Beauchamps said, “Clayton, something you never learned—being a killer instead of a robber—that to be successful, you sometimes have to trust people. I trust Cole.”
Beauchamps told Cole and Cox about the possibility of getting money from Smith and that they’d get a cut, if only a small one, and Cole bobbed his head, said, “Terrific,” and Cox said to Deese, “That’s nice of you,” the insincerity clear in her voice.
Later that night, when they were all in their separate rooms, Deese got a call on his burner. Roger Smith. He spoke low, and pool balls clicking in the background told Deese exactly where Smith was. Deese rarely yearned for anything other than money, cocaine, and sex, but he was suddenly overcome with yearning to be back in his old haunts in Louisiana, the green-baize pool tables, the smell of chalk, the squeak when twisting it on the tip of a cue. He pushed the yearning away, and asked, “You get my message?”
“Yes. I’m gonna do this, but I want to make a point plain. It’s a lot of money. If you take it and don’t hold up your end of the bargain, to leave the country, I’ll find the best talent I can and hire them to kill you. You understand?”
“Man . . .”
“You understand?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Don’t be bullshitting me, bon ami,” Smith said. “New Orleans is now off-limits for you. If you get the idea in your head of coming back here to put me down, you won’t get two feet inside the city before I know it. We won’t set no dumbass Lugnuts on you. So take the money and run and have a happy life.”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
As the Gang of Four was doing reconnaissance and making the aborted run at Harrelson, Lucas, Bob, and Rae were pulling together what they’d learned in Las Vegas.
They’d planned to start the day by checking local hospitals for anyone who’d paid cash for a leg injury before the robbery at the Wrights’ place; Bob and Rae would do that. Lucas would get together with Las Vegas’s Sergeant Mallow to interview local fences about the missing jewelry.
“Here in Las Vegas, they’ve probably got a Yellow Pages listing,” Rae said. They were sitting in the hotel’s café, eating pancakes.
“When was the last time you saw the Yellow Pages?” Bob asked.
“This place is so wired up. It’s like methamphetamine lighting. Makes me jittery. Gotta be more neon here than anywhere in the world,” Rae said. “At night, the whole street out there looks like a slot machine.”
“Not by accident,” Bob said.
“You know what I’ve noticed?” Lucas asked. “Everybody looks so normal. You expect these hard-faced women and burnt-out guys and sleazy gamblers. But when you look around, it’s like every state in the U.S. sent a couple thousand residents here, dressed like they dress back home. Not even like the airport, where people dress up a little bit. They’re all dressed exactly like they do in Podunk.”
“Except they walk down the main drag here drinking out of martini glasses,” Rae said. “You don’t see that in Podunk.”
* * *
—
AS THEY ATE, they were looking at Bob’s printed-out maps to local emergency rooms when their planning session was temporarily derailed by a call from Earl, the FBI phone guy. He said that the phone they’d been watching had popped up again, and repeatedly, at several locations off West Chicago Avenue.
“I checked it out on a map and it looks like they were walking up and down an alley, like they were going back and forth between a couple of different places,” Earl said.
“Did you check the numbers they were calling?”
“Yeah, but they’re all to other burners. Not a full-time phone among them.”
“Huh. Don’t know what that means,” Lucas said. “Watch those other phones, too. Something’s going on here.”
Bob to Lucas: “Me’n Rae could go over there while you hook up with Mallow.”
Lucas shook his head. “I want to take a look. Let’s all three run over. You can drop me back if we don’t see anything promising.”
* * *
—
CHICAGO AVENUE turned out to be part of a neighborhood beneath a thousand-foot-tall observation tower that hung overhead like an enormous chess queen. When they turned down the block, Lucas said, “Goddamnit,” and Rae said, “Yeah,” and Bob said, “Well, now we know for sure that they know we’re here.”
They all recognized the neighborhood as a place you’d unload your burners if you thought the cops were watching and you hoped to confuse them. “Probably