“Somehow I get the idea that us two ain’t never gonna get all ‘Kum Bay Ya,’ ” said Tristan Hawkins.
The next and final job of their long working day was at a popular Gym-and-Swim in the San Fernando Valley. It boasted an enormous workout room with state-of-the-art equipment and an indoor pool, and Jakob Kessler had arranged a membership card for Tristan under a fictitious name. This kind of job was not for Jerzy, who looked too much like street trash to get through the door without someone grabbing weapons of self-defense. Tristan, on the other hand, was clean-shaven and untatted, wore wire-rim glasses even though he didn’t really need them, and always dressed in a clean Polo shirt and Banana Republic jeans and the kind of Nike sneaks that white men wore. He figured that his dreads even enhanced his aura of respectability, making him look more like the sensitive artistic type he felt he was.
Tristan parked the car in the Gym-and-Swim lot, where Jerzy pulled his baseball hat over his eyes to snooze. Tristan opened the trunk, took out his gym bag, and entered, showing his card to the kid at the desk, who barely glanced at it before giving him a locker key and a towel.
There were no members in the locker room, so Tristan walked along the double rows of laminated wood lockers and tried them all before putting down his bag. You never knew when somebody might forget to lock his, but not today. He put the bag on one of the benches and took out his tiny eyeglass screwdriver and a pick. He could open a locker in less than a minute, and he opened two that turned out to be empty before he found one that was in use. The clothes hanging there looked promising, and the Rolex inside one of the Ferragamo loafers looked very promising, possibly indicating a large line of credit for this dude. It took all of Tristan’s self-control not to steal the Rolex and the wallet, but Jakob Kessler had drilled it into his head that discipline would make money for them and keep them out of jail. And that greed would get them jailed, “or worse.”
Jakob Kessler, which Tristan figured was a bogus name, looked to Tristan like an accountant. He was an unimposing guy, maybe in his late fifties, with a full head of slicked-back silver hair, and maybe six feet tall but with posture somewhat stooped. There was something about those eyes, so pale that the irises looked more white than blue. Tristan thought from the beginning that he shouldn’t fuck with the guy, at least not until he saw how much money he was going to make through their association. He took the “or worse” to mean something very bad might happen to him if he disobeyed orders.
Kessler had explained the game to Tristan in that accent of his, saying, “If you steal money, the man can figure out how it happened. If you replace the card and steal nothing, he will be confused and try to think, when was it he had his last restaurant meal and mistakenly got given back the wrong card?”
“What if he goes to a gas station right after his workout and finds out he’s got a wrong card?” Tristan had asked Kessler.
His employer had said, “Even if he discovers the replacement card today, he is going to take time to ponder and to maybe call the last restaurant he visited. He will not think that the card could have been stolen from his wallet, because nothing else is missing-not his money, nothing. His belief will be that the restaurant made a mistake. And we may have the use of the card for perhaps one day. Perhaps two. Perhaps longer, you never know. So you see, Creole, why we do not steal money, rings, or wristwatches? It would end that specific game for us.”
When he spoke to Kessler, Tristan was conscious of his own grammar and diction, never talking street to the man. He said, “You mean at that specific location?”
“Exactly,” Kessler said. “We can visit the Gym-and-Swim at least once a week for a very long time if we are patient and not greedy. You must never surrender to greed.” Then his employer said, “There must be discipline.”
Tristan did not like the way Kessler’s eyes bore into his when he uttered that last word, and he didn’t think it wise to push it. Instead he said, “What’s the longest you ever had a card before it got canceled?”
“For almost a month,” Kessler said.
“And how much did your people charge on it?” Tristan asked.
Kessler chuckled and said, “You have a curious mind, Creole. I don’t mind that. I like curiosity in a man as long as he is loyal and obedient. To answer your question, many thousands were charged in small amounts for three weeks before the switched card was discovered and reported.”
“That ain’t-that’s not bad,” Tristan said. “Not bad at all.”
“Think of what one location like Gym-and-Swim could do for us in a few months, Creole,” Kessler said to him, “if we never surrender to greed.”
There it was again: greed. When Kessler said it that time, his eyes seemed to grow deader than Old Jerzy Krakowski. That’s where Tristan figured Old Jerzy was-dead. He figured that’s what Kessler really meant when he’d said that Old Jerzy’s employment had been terminated. He wondered if Old Jerzy had surrendered to greed.
Tempted though he was, memories of all of those conversations with Jakob Kessler made Tristan leave the Rolex inside the loafer. Tristan opened the wallet and found three credit cards. He removed the American Express card and, choosing from among the several cards that Kessler had given to him, replaced it with a stolen and expired American Express card.
Tristan picked six more lockers and was disappointed that only one had clothes inside. He removed a Visa card from the wallet in that locker, and was in the process of replacing it with a stolen and expired Visa card, when a customer in a Speedo walked into the locker room, drying off with a towel. Tristan was ready to bolt if this was the guy’s locker and he started yelling.
But the man, a flabby fifty-something with a bad transplant and a worse dye job, just smiled and said, “The pool’s too cold today in case you plan to try it.” He went to a locker on the other side of the benches and unlocked a lower one.
Tristan said to the guy, “I just had a workout on the treadmill. I’m ready to go home.”
Then a naked bodybuilder suddenly entered from the pool area, a white guy with shoulders like a buffalo who was all sleeved-out with tatts, from his wrists to his bulging biceps. On his belly he had an attention-getting tattoo of a semiautomatic pistol, muzzle down. With his shirt hanging open, it would look like he was packing, a handgun tucked inside his waistband. His head was shaved, and even his skull was inked-up. Just over his left ear, where a gold loop dangled, a tatt on his skull said, “What’re you looking at, bitch?”
Tristan froze. The guy was between him and the exit. If he was into this ’roid monster’s locker, he was one dead identity thief. But the guy walked past him and opened a locker near the end of the row.
Tristan hurriedly completed the switch, closed the locker, and left the locker room, making sure to slip past the desk when the kid was on the phone and not looking, because he hadn’t been in there long enough for a workout or a swim. His only regret was that the Rolex would’ve looked very fine on his wrist. He was definitely a Rolex type of dude.
Officer Sheila Montez, the heavy-lashed, sloe-eyed P2 who was currently the heartthrob of both surfer cops as well as half the midwatch, had just finished doing her nails with clear polish, all the while shooting peevish glances at her slightly older partner. Aaron Sloane, at age twenty-nine and with eight years on the LAPD, certainly did not look older than Sheila Montez, nor anyone else at Hollywood Station, and that included twenty-two-year-old rookies. The boyish-looking cop was too heavy-footed on brake and throttle for Sheila’s taste, and he caused her to smear polish on her fingertip.