Criminal Karma (27 page)

“What would you have done if they pushed it?”

“Fought them.”

Reggie nodded. “I had that black cop measured.”

“I know you did,” I said. “That big prick had his legs too far apart for his own good. If the shit went down, he would have been singing soprano at the next smoker.”

I pulled into the alley behind the flophouse a few minutes before two, popped the trunk, and got out, leaving the engine running. Reggie slid over behind the wheel while I retrieved the loot.

“Park wherever you can find a spot,” I told him. “We’ll take the car back first thing tomorrow. Be sure to check the street-sweeping signs so we don’t get towed.”

The back door that opened into the kitchen was bolted from the inside. Walking to the front, I saw a glimmer of light in the derelict house where Ozone Pacific slept. I was surprised he was awake this late.

Upstairs, I emptied out the bag of gold and the envelope of bonds. There were seventy-three Krugers. If gold was at $300, the coins were worth twenty-two grand. If it was at $400, they would be worth nearly thirty. The unexpected windfall put helium in my heart, made it light. The grin I had worn earlier, when we opened the safe, came back from wherever it had gone during the cop encounter.

The face value of the bonds was $18,300. The oldest issues had passed their maturity dates, which made them worth much more than face value. The newest issue was from the previous summer. It would be worth a little more than half of its nominal. All together, there was probably $40,000 worth of government paper. I could lay them off for 20 percent of that, another eight grand.

I took the diamonds out and held them up to the light, marveling at their beauty. Folding the necklace in my hand so that a single rose-colored
crystal protruded between my thumb and the side of my index finger, I scratched a crude
OM
symbol in the mirror, then put the jewels back in the blue velvet case.

Fahid would be very happy.

But not as happy as me.

The money was the main thing, of course. But I also felt a glow of professional pride—pride in a tricky, high-stakes heist well-planned and executed, a feeling like I used to get in the construction business when a new room was latched solidly onto an old house, electrical and plumbing work up to code, interior paint job perfect, siding and roofing materials buttoned tight to protect the structure from the elements.

I was glad to be hurting Baba, too. I didn’t like his yogic con game in the least. I didn’t like what he was doing to Evelyn. I hated him because of Mary.

I hoped the real estate deal collapsed on him like an iron bridge.

When I hid the loot in the compartment I had constructed beneath the floorboards under my bed, I kept out one gold coin on an impulse. I wanted to show it to Ozone, to let him see the difference between plastic and real gold.

When I went back downstairs, I found Budge standing in the middle of the living room with his eyes closed. I couldn’t tell if he had stopped to think about something or had passed out on his feet, sleeping like a horse in its stall.

“Budge.” I tapped him on the shoulder, ready to catch him if he fell or duck if he took a swing at a dream-world enemy.

He opened his eyes and looked at me blankly for several seconds, then whipped his head back and forth rapidly, like a boxer shaking off a blow. When he recognized me, he smiled broadly.

“Rob!”

“Yeah!”

“Whatcha doin’, man?”

“Just going to check on Ozone. I saw his light on.”

“Little Oz! I love that kid, man.”

“I know you do.”

“Hey, Rob!”

“What?”

“You got that little blonde upstairs?” He spoke in the sly whisper he always
used when talking about women or sex while he was drunk, nodding his head to try and provoke an affirmative answer.

“No.”

“Don’t let that get away, man. That’s some sweet shit. Those pink shorts! I ever got my hands on her little behind I’d lick that brown eye clean as a whistle.”

“It’s a thought,” I said.

“Got to lick the brown eye, Rob,” he said with conviction. “Girls like it. Makes ‘em squeal and squirm.” He wiggled his big body to illustrate and lost his balance, stumbling a couple of steps sideways before getting his feet back under him. “That little girl had me around, she wouldn’t need toilet paper.”

“I’ll let her know,” I said. “You better get to bed.”

“Yeah, um drunker na skunk.”

Listing like a sailboat in the wind, my burly housemate staggered toward the hallway. I watched until he made it into his bedroom, then went out the front door and along the sidewalk to the abandoned house next door. There was a notice from the city taped to the front door, stating that the house was unfit for human habitation and had been condemned. Discenza wasn’t wasting any time.

I left the door open for the light that filtered in from the street and picked my way through the debris on the living room floor to the hallway. Ozone Pacific’s door was open, pale gold leaking into the hall.

I heard someone crying as I went toward the room. The boy was sitting on the floor wearing nothing but his old jeans. His cowboy boots and cowboy shirt were beside him on his sleeping bag. There was a book open in front of him and his shoulders shook as he dribbled his plastic coins onto the colorful pages.

“I’m rich,” he sobbed.

Glimpsing Ozone’s private world
, I decided to give him not one but ten of the Krugerrands, or the value of them, to help him get off the street and do something with his life. Both of our houses were condemned, and I didn’t want to leave him wandering homeless when I skipped town.

“Those coins are plastic,” I said from the doorway.

Ozone looked around, frightened, and turned his back toward me as if shielding himself from a blow.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said, crossing the room to stand behind him. “It’s me, your friend Rob.”

“Hi, Rob,” he sniffled, gathering up the coins.

In the light of the caged forty-watt bulb dangling above him I saw that the volume open on the floor was a children’s picture book filled with farmyard scenes. It was old and worn with torn pages, as if it had been
much handled. The lush illustrations showed a red rooster crowing in front of a yellow sun, and cows and horses grazing in green pastures.

“Don’t you know those coins are worthless?” I said, trying to draw him back toward reality. “You’re not rich. You can’t spend plastic money.”

“I am, too,” he said, his pathetic tone tinged with anger. “My mom had a lot of money that she showed me. She told me we are rich.”

“Did she finally show up?”

“No,” he said miserably. “She never came back. I waited all day, but then I got scared and tried to find her. She told me not to cross Pacific so I walked down to the end of the beach, looking for her. I was afraid to go any farther. I was afraid she would come back and be mad when she couldn’t find me. She told me to stay by the palm tree. Do you think she came back while I was gone, Rob, and left again when she couldn’t find me?”

“I don’t know, Oz. When did that happen?”

“I was eight,” he said. “It was my birthday. It was summertime.”

“You’ve been waiting for your mother to come back for you since you were eight years old?”

He turned his head to look up at me, keeping his body hunched protectively, his fistful of plastic coins clutched to his chest. Tears were leaking from his eyes. He nodded.

“Sometimes I walk back down to Ozone looking for her, but then I get afraid again and come back. I think she’ll come soon, Rob, don’t you? A man came and said I have to get out of here, and I don’t have any place to go. I want to go with my mom but I don’t know where she is.”

Without wanting to, I imagined the long days he had lived through in the monotonous sunshine, days when loneliness gnawed at him until he couldn’t sit still and he trudged north along the boardwalk, retracing his childhood route to that first stopping point. It had become a Pavlovian barrier, like a disconnected electric fence still restraining horses or cattle that don’t know the shock is gone. Ozone Pacific. A nickname that took hold years before, when boardwalk denizens first noticed his odd geographical limitations.

“Look at this,” I said, taking the Krugerrand out of my pocket and holding the heavy coin out to him. “This is real gold.”

Keeping the plastic disks tight against his chest in his left hand, he reached out with his right to take the Kruger. As he grasped it, I saw that his arm was bleeding. Taking hold of his wrist, I turned his arm and saw
several fresh cuts midway between his wrist and elbow. The cuts were surrounded by countless scars. The long-sleeve shirt in all weather.

“Oh, Oz, what are you doing?” The periodic misery that underlay his cheerful demeanor hit me like a knee in the gut. I guess I should have known. People who are always smiling are usually sad.

He pulled his hand free and hunched back over, holding gold in one hand, plastic in the other.

“I’m sorry, Rob. I know I’m not supposed to do it. Please don’t tell anybody.”

“But why are you doing it, Oz? Why would you want to cut yourself?”

I had heard of schoolgirls who supposedly sliced their delicate skin for some kind of perverse satisfaction, but I had never understood it. It seemed like something made up by daytime talk-show hosts to elicit maudlin tears from emotionally congested housewives, not something that actually happened in real life. I knew all about addictions to things that make you feel good, at least temporarily, like alcohol and heroin and sex, but I couldn’t comprehend being addicted to pain.

“I do it when I feel sad,” he said. “It makes me feel better. It hurts, and I think about that and forget about my mom and everything else.”

“What else?”

He leaned his head back and moaned. “All my problems. Baba Raba won’t give me my picture back, and I’m going to get kicked out of my room, and I’m never going to get out into the country. I’m all grown up and I’ve never even seen a cow. I am afraid I am going to be stuck down here forever and never see my mom or the country or anything.”

I knelt down beside him and put my arm around his thin shoulders. He leaned his head against me and wept. He smelled sour. Tears dripped from his chin, jewels of blood from his elbow. I let him cry for a minute or so to get it out of his system, then squeezed his shoulder.

“I am going to make sure you get out into the country, Oz,” I said. “Don’t worry about that anymore.”

It had occurred to me how much I owed the kid. He was the one who had put me on the trail of the necklace in the first place, and the necklace was going to make me rich. Not rich like Howard Hughes or Christina Onassis or any of the other sick superrich for whom money was a painful poison, but rich like a guy in the fairy tale who steals the ogre’s treasure and exits the story whistling, bag slung over his shoulder, hat pushed back on his head, disappearing down a country lane.

More than that, in the hollowness of late nighttime, I felt a kinship with him in his sorrow, as if he were my son or brother. He had lost his mother, who I was quite sure would never return. I had lost my daughter, whom I probably would never see again. Oz and I were sandwiched together in the darkness between two devastations.

Reggie and I would be leaving Venice the next day. Or maybe the day after. I might try one more time. Before leaving, I would hook Ozone up with some kind of social-services agency and find him a place to stay, maybe some vocational training. Something better than sleeping in alleys.

“Come on, stop crying,” I said. “Why don’t you come over and sleep on our couch tonight? We need to put some antiseptic on those cuts so they don’t get infected. What did you cut yourself with, anyway?”

He reached under the sleeping bag and pulled out a single-edged razor blade. I took it from him and slipped it in my shirt pocket, then helped him up.

“Bring your shirt and boots. We’ll wash your clothes tomorrow after you take a bath and get cleaned up.”

Following Oz out of the dim room, I tripped on some of his junk, kicking a pile of magazines so that they splayed across the floor. One of them caught my eye. It was the copy of
Riviera
with Evelyn’s bejeweled picture that the boy had shown me on the boardwalk. I wondered if he had two copies or if he’d forgotten that Baba had returned it to him. I started to ask him as we walked back over to the flophouse, but thought better of it. I didn’t want to challenge another of his delusions, if that’s what it was. He was upset enough already.

Though he should have been dead to the world, Budge must have heard us go into the downstairs bathroom. I was putting Bactine on Ozone’s arm when the former lineman’s bulk loomed in the doorway.

“Don’t let him see!” Ozone said, turning away.

But he had already seen.

“Oh, motherfucker!” Budge said, turning away from us and smashing his fist into the wall, punching through the plaster and lath, something I’d never seen anyone do before.

Any fool with a few drinks in him can put his fist through a piece of drywall without damaging his hand, unless he hits a stud. Most of my friends’ homes when I was growing up had a hole or two in the kitchen or living room drywall, testament to some memorable domestic disturbance, as when a drunken father objected to his wife’s shrill 2 a.m. accusations.
But plaster and lath is more like concrete than half-inch drywall. My man Budge had a big punch.

“Knock it off, Budge,” I said. “Look what you did to your hand.”

He held his fist up in front of his face and looked at the blood seeping through the white plaster dust.

“Who gives a shit?” he said.

“Sharpnick will when she sees that hole in the wall.”

“Why should she? They’re gonna tear it down anyway.”

“Just behave yourself.”

After Oz’s cuts were disinfected and bandaged, I sent him to the living room to lie down on the couch.

“I’m sorry, Budge,” he said softly as he went down the hall. But Budge wouldn’t look at him.

“Let me see your hand,” I said, pulling the big goof into the bathroom. He had gashed his knuckles badly, grinding old paint and plaster into them.