Ed Hoyt leaned back in his lounge chair and stared at his copy of the Los Angeles Times. As he read, his big hairy feet moved, and his toes clenched and unclenched. Nicole’s eyes were hidden behind her dark sunglasses, studying him.
She had been lying peacefully beside this small pool at the end of a line of pools at the Bellagio hotel, savoring the pleasant feel of the dry desert air. She had gone in to swim a couple of lengths, a feat only possible at this time of the morning, before other people got up and stood in the pool like posts. Then she had come back and lay here on her chaise longue beside Ed, feeling the hot, parched air drinking the water off her skin. The faint breeze seemed to her to carry microscopic particles of sand that buffed her skin and made it feel tight and clean and new.
Nicole had repeated the process three times, and when she had come back to lie down beside Ed for the third time, he’d had the newspaper. She loved that about Las Vegas—if you looked like a reasonably good tipper, people would bring you what you wanted. She looked him over again. She had mixed feelings about lying next to Ed in bathing suits.
Ed was big, about six foot four. He was hairy, with tufts of black hair on his chest that tapered into a streak of hair going down his belly past his navel. He was also very muscular. That was a good thing, really. Her husband was in great shape, especially for a man in his forties. But he made her feel a little bit déclassé when he was this visible. Here they were at a fancy hotel—one of the few in Las Vegas that was still fancy, now that Las Vegas had become so eager for young people and their children—but Ed didn’t look like a high-class man. Rich lawyers, the CEOs of big companies, men of hereditary wealth didn’t look like Ed. They didn’t have all that body hair. They had it waxed or shaven, so they were smooth as girls. And they were in good shape, but not the same way as Ed Hoyt. He looked like a cage fighter, a martial arts teacher, maybe even like what he was. He was very male, very virile, but maybe a little bit too flashy and obvious.
He was a bit like a male version of some of the women she had seen around the pools in Las Vegas. They had wonderful perky round breasts and tiny waists, and asses like a pair of bubbles. Nature had been good to them, but maybe a bit too generous. They might be utterly blameless, and many of them hadn’t paid to have anything enhanced. But when the eye settled on them, the brain didn’t say “science major.” Ed was like them. There was nothing subtle about him, and he was no more self-conscious than a dog.
She closed her eyes and lay there, and reminded herself to take him as he was. She was with him, and they were alive and healthy. They’d had to rent a two-bedroom suite at the hotel so they would have two safes instead of one to hide all the cash they’d brought with them.
Ed said, “You know what it says in the paper?”
“I have my eyes closed. I haven’t seen a paper in four days. No.”
“The weird people who hired us aren’t just thieves like that one guy said. They’re from a famous gang of jewel thieves. The police are looking for them. They were in this country getting ready to rob the jewelry stores on Rodeo Drive, and a bunch of jewelry businesses in the jewelry district downtown.”
“It can’t have been entirely successful if the LA Times knows who they are.”
“The cops recognized one of them, and then figured out a whole bunch of them were here, so they flooded those places with cops before the thieves could do it,” said Ed. “The police sat there for two or three days waiting for the thieves to show up, but they never did.”
Nicole still didn’t open her eyes, determined to devote most of her mind to feeling the treatment her body was receiving from the warmth, the breeze, and the relaxation of her muscles. “How many were there to start?”
“The cops think maybe forty.”
Now she had to open her eyes to be sure nobody was too close to them. “You killed a couple, remember.” She had shot at least three, but that was irrelevant.
“The police say they each stole millions of dollars all over the world for years. All they take is diamonds.”
“Oh, you know how that is,” said Nicole. “Some store gets robbed of two dollars. They tell the cops and the insurance company it was twenty. The clerks let the thieves get away before they report it so they can take eighteen themselves before the cops get there.”
“This isn’t some liquor store in Bakersfield,” Ed said. “It’s places like the Harry Winston store in London. Other places in Paris, and Tokyo. They just come in and rake off the diamonds.”
“When, exactly, did you get so interested in diamonds? I practically had to beg you to buy me a pair of earrings.”
“It’s not the diamonds,” Ed said. “It’s the fact that it’s these people. We worked for them, even if we didn’t know it right away. We went after the Abels and kept them fully occupied while these people planned—and maybe even carried out—the theft of the century. For all we know, they pulled it off and it hasn’t been reported to the cops yet. After we risked our lives for them, they turned on us. We got screwed.”
Nicole shook her head. “I don’t see how you can twist what happened to them into anything about us. We weren’t their partners or something. Vince Boylan hired us to do a job for them. And we paid ourselves very well with Boylan’s money. The end.”
“They shot at us.”
“We shot at them, and we’re not dead.”
“Want to know who identified the members of their gang? It was Mr. and Mrs. Abel. If that bunch of freaks had kept us on and treated us decently, they wouldn’t have lost anything. They could have stolen twice as much money by now, and the cops wouldn’t be searching all their houses and showing their pictures in all the train and plane terminals.”
“Okay,” said Nicole. “They would have been better off with us than without us. No argument.”
“I’m saying more than that,” said Ed.
“What more is there to say?”
“They owe us damages.”
Nicole coughed out a big “hah!” laugh before she’d had time to stifle it. Then, because the laugh was so big and unexpected, and because Ed looked so shocked, she laughed even harder, the regular way. She held one hand up and clapped the other over her mouth. After a few seconds she pushed the laughter back down. “Sorry, sorry. It just caught me by surprise. You sounded like you were planning to sue them.”
“Obviously not,” said Ed.
“Sure you don’t want me to call a lawyer?”
He folded the paper and tossed it onto her stomach. “If you read it, you’ll see that about forty of them are now on the loose with all those diamonds from their old jobs. They were planning to get out of the country with them, but that didn’t pan out. They can’t have made it.”
Nicole opened the paper, found the start of the article, and began to read. After a few minutes she glanced over at Ed again. He was lying there with his eyes closed, his face turned peacefully to the blue sky. “Why can’t they have made it?”
“The cops were warned ahead of time—by the Abels, but that’s not the point. The cops threw everything they had into keeping the thieves from getting on a plane or a ship or a train or a bus, and they had enough time to transmit all of their pictures to every foreign customs service. So far, not one of them has turned up.”
“You believe they let themselves get trapped in this country?”
“Let themselves or planned to.”
“Planned to? Really?”
“You saw that house where the three guys lived,” Ed said. “They funneled money here for months in advance—maybe years—and moved in.”
“The paper says that was so they could spend a lot of time casing the jewelry places and planning their robberies down to the last detail.”
“Right,” he said. “I’m sure they did that. They had figured out that the safest place to live in this country is on a quiet street in an outer suburb. Did they do all that for one job, or even a day of jobs?”
She put down the newspaper. “Oh my God,” she said. “What if you’re right?”
“Don’t make it sound like a fluke.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. She sat in silence, staring across the palm-lined row of pools and baroque fountains planted in the long fake piazza. Her mind was working its way through all of the details she knew about this gang of thieves. Now and then she would say something.
“When those idiots killed that man and dumped him in the sewer, most people would have just called the whole operation off, and moved on. When the Abels started looking for the idiots, offering rewards and things, they’d certainly leave.”
Ed didn’t open his eyes or move. “Mm-hmm.”
“They stayed, and hired somebody to get rid of the detectives. Us—no, Vincent Boylan, who hired us. They were committed to staying awhile, and to keeping it a secret.”
She didn’t detect a reaction from Ed, but she went on. “They spent time planning robberies at what’s got to be some of the hardest places in California to rob. We always assume that what happens after something like that is a quick getaway that very minute. But these people know a lot. Running away is usually the part that gets you caught. Getting away is a second whole job. It takes time to plan, time to arrange. And there’s no reason you have to do it right away, or all at once.”
Ed still didn’t say anything, but she saw a little tremor at the corners of his mouth.
Nicole got up and walked off across the sun-warmed, smooth pavement, past the fountain pool with the four-sided bearded face blowing streams of water onto the bathers, to the long rectangular pool beyond. It was getting to be past breakfast time now, and already there were people sitting on the submerged benches that ran the length of the pool on both sides. She swam to the far end and back, and then did it three more times. She stood, leaned back at the edge to catch her breath, and returned to the chaise beside Ed.
She lay still, feeling the water baking off her, the gentle abrasion of the desert breeze, and the looseness of her arm and leg muscles. She said, “So where do you think they are now?”
He said, “Their houses are out. The cops have already been watching those places. So they must have found somewhere else. They’re foreigners. There are a bunch of them. They don’t have a lot of options.”
“Name one.”
“A house they know for sure is empty and the owners aren’t coming back. Vincent Boylan’s house, or our house.”
“Jesus,” she whispered to herself.
She turned to look at him again. He lay there looking like some big dumb guy who’d been in a lot of fights. And he was that. But he was something else. She sat up, leaned over, and kissed his cheek. “Come on,” she said.
“What for?”
“I want to show you something.”
He opened his eyes. “Where is it?”
She stood up, threw her cover-up over her head, and stepped into her sandals. “It’s going to be upstairs in the room.” She began to walk toward the rounded arch leading into the hotel. In a few seconds she heard him catching up with her.