Reggie was getting scruffy again, his inner biker emerging in the hiatus between the barbershop visits he had such strong resistance to. But his clothes were up to par-new khakis and a dark-blue aloha shirt the fortune-teller on the promenade had given him the previous week-so he blended in, too, sort of.

He wasn’t an ideal partner for this kind of job-no luxury-resort manners, and too apt to freelance something on the side that might interfere with the main plan. But he had criminal virtues, too. Besides being a skilled driver, he was a good mechanic, a decent alarm guy, and a tricky, explosive street fighter. They didn’t come any tougher when there was blood in the water.

He’d shown up at the right time in my personal Kabuki play, too, motoring out from St. Louis on a broken-down trike eight months before, just when Switch, my former partner, decided to get out of the high life, swayed by a beautiful young Mexican woman who was about to give birth to their first child.

And Reggie was fun to be around when he wasn’t fucking up. Coming up on fifty, with a droopy bearded bloodhound face and sizable gut, he still exerted the same old mysterious pull he always had on the opposite sex. For as long as I’d known him, women had been drawn to his gruff, monosyllabic charm like lookie-loos to a car wreck. The fortune-teller was sub-par, chubby and in her forties, but she was constantly buying him gifts and cooking him meals and doing his laundry. In between banging surfer girls he picked up on the Venice boardwalk, he afforded her a casual fuck every week or so to keep her cheerful, putting about as much into it as a big-leaguer playing catch with a kid at a charity event.

After craning his head to look up into the atrium and swiveling it to take in the expanse of the upper lobby, Reggie shrugged. “What’s it cost to crash in a dump like this?” he asked. Part of his code was never letting anything impress him-unless he was flattering you to get something he wanted-and now he was trying to retract the admiring whistle and the tone of his earlier comment.

“High season, rooms start around three hundred and go up to five grand.”

“Five grand! People must be fucking crazy. You could buy a cherry scooter for that.”

“I know,” I said and smiled. “They’ve got more money than they know what to do with.”

The lady was standing in line at the front desk, off to our right. I didn’t see the ex-con.

“Get a cup of coffee and sit where you can see the entrance and front desk,” I told Reggie. “Keep an eye out for the driver. I’ll go see what room she’s checking into.”

“Coffee?”

The lobby bar was next to the coffee shop. “All right,” I said. “Have a beer. But keep your eyes open. I don’t want that muscle-bound prick sneaking up behind me. And take this.” I handed him the black leather shoulder bag, which was the size of a large briefcase and heavy as a concrete block.

At the front desk, I joined the line next to the one the lady was standing in. Up close, she was spectacular, with flawless, lightly tanned skin, delicate features, and thick, silken blond hair that was cut straight all the way around. She had lovely hands, with perfectly manicured nails the same red as her outfit and lipstick. It crossed my mind that it would be nice to have those soft, strong sportswoman’s hands gripping the shaft of something other than a golf club. The thought surprised me because I’m not usually attracted to older women, and I believed her to be somewhere between forty-five and fifty, five to ten years older than me. Her red lips were parted, showing the tip of her pink tongue. While I watched her without appearing to watch her, she turned and looked around the lobby with a anxious air.

The glittering space was filling up as the Friday-evening rush came on, well-heeled people from Los Angeles, San Diego, and points around the globe jostling for position in the check-in lines. The bobbing faces ranged from doughy-white to dark brown, flaccid to eagle-sharp. Twenty conversations in several languages competed for decibel space around us. As the lady reached the desk, I edged in as close as I could without being conspicuous.

“We have you in a Catalina Suite, Mrs. Evermore,” the pretty young Latina desk clerk was saying, focusing on her computer screen. “Room 589, overlooking the pool with a view of the Santa Rosa Mountains. How many keys will you need?”

“Two,” the lady said unhappily, glancing around the lobby again.

The clerk ran two key cards through the coding machine and inserted them in a paper folder. “You go left when you come out of the elevator on the fifth floor, left again and then follow the hallway to your suite. A bellman will be right up with your luggage.”

“Can’t someone bring it now?” the lady said.

“We’re very busy,” the clerk said. “It will be just a few minutes.”

“Please,” the lady said. “I’d much rather have the luggage go up with me.”

Her words caught my heart like the toe of a punter’s shoe, sending it soaring into the blue sky above the stadium. She didn’t want that Samsonite out of her sight.

“Let me see what I can do,” the Latina said, and walked away to the end of the counter, where there was a traffic jam of laden luggage carts and harried bellboys. She spoke to a plump black man with a goatee, who nodded and pointed to the red suitcases. As the clerk came back, the goatee maneuvered the cart into the clear.

“John will take you to your room, Mrs. Evermore.”

“Thank you so much. What is your name, dear?”

“Loretta, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Loretta.”

“My pleasure, ma’am.”

You don’t get that kind of service at Motel 6.

As the lady and the black bellman moved toward the elevators on the far side of the lobby, a hulking matron in a green tweed outfit more suitable for wintertime Chicago than Indian Wells charged past them in the opposite direction, bearing down on the front desk as if it were a buffet. Barging through the resentful crowd, she leaned her bosom across the counter to address the clerk next to the one who had waited on Evermore.

“Where are my bags?” she screeched in a falsetto that was comical coming from her pro lineman’s body. She was six feet tall, probably 275 pounds, with a big fry cook’s head and what looked like size-twelve feet squeezed into size-ten brown leather traveling shoes. “We’ve been waiting half an hour and we can’t even change our clothes to go out to dinner. What kind of hotel is this? My husband isn’t paying four hundred dollars a night to be treated like this. We’ve been on a plane for six hours and we’re starving to death!”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said the clerk, flustered by the onslaught. “Where are you-what room are you in?”

“I’m in room 569, and I want my luggage now!”

While all eyes were fixed on the drama of the bitchy snowbird and the beleaguered desk clerk, I reached over the counter and took a blank key card from the stack beside the coding machine and murmured my way through the crowd to sit on a tan leather couch against the wall.

After about ten minutes, the Latina who had waited on Evermore disappeared through a doorway behind the front desk. I made my way back to the counter.

“Excuse me,” I said to a woman arguing with two children at the front of one of the lines, then spoke to the clerk, holding out the stolen card: “There’s something wrong with this card. My wife forgot her medication in our room and when we tried to get back in the door wouldn’t open.”

The clerk glanced from the woman to me and back.

“Go ahead and help him,” the woman panted, trying to wrestle into submission a freckle-faced demon who was squealing and kicking a suitcase.

“What room are you in?” the clerk asked me.

“Room 589, Evermore,” I said.

She looked at her computer screen, nodded, pressed a couple of keys, and ran the blank card through the machine. “Here you go, Mr. Evermore. Sometimes if you put them next to a credit card in your wallet, it messes them up. It should work now.”