Carousel Court (15 page)

No immediate reply.

You understand I'm conflicted. I wouldn't have been standing there waiting for you if I wasn't. I just couldn't get in the car. Do this again. Maybe if someone had pushed me. If you'd grabbed me and pulled me in. I don't know. It can't be like it was.

His response:
So then why that skirt?

She ignores JW's question. She sends a series of messages to Nick instead:

OK. Let's try it. I want the dog.

Was there a collar on it? Can we find out the name?

You're right Jackson will love it. Can you still get it?

There's no response. She sends another message:

It would be good to do for Jackson. And for us.

Nick finally responds:
It's been nearly a month, Phoebe.

Try?

Too late.

Why?

He's gone.

23

N
ick doesn't know why he lied to Phoebe about the dog. He paid for the dog. They're getting the dog. He reaches for his coffee and apologizes to the couple across from him in the booth. She's a nurse. He's a teacher. They look tired, like new parents, minus the joy. Their kids are six and nine. Their house is a four-bedroom foreclosure in Corona.

“We're getting a dog,” Nick says. “I think. Do you have pets? I'm fine with pets. It's not a problem.”

They shake their heads.

“California's fucked. Teachers are fucked. We're fucked.” The man looks out the window as he speaks. “Nurses at teaching hospitals are fucked. No money. State's defaulting. Everyone's fucked.” He turns to Nick. “Except you, apparently. How are you not fucked?”

Nick presents them with his authentic-looking three-page rental agreement.

The wife places her hand over the husband's. “But we can pay the rent,” she says. “We have income. We're just fucked in every way imaginable. This is month-to-month, right?”

“Right.”

They'll likely be in the place for a month, maybe two, before they figure out whatever's next, some better place to land.

“We'll do a fresh coat of paint inside,” Nick says. Panera is packed and quiet. Too many middle-aged men and women staring at laptop screens, looking for jobs.

The husband thumbs through messages on his iPhone. “Hang on,” he says. He jots some numbers on a napkin, slides it in front of his wife, who glances down at it, gives a nod.

“We'll do something about the pool, too, the pump—”

“We don't give a shit about the pool,” the man snaps.

“Okay. No pool. I'll take a hundred off the monthly.”

“Fine,” the man says.

“Okay,” the woman says.

The man enters a number, holds the phone to his ear. He follows some prompts, enters more numbers, ends the call. He signs the rental agreement—as binding as the napkin he's writing on, Nick thinks.

The woman signs next.

Nick wants to get this over with, get their check, get home. But he needs to see it through. “Initial and date, here and here.”

“So how'd you get so lucky?” the woman asks Nick.

“With what?”

“Everyone's pretty much screwed out here,” the man says. “Except you?”

Nick is pleased with himself. He plays the part to perfection. “I'm not making shit,” he says. “Whatever I collect goes straight to the bank that owns me.”

The $2,998 Nick and Phoebe had in savings is now $21,400 and about to jump another thousand when the cashier's check the couple slides across the table clears.

24

T
he vibration on Nick's handheld is Arik. Nick is home alone with Jackson, who fell asleep on his chest ten minutes ago. Phoebe is out, still working, or not.

Guess who's lying like a half-dressed skank next to me on the floor drinking a kale smoothie?

Nick doesn't respond.

The next message is a JPEG: Mallory lying facedown on the plush cream carpet, sipping a Jamba Juice, wearing black-lace boy-shorts and nothing else. She has rings on her toes and an iPad open to TMZ.com in front of her.

Arik messages again:
Got something juicy.

Go

Favor for boss. Don't ask him about it. He can't know we're doing it. He wants possible deniability.

Plausible?

??

What do you need me for?

You gotta drive us. And help. Boss wants YOU.

You said he asked Greg and the Hondurans

That was bs. Just come. Mallory and her girls want to chill after.

Nick carries Jackson upstairs and lowers him into the crib, but the boy grips the back of his neck and won't let go. Nick keeps him in his arm and walks to the window. Outside he sees Metzger smoking a cigarette, shirtless, pointing his shotgun at the sky.

So you down or what?

I don't think so.

EZ cash/merch.

No.

We need three, dude. This ain't no trash-out

Then what?

Collection. Renter owes boss a shitload of money.

Call Sean.

We're not allowed to do this without you.

Nick inhales the clean baby scent of his son. He kisses his warm forehead twice as he lowers him into the crib, this time without waking him.

25

T
hey've been driving for over an hour. Nick is sipping a can of warm Red Bull that Arik handed him when he got in, and a Dirty Beaches track drifts from the speakers. Arik approves by nodding. After calling Mai, despite the late hour and last-minute request, and asking if she'd stay with Jackson until Phoebe or he returned, Nick relented and said yes, he would join them tonight. The call to Mai was also after he'd spent hours online researching the quality of local pre-K and elementary schools and read nothing that gave him confidence they could do for Jackson what he and Phoebe both insisted they wanted for him.

Nick had to drive out toward Redlands to get Arik and then turn around and head down to Riverside to pick up Sean. He was rushed all night, and arrived late after he fell behind on laundry and cleaning the pool, walking Carousel Court with Kostya to check on the empty house next to Metzger's. (Marina was sure she saw three men in a white pickup truck idling in front of it, leering at her as she jogged past. Nick did find a few cigarette butts at the end of the driveway.)

The house Sean and Arik need to hit tonight is in North Hollywood: Toluca Woods. It'll be the three of them and a supposedly empty twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot five-bedroom gated villa that was
rented to a man in his late twenties who left the house behind and owes thousands to the owner of the property, a wealthy colleague of Boss. The men—Nick, Sean, and Arik—are the muscle. They'll divide the cash or possessions among themselves, change the locks on the doors so the owner can rent it out again.

The property belongs to a casino owner in Rancho Mirage, the title holder of a handful of homes used for favors, bribes, for people who couldn't go through conventional channels to get a place to live legitimately. They all paid in cash. They were all men, here illegally or in hiding, who would fail background checks because of crimes committed or IRS issues. The upside for the owner was the huge cash payments up front; the downside was the inability to enforce agreements. Nick and the casino owner have that in common, if nothing else.

• •

It's just after midnight. The moon looks swollen. Like it's going to burst. Arik rolls a joint and lights it.

“What if it blew up? The moon? Tsunamis, right? I mean, the tides. Wouldn't the oceans just roll over us? Waterworld.”

Nick is driving tonight because he didn't share the address with Arik or Sean and asked Boss not to, either, even if they bothered to ask, because they would have gone to the house first and gutted it or, if the man were still there somehow, collected if they could, and Nick would have lost his cut. Because in the end, Boss doesn't care how the possessions are divided up, as long as the favor gets done. There will always be another job, another payout, according to Boss. And he's right. This thing is just getting started.

Arik gives up the front seat to Sean. “You're late,” Sean says to Nick when he gets in. He smells like weed. All the lights are on in his ranch-style house. He's been here for a month: since his wife left. He's here for the schools, he says, and laughs because his only son, sixteen, is gone for good, went with his mother. Sean needs a lot of money and soon. So tonight Sean is missing his son's concert (he's in a band with some friends called Prisoner, and they're playing a warehouse show). He sends messages to his son's mother, who is uploading the concert on YouTube. “Bitch won't text me back.”

It's almost one by the time they take the Universal City exit and Nick says, “Find Cahuenga, Cahuenga.”

“There it is,” Arik says from the backseat, window down, leaning out, the warm night air washing over him.

Nick says, “Ledge, Ledge, Ledge.”

“There,” Arik says.

“Take a left,” Sean says. “When we cross Camarillo we're there. It's on the left.”

“You know this how?” Nick asks.

“I do my homework,” Sean says. “Toluca Woods. Keep going. About a mile.”

The ranch-style houses on Ledge Avenue are similar to Sean's, only much nicer, with manicured lawns and white picket fences, oleander and silk floss and short palms. They're set close together, giving the street a neighborhood feel; Nick imagines streets blocked off for Fourth of July barbecues and Halloween parties or some kid's fourth birthday party.

Sean hits Nick's arm. “Stop here.”

• •

The house is three stories and set farther back from the street than the rest, behind a ten-foot cast-iron gate.

Nick called the Hondurans, but they refused to help. Only for Boss, they said. They do work for his properties, not “the collections,” too
peligroso
.

If they're able to collect the money owed from the tenant, he's told by Sean and Arik, they'll clear nine thousand. The three of them will split three thousand and whatever they can carry out of the house in one trip.

“How likely is that?” Nick asks.

“It's not,” Sean said. “These assholes are never home.”

Nick sighs audibly. “This isn't your first . . . job?”

Sean ignores him. “It's a wild card. You can say no. Drop us and wait.”

“If they're home?”

“They've got security and won't let you get close enough to piss on the place. In that case, you just walk away.”

“And if there's no one there?” Nick asks.

“Do us a favor: Stay in the car.”

Ledge Avenue narrows where the house lies. The winds have slowed. The air is eerily still and so dry it seems to crackle. The bright moon seems larger than ever, closer somehow. Arik is staring up at it like a child. Nick breathes in the scent of smoke. Not a controlled burn, he thinks. Something started carelessly, like most of the wildfires, or with intent, and soon helicopters and sirens will fill the purple night sky. Stone walls and the black iron gate surround the property. Poised atop each of the two columns on either side of the gates: a pair of matching wild-eyed gargoyle statues.

“The only house for ten blocks that's gated,” Arik says. “That's not a small gate, either.”

Nick and Sean ignore him.

“We're going to get shot,” Nick says.

“Then stay in the fucking car!” Sean roars.

• •

Sean spits fierce instructions, warnings, into Arik's ear as they stand next to the car. Nick can hear Arik saying, “I know, I know,” and he sounds like a boy, “I will.” Sean runs his fingers through his long hair three times, walks around to Nick's side, the open window, inches from Nick's face, the liquor on his warm breath, skin pocked with acne scars and reddish-gray stubble, eyes glassy, as if they've been dipped in something yellow, translucent. “You're not calling the shots on this one, chief. Your nuts come off if you screw around.”

Nick and Sean pull themselves up so they can see over the wall as Arik sits on the hood of the car. The floodlights are turned off; the lawn is green; the sprinklers are on, watering the patchy green turf; the driveway is empty.

“The bank could be turning the water on,” Nick says. “Keeping the place ready to show.”

“No signs posted,” Sean answers.

“Place looks lived in.”

They drop from the wall.

Nick checks the address again: 11290 Ledge. He calls Boss and gets voice mail. He leaves a message, then follows up with a text:
Sprinklers ON. Sure about this address??

Sean wears a grim expression, takes a drag of a cigarette. He motions for Arik, and from the deep side pockets of his black cargo pants: three white latex masks. Sean and Arik slowly slip theirs on. The effect is terrifying. The eyes are black plastic circles, the heads misshapen and white, like executioners from a fever-induced nightmare that Nick used to suffer as a child. This feels completely out of control.