The Heist (15 page)

But, sadly, they could afford Chet, who was finding it harder and harder to get work that took advantage of his many skills. So he’d schlepped from L.A. to the hellhole of Gallup just for the pleasure of plying his trade. He didn’t want to spend his days in a trailer powdering noses and applying concealer to the Botoxed faces of aging actresses for shit wages. Instead, he was out in the blazing desert sun making a bunch of young strippers look like decomposing brain-hungry corpses for even worse wages.

The usually jovial Chet might have found the decomposing
strippers amusing if he wasn’t so miserably depressed. And then he looked up from the bottom of his fourth beer and noticed Kate sitting on the bar stool next to him. He had no idea how long she’d been there, studying him with undisguised curiosity.

“Can I buy you another beer?” she asked, gesturing to his empty glass.

It was an unbelievable question. No woman in a bar had ever offered to buy him a drink before, and while he wasn’t painful to the eyes, he knew he wasn’t Sam Worthington or Chris Hemsworth either. “Are you a hooker?”

“I don’t think hookers buy men drinks,” Kate said. “I think it works the other way around.”

“I haven’t got a lot of experience with hookers.”

“Me neither. Do you want the beer?”

“Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

They sat in awkward silence until two fresh mugs of beer were set in front of them.

“Cheers,” Kate said, hoisting her mug.

They clinked glasses and Chet chugged his down. “I meant no offense.”

“None taken,” Kate said.

Chet wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m recently divorced and I guess I’ve forgotten how to talk to women. Then again, seeing how things went with my ex, maybe I’ve never known. What brings you to Gallup?”

“You,” she said, and told him basically the same story they’d given Boyd Capwell two days before. “We need your makeup and special effects skills to convince our mark that what is happening is real.”

“I’m in,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” she said, startled. “You don’t even know what we’re willing to pay.”

“Has to be more than what I’m getting now,” he said. “Plus you bought me a beer.”

“Has it occurred to you that what we are proposing is most likely illegal, and if things go wrong you could be arrested?”

“Lady, jail can’t be any worse than this hellhole I’m in now.”

If George Pogue had a mustache, he would have been twirling it like a silent-film villain. In the absence of a mustache, the pale, balding banker sat behind his desk, tapping his pen on a bulging file folder, looking at Tom Underhill as if he was an unpleasant smudge on his calendar. To Tom, the tapping of the pen sounded like the ticking of a stopwatch, counting down the seconds until his home was taken away from him, his wife, and their three children.

“I’m not asking for a free ride,” said Tom, dressed in his best suit and tie. He wanted to impress the banker with his professionalism, but he felt like a kid trying to pretend he was a grown-up. “I am willing to make payments.”

“How gracious of you,” Pogue said.

“All I ask is that you adjust the principal to take into account the reality of the marketplace. We both know that the house isn’t worth much more than half what I paid for it.”

When Tom bought the house in 2006, it was at the height of the Southern California housing market, and $557,000 seemed like a steal for four bedrooms and two baths in Rancho Cucamonga, a rapidly expanding suburban community in San Bernardino County. Thousands of houses were spreading across the valley and creeping up the hillsides toward Mount Baldy. But then the housing bubble burst, the market took a dive, and jobs in the area evaporated. Entire housing tracts became ghost towns.

“But the fact remains, five hundred fifty-seven thousand dollars is what we paid the builder on your behalf,” Pogue said. “That is cash that is now gone. I fail to see why the bank should take the loss.”

“Because I was stuck in a subprime loan with an adjustable interest rate that skyrocketed. Every six months it jumped up, even as my income was going down. I repeatedly tried to renegotiate the terms, but you wouldn’t let me.”

Pogue held up his hand in a halting gesture. “I don’t need to hear the litany of excuses or your version of events. The fact is, you have fallen woefully behind in your mortgage payments.”

“I’ve sent you a check every month, but you haven’t cashed the last four of them.”

“Because the amount you are sending doesn’t meet the minimum payment due.”

“It’s what I can afford,” he said. “It’s what my payments were before you kept jacking up the interest rate.”

Pogue waved off the remark. “It has come to the point that we have no choice but to exercise our right to seize the property and auction it off to recoup our losses.”

Tom took a deep breath, trying to control his anger. He didn’t
want to be on the eleven o’clock news that night, depicted as the angry black man who threw himself across a desk and strangled a white banker.

“Instead of listing the house for half what I paid for it, and then letting it sit vacant for years while squatters and vandals strip the place,” Tom said, “wouldn’t it make more sense to just lower the loan amount to that same figure so that I can afford to stay in my home, maintain the property, and provide you with cash flow?”

“It’s more complex than that,” Pogue said.

“It certainly is,” Nick Fox said, taking the seat beside Tom and directing his remark to Pogue. Nick was dressed in a navy blue blazer, an open-collared shirt, jeans, and loafers, and he seemed to have appeared out of thin air. “What Tom doesn’t realize is that you talked him out of making a down payment, making him ineligible for a more attractive interest rate, and steered him into a subprime loan back in 2006, even though he had a FICO score of 690 and a forty-five percent debt-to-loan ratio, because you personally earned a two percent higher commission from those loans over prime mortgages. You also got bonuses, and all-expenses-paid trips to Hawaii, from the bank based on how many subprime mortgages you moved.”

“I don’t know what kind of crackpot activist you are, or what kind of stunt this is, but if you don’t leave right now, I’ll have security drag you out,” Pogue said.

Nick calmly continued. “Not only that, you gouged him on fees. Shame on you, George. Or would you prefer I called you ‘Le Chiffre’?”

Pogue went pale. “Who are you?”

“I’m the man you’ve lost nearly forty-five thousand dollars to
over the last few months playing online poker,” Nick said. His most recent win against Le Chiffre had come during his short stay in Bois-le-Roi.

Pogue stared at Nick as if he had risen from the dead. “You’re Bret Maverick.”

“At the online poker table, yes, that’s me. But right now, you can call me your conscience. Because here’s what else I know, George. You covered those gambling losses, and others totaling another twenty-three thousand dollars, by embezzling funds from this bank.”

“What do you want?” George whispered, waving at Nick to keep his voice down.

“You’re going to modify Tom’s loan to reflect the true market value of his home and offer him the lowest available interest rate with no refinancing charges whatsoever. You’re going to credit him for making all of his payments to date and you will erase any penalties. And you’re going to repair his credit rating, all by this time tomorrow when he comes back in to sign the papers, or I will turn you in to the authorities.”

George glanced around again, and then whispered, “What about the other matter?”

“It’ll be our little secret. My advice would be to put back what you took and hope nobody ever finds out what you did. If you’re thinking about making a run for it, that’s fine, but you’d better make things right for Tom before you go, because I will find you and I won’t be as understanding next time.” Nick turned to Tom, who was staring at him in shock. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

Tom was so dumbfounded by this unexpected turn of events that all he could do was nod. Nick ushered Tom out and led him to the Starbucks next door. They got their coffees and took a table
outside. A number of the properties in the strip mall were vacant, and the parking lot was mostly empty, but Starbucks was busy. The sun was shining in a brilliant blue sky, and Tom was grateful for the warmth soaking into his shirt after the frigid air in Pogue’s office.

When Tom Underhill was a kid, he’d lived in a place not unlike this, a seemingly ever-expanding suburban housing tract that gobbled up the walnut orchards that gave his hometown of Walnut Creek its name. He’d been fascinated by the construction, especially since nobody in his family worked with their hands. The family business was insurance. So each day Tom climbed the walnut tree in his backyard and spent hours watching the houses go up, making detailed drawings of every stage of construction. He salvaged scrap wood, borrowed some basic tools, and built a rambling multilevel treehouse in his backyard.

Tom’s friends went on to college after high school, but Tom kept building treehouses. He moved to Southern California, and the treehouses turned profitable. He added playhouses to his repertoire and his business boomed. He was famous for his miniature Victorian houses and Swiss Family Robinson tree forts, and for his ability to replicate virtually anything in reduced size. Unfortunately the playhouses weren’t cheap, and the playhouse bubble burst when the housing bubble burst and the global economy took a nosedive. Now Tom scrounged up work as a handyman while his wife took care of their kids, ages two, eight, and ten. What Nick had just done for him was a miracle, but it didn’t solve all of his problems. And his fear was that he might have fallen into an even bigger, more awful problem.

“I don’t mean to seem ungrateful,” Tom said, “but who are you, and why did you just do that?”

“I stepped in because you’re a magician with a hammer, nails, and a pile of wood and I want to convince you to work for me,” Nick said.

“I’m not that hard to convince and there are easier ways to hire someone.”

“This is not a typical job. For starters, I need someone who can transform a Palm Springs vacation home into a drug lord’s fortified compound in Mexico.”

“Okay, that’s a little off the map.”

Nick gave him the short-form explanation.

“You saved my house from being taken by a sleazy banker who tricked me into a crap loan, and now you’re asking me if I’ll help you take down an even bigger, sleazier banker who ran off with people’s life savings?”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Nick said. “You can walk away right now, and maybe you should, because there are people who’d call what I’m proposing illegal.”

“Don’t care,” Tom said. “I’m going to love taking that son of a bitch down. Count me in.”

Two days after Nick enlisted Tom Underhill, Kate stopped by her sister’s place at midafternoon. She’d hoped to catch her father while Megan was away, but her timing wasn’t perfect. Kate pulled up just as Megan was leaving in her huge Toyota Sienna for a Costco run with the kids. They rolled down their windows and talked to each other from their driver’s seats.

“Good news,” Megan said. “The hunky airline pilot is back in town. I told him all about you and he’s very interested.”

“I’m not.”

“He didn’t even blink when I told him you’re an FBI agent,” Megan said. “Usually that sends them running.”

“Usually?” Kate said. “How many men have you talked to about me?”

“It doesn’t matter. Can I give him your number?”

“No!”

“Your loss. What are you doing here?”

“I’m taking Dad to the shooting range,” Kate said.

“This is his nap time.”

“He takes naps?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, he’s a senior citizen and he’s still recovering from the sport fishing trip to Mexico he took with his army buddies.”

Kate knew that was his cover for going to Greece with her. “It’s okay, I’m sure that shooting at things relaxes him almost as much as a nap.”

Megan drove off and Kate pulled into the driveway. Kate hadn’t planned on taking her dad shooting, but since that was the excuse she’d given her sister, they went to the range together anyway. It was very relaxing for them both. Afterward, she ran the broad outlines of the con and her misgivings about it past him over a couple beers at a bar on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills.

“Sounds like a winner to me,” Jake said. “And even if it goes to hell, it’s not like you’re going to be backed against a wall in some third-world country and executed by an army of illiterate rapists that the bozos at the CIA, in their infinite wisdom, armed with U.S. weapons.”

“But I could end up in prison.”

He waved off her concern. “I’d break you out.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“You’re my daughter, aren’t you?”

Kate smiled. Sure, he’d missed a lot of Christmases and birthdays during her childhood, but not many fathers could be counted on to mount a prison break.