Chapter One She was three cars ahead of us on Highway 60, headed east toward Palm Springs in a white Town Car driven by a guy who looked like trouble. We were in my new Seville STS, Reggie behind the wheel, slouched down in the leather seat, steering with one thick finger. I was almost but not quite sure she had the jewels with her, packed in one of the red Samsonite suitcases I'd seen her escort load into the Lincoln's cavernous trunk. People think gangsters drive Lincolns to show off their money, and they do, but they also like them because there's room for multiple bodies in the trunk. Not that the lady was a gangster. That was us. Kind of.  We'd tailed her from the canal- side house in Venice, through downtown and East L.A. Ahead of us to the right, the Puente Hills bulked up in the golden light you get on winter afternoons after the Santa Ana winds have whisked the smog out to sea. With black- and- white dairy cattle grazing on the green slopes, the hills reminded me of an oil painting I'd seen while casing a Santa Barbara museum a couple of weeks before--a plein air vision of SoCal's vanishing rural past worth $30,000, more than the rolling expanse of portrayed acreage was worth when the painter committed it to canvas in the 1920s.  "What's the plan?" Reggie said.  I'd explained everything to him the night before. Either he hadn't paid attention or he was just annoying me now because he was bored. "We'll play it by ear," I said, annoying him back.  He turned his shaggy head and gave me a look, half exasperated, half disgusted, that I remembered from years before in St. Louis when he had been the tough mentor showing me, a teenage novice, the ins and outs of our suburban underworld.  Traffic was thinning as we left the city behind, the red needle of the Seville's speedometer edging up to 80 mph as Reggie kept close but not too close to the Lincoln. I didn't know much about the lady other than what I'd read in the society pages of a slick coastal magazine where I first saw the pink diamond necklace reproduced on glossy paper, but I appreciated her judgment in leaving for the desert early in the afternoon.  On Friday evenings, the Los Angeles basin is like an ants' nest that has been stirred with a stick. Whether you are heading north along the coast to Santa Barbara, south to San Diego, or inland to the mountain resorts or desert, every outlet is clogged with cars, fumes, and frustration as swarms of the basin's ten million inhabitants rush for the exits of paradise.  One of the things about conventional people that annoys me the most is their tendency to do everything at the allotted time. If it is noon, they go to lunch--at exactly the worst moment, when restaurants are most crowded and the wait for tables and food is the longest. If it is Friday and by some unaccountable oversight they have one credit card left that's not maxed out, then it is time for them to go away for the weekend; they cheerfully edge onto gridlocked highways after work, stubbornly oblivious to the stupidity of their timing. If we had left Venice at 5 p.m. instead of 2 p.m., we would have been part of a hundred- mile- long traffic jam, arriving in Palm Springs with red faces and sparking nerves after a miserable fourhour commute.  Instead, it was clear sailing as we crossed the 57, the 15, and the 215, and entered the Badlands that lurk like a fairy- tale barrier between Los Angeles and the handy Shangri- La of the Coachella Valley. I gave the lady credit for a sense of tradition, too. Instead of hu Excerpted from Criminal Karma: A Novel by Steven M. Thomas All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.