Gated Prey (Eve Ronin #3)(2)
“I should buy a couple of rolls of boob tape,” Duncan said, kicking off his shoes and running his toes through the furry floor mat.
“For your wife or for your daughters?”
“Are you kidding? I don’t want them walking around with everything hanging out.”
She glanced at him. “Then what do you want the tape for?”
Duncan patted his belly. “To hold this back and create the illusion that I have six-pack abs.”
“You should call David Copperfield instead.”
“Maybe I should,” he said. “Then we can take this show on the road.”
“Isn’t that what we are doing now?”
Over the last four days, they’d visited all the local grocery stores and shopping centers, making a spectacle of themselves—as an obscenely rich, hobbled old man and his much younger gold-digger wife—on the off chance that was how the robbers picked their targets.
“I don’t see the point,” Eve continued. “All of the homes hit so far were in one of the gated communities along Parkway Calabasas. A robber can’t just follow the victims home through the gate.” She’d made the argument before, and was overruled, but she was growing more irritated with the assignment as time wore on.
Eve stopped at the light at the intersection of Park Granada and Calabasas Road, facing the Commons shopping center on their left and the Courtyard shopping center on their right. The Commons was an upscale re-creation of an Italian village with a landmark clock tower topped by the world’s largest Rolex. The Courtyard was a mundane, architecturally forgettable collection of shops, fast-food restaurants, and banks, anchored by a Trader Joe’s. Eve and Duncan had performed their act at both shopping centers.
“The point, Grasshopper, is we don’t know how the targets are getting picked, or how the thieves are getting in or out of the gated communities,” Duncan said. “And when you don’t know shit, you try everything.”
Like luring the thieves to them rather than tracking the thieves down, which was why they were spending their days in a 4,500-square-foot furnished McMansion they’d rented in Vista Grande. It was one of the four gated communities built atop a ridge that overlooked Parkway Calabasas and the Calabasas Country Club’s golf course on the east side, the high-end dealerships along Calabasas Road and the Ventura Freeway on the north side, and Las Virgenes Road on the west, which snaked its way through Malibu Canyon to the Pacific Ocean.
“You should make a note,” Duncan said.
“Of what?” She made a right onto Park Granada, passing the side entrance to the Commons as she headed up the road.
“My little nuggets of wisdom. You’re going to miss them when I’m gone.”
“No, I won’t. You’re going to haunt me like Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
“Who the hell is that?”
She gave him a look, unsure if he was joking. “Why do you keep calling me a grasshopper?”
Now he gave her a look, unsure if she was joking. She wasn’t.
Duncan shook his head. “I feel so old.”
“You aren’t old,” she said. “You’re ancient.”
Park Granada ended at a T intersection with Parkway Calabasas and the ornate wrought-iron front gates of Vista Grande, which had two massive rocky fountains, one flanking the exit side and one on the entrance side, that spilled into large ponds. It could have been the entrance to one of the Las Vegas Strip’s hotel-casinos. All that was missing, Eve thought, was a volcano, dancing water, and a Frank Sinatra tune blaring from speakers hidden in the lush tropical landscaping.
The light turned green and she drove through the busy intersection into Vista Grande, where the entranceway forked into two lanes, one for community guests that passed by the window of the Spanish-Mediterranean-style guardhouse and one for residents who had decals on their windows. The resident’s lane was also used by vehicles from utilities like Edison, Spectrum Cable, and PacBell, from official state and local government, from law enforcement agencies and the fire department, as well as for regular deliveries from the post office, FedEx, Amazon, UPS, and, Eve believed, anybody with a car with a base sticker price over $75,000. She took the resident’s lane.
“I don’t see why they bother with the gates,” Eve said as she waved at the uniformed guard, a young man who waved back at them and hit the button that opened the rolling gate, proving her assumption. She hadn’t bothered to put a Vista Grande resident decal on the Rolls and hadn’t been stopped at the gate yet. “It’s a joke.”
“Maybe so, but they get a lot less crime in the gated communities than they do in the ones that are wide open,” Duncan said. “The cameras catch the license plates and faces of everyone who drives in and out. That’s a big deterrent.”
“Not to the home invaders we’re after.”
Eve drove up the steep hill. Both sides of the street were lined with mini-mansions in the same Spanish-Mediterranean style as the front gate guardhouse with red-tiled roofs, perfectly manicured landscaping, lots of German-made cars in the driveways, and hardly a security camera in sight. Or, she knew, even out of sight.
“The gates give the residents a false sense of security,” Eve said. “They have Ring doorbells, simple alarms they rarely turn on, and are too lazy to lock their doors and windows. They might as well have lighted signs on their front lawns that say ‘Come and get it.’”