Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Old Crew
CLIFF
Cliff walked out to the end of Hermosa Beach Pier to clear his head and wait for the call to come in.
A handful of people were casting off their lines into the water to catch passing mackerel, but otherwise, he had the space to talk.
The sun had set into the Pacific, leaving a vast beautiful fading canvas of color behind.
He sighed heavily as the call came in and the name came up.
He had to face it. Now or never. Cliff slid the bar across to answer and said, “Hello,” which was not in the form of a question.
“I was beginning to think you didn’t want to see me.
” A low nasally and clipped voice with a New Jersey accent came seeping through the line, dragging menace and looming chaos with it.
Cliff could picture short, stout Melvyn Ott just like he’d left him, in a gray jumpsuit, lingering in the hall by the phones, a constant look of suspicion in his beady eyes, drawing tiny circles on his round, hard belly.
“Melvyn. Not at all,” Cliff answered warily.
“I hear you’ve got yourself set up at the beach. Sounds like a nice place.”
Cliff didn’t want Melvyn Ott to know a single thing about what he was doing, so for a moment he didn’t say anything.
Melvyn continued, “I also heard your town is filled with fat cats in fat mansions. Oooh, that must be torture for a thief like you.”
“It’s a nice place.” Cliff added, “But it’s crawling with bored cops. Serves as a powerful deterrent.”
Melvyn snorted a laugh. “Anyways, so I am coming for a visit.”
Cliff retorted, “I don’t think I’ll be in town.”
Silence and then a long slow sigh. “I didn’t mention when.”
Cliff clenched his jaw. Not now, not now.
A long silence. Melvyn continued, “You can make time for me, right, Cliff? We can play some eight-ball, and have a catch up?”
Cliff closed his eyes and tried to think. Melvyn Ott was going to call in his favor, no doubt. When he finally replied, Cliff said, “Anything for a friend, Melvyn.”
“Wonderful. I’ll be in touch. Soon.”
The line went dead.
Cliff sat there unmoving, trying to figure out exactly how he was going to handle his ex-crew mate.
Melvyn Ott was not going on the straight and narrow.
He was a career criminal and by all accounts he was getting more violent.
Cliff was a thief. A con man. He did slick and quiet jobs.
Get in, get out, nobody gets hurt. But that was not the way of Melvyn Ott.
Cliff hadn’t rolled over on Melvyn. He hadn’t given him up from the heist they did together; that’s the kind of thing that can get an ex-con murdered.
However, Cliff did tell detectives he thought Melvyn Ott was dangerous and violent.
Ott had been part of another crew that pulled off a sloppy bank job in Hacienda Heights where Ott had shot and wounded a teller just for the fun of it.
Case was never solved, but Ott admitted the truth to Cliff as a show of trust. Cliff had not betrayed that trust, but he did owe Ott for saving him from being savagely beaten by a volatile gang of neo-Nazis in the joint.
He owed him. But he didn’t owe him that big.
If Ott did come to call in his favor, Cliff had to set boundaries, manage his expectations. He was not willing to sacrifice his freedom because Melvyn Ott demanded fealty.
If Ott was going to force his hand, Cliff had to find a way to handle him.
He recalled the advice Dez had given him concerning the man.
Find a way to send him back to prison for good.
The alternative—the one that kept him breathing and upright, with all his various body parts firmly attached—meant betraying his dream of staying clean and giving in to his darker impulses. It meant staying the man he already was.
It would be too easy.