anything for a couple of days who’d died that way. Heart just stopped beating.
He stayed in the shower for ten minutes, letting the spray pound him. He felt a little better when he stepped out onto the cool tile floor and started drying himself with the big fluffy beach towel. A little better wasn’t going to cut it.
His stash was in the wheel well of his car’s trunk, and the car was parked in the lot of the sandwich place two down from them. When Bobby was running in paranoid mode, which was most of the time, he wouldn’t let Tad keep anything in the house that might get them busted. Not even in the car, if Tad wanted to park it in the driveway or garage or anywhere inside the security gate. Nothing more than you can swallow, Bobby told him, and close enough so you can do that if somebody crashes the gate.
Tad mostly tried to do it that way. For a while, he buried his drugs on the beach. He had kept his stuff in a mason jar with a plastic lid so no coin-hunter or narc would find it with a metal detector. He would sneak out late at night and bury the jar in the sand. But he’d lost one that way, completely spaced out on where he’d hidden it. And another time, somebody’s dog had dug up one of the jars, so he’d stopped that. The walk to the car wasn’t that far, half a block, but of course, it felt like a thousand miles after a session with the Hammer.
Well, there was no help for it. He wasn’t going to send Adam or one of his hard-ass friends to collect his dope. He didn’t trust anybody that much except Bobby, and Bobby wouldn’t do it anyway.
Tad slipped on a pair of raggy black sweatpants, a black T-shirt, and a pair of black zorrie sandals. Might as well get to it. It was gonna take a while.
“I’m walking over to where I parked my car,” he told Adam. “Don’t fucking shoot me when I come back.”
“Why waste a bullet?” Adam said. “You look like somebody could kill you with a hard look. Hell, you look dead already.”
“You need to work on your material, Adam. I heard that one already.”
“Lots of times, I bet.”
Tad thought about his route for a minute. Out the front gate and along the road was longer. But walking along the beach through the sand would be harder. The road would be noisier, all the traffic. The beach would be hot. He’d have to walk around cars parked on the highway. He didn’t need any more obstacles at the moment. Until he got his medicine mixed and working, just breathing was an effort.
Okay, the beach. He headed for the deck stairs.
Michaels said, “One of those three or four houses?”
Howard drove, Michaels rode shotgun, Jay sat in the back. As they idled slowly along the highway, looking toward the beach, Jay said, “Got to be. Permit specifies this part of the beach. That sandwich shop over there is in the movie. I pulled it up and scanned location shots. That house to the far left was built two years ago, so it wasn’t there then.”
“Do we have owners on these?”
“Yes. The pinkish one is owned by the actress Lorrie DeVivio. She got it in the divorce settlement with her fifth ex-husband Jessel Tammens, the movie producer.”
“DeVivio is what… sixty and rich? Hard to image her making and peddling dope,” Howard said.
“Ah, you know the old movie stars, eh, General?”
“She won an Oscar,” Howard said. “And not for her looks.”
“What about the other houses?”
“Second one belongs to the chairman of the board of the Yokohama-USA Bank. He’s also sixty-something and also richer than God.
“Third one, the pale blue and white one, is owned by a corporation called Projects, Inc. Some kind of corporate retreat, maybe. I’m running down the incorporation stuff now. They are out of Delaware.
“Fourth one belongs to one Saul Horowitz. Don’t know who Solly is, and the searchbots haven’t been more forthcoming so far.”
“That sounds promising. Pull over there, into that restaurant lot, and let’s think about this for a minute,” Michaels said.
All four of the houses had security gates and fences, at least to the road side. As Howard parked the car, a Mercedes convertible arrived in front of the third house and pulled up to the gate. The car’s top was down, and a sun-bleached blond, deeply tanned young man in a Hawaiian shirt who looked like a surfer held up an electronic remote and pointed it at the heavy steel gate, which slowly swung open to admit his car. He pulled into the drive, and the gate started to close behind him.
“Yo, kahuna dude!” Jay said, in a valley-boy voice, “Surf’s up!” Jay held up his hand, the middle fingers closed, his thumb and little finger extended. He waggled his hand back and forth. “Mahalo!”
“Thank you, Brian Wilson. You get the license plate number?” Michaels said.
“Crap! I’m sorry, boss—”
“It’s a vanity,” Howard said. “P-R-O-J-E-C-T-S.”
“Run it,” Michaels ordered.
Jay, chagrined at his failure to catch the number, dialed up the California DMV and logged in, using his Net Force access code.
A few seconds later, he said, “Car is owned by Projects, Inc.,” he said. “Big surprise there, huh? Looks like you get wheels to go with the house. Nice perks.”
“So, what do you think?” Michaels said.
“Either it’s that one or the Horowitz place,” Howard said. “Rich bankers and rich movie stars might use dope, but they don’t need to sell it.”
“Just FYI, General, they found a bug on your car. That’s how the shooter kept from losing you.” Jay pointed at the flatscreen. “Also, Mr. Lee, who as we all know couldn’t have been said shooter, called in sick today.”
“Something fatal, I hope,” Howard said.
“And to keep things interesting, Mr. Zachary George is on vacation this week and next,” Jay said.
Michaels said, “Anything on the searchbots for Mr. Horowitz here yet?”
“Nope,” Jay said. “But I don’t think we need it.”
“And why would that be?”
“Take a look at the death-warmed-over stick in black walking along the road there, coming from the sandwich place,” Jay said.
“So?”
“Look again, boss.”
Michaels did. He frowned.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “Kind of hard to picture him beating the crap out of a room full of bodybuilders and trashing a gym, isn’t it?”
Michaels nodded. “But that’s the guy.”
“Never thought I’d see an actual match to a police ID composite,” Jay said. “All we have to do is watch and see if he chooses door A or door B. Whichever one he picks, I’d bet my next month’s salary against a bent quarter that’s our dealer’s house.”
The three watched the man, who looked as if he might fall down any second, as he shambled along. It took him a while to get there, but he finally did.
“And we have a winner,” Jay said. “It’s the surfer dude’s pad. Net Force rules!” He looked at Michaels. “Now what, boss? We gonna go kick ass and take names?” He held up his air taser and waggled it.
Both Howard and Michaels laughed.
Michaels said, “I see your experience in the field didn’t teach you anything. We’re not going anywhere. We’re calling the FBI. They’ll go in.”
Drayne parked the car and went in. He saw one of the bodyguards skulking behind the banana and short palm trees nod and wave at him. Good to know they were watching the place like they should.
Inside, Drayne walked out to the deck. Adam was there, looking at the ocean. “Where’s Tad?”
“He stepped out, said he was going to his car,” Adam said. “Said he’d be back in a few minutes.”
Drayne nodded. Tad would be self-medicating as soon as he was ambulatory again, and his pharmacy would
