The Heist (14 page)

Nick intercepted Boyd as he was leaving the stage and asked him to join them to discuss Boyd’s possible participation in a new production in Los Angeles.

“You bet. Give me five minutes,” Boyd said. “I need to get out of character.”

Boyd joined Nick and Kate after he’d removed his makeup and made a pass through the buffet line. His plate was loaded, and Kate was pretty sure he had a few rolls stuffed into his pockets. He was good-looking, she thought, but in a slightly dated way, like last year’s model of a sports car immediately after the sleeker, redesigned model has come out. And he moved as if there was a spotlight following him. Even his littlest gestures, whether it was
putting his napkin into his lap or reaching for his silverware, had flamboyance, as though he was aware, or at least hoping, that people were watching his every move. Not entirely attractive in a man, but oddly compelling to watch.

Nick introduced himself without giving a last name. “And this is my associate, Kate,” he said.

“What did you think of my performance?” Boyd asked Kate. “I was a little worried I might have played the ending with too much intensity.”

“No way,” Kate said. “You were great. I don’t know how you were able to keep focused with all those people walking in front of the stage on their way to the buffet.”

Boyd pulled a roll and two pats of butter out of his pocket and set them beside his plate. “You have to be a bit delusional to be an actor. In my mind, I wasn’t in a restaurant performing on a plywood stage with grocery store cashiers, car salesmen, and college students,” he said. “I was Willy Loman, desperately trying to hold on to a life that was coming unglued. That was my world and I totally believed it.”

“I did, too,” Kate said.

“I couldn’t ask for a better review,” he said, buttering the roll, “particularly from a Hollywood producer.”

“We aren’t Hollywood producers,” Nick said.

Boyd looked up from his buttering. “I thought you said you were producing a show in Los Angeles.”

“We are, but it’s not like anything you’ve been involved with before,” Nick told him. “We are operatives with Intertect, a private security and detective agency, and we’re on the trail of an international fugitive who has stolen a great deal of money that we want to recover for our client.”

“What do you need an actor for?”

“To find this man we have to make one of his accomplices talk, and to do that we have to make him an actor in a play, only he’ll be the only one on the stage who doesn’t have a script.”

“He won’t even know it’s a show,” Kate said.

Boyd set his roll aside and took up a drumstick. “You’re talking about running a con.”

“You’re very perceptive,” Nick said.

“I did six weeks as Harold Hill in
The Music Man
at the Loon Lake Casino,” he said. “The thing is, cons are usually illegal.”

“Think of this as an elaborate practical joke,” Nick said.

“Exactly,” Kate said. “A practical joke that is sort of illegal but not entirely. We’ve been asked to do what the police can’t, and that’s catch a man who has robbed thousands of people out of their homes, their savings, and their retirements. We’re using kidnapping and fraud to accomplish that goal. If we don’t fool the mark, and he goes to the police, we could all get arrested.”

“But it’s highly unlikely that he will,” Nick said.

Boyd gnawed on his drumstick. “What’s in it for me?”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” Nick said. “And the role of a lifetime, an acting challenge greater than any Oscar, Emmy, or Tony award winner has ever dared or attempted.”

“Because the Oscar, Emmy, and Tony award winners don’t have to,” Boyd said.

“But we both know that they wouldn’t because they don’t have the guts or the skills, and you will because you do,” Nick said. “And this will prove it.”

Boyd sat back and looked at them. “And nobody will ever know.”

“You will,” Nick said.

“There won’t be any reviews, no film to put on my reel,” he said. “It won’t get me more work.”

“It might from us,” Kate said.

“But if I am not utterly convincing in my performance, or another actor lets me down, or a set falls, or some other calamity happens that I can’t act my way out of, I could get thrown in jail.”

“Or worse,” Nick said, “you could spend another night performing here.”

Boyd met his gaze. “How big is my trailer?”

“You won’t have a trailer,” Nick said. “But you will have a mansion.”

“I’m in,” Boyd said. “I don’t think I caught your last names.”

“We’re on a first-name basis,” Nick said. “Last names are cumbersome.”

Wilma Owens could drive, steer, or pilot just about anything that moved people from one point to another—cars, planes, boats, Zambonis, motorcycles, bulldozers, helicopters, steamrollers—with the possible exception of the Space Shuttle, not that she wasn’t game to give it a try. She’d grown up in Alvin, Texas, living in a double-wide next to her daddy’s auto body shop. She raced moto-cross and dirt track stock cars, and got a job straight out of high school driving a dump truck for Owens Excavating. Two years down the road she married the owner’s son, Buster Owens, and since they didn’t have any luck getting Wilma pregnant, she kept driving the dump truck. After twenty-six years of marriage and dump truck driving, Wilma divorced Buster, citing terminal boredom. She got a couple double-D implants that perked up her boobs, joined a spin class, and set out on what she’d named The Big Adventure.

Nine years into The Big Adventure, Wilma was finding it hard
to get a job driving heavy equipment what with the economy in the toilet and her not belonging to a union. She’d had a short stint flying tourists over the Everglades until she crashed her plane in the swamp and it was discovered she wasn’t licensed to fly. Ditto the job she wrangled flying a helicopter, spraying toxic chemicals over mosquito-infested Port Charlotte.

It was while Wilma was recovering from the helicopter crash that she got the idea to be a contestant on
The Amazing Race
. She figured she was a cinch to win, since she’d be good as new as soon as they took the pins out of her broken ankle. She’d win
The Amazing Race
, and she’d be rich and famous. She’d buy a sweet piece of land somewhere with her winnings, and maybe she’d buy a backhoe to drive around. And it might have happened too if Wilma hadn’t had a stroke of bad luck.

Wilma and her best friend, Loretta Sue, were inches from making the last cut for
The Amazing Race
when it was discovered that Wilma had “borrowed” a freight train to make the tryouts on time when her Ford crapped out. Loretta Sue was let go on a technicality, being she wasn’t the one driving the borrowed train. Wilma was arraigned in Solano County court, where she was represented by a public defender. Bail was set at $35,000, but it might as well have been $350,000. There was no way Wilma could raise the cash, so she was remanded to a cell at the Solano County jail in Fairfield to await trial. It would be an enormous understatement to say that she was stunned when a deputy came to her cell, where she’d been sitting for six weeks, and told her that her bail had been posted and she was free to go.

Two days before, Nick had been in Cape Girardeau. Now here he was on a bench outside Solano County’s Romanesque courthouse,
which was set back from the palm-lined street behind a large crabgrass lawn. He watched Wilma walk out of the courthouse and knew he’d made a good choice. She’d be perfect for his purposes. She was another natural grifter. She was fearless. She had talent. She was desperate.

He recognized her from her picture in the paper. Average height and average weight except for the boobs. The boobs weren’t average. She was wearing skintight jeans, a poison-green tank top, and platform raffia-wrapped wedge sandals that had about a five-inch heel. She had bleached-out blond hair pulled into a haystack ponytail. She was in her mid-fifties, but thanks to her boob job and either good genes or some nip and tuck she looked younger. If the light was dim enough and her date was drunk enough, she might even pass for late thirties.

Nick stood and waved to her, and she walked over to him.

“Hey, hon,” she said. “Were you waving at me? And is that a bag of candy you’re holding? Isn’t that kind of a cliché?”

“They’re jelly beans fresh from the Jelly Belly factory here in town. While I was waiting for your bail to be processed, I took the tour. They’ve got a portrait of Ronald Reagan made out of jelly beans. Just think, if jelly beans had been around in Leonardo da Vinci’s time, the
Mona Lisa
might look very different today.”

She looked him up and down. “So you’re the one who bailed me out?”

“Yep.”

“Well, you’re cute as a button and you got a bag of jelly beans. A girl couldn’t ask for much more. I’m guessing you’re a Hollywood producer sent by
The Amazing Race
. They changed their minds, right?”

“Wrong.”

“Then what’s the deal?”

“I want you to drive cars and fly airplanes for a project I’m putting together.”

“My driver’s license was revoked and I don’t have a pilot’s license,” she said.

“A license is just a piece of paper. It means nothing to me. What I care about is that you’re a quick learner, you can steer anything, and you’re willing to take chances.”

“And I’d want to drive these cars and airplanes for you why?”

“I got you out of jail, and I can make the criminal charges against you go away.”

“How can you do that?”

“I have friends in very high places in law enforcement,” Nick said.

“What if I decide to walk away right now?”

“I lose thirty-five thousand dollars,” Nick said.

“And I’ll have you chasing me? Not that I’d mind, being you’re a little hottie, but still …”

Nick shook his head. “I don’t chase people. I do, however, swindle them. That’s what this is all about. I want you to help me trick a man into telling me where to find an international fugitive who has stolen half a billion dollars.”

“So you can take the money?”

“So I can give it back to the people he took it from,” he said.

“What are you, one of those Robin Hood do-gooders?”

“No. It’s a job.”

He took a key out of his pocket and aimed it at a red Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, the most powerful car ever built by the Italian automaker, capable of going from zero to 120 miles per hour in 8.5
seconds, thanks to a 730 horsepower V12 engine and 509 pound-feet of torque. The car chirped and Wilma sucked in air.

He dangled the keys in front of her. “Want to drive?”

She snatched them from his hand. “I’m in. And you can call me Willie.”

While Nick Fox was handing the keys to a $375,000 car to Willie Owens, the zombie apocalypse was beginning in the desert outside of Gallup, New Mexico. It was a very low-budget nonunion apocalypse, written and directed by a twenty-seven-year-old whose prior filmmaking experience was a series of viral videos of drunk girls taking their tops off at Lake Havasu during spring break.

The job of making the two dozen amateur actors look like decaying zombies hell-bent on eating human flesh fell to Chet Kershaw, a big bear of a man who, at thirty-eight years old, had come to the sobering conclusion that he was an aging dinosaur facing imminent extinction.

It was cruel and ironic that he was having this epiphany while sitting in the western-themed bar at the El Rancho Motel. The motel had been built in Gallup in 1937 by the brother of director D. W. Griffith to cater to all the big-name Hollywood directors and actors who were flocking to this dramatically photogenic patch of desert to shoot westerns. Perhaps Chet’s realization of his bleak future was hitting him with such force because Chet was sitting exactly where Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and John Ford had once washed the sand out of their throats.

Among the many filmmakers who came to Gallup in those early days was Chet’s grandfather Cleveland Kershaw. He was one
of the greats in the art of movie makeup and related special effects. Cleveland passed along the experience, skills, and tricks that he knew to his son, Carson, who carried on the family business in film and TV well into the 1980s.

But by the time Chet took over the family business in the 1990s, his art was quickly becoming a software application. More and more makeup effects, and virtually everything that was once considered a “special effect,” including simple gunshots and bullet hits, were being done in postproduction using computer graphics.

Even location shooting and the fake streets on studio back lots were becoming a thing of the past. A director didn’t have to go to New Mexico to get the desert look. He could shoot in Calgary in the dead of winter. All he needed was a green screen and a digital effects company. Now if directors came to New Mexico to shoot, it was because of the generous production tax credits and rebates, known in Hollywood as “free money,” offered by a state government desperate to stimulate the local economy. Which was one reason why
Revolt of the Zombie Strippers
was being shot in Gallup and not in a warehouse in Van Nuys. The other reason was that the producers of the film were so incredibly cheap, they couldn’t afford even the simplest digital effects.