L. A. Outlaws (2 page)

Right now I’m about to stick up a west-side dude for twenty-four thousand dollars in cash. He won’t be happy, but he’ll turn it over.

And I’ll be richer and more famous than I already am.

My name is Allison Murrieta.

Here’s how you get a mark to bring you that much in cash: you put an ad in the
Auto Trader
for a 2005 BMW 525, low mileage and mint condition, and you ask twenty-five thousand, which is three grand less than it’s worth. You get a lot of calls on that car. They know you should be asking twenty-eight, but you’re a woman and you don’t sound overly bright. You’ve got a soft voice. You talk up the Beemer’s options and upgrades. The creamy leather and all that, even though BMW leather isn’t creamy. You say you’re pretty sure it’s worth more but you’re willing to sell quick because there have been some disappointments lately and you really do need to get on with your life.

You can hear the excitement in the men’s voices. The women often say they understand the disappointment part. You set up a time and a location to meet and you forget about them.

You’re waiting for Greed to make its appearance. It always does. Guaranteed. In this scam it’s always a dude, because they smell a chick in distress and can’t pass up an opportunity to help her out and cheat her at the same time.

“Will you take twenty-four thousand in cash?” Greed asks.

You can hear the pride in his voice when he says the word.
Cash.
You try to sound firm. “I need twenty-five. I think that’s a pretty good deal for a 525 with twelve thousand miles, isn’t it?”

“You said LoJack and navigation?”

“Premium sound, too.”

“Twenty-four, cash.”

“Okay. I’m Allison.”

“Rex. What’s your address?”

 

 

 

Laurel Canyon. Dusk on an August Saturday, about eight P.M. The L.A. sky is orange and gray and the air smells like flowers and exhaust.

The lot is tree-shaded, surrounded by a wall heavy with nightshade. There’s a “For Sale” sign out front on the street. It took me weeks to find this place. The right place is everything.

I park down the street and wait outside the house, a swanko glass-and-steel job with big smoked windows. Nobody can see me from the street. I’ve got my back to the driveway. I’ve got my gloves on and my mask on and my hair under a wig and the wig in a ponytail. My leather satchel sits on the ground beside me.

When I hear the car coming up the drive behind me, I hold Cañonita up next to my ear. Cañonita is a .40-caliber, two-shot, over-and-under, ivory-handled derringer that fits in the palm of my hand and from any distance at all looks like a cell phone. It will blow a big hole in you but is accurate only to about ten feet. Maybe. I continue to stand in front of the window with my back to the driveway.

In the smoked glass I watch Greed come up the drive in an old BMW 535, probably a ’92; he’s got it washed and waxed and the “For Sale” sign taped inside a window. He’s five minutes early. I leave my back to him, and my head cocked toward Cañonita.

Greed parks and gets out. He’s forty and fit, wavy gray hair. I see his reflection as he walks up, and I’m careful to keep my back to him. He smiles small, trying to keep his good luck under wraps and not tip me to my own stupidity. He approaches, checking out my butt, his smile tight and dry.

“Allison. Rex.”

I impatiently wave him toward me but I don’t turn around. I can’t allow a mere person to interrupt a cell call.

Rex walks obediently toward me, stops, looks around. “Where’s the car?”

I can’t let him come any closer or he’ll make me. Or at least he should.

In the window, reflected Rex looks oddly hopeful, then I turn, take a quick step up to him and place Cañonita right in front of his eyes. The two barrels must look gigantic to him at this range. Tunnels to hell.

“
Fuck,
” he says quietly. “
You.
”

Rex backpedals off-balance, falls but gets up and backpedals again. Two seconds later I’ve got him over the hood of his ancient sedan, gun pressed up nice and snug to his forehead. I’m physically strong, have a black belt in hapkido, and I’m swearing at him in a very calm voice. Through the windshield I see the envelope on the passenger seat and think to myself, Mother of God, people do the dumbest things, which is exactly why I do so well in my business.

“
Is that my money, shithead? That better be my money I see in there.
”

Of course I talk like this because I’m half terrified that something might go wrong. Terrified I’ll have to shoot this guy—there’s a first time for everything. The words are just weapons, something I can use to hurt and scare him.

He picks this moment to try to turn things around. Almost every guy will try to fight you. Most dudes just cannot get jacked at gunpoint by a woman without putting up a fight—they’re incapable of it. I feel his body tighten and hear him holding his breath, and I know he’s about to explode on me, so I blast him with the full-strength pepper spray I have ready in my left hand, and he writhes away and slides down to the driveway with an agonized moan.

I get the envelope and make sure it’s my money.

He’s on his elbows and knees now, his face buried in his hands, breathing fast and whining quietly with each exhale. He peeks up at me, eyes flooded. I rock him over with one steel-toed construction boot and zap him again. Then I cinch his wrists and ankles with plastic ties from my pants pocket, tight but not tight enough to cut him unless he struggles.

“The car’s worth thirty, dumb-ass,” I say. “You get what you pay for.”

I get my satchel and drop one of my cards beside him. He’s crying. I walk away while into the satchel goes Caño nita, my mask, my money and my black wig. I shake out my own light brown hair and slide the pepper spray into its little holster on my belt.

I round the nightshade-covered wall.

Then I stride—don’t hurry, don’t hustle, don’t trot—toward my car. It’s parked one house away, facing downhill toward Sunset.

What a nice evening. Some frat boys in a ragtop Mustang check me out on their way up the hill, hoot and holler. Nice to be appreciated.

I’ve got a little swagger to my step, and I’m tapping the mask and envelope against my left thigh with each stride toward my Corvette Z06—505 big-block horses, all mine. They whinny as I get in.

2

H
ome for tonight is the Luxe Summit Hotel up Sunset—big rooms, you can park yourself and you’re right on the freeway. I let myself in, shower off the fear, break up my cell phone on the cool bathroom tile and flush the pieces down the toilet. I’ve got three more cells, the ones you load with prepaid minutes and toss before the number gets hot.

I lie down on the bed and picture Rex coming toward me, checking me out. Then his eyes, bloodshot and dripping tears. I sleep hard for an hour, dream I’m riding a horse along a beach where I hold up a good-looking buck with a saddlebag full of gold bars then we make love in a sand dune on the beach and I steal both horses and ride away while he sleeps.

I eat some of the food I stocked in the fridge, shower again and put on laundered jeans, cowboy boots and a yoked C&W blouse I shoplifted from a saddlery up in Topanga. I make the local ten o’clock news:
The armed robber who calls herself Allison Murrieta has apparently struck again, this time in the Hollywood Hills . . .

They show the nightshade-covered wall, partially lit by roving spotlights, and the dark driveway. Then they run the popular video clip that shows a woman robbing a McDonald’s. It’s from last year. It’s me all right. Everything on screen is yellow and red and cheery except this babe dressed in black with a gun. I had no idea somebody was shooting video, but these days somebody always is. Luckily I have my professional face on, which means my wig is back in the ponytail and I’m wearing my mask. The mask is made of thick cardboard with black satin glued over it. I cut it to shape, added the satin and one very nice Swarovski crystal for fun. It covers my nose and eyes, cheeks and mouth, ears. Then the news shows an enlarged image from the McDonald’s video, and I note again that with the mask on I look stylish and dangerous. The crystal is near the mouth opening, and it draws your eye, just like Marilyn’s birthmark. The network goes to a commercial for—you guessed it—McDonald’s.

My next job is at midnight, a little over an hour from now. If it goes as planned, I’ll leave Hollywood with forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of unmounted gem-quality diamonds.

Here’s the plot: a friend of a friend of a friend’s boyfriend is a diamond district broker, young guy, a real go-getter and they love him at the Caesars’ sports book in Las Vegas and you know how it goes—he’s lucky and he’s smart and then he’s neither. Barry. Takes him two years to run his business into the ground, borrowing, betting, losing. Throw in lots of booze. The bottom line is that Barry is into the Asian Boyz for seventy-five grand and he’s willing to give them four hundred and fifty thousand retail dollars’ worth of very good and very insured diamonds because the cut will be one-tenth when the Boyz manage to fence them. You’ll notice that Barry is cheating the Boyz by almost half. They don’t know that. They’re amateurs and they’re kids. They don’t know that it isn’t easy to lay off that much ice to one guy, all at once.

I can. The arrangements are made. Forty-five thousand dollars won’t make me rich, but I love diamonds.

I just have to hit up Barry before he makes it to the Boyz at Miracle Auto Body in City Terrace at one A.M.

And I know something way more valuable than where he’s going. I know where he’ll be
leaving from,
and it’s his own damned fault that I do.

See, Barry is not a good man. He’s Greed, too, just like Rex. In order to pay down his debt, Barry talked his girlfriend Melissa out of ten thousand dollars. But he won’t pay her back. All she gets is excuses. Barry’s not only gone hostile on her, he’s trying to work another girlfriend into their life. I hear that Melissa is a little brokenhearted and a lot pissed off. But Barry’s careless, you know—he treats her like a moron—so it was easy for her to learn the pay-back plan for the Boyz. Then she sent word up the friends’ ladder to see if anyone could help her get her money back. If Barry had any real stones he’d have taken care of his woman. But since he doesn’t, he’s going to have to deal with me. And much more important, he’ll have to deal with the Asian Boyz, who will be unhappy when I steal what he owes them. Barry’s going to have to get his hands on enough diamonds to buy his life not once but twice.

You make your own luck.

I don’t leave one thing at the Luxe Summit that I can’t live without.

 

 

 

I pull up to Barry’s place just before midnight. It’s a modest little stucco off Highland in Hollywood. It’s got stands of giant bird-of-paradise and rhododendron for privacy. The lights are on but the shutters are closed.

Melissa said that Barry will leave from home. She guaranteed it. Barry’s a homebody, she swore. Home is where he is unless he’s in Las Vegas or at the office down in the diamond district; home is where he loves to be, where he drinks and cooks and watches sports on the tube hour after hour—Melissa could hardly get Barry to drive her to Philippe’s for a French dip. Home also has the safe where Barry will stash the four hundred and fifty thousand retail dollars’ worth of diamonds he’s going to give the Boyz.

Melissa also said that Barry’s gun stays up in a closet at home because he’s afraid of it. Never carries it.

Good to know.

I park across the street two houses down and watch for just a minute. The streetlamps are far-spaced and dim. I’ve cased the place, and I know the giant bird-of-paradise and the rhododendron are my friends. Nobody who carries diamonds for a living should have anything but a low hedge and floodlights out in front of their house. Barry undoubtedly knows this, but an informed fool is still a fool. Barry thinks he can be invisible just by keeping a straight face.

The walkway to the front door isn’t even lit. From the street you can barely see the front door and that’s good for me. The porch light is on. I listen to the police band radio for a minute or two, just in case some Hollywood Station PD patrol car gets a call nearby, but most of the cops talk on the mobile data terminals now to discourage people like me from listening in.

At midnight I’m walking down the sidewalk with my satchel—it’s a big leather and brass-studded Hobo I shoplifted from Nordstrom—same side of the street as Barry’s house. When I get to his yard, I cut across the grass in the dark and push through the rubbery rhododendrons.

I hit the ground and walk on my hands and knees below the shuttered windows, dragging the Hobo along beside me. When I get to the porch, I stand up with my back near the stucco wall, spin my hair into a ponytail and put on the wig. Next I pull the mask from the satchel and put it on, then get Cañonita ready. I’ve got the pepper spray on my belt. I’m not expecting any fight from Barry, but sometimes the chumps surprise you. My heart is pounding like someone just mainlined me with ten cc’s of pure adrenaline.