It was cool inside. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. Considering the way I’d been sleeping, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that I’d nodded off, but I felt pissed off and ashamed anyway. If something dangerous had happened—hell, if Arne had decided to shove me out of the car at freeway speeds—I couldn’t have done much about it.
I watched Arne as he moved away. He didn’t look tense, but maybe he’d gotten more relaxed when he stole cars in the years I’d been away. Maybe he’d lost his edge. Or maybe he didn’t expect any trouble out here at all.
After forty yards or so, he disappeared around the side of the hill. Without really thinking about it, I opened the driver door as quietly as I could and slipped into the afternoon heat. I shut the door gently, hoping the sound of car tires on the nearby freeway would mask the noise.
Arne didn’t peek back around the edge of the hill at me. I felt absurdly like a disobedient teenager as I followed after him, walking on the dry, hard ground to avoid the crunch of footsteps on gravel.
At the bend in the path, I crouched low behind an outcropping of rock and spied on Arne. He had stopped at the end of the gravel path and was fiddling with a padlock on a gate. The hill concealed a fenced area, and inside the fence was a prefab sheet-metal building.
The gate was on the western part of the property. The building faced south, with a peaked roof and a row of closed windows set high on the walls. The huge front doors slid open on runners.
The building was deep enough that a tractor trailer could have driven through the front and pulled all the way inside without turning, and it was three times wider than it was deep.
Whatever Arne was doing with the gates, he got them unlocked and pushed them both all the way open. Then he started toward the big front doors. He moved casually, but his head turned back and forth as he scanned the area, making sure he was alone.
He spent much less time fiddling with the latch at the two big front doors before sliding them open and walking into the darkness. Damn, it must have been like an oven in there. Sweat prickled on my back at the thought of it.
There was a sign on the open gate, but I was too far away to read it. If the society had brought me in as an investigator, I’d probably have a pair of binoculars, or maybe a camera with a telephoto lens that would not only let me read the sign but would record it for the benefit of the people who recovered my body.
But I was just a wooden man, and this was not even an official mission.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what Arne was doing all the way out here in the middle of nowhere. When I’d been with him, we’d stolen cars and driven them to a dealer in Long Beach. He’d fake up papers for them and ship them out of the country for resale. It hadn’t made any of us rich, but it had been better than throwing trash into the back of a municipal truck, or mopping floors, or clearing dirty plates from restaurant tables. At least, we’d thought so. Maybe we’d have made more money if Arne had been more willing to take risks, but he’d kept most of us out of jail.
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.
