Cool Heat (23 page)

She said she thought that was filmed at Fallen Leaf Lake.

Marco said, “Where your girl and her boyfriend were murdered?”

“Yes.” Then she said, pointing, “There’s a boat coming this way pretty fast. Maybe trouble.”

Sydney moved in a half circle and opened the throttle but held off making a fast run until they could make out what they were dealing with. Marco had his weapon out in one hand, the night glasses in the other.

“Looks like kids.”

The speedboat turned and headed west toward Tahoe City, rocking them in its wash.

Sydney turned southwest, past the Cal-Neva highlands and then Tahoe City.

***

Back at the Shaws’ they stayed up late and intended to do that for the next two nights to get adjusted to pulling an all-nighter Saturday to Sunday morning. They ate from the foods Marco had liberated from the Doc. Linguini, spinach, chicken. A real meal.

They went over and over the maps and drawings, studying the entry point and approach, fighting sleep to acclimate themselves to the night operation. She knew that eventually they would be in bed. That his hands would be all over her and that she’d surrender to him. When it happened, she marveled at the man’s ability to turn her aches and pains into something completely opposite.

Afterward, as he was making a predawn check of the perimeter, she lay on the bed feeling utterly fucked, looking forward to a good, long sleep. On the way into that sleep, she went over everything that had happened since Sunday.

She thought about the man whose face she broke with the dumbbell and then shot, his body lying somewhere up in the woods, becoming a feast for whatever creatures got to it first.

49

Ogden Thorp had a difficult time dealing with early guests and party preparations until he finally got word from Rouse that their boy was back. Rouse had him taken to the clinic owned by one of their golf and business associates, Doc Winters.

One in the morning, Thorp finally heard from Rouse that their boy was in the cabin and there was good news. “I’ll meet you in the gazebo in ten minutes.”

In the gazebo on the water’s edge of Thorp’s estate, with the work of setting up still going on behind him, Oggie drank scotch and paced as he waited for Rouse to get out of his golf cart and join him. Just getting Rouse to handle the situation when the guy returned had been a major deal. But Oggie had been bogged down with the early arrivals and Rouse had to handle it.

“How’s he doing?”

Rouse went for a drink. “The doc said he had a zygomatic fracture. They fixed him up with a mask like a goalie hockey mask. Makes him look like a cross between Hannibal Lector and an alien.”

“Well, Kora’s okay, right?”

“Yeah. Sit. You’ll need to sit.”

“None of your drama routines. Just tell me what he found out. Why was she with them? What happened?

Thorp saw in Rouse’s face that it was something. “Well, damnit?”

Rouse smiled. He was waiting for this moment. “They’re dead. They had Kora, threatening her. Wanted her to lure you out, and she wasn’t cooperating. He showed up, killed them both. Kora’s right on the water. They took the bodies down to her boat in the middle of the night, wrapped up in blankets. He anchored them with wire and the Kettle balls that Kora works out with. They’re at the bottom of the lake swimming, as the Italians like to say, with the fishes.”

“Are you serious?”

“Dead serious.”

Thorp was dumbstruck for a moment as he looked out at the lake. “Pour me another. Hallelujah. That calls for a toast. Nobody saw them?”

“Not that we’ve heard.”

Finally, Thorp thought. Finally that bitch is gone.

“Our boy is something else,” Thorp said. “He goes over there with his goddamn face broken and does the job. Jesus, that’s a real soldier.”

They toasted to their boy.

“I worry,” Rouse said. “He’s killed four people. That’s a lot of dead. They haven’t even found Corbin. Maybe we should send somebody over to get rid of the body.”

“Cillo’s was an accident. Corbin committed suicide or something. Who cares? Don’t go anywhere near that. And Cruz ran off to places unknown with his new girlfriend. Don’t worry so damn much. We own the right people and means, we get to decide what the truth is. And that, my friend, being a lawyer, you should know is the greatest power of all.”

They clinked glasses. Behind them, the party crews below were putting up the finishing touches for the big striped tents, outdoor dance floor, stage, and the movie screen behind the stage that would play, silently, over and over all night, the movie version of
The Great Gatsby
.

Thorp was buoyant, thrilled, in love with his hired gun. Getting rid of Jesup was a big relief, a huge weight off of him. He couldn’t wait to see Kora and find out the details of what those bastards had wanted her to do.

***

Friday night, when the festivities got underway, Thorp was in for another surprise.

“She’s at the Cal-Neva,” Rouse said, coming out on the veranda. “She’s coming over in a limo with, she says, the mystery guest.”

“What?”

***

From the moment they exited the limo, Kora and her masked mystery guest were something of a sensation. Kora, decked out in her white Daisy outfit, Leon in a black suit, black mask, perfect beside her. Thorp and Rouse met and escorted them up to his office, its deck overlooking the party and the lake.

They listened, enraptured, as Kora told them told them this wild story about how Corbin was blackmailing her and how she was kidnapped by Jesup and Marco Cruz and how they were going to use her to get to them and kill him.

“If Leon hadn’t shown up when he did, killed them both, you might be the ones dead.”

Kora seemed very different in some way. Beautiful and bold as he’d never seen her. And brilliant.

Touching Leon’s arm, she said, “You need to offer a big prize for anyone who can guess who he is. Not that they will, but it’ll be a lot of fun. Offer half a million or something. It’ll be really cool.”

It took a bit for Thorp to buy into it, but Kora proved right. Friday night was a winner all around. And it was just the opening act. The warm-up as people continued to stream in from Hollywood, Vegas, Silicon Valley, Texas.

The whole mystery-guest thing got bigger and bigger. Word went around of the half million to the winner. People came up to Thorp with their guesses. Saturday, it grew until the mystery guest was almost the centerpiece of the event.

And the pro played it to the hilt. He seemed to love the whole thing.

Rouse, as usual, wasn’t happy, especially when he learned from Kora that the pro decided he might take Thorp up on the idea of becoming a permanent part of the new world Thorp and his investors were planning. Rouse looked petrified at the idea. They watched as Leon walked among the guests.

“He’s great,” Kora said. “He’ll be a great addition. He can run all the security operations. And deal with problems.”

“Why don’t we just make him a
Tonka
overseer to senior management,” Rouse said with disgust.

Thorp and Kora both laughed.

The band was in full throat. Servers in their elegant outfits were carrying trays of drinks. The lakefront, gazebo, and dance floor festooned with lights.

Thorp said, “Daisy, this mystery guest is genius. It’ll be talked about and guessed at for years because we’ll never reveal who he is. Hell, I even had one drunk woman suggest it was Obama with his skin deliberately whitened for the occasion.”

Rouse, not amused, left, heading for the poker room. Kora watched him go. “Well, that’ll probably be the last we see him until Sunday afternoon.”

Thorp put his arm around Kora and escorted her into the crowd, calling people
old sport
and acting like he was king of the universe.

Enjoy it,
Kora thought,
it won’t last all that long.
Thorp, thinking he had the world in the palm of his hand, King of the Sierras on his throne, had no idea what was going on. He was in for a big shock.

He loved to brag how his ancestors had cleared the Indians from this land, housed and fed gold seekers, hung a few, brought Chinese coolies to help build the railroads. This was his land, his heritage.

Not for much longer, asshole,
Kora thought, as she smiled at admiring guests. Somebody was insisting it was Brad Pitt.

“He’s better looking and more available than Brad,” Kora said, drawing laughter.

Kora needed to break free and go text Marco Cruz, so she whispered to Thorp she needed to take a pee, and then kissed him on the ear, thinking that would be a nice place to put a bullet.

She needed to know if they had anyone else on the inside. If they did, explaining the mystery guest might be a problem. She hadn’t thought about that.

But when she contacted Jesup and Cruz, it seemed she was their only inside girl. “So far, so good,” Kora told Leon when she met him out by the gazebo.

50

The communication with Kora had gone well. Her head, as Marco had predicted, was very much in the game. They learned from Kora that the party was a huge success. So far, Kora knew nothing about what happened to the guy who’d killed Corbin.

Sydney kept tabs through her police-reporter friend on what was going on, and Corbin’s body hadn’t yet been found. He apparently had no friends coming over to see what he was up to.

Saturday night, Sydney, feeling the butterflies of excited tension, helped Marco get everything into the boat they would need. Marco had two escape plans in case everything went to hell. Sydney didn’t want to get into negative thinking, so she left that up to him. In her mind, if something went wrong, escape might be all but impossible given the security Thorp had roaming around his estate. Fortunately, they weren’t going anywhere near his party or his grounds.

It had been a week since the incident at the hatchery and for the first time, Sydney felt good physically. The wounds had enjoyed a few days without further trauma and were beginning to heal nicely.

That night, they ate a good meal, rested, then left in the boat at two in the morning. It was warm. A balmy, beautiful night on the empty, vast waters of the lake. They were both dressed in black, camouflage under their eyes, ball caps. Marco carried Dutch’s equipment. She brought Kora’s tapes and pics in a shoulder bag along with nylon rope, cutters, backup batteries.

Sydney drove the boat toward Brockway, leaving Tahoe City behind to the west, then past Carnelian Bay and Kings beach on the eastern side of the lake, where they crossed that invisible line that separated California and Nevada. They approached Incline east of the Cal Neva Highlands and entered Crystal Bay without encountering any other craft on the lake, since it was so late at night.

The denizens of Incline, usually in total darkness at night from any distance out on the lake, had a brightness this night. One big splash of colorful Christmas-style lights ringed the Thorp estate.

“I’ve been dreaming about this night for a long time,” Sydney said.

“Let’s hope it’s a dream come true,” Marco said. “This equipment works, Kora keeps it together, the lawyer doesn’t check his place every fifteen minutes, we’ll get into the house. Then, of course, we need to get into the office and then, if the safe is too much, we’re going to need some help.”

They discussed this possibility and decided at that point, Kora was going to have to find a way to bring Rouse over. They hoped that wasn’t necessary.

The closer they came, the more they could make out the lanterns and colored strings of lights. The band had a giant movie screen behind it. The tents and outdoor dance floor swarmed with what looked like hundreds of people having a riotous time.

Marco trained the night glasses on the party. “It’s in high gear,” he said. “Won’t be many sober folks around.”

“If they get their way,” she said, “that’s what the whole lake will look like every night. The Vegas Strip wrapped around from one end to the other like a big neon necklace. Okay in the desert maybe, but not here.”

She then drove the boat past Thorp’s and Rouse’s, turned, and moved in toward shore at Incline beach. They came in quiet as a shark slicing across the calm water, the boat engine’s hum silenced by the background big-band noise. Two hundred yards out, she slowed and took the binoculars. The party was in full throat, the guests in their Roaring ‘20s finest.

“I never get invited to these kinds of parties,” Marco said. “I bet you don’t either.”

“My invitations always get lost in the mail.”

The grounds were swarming with Mexican frijoleros in their waiter outfits. The ladies in their flapper dresses and hats out on the open-air dance floor, Lindy hopping all over the place.

“But look at the bright side—we’re both invited to this one,” Sydney said.

As they drew closer, they could see the big screen behind the band stage, the movie showing Nick Carraway losing his hat from the boat. The beginning? She couldn’t remember but thought so. The movie probably played nonstop, over and over. No way, if there was sound, anybody could hear anything with that big band.

The boat bobbing gently in the water, Sydney sent a text to Kora North and waited for her reply. With the party lights sucking up visibility, and dark mountains behind them, they were virtually invisible to anyone farther than fifty yards away. Rouse’s estate was dark except for ground-level Malibu lights along the walkways through his gardens.

“C’mon, Kora, respond,” Sydney said anxiously.

Finally, they got the text they were waiting for. Kora was ready per the plan. She had Rouse under close surveillance with the help of two girls who were working the gaming.

51

Kora went back outside after her last text. She found Leon in the middle of a small group trying to guess his identity. The reward was now rumored to be a cool million dollars.

Thorp, all decked out in a white suit exactly as Redford, came over to Kora. “The fountain swim is in about an hour. Get the girls together. This will be the icing on the cake.”

“We’ll be ready,” Kora said. Somebody called Thorp, and he went off to join some of his big investors.