and forty-five minutes coming home at three o’clock in the morning by Uber.”
“That’s raw,” Rae said. “He didn’t drive you home?”
“Called an Uber, put me out on the street,” she said. “I haven’t seen him since. If I had, I’d have given him another piece of my mind, on top of the piece he’d already got.”
“You think you could find—”
“No, I couldn’t. It was almost midnight when we got there, and I’d had a few drinks and wasn’t paying much attention. It’s a standard suburban, upper-middle California neighborhood that looks like a million other places. Saw a nice Spanish Revival house on the way—I’d put it at a million-five, maybe two, depending on condition. Now that I’m thinking about it, it was probably not in Pasadena but maybe Altadena. But you know what? Since you’re the FBI—”
Bob: “Marshals Service.”
“Whatever . . . I know how you could find him. He had a regular phone in the bedroom. When he went off to the bathroom, I called myself on it.”
Rae: “You called?”
“Yeah. So I’d have a record of his phone number, if I wanted to call him up. I never wanted to, it turns out. I didn’t tell him about calling myself, though.”
Lucas: “You still have . . . ?”
She got her purse, got her phone, thumbed through it, and said, “Ready?”
* * *
—
WHEN THEY LEFT, going down in the elevators, Bob said, “I’m telling you, it’s too easy.”
“Gift horse,” Lucas said. “Don’t look in the mouth.”
“I’m with Bob,” Rae said. “You haven’t been on many fugitive things like this, Lucas. Maybe one, down in Texas, right?”
“A couple more up in Minnesota,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, but those were amateurs. You’ve only done one hard-core guy,” Rae said. “What you find out is, you always have trouble. It might be spread out, so you have trouble all the way through the operation, or everything can be sweet, but then, right at the end, a pile of trouble jumps up and bites you on the butt. Always.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, but it sounds like superstition,” Lucas said. They walked out through the lobby, and Lucas put his sunglasses on. “You two haven’t worked with a sophisticated, well-dressed investigator like myself, so you don’t appreciate how smoothly things can go. With you guys, it’s always combat fatigues, guns, kicking down doors.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Bob said. “And you can take your well-dressed sophistication with about two pounds of beach sand and pack it up your ass.”
“That’s the Marine Corps talking,” Rae said to Lucas. “The whole packing sand thing.”
“Ask Tremanty to check that phone number. We need to get over there—Pasadena, or wherever it is,” Lucas said. “She said forty-five minutes at three in the morning. At this time of day, it could be two hours. The fuckin’ traffic here is unbelievable.”
Rae called Tremanty, who was back to them in five minutes with an address for the hardwired phone. “You guys are like some kind of geniuses,” he said.
“We already knew that,” Lucas said, “but we try to keep it quiet.” He wrote the address in his notebook and said to Bob and Rae, “Altadena Drive. Suzie-Q knew where she was.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
They took both the Malibus, one silver, one black, Lucas driving on his own, Bob and Rae together, following their iPhone navigation apps up a number of freeways that began to sound like a bad California surfer song: the 405 to the 10 to the 110 to the 210—the thighbone connected to the hipbone, the hipbone connected to the iPhone—and then off into a welter of streets that began climbing the first low foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
The landscape was lush: towering royal palms mixing it up with darker, heavyset pines, and flowering bushes in scarlet and brilliant yellow, and everywhere two thousand shades of green, all behind wrought-iron fences with long, wide driveways.
They cruised, a hundred yards apart, past the target. The house was a sprawling, single-story ranch, with a curving driveway that led to a two-car garage partly obscured by foliage. A six-foot hedge ran along the front and sides of the property, separating it from its neighbors. They couldn’t see the backyard, but it looked as overgrown as the front.
After cruising the place, they drove out to a coffee shop on Lake Avenue and got coffee, and Bob also got donuts. Lucas brought up an Altadena map on his iPad and then a satellite view of the house, which told them almost nothing because of the heavy foliage across