Criminal Karma

by Steven M. Thomas

  “Vacation.”

  “Where you staying?”

  “The Georgian, down by the beach.” I could see the name of the hotel impact his thinking. Standard rooms at the Georgian were three hundred a night. The fact that we were staying there moved us up from transients to well-heeled travelers, whether he liked it or not.

  “You got some ID?”

  “Sure.” I handed him my Stephen Michaelson driver’s license. He looked at it for a few moments, then half-turned, keeping one eye on us, and handed it through the window of the squad car to the other cop, who was on the radio running our plate.

  “How ‘bout your friend?” He leaned down to look at Reggie. “Got some ID, sir?”

  Reggie dug in his back pocket and came up with his fake license, which also had a Sacramento address. I handed it to the cop, who looked at it and passed it to his partner.

  “What did you guys put in the trunk?”

  This was what he had been leading up to.

  “Our backpacks,” I said.

  “What do you have in them?”

  “Water, a guidebook, a jacket, my camera—that kind of stuff.”

  “You sure that’s all? They looked pretty heavy.”

  “Why all the questions, Officer?”

  “I get curious when I see people putting bulky backpacks in the trunk of a car in the middle of the night. Makes me think they might be burglars.”

  “Not us,” I said and laughed. “We’re just tourists.”

  “Would you mind stepping out of the car?”

  “Why, Officer? Are you detaining us?”

  “Just get out of the car,” he said, filling his voice with that cop threat they get so good at. “You, too.” He leaned down to look over at Reggie again.

  I rolled the window up and opened the door. As Reggie and I got out of the car, I pushed the button that snapped the locks down and then slammed my door.

  “Why did you lock your car?” the cop said.

  “Just habit. I don’t want anyone to steal it.”

  “Can I see your car keys, please?”

  “Why?”

  “I need to do a routine check to make sure you don’t have anything illegal in the vehicle. There’s been a lot of burglaries around here lately, and your friend looks like a guy I arrested last year. You don’t have anything to hide, do you?”

  “No, Officer, I don’t have anything to hide. But I don’t consent to any searches.” I paused, looking him in the eye. “Are we free to go now?”

  Cops are so used to riding roughshod over people on the street that it confuses them if you assert your rights calmly and politely. After a moment’s indecision, the lurch fell back to a default tactic honed during countless late-night encounters with scared petty crooks, drunk kids, and timid citizens. Stepping up nose to nose, looming over me with his extra two inches of height, he breathed salami fumes in my face.

  “All right, smart guy,” he said. “There are two ways we can go here. I think you got something in the trunk you shouldn’t have and I’m gonna find out what it is one way or the other. If you cooperate, I’ll make things easy for you. But if you give me a hard time I’ll nail your hide to the wall. Do you understand that?”

  He glared at me, waiting for an answer.

  I didn’t answer, just looked him in the eyes.

  “We got a special cell down at the station for guys who don’t play along with us,” he said. “Guys walk into that room cocky but they crawl back out ready to kiss the ass of any cop who bends over. We make tough guys into sacred little schoolgirls in that room. Now, what’s it going to be? You gonna be smart or stupid?”

  Alert to conflict, the other cop had come up behind his partner. He held our licenses in one hand. His other hand was on the butt of his gun. I glanced at Reggie. He was leaning against the rental car, a couple of feet from the doughnut eaters, his face as impassive as a cigar-store Indian’s.

  “Why don’t you let us take a look in the backpacks, sir?” the black cop said. “If there’s nothing in them, you can be on your way. Save a lot of trouble.”

  “I don’t want any trouble, Officer,” I said, addressing the black cop. “I know you guys are just doing your job. But I believe it is my obligation as a good citizen to protect my constitutional rights and I do not consent to any searches of my vehicle or my person. My friend and I aren’t doing anything wrong. If you think the fact that we put our backpacks in the trunk of our rental car gives you probable cause, then I guess you will search the car. But you don’t have my permission.”

  The big cop was seething. He glanced around the parking lot to see if there were any witnesses. If he assaulted me and I fought back, he could arrest me for resisting, then search the car to his heart’s content. Bad luck for him, an elderly gentleman wearing cowboy boots and a straw cowboy hat had just come out of Norm’s and was walking across the parking lot toward us.

  The black cop pulled the lurch back a couple of paces. Standing by the rear bumper of the squad car, they held a whispered conference.

  “There are no warrants for either of them and the car is clean,” I heard the black cop say, warning in his voice. “There haven’t been any prowler calls or alarm trips within a mile of here tonight.”

  “I know they are up to something, goddamn it!”

  “Then we’ll get them next time.”

  The black cop walked back over.

  “Are we free to go, Officer?” I said politely, keeping the pressure on them.

  “Can you establish your local address so we know where to find you if we need to?”

  “Why would you need to find us, Officer?”

  “Don’t push it,” he said. “You have a key or receipt or something that shows you’re staying at the Georgian?”

  “Yes.” I took out the key card I’d kept since our stay there six weeks before and handed it to him.

  “If I call over there, are they going to tell me you’re registered?”

  “Absolutely. We have a suite on the top floor.” Suites at the Georgian went for $500 and up. We were getting more respectable by the minute. The cop looked at the front and the back of the card, flexed it, then shrugged and handed it back along with our licenses.

  “I wouldn’t advise wandering around the city this time of night in the future,” he said, trying to come out on top psychologically.

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “It’s probably a bad idea. Are we free to go?”

  “Yeah, get out of here.”

  “If you’re smart, you’ll keep right on going until you get back to Sacramento,” the lurch said in his menacing tone.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Just let me see you around here again in the middle of the night and you’ll find out why.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Yep,” Reggie said, nodding to himself, looking straight ahead out the windshield as we drove down Santa Monica toward the Pacific. “I picked the right partner.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “‘Why’s that?’” He swiveled his head to look at me. “Listen to this shit. You outfoxed that flatfoot like a flimflam man on a Sunday school teacher. You were smooth as a sixteen-year-old girl’s heinie, Robby, and you know it. ‘Why’s that?’ Shit!”

  “Seemed like the way to play it.”

  “How’d you know they wouldn’t just search the car anyway and claim they saw something that gave ‘em cause?”

  “I didn’t. I was gambling that they would play by the rules. If the cops are out-and-out corrupt, asserting your rights doesn’t help. But if they are halfway honest, mentioning things like probable cause makes them stop and think. Even if they really want to stick it to you, even if they are really suspicious, they know they aren’t allowed to search you or your car unless they have some evidence that a crime has been committed. A strong hunch isn’t enough. If you know your rights, it makes them cautious. They wonder who they are dealing with and start thinking about getting bawled out by the district attorn
ey, or being made a fool of on the witness stand by a good defense lawyer.”

  “What would you have done if they pushed it?”

  “Fought them.”

  Reggie nodded. “I had that black cop measured.”

  “I know you did,” I said. “That big prick had his legs too far apart for his own good. If the shit went down, he would have been singing soprano at the next smoker.”

  I pulled into the alley behind the flophouse a few minutes before two, popped the trunk, and got out, leaving the engine running. Reggie slid over behind the wheel while I retrieved the loot.

  “Park wherever you can find a spot,” I told him. “We’ll take the car back first thing tomorrow. Be sure to check the street-sweeping signs so we don’t get towed.”

  The back door that opened into the kitchen was bolted from the inside. Walking to the front, I saw a glimmer of light in the derelict house where Ozone Pacific slept. I was surprised he was awake this late.

  Upstairs, I emptied out the bag of gold and the envelope of bonds. There were seventy-three Krugers. If gold was at $300, the coins were worth twenty-two grand. If it was at $400, they would be worth nearly thirty. The unexpected windfall put helium in my heart, made it light. The grin I had worn earlier, when we opened the safe, came back from wherever it had gone during the cop encounter.

  The face value of the bonds was $18,300. The oldest issues had passed their maturity dates, which made them worth much more than face value. The newest issue was from the previous summer. It would be worth a little more than half of its nominal. All together, there was probably $40,000 worth of government paper. I could lay them off for 20 percent of that, another eight grand.

  I took the diamonds out and held them up to the light, marveling at their beauty. Folding the necklace in my hand so that a single rose-colored crystal protruded between my thumb and the side of my index finger, I scratched a crude OM symbol in the mirror, then put the jewels back in the blue velvet case.

  Fahid would be very happy.

  But not as happy as me.

  The money was the main thing, of course. But I also felt a glow of professional pride—pride in a tricky, high-stakes heist well-planned and executed, a feeling like I used to get in the construction business when a new room was latched solidly onto an old house, electrical and plumbing work up to code, interior paint job perfect, siding and roofing materials buttoned tight to protect the structure from the elements.

  I was glad to be hurting Baba, too. I didn’t like his yogic con game in the least. I didn’t like what he was doing to Evelyn. I hated him because of Mary.

  I hoped the real estate deal collapsed on him like an iron bridge.

  When I hid the loot in the compartment I had constructed beneath the floorboards under my bed, I kept out one gold coin on an impulse. I wanted to show it to Ozone, to let him see the difference between plastic and real gold.

  When I went back downstairs, I found Budge standing in the middle of the living room with his eyes closed. I couldn’t tell if he had stopped to think about something or had passed out on his feet, sleeping like a horse in its stall.

  “Budge.” I tapped him on the shoulder, ready to catch him if he fell or duck if he took a swing at a dream-world enemy.

  He opened his eyes and looked at me blankly for several seconds, then whipped his head back and forth rapidly, like a boxer shaking off a blow. When he recognized me, he smiled broadly.

  “Rob!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Whatcha doin’, man?”

  “Just going to check on Ozone. I saw his light on.”

  “Little Oz! I love that kid, man.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Hey, Rob!”

  “What?”

  “You got that little blonde upstairs?” He spoke in the sly whisper he always used when talking about women or sex while he was drunk, nodding his head to try and provoke an affirmative answer.

  “No.”

  “Don’t let that get away, man. That’s some sweet shit. Those pink shorts! I ever got my hands on her little behind I’d lick that brown eye clean as a whistle.”

  “It’s a thought,” I said.

  “Got to lick the brown eye, Rob,” he said with conviction. “Girls like it. Makes ‘em squeal and squirm.” He wiggled his big body to illustrate and lost his balance, stumbling a couple of steps sideways before getting his feet back under him. “That little girl had me around, she wouldn’t need toilet paper.”

  “I’ll let her know,” I said. “You better get to bed.”

  “Yeah, um drunker na skunk.”

  Listing like a sailboat in the wind, my burly housemate staggered toward the hallway. I watched until he made it into his bedroom, then went out the front door and along the sidewalk to the abandoned house next door. There was a notice from the city taped to the front door, stating that the house was unfit for human habitation and had been condemned. Discenza wasn’t wasting any time.

  I left the door open for the light that filtered in from the street and picked my way through the debris on the living room floor to the hallway. Ozone Pacific’s door was open, pale gold leaking into the hall.

  I heard someone crying as I went toward the room. The boy was sitting on the floor wearing nothing but his old jeans. His cowboy boots and cowboy shirt were beside him on his sleeping bag. There was a book open in front of him and his shoulders shook as he dribbled his plastic coins onto the colorful pages.

  “I’m rich,” he sobbed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Glimpsing Ozone’s private world, I decided to give him not one but ten of the Krugerrands, or the value of them, to help him get off the street and do something with his life. Both of our houses were condemned, and I didn’t want to leave him wandering homeless when I skipped town.

  “Those coins are plastic,” I said from the doorway.

  Ozone looked around, frightened, and turned his back toward me as if shielding himself from a blow.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said, crossing the room to stand behind him. “It’s me, your friend Rob.”

  “Hi, Rob,” he sniffled, gathering up the coins.

  In the light of the caged forty-watt bulb dangling above him I saw that the volume open on the floor was a children’s picture book filled with farmyard scenes. It was old and worn with torn pages, as if it had been much handled. The lush illustrations showed a red rooster crowing in front of a yellow sun, and cows and horses grazing in green pastures.

  “Don’t you know those coins are worthless?” I said, trying to draw him back toward reality. “You’re not rich. You can’t spend plastic money.”

  “I am, too,” he said, his pathetic tone tinged with anger. “My mom had a lot of money that she showed me. She told me we are rich.”

  “Did she finally show up?”

  “No,” he said miserably. “She never came back. I waited all day, but then I got scared and tried to find her. She told me not to cross Pacific so I walked down to the end of the beach, looking for her. I was afraid to go any farther. I was afraid she would come back and be mad when she couldn’t find me. She told me to stay by the palm tree. Do you think she came back while I was gone, Rob, and left again when she couldn’t find me?”

  “I don’t know, Oz. When did that happen?”

  “I was eight,” he said. “It was my birthday. It was summertime.”

  “You’ve been waiting for your mother to come back for you since you were eight years old?”

  He turned his head to look up at me, keeping his body hunched protectively, his fistful of plastic coins clutched to his chest. Tears were leaking from his eyes. He nodded.

  “Sometimes I walk back down to Ozone looking for her, but then I get afraid again and come back. I think she’ll come soon, Rob, don’t you? A man came and said I have to get out of here, and I don’t have any place to go. I want to go with my mom but I don’t know where she is.”

  Without wanting to, I imagined the long days he had lived thro
ugh in the monotonous sunshine, days when loneliness gnawed at him until he couldn’t sit still and he trudged north along the boardwalk, retracing his childhood route to that first stopping point. It had become a Pavlovian barrier, like a disconnected electric fence still restraining horses or cattle that don’t know the shock is gone. Ozone Pacific. A nickname that took hold years before, when boardwalk denizens first noticed his odd geographical limitations.

  “Look at this,” I said, taking the Krugerrand out of my pocket and holding the heavy coin out to him. “This is real gold.”

  Keeping the plastic disks tight against his chest in his left hand, he reached out with his right to take the Kruger. As he grasped it, I saw that his arm was bleeding. Taking hold of his wrist, I turned his arm and saw several fresh cuts midway between his wrist and elbow. The cuts were surrounded by countless scars. The long-sleeve shirt in all weather.

  “Oh, Oz, what are you doing?” The periodic misery that underlay his cheerful demeanor hit me like a knee in the gut. I guess I should have known. People who are always smiling are usually sad.

  He pulled his hand free and hunched back over, holding gold in one hand, plastic in the other.

  “I’m sorry, Rob. I know I’m not supposed to do it. Please don’t tell anybody.”

  “But why are you doing it, Oz? Why would you want to cut yourself?”

  I had heard of schoolgirls who supposedly sliced their delicate skin for some kind of perverse satisfaction, but I had never understood it. It seemed like something made up by daytime talk-show hosts to elicit maudlin tears from emotionally congested housewives, not something that actually happened in real life. I knew all about addictions to things that make you feel good, at least temporarily, like alcohol and heroin and sex, but I couldn’t comprehend being addicted to pain.

  “I do it when I feel sad,” he said. “It makes me feel better. It hurts, and I think about that and forget about my mom and everything else.”

  “What else?”