The Heist

reason.”
    “Rockets lift off. Planes take off.”
    “We’re in the air, aren’t we?” she said.
    They wouldn’t be for long because they didn’t have far to go. Their destination was the general aviation airport in Thermal, California, so named because the temperature there could be as close to hell as it was possible to get without actually being damned, often making Death Valley feel like the North Pole by comparison.
    Thermal was 136 miles southeast of Los Angeles, a two-hour-plus drive by car but only a few minutes travel by plane. The climate and landscape in that corner of the Mojave were very similar to Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert, where the Viboras were waging a bloody war with the Sinaloa Cartel for the control of narco-traffic into the U.S.
    Nick glanced at his watch. “How are you feeling about landing the plane?”
    “I can’t wait. I just hope they have a very long runway,” Willie said, and then laughed when she saw the troubled expression on Nick’s face. “If you’re worried about my piloting skills, you shouldn’t have given me a pilot’s license.”
    “It’s fake,” he said.
    “Aren’t we all?”
    Nick put his ski mask back on and returned to the cabin. Chet was still wearing his mask, too, even though Burnside was out cold. That’s because Nick was a firm believer in never slipping out of character in the presence of the mark, no matter what. It kept the crew sharp and prevented them from letting their guard down. He was impressed that Kate seemed to know that instinctively, not even sharing a glance with him back in the cabin, even after Burnside was covered with a hood.
    The first few years of the new millennium had been a boom time in the Coachella Valley. The desert resort communities of Palm Springs, Palm Desert, La Quinta, and Indio had expanded quickly. New homes were sold as fast as they could be built and at well over their asking prices. The demand for vacation properties was so strong that developers scrambled to buy up large tracts of land.
    It was only natural that developers turned their eyes to Thermal, despite the fact that the pitiful patch of blazingly hot desert was downwind from the Salton Sea, which was frequently stricken with algae blooms, massive water evaporation, and catastrophic fish die-offs that made the entire area smell like it was under a huge, ferocious fart cloud. Encino Grande was going to be the development that would transform the perception of Thermal, making it a prestigious address for resort living, with its 144 luxury homes built around a shimmering man-made lake and a lush nine-hole golf course.
    A grand entrance gate, a stone wall surrounding the property, and three homes were built and landscaped before the economy cratered. One day the developer simply disappeared, leaving behind the homes, an empty lakebed, acres of graded sand, and a dozen foundations in various stages of construction to bake under the scorching sun.
    And so it had remained for seven years until Nick Fox came along and, using one of his pseudonyms, rented the property from the bank to use as a location in a low-budget movie about drug smuggling.
    Tom Underhill came in with a construction team that worked day and night for three weeks to transform one 6,500-square-foot home into a Vibora drug lord’s luxurious but fortified hideaway,with an open-air guard tower and a high, bullet-pocked wall topped with razor wire. The yard at the immediate rear of the house, within the high walls, was landscaped with tropical plants around a swimming pool with a swim-up wet bar. It was an oasis within an otherwise militaristic compound. A zigzag of concrete K-rail barriers was placed inside the gate to prevent attackers from surging into the compound with vehicles. A detached garage was converted into guard quarters, and the pool house was turned into a “prison block” for unwelcome guests. Of course, most of it was fake.
    Boyd Capwell watched his mansion take shape and read up on the Vibora cartel, screened Al Pacino in
Scarface
and Ricardo Montalban in
Fantasy Island
, listened to Julio Iglesias CDs, and ate almost exclusively at Taco Bell, which also happened to be the most upscale restaurant in the vicinity of Thermal. He picked out a wardrobe at the stores along El Paseo in Palm Desert, wore the makeup that Chet created for him, and a week before Burnside’s abduction, moved into the Encino Grande house and arranged the décor, tended the landscaping, and swam in the