Criminal Carma Read online

  “Your friend’s pretty funny,” she said to me as I climbed up the two shallow steps into the bar.

  “Don’t encourage him,” I said.

  “Shall I charge this to your room?” she said, holding the leather folder poised between us.

  “Sure, sweetheart, why not,” Reggie said, reaching out to take the check. He scrawled a name and room number, added 25 percent, and handed the folder back to Tawny.

  “Why thank you, Mr. Delmonte,” she said, her eyes lighting up when she saw the tip. “You’re on the fourth floor, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Reggie growled, “I’ll be home later if you want to come up.”

  Tawny’s jolly face got serious. She looked plainer and older without the smile. “You mean it?” she said.

  Reggie winked and nodded. Cryptic. Her smile came back but it was sad. “You’re just kidding,” she said.

  Reggie gave the slightest of shrugs, shoulders going up a quarter inch and then back down, as if to say, “I made the offer.”

  “Oh, you!” Tawny said and walked away with a little extra swish, glancing back once over her shoulder.

  “Did you make that name up?” I asked.

  “No! Thad be too risky. Old codger was leaving as I came in. I snuck a peek at the check on his table and got his name and room number. He went out the front with his old lady and got in a limo while you were ripping off the key card.”

  Over at the register, the waitress was looking closely at the check.

  “What if Tawny notices your name is the same as the old guy’s?” I said, looking around to see if there was anyone between us and the nearest exit, thinking that I was going to leave Reggie at a rest stop in the desert if he fucked up this score.

  “Shift changed right after he left. She just came on.” Smug.

  “Yeah, well, here she comes again,” I said. Tawny was walking across the floral rug toward us, check in hand, funny look on her face. Halfway to our table, another customer tugged on her sleeve, asking a question. She spoke with the man briefly, then continued on toward us.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Delmonte,” she said to Reggie, her manner hovering between apology and coquetry, “but I can’t tell if that is a seven or a nine on your room number.”

  “Nine,” Reggie said.

  “That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure,” she said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “No bother, babe,” Reggie said, gruff but genial.

  He looked at me as she walked back to the counter. “See? No sweat.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, “but it was still a stupid chance to take for a twenty-five-dollar bar bill when there’s a couple hundred grand on the table.”

  I couldn’t blame him too much. Both of us were as full of larceny as a slot machine is of quarters.

  We rode up to the fifth floor in an elevator lined with mahogany and padded brocade. The elevator floor was covered with a carpet that had the word FRIDAY woven into the wool pile. They changed the carpet each day for the benefit of travelers who had lost their place in the continuum of time.

  Coming out of the elevator alcove, we stepped onto a carpeted walkway that went continuously around all four sides of the atrium, numbered doors on one side, railing on the other. At the corners, hallways led to the wings of the gigantic hotel. Standing at the railing, looking down five stories, we had a clear view of the entrance and front desk. The lobby and lounge were crowded with miniature people, and the murmur and clatter of their self-absorbed oblivion rose up to us like faithless prayers to an empty heaven.

  Tawny was clearing a table in the bar, looking girlish in the distance. Glancing up the way people do when they sense someone watching them, she saw us and waved, stretching her arm up high and waggling her hand. Reggie gave her a little salute.

  I left him at the railing to watch the entrance and started down the wide hallway that led to 589, heavy black bag hanging from my shoulder. Anyone who has ever read the numbers on a lottery ticket over and over, feeling the realization that they have actually won spreading like an orgasm through their bones and belly, knows how I felt approaching the room of Evelyn Evermore in Indian Wells on the last Friday in January 1996. The adrenaline pump had kicked on like an air-conditioner compressor, flooding the spongy tissue of my brain with epinephrine, bringing a fresh surge of exhilaration. I had felt alien and out of place in normal society for as long as I could remember, but I was at home in the world of crime, happy as a soldier at the end of a war he never expected to survive as he crosses the bridge back into the town he came from.

  The hallway was illuminated by crystal chandeliers that sparkled above my head. The rose-colored carpet was springy beneath my feet. I passed one dark-skinned housekeeper who snubbed her cart against the wall and stood with downcast eyes as I passed, and one room-service tray piled with dirty dishes and wadded cloth napkins outside the door of a suite.

  I walked past 589, which was near the end of the long hallway. At the very end, there was a fire exit. The door opened into a bare steel and concrete stairwell that I could descend in a hurry if I had to. To my right as I faced the fire door, a narrow hallway extended for twenty feet, then jogged out of sight. I didn’t explore it.

  Back at the door to the lady’s suite, I slid the key card into the slot. The green light blinked on, the lock beeped and, with a quick glance up and down the hallway, I stepped into a future far different than the one I imagined.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The living room was furnished richly in desert brown and tan with umber and gold accents. Directly in front of me as I entered, a sliding glass door opened onto a large balcony. Through the door, framed by heavy gold drapes, I could see the orange disk of the sun half hidden by the Santa Rosa Mountains, which rose abruptly several miles to the west. Early in the morning when they are bathed in eastern light, the mountains glow red. But they turn black in the afternoon.

  The bedroom, where everything of value would be, was through a doorway to my right. The bathroom was beyond the bedroom, corner of a sunken marble bathtub visible through a second doorway.

  I entered the bedroom silently. Since the suite was empty, it wouldn’t have mattered if I coughed and scuffed my feet, but the habit of stealth was engrained in muscle memory. The king-size bed was crisp and unwrinkled, but I opened the louvered closet doors as softly as if a police captain was snoring beneath the yellow duvet. A small room safe fastened to the closet floor made a flutter in my chest.

  Like most precautions approved by security-conscious citizens and their enablers, hotel room safes are actually a boon to serious criminals. The main hotel safe at the Oasis was, I knew without having seen it, a hard-core, high-tech device that would be difficult to access. But travelers in luxury hotels no longer put their valuables in big safes protected by cameras and security guards. Instead, they take advantage of an “amenity” they get for paying exorbitant rates and put their money and jewelry and drugs and weapons in convenient room safes, cracker boxes made of soft metal with no alarms.

  I laid the black bag on the bed. It held a.32-caliber Beretta Tomcat; a very expensive, very powerful, nearly silent cordless drill; and a set of razory titanium bits that would cut through the little play safe like a surgeon’s scalpel slicing through a girdle of fat. There was also a flexible, lighted scope that I could insert through a drill hole to see the contents of the “safe,” and a hardened steel prying tool which, when the sections were screwed together into a five-foot bar and the hooked tip inserted up to its back spur in that same handy hole, would give me enough leverage to break the lock and pop the door open.

  I was all set to crack the safe and steal the lady’s jewels, polishing my image of myself as a crafty and competent criminal in the process, but I didn’t get the chance. The safe was unlocked. And empty. Either Evermore was careless with her diamonds or she hadn’t brought them.

  The three red hard-shell suitcases were empty, too. There was nothing bulky in the pockets of any of the clothes hanging in
the closet. The top dresser drawer contained the outfit the lady had worn in the car, neatly folded, a nightgown, pantyhose, and half a dozen pairs of panties, silky and colorful. The middle drawer was cashmere sweaters and folded wool pants. There were no men’s clothes.

  The bottom drawer held two phone books, a Gideon Bible with a cardboard cover, and what looked like a child’s jewelry box, flimsy wood with seashells glued to it, secured by a ten-cent latch. I felt the unmistakable weight of something valuable as I lifted it from the drawer and set it on top of the dresser.

  Pasted to the underside of the lid was a photograph of a girl about the right age for a seashell jewelry box. She was smiling and waving at the camera, wearing what might have been a Confirmation dress. Pasted next to it was another picture of the same girl, older, sadder, with angry eyes, standing against the railing of a corral, with a barn and pasture in the background. She was wearing a blue jean jacket and her blond hair had been dyed black. A woman who could have been Evelyn Evermore some years back was looking at the camera with a strained smile, her arm placed awkwardly around the girl’s shoulders.

  In the box was a collection of mementos: an ID card with a third and final picture of the girl, identifying her as Christina Evermore, an eighth-grader at Sea Winds Middle School; a silver thimble; a small magnifying glass; and a pink plastic unicorn with a bedraggled mane. The sense of loss that clung to the trinkets and fading snapshots made me think of my own lost daughter, the little girl who wasn’t so little anymore, growing up somewhere in the wide world without me.

  But there was also a blue velvet case in the box, three inches wide by eight inches long by an inch and a half deep. It injected a silver shimmer into my dark heart, washing over the sadness like cool surf over disheveled sand after the last swimmer has left the beach at the end of a summer day. In the white satin interior lay the necklace: twenty-six carats of fancy pink diamonds. A set of earrings lay beside the necklace. Each earring was an unadorned one-carat rose-colored diamond in a simple platinum setting.

  Diamonds are one of society’s most spectacular illusions. The clear, sparkling gems people think of when they hear the word aren’t actually all that rare. They are abundant all over the planet, from Africa to India to Siberia to South America. A cabal of South African businessmen and Israeli merchants that has persisted for generations maintains inflated prices by strictly controlling the flow of stones into the market. People routinely pay as much as ten thousand dollars for very fine one-carat clear diamonds, but if you try to sell a stone like that back to a jeweler, you will be lucky to get ten cents on the dollar.

  Pink diamonds, on the other hand, are genuinely rare and valuable. Which meant I would be able to fence the necklace for a decent percentage of its quarter-million-dollar appraised worth, netting at least a hundred thousand dollars. Likely more.

  Roy Rogers had just started playing “Happy Trails” in my mind when I heard someone move behind me. Whirling, I saw that it was the weightlifter. He was standing in the bedroom doorway holding a big black automatic that looked like it had come from a fascist country. It was an ugly, large-bore weapon that would make an ugly hole. The hall door was open behind him. Rifling the dresser drawers, I hadn’t heard him enter. I wondered how he had gotten by Reggie.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I said.

  “I’m Jimmy Z, the last one you think of, the first one to show,” he said. “Who are you?” His leather jacket was stretched tight over his bulging chest and upper arms. It looked like the seams would split if he flexed his biceps. His long narrow ex-con’s face was as expressionless as his voice. I had a premonition that one of us was going to kill the other at some point.

  “Hotel security,” I said. “We had a report of a break-in. What are you doing in Mrs. Evermore’s suite?”

  “Um her bodyguard,” he said. “Show a badge.”

  “I’m not showing you shit,” I said. “I’m going to put Mrs. Evermore’s necklace in the hotel vault for safekeeping. Then you’re going to answer some questions.” I snapped the jewelry case closed and reached for the black bag on the bed. The Tomcat was a much nicer pistol than his industrial piece. It was an elegant James Bond sort of weapon, stainless steel with an ivory grip. At 4.9 inches long and 15 ounces, it was light and easy to conceal, yet had the stopping power of a.38. There were seven 60-grain hollow-points in the magazine and one in the tilt-up chamber. It never jammed.

  But I had to get my hands on it.

  “Stop,” he said, raising his pistol an inch or two so that it was pointing at my solar plexus. The hammer was cocked. “You ain’t hotel security. And that ain’t Evermore’s necklace no more. It belongs to Baba Raba now.”

  “You better put that pistol away, Jimmy, or you’re going to end up back in the clink.”

  He took a step toward me. “Drop the case on the bed and put your hands behind your head, or you’re gonna end up in a funeral parlor,” he said, voice flat and uninflected. All the emotion had been beaten out of him by a sadistic older brother or drunken mother, and by the blackjacks of cops in police departments from San Diego to San Francisco. He had probably killed his first small animals in grade school, moving on to larger prey as he matured.

  I was running out of options. “Who’s Baba Raba?” I said, still holding on to the blue velvet box full of long, leisurely rides up the coast and meals in fine restaurants and trips to Cabo and Hawaii.

  “Last chance,” he said. The knuckles on his right hand, swollen from hitting the heavy bag, looked like one-inch ball bearings. They were white with tension. Numb heart full of Novocain, he would kill without remorse. He might be able to get away with it, too. He had caught me burglarizing the room. I had a gun that he could put in my hand if he found it in time. His gun was probably unlicensed, but that would be a minor charge. He looked like he could do ninety days standing on his ear. I dropped the jewelry case on the edge of the bed and it bounced off onto the floor.

  “Now the hands,” he said.

  Everyone likes to be tough. I like to be tough. But sometimes when a sociopath is pointing a hand cannon at you, you feel a little scared, or sad. Sometimes you remember walking along a path by a river with someone you loved who you will never see again. A narrow dirt path overhung with alder trees and bordered by all the flowers of a midwestern spring. Sometimes you remember the hopes you had for your life when you were young. But then you get over that and start calculating your odds of ducking under the gun with a fast tackle.

  The odds weren’t good.

  I put my hands behind my head, scrambling mentally, looking for an out. There wasn’t going to be anything pleasant in store for me if I let him take me prisoner, arrested at the least, shot and dumped in the desert at the worst.

  “Turn around and get down on your knees,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Before I could turn my vulnerable back to the large bore of the.45, there was a knock at the half-open hall door and Reggie burst into the room carrying the tray I’d seen in the hallway. He had covered the dirty dishes with a white cloth napkin and tucked another napkin in the front of his pants so that it hung down like an apron.

  “Room service,” he shouted.

  The weightlifter half-turned, looking over his shoulder at Reggie, then glancing quickly back at me. He turned the gun away from me, holding it flat in front of his body so that Reggie couldn’t see it. “Put it down and get out,” he said.

  “Where you want it?” Reggie said, panting a little bit. His face was red with excitement or exertion and I saw some lipstick on his right ear. At first glance, with the improvised apron, he looked a little like a waiter. At second glance, not so much.

  The weightlifter was noticing that. As he turned for a better look, I dove toward him, tucking, doing a tight somersault on the thick carpet, and coming up to tackle him from a crouch with a lot of momentum. He clubbed me on top of the head with the.45 as he went down, loosening my grip on his waist. Stomping at me, he kicked free, still holding on to
the gun. Dazed, I heard a loud crash as he scrambled to his feet, dishes shattering and metal dish covers clanging, then saw Reggie looming up behind him, metal serving tray raised high. The weightlifter spun toward the noise a split second too late, and Reggie brought the tray down on his head with a bong.

  His muscular legs wobbled but held. As Reggie raised the tray for another blow, the weightlifter backfisted him with the.45, striking his forehead with the heavy barrel. Reggie dropped to his knees and the weightlifter reared back his right foot for a kick. I was up on one knee and grabbed his foot as it came back. Lifting and charging toward him as I got to my feet, I flipped him onto his head. His gun went flying and landed under the table near the hall door, which Reggie had left standing wide open. As the weightlifter scrambled after his piece, I dove on top of him, flattening him against the floor and knocking the wind out of him. Before he could recover, I got him in a stranglehold, my right forearm across his windpipe, right hand gripping my left bicep, left hand locked on the back of his head.

  He was strong. He got up on his hands and knees and nearly bucked me off. He hit back over his shoulder with one hand and then the other, putting knots on my head, and crashed around, bashing my body against furniture and walls. But I kept his air cut off and after a minute or so I could feel him getting weaker. Finally, he stopped struggling. I kept the choke hold tight, grinding his trachea, not taking any chance in case he was playing possum.

  “Less get outta here,” I heard Reggie say in a weak voice. The weightlifter was sprawled flat on the living room floor with his head near the hall door. I was lying full length on top of him. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Reggie leaning against the wall by the bedroom door. He was holding one of the cloth napkins to his forehead. It was red. Blood dripped from the end of his nose. “Too much noise,” he said.

  I released the choke hold and sat up on the weightlifter’s back, which twitched and heaved as he started to breathe again with his face in the carpet. He smelled like the jocks I fought in high school: too much sweet cologne not quite covering up the stink of old sweat. Thinking about the beautiful, bewildered lady he had somehow gotten his hooks into and remembering the fear he made me feel, I grabbed his hair with my left hand, turned his head so that his face was exposed and slammed my right fist into his nose as hard as I could in a tight roundhouse. There was a crunching sound as bone and cartilage gave way and blood sprayed on my hand and forearm.