first attempt. They didn’t see any cops—“I bet they got every spare car covering the house,” Cole said—and they made it to the wall across the street from Harrelson’s with three or four minutes to spare.
Cole and Deese had pulled the ski masks over their heads, checked their guns. Before they left the house, Cole had unscrewed two wooden legs from a coffee table. These made satisfactory clubs, each two feet long, with sharp, ninety-degree corners at the top end. Cole handed one to Deese and said, “Your leg. Don’t kill anybody.”
Deese hefted it and said, “Maybe I shoulda worked with you guys instead of working for fuckin’ Smith, that miserable piece of shit. I used to have this walking stick . . .”
“Right,” Cole said.
Cox would find a place to ditch the Cadillac not too far away. If something went wrong, they’d call and she’d come in a hurry. If all went well, they’d take one of Harrelson’s cars and leave town in that. As they came up to the wall, she slowed, and Deese said to her, “Don’t you run off. Don’t you run off to the cops. If you run off and leave us here, after I get out of prison, I’ll find you and cut you open and eat your liver right in front of your eyes.”
“Jesus, Deese,” Cole said. And to Cox: “You’ll be okay. Stay in the game.”
They were at the wall, and Deese and Cole, now in complete darkness, were quickly out of the SUV and over it.
* * *
—
AS WAS THE CASE with their first attempt, the subdivision seemed dead: no cars on the streets, nobody outside, no voices or music or people in swimming pools. The flicker of television screens danced behind a few curtains, but as part of Las Vegas, with its all-night reputation to live up to, the place was a failure.
Deese and Cole squatted behind a shrub across the street from Harrelson’s house, which was dark except for one yellow-bulbed lantern by the front door. When Deese tried to brush the shrub a bit to the side, he got a handful of thorns and spent the next two minutes pulling them out of his palm and cursing in a stage whisper.
Those two minutes were well used, it turns out, as they scanned the street for trouble. Cox called, “Harrelson just went past, two people in the car . . . He’s turning into the gate right now . . . He’s inside the gate.”
“Go,” Cole said. “Walk, don’t run.”
They walked across the street, up to Harrelson’s garage, then around the corner and behind another shrub that matched exactly the one they’d left the moment before.
Cole asked, “Ready? Got your table leg?”
“Yeah, yeah, if you got your gun. This mask keeps sticking to my tongue.”
“Quiet. This is them.”
* * *
—
LIGHTS ON the street now, a car moving slowly. Then the garage door’s lifting mechanism engaging, the overhead light coming on, the door starting up. Cole said, “Not until you hear the garage door starting to come down or a car door slam. We don’t want him inside the truck with his keys. Step high when you cross into the garage, you don’t want to trigger the safety laser beam and reverse the door, getting it going back up again.”
“I got it, I got it, you told me a million times.”
The Yellow Cab Porsche was at the curb, then in the driveway, pausing to let the garage door go all the way up and disappear. A second later, the door started down again, and Cole said, “Go!”
They scrambled around the prickly shrub and the corner of the garage, high-stepped over the beam, and stooped behind a black Lexus sedan. The Porsche was on the other side of the sedan, and, beyond that, behind the single-bay garage door, was a tan Jeep Sahara. A door slammed on the Porsche, then another, and as Cole and Deese peered through the back window of the Lexus, and out the other side, they saw the short, pumpkin-headed man walk between the Lexus and the Porsche and turn away from them, toward the door to the interior of the house.
Cole said, “Now,” and stood and stepped around the end of the Lexus behind Pumpkin Head, who didn’t see him, and then Harrelson emerged from behind the Porsche, and he did see him and tried to reverse his course but Cole pointed his gun at Harrelson’s head and screamed, “Freeze! Freeze or I’ll kill you, motherfucker.”