Read Online The White Gold Score (A Daniel Faust Novella) by Craig Schaefer - Free Book Online Page A

perfect spot to stash our getaway ride. Check out the mailbox: it’s stuffed to overflowing. Good bet these people are on vacation, which means we can leave the car here for a couple of hours. Just one thing to make sure.”
    She killed the engine and followed me up the walk. I rang the doorbell.
    “What if someone answers?” she asked as we waited.
    “Then we’re lost tourists who need directions.” I shoved my thumb against the buzzer, listening to fifteen straight seconds of muffled chiming on the other side of the door. No response, not even a light clicking on or a ruffled curtain. “Yep, nobody’s home. Anyway, we
could
park on the street, but a passing cop might remember seeing a strange car if anything goes wrong tonight. Driveway’s a little farther out of sight.”
    She smiled. “I didn’t know you were so detail oriented.”
    “If you want to stay out of prison, you have to be. And on that note, Breaking and Entering one-oh-one.” I took out my phone and turned the screen toward her. “Please silence your cell phone before the performance begins.”
    I set my ringer to silent, and she followed my lead.
    “I knew a guy,” I told her, “who was robbing a mansion back in Miami. Slipped past infrared sensors, guard dogs, and three layers of embedded security. And just as he was about to seal the deal and make off with an original Rembrandt, some asshole called him. The mark’s security guards all got an earful of his ringtone: the ‘Macarena’ playing at full volume.”
    “How embarrassing,” Caitlin said.
    “Imagine how I felt. I was the asshole who called him.”
    We strolled along the sidewalk, just an average couple out for an evening walk. A breeze ruffled my shirt, chasing away the arid heat for one blissful moment. Crickets trilled in the dark.
    “This part’s crucial,” I said. “Self-preservation is more important than any score. If an alarm goes off, we
leave
, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. If the cops are coming and we get split up, don’t try to meet back at the car. They’ll be on the lookout for anyone strange to the neighborhood, and on a street this swank I guarantee they’ve got a ten-minute response time, tops. Just get lost any way you can, put as much distance behind you as possible, and we’ll meet up come sunrise. Run through a few backyards and try to get to Ventura, where the crowds are.”
    Caitlin cracked her knuckles. “I’m hardly worried about the police. I’d think we could make short work of them.”
    “Uh-uh. No dead cops, under any circumstances. Avoid and evade, never engage.”
    She gave me the side-eye. “Why not? You don’t have any compunction about killing, at least not that I’ve seen.”
    “You want a practical reason? The police are the biggest street gang in any given city. You mess with one of them, you’re messing with
all
of them. Nothing brings the hammer down like a dead cop. We don’t need that kind of trouble.”
    We came up on Dino’s address. His house was modern, on the edge of brutalist, a pale white cube that married another cube and gave birth to a bunch of little baby cubes. Faint lights shone behind long, skinny windows and ivory Venetian blinds.
    “And what about him?” Caitlin asked with a nod to the house.
    I’d been thinking about that. With one hand in the coke game and the other on the gun that killed his business partner, Dino Costa was anything but a civilian. I wouldn’t lose any sleep if he didn’t survive the night. Then again, I wasn’t getting paid to pull that trigger and I don’t work for free.
    “If he dies, he dies,” I said, thinking it through, “but there’s always the chance of blowback. I don’t particularly want a murder investigation following us back to Vegas. Besides, if we just grab the watch and split, it’s a perfect getaway. What’s he gonna do, call the cops and complain that somebody stole the Rolex he took off his victim’s corpse?”
    “So he’ll know he was stolen