"I'm glad you're back. It'll be like old times again."
"No, Leo. Not without Max. It will never be the same again."
This time Leo didn't protest her use of his name. They both hung up and Cassie walked away from the phones. The man on the bench called after her but she couldn't make out what it was he had said.
She had to walk up to Victory Boulevard to get to the Boxster. It was the closest she had been able to get to the criminal justice complex. Along the way she thought about Max Freeling. She remembered their last moments together; the bar at the Cleo, the beer foam in his mustache, the tiny scar on his chin where no whiskers grew.
Max had made a toast and she repeated it now silently.
To the end. To the place where the desert is ocean.
Thinking about what happened afterward left her depressed and still angry, even after so many years. She decided that before she went to the dealership she would drive by Wonderland Elementary and catch the lunch recess. She knew it was the best way possible to chase the blues away.
When she got to the Boxster she found it had been ticketed after the two hours on the meter expired. She pulled the citation off the windshield and tossed it onto the passenger seat. The car was still registered to the deadbeat it had been repossessed from. So when the ticket went unpaid, the bill from the city would go to him. He could deal with it.
She got in the car and drove off. She took Van Nuys Boulevard south to the 101 . The boulevard was lined with new-car dealerships. Sometimes she thought of the Valley as one big parking lot.
She tried listening to a Lucinda Williams compact disc but the stereo was so jumpy that she had to pop it out and just listen to the radio. The song playing was an old one. Roseanne Cash singing about a seven-year ache.
Yeah, Cassie thought. Roseanne knew what she was talking about. Seven years. But the song didn't say anything about what happened after seven years. Did that ache go away then? Cassie didn't think it ever would.
5
IN the following days, while she waited for word from Leo, Cassie Black found herself dropping into the rhythm of preparation that was both familiar and comforting to her. But most of all it was exciting, putting a thrill into her life she had not felt in many years.
The preparation was also a solitary time of introspection. She studied her decision repeatedly and from all angles. She found no cracks, no second thoughts, no intruding guilt. The hurdle had been in making the choice. Once decided upon, it only brought her relief and a great sense of freedom. There was the excitement of danger and anticipation in her that the years of incarceration had robbed from her memory. She had forgotten how truly addictive the charge of adrenaline could be. Max had simply called it outlaw juice because he could not put his feelings into words. In those days of preparation she came to realize that the true essence of incarceration was aimed at removing that charge, of washing it from memory. If so, then five years in lockdown had failed her. The charge of outlaw juice was boiling in her blood now, banging through her veins like hot water through frozen winter pipes.
She began by changing her body clock, dramatically shortening her sleeping hours and pushing them well into the morning. She offset the sleep deprivation with a regimen of energy-enhancing vitamins and an occasional late-afternoon nap on her living room couch. Within a week she had dropped from seven to four hours of sleep per night without a noticeable impact on her alertness or productivity.
At night she started taking long drives on the dangerously curving Mulholland Drive so that she could sharpen her sustained alertness. When home she moved about her house without lights on, her eyes adjusting and becoming reacquainted with the contours of night shadows. She knew she would have the option of night-vision goggles when the job came up but she also knew it was good to be prepared for any eventuality.
By day, when she wasn't working at the dealership, she started gathering the equipment she might need and making the tools she would use. After carefully making a list of every conceivable thing that would help her overcome any obstacle on a job, she memorized its contents and destroyed it - such a list in her possession was enough in itself to violate her parole. She then spent an entire day driving to a variety of hardware stores and other businesses, gathering the items on the list and spreading her cash purchases across the entire city so that the various parts to her plan could never be construed as the whole.
She bought screwdrivers, iron files, hacksaw blades and hammers; baling wire, nylon twine and bungee cords. She bought a box of latex gloves, a small tub of earthquake wax, a Swiss Army knife and a painter's putty knife with a three-inch-wide blade. She bought a small acetylene torch and went to three hardware stores before finding a small enough battery-powered and rechargeable drill. She bought rubber-tipped pliers, wire cutters and aluminum shears. She added a Polaroid camera and a man's long-sleeved wet suit top to her purchases. She bought big and small flashlights, a pair of tile worker's knee pads and an electric stun gun. She bought a black leather backpack, a black fanny pack and belt, and several black zipper bags of varying sizes that could be folded and carried inside one of the backpack's pockets. Lastly, in every store she went to she bought a keyed padlock, amassing a collection of seven locks made by seven different manufacturers and thereby containing seven slightly different interior locking mechanisms.
In the small bungalow she rented on Selma near the 101 Freeway in Hollywood, she spread her purchases out on the scarred Formica-topped table in the kitchen and readied her equipment, wearing gloves at all times when she handled each piece.
She used the shears and the torch to make lock picks from the baling wire and hacksaw blades. She made a double set of three picks: a tension spike, a hook and a thin, flat tumbler pick. She put one set in a Ziploc bag and buried it in the garden outside the back door. The other set she put aside with the tools for the job she hoped would be coming from Leo very soon.
She cut half a sleeve off the wet suit and used it to encase the drill, sewing the sound-deadening rubber tightly in place with the nylon twine. From the rest of the wet suit she created a roll-up satchel in which she could quietly carry her custom-made burglary kit.
When her working tools were ready, she rolled them up in the satchel, secured it with a bungee cord and then hid it in the hollow of the Boxster's front right fender, attaching it to the suspension struts with more bungee cords. Her fingerprints were on nothing. If the tool satchel were ever discovered by Thelma Kibble or any other law enforcement officer, Cassie would have a degree of deniability that might keep her out of lockdown. The car was not hers. Without prints on the tools or evidence of her having purchased and made them, it ultimately could not be proved that they belonged to her. They could hold her and sweat her but they would eventually have to let her go.
The seven padlocks Cassie used for practice. She locked them onto a wooden clothing hanger and dropped the keys into a coffee cup in a kitchen cabinet. At night she sat in the dark in her living room and blindly worked the extra set of picks into the padlocks. The nuances of finessing a lock open came back to her slowly. It took her four days to open all seven padlocks. She then hooked them back on the hanger and closed them. She started over, this time wearing latex gloves. At the end of two weeks she was regularly timing herself and she could open all seven locks in twelve minutes with gloves on.
She knew all along that what she was doing was as much mental preparation as anything else. It was getting back into the rhythm, the mind-set. Max, her teacher, had always said the rhythm was the most important preparation. The ritual. She knew it was unlikely she would have to pick a lock on the job Leo would find for her. Most of the hotels in Las Vegas and elsewhere had gone to electronically programmed card keys in the last decade. Subverting electronic protection was another matter altogether. It required inside help or a skill at soshing -short for social engineering, meaning the con at the front desk or the finesse moves with the housekeeper.
The prep time brought her close to memori
es of Max, the man who had been both her mentor and lover. These were bittersweet memories because she could not think of the good times without remembering how they had all ended so badly at the Cleopatra. Even still, she often found herself laughing out loud in the darkness of her house, the hanger full of padlocks on her lap, her hands sweating inside tight latex gloves.
She laughed hardest as she remembered one soshing trick Max had pulled to perfection at the Golden Nugget. They needed to get into a room on the fifth floor. Spying a night service maid's cart outside a room down the hall, Max went into a service alcove and took off all his clothes. He then ruffled his hair and walked down the hall to the maid's cart, cupping his privates in his hands. After startling the woman, he explained he had been sleeping and got up to go to the bathroom and in his sleepy confusion had inadvertently stepped through the wrong door and out of his room, the door closing and locking behind him. Not wanting to prolong her encounter with a naked man, the housekeeper quickly handed him her pass key. They were in.
What made the story so funny in memory to Cassie was that once Max was in the room he had to dress and return the key to the maid in order to complete the trick. But his clothes were hidden down the hall in the alcove. So he put on a set of the mark's clothes. The man they had targeted was slightly shorter than Max and rail thin. He weighed at least fifty pounds less. He was also openly gay and his clothes announced this to the world. Max walked back down the hall to the maid in a flamingo pink shirt open to the navel and black leather pants so tight he couldn't bend his knees.
Each night when she had finished practicing and was ready for sleep, Cassie reburied the second set of picks and put a heavy winter coat on the hanger holding the padlocks. She zipped the coat closed, hiding the locks, and returned it to a hallway closet. Ever aware that Thelma Kibble might make good on her threat to make an unscheduled appearance, she left no outward appearance in her home or activities of what she was planning and preparing for.
But she never saw any sign of Kibble's presence. The parole officer apparently didn't even make a follow-up call to Ray Morales to check on Cassie's behavior and work status. Cassie believed the woman was simply overrun with too many cases. Despite the stern words to Cassie, Kibble probably had dozens of hard cases that were more deserving than Cassie of a field visit.
As Cassie waited for the call from Leo she kept her old routines as well. Each morning she went running at the Hollywood Reservoir, circling the lake and crossing the Mulholland Dam twice. The run was penance for her earlier morning ritual: stopping at the farmers' market on Fairfax for doughnuts and coffee at Bob's. She would take her breakfast in the car, driving up into the hills of Laurel Canyon and stopping, if parking was available, near the fenced playground outside the Wonderland School.
As she ate her glazed doughnuts and gulped steaming black coffee, she watched the children being dropped off by parents and playing in the schoolyard before the morning bell. Her eyes would solemnly scan the fenced playing ground until she found the grouping of the kindergarten girls, usually gathered closely around their teacher - a woman who looked very caring and kind. Cassie's eyes would move into the pack and search out the same face each morning: the girl who wore the backpack with the Have a Nice Day smiley face on it. She would watch as the bright yellow backpack bobbed and moved in the crowd. Cassie would not lose sight of the girl until the bell rang and the children were herded inside to the classrooms. Only then would she crumple the doughnut bag and start her car to head to the reservoir to work her body and mind to near exhaustion before the day had barely begun.
6
FIFTEEN days after Cassie Black made contact with Leo, she got the return call. She was sitting in her office, going over the figures on a trade-in sheet with Ray Morales, when the phone rang. Her mind on the work at hand, she grabbed the phone and punched the line without thinking about it.
"This is Cassie Black, can you hold?"
"Sure."
She recognized the voice with that one word. She paused as a cold finger slid down her spine, then she hit the hold button. A palpable excitement rose in her chest.
"You okay?" Morales asked.
"Sure, fine. I have to take this, though."
"Go ahead."
"I mean alone. It's personal."
"Oh. Okay."
Ray looked a little rejected and maybe even annoyed. To him personal probably meant a new boyfriend was calling. Cassie had gently rebuffed him two days earlier when he had asked her out to dinner after work. Now that he had finally made his move, he was too late. Cassie was waiting on Leo and wasn't going to complicate things with Ray. If things went the way she was planning, she would be doing him a favor by not getting involved with him. He'd have no secrets to hide when the cops came to talk to him.
Ray said he would be in his office if she wanted to finish going over the trade-in report. He moved out of her small office and closed the door without Cassie's having to ask. She leaned forward to look over the desk at the bottom of the doorjamb. She could tell that Ray was standing just outside the door, hoping to hear her conversation.
"Ray?"
He didn't respond but Cassie watched the feet move away. She clicked the hold button on the phone.
"Hello?"
"What, did you go for a test drive or something?"
"Sorry."
"Well, I got something for you."
Cassie didn't respond at first. The trilling of adrenaline in her blood was strong. Outlaw juice. She felt a sense of being at the edge of a cliff. It was time to go over. Now or never. Those people who got in padded barrels and floated over the falls had nothing on this.
Leo spoke into the silence, breaking the spell.
"I'm not sure you're going to like it, though."
Cassie swallowed back a catch in her throat.
"How come?"
"We'll talk about it when I see you."
"When and where?"
"Just come here. But make it soon. Either tonight or tomorrow first thing. This has to go down by tomorrow night or we lose it."
"All right, tonight after work. You still in the same place?"
"Always. One last thing. I'm turning on the memo button on the phone machine here so I have this on tape. Kid, you know I love you but it's been a long time. Don't get insulted, because this is just a precaution. Ever since Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky, it's standard operating practice around here. Here goes. Are you currently working with any law enforcement agency at this time?"
"Leo . . ."
"Don't say my name. Just answer the question. I'm sorry but this is a precaution I have to take. People been settin' traps right and left out there."
"No, Leo, I'm not. If I wanted to set you up I could have done it back before I spent the nickel at High Desert. Everybody and their brother wanted me to make a deal then. But I didn't."
"You sure didn't and you know I appreciated it. Didn't I take care of you when I could? What about that PI you wanted to hire - that cost me five grand, you know."
"You took care of me, Leo. I won't forget."
"I wish you'd forget using my name."
"Sorry."
"Okay, good enough. The tape's off. We're good to go. I'll see you in a little while. Take - "
"Did you get the passports?"
A pause.
"Not yet. Next time I'm out I'll make a call to check on that. Okay?"
"Okay, but I need them. Soon."
"I'll deliver the message. See you soon. Take all usual precautions."
After she hung up Cassie's eyes traveled up the wall next to the door. Her eyes held on the poster taped on the wall and facing her. It showed a woman in a string bikini walking on a sun-drenched beach. The word TAHITI! was scrawled in the sand behind her, just out of reach of the surf's wash.
"To the place where the desert is ocean," she said out loud.
7
CASSIE drove west on Sunset. She had the top down on the Porsche. She loved the thrum of the engine c
oming through the seat and the deep, guttural tones she heard on the curves. At Beverly Glen she turned the Boxster north and followed the winding canyon road over the hill and down into the Valley.
Leo Renfro lived in Tarzana in the flats north of Ventura Boulevard on a street fronting the 101 Freeway. His house was a small, postwar ranch house without any real defining design or style. It was like every other house in his neighborhood and that was exactly the way Leo wanted it. Leo had survived by being nondescript, by blending in.
She drove by the house without braking and then up and down the surrounding blocks, studying every parked vehicle she passed and looking for the telltale signs of a surveillance vehicle: vans with mirrored windows, cars with more than one antenna, pickup trucks with camper shells on the back. One vehicle caught her attention. It was a plumbing repair van, according to the sign painted on the side panel. It sat at the curb in front of a house one block from Leo's house. Cassie passed it without stopping but then turned around and headed back, pulling to the curb and parking a half block from the van. She sat there watching the vehicle and looking for movement behind the glass, a shifting of the suspension as people moved around inside, any indication of life within. Nothing happened but Cassie maintained her vigil for almost ten minutes before she saw a man in a blue jumpsuit come out of the house and approach the van. He opened the side door and climbed inside. A few moments later he carefully lowered a heavy pipe-snaking machine to the road. He then got out, closed and locked the van's door, and pushed the machine toward the front door of the house. He seemed legit to Cassie. She restarted the Porsche, made one more circuit through the neighborhood and then returned to Leo's house. She parked at the curb out front and reminded herself not to buy into Leo's constant paranoid sensibility. She remembered all the rules and precautions he used to lay on her and Max before a job. Don't bet black before a job, don't eat chicken before a job, never wear a red hat and so on and so on. It was all step on a crack, break your mother's back stuff as far as Cassie had been concerned.