A car rolled slowly out of the big double doors of the building below. I didn’t recognize it for a moment. Then Arne got out to close the hangar doors.
A Bugatti. Arne was stealing a Bugatti.
They were worth a quarter million dollars, and they were completely out of the range of cars we usually handled. Hell, he’d told us not to steal Ferraris because they were too high-profile. But a Bugatti?
He shut the building. I’d seen enough. I slipped away from the outcropping of rock and hustled back to the car. It was several minutes before Arne pulled up alongside me.
I rolled the driver’s window down, but he only gave me a thumbs-up as he crept by. I followed him back to the freeway, watching him drive at a crawl. The Bugatti scraped its bottom on the gravel, but it had made it in, and it made it out, too. Arne gunned the engine and zipped into traffic. I hurried after him. Together we headed west again toward the setting sun.
I made note of the first sign that told me how many miles we were from L.A. Figuring quickly, the sheet-metal building was almost as far as Bakersfield, but not quite. That meant the desert on the other side of the highway had to be the Mohave.
I hoped Arne would let me drive that damn Bugatti, just for a few miles.
That didn’t happen, of course. Instead, we drove through the last remaining hours of the evening rush and swung over to Bel Air.
Arne pulled up to a white marble mansion ringed by a black iron fence like a wall of spears. The lawn was as neat as a putting green, and the driveway was lined with white pillars. As L.A. mansions went, it was nearly moderate in its splendor. The place across the street was little more than a long driveway with a gate at the end. Nothing of the house itself was visible except for the Mediterranean-style roof.
I’d always liked driving through the rich neighborhoods of Los Angeles to look at the houses. There’s a kind of sick fascination about it, like looking at a car accident.
Arne honked the Bugatti’s horn and stepped out of the car. I rolled down his window as he came over. He dropped his fat roll of keys into a little pocket on the driver’s-side door. “Wait out here, okay?” He was rubbing his hands together. “I’ll be a couple minutes.” He’d never been this excited on jobs in the old days, and I didn’t like to see it now. I didn’t trust it.
“What are we doing here?”
“Recovering stolen property,” he answered. “Some guys have been operating out of the Valley, mostly, crowding my turf. I made a point of learning all their wheres, whens, and hows, and now they’re going to make me a couple of bucks.”
“That doesn’t sound like your style.”
“You’ve been gone a long time, baby. Things change.”
He got back behind the wheel as the gate rolled open. He drove through the pillars while I shut off the engine and settled in.
I didn’t stay settled in for long. After about three minutes, four men walked through the gate toward me. The one in the lead was a white man of about fifty, with a bull neck and a face like a plate of lumpy mashed potatoes. One of the men behind him looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was a black man, my height but bigger in the shoulders. His broad forehead was furrowed with a resentful scowl.
I rolled down the window a few inches. Potato Face crooked his finger at me, signaling me to come with him. There was nothing bullying or arrogant in his expression, but I didn’t like being treated like a misbehaving first-grader.
“Why?” I asked.
Mr. Familiar didn’t like my question. He tried to come around Potato Face at me, but the old man laid a hand on his chest to stop him, and Familiar stopped. Nice to know who was in charge.
Potato looked at me again. “Your buddy needs your help.”
I didn’t believe that for a second, but I opened the door and climbed out anyway, mainly because I could see they’d force me out if I didn’t. There was no sense in scuffling in the street.
Potato walked toward the house, and I fell in behind him. Familiar walked on my left, and the two other guys, both bulky, pale-skinned, and as expressive as boulders, flanked me on my right and from behind.
“I recognize you,” Familiar blurted out. “You’re the Flower.” Suddenly I recognized him right back. He was Wardell Shoops, a former wide receiver for the Chiefs. He’d been drafted out of UCLA and, during bye week of his rookie year, he’d flown home to have dinner with his mother and to beat the hell out of his business manager, who’d lost half his money on a Louisiana alligator farm. He’d pleaded guilty and did a year in Chino while I was there.
I looked at him and at his aggressive smile. He looked at me like I was an apple about to be plucked and eaten. I didn’t like that look. “I remember the man you used to be,” I said. “What happened to that guy? He was something else.”
Wardell’s smile vanished. He cursed and stepped toward me, but Potato stopped him with one backward glance. We all walked up the driveway while the gate rolled closed behind us.
The inside of the house was bright with natural light. Nearly everything was white—the carpet, the chairs, even the narrow hall tables with white princess telephones. White picture frames with no pictures hung on the walls. The ceiling was made of squares of glass with black framework in between.
Potato led us into a sunken living room at the back of the building. Arne was there, standing by a pair of French doors, with two more heavyset creeps next to him. Through the doors, I could see a broad lawn with a flower garden along one side and a little Jacuzzi on the other. Two men were on their hands and knees digging in the garden, but I couldn’t see them well enough to tell if they were Japanese, Mexican, or something else.
“Come on,” a man said impatiently. “There’s no reason to be afraid.”
Potato led me down into the room, and there, seated on an overstuffed couch in the corner, was the man who thought I was frightened of him. He was narrow-shouldered and as thin as a boy, and just about as tall, too. His face was weathered by sun, but his two-hundred-dollar haircut and open-necked linen shirt suggested he’d gotten his tan in a deck chair. His blue eyes were watery, and his thin hair was the color of sand. A tall, bony Asian woman in a purple bikini lounged on a couch beside him, a magazine in her hand.
Potato jerked a thumb back at me. “This is him.”
Linen Shirt was about to speak when Wardell said: “I know him. His last name is Daffodil or something. Something flowery. He was in Chino a couple years back, and someone on the outside had to pay for his protection, ’cause he couldn’t do it himself.”
Linen waited for Wardell to finish. Everyone else was silent, and I had the impression that Wardell had stepped on his boss’s line, and not for the first time. Then he glanced at me. “What are you doing here, Mr. Daffodil?”
Arne spoke up. “I needed someone to drive my car.”
“I wasn’t asking you,” Linen said, his voice sharp. He turned away from me. “Well? Is this him?”
The Asian woman regarded me with a sleepy, careless self-confidence. Her skin was dark and her face broad and beautiful. “Nope,” she said. She took a swizzle stick off the table beside her and began moving it through her hair as though she was stirring her scalp. “I told you it was a spic.”
Linen sighed. “Don’t say spic. It’s low-class.” She shrugged and went back to reading.
“I told you before,” Arne said, “I didn’t steal your car. I thought I knew who’d done it, and I was right. I took a real risk retrieving it for you.”
Another one of the interchangeable beefheads came into the room. He held up a DVD inside a paper sleeve. “It was right where you left it.”