Criminal Carma

by Steven M. Thomas

  Sizing the situation up while the door was still swinging shut behind him, the newcomer dropped the grocery bag, which burst, sending cans of beer rolling, and whipped out an ugly black automatic before I could reach for my gun. The nose on his long narrow face was covered with a bandage. Above the cotton strip, his eyes sparkled with malice.

  “Jimmy Z,” I said.

  His voice, strained through a swollen larynx, was a gritty whisper: “The last one you think of. The first one to show.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “I was beginning to think you had abandoned us, Jimmy,” Baba said.

  “Yeah, what took you so long?” Pete said, throwing off the loose rope and jumping up. “I thought we were going to have to deep-six these jack-offs ourselves.”

  “You didn’t tell me it was eight blocks to the liquor store,” Jimmy growled. “I would’ve took the car if I knew it was that far.”

  Namo was struggling to his feet, clawing at the wall for support. Now that Jimmy had the drop on us, he wanted to get at me as soon as possible.

  “Wend you get out of the hospital?” Reggie asked conversationally, edging toward his gun.

  “You can ask ‘em when they wheel you in,” Jimmy said.

  Namo was hobbling toward me, his face like a rabid animal’s. As he passed Pete, he sucker-punched him on the side of his head, knocking him to his knees.

  “Watch this bitch,” he said to Jimmy as he came toward me. “He’s got two guns on him.”

  Jimmy raised the fascist pistol, targeting my breastbone. He was no fonder of me than Namo.

  “Go easy!” Baba said. “We have to get the money from him.”

  When the Muscle Beach moron was a step away, rearing back for a haymaker, and Jimmy’s finger was whitening on the trigger, the hall door swung in again and Mary burst into the room, blond hair streaming behind her, pearl-handled switchblade held low in her right hand.

  Jimmy was quick. Keeping the gun trained on me, he lashed back with his left hand, hitting Mary in the face at the same moment she plunged the knife into the back of his thigh. He howled, dropped his gun, and staggered toward the table with the blade buried in his muscular leg. I ducked Namo’s awkward, time-delayed swing and sank my fist into his solar plexus, dropping him.

  As Namo went down, Pete scrambled up, feet skittering on the lino like a cartoon character’s as he darted to the back door. When he jerked it open, Budge was waiting on the steps, slapping the fish billy in his hand. Stepping into the kitchen, he hit Pete with a tremendous uppercut. There was payback for a good many existential eye pokes and light pay envelopes in that blow, and it made an airman of the ex-swabbie, sending him flying halfway across the room. Landing hard on his back, he convulsed just once, then lay unconscious.

  In the confusion, Baba sprang from his chair and charged the open back door with surprising agility and speed. Years of hatha yoga had kept him limber despite his size. His three hundred pounds of human freight train should have been unstoppable. But Budge still blocked the doorway. He dropped down to a three-point stance and met Baba head-on with the strength and leverage that made him all-city in 1973. Living up to Coach’s billing, he stopped the guru in his tracks and, after a brief sumo bout, shoved him back into the room, where he stood, slump-shouldered and panting, defeated.

  Mary was sitting with her back against the wall, rubbing her cheek, watching Jimmy writhe on the floor. Namo was crawling toward the hall door. Ozone Pacific was crouched in a corner. Reggie had snatched up Jimmy’s cannon and his peashooter and backed himself against the counter, keeping an eye on all the players. I had the Tomcat in my hand.

  “Are you all right?” I asked Mary.

  “Yeah,” she said and then lit up the room with an amazed and amazing smile. “This is wild!”

  While Reggie covered, I jerked the knife out of Jimmy’s leg, evoking a piercing scream and releasing a spurt of blood. I tied a piece of rope above the wound as a tourniquet and dragged him over to the wall by the table. With Budge’s help, I lugged Pete and Namo over and dumped them beside him.

  Baba stood brooding, looking much sillier in his fine blue suit than he ever had in his ridiculous dhoti.

  “You won’t get away with this,” he said. “I’ll turn you in for the burglary and grand larceny. That necklace belongs to me. If the police don’t get you, Discenza’s men will.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said. “Turn around and face the wall.”

  Before he could execute the maneuver, Evelyn came into the kitchen from the hall. It was getting to be like Grand Central station in there.

  “Where is my grandson?” she asked the disgraced guru.

  “He’s right here,” Mary said. She stood up and took Oz’s hand and led him to Evelyn.

  “You’re the lady in the picture!” the boy said.

  “She’s your grandmother,” Mary said. “She’s going to take care of you now.”

  “I’m going to take the best care in the world of you, Kelly,” Evelyn said. “You are my precious jewel.”

  Oz looked from the elegant lady to me, and then back at her and back at me again, wonder emerging from the confusion on his face. Behind the wonder, something sly flitted in and out of sight, like the flash of a fish turning just below the surface.

  “I’m rich,” he said to me.

  I nodded and smiled. “You were right, buddy.”

  “Help me, too, Evelyn,” Baba pleaded. “Just give me a couple of the diamonds to get away with.”

  “Where’s Christina? If you tell me, I will help you. I will help you get away.”

  “He doesn’t know where she is, Evelyn,” I said. “He was lying about that.”

  I didn’t want her to find out about her daughter’s death right then. The scene was fraught enough already. I could break the news to her later, in private, and let her explain it to her grandson.

  Baba’s eyes darted to mine when I spoke, not knowing why I was covering up but accepting the lie as wise. He didn’t want Evelyn going banshee, either.

  “Tell her to help me,” he said, conspiratorially. “I promise no one will know of your involvement in any of this. It is in your interest to let me go.”

  “I don’t think so, Baba.”

  Pete was stirring on the floor and Namo had pulled himself together. Only Jimmy Z was still incapacitated. He was in shock, his leg bleeding badly, despite the tourniquet.

  “Get up,” I said to Pete and Namo. They got to their feet slowly, wincing and cursing, and stood unsteadily beside the bulk of Baba Raba, looking like his abused children.

  According to the Seth Thomas wall clock, it was 5:10. Baba was late for his meeting with Discenza and the appraiser. Budge was standing behind the three upright bad guys, looking at me, waiting for instructions. Pointing the Tomcat at them to keep them still, I raised my other hand and brought it down, a judge passing sentence. Budge grinned and nodded.

  Like a man playing an oversize xylophone, he went down the row, cracking first Namo and then Pete on top of the head with the broad edge of the billy. As they collapsed in sequence onto the bloody floor, I was moving Mary, Evelyn, and Oz into the hall, Reggie bringing up the rear. He looked back from the doorway as Budge raised the billy above Baba’s cannonball head.

  “Hey, Baby Huey,” he said, thrusting out his hip and slapping his broad ass, “meditate on this.” Baba’s eyes got wide with what looked like fury, then snapped shut as Budge rapped his thick skull. The house shook when his body hit the floor.

  On the street, we piled into the Cadillac-me, Mary, and Reggie in front, Budge, Oz, and Evelyn in the back. We had only gone a block toward the ocean when a black Cadillac limo turned off Seventh and pulled up in front of the ashram. In the rearview mirror, I saw four men in suits getting out. One of them was Councilman Discenza. The malevolence on his beaked face etched the glass of the mirror.

  “Where we going?” Reggie asked.

  “The hotel.”

  We made it back to Le Merigot
without incident. I didn’t think anyone could trace us there. I was about to make a left into the hotel’s semicircular drive when a blue Taurus cut in front of me and pulled up at the entrance ahead of us. When the valet opened the door, a giantess in a brown linen suit struggled out. Her big hash-slinger’s face was mottled with anger as if someone had just skipped out without paying the check.

  It was a face that had launched, at most, a single rowboat. The guy at the oars, who had proposed to it after a dozen longnecks and his first hand job, probably wished by now that he had drowned himself in the lake instead of plunging into matrimonial fire. It was a face I knew.

  “We want our luggage brought right up,” the snowbird said shrilly to the valet. “We left the last hotel because of poor service and we won’t stay here if things aren’t to our liking. My husband won’t stand for any malarkey. We have been driving around this cockamamie town for two hours trying to find this place and we’re starving. I hope you have good food in your restaurant and decent portions. They didn’t give you enough food at the last place.”

  She was a lady who would always stuff herself and never be full, a spiritual cripple but a stellar consumer. Each expensive stop on her journey was an inevitable disappointment that took her nowhere but closer to the exit door of an oversize casket, lowered without emotion into a prepaid grave.

  Reggie looked at me, making saucer eyes: “Ain’t that the lady from…”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is. We’ll have to go someplace else.”

  “What is it?” Mary said.

  “Those people were at the hotel in Indian Wells. They saw us in Evelyn’s room after the fight with Jimmy.”

  “I still can’t believe that was you,” Evelyn said, somewhat dreamily, stroking Oz’s hair.

  As I pulled past the Taurus, the valet opened the driver’s door and the little husband popped out, making a mean face. I didn’t blame him.

  “My wife has to have the best of everything,” he said angrily. “She is not easily satisfied.”

  Several blocks south, I took a right, cutting over to the expansive beachfront lot on Nelson Way. I parked at the far edge, near the creaming waves, and turned around to look at Budge.

  “Do you know where Candyman is?” I asked him.

  “I think he went to Shoshana’s.”

  “Can you get in touch with him?”

  “Sure, I got the number.”

  “Call him and warn him not to go back to the flop, and you stay clear of it, too. The Italians are going to be out for blood.”

  After Baba spilled his guts, Discenza’s men would be fanning out to try and find the necklace. They would go to Evelyn’s, the flophouse, maybe even Hildebrand’s office.

  “All right, Rob. I’ll let him know.”

  “Thanks for your help, Budge,” I said, stopping him before he could ask any of the questions that were crowding onto the tip of his tongue. “Take this for your trouble.” I handed him a packet of ten hundreds.

  “Wow! Thanks a lot, man.” He shoved the money into his pants pocket and got out of the car. “I’ll share this with Candy.”

  “If anyone asks you what happened at the ashram, you weren’t there and you don’t know anything about it.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Take care, brother.”

  “You, too, Rob. Thanks again.” Leaning down, he reached in the window to clasp hands with Reggie, biker-style.

  “Fly low,” Reggie said.

  “You too, man. See ya, Oz.”

  “‘Bye, Budge.”

  He strode off across the lot with his head high and shoulders back, a valuable player returning to the locker room after a big game. Halfway across, he changed direction, slightly, angling toward the public restroom. I think it was a Teena Marie song that he was whistling.

  “What now?” Mary said.

  “We have to find someplace to regroup,” I said. I didn’t want to head for Mexico with Evelyn and Oz in tow.

  “Why don’t we check into another hotel?” Reggie said.

  I shook my head. “We’re too conspicuous. I don’t know what kind of network the Italians have around here. Discenza may put out the word to cabbies and hotel clerks to watch for us. What about your place in Bel Air, Evelyn?”

  She had her arm around Oz. His head lay on her shoulder.

  “We can’t go there,” she said. “It’s rented out.”

  “Any other thoughts?” I asked the group.

  “I have a cabin in Big Bear,” Evelyn said. “We could go there.”

  “Does Baba know about it?”

  “No.”

  “Perfect.”

  I took the 10 to SR-60, following the same route we had four days earlier when Evelyn had been ahead of me in a white Lincoln instead of behind me in the backseat of my Caddie. As we passed through Pomona below the Chino Hills, Ozone cried out:

  “Look! Cows!”

  In a pasture that sloped up from the right side of the highway, Holsteins were chewing their cuds in the evening light. I took the next crossroad and circled back, winding along narrow lanes to a spot above the pasture where the shoulder was wide enough to pull over and park.

  “Can I pet them?” Oz said, excited.

  “I don’t know,” I said. There was a five-strand barbed-wire fence between us and the cattle and I didn’t want him to get torn up climbing over.

  “Pop the trunk,” Reggie said.

  I pulled the lever and Reggie got out and walked to the back of the car. The rest of us got out too, watching as he took his church key to the fence and cut the top four stands of wire, pulling them back out of the way.

  “Go on down,” he said gruffly.

  With a happy laugh, the boy stepped over the bottom wire and ran downhill toward the cattle.

  “Be careful,” Evelyn said, following him.

  Reggie leaned against the hood, lock snips hanging down in one hand, watching them cross the pasture.

  Mary and I were standing next to the car.

  “You’re pretty good,” she said. “You got the necklace and torpedoed Baba. You saved me and the kid and gave Evelyn back her grandson.”

  “Look who’s talking,” I said. “You were awesome with that knife. You saved my ass.”

  There was a tumbledown barn on the other side of the tar road. Taking my hand, Mary led me across the road and around the corner of the weathered building into a grassy area beneath an alder tree. Once we were hidden from view, her small hands with their heartbreaking nails went to the button that fastened her pants. Unzipping, she wriggled her butt free, pushing her jeans and panties down to her knees, then bent over, placing her delicate palms against the rough gray boards of the barn.

  “I like it hard,” she said.

  Curiously, I was not offended by this.

  Afterward, as we walked down through the pasture to where Evelyn was sitting beneath a pine tree, watching Oz stroke the coarse hair of a drowsy dairy cow, Mary gave me a teasing look through her fairy eyelashes.

  “That wasn’t very tantric,” she said.

  “I felt close to you.”

  “I felt close to you, too.” She squeezed my hand, making the chakras in my heart and throat swell. “But if it is tantra, the guy doesn’t come. And I am pretty sure you did!”

  “You got me there, baby. It may take a lot of practice before I get it right.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  It was nearly dark by the time we pulled Oz away from his bovine friends and got back on the road. The world must have seemed magical that night to the homeless kid turned heir, his picture books and magazines coming to life around him. It was pretty sparkly for me, too, with the briefcase full of Benjamins and the tough blonde tight beside me, leaning hard against my shoulder and then away, as we switchbacked up Highway 330 into the San Bernardino Mountains. Above five thousand feet there were patches of snow, white among the black pines, and by the time we reached Running Springs the ground was blanketed with cold crystals. As
we drove along the Rim of the World Highway toward Big Bear Lake, fresh snow began to fall, big flakes floating down through the headlight beams, carrying Christmas memories like candles and bringing smiles to all our faces.

  EPILOGUE

  We spent a week at Evelyn’s lodge, a five-bedroom timber-frame overlooking the frozen lake. It snowed all through the first night and most of the next day, so there was fresh powder for sledding and skiing and snowball fights. Mary turned out to be a daring downhill racer, beating me to the bottom of the mountain two times out of three. Oz made a cow out of snow. It was hard to recognize if you didn’t know what it was supposed to be, but it made him happy. He used a piece of rope for the tail. In the evenings we burned cedar logs in Evelyn’s big stone fireplace.

  We followed developments in Los Angeles on TV and in the newspaper. The ashram burned down the night we left town. It was a big, lurid story on the next day’s evening news. Police found five bodies in the ruins, including those of Herbert Finklestein, who ran the ashram, and Pedro Sanchez, who was under investigation for arson in connection with several recent fires in the neighborhood. The Krispy Kremes were treating the ashram fire as arson and the deaths as homicides, in part because the victims had fresh knife and gunshot wounds. Oz had been prescient when he’d called Baba’s place an ash farm.

  With the guru and his amateur gangsters gone, the link between me and the Center for Enlightened Beings was broken. Nobody else except for Evelyn, who had seen me there, knew who I was. With Evelyn on our side, the link between Reggie and me and the safe job was broken, too. Hildebrand didn’t know who had knocked off his office, so he was no threat. The cops who had questioned us the night of the robbery only knew us by our aliases, and we couldn’t be traced through the rental car.

  On Thursday, our second day in the mountains, a story in the local section of the Los Angeles Times reported that the controversial Pacific City resort plan had collapsed when the main parcel of land fell out of escrow on Wednesday. The article noted in passing that Herbert Finklestein, a.k.a. Baba Raba, who was killed in the Murshid Center fire, had been a partner in the resort deal.