. I’d always found Arne hard to read; maybe that was why I’d always been willing to follow him.
“She said it was my fault.” But I’d said this already, and it didn’t pry the truth out of him this time, either. Arne stared into the harsh desert sunlight, staying with traffic. He never drove faster or slower, preferring to hide in the crowd.
We were heading east. Las Vegas? But he’d said three hours at most, so it couldn’t be. “Where are we going?” I asked again.
“Ray, have you noticed that I’m not answering your fucking questions?”
I looked over at him. He was shorter than me and built heavier, but he was quick. And I knew he was tough, but I was a wooden man with the Twenty Palace Society. I’d faced scarier things than Arne Sadler. “That’s why I have to keep asking.”
He smiled at me then, and I truly couldn’t read his intent. Then he turned his attention to the road. We drove in silence for a while.
For more than ten years, Arne had been the most important person in my life.
I met him in juvie, when I believed I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison. He was three years older, and while he wasn’t the first person to tell me that the shooting wasn’t my fault, he was the first one I believed even halfway. And he told me to come find him when the time was right.
I did. Arne taught me to steal cars, to fight, to live as a criminal without being an asshole, to tell victims from non-victims, and how to treat them both.
But I’d turned my back on him. When I walked out of Chino, I couldn’t go back to that old life. I just couldn’t. I wouldn’t have chosen the society in its place, but that didn’t change how I felt about being in L.A. again.
And yet, here I was. Worse, I had already gotten swept up into one of Arne’s jobs.
I was seriously considering cutting him with my ghost knife—he’d tell me whatever I wanted to know after that, and he’d apologize for making me wait, too—when he suddenly sighed.
“Ray, how about this? You help me finish this job, and I’ll help you with your thing. Okay? Melly was right. Things are in a bad way for me, and for Robbie, Summer, Lenard, even Bud, if that matters. But this job we’re on is too important, and if I start talking about this shit, I’m going to lose my game face. You get me, don’t you?”
“I get you.”
He smiled at me. “Thanks, man.”
We cruised the freeway eastward. The houses and strip malls gave way to warehouses and industrial, which eventually gave way to rough, low desert hills. The car was silent. Arne hated to play music when he was on a job.
The hum and movement of the car had lulled me to a dreamless sleep. I heard the tires roll over gravel and jolted awake. “This is it,” Arne said. The sun was in my face; we’d turned around, and I’d slept through it.
Arne pulled off the highway onto a flat gravel path. There was a dry streambed directly beside us—if the car swerved a foot to the right, we’d tumble into it. Directly in front of us was a low hill, no different from any other low desert hill in Southern California. I honestly had no idea where we were, or even if that was the 15 back there. The gravel gave way to a dirt track as we drove northwest, following the trail around the hill.
At a wide part, nearly out of sight of the freeway, Arne did a quick two-point turn. “Get behind the wheel and wait here for me,” he said. “I have to pick up a ride from just around the bend there.” That meant he was about to steal a car. I held out my hand. Arne smirked at me, then took out his key ring. He had dozens of keys, along with a little flashlight, carabiner, Swiss Army knife, and who knows what else. He detached the Land Rover key and gave it to me.
He got out of the car into the scorching desert heat. The Land Rover was pretty roomy, but I was too tall to climb over the shifter. I got out, too, and walked around the front. “Expecting trouble?” I asked.
“We’ll see.” I must have reacted to that, because he smirked again and said, “The place should be empty. It’s a hell of an August out here. But if someone’s home, it won’t be a problem. Wait here and be ready to pull out fast, just in case.” He turned his back to me and walked away. After a few steps, he glanced back. The expression on his face suggested I was not doing my job. I climbed into the car and shut the door.
It was cool inside. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. Considering the way I’d been sleeping, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that I’d nodded off, but I felt pissed off and ashamed anyway. If something dangerous had happened—hell, if Arne had decided to shove me out of the car at freeway speeds—I couldn’t have done much about it.
I watched Arne as he moved away. He didn’t look tense, but maybe he’d gotten more relaxed when he stole cars in the years I’d been away. Maybe he’d lost his edge. Or maybe he didn’t expect any trouble out here at all.
After forty yards or so, he disappeared around the side of the hill. Without really thinking about it, I opened the driver door as quietly as I could and slipped into the afternoon heat. I shut the door gently, hoping the sound of car tires on the nearby freeway would mask the noise.
Arne didn’t peek back around the edge of the hill at me. I felt absurdly like a disobedient teenager as I followed after him, walking on the dry, hard ground to avoid the crunch of footsteps on gravel.
At the bend in the path, I crouched low behind an outcropping of rock and spied on Arne. He had stopped at the end of the gravel path and was fiddling with a padlock on a gate. The hill concealed a fenced area, and inside the fence was a prefab sheet-metal building.
The gate was on the western part of the property. The building faced south, with a peaked roof and a row of closed windows set high on the walls. The huge front doors slid open on runners.
The building was deep enough that a tractor trailer could have driven through the front and pulled all the way inside without turning, and it was three times wider than it was deep.
Whatever Arne was doing with the gates, he got them unlocked and pushed them both all the way open. Then he started toward the big front doors. He moved casually, but his head turned back and forth as he scanned the area, making sure he was alone.
He spent much less time fiddling with the latch at the two big front doors before sliding them open and walking into the darkness. Damn, it must have been like an oven in there. Sweat prickled on my back at the thought of it.
There was a sign on the open gate, but I was too far away to read it. If the society had brought me in as an investigator, I’d probably have a pair of binoculars, or maybe a camera with a telephoto lens that would not only let me read the sign but would record it for the benefit of the people who recovered my body.
But I was just a wooden man, and this was not even an official mission.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what Arne was doing all the way out here in the middle of nowhere. When I’d been with him, we’d stolen cars and driven them to a dealer in Long Beach. He’d fake up papers for them and ship them out of the country for resale. It hadn’t made any of us rich, but it had been better than throwing trash into the back of a municipal truck, or mopping floors, or clearing dirty plates from restaurant tables. At least, we’d thought so. Maybe we’d have made more money if Arne had been more willing to take risks, but he’d kept most of us out of jail.