The White Gold Score (A Daniel Faust Novella) (6 page)

As we edged up a long, narrow hallway, taking it slow, my eyes adjusted to the dark. No pictures on the ivory walls, no memorabilia. Dino wasn’t a sentimental guy. Up on the left, light spilled from an open archway, along with a peal of audience laughter as Conan O’Brien delivered his monologue.

I was about to peep around the threshold to see if I could spot Dino, when a cell phone trilled. The television volume dipped and a voice—hard, irritated—spoke from just a few feet away.

“Yeah,” said the man. Dino, I presumed, unless he had company over. Then a pause. “I don’t want to hear about it, Max. I don’t wanna hear about any goddamn magic flying cards or some chick who lifted your guy like he weighed ten pounds. If I didn’t already
know
you were on meth, I’d be worried right now. Cut the deadwood and go hire some more guys. No more of these pool-hall wanna-be gangsters, either. Get me some
soldiers
, all right? People with security training, military experience—spec ops if you can round a couple up. Tanesha
is
going to sign with us. That’s not up for discussion. And once that’s done, we’ve got another tour to prep for.”

Beside me, Caitlin frowned. The kind of frown, in my experience, that sailed just ahead of violence like thunder before the storm.

“Well, Monty’s not here anymore. We’re doing this my way now. Take out her security, get her alone, and convince her to sign the damn contract.” Dino paused, listening. “Jesus, Max, do I really have to spell it out for you? Just don’t mark up her face. Her looks are half the package. We’ll talk tomorrow, I got another call coming in.”

Dino listened for a moment, then replied in halting, broken Spanish. Caitlin edged toward the open doorway. I knew what she had in mind. Threatening an artist Caitlin liked was a great way to end up dead.

There went my chance to show off my amazing thieving skills. Once Caitlin went to work on him, the first responders would have to scoop the remains of Dino Costa into ten separate body bags. Still, it wasn’t that momentary pettiness that moved to me to touch her shoulder, shaking my head. It was the feeling that I was overlooking something. That there were angles in play I wasn’t accounting for, and we’d be missing out if she killed Dino here and now.

I crept forward, daring to peek around the edge of the threshold. Dino—untucked salmon shirt draped over his beer gut, sporting a graying ponytail—paced back and forth in front of the muted television set. Phone in one hand, a nearly empty glass of scotch in the other. And the glimmer of white gold on his wrist. The son of a bitch hadn’t just taken the watch off Monty’s dead body; he was wearing it like a trophy.

“Can we—can we do this in English, please?” He tossed back the last swig of scotch and set the glass down on the end table beside a long black leather sofa. “
Thank
you. Look, we’ve gotta make this happen. Winter Court is going on national tour next week. I’ve got everything in place. We do it just like last time. Simple, easy, everybody makes a mint.”

As he paced, he loosened the Rolex, dropping it next to the empty glass.

“Yes, ten keys, on credit.” He paused, frowning. “You know I’m good for it. Come on, have I ever not come through with—no. No,
señor
, I’m not—yes. Thank you.
Gracias
. I’ll call with the details as soon as we’re ready to move.”

Dino hung up and set down the phone, cursing under his breath as he traded it for the empty glass. He stomped off, presumably in search of more booze, and I craned my neck to follow as he vanished through another arch and into the dining room.

Now was my chance. I motioned for Caitlin to hold back, then scurried across the living room floor, head ducked, to drop down behind the sofa. The watch, abandoned on the end table, was just a quick grab away.

Instead, I took his phone. Moving on instinct now, letting my gut call the shots. I pulled up his incoming-call log. The “Max” he’d been talking to—I’d bet fifty bucks it was our friend with the tire iron from the fight on Tanesha’s porch—was listed as “Dunsborough Security Solutions.” The second call came from a Red Bee Supermarket, weirdly enough. I took out my own phone and copied down the numbers as fast as I could, fighting to keep my hands steady and listening for footsteps.

He was coming back. I put his phone right back where I’d found it and looked at the watch.

And left it there as I scrambled back into the shadows, out of sight.

In the darkened hall, Caitlin gave me a quizzical look and wriggled her empty hands. I shook my head and nodded for her to follow me, back to the kitchen, to the open door and our waiting getaway. We slipped out of the house in silence. Dino never knew we were there.

A plan percolated in the back of my head, a map with lines drawn between the players in this little drama. Dino. Monty. Tanesha.

And in the intersection of those lines, an opportunity waiting to happen.

*     *     *

Caitlin and I sat snug in a scarlet booth at Fred 62, an all-night retro diner in Los Feliz where black-and-white movie stars adorned the wall and hipsters clustered at the long central bar for black coffee and breakfast at midnight. Caitlin ordered milkshakes—chocolate peanut butter for me, strawberry banana for her—and they came tall and thick as cement in fifties-style fluted glasses.

“Best in the city,” Caitlin said, tearing the paper from a fat plastic straw. “So, now that we’re away from the scene of the crime, mind explaining why we apparently forgot to
commit
the aforementioned crime?”

“Would I be remiss in guessing that you’ve got plans of your own for Dino Costa?”

She wrinkled her nose. “After what I heard? I like Tanesha’s music, Daniel. I’d like there to be more of it for me to enjoy in the future, and art produced under duress is rarely worthy of being called art. You said yourself you’d have no problem seeing Dino dead. So why did you stop me? And why didn’t you at least steal the watch so you can finish the job you’re being paid for?”

I took a long sip of the shake. It tasted like a frozen peanut-butter cup melting on my tongue.

“Greenbriar’s paying me a measly two grand to play his errand boy and put my neck on the line while he sits back home in Vegas. And the more I think about it, the more it sticks in my craw.”

“Which part?” Caitlin asked, the tip of her straw brushing her bottom lip. “The two thousand dollars, or playing the errand boy?”

“Both. Sure, I could do my magic-detective routine, lay Monty to rest and collect my pay, and put this whole mess in the rearview. And you could rip Dino’s throat out to keep Tanesha safe—which makes you pretty much the most hardcore music fan alive, by the way. But we’re
both
thinking too small.”

“Enlighten me,” she said.

“We know Dino’s hooked up with some shady customers, and based on that second phone call, we know he’s got a new coke deal on the horizon. Probably the same scam he pulled on Curtis Rake: sending his “roadies” along with the drugs stashed in the tour cases. Selling blow at every stop, making bank, and the artists are none the wiser.”

“Unless they’re found out, in which case Dino can blame it on the musicians,” Caitlin murmured, frowning. “Walking away with clean hands.”

“Bottom line, there’s about to be a lot of money and product swirling around Dino’s orbit.” I lifted my glass. “So how about we wring him dry and burn him down?”

Caitlin showed her teeth. Her glass clinked against mine.

“All the way down,” she replied.

We hit the streets bright and early the next morning, tracking down the grocery store on Dino’s phone with a reverse directory search. We followed the trail to East Los Angeles, down a warren of twisty streets lined with bodegas, bars, and broken windows reinforced with chicken wire. The Red Bee was a smallish store, windows plastered with the daily deals scrawled on big sheets of construction paper, shaded by an angled cherry-red plastic roof. The dusty sign on the door said
Open
, but the locals were staying away in droves.

“Not a popular place to shop,” Caitlin mused.

“I’m thinking groceries aren’t their main line of income. See that alley? Pull around. I want a look at the back of the store.”

Loading-bay doors. A delivery truck in faded paint, rusting away in the morning sun. And a few employees hanging out, smoking and kicking loose rocks around. Most grocery stores made you wear an apron and a name tag. These guys wore a uniform of bandannas, matching gym shoes, and prison ink on their shirtless chests, and they turned to give us hard-eyed stares as we rumbled on by.

“Keep going,” I said to Caitlin. “And turn left at the corner. Hopefully they’ll just assume we’re a couple of lost tourists.”

“What did you see?” she asked.

“Trouble,” I said and dug out my phone while Caitlin drove.

When it came to recreational substances of the forbidden variety, Jennifer Juniper was my faithful guide in the wilderness. Yes, that was her real name. Her parents were hippies. She picked up on the fourth ring.

“Hey, sugar,” she drawled, sounding just a little bit off.
The old wake-and-bake
, I thought.

“Hey, Jen, question for you. Out in LA, what set wears blue Chucks and blue and black bandannas?”

“Narrow it down for me. See any ink?”

“Yeah, but we didn’t get close enough to read it. I did see one guy with a big tat on his chest, a hand with the pinky and index finger sticking up. Like throwing up the horns at a metal concert.”

“Ooh. Sounds like MS-Thirteen, or a set claiming to be down with ’em. Steer clear, Danny—those guys are bad news.”

“Define ‘bad news.’”

“They’ll kill your whole family for looking at ’em sideways. Bad enough news for ya?”

I winced. “Yeah. They make any waves in the coke game?”

“Sure. They’re arm in arm with the Sinaloa Cartel.”

There it was. Dino’s supplier. His contact at the “supermarket” must have been his link to the cartel and their cocaine pipeline. I thought back to Dino’s phone call and a detail that stuck in my memory.

“I’m gonna ask a really dumb question. Is there any chance, ever, for any reason, these guys would operate on credit? Give out product on a promise to pay ’em back later?”

“To a junkie? Hell no. To a street-level dealer? Sure. Happens all the time.”

Not the response I was expecting. “You’re kidding me.”

“Nope,” Jennifer said. “Not to just anybody, of course, but if you’ve got the right vouchers, they’ll kick you some powder on credit. It’s coke, Danny. Selling coke in the United States is like selling ice water in the desert. You can’t
not
make money at it. Of course, you gotta pay ’em back on time, unless you’re looking to die in a bad way.”

Listening to my gut was feeling like a better idea all the time.

“Jennifer,” I asked, “would you like some cocaine?”

“I’m not in college anymore, Danny. Nah, the hardest stuff I do these days is weed, maybe some E, the occasional handful of shrooms. You shouldn’t touch that stuff either. I know you. With your personality, you’d like coke
way
too much.”

I sighed. “Not for personal consumption. To sell. See, I know this guy who’s about to come into possession of ten kilos of coke, and it looks like some cowboys from Vegas might be getting ready to rob him blind.”

“Now you’ve got my attention,” she said. “What’s the plan, sugar?”

“A little bit of hustle, a little bit of muscle.”

“That’s my favorite combo. I’ll be on the next flight out.”

Caitlin had booked us a room at the Orchid Suites in Hollywood, a stone’s throw from Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the Walk of Fame. The room was simple, clean, eggshell white, with a balcony window overlooking the rectangular swimming pool. I could have stepped back in time thirty years, and everything would have looked exactly the same.

A knock at the door announced Jennifer’s arrival, sunlight glinting off her blueberry-tinted Lennon glasses, one tattoo-sleeved arm dragging a battered roll-on suitcase. She threw her free arm around me, a quick tight hug, then waved to Caitlin as I shut and latched the door behind her.

“Cait,” Jennifer said, “lookin’ good.”

“And you,” Caitlin replied. “Daniel tells me this is your field of expertise.”

“When I was little, my mama taught me about two things: blood magic and bootleg hooch. I’ve diversified my portfolio considerably in the years since.”

“If we jack this shipment,” I said, “you’re sure you can line up a buyer?”

She left her suitcase by the door and flopped down on the bed, stretching her sneakered feet straight up in the air.

“Damn, that feels good. Think I had about three inches of legroom on that flight. Now just to be clear, Danny, I’m not about to pick a fight with those MS-Thirteen boys,
or
the Sinaloa. This guy you’re looking to take down—what’s his deal? How connected is he?”

“Record producer. Not a very reputable one. The drug game’s a sideline for him.”

“Hell of a sideline. You’re sure he said
ten
keys?”

I nodded. “He lines up national tours for his acts, then sends his crew along to deal at every stop. Not sure how often he pulls this routine, maybe once a year?”

“Why?” Caitlin asked her. “How much is ten kilograms worth?”

Still flat on her back, feet pointed at the ceiling, Jennifer poked the air with her fingers as if working an invisible calculator.

“Let’s see. Current price in Colombia is eighteen hundred a key, but bring that over to the States and—well, it varies by state. Some are drier than others, but to use our homestead as a reference? Street value in Vegas is twenty to twenty-five grand. Each.”

“Wait,” I said. “So this shipment could be worth a quarter of a
million
dollars?”

“Pop your eyes back into your head, sugar. That’s best-possible-world pricing, and we ain’t gonna get that. For starters, I’m gonna have to hire a mule to ferry this stuff back home—”

“Couldn’t we do that?” Caitlin asked.

“You wanna drive about three hundred miles in a rented car with enough coke to put all three of us behind bars until we qualify for Medicare? I’ll answer that for ya. No. You do not. We’ll use this guy I know; he’s a ghost on wheels. Never been sniffed at, let alone caught, and he’s rock-solid trustworthy. So he’ll take a small chunk of the profit.”

I paced the room, running numbers in my head, as Caitlin edged closer to the bed and eyed Jennifer. “And then?”

“Understand I’m not selling this on the street level. It’d take forever, and the dealers on my payroll don’t run in the kinda circles where Peruvian marching powder is the flavor of the day. Your average pothead’s got no interest in blow. So I’ll hook up with some midlevel specialty dealers and offer them the product—or pieces of it, if they can’t afford the whole kit and caboodle—at a wholesale discount. We get a lot less money, but we get it next week as opposed to the cash trickling in over the next decade or so, and we’re not caught with the goods if the DEA comes sniffing around.”

“Define ‘a lot less,’” I said.

Jennifer tapped at her invisible calculator.

“Figure five percent for the mule, but he’ll probably go for a flat fee if I ask nice. Might have to break the cargo up between three distributors I know. One’s stingy as hell, but I can sweet-talk the other two into a fifty-fifty split. Then there’s five percent for Nicky Agnelli, since you
know
that son of a bitch is gonna hear about our score ten seconds after we get back in town. I hate payin’ the Nicky Tax, but he’ll keep Metro off our backs while we get the deal done.”

I couldn’t argue that. Nicky was the de facto boss of Las Vegas, and he had his fingers in every seedy slice of pie. By blackmail, bribery, or both, he had heavy pull in Metro, too. Keeping him happy was the difference between vice detectives looking the other way, and a full-on SWAT team ramming down your front door.

Caitlin slid onto the bed, lying on her side and propping herself up on one arm as she looked into Jennifer’s eyes. “And the grand total is?”

More air tapping. “Hold on. Carry the three, divide by…okay, there’s a lot of wiggle room, and the more people we gotta hire for this job the less take-home pay we get, but I’m thinkin’ it’ll come to somewhere between seventy and eighty grand in profit. Call it a three-way split, so around twenty-three to twenty-six thousand dollars for each of us.”

“Each,” I echoed.

“Each.” Jennifer tilted her head, glancing at Caitlin. “On the high end, specifically, twenty-six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six dollars. And sixty-six cents, repeating. Figured you might appreciate that.”

Caitlin grinned. “You have a head for numbers.”

“And a bod for all
kinds
of things,” Jennifer replied, wriggling one eyebrow.

“I don’t know if I believe you,” Caitlin said. “I might need a demonstration.”

I wasn’t sure what jarred me more: the idea of twenty-five thousand dollars in my pocket, or watching my girlfriend flirt with my ex-girlfriend. This was shaping up to be one of my stranger days.

“Not to change the subject,” I said, “but to change the subject: the mark, Dino Costa, he’s taking this whole shipment on credit. When it goes missing, what are the odds his MS-Thirteen buddies or the Sinaloa come gunning for us?”

“Long as we cover our tracks, zilch,” Jennifer said. “Dino’s the buyer, so it’s his responsibility to pay for the product, no matter what happens. These people ain’t big on excuses. He can’t pay up, he is
done
. They’ll make an example out of him.”

Caitlin looked my way. “Do you think he can cover the loss? Judging from his home, he’s not in want of wealth.”

“I think he might be. Curtis Rake—”

“Big Rig?” Jennifer asked. “You met Big Rig and you didn’t invite me?”

“Didn’t know you were a fan.”

“‘Booty Thumpin’’? That is my
jam
.”

Jennifer bicycled her legs while snapping her fingers to the beat in her head. I took a deep breath.

“
Anyway
, Curtis told me Dino’s overextended. He’s investing all his cash—legal and otherwise—into some streaming-music start-up. He sounded pretty hot to get this coke run lined up. If he’s got all his eggs in one basket, losing the shipment could be enough to sink him for good.”

Caitlin gave me a sly smile. “So the best case for him is bankruptcy. He has to sell everything he owns to pay the cartel back.”

“And worst case for him—best for us—is if he can’t even manage that. The Sinaloa kill Dino for us, and
nobody
comes looking for ten kilos of stolen coke.”

“Got a feelin’ you’ve got something more complicated in mind than a straight-up hijack,” Jennifer told me.

“Dino’s got to be feeling confident right now. Like you said on the phone, selling coke is like selling water in the desert. Hard to go bust on a sure thing. So what if we gave him a reason to overextend his cash reserves just a little bit further? Make him spend more than he ever would if he wasn’t confident that he was about to make some serious drug money.”

“What do you have in mind?” Caitlin asked.

“Offer up another ‘sure thing.’ We know he’s desperate to sign big names to this streaming venture, and we know he wants Tanesha bad. What if we convinced her to say yes—in exchange for a nice fat signing bonus? She wouldn’t have to follow through with it. Dino’ll be dead before the ink dries on the contracts.”

Caitlin shook her head. “While you are quite skilled at your chosen vocation, pet, reading people is
my
specialty. Did you notice how she cringed at the mere mention of his name? And that was before she knew Dino murdered Monty Spears. No, there’s no force capable of compelling Tanesha to cooperate like that—none that I care to inflict upon her, anyway.”

“Idea ain’t a bad one, though,” Jennifer mused. “Could work if we had another musician on the crew, somebody good—I mean
real
good—who Dino might go for.”

I shrugged. “I’ve got safecrackers, wheelmen, and grifters on my speed dial. I can call a guy who makes corpses, and another guy who makes corpses disappear. No musicians. That’s a little outside my usual circle.”

“
Is
it?” Caitlin said archly, rolling off the bed and landing in a crouch. She rose gracefully to her full height.

“Well, yeah, generally it’s not the kind of—”

The sound that trilled from her throat was like a pitch-perfect instrument given human form, an operatic diva running through her warm-up scales with the skill of a master. Then she sang a cappella, the words flowing around me like velvet smoke. It took me a minute to place the lyrics, an old Duran Duran tune. I stood stunned until she finished the first chorus. Then her song faded as she took a bow.

“You can sing?” I asked. “I mean, holy shit, you can
sing
.”

“Got that right,” Jennifer said, looking like she’d just been blindsided by a truck.

“How soon we forget,” Caitlin told me. “I sang for you in your dreams.”

“Sure, but that was, you know, a
dream
. I can fly in my dreams. Doesn’t mean jumping off the hotel balcony is a good idea.”

“I haven’t had cause to perform in quite some time. Hmm. Come to think of it, last time I set foot on a stage was…well, never mind when it was. Suffice to say this isn’t my first visit to Hollywood, but Los Angeles wasn’t
quite
as large back then. Or as smoggy. The parties were delightful, though.”

I snapped my fingers, feeling the plan come together. “All right, this is good. So we dangle you in front of Dino, get him all hot to sign you, and hold out until he forks over a nice stack of cash. Enough cash that when his coke goes missing, there’ll be no way for him to recover. We split town with the money
and
the drugs, the cartel kills Dino, and dinner at Joel Robuchon’s is on me.”

“Good deal,” Jennifer said. “Only one problem. Cait’s gonna have to cut a demo tape. We got the singer, but we
don’t
got the songs.”

“I have a thought on that,” Caitlin replied. “As I said, Tanesha won’t help directly. That doesn’t necessarily mean she won’t lend us a hand behind the scenes.”