Gold Coast Read Online Free PDF Page A

rates and finally saying, Hey, thanks very much for everything, accepting the hundred dollar bill she always offered and getting out of there.
    Andre Patterson saying, No security people. Walk in, pick up the wallets, watches. All right, everybody take off your clothes, get in the shower. Carry their clothes outside and throw ’em in the bushes—they all running around the club nekked.
    Maybe wear ski masks, something like that?
    Andre saying, Wear a tuxedo you want to. We going to the club , man.
    That would be funny, tuxedos. It was good to keep it light, have a couple of drinks, smoke a joint before going in . . . lock the outside door after you . . . little details to think about. Watch the door that went from the locker room to the grill—
    Maguire said, “I haven’t done this in a couple years. I mean I haven’t ever actually done it, Christ, gone into a country club.”
    Andre said, “Who has?”
    * * *
    They went in on a Wednesday, August 16, four o’clock in the afternoon, when all the doctors and sales reps would be out there playing golf, rolling Indian dice for drinks, talking their locker room talk with all the obscene words they couldn’t say at the office.
    They parked the van Cochise had picked up and went in a side door that led directly into the men’s locker room—without the ski masks, too hot—Andre Patterson wearing a knit cap and faking some kind of Jamaican-Caribbean British-nigger accent, Cochise wearing a red and white polka-dot headband that bunched up his Afro like black broccoli. Maguire had quit his job at the hotel cocktail lounge, had a photograph taken for his passport application, then let his dark, black-Irish beard grow for three days. Once in the locker room he picked up a green Deep Run golf cap and set it on low over his sunglasses. He and Andre carried 9mm Berettas, brand new; wild-ass Cochise went in with a sawed-off double-barreled Marlin to scare the shit out of the members, get their attention quick and make them behave.
    Maguire was nervous going in, Christ yes, but he wasn’t too worried about the Patterson brothers overreacting, becoming vicious. There was a moment right in the beginning when they eithergrabbed control of the situation and it went smoothly, or they didn’t grab control and it could turn into a fuck-up with a lot of yelling and jabbing. That moment of surprise—
    The golf club members talking loud, their voices coming from the shower and the rows of lockers, middle-aged men in their underwear and towels, shuffling around in paper slippers . . . looking up and seeing, Christ, a wildman, a Mau-Mau, twin blunt holes of a Marlin pointing at them, Oh, my God! Sharp little startled sounds, seeing two mean-looking black guys with guns—
    Then silence.
    God Almighty, was it a revolution or a holdup? Hoping all they wanted was money. Andre Patterson telling the members in Jamaican to be cool, mon, and go in the shower room. Herding those wide-eyed, slow-moving white bodies in there, guns touching naked flesh—go on, mon, move your chickenfat ass—like a scene in a high-class concentration camp, moving them into the gas chamber. Getting the shit-scared locker room attendant to start opening up the lockers. Cochise going through the shoeshine room and the service bar into the ladies locker room—yeah, let’s get everybody in here—the three of them actually grinning. Sure, because they knew they had it in their hands now. Unbelievable, Maguire thought, relaxing a little, already seeing himself and the Patterson brotherstalking about it after, laughing, giggling at the scene, retelling parts of it one or the other might have missed.
    Maguire dumping the clubs out of the golf bag, hanging it over his shoulder and throwing in all the wallets and watches, silver money clips with the club crest, a few pinkie rings, electric razors, hair-blower for Cochise—all the stuff he got out of the lockers. Unbelievable, the doctors and sales reps contributing