He recognized her from her picture in the paper. Average height and average weight except for the boobs. The boobs weren’t average. She was wearing skintight jeans, a poison-green tank top, and platform raffia-wrapped wedge sandals that had about a five-inch heel. She had bleached-out blond hair pulled into a haystack ponytail. She was in her mid-fifties, but thanks to her boob job and either good genes or some nip and tuck she looked younger. If the light was dim enough and her date was drunk enough, she might even pass for late thirties.
Nick stood and waved to her, and she walked over to him.
“Hey, hon,” she said. “Were you waving at me? And is that a bag of candy you’re holding? Isn’t that kind of a cliché?”
“They’re jelly beans fresh from the Jelly Belly factory here in town. While I was waiting for your bail to be processed, I took the tour. They’ve got a portrait of Ronald Reagan made out of jelly beans. Just think, if jelly beans had been around in Leonardo da Vinci’s time, the Mona Lisa might look very different today.”
She looked him up and down. “So you’re the one who bailed me out?”
“Yep.”
“Well, you’re cute as a button and you got a bag of jelly beans. A girl couldn’t ask for much more. I’m guessing you’re a Hollywood producer sent by The Amazing Race. They changed their minds, right?”
“Wrong.”
“Then what’s the deal?”
“I want you to drive cars and fly airplanes for a project I’m putting together.”
“My driver’s license was revoked and I don’t have a pilot’s license,” she said.
“A license is just a piece of paper. It means nothing to me. What I care about is that you’re a quick learner, you can steer anything, and you’re willing to take chances.”
“And I’d want to drive these cars and airplanes for you why?”
“I got you out of jail, and I can make the criminal charges against you go away.”
“How can you do that?”
“I have friends in very high places in law enforcement,” Nick said.
“What if I decide to walk away right now?”
“I lose thirty-five thousand dollars,” Nick said.
“And I’ll have you chasing me? Not that I’d mind, being you’re a little hottie, but still …”
Nick shook his head. “I don’t chase people. I do, however, swindle them. That’s what this is all about. I want you to help me trick a man into telling me where to find an international fugitive who has stolen half a billion dollars.”
“So you can take the money?”
“So I can give it back to the people he took it from,” he said.
“What are you, one of those Robin Hood do-gooders?”
“No. It’s a job.”
He took a key out of his pocket and aimed it at a red Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, the most powerful car ever built by the Italian automaker, capable of going from zero to 120 miles per hour in 8.5 seconds, thanks to a 730 horsepower V12 engine and 509 pound-feet of torque. The car chirped and Wilma sucked in air.
He dangled the keys in front of her. “Want to drive?”
She snatched them from his hand. “I’m in. And you can call me Willie.”
While Nick Fox was handing the keys to a $375,000 car to Willie Owens, the zombie apocalypse was beginning in the desert outside of Gallup, New Mexico. It was a very low-budget nonunion apocalypse, written and directed by a twenty-seven-year-old whose prior filmmaking experience was a series of viral videos of drunk girls taking their tops off at Lake Havasu during spring break.
The job of making the two dozen amateur actors look like decaying zombies hell-bent on eating human flesh fell to Chet Kershaw, a big bear of a man who, at thirty-eight years old, had come to the sobering conclusion that he was an aging dinosaur facing imminent extinction.
It was cruel and ironic that he was having this epiphany while sitting in the western-themed bar at the El Rancho Motel. The motel had been built in Gallup in 1937 by the brother of director D. W. Griffith to cater to all the big-name Hollywood directors and actors who were flocking to this dramatically photogenic patch of desert to shoot westerns. Perhaps Chet’s realization of his bleak future was hitting him with such force because Chet was sitting exactly where Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and John Ford had once washed the sand out of their throats.
Among the many filmmakers who came to Gallup in those early days was Chet’s grandfather Cleveland Kershaw. He was one of the greats in the art of movie makeup and related special effects. Cleveland passed along the experience, skills, and tricks that he knew to his son, Carson, who carried on the family business in film and TV well into the 1980s.
But by the time Chet took over the family business in the 1990s, his art was quickly becoming a software application. More and more makeup effects, and virtually everything that was once considered a “special effect,” including simple gunshots and bullet hits, were being done in postproduction using computer graphics.
Even location shooting and the fake streets on studio back lots were becoming a thing of the past. A director didn’t have to go to New Mexico to get the desert look. He could shoot in Calgary in the dead of winter. All he needed was a green screen and a digital effects company. Now if directors came to New Mexico to shoot, it was because of the generous production tax credits and rebates, known in Hollywood as “free money,” offered by a state government desperate to stimulate the local economy. Which was one reason why Revolt of the Zombie Strippers was being shot in Gallup and not in a warehouse in Van Nuys. The other reason was that the producers of the film were so incredibly cheap, they couldn’t afford even the simplest digital effects.
But, sadly, they could afford Chet, who was finding it harder and harder to get work that took advantage of his many skills. So he’d schlepped from L.A. to the hellhole of Gallup just for the pleasure of plying his trade. He didn’t want to spend his days in a trailer powdering noses and applying concealer to the Botoxed faces of aging actresses for shit wages. Instead, he was out in the blazing desert sun making a bunch of young strippers look like decomposing brain-hungry corpses for even worse wages.
The usually jovial Chet might have found the decomposing strippers amusing if he wasn’t so miserably depressed. And then he looked up from the bottom of his fourth beer and noticed Kate sitting on the bar stool next to him. He had no idea how long she’d been there, studying him with undisguised curiosity.
“Can I buy you another beer?” she asked, gesturing to his empty glass.
It was an unbelievable question. No woman in a bar had ever offered to buy him a drink before, and while he wasn’t painful to the eyes, he knew he wasn’t Sam Worthington or Chris Hemsworth either. “Are you a hooker?”
“I don’t think hookers buy men drinks,” Kate said. “I think it works the other way around.”
“I haven’t got a lot of experience with hookers.”
“Me neither. Do you want the beer?”
“Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”
They sat in awkward silence until two fresh mugs of beer were set in front of them.
“Cheers,” Kate said, hoisting her mug.
They clinked glasses and Chet chugged his down. “I meant no offense.”
“None taken,” Kate said.
Chet wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m recently divorced and I guess I’ve forgotten how to talk to women. Then again, seeing how things went with my ex, maybe I’ve never known. What brings you to Gallup?”
“You,” she said, and told him basically the same story they’d given Boyd Capwell two days before. “We need your makeup and special effects skills to convince our mark that what is happening is real.”
“I’m in,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” she said, startled. “You don’t even know what we’re willing to pay.”
“Has to be more than what I’m getting now,” he said. “Plus you bought me a beer.”
“Has it occurred to you that wh
at we are proposing is most likely illegal, and if things go wrong you could be arrested?”
“Lady, jail can’t be any worse than this hellhole I’m in now.”
If George Pogue had a mustache, he would have been twirling it like a silent-film villain. In the absence of a mustache, the pale, balding banker sat behind his desk, tapping his pen on a bulging file folder, looking at Tom Underhill as if he was an unpleasant smudge on his calendar. To Tom, the tapping of the pen sounded like the ticking of a stopwatch, counting down the seconds until his home was taken away from him, his wife, and their three children.
“I’m not asking for a free ride,” said Tom, dressed in his best suit and tie. He wanted to impress the banker with his professionalism, but he felt like a kid trying to pretend he was a grown-up. “I am willing to make payments.”
“How gracious of you,” Pogue said.
“All I ask is that you adjust the principal to take into account the reality of the marketplace. We both know that the house isn’t worth much more than half what I paid for it.”
When Tom bought the house in 2006, it was at the height of the Southern California housing market, and $557,000 seemed like a steal for four bedrooms and two baths in Rancho Cucamonga, a rapidly expanding suburban community in San Bernardino County. Thousands of houses were spreading across the valley and creeping up the hillsides toward Mount Baldy. But then the housing bubble burst, the market took a dive, and jobs in the area evaporated. Entire housing tracts became ghost towns.
“But the fact remains, five hundred fifty-seven thousand dollars is what we paid the builder on your behalf,” Pogue said. “That is cash that is now gone. I fail to see why the bank should take the loss.”
“Because I was stuck in a subprime loan with an adjustable interest rate that skyrocketed. Every six months it jumped up, even as my income was going down. I repeatedly tried to renegotiate the terms, but you wouldn’t let me.”
Pogue held up his hand in a halting gesture. “I don’t need to hear the litany of excuses or your version of events. The fact is, you have fallen woefully behind in your mortgage payments.”
“I’ve sent you a check every month, but you haven’t cashed the last four of them.”
“Because the amount you are sending doesn’t meet the minimum payment due.”
“It’s what I can afford,” he said. “It’s what my payments were before you kept jacking up the interest rate.”
Pogue waved off the remark. “It has come to the point that we have no choice but to exercise our right to seize the property and auction it off to recoup our losses.”
Tom took a deep breath, trying to control his anger. He didn’t want to be on the eleven o’clock news that night, depicted as the angry black man who threw himself across a desk and strangled a white banker.
“Instead of listing the house for half what I paid for it, and then letting it sit vacant for years while squatters and vandals strip the place,” Tom said, “wouldn’t it make more sense to just lower the loan amount to that same figure so that I can afford to stay in my home, maintain the property, and provide you with cash flow?”
“It’s more complex than that,” Pogue said.
“It certainly is,” Nick Fox said, taking the seat beside Tom and directing his remark to Pogue. Nick was dressed in a navy blue blazer, an open-collared shirt, jeans, and loafers, and he seemed to have appeared out of thin air. “What Tom doesn’t realize is that you talked him out of making a down payment, making him ineligible for a more attractive interest rate, and steered him into a subprime loan back in 2006, even though he had a FICO score of 690 and a forty-five percent debt-to-loan ratio, because you personally earned a two percent higher commission from those loans over prime mortgages. You also got bonuses, and all-expenses-paid trips to Hawaii, from the bank based on how many subprime mortgages you moved.”
“I don’t know what kind of crackpot activist you are, or what kind of stunt this is, but if you don’t leave right now, I’ll have security drag you out,” Pogue said.
Nick calmly continued. “Not only that, you gouged him on fees. Shame on you, George. Or would you prefer I called you ‘Le Chiffre’?”
Pogue went pale. “Who are you?”
“I’m the man you’ve lost nearly forty-five thousand dollars to over the last few months playing online poker,” Nick said. His most recent win against Le Chiffre had come during his short stay in Bois-le-Roi.
Pogue stared at Nick as if he had risen from the dead. “You’re Bret Maverick.”
“At the online poker table, yes, that’s me. But right now, you can call me your conscience. Because here’s what else I know, George. You covered those gambling losses, and others totaling another twenty-three thousand dollars, by embezzling funds from this bank.”
“What do you want?” George whispered, waving at Nick to keep his voice down.
“You’re going to modify Tom’s loan to reflect the true market value of his home and offer him the lowest available interest rate with no refinancing charges whatsoever. You’re going to credit him for making all of his payments to date and you will erase any penalties. And you’re going to repair his credit rating, all by this time tomorrow when he comes back in to sign the papers, or I will turn you in to the authorities.”
George glanced around again, and then whispered, “What about the other matter?”
“It’ll be our little secret. My advice would be to put back what you took and hope nobody ever finds out what you did. If you’re thinking about making a run for it, that’s fine, but you’d better make things right for Tom before you go, because I will find you and I won’t be as understanding next time.” Nick turned to Tom, who was staring at him in shock. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
Tom was so dumbfounded by this unexpected turn of events that all he could do was nod. Nick ushered Tom out and led him to the Starbucks next door. They got their coffees and took a table outside. A number of the properties in the strip mall were vacant, and the parking lot was mostly empty, but Starbucks was busy. The sun was shining in a brilliant blue sky, and Tom was grateful for the warmth soaking into his shirt after the frigid air in Pogue’s office.
When Tom Underhill was a kid, he’d lived in a place not unlike this, a seemingly ever-expanding suburban housing tract that gobbled up the walnut orchards that gave his hometown of Walnut Creek its name. He’d been fascinated by the construction, especially since nobody in his family worked with their hands. The family business was insurance. So each day Tom climbed the walnut tree in his backyard and spent hours watching the houses go up, making detailed drawings of every stage of construction. He salvaged scrap wood, borrowed some basic tools, and built a rambling multilevel treehouse in his backyard.
Tom’s friends went on to college after high school, but Tom kept building treehouses. He moved to Southern California, and the treehouses turned profitable. He added playhouses to his repertoire and his business boomed. He was famous for his miniature Victorian houses and Swiss Family Robinson tree forts, and for his ability to replicate virtually anything in reduced size. Unfortunately the playhouses weren’t cheap, and the playhouse bubble burst when the housing bubble burst and the global economy took a nosedive. Now Tom scrounged up work as a handyman while his wife took care of their kids, ages two, eight, and ten. What Nick had just done for him was a miracle, but it didn’t solve all of his problems. And his fear was that he might have fallen into an even bigger, more awful problem.
“I don’t mean to seem ungrateful,” Tom said, “but who are you, and why did you just do that?”
“I stepped in because you’re a magician with a hammer, nails, and a pile of wood and I want to convince you to work for me,” Nick said.
“I’m not that hard to convince and there are easier ways to hire someone.”
“This is not a typical job. For starters, I need someone who can transform a Palm Springs vacation home into a drug lord’s fortified compound in Mexico.”
“Okay, that??
?s a little off the map.”
Nick gave him the short-form explanation.
“You saved my house from being taken by a sleazy banker who tricked me into a crap loan, and now you’re asking me if I’ll help you take down an even bigger, sleazier banker who ran off with people’s life savings?”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Nick said. “You can walk away right now, and maybe you should, because there are people who’d call what I’m proposing illegal.”
“Don’t care,” Tom said. “I’m going to love taking that son of a bitch down. Count me in.”
Two days after Nick enlisted Tom Underhill, Kate stopped by her sister’s place at midafternoon. She’d hoped to catch her father while Megan was away, but her timing wasn’t perfect. Kate pulled up just as Megan was leaving in her huge Toyota Sienna for a Costco run with the kids. They rolled down their windows and talked to each other from their driver’s seats.
“Good news,” Megan said. “The hunky airline pilot is back in town. I told him all about you and he’s very interested.”
“I’m not.”
“He didn’t even blink when I told him you’re an FBI agent,” Megan said. “Usually that sends them running.”
“Usually?” Kate said. “How many men have you talked to about me?”
“It doesn’t matter. Can I give him your number?”
“No!”
“Your loss. What are you doing here?”
“I’m taking Dad to the shooting range,” Kate said.
“This is his nap time.”
“He takes naps?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, he’s a senior citizen and he’s still recovering from the sport fishing trip to Mexico he took with his army buddies.”
Kate knew that was his cover for going to Greece with her. “It’s okay, I’m sure that shooting at things relaxes him almost as much as a nap.”
Megan drove off and Kate pulled into the driveway. Kate hadn’t planned on taking her dad shooting, but since that was the excuse she’d given her sister, they went to the range together anyway. It was very relaxing for them both. Afterward, she ran the broad outlines of the con and her misgivings about it past him over a couple beers at a bar on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills.