events, the women all in jewelry and their hottest dresses. When they had a list, they went to the cheapest all-cash motel they could find that had WiFi and used Cole’s laptop to research the people.
When they’d whittled the list down to four candidates, they checked the houses on Google Earth, spotting getaway routes and possible security problems. They eliminated a condo right away and finally settled on the Wrights.
Deese picked up some current-looking license plates from a junkyard—five hundred bucks, no questions asked. They bought a railroad tie at a nursery, the kind used for landscaping, and two door handles at a Home Depot to affix to the tie, to make a battering ram.
When they went into Wrights’ house, it had all gone smoothly, like old times. The robbery went well, Deese taking Nast’s place as the frightener, but much of the take was in jewelry that would be hard to sell. They’d talked to their new fence about it and he suggested they not move more than a single piece of the Loloma, or two, each year.
“That Loloma stuff—it’s all unique, it’s all documented with photographs, quite a bit of it is in books that all the Indian traders will have,” the fence told them. “That’s gonna be tough.” He said that if he bought it, he might eventually make two hundred thousand dollars, but that could take ten years and with serious risk involved. He’d offer them twenty thousand—take it or leave it. After some grumbling, they took it.
They got ninety thousand for the rest of the jewelry: the diamonds and the pieces made by Belperron. The diamonds were no problem at all—they were excellent, and anonymous, stones. The Belperron would be resold to a fence in France, who’d move it in Europe, but that meant the take was further reduced because there’d be two fences involved.
The bottom line: the raid was a success but the take, including the cash, amounted to less than forty thousand dollars for each of the men.
Cole, on his own, lying low in Omaha, might stretch forty thousand dollars out over five or six months, but Deese and Beauchamps, with heavy casino and cocaine expenses, could cover a couple of months at best. Each of them gave Cox, as the driver, two thousand, which she thought was ridiculously stingy. She talked Cole out of another five thousand when they were alone, which meant that he wasn’t covered for more than three or four months. And Cox knew that with her cocaine and casino expenditures the same as Deese’s and Beauchamps’s, she’d be lucky if her money lasted a month.
* * *
—
THEY NEEDED more money but were hesitant to hit another house too soon. Would the marshals and the LA cops hear about the Wright raid and figure out where they were? They waited for any sign that the cops were looking for them but saw nothing.
They began to relax and to talk about a second raid, one that would get them out of Vegas. There was also the tempting prospect of a huge score—five million—but the information was funky. It involved a gambler named Harrelson.
And Deese, behind the backs of the others, had spoken to Ricardo Santos and Roger Smith about a payment that would allow him to truly get lost. Smith was at three hundred thousand, Deese wanted a million. Then came the call from Beauchamps’s friend at the trailer park: the marshals had tracked them to Vegas.
“There’s only one way they could get to the park and that’s by tracking the phones. Either Haar sold us out or the feds are doing something we don’t know about, some high-tech shit. We’ve got to get rid of the phones, like, tonight. We all have to change numbers,” Cole said. “We have to think about going somewhere else.”
Beauchamps: “Like where?”
“Miami, Seattle, Boston . . . Well, not Boston, too fuckin’ cold . . . Maybe Houston. Someplace not in California or Nevada,” Cole said. “We should split up. Do one last job, like the Harrelson thing, and retire for a few years. If it’s what Larry thinks it is—five million, all cash—we should be able to do that. I could go to Omaha or Sioux City with my cut, a million and a half, and live there for eight to ten years in style.”
“I’ll believe the five million figure when I see it. But I sure as hell ain’t going to Sioux City,” Deese said. “I agree that we should split up.