said. “That way, we don’t have to follow him back, there’s no chance he could spot us.”
“You know, if we’re hiding in the yard and Harrelson’s old lady should come outside to the pool, we could grab her then and start taking the house apart. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to go up against Harrelson himself,” Beauchamps said.
“Larry said Harrelson carried money in his car,” Deese said. “We’d miss out on that.”
“Well, if we have a chance to grab her, I’d say we do it,” Cole said. “Then depending on what the take is, we either get out of there or we wait until Harrelson gets back. We don’t make the decision until we see what’s what.”
Deese: “What the man said.”
Beauchamps nodded. “Sounds logical to me. That bar’s got a big parking lot, Geenie could pull in there and sit for as long as she needs to.”
That, they decided, was what they’d do.
* * *
—
AND IT WORKED perfectly, up to a point. They started cruising Tina’s Wayside at nine o’clock, and Harrelson’s yellow Porsche Cayenne was already there. “Can’t be two of those,” Beauchamps said. The Porsche was painted the precise tint of a Yellow Cab.
They headed back to Harrelson’s house. The perimeter road didn’t have much traffic after dark. They waited until there was a gap, then Cox pulled behind Harrelson’s house. The three men, all dressed in dark clothing and wearing driving gloves, scrambled out and squatted behind a screen of eucalyptus trees. They carried with them a black backpack with guns in it, duct tape, ski masks, Geenie’s book-marking butcher knife, a fifteen-foot chain with four padlocks, and three flashlights. They wouldn’t need the battering ram because they wouldn’t be knocking down a door.
They waited in the trees for five minutes, and then, during another carless interval, they crossed the five-foot wall. They landed in more generic landscaped brush on the far side of the wall, waited there for an alarm, a motion light to go on, a dog’s bark, a questioning voice, and, when there was nothing, made their way slowly between the houses, with Harrelson’s to the left. There were lights on in the house, but Harrelson’s wife was apparently deep inside and they never saw her or even a shadow behind a curtain. They stopped behind a clump of decorative grasses next to Harrelson’s garage door. Beauchamps opened the pack and passed out the ski masks and the guns and zipped the case back up.
O’Conner had told them that Harrelson usually had an early golf game in the summer and wouldn’t linger at Tina’s. He was correct.
Beauchamps’s phone buzzed at nine forty-five. Cox was on the other end, and she said, “He’s on his way. He’ll be there in five or six minutes, if he doesn’t stop.”
“Stay way back behind him, don’t try to get close,” Beauchamps told her.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I’m not dumb.”
* * *
—
FIVE MINUTES LATER, she called again. “He’s turning in at the gate. He’s only a minute away.”
Cole said to Deese and Beauchamps, “Get ready, he’s here.”
Beauchamps: “I’ll lead. Clayton, you follow. Cole, you know the routine: you watch behind us, me’n Clayton will take him.”
“But easy,” Cole said, for Deese’s benefit.
* * *
—
“LIGHTS,” Beauchamps muttered. “Here he comes.”
They saw the Cayenne pass under a streetlight. The yellow finish was unmistakable. The car slowed, and Beauchamps said, “Ready?”
Then Cole asked, “What the fuck is this?”
They watched, dumbfounded, as the garage door of the house across the street went up. The Cayenne pulled in and the door started down again. No chance they could get there in time to confront Harrelson.
“That fuckin’ O’Conner got the address wrong,” Deese said. “I’m gonna cut his fuckin’ nose off.”
“Not fuckin’ O’Conner, fuckin’ Google,” Cole whispered. “I saw the map and they marked this house. You gonna cut Google’s nose off?”
“We gotta get out of here,” Beauchamps said. “Jesus H. Christ. We gotta get out of here.”
* * *
—
THEY GOT BACK to the house without incident, fuming but sometimes laughing about it. Deese had thought it over and finally told Beauchamps that he was dealing with Roger Smith on a possible payoff that would see him out of the country.
“I’m telling you but not them other ones. If I get the cash, I’ll give you enough to get you anywhere you need to go and get set up again.”
Beauchamps shook his head. “Cole is my friend. I’ll take you up on the offer, but I’m going to tell him it might be