Los Angeles and Monterey
Early 2000
I was still in L.A. when I turned eighteen that month. February of 2000. Lucy had asked me for my birthday. Just out of curiosity, I thought. I had no idea they were planning anything. But on that day, Julian and the gang put a blindfold on me and took me out to the street. They took the blindfold off and there it was. A Harley-Davidson Sportster with a big red bow on the seat. The most beautiful motorcycle I had ever seen, even better than that old Yahama my uncle had given me.
I had already moved into the little apartment that was attached to the garage. It didn’t take long to bring in all of my stuff, which at that point could still fit into the two luggage bags from my old bike. Julian apologized to me about how small the space was, but damn… after setting out on my own, figuring I’d be living in motel rooms or God knows where else… this was as close to a real home as anything I could have hoped for.
I still had a lot of questions about these four people. The White Crew. First of all, you can only spend so much time stealing money from rich people. What else did they do all day?
As it turned out, Julian had grown up in a family of wine snobs, so he took that background and he turned it into a business. He had a storefront in Marina del Rey, not far from the docks. There was a climate-controlled wine cellar beneath the store with well over a million dollars’ worth of bottles. The very finest, most expensive wine in the world. The kind of stuff that only a very rich person would even think of buying. That’s how he made many of his first contacts in this community of obscene wealth, mostly from the people who’d dock their yachts in the harbor. At the same time, it gave him a way to launder some of the money he made from the robberies.
There was a kind of symmetry to my life now, if you think about it. A man who sold cheap liquor took me in when I needed him most. Now, it was a man who sold overpriced wine.
Ramona spent most of her time at the store, too, along with members of her extended family, especially her three sisters. Like her, they were ridiculously attractive Hispanic women who could charm you right out of your undershorts. The few times I was around the store, I’d hear them talking Spanish to each other at a million miles an hour, and it would often disintegrate into shouting matches. By the end of the day, they’d make up. It was a tight family. They loved each other like crazy and would kill for each other, I could tell. I was envious of that.
As for Gunnar, he was a tattoo artist. He had a little shop right there in Santa Monica. When he wasn’t there, I often saw him working out in the backyard. Even now that he was hooked up with Julian and had some money in his pocket, he still liked to use junkyard equipment like cinder blocks and tire chains.
He didn’t talk to me much. Then again, the more I hung around the more I noticed that he didn’t really talk to anybody. I mean, he lived in the same house with these people. He had dinner with them almost every night. When it came time to put a big job together, he would literally entrust these people with his very life. But he was different from them. That much was clear. There always seemed to be a subtle undercurrent in the room, with Julian especially, and now me. Like there’s no way on this earth he’d be spending so much time with us, if it weren’t for our one common interest.
Lucy? She was the one member of the gang who hadn’t found her daytime calling yet. She’d worked a number of jobs since getting out of rehab, but nothing had seemed to stick. Her latest kick had apparently been painting. Some of her work was hanging around the house, and Julian had arranged for some pieces to be shown at one of the local art galleries. Most of her work was these almost psychedelic paintings of birds or dogs or even jungle animals that I’m sure she’d never seen in person. It was good, I thought, but she didn’t make many sales.
Because she was the one with the most free time, I’d often end up hanging around while she was painting or cooking or whatever else. One day, she caught me drawing a picture of her on my pad of paper. Nothing much, just a quick pencil sketch, but she took the paper from me and looked at it for a long time.
“One more reason to hate you,” she said as she flipped it back at me.
They still had the safe in the back room. For the rest of that month, she kept trying to open it. I’d watch her, and I’d do whatever I could to show her exactly what I was feeling when I got to the shorter contact areas, but I knew there was no way to make her feel it. It would either come to her or it wouldn’t.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t feel it.
Julian made me throw away my fake New York driver’s license. He told me he’d find me a real fake identity. So I was no longer William Michael Smith.
A friend of a friend of his had a young neighbor who hadn’t gotten his California driver’s license yet. In fact, he would have had to lose about two hundred pounds before he could even think about trying to fit behind the wheel of a car. So for a certain amount of cash delivered to his door every month, he agreed to “loan” me his identity. I could open up a bank account in his name if I wanted to. I could even use his Social Security number if I wanted to go out and get a real job.
That’s how my new fake name became Robin James Agnew.
I still had the pagers with me, of course. One day, the green pager went off. This was the one that had been silent for years, according to what the Ghost had told me. He didn’t even know if anyone still had the number.
Well, apparently someone did.
I called the number on the screen. The man who answered asked me if I was the Ghost. When I didn’t answer, he asked again, swore a few times, then hung up.
So much for the green pager, I thought. I kept it anyway. I made sure the batteries were fresh, just like in all the others. They sat in the shoebox under my bed, and I checked them every day.
On the first day of February, the yellow pager went off again.
I thought about ignoring it. I finally went to a pay phone down by the marina and dialed the number. It rang twice, and then I heard the voice.
“Is this Michael?”
He knows my name, I thought. Yet he doesn’t seem to know I can’t answer him.
“This is Harrington Banks,” he said. “Harry. Do you remember me? I met you at that junk store in Detroit.”
Yes. I remember you. You came in and asked a few questions. I saw you the next day, in your car. You were just sitting there. Watching.
“Is there someplace I can meet you, Mike? I think we really need to talk.”
He got his hands on the yellow number. I wonder if he can tell I’m calling him back from L.A.? Hell, maybe he’s tracing the number right now. Right down to this exact pay phone next to the docks.
“I think you might have gotten yourself in way too deep,” he said. “Are you listening to me? I think you’d better let me try to help you.”
I hung up the phone and left. I rode my motorcycle back to the house. When I went back inside, I could hear the yellow pager beeping again. It was the same number.
I was two seconds away from smashing the stupid thing. No matter what would happen to me if the man in Detroit found out about it. Instead, I just took out the batteries and left it lying there dead in the box.
Gunnar was getting restless. He didn’t wear it well.
“Julian only knows one way to do this,” he said to me. We were sitting at the dining room table. Julian and Ramona and Lucy were in the kitchen. “It takes him like six months to set up a score. Six months. Everything’s gotta be just right, you know? We gotta know every single last detail about the guy. If he gets up in the middle of the night to take a piss, we gotta know about it.”
He drained the last bit of red wine from his glass.
“Meanwhile, Julian gets to play around in his wine store and him and Ramona get to go out with all these big shots. Wine and dine them. Me and Lucy, we just sit around waiting. Until it’s finally time to do something. Then I get the grunt work, of course. I’m the guy who sits in the fucking closet for six hours. You saw that. And Lucy, either she doesn’t get to do anything because Julian can’t trust her, or else she ends up being the bait for some horny old guy.”
He picked up the bottle and started to fill up his glass again. He got a couple of tablespoons’ worth, then nothing but a dribble. He put the bottle back down on the table with a loud thump.
“Life’s too short for this, know what I mean? We could be out there hitting people. As long as you move fast, you can take a little chance now and then. You don’t have to wait so goddamned long. Be such a fucking yellow-ass pussy all the time.”
I don’t know why he was confiding in me like that. I was the new member of the gang, after all. But hell, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. You can tell me just about anything and be pretty sure I’m not going to repeat it.
But no matter how anxious Gunnar got, Julian never wavered from his approach. He made his contacts. He developed them. Slowly. Carefully. He got to know everything he could about his marks. Until he would finally see the right opportunity. If it came at all.
Only one time had he ever miscalculated. He had picked the wrong mark, at the wrong time, and it should have gotten him killed.
Instead, he got the Ghost. Then me.
“Your man in Detroit,” Julian said to me. “This is how I first met him.”
It was a few nights later. After another big dinner, just me and Julian and Ramona sitting there with two empty wine bottles on the table. Gunnar and Lucy out riding around somewhere. Julian was telling me this story now, finally, like it was the most important thing he’d ever tell me. It probably was.
“I knew he was a heavy hitter the moment he walked into the store. You’ve seen him. You know what I’m talking about. I mean, he’s not the biggest man in the world, but it’s like, he takes up more space than anybody else. You know what I mean?”
I nodded. Yes. I know.
“This was a couple of Septembers ago. What he does, apparently, is he leases a big yacht, gets some other really serious guys together, and they start up in Oregon, play some golf up there, work their way down the coast, stop at marinas every couple of days, come ashore for a while, play some more golf, maybe run over to Vegas when they’re here in L.A. Sounds like a pretty fun trip, right? A nice little pleasure cruise?”
I thought back to the two times I’d met the man. It was hard to imagine him golfing or sitting on the deck of a boat. Or doing anything remotely human.
“It’s all just a warm-up. They push off from here and head down to Mexico, and on their way they start playing poker. No limit hold-’em. Seven, eight guys. Half-million-dollar buy-in. No credit. Strictly cash. So they’ve got like four million dollars sitting on that boat, Mike. Can you imagine what I was thinking when he told me that? I mean, here he is, standing right in my store, sharing this with me like it was no big deal. This man I’d never even seen before. Anyway, he said he came in to buy some more wine for the boat, but I’m thinking, the universe woke up this morning and decided you’ve got way too much money, sir. That’s the only reason why you’re here.”
Ramona was sitting next to him. She smiled and shook her head.
“I wasn’t quite sure how to make the play,” Julian said. “It was such a short window of time, you know? He was heading back to the boat. They’d be leaving the next day. All that money on its way to Mexico. I was thinking, hell, I don’t know… what could I do? He seemed so open and candid about everything. At least if I could spend a little more time with him, maybe I’d see an angle. So I told him I’d get together the best wine I had, some really nice bottles, bring them all out to the boat personally. And he was like, that would be very kind of you. Come on out, I’ll show you around the boat. The whole thing, you know? Really friendly about it. Which should have been a red flag right there. But I was stupid! Four million dollars. It makes you lose your balance.
“So I go out to the marina. He’s got the boat there. Biggest boat in the place, by far. Just dwarfs everything else. It wasn’t his, remember. He just leases it for the month. Complete with crew, I’m sure. Anyway, Ramona and I are both there, we’ve got a few cases of wine with us. Ramona’s put together some nice flower arrangements. Some cigars. The whole thing, right? We’re walking all this stuff up the gangway, Ramona’s wearing her bikini top, flirting with Mr. Bigshot there. Everybody else is still on shore, so the rest of the boat is pretty much empty. I figure I can take a little walk around the cabins, right? Take some flowers with me? Open up a few doors, see what’s inside. If he sees me, I can just play it off, say I was putting some flowers in the cabins, being a nice guy. Going the extra mile for him. I mean, it’s not like I expected the money to just be sitting out there in a pile or anything, but if I could figure out where it was… at least we might have a shot, right? If it was all in a safe, maybe Lucy could open it, I was thinking. She’d been working real hard on it back then, and I was just hoping, if the safe wasn’t a great one…”
He stopped to think about it for a moment. Ramona’s smile had disappeared.
“It was really dumb, I know. To just improvise like that. I totally lost my head. Of course, the whole thing turned out to be a setup, anyway. I’m poking around in the cabins, and I actually find the safe. It’s right there in one of the cabins. Not a great-looking safe, either. I was pretty sure Lucy could open it. So I’m excited now. When all of a sudden I hear this voice from behind me. I turn around, and there’s this other guy there with a gun pointed at me. Some guy I didn’t see before. Real strange-looking. You ever meet him? He’s got this lazy kind of face, like he’s half-asleep all the time?”
I nodded. Oh yes. We’ve met.
“I started giving him my excuse. ‘I was just putting some flowers down here, friend.’ But he’s not buying it. Hell, it sounded lame to me. So he gets me up on deck and there’s Ramona with Mr. Bigshot, and all of a sudden nobody’s friendly anymore. He sits me down and he asks me to give him one good reason why he shouldn’t just take me with them out into the ocean and dump our bodies there. I’m trying to think of something to say, when Ramona pipes up. ‘Because sharks don’t like Mexican,’ she says. Which gets the guy thinking. He says, ‘But your boyfriend here isn’t Mexican.’ And she says, ‘Who’s talking about him?’ Which got this guy laughing, at least. But then he got real quiet, and he said, ‘Somebody told me you guys were good. So I had to see for myself. Is this the kind of scam you usually run? Wait until a rich man shows up on a boat? Go snooping around the cabins?’ And I’m like, ‘No, sir. Not at all, sir. And how did you even hear about us in the first place?’ Because at that time there was no way he could have known about us. I mean, no way. But he gets real close to me and he says, ‘I know everything. That’s all you have to remember.’ And I’m thinking, okay, this is it. We’re dead. The lazy-looking guy is getting ready to put a bullet in our heads.
“Then he let us go. Under two conditions, he said. Number one, well, thanks for all the wine and cigars and flowers. That was very thoughtful of you to deliver all of this stuff to the boat. And number two, here’s a phone number. ‘If you guys live long enough to learn how to do this right,’ he says, ‘then you’ll probably need a good boxman.’ We just have to remember to always pay him ten percent off the top. Which is how we got to meet the Ghost.”
“Lucy told you about going to visit him,” Ramona said. “About her trying to learn from him?”
I nodded.
“Things have a way of working out,” Julian said. “We got you instead.”
Yeah, things worked out, I thought. And here I am. Working with a guy who tried to set up the wrong target. The absolutely worst target in the world.
No wonder he’s so careful now.
____________________
About a month later, the next score finally came together. It was time to get back to work.
The mark was a smooth, suit-with-no-socks kind of guy who lived up in Monterey, apparently in some ridiculous house perched right on the ocean. He’d been coming down to L.A. every week on some sort of Hollywood-related business. He liked expensive wine, and he really liked women who were beautiful in unique, quirky ways. Which is where Lucy came in. She was playing the bait, just like Gunnar had told me.
So on a clear day in April, Julian got his car out of the garage and we drove all the way up the coast to Monterey. Six hours up the Pacific Coast Highway. We stayed overnight in a little hotel, and then the next day it was time to take down Mr. Moon Face. That was our pet name for him.
Julian, Ramona, and Lucy went to his house for dinner that evening. Mr. Moon Face fancied himself quite the gourmet, so he made some kind of poached sea bass or some damned thing and they drained a couple bottles of wine Julian had brought up with him. While the man was distracted, Julian took out a little razor blade and sliced a thin line through the electric foil that ran around the perimeter of one of the man’s seaside windows. All of the windows were foiled like this, of course, but now when the man activated his security system, the one window would show a disconnection in the closed circuit. When he looked at the window and found nothing wrong, he’d have to call the security company to get it fixed. Of course, if he was on his way out for a night on the town and a possible shot at sleeping with the young Lucy, the little chink in his security armor would get put aside until the next day.
When they finally left the house, it was time for Gunnar and me to do our thing. The house was close to the road and to some other ridiculous houses hanging on the cliff, so we only had one good way in. We took the car Gunnar had rented in town and parked down by the shore, at one of the observation points. We climbed down the rocks and made our way across the beachfront, finally climbing our way back up to the house. It was a longer climb than either of us had anticipated, and the weather was turning bad fast. The wind picked up. The waves below us were getting higher. It was dark and hard to see exactly where we were going.
The Pacific Ocean, right below me as I struggled my way up those wet rocks. One false step, I thought. That’s all it would take. Not the way I wanted to die today. Then in that very next moment I lost my footing and I felt myself starting to fall. I could already feel the cold water against my skin. The waves turning me over and dragging me to the bottom. How quiet it must be down there, compared to this violent roar on the surface.
Then Gunnar reached out a hand and grabbed me by the belt. He saved my mortal life right there. When I was back on the rocks, I shook it off and we kept climbing, until we finally got to the house.
Gunnar located the window with the deactivated foil, put a wad of modeling clay on the glass, and then started cutting a hole, just large enough for us to climb through. We obviously weren’t going for a clean in-and-out this time. There’s no way you can cover your tracks when you cut a big hole in a window, after all. Julian was confident we wouldn’t need it this time. Not with Mr. Moon Face. So we made the forced entry, and within two minutes we were standing inside the house. There was no infrared motion detector to worry about this time, so we were clear. Julian, Ramona, and Lucy would be sure to keep Mr. Moon Face out for another couple of hours, at the very least.
We walked in through the kitchen, past the remains of their fancy dinner. A half-dozen wine bottles sat empty on the table. We found the man’s office, where the safe stood tall and proud in the corner. No hidden wall safes for this guy.
I eliminated the tryouts first, then got to work.
Find the contact area, park the wheels, spin and count. Three wheels, check.
Back to 0. Find the area again, feel for the short contact.
3. 6. 9. 12. 15.
I started getting nervous around 30. Were all three numbers high on the dial? Most people don’t do it this way.
45, 48, 51.
Damn. Damn.
72, 75, 78.
I was starting to sweat.
93, 96, 99.
Nothing.
I stopped and shook out my hands.
“What’s the problem?” Gunnar said.
I shook my head. No problem, man. Everything’s cool.
I could hear the waves crashing on the rocks outside. I could smell the salt in the air. I started again.
This time, when I got to 15, I thought I was getting close to something, but the difference felt so faint to me. It was like tuning in a radio station from a thousand miles away.
I shook out my hands again. I tried to clear my mind. I didn’t even bother asking myself what the problem was, because at that point I knew.
I hadn’t been practicing enough. Simple as that. I hadn’t been spinning the dial enough on the safe in Julian’s house. I hadn’t been spinning on my portable lock. I just hadn’t been doing it. I had just assumed I could pick it back up again, any time I wanted.
So I had to spend the next full hour finding my touch again, while Gunnar paced back and forth and tried very hard not to strangle me. I finally narrowed the numbers down, and even then I wasn’t totally sure about them. My face was dripping with sweat now.
I’ll never take this for granted again, I promised myself. Just get this thing open and I promise I’ll practice every single day.
I spun through the possible combinations. Every single damned one of them. None of them opened the safe. So I had to go back and redo my contacts, go through them again and find the number I had gotten wrong. When I finally did that… when I hoped I had done that… I had to go back and do the combinations again. We were going on two hours inside the house now.
I cranked through each possible combination. The waves were getting louder. From somewhere in the room I could hear a clock ticking.
Then… finally. Finally! I hit the right combination and turned the handle. Gunnar pushed by me and started shoving money into his bag. I got up and stretched out my back, walked around a little bit and saw the headlights through one of the front windows.
Son of a bitch.
I ran back and helped him finish putting the money in the bag. Then I slammed the door shut, and we went back to the hole in the window, keeping our heads down. We jumped through it like circus performers, rolling in the sand and gravel outside and scrambling down onto the rocks.
When we were down on the beach, we ran back toward the rental car, the waves even higher now, our legs getting soaked. We climbed back up to the car. We stood there catching our breath for a minute. Then Gunnar grabbed me by my shirt. He got his face up close to mine, and I was waiting for him to yell at me for taking so fucking long to open the fucking safe. But he didn’t.
“Lucy’s mine. Do you hear me? She’s the only person I’ve ever loved. Like in my whole life. You understand me?”
I looked at him. Was he really telling me this now?
“Do you understand me or not?”
I nodded my head. Yes, I understand.
He let go of me. He threw the money in the backseat and got behind the wheel. I got in beside him and made two promises to myself.
Stay away from Lucy.
And practice.