He had done his best. He had taken a big risk to go to Kapak unarmed and show him his face, so Kapak would know that Carver wasn’t the man who had robbed him. He had politely asked Kapak to start leaving him alone.
Within minutes Kapak had shot at him from behind. There was no way to make a simple truce with Manco Kapak. The man didn’t care that Carver had done him no harm. Now he was going to have to learn how expensive it was to persist in a wrong decision.
Carver drove to a Big Five sporting goods store and picked out a Remington Model 870 twelve-gauge shotgun with a short barrel and a magazine tube that held eight shells. He couldn’t imagine Kapak sending fewer than eight people next time if he sent any. Carver drove to Griffith Park to find a lonely parking lot beside a small picnic grove so he could take it out of its box and load it with double-ought buckshot. He laid it in the trunk under a mat and put the rest of the box of twenty-five shells in the plastic bag, then flattened the boxes and burned them in one of the picnic grills.
He drove to Sherman Oaks, parked in the lot of a grocery store, and walked to a Wells Fargo Bank branch. He opened a checking account for an entity called the Fortuna Company, deposited five thousand dollars, and received a sheaf of temporary checks.
His next stop was the Westfield Mall. He used Kapak’s card to pay for a hundred American Express gift cards at two hundred dollars each, then bought a new wardrobe of suits, shoes, and informal clothes, the most expensive he could find.
The next series of purchases were simply an effort to drain as much money out of the card as possible before the account was shut down. He bought diamond jewelry and high-end wristwatches for men and women from two different stores. He was aware that there was a federal law that would prevent Kapak from losing much money through a stolen credit card, but he also knew that the charges would horrify and enrage Kapak. Carver took everything he had bought out of the bags, hid the large items in the car trunk, and stashed the rest under the front seats.
Carver had bought enough so he felt he had to move to another shopping center. He had estimated that he could keep charging until late afternoon, so when he got to the Glendale Galleria, he decided it was time to run a check. He went to the food court and ordered a dozen cookies, and handed Kapak’s card to the teenager at the counter. The boy ran the card, waited for the approval, and then handed it back to Carver with an apologetic expression. “Sorry, man. This isn’t any good. Would you like to cancel the order?”
“That’s okay” Carver said, and handed him the cash for the cookies and a tip. He decided the boy looked too embarrassed for a simple declining of credit. Some other message must have come up on his machine like “Confiscate card” or “Call the police.” Carver hurried away and slipped out of the Galleria through the big Nordstrom store that opened into the parking garage. He looked at his watch. It was just 4:00. He’d had a pretty good day. He had a gently used car for free, still had thirty thousand cash and twenty thousand in American Express cards, some very nice clothes, about sixty thousand dollars in jewelry, and a loaded shotgun.
As soon as he was two miles from the Galleria, he took off the uncomfortable fake hair, eyebrows, and mustache, and then used hand wipes to rub off the dark makeup from his face, neck, and hands as he drove. He stopped at a grocery store and used cash to pay for a roll of duct tape, a box of kitchen matches, two hundred feet of clothesline, and a can of charcoal starter.
When he reached the neighborhood where Kapak lived, he began to drive up and down the streets. The next step was going to take some thought and study. If only he knew who had really robbed Kapak, none of this would be necessary.
6
JEFFERSON DAVIS FALKINS lay on the spine-snapped couch under the big window in Lila’s apartment, feeling the faint motion of air across his bare chest and bare feet and bare legs up to the place where his baggy khaki shorts began.
The couch smelled like dog, and because he had been sleeping on it, he supposed he did too. He sat up. The sun must be very low now, because to the east he could see the hint of the deep indigo rising from somewhere beyond the curve of the earth.
Eldon the dog raised his head and turned to Jeff, knowing that in a minute Jeff would probably insist on getting up and spoiling the community and comfort of the couch. Eldon sniffed the air, learning things from it that he kept to himself. All Jeff could tell was that he had not sniffed anything that worried him, like the approach of hostile strangers. Jeff shifted his leg and the heavy dog stood up on all fours, stepped down from the couch to the filthy yellow shag rug, and trotted off. A few seconds later the scrit-scrat sound of his toenails announced he had arrived in the kitchen. Falkins could hear Eldon’s long tongue lapping the water in his dish.
Jeff didn’t hear Lila say anything to Eldon, so he called out. “Lila?” There was no response, so he said it louder. “Lila!” He stood up, rubbed his stubbly chin, and joined Eldon in the kitchen. The note was on the kitchen table. To Mr. Jefferson Davis Falkins. Went to Work. You should try it sometime. That was perfect Lila. She had such a superstitious reverence for work that she capitalized it. Her respect for it transcended even her attachment to arithmetic. She worked the evening shift at the Siren Club from 4:00 until midnight five nights a week and made so little that she couldn’t have afforded to eat at that club without tips. She was slim and pretty and naturally blond, so she at least got good tips, but that was beside the point.
Jeff went into Lila’s tiny bedroom, opened the small closet that she let him share, and began to move aside the pile of shoes on the floor. He found the white laundry bag he’d left there, carried it to her bed, and poured out the bills. Most of them were small now—ones, fives, tens. That was chump money, not the kind of money you could flash. If he wanted to show off and buy a bottle of Cristal at a club, he would have to count out around fifty five-dollar bills, even more at some places. It completely defeated the purpose of buying the Cristal at all. Over the past month, he had spent hundreds of dollars every night buying dinners, champagne, the occasional hotel room for a few hours.
He plucked the twenties and the two fifties out of the pile and stuck them in his wallet, then dutifully gathered the smaller bills and made them into a four-inch stack. He went to Lila’s dresser, found a black elastic hair band, slipped it over the stack, and tossed it on the bed. He began to open drawers, found a pair of black stockings still in a package. He opened it, lay the stockings out on the bed, put a pair of high heels where the feet would be, put a black bra up above, and put a big pair of sunglasses above that to indicate the eyes. He took her nail scissors and cut the cardboard backing from the package into the shape of a heart, wrote “I love you” on it in lipstick, and placed it in a strategic zone above the stockings. In the lowest drawer of her dresser, he found her leather gloves, put them on either side of the effigy, and put the stack of bills in the right glove.
Two last items had fallen from the laundry bag—his Browning .45 Hi-Power pistol and the spare magazine. He checked to be sure the gun and the extra magazine were both loaded, the way he had left them. If Lila had found them sometime while he was out, it would be just like her to unload them and think she was making him safe. No, she hadn’t found the gun. He clicked the safety off and on again, put it into the inner pocket of the leather jacket hanging in the closet, put on a pair of jeans, a blue shirt, and a pair of running shoes.