Criminal Carma

Steven M. Thomas

Criminal Carma

For my wise, wonderful, beautiful wife,

Mary Patricia Thomas

The rabbi of Lublin said: “I love the wicked man who knows he is wicked more than the righteous man who knows he is righteous. But concerning the wicked who consider themselves righteous, it is said: ‘They do not turn even on the threshold of Hell.’”

– from Tales of the Hasidim: Early Masters, Martin Buber

CHAPTER ONE

She was three cars ahead of us on Highway 60, headed east toward Palm Springs in a white Town Car driven by a guy who looked like trouble. We were in my new Seville STS, Reggie behind the wheel, slouched down in the leather seat, steering with one thick finger. I was almost but not quite sure she had the jewels with her, packed in one of the red Samsonite suitcases I’d seen her escort load into the Lincoln ’s cavernous trunk. People think gangsters drive Lincolns to show off their money, and they do, but they also like them because there’s room for multiple bodies in the trunk. Not that the lady was a gangster. That was us. Kind of.

We’d tailed her from the canal-side house in Venice, through downtown and East L.A. Ahead of us to the right, the Puente Hills bulked up in the golden light you get on winter afternoons after the Santa Ana winds have whisked the smog out to sea. With black-and-white dairy cattle grazing on the green slopes, the hills reminded me of an oil painting I’d seen while casing a Santa Barbara museum a couple of weeks before-a plein air vision of SoCal’s vanishing rural past worth $30,000, more than the rolling expanse of portrayed acreage was worth when the painter committed it to canvas in the 1920s.

“What’s the plan?” Reggie said.

I’d explained everything to him the night before. Either he hadn’t paid attention or he was just a

“We’ll play it by ear,” I said, a

He turned his shaggy head and gave me a look, half exasperated, half disgusted, that I remembered from years before in St. Louis when he had been the tough mentor showing me, a teenage novice, the ins and outs of our suburban underworld.

Traffic was thi

On Friday evenings, the Los Angeles basin is like an ants’ nest that has been stirred with a stick. Whether you are heading north along the coast to Santa Barbara, south to San Diego, or inland to the mountain resorts or desert, every outlet is clogged with cars, fumes, and frustration as swarms of the basin’s ten million inhabitants rush for the exits of paradise.

One of the things about conventional people that a

Instead, it was clear sailing as we crossed the 57, the 15, and the 215, and entered the Badlands that lurk like a fairy-tale barrier between Los Angeles and the handy Shangri-La of the Coachella Valley. I gave the lady credit for a sense of tradition, too. Instead of hurtling east on I-10, the soulless highway the monads take, she was following the route old Hollywood rolled along when stars first discovered the charms of Palm Springs in the 1920s and ‘30s. Dressed in fla

The Badlands take you by surprise. One minute you are speeding along a straight, level road; the next you are in the middle of a civil engineer’s nightmare, narrow highway curving and banking crazily through rugged hills. If you’re used to the route you can go through at 70 mph, but if it’s new to you, the Six Flags centrifugal forces on the steep curves scare most drivers down to about fifty. The tough guy steering the Lincoln must not have been in high society very long. He slowed abruptly as we entered the treeless hills, Galway green after the December rains. Reggie, a talented wheelman, gave a contemptuous snort as he trod on the brakes, keeping pace with the Lincoln.

In the guy’s defense, the Town Car isn’t nearly as agile as the Seville. With only 210 horses and weighing almost 5,000 pounds, it’s underpowered and tends to wallow in normal highway curves. It must have felt like a roller coaster with elastic bolts as it careened through the Badlands. Of course, the hills put some strain on the Cadillac, too-about as much as a politician feels pocketing a brick of hundreds for a favor that will slip his mind as soon as the cash has been converted to scotch and companionship. The Caddie held the road like it was on a rail, 300-horsepower Northstar engine quiet as a wooden top spi

I still missed the DeVille that I had lost on our last job down in Newport Beach -the consequences of which we were hiding out from in Venice -but I was starting to love this car, too. Midnight blue, with $2,000 worth of chrome wheels and an artist’s touch in its sleek lines, it was a beautiful piece of machinery to look at. More important, it accelerated like a rocket and handled at 120 mph. I liked knowing I had a getaway car that gave me a realistic chance of actually getting away, and that if the cop caravan and TV crews caught up with me, I would at least be branded into the public’s memory behind the wheel of the classic American success car.

The boulevards of Southern California are jammed nowadays with German and Japanese luxury cars that cost twice as much as Cadillacs and hold their value better, but the American car retains an aura of happiness and well-being that mere economics can’t dispel. Whether you are pulling up in front of a club on Saturday night or church on Sunday morning, you have to like yourself a little bit if you are driving a Caddie.

When we dropped down out of the Badlands onto the flat road below Ba

“Drop back a little bit but stay with them,” I said. “If there’s CHP, they’ll tag the Lincoln and we can slow down.”