and Marty,” Cole said. “You didn’t exactly seem like a girlfriend. Like when he was banging that actress chick, he was right out front about it. You didn’t seem to care.”
“I didn’t. Less wear and tear on me,” Cox said.
“So . . . I thought maybe he was paying you to hang around.”
“He was, sorta. Not like a hundred bucks a time, or whatever,” Cox said. “But, well, two words: ‘money’ and ‘cocaine.’ I wasn’t on the corner, but I do like money and cocaine. I like rich guys, especially the ones who like to spend the money and who like to go out clubbing. Dancing. Who’ll loan out their Amex cards. I dated a lot of Arab boys from USC.”
“Huh.” Cole thought about that, then said, “I only had one legitimate credit card in my life. From Sears, and I think they went broke. I got it when I was a kid so I could buy tires and tools and shit.”
Cox reached across the seat and patted him on the leg. “You always seemed like a nice guy to me, a lot nicer than the others,” she said. A minute later: “If Marty and I develop a problem, would you take care of me?”
“If I could,” Cole said, “I guess. I don’t know what I could do. I lost a lot of money in this deal. I kept it in my car, down below. Cops got it now.”
“Oh my God.”
“No kiddin’.”
“Something bad is going to happen,” Cox said. “Marty’s not a guy to keep his head down. You seem more responsible that way. I know he and Deese are going to start gambling up in Vegas because . . . because that’s what they do.”
“That’ll get them caught. They got cameras, tight security, and smart cops up there,” Cole said. “We need to lay low until we can get a little cash together.”
“If we worked on this husband-and-wife stuff, like Marty said, we’d have a better chance to get away. Couples up in Vegas are invisible. People look at single guys and single girls, but not couples, because they aren’t . . . available. There are millions of them, all over. Nobody even looks.”
“But what’s to work on? Being a couple? You just go around together, right?”
“People who are couples act different than other people,” she said. “You can tell.”
“Tell what?”
“That they’re together,” she said. “You know, that they’re intimate with each other.”
“You mean, sleeping together?”
She shrugged. “Or whatever. Intimate.” Long silence, the two of them looking out at the overheated desert, which definitely wasn’t as picturesque as the one in Tucson. “Listen . . . you wanna blow job?”
Cole scratched his head, looked at her, checking to see if she was serious. She seemed to be, her eyes flat and not wise. Finally: “Sure, if you think Marty won’t mind.”
“I don’t plan on telling him,” she said. And, “You know his real name is Marion?”
“Yeah, but he wanted everybody to call him Marty because he’s had legal problems with the Marion name.”
Neither said anything for another minute, then Cox said, “You probably ought to slide the seat all the way back.”
“Oh. Sure. Let me get rid of the smoke first. It is pretty boring out here.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
They had driven Bob’s Malibu around the block and parked it, leaving the driveway empty. Rocha left in the minivan and came back an hour later with two sheriff’s deputies to help with the surveillance. They brought more groceries.
The Jaguar came back late in the afternoon, followed a few minutes later by the BMW. One of the deputies took photos with a telephoto lens.
As they waited through the afternoon for Rocha to coordinate the raid with the three different departments involved, Lake hooked a laptop into an industrial-strength hotspot and brought up all kinds of official documents regarding the target house—building permits, tax assessor’s reports, plat maps, aerial views. The original permits, thirty-five years old, showed the house as having three modestly sized bedrooms, but a later permit hinted at extensive internal remodeling but didn’t include detailed plans.
“We don’t really know what it’s like in there,” Rocha said. “The building permits are mostly about new HVAC, but those are old-style family bedrooms, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d combined some of them into one- or two-bedroom suites. We can’t count on the doors and bedroom access being where the plans say they are.”
“But there are at least four people using the place,” Rae said.
“First-floor family room could have been converted into another