I thought back to the two times I’d met the man. It was hard to imagine him golfing or sitting on the deck of a boat. Or doing anything remotely human.
“It’s all just a warm-up. They push off from here and head down to Mexico, and on their way they start playing poker. No limit hold-’em. Seven, eight guys. Half-million-dollar buy-in. No credit. Strictly cash. So they’ve got like four million dollars sitting on that boat, Mike. Can you imagine what I was thinking when he told me that? I mean, here he is, standing right in my store, sharing this with me like it was no big deal. This man I’d never even seen before. Anyway, he said he came in to buy some more wine for the boat, but I’m thinking, the universe woke up this morning and decided you’ve got way too much money, sir. That’s the only reason why you’re here.”
Ramona was sitting next to him. She smiled and shook her head.
“I wasn’t quite sure how to make the play,” Julian said. “It was such a short window of time, you know? He was heading back to the boat. They’d be leaving the next day. All that money on its way to Mexico. I was thinking, hell, I don’t know… what could I do? He seemed so open and candid about everything. At least if I could spend a little more time with him, maybe I’d see an angle. So I told him I’d get together the best wine I had, some really nice bottles, bring them all out to the boat personally. And he was like, that would be very kind of you. Come on out, I’ll show you around the boat. The whole thing, you know? Really friendly about it. Which should have been a red flag right there. But I was stupid! Four million dollars. It makes you lose your balance.
“So I go out to the marina. He’s got the boat there. Biggest boat in the place, by far. Just dwarfs everything else. It wasn’t his, remember. He just leases it for the month. Complete with crew, I’m sure. Anyway, Ramona and I are both there, we’ve got a few cases of wine with us. Ramona’s put together some nice flower arrangements. Some cigars. The whole thing, right? We’re walking all this stuff up the gangway, Ramona’s wearing her bikini top, flirting with Mr. Bigshot there. Everybody else is still on shore, so the rest of the boat is pretty much empty. I figure I can take a little walk around the cabins, right? Take some flowers with me? Open up a few doors, see what’s inside. If he sees me, I can just play it off, say I was putting some flowers in the cabins, being a nice guy. Going the extra mile for him. I mean, it’s not like I expected the money to just be sitting out there in a pile or anything, but if I could figure out where it was… at least we might have a shot, right? If it was all in a safe, maybe Lucy could open it, I was thinking. She’d been working real hard on it back then, and I was just hoping, if the safe wasn’t a great one…”
He stopped to think about it for a moment. Ramona’s smile had disappeared.
“It was really dumb, I know. To just improvise like that. I totally lost my head. Of course, the whole thing turned out to be a setup, anyway. I’m poking around in the cabins, and I actually find the safe. It’s right there in one of the cabins. Not a great-looking safe, either. I was pretty sure Lucy could open it. So I’m excited now. When all of a sudden I hear this voice from behind me. I turn around, and there’s this other guy there with a gun pointed at me. Some guy I didn’t see before. Real strange-looking. You ever meet him? He’s got this lazy kind of face, like he’s half-asleep all the time?”
I nodded. Oh yes. We’ve met.
“I started giving him my excuse. ‘I was just putting some flowers down here, friend.’ But he’s not buying it. Hell, it sounded lame to me. So he gets me up on deck and there’s Ramona with Mr. Bigshot, and all of a sudden nobody’s friendly anymore. He sits me down and he asks me to give him one good reason why he shouldn’t just take me with them out into the ocean and dump our bodies there. I’m trying to think of something to say, when Ramona pipes up. ‘Because sharks don’t like Mexican,’ she says. Which gets the guy thinking. He says, ‘But your boyfriend here isn’t Mexican.’ And she says, ‘Who’s talking about him?’ Which got this guy laughing, at least. But then he got real quiet, and he said, ‘Somebody told me you guys were good. So I had to see for myself. Is this the kind of scam you usually run? Wait until a rich man shows up on a boat? Go snooping around the cabins?’ And I’m like, ‘No, sir. Not at all, sir. And how did you even hear about us in the first place?’ Because at that time there was no way he could have known about us. I mean, no way. But he gets real close to me and he says, ‘I know everything. That’s all you have to remember.’ And I’m thinking, okay, this is it. We’re dead. The lazy-looking guy is getting ready to put a bullet in our heads.
“Then he let us go. Under two conditions, he said. Number one, well, thanks for all the wine and cigars and flowers. That was very thoughtful of you to deliver all of this stuff to the boat. And number two, here’s a phone number. ‘If you guys live long enough to learn how to do this right,’ he says, ‘then you’ll probably need a good boxman.’ We just have to remember to always pay him ten percent off the top. Which is how we got to meet the Ghost.”
“Lucy told you about going to visit him,” Ramona said. “About her trying to learn from him?”
I nodded.
“Things have a way of working out,” Julian said. “We got you instead.”
Yeah, things worked out, I thought. And here I am. Working with a guy who tried to set up the wrong target. The absolutely worst target in the world.
No wonder he’s so careful now.
____________________
About a month later, the next score finally came together. It was time to get back to work.
The mark was a smooth, suit-with-no-socks kind of guy who lived up in Monterey, apparently in some ridiculous house perched right on the ocean. He’d been coming down to L.A. every week on some sort of Hollywood-related business. He liked expensive wine, and he really liked women who were beautiful in unique, quirky ways. Which is where Lucy came in. She was playing the bait, just like Gunnar had told me.
So on a clear day in April, Julian got his car out of the garage and we drove all the way up the coast to Monterey. Six hours up the Pacific Coast Highway. We stayed overnight in a little hotel, and then the next day it was time to take down Mr. Moon Face. That was our pet name for him.
Julian, Ramona, and Lucy went to his house for dinner that evening. Mr. Moon Face fancied himself quite the gourmet, so he made some kind of poached sea bass or some damned thing and they drained a couple bottles of wine Julian had brought up with him. While the man was distracted, Julian took out a little razor blade and sliced a thin line through the electric foil that ran around the perimeter of one of the man’s seaside windows. All of the windows were foiled like this, of course, but now when the man activated his security system, the one window would show a disconnection in the closed circuit. When he looked at the window and found nothing wrong, he’d have to call the security company to get it fixed. Of course, if he was on his way out for a night on the town and a possible shot at sleeping with the young Lucy, the little chink in his security armor would get put aside until the next day.
When they finally left the house, it was time for Gunnar and me to do our thing. The house was close to the road and to some other ridiculous houses hanging on the cliff, so we only had one good way in. We took the car Gunnar had rented in town and parked down by the shore, at one of the observation points. We climbed down the rocks and made our way across the beachfront, finally climbing our way back up to the house. It was a longer climb than either of us had anticipated, and the weather was turning bad fast. The wind picked up. The waves below us were getting higher. It was dark and hard to see exactly where we were going.