“Maybe your dog crapped on somebody’s lawn,” Jay offered.
“I don’t think so,” Howard said. “We don’t have a dog.”
“Maybe you should get one. One with big teeth.”
The car hop arrived and pulled the rental car to a stop. Michaels took a five from his wallet and gave it to the man, who looked at it as if it were a piece of used toilet paper. Lord, what kind of tips was he used to getting?
Inside, Michaels said, “Find us a place to go, Jay.”
“I’m on the case, boss.”
34
When Tad woke up, he noticed a couple things: First, he was on the deck, with the beach umbrella doing its best to keep him in the shade, but starting to lose that battle.
Second, there were some men with guns wandering around in the house.
Fortunately, he recognized one of the gunslingers, so he realized the bodyguards had showed up, and Bobby must have decided to hire them.
Shit happened when you went into hibernation. You got used to it.
He looked at his watch, and the date showed he’d been out for a couple of days. Not too bad.
His head felt as if somebody had opened it with a dull shovel and poured half the beach into it. He was way beyond grainy. All the rest of him just hurt. Bad.
He managed to get to his feet, using the umbrella for support, and headed toward the bathroom. Once, after sleeping for a couple of days, he had stood over the toilet peeing for more than a minute, on and on, must have pissed half a gallon. For some reason, his bladder never let go while he was out, and he counted that as a blessing.
The guy with the gun that Tad recognized nodded at him. “Hey, Tad.”
Tad nodded in return. The name came to him, slow, but there. “Adam. How’s it going?”
“Good. Bobby’s out. He’s supposed to be back in a while.”
“Cool.”
He shambled into the bathroom, cranked the shower up, then stripped. He waited a few seconds for the water to heat up, then stepped into the shower. He stank, and he could pee just as well in the shower.
He needed to get to his stash. He wasn’t gonna be able to function real well for a couple of days yet, no matter what, but certainly not straight.
He opened his mouth, let the needle spray rinse the taste of tar and mold out, spat three or four times, then swallowed a couple of mouthfuls of the hot water. He knew he was dehydrated, and if that got bad enough, his electrolytes could get wacky enough to stop his heart. He’d known guys on speed who hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for a couple of days who’d died that way. Heart just stopped beating.
He stayed in the shower for ten minutes, letting the spray pound him. He felt a little better when he stepped out onto the cool tile floor and started drying himself with the big fluffy beach towel. A little better wasn’t going to cut it.
His stash was in the wheel well of his car’s trunk, and the car was parked in the lot of the sandwich place two down from them. When Bobby was running in paranoid mode, which was most of the time, he wouldn’t let Tad keep anything in the house that might get them busted. Not even in the car, if Tad wanted to park it in the driveway or garage or anywhere inside the security gate. Nothing more than you can swallow, Bobby told him, and close enough so you can do that if somebody crashes the gate.
Tad mostly tried to do it that way. For a while, he buried his drugs on the beach. He had kept his stuff in a mason jar with a plastic lid so no coin-hunter or narc would find it with a metal detector. He would sneak out late at night and bury the jar in the sand. But he’d lost one that way, completely spaced out on where he’d hidden it. And another time, somebody’s dog had dug up one of the jars, so he’d stopped that. The walk to the car wasn’t that far, half a block, but of course, it felt like a thousand miles after a session with the Hammer.
Well, there was no help for it. He wasn’t going to send Adam or one of his hard-ass friends to collect his dope. He didn’t trust anybody that much except Bobby, and Bobby wouldn’t do it anyway.
Tad slipped on a pair of raggy black sweatpants, a black T-shirt, and a pair of black zorrie sandals. Might as well get to it. It was gonna take a while.
“I’m walking over to where I parked my car,” he told Adam. “Don’t fucking shoot me when I come back.”
“Why waste a bullet?” Adam said. “You look like somebody could kill you with a hard look. Hell, you look dead already.”
“You need to work on your material, Adam. I heard that one already.”
“Lots of times, I bet.”
Tad thought about his route for a minute. Out the front gate and along the road was longer. But walking along the beach through the sand would be harder. The road would be noisier, all the traffic. The beach would be hot. He’d have to walk around cars parked on the highway. He didn’t need any more obstacles at the moment. Until he got his medicine mixed and working, just breathing was an effort.
Okay, the beach. He headed for the deck stairs.
Michaels said, “One of those three or four houses?”
Howard drove, Michaels rode shotgun, Jay sat in the back. As they idled slowly along the highway, looking toward the beach, Jay said, “Got to be. Permit specifies this part of the beach. That sandwich shop over there is in the movie. I pulled it up and scanned location shots. That house to the far left was built two years ago, so it wasn’t there then.”
“Do we have owners on these?”
“Yes. The pinkish one is owned by the actress Lorrie DeVivio. She got it in the divorce settlement with her fifth ex-husband Jessel Tammens, the movie producer.”
“DeVivio is what… sixty and rich? Hard to image her making and peddling dope,” Howard said.
“Ah, you know the old movie stars, eh, General?”
“She won an Oscar,” Howard said. “And not for her looks.”
“What about the other houses?”
“Second one belongs to the chairman of the board of the Yokohama-USA Bank. He’s also sixty-something and also richer than God.
“Third one, the pale blue and white one, is owned by a corporation called Projects, Inc. Some kind of corporate retreat, maybe. I’m running down the incorporation stuff now. They are out of Delaware.
“Fourth one belongs to one Saul Horowitz. Don’t know who Solly is, and the searchbots haven’t been more forthcoming so far.”
“That sounds promising. Pull over there, into that restaurant lot, and let’s think about this for a minute,” Michaels said.
All four of the houses had security gates and fences, at least to the road side. As Howard parked the car, a Mercedes convertible arrived in front of the third house and pulled up to the gate. The car’s top was down, and a sun-bleached blond, deeply tanned young man in a Hawaiian shirt who looked like a surfer held up an electronic remote and pointed it at the heavy steel gate, which slowly swung open to admit his car. He pulled into the drive, and the gate started to close behind him.
“Yo, kahuna dude!” Jay said, in a valley-boy voice, “Surf’s up!” Jay held up his hand, the middle fingers closed, his thumb and little finger extended. He waggled his hand back and forth. “Mahalo!”
“Thank you, Brian Wilson. You get the license plate number?” Michaels said.
“Crap! I’m sorry, boss—”
“It’s a vanity,” Howard said. “P-R-O-J-E-C-T-S.”
“Run it,” Michaels ordered.
Jay, chagrined at his failure to catch the number, dialed up the California DMV and logged in, using his Net Force access code.
A few seconds later, he said, “Car is owned by Projects, Inc.,” he said. “Big surprise there, huh? Looks like you get wheels to go with the house. Nice perks.”