Steven Thomas - Criminal Carma

“Where we going?” Reggie asked.

“The hotel.”

We made it back to Le Merigot without incident. I didn’t think anyone could trace us there. I was about to make a left into the hotel’s semicircular drive when a blue Taurus cut in front of me and pulled up at the entrance ahead of us. When the valet opened the door, a giantess in a brown linen suit struggled out. Her big hash-slinger’s face was mottled with anger as if someone had just skipped out without paying the check.

It was a face that had launched, at most, a single rowboat. The guy at the oars, who had proposed to it after a dozen longnecks and his first hand job, probably wished by now that he had drowned himself in the lake instead of plunging into matrimonial fire. It was a face I knew.

“We want our luggage brought right up,” the snowbird said shrilly to the valet. “We left the last hotel because of poor service and we won’t stay here if things aren’t to our liking. My husband won’t stand for any malarkey. We have been driving around this cockamamie town for two hours trying to find this place and we’re starving. I hope you have good food in your restaurant and decent portions. They didn’t give you enough food at the last place.”

She was a lady who would always stuff herself and never be full, a spiritual cripple but a stellar consumer. Each expensive stop on her journey was an inevitable disappointment that took her nowhere but closer to the exit door of an oversize casket, lowered without emotion into a prepaid grave.

Reggie looked at me, making saucer eyes: “Ain’t that the lady from…”

“Yes,” I said. “It is. We’ll have to go someplace else.”

“What is it?” Mary said.

“Those people were at the hotel in Indian Wells. They saw us in Evelyn’s room after the fight with Jimmy.”

“I still can’t believe that was you,” Evelyn said, somewhat dreamily, stroking Oz’s hair.

As I pulled past the Taurus, the valet opened the driver’s door and the little husband popped out, making a mean face. I didn’t blame him.

“My wife has to have the best of everything,” he said angrily. “She is not easily satisfied.”

Several blocks south, I took a right, cutting over to the expansive beachfront lot on Nelson Way. I parked at the far edge, near the creaming waves, and turned around to look at Budge.

“Do you know where Candyman is?” I asked him.

“I think he went to Shoshana’s.”

“Can you get in touch with him?”

“Sure, I got the number.”

“Call him and warn him not to go back to the flop, and you stay clear of it, too. The Italians are going to be out for blood.”

After Baba spilled his guts, Discenza’s men would be fanning out to try and find the necklace. They would go to Evelyn’s, the flophouse, maybe even Hildebrand’s office.

“All right, Rob. I’ll let him know.”

“Thanks for your help, Budge,” I said, stopping him before he could ask any of the questions that were crowding onto the tip of his tongue. “Take this for your trouble.” I handed him a packet of ten hundreds.

“Wow! Thanks a lot, man.” He shoved the money into his pants pocket and got out of the car. “I’ll share this with Candy.”

“If anyone asks you what happened at the ashram, you weren’t there and you don’t know anything about it.”

“Gotcha.”

“Take care, brother.”

“You, too, Rob. Thanks again.” Leaning down, he reached in the window to clasp hands with Reggie, biker-style.

“Fly low,” Reggie said.

“You too, man. See ya, Oz.”

“‘Bye, Budge.”

He strode off across the lot with his head high and shoulders back, a valuable player returning to the locker room after a big game. Halfway across, he changed direction, slightly, angling toward the public restroom. I think it was a Teena Marie song that he was whistling.

“What now?” Mary said.

“We have to find someplace to regroup,” I said. I didn’t want to head for Mexico with Evelyn and Oz in tow.

“Why don’t we check into another hotel?” Reggie said.

I shook my head. “We’re too conspicuous. I don’t know what kind of network the Italians have around here. Discenza may put out the word to cabbies and hotel clerks to watch for us. What about your place in Bel Air, Evelyn?”

She had her arm around Oz. His head lay on her shoulder.

“We can’t go there,” she said. “It’s rented out.”

“Any other thoughts?” I asked the group.

“I have a cabin in Big Bear,” Evelyn said. “We could go there.”

“Does Baba know about it?”

“No.”

“Perfect.”

I took the 10 to SR-60, following the same route we had four days earlier when Evelyn had been ahead of me in a white Lincoln instead of behind me in the backseat of my Caddie. As we passed through Pomona below the Chino Hills, Ozone cried out:

“Look! Cows!”

In a pasture that sloped up from the right side of the highway, Holsteins were chewing their cuds in the evening light. I took the next crossroad and circled back, winding along narrow lanes to a spot above the pasture where the shoulder was wide enough to pull over and park.

“Can I pet them?” Oz said, excited.

“I don’t know,” I said. There was a five-strand barbed-wire fence between us and the cattle and I didn’t want him to get torn up climbing over.

“Pop the trunk,” Reggie said.

I pulled the lever and Reggie got out and walked to the back of the car. The rest of us got out too, watching as he took his church key to the fence and cut the top four stands of wire, pulling them back out of the way.

“Go on down,” he said gruffly.

With a happy laugh, the boy stepped over the bottom wire and ran downhill toward the cattle.

“Be careful,” Evelyn said, following him.

Reggie leaned against the hood, lock snips hanging down in one hand, watching them cross the pasture.

Mary and I were standing next to the car.

“You’re pretty good,” she said. “You got the necklace and torpedoed Baba. You saved me and the kid and gave Evelyn back her grandson.”

“Look who’s talking,” I said. “You were awesome with that knife. You saved my ass.”

There was a tumbledown barn on the other side of the tar road. Taking my hand, Mary led me across the road and around the corner of the weathered building into a grassy area beneath an alder tree. Once we were hidden from view, her small hands with their heartbreaking nails went to the button that fastened her pants. Unzipping, she wriggled her butt free, pushing her jeans and panties down to her knees, then bent over, placing her delicate palms against the rough gray boards of the barn.

“I like it hard,” she said.

Curiously, I was not offended by this.

Afterward, as we walked down through the pasture to where Evelyn was sitting beneath a pine tree, watching Oz stroke the coarse hair of a drowsy dairy cow, Mary gave me a teasing look through her fairy eyelashes.

“That wasn’t very tantric,” she said.

“I felt close to you.”

“I felt close to you, too.” She squeezed my hand, making the chakras in my heart and throat swell. “But if it is tantra, the guy doesn’t come. And I am pretty sure you did!”

“You got me there, baby. It may take a lot of practice before I get it right.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

It was nearly dark by the time we pulled Oz away from his bovine friends and got back on the road. The world must have seemed magical that night to the homeless kid turned heir, his picture books and magazines coming to life around him. It was pretty sparkly for me, too, with the briefcase full of Benjamins and the tough blonde tight beside me, leaning hard against my shoulder and then away, as we switchbacked up Highway 330 into the San Bernardino Mountains. Above five thousand feet there were patches of snow, white among the black pines, and by the time we reached Running Springs the ground was blanketed with cold crystals. As we drove along the Rim of the World Highway toward Big Bear Lake, fresh snow began to fall, big flakes floating down through the headlight beams, carrying Christmas memories like candles and bringing smiles to all our faces.