caught a muttered word.
“Slacker.”
Then she was gone, and Ed was left asking himself if the rookie was going to work out.
19
“Got her okay” Blair called from the driveway.
Tyler lugged the lady cop down the flagstone path in the starlight. “Easy as taking out the garbage.”
The trunk of the squad car was open, the interior light illuminating two helmet bags and some folded blankets. Blair tossed them out, and Tyler dumped the patrolwoman inside.
She groaned but didn’t stir. The clasp securing her hair came loose, and a spill of blonde strands, shoulder length, fanned out in a lustrous spray.
“She’s pretty, huh” Blair said.
“Yeah.” Tyler shut the trunk and heard it lock. “Soon she’ll be pretty dead.”
As he walked to the driver’s door, he glanced through the side window. Officer Wald lay across the floor of the backseat, his right eye gone, the left staring sightlessly.
In Wald’s wallet Tyler had found a photo of a redheaded wife and two high school kids posing on Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara. Family man.
But not anymore.
He got behind the wheel and raised his ski mask, grateful to have it off. Sweat dampened his face. His ponytail was a wet mop. The camouflage paint around his eyes had run like black tears.
In the passenger seat Blair tugged off his own mask, revealing a lumpy nose and pockmarked cheeks. “Hot night, huh”
“I grew up in Arizona,” Tyler said. “Lake Havasu City. Gets to be a hundred fifteen in the summer.”
“Where you gonna go once we split the haul”
“Just south of here. Malibu. You”
“Maybe back to San Diego. Me and Gage grew up there. Nice town.”
“Lots of Mexicans.”
“The Mexicans are all right. I used to do some part-time stuff with some Mexicans.”
“What stuff”
“Swiping boats. Real easy work. Just hotwire the sucker and go.”
Tyler nodded. “I helped run a chop shop out in El Centro for a while. Autos, I mean. Not a bad way to earn a living.”
“The gangs are taking over the auto racket. Boats too. Not much future in it for the independent businessman.”
“Well, after we get paid, the future’s gonna look a lot brighter for all of us.”
“You got that right,” Blair said with a smile.
Though they had spent the past thirty-six hours together, this was Tyler Sinclair’s longest conversation with Blair Sharkey. The kid didn’t say much, and his brother Gage said even less.
Still, Tyler had seen enough of them to judge that neither measured up to Hector Avalon, the man they had replaced. Tyler had gotten to know old Hector pretty well during a week of drills conducted by Cain in the wilds of the San Jacinto Mountains. The crew had donned their black camouflage outfits, practiced with modified Glocks that fired blank rounds, and run through every possible contingency plan.
Basic training, Cain had called it. Boot camp.
Too bad the Sharkeys hadn’t been part of all that. Maybe then tonight’s mishap wouldn’t have occurred, and the lady in the trunk wouldn’t have to die.
The squad car’s key had been left in the ignition. Tyler cranked it, and the engine caught. High beams snapped on. He guided the Chevy between the house and the garage, then through the backyard to the rear gate.
Had he thought of it, he would have opened the gate from inside the house; there was a switch by the rear door. Since he’d forgotten, the gate would have to be pushed by hand.
“Do it,” Tyler told Blair, assuming his authority as Cain’s right-hand man, a promotion he’d obtained upon Hector Avalon’s demise.
The kid got out. Tyler sat in the idling Chevy, curiously at peace amid the radio’s occasional low squawks. The car was a Caprice from the early ‘90s, a big old boat popular with cops and cab drivers.
Boat. The thought made him smile. Officer Robinson was going to wish it was a boat.
Anyway, the Caprice wasn’t much of a car. Nothing like the Danforths’ Porsche. Man, just sitting in that 928 GTS had been a thrill, and starting the engine …
Soon he would have a Porsche of his own. Not a GTS-nifty as it was, it lacked the hard-riding feel of a true sports car. The one he would buy was a brand-new 911 Carrera. Two hundred forty-seven horses and a classic design. Black exterior … or red; he hadn’t decided.
He saw himself cruising down Pacific Coast Highway, Dr. Dre on the CD player at eardrum-bursting volume, a girl with big tits and no brains at his side.
The passenger seat creaked, but it wasn’t his dream girl sliding into the Chevy, just Blair Sharkey. The gate was open.
Tyler drove through, his foot resting lightly on the gas pedal, the speedometer needle pegged at a cautious fifteen miles an hour.
“Things are going slick enough so far,” Blair said.
“Would’ve been slicker,” Tyler answered evenly, “if your baby brother hadn’t gotten himself eyeballed while he was mucking around in the backyard.”
“Hey, Tex, lighten up.”
“I’m from Arizona, I said.”
“Sorry. Just an expression. Anyway, Gage is okay.”
Tyler wouldn’t let it go. “How could he let the Kent woman see him”
“I thought he was right behind me on the way to the patio. Guess he fell back. Tried to catch up by taking a shortcut past the gazebo.”
“Within view of the kitchen window.”
“He didn’t know.”
“Why didn’t he”
“We got in on this action kind of late,” Blair said, getting hot.
“Sure you did. But shit, we went over it a hundred times. Cain showed you blueprints, diagrams.”
“Look, he’s young, all right”
Young. Both of the Sharkey boys were young. Gage was sixteen, Blair just two years older. Tyler Sinclair, at twenty-two, felt like Methuselah by comparison.
“Yeah,” Tyler said, “he’s young, but he ought to be smarter. Didn’t he learn anything heisting boats”
Blair looked away. “I didn’t say he was with me on those jobs. That was me and some Mexicans.”
“You mean the kid’s a virgin”
“Nah, he’s done some stuff. Nothing this major.”
“Nobody here’s done anything this major,” Tyler said, stating the obvious. “What has he done”
“You know, the usual. Ripping off mailboxes, busting into parked cars … he’s shoplifted some pretty nice items too.”
“Sounds real small-time.”
“Hey, I’ll vouch for him, all right He’ll be okay. I got him into this, and I’ll talk him through it. Or do you got a problem with that”
“I don’t got a problem,” Tyler said coolly, “as long as he doesn’t mess up again.”
Blair gave no response. They finished the drive in silence.
The wide, paved path angled down a gentle grade for a quarter mile or so, past stands of live oak and bigleaf maple and dense pockets of yerba buena and fiddleneck. Night air blew in through the open windows, warm at first but cooling steadily as the lake drew near.
