Storm Runners

‘Oh?’ He glanced at her and saw that she was looking down. ‘I appreciate that. I really do.’

‘What I mean is, this is me. This is what I look like and this is what I am. And I think you’re wonderful and brave and loyal and I’d be proud to be your friend. Maybe more. I’m sorry to be clumsy and insensitive. I think my moment is right now and if it passes I’ll never see you again.’

He looked at her, not knowing what to say.

‘Plus, I get four weeks’ paid vacation, great medical, and good retirement. I’ve got good teeth, strong legs, and an iron stomach. I’m relatively low maintenance.’

He smiled.

‘And I only look clean-cut.’

‘I can’t.’

They came to the street and headed toward Stromsoe’s house.

‘I talk too much at the wrong time,’ she said. ‘It’s a problem.’

‘Hallie was the same way.’

‘You’re a beautiful man.’

‘You’re a beautiful woman but I can’t.’

‘I understand, Matt.’

Susan lightly held his arm until they came to the house. She waited in the living room while Stromsoe chose a framed picture from the spare bedroom wall: Hallie, Billy, and him on the beach, not far from where he had just watched the sun go down, smiling back at the stranger they’d asked to take the shot.

She looked at the picture then at Stromsoe. ‘You’ll find all this again. Somewhere, someday.’

He wanted to tell her it was impossible, but saw no reason to belittle her opinion.

One thing Stromsoe knew for certain about life was that things only happen once.

Later that night he packed and loaded the car. It didn’t hold much, but he got his bare necessities, the bag with Hallie’s jewelry, and the one with Billy’s things.

He cooked canned stew and drank and limped through the house again as the memories collided with one another and the waves roared then hissed against the beach.

He signed a power-of-attorney form down-loaded from the Web and left it on the kitchen table with a check for five thousand dollars, made out to Dan Birch.

He’d call Dan from wherever he was tomorrow, explain the situation.

He slept in his bed for the last time.

Early the next morning he gassed up and headed east toward Arizona. By two that afternoon he was in Tucson, where he called Birch and talked about the selling of his house. Dan was unhappy about Stromsoe’s plans but said he’d handle the sale and have the money deposited in the proper account.

‘I want you to call me,’ said Birch. ‘I’m not going to let you vanish.’

‘I’ll call, Dan. I don’t want to vanish.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Forward motion.’

By midnight Stromsoe was outside of Abilene, Texas. He parked in a rest stop, unloaded boxes from the backseat, and slept. At sunrise he was on the road again.

He began drinking in Jackson, Mississippi, ten hours later. In the morning he took a city tour by bus for no reason he could fathom. He threw his cell phone into a trash can on Gallatin Street, then gassed up the Ford and stepped on it.

Mississippi became Alabama, then, troublingly, Indiana. He aimed south again, got a motel for the night, but by then it was morning. Georgia was humid and Florida was flat, then suddenly Miami was wavering before him like the Emerald City itself. He rented an upstairs apartment on Second Avenue, not far from the Miami-Dade College campus. Once he had the boxes upstairs he sold the Ford for five thousand and opened a checking account with fake ID from his undercover days with the Sheriff’s Department. He got a new cell phone but never told Dan the number. The restaurant below his apartment was Cuban-Chilean and the food was extremely hot. Lucia the waitress called him Dead Eye. He ate and drank, drank and ate. Months later he flew back to California to testify against Tavarez. Other than that one week, he didn’t get farther than walking distance from his Second Avenue apartment. Downtown Miami swirled around him, a heated closed-loop hallucination featuring Brickell Avenue, Biscayne Bay, and the ceiling fan of his small, box-choked room.

Two years later Stromsoe woke up to find Dan Birch hovering over him. A potful of cool water hit him in the face.

‘It stinks in here,’ said Birch. He dropped the pot with a clang. ‘There’s cockroaches all over your floor. Get up, Matt. No more of this.’

‘Of this?’

‘Get the fuck up. Then we can talk about it.’

PART II The Heart of the X

7

Stromsoe sat in Dan Birch’s Irvine office and looked out at the clear October morning.

It was thirty-two days since Miami and the pot of water in his face. He had come back to California with Birch, completed a month-long detox program in Palm Springs, then taken a furnished rental in downtown Santa Ana, not far from where he had grown up. He’d started jogging and lifting weights during his detox, with arguable results. Everything hurt.

Today, Monday, he sat in his friend’s office with a cup of coffee, like any other guy hoping for a job. He could hardly believe that over two years had passed since he last talked with Birch in his haunted, long-sold home in Newport.

‘How are you feeling, Matt?’

‘Good.’

‘Drinking?’

‘Lightly.’

‘You idiot.’

‘It’s under control.’

Birch tapped his desktop with a pen. The office was on the twelfth floor and had great views southwest to Laguna.

‘We got a call last week from a woman down in San Diego County,’ he said. ‘She’s a weather lady for Fox down in San Diego – Frankie Hatfield is her name. Nice gal. Seen her on TV?’

‘No.’

‘I hadn’t either, until last night. She’s good. A year ago I did some work for one of the producers there at her channel. Frankie – Frances Leigh is her full name – told him she had a problem. The producer recommended me. I recommended you.’

Stromsoe nodded as Birch stared at him.

‘Up for this?’ asked Birch.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You would be an employee and representative of Birch Security Solutions,’ said Birch. ‘I use the best.’

‘I understand, Dan.’

‘The best control themselves.’

‘I can do that. I told you.’

Birch continued to look at his friend. ‘So, Frankie Hatfield is being stalked. Doesn’t know by whom. Never married, no children, no ugly boyfriends in the closet, no threats. The last time she saw the guy, she was doing one of her live weather broadcasts. They shoot live on location, various places around San Diego. He might be an infatuated fan – some guy who follows the Fox News van out of the yard and around the city. I’ve got some letters and e-mails she’s received at work but I don’t see anything to take seriously. She’s caught glimpses of this guy – dark hair and dark complexion, medium height and weight – three times. Twice on her private property. She filed a complaint with SDPD but you know that drill.’

‘They can’t help her until he assaults her.’

‘More or less.’

Birch tapped his keyboard, adjusted the monitor his way, and leaned back. ‘Yeah, here. She’s seen this guy outside her studio in downtown San Diego, on her residential property in Fallbrook, on her investment property in Bonsall, and possibly following her on I-5 in a gold four-door car. She hasn’t gotten plate numbers because he stays too far back. He takes pictures of her. He has not spoken to her. He has not called. He has not acknowledged her in any way except by running away from her.’

‘She’s tried to confront him?’

‘Confront him? Hell, she photographed him. Check these.’

Birch flicked four snapshots across the desk to Stromsoe. Stromsoe noted that they were high-pixel digital images printed on good picture paper.

‘Frances is not a fearful sort,’ said Birch.

Two of the pictures showed a sloping hillside of what appeared to be avocado trees. In a clearing stood a tapered wooden tower of some kind. It looked twenty feet tall, maybe more. In one picture a man stood beside the tower looking at the camera, and in the next three he was running away. He was dark-haired and dark-skinned, dressed in jeans, a light shirt, and athletic shoes. He looked small.

‘That was taken on her Bonsall property,’ said Birch.

‘How big is the parcel?’ asked Stromsoe.

‘A hundred acres. Says she goes there to be alone.’

‘Where’s Bonsall?’

‘Next door to Fallbrook.’

Stromsoe pictured a woman sitting in the middle of a hundred-acre parcel to be alone. It seemed funny, but it also seemed like she had a right to her privacy on her own land.

‘Frankie has a decent home security system,’ said Birch. ‘I set her up with a panic button that will ring the Sheriff’s substation in Fallbrook and you simultaneously. I set her up with one month of twice-a-day patrol. I sold her a bodyguard – that would be you – for trips to and from work and while she’s on the job, for the next thirty days. Handle it?’

‘I can handle it.’

‘This guy is pretty bold, Matt. She’s seen him three times in twelve days, plus the maybe on the freeway. I don’t think he’s a weenie wagger – he’d have whipped it out already. Obsessed fan? Rapist? Find out. Arrest the creep if you can, let the cops chew his sorry ass. Give Frankie some peace of mind. I told her you were our best. She’s expecting you at her home at noon today, to follow her into San Diego to the studio. She starts around one in the afternoon and heads home after the live shoot at eight o’clock. Keep track of your hours. If you shake this guy loose before thirty days are up, we’ll all talk.’

Birch handed Stromsoe the panic button, a concealed-carry sidearm permit for San Diego County, and a sheet of paper with Frances Hatfield’s numbers on it.

Fallbrook was a small town fifty miles north of San Diego, twelve miles inland, tucked behind Camp Pendleton. Stromsoe had never been there. The road in from Oceanside was winding and the traffic was light. He looked out at the avocado orchards and orange groves, the flowered undulating valleys of the big nurseries, the horses in their corrals, the houses on the hilltops or buried deep within the greenery. There was an antiques store, a feed and tack store, a drive-through cappuccino stand. He saw a tennis court hidden in the trees, and a very small golf course – obviously homemade – sloping down from a house with a red tile roof. He drove through a tunnel of huge oak trees then back into a blast of sunlight and thousands of orange butterflies. The sky was filled with them. A herd of llamas eyed him sternly from an emerald pasture. He rolled down the window of his new used pickup truck and smelled blossoms.

Frances Hatfield’s voice on the gate phone was clear and crisp. She enunciated well. The gate rolled to the side without sound.

Her property was hilly and green, planted with avocado and citrus. The avocado trees were tall, shaggy and heavy with small fruit. Stromsoe had no idea how much of the land was hers because the orchards rambled on, a hilly, fenceless tableau in the clean October sunlight. A hawk shot across the treetops with a high-pitched keen.

Frances Hatfield was a tall woman, dark-haired and brown-eyed. She looked to be in her midtwenties. A straight, narrow nose and assertive bones gave her a patrician face, but it was softened by her smile. She was dressed in jeans, packer boots, and a white blouse tucked in.

‘Hello, Mr. Stromsoe. I’m Frankie Hatfield.’

She offered her hand. A golden retriever itemized the smells on Stromsoe’s shoes and legs.

‘My pleasure, Ms. Hatfield.’

‘This is Ace.’

‘Hey, Ace.’ He looked up. ‘Nice butterflies.’

‘Painted ladies,’ she said. ‘They migrate by the millions every few years. They’ll be gone with the first rain.’

‘Are these your orchards?’

‘I almost break even on the avocados,’ she said. ‘They take a lot of water and water is expensive here. Please come in. Want to just go with Frankie and Matt?’

‘Good.’

The house was cool and quiet. Through the mullioned windows the orchard rows convened in the middle distance. Ace produced a ball but gave no hint of giving it up. Stromsoe smelled blossoms again, then a recently used fireplace, then brewing coffee. A grizzled gray dog with a white face wandered up to Stromsoe on petite feet and slid her head under his hand.

‘Hope you don’t mind dogs,’ said Frankie.

‘I love dogs.’

‘Do you have any?’

‘Not right now.’

‘That’s Sadie.’

They sat in the living room. It was large, openbeamed, and paneled with cedar. With its many windows the room seemed to be a part of the patio beyond it and the avocado orchard beyond that. The patio fountain trickled faintly and Stromsoe could hear it through the screen doors.

A series of softened explosions seemed to roll across the sky to them, powerful blasts muted by distance.

‘That’s artillery exercise at Camp Pendleton,’ said Frankie. ‘The sound of freedom. You get used to it.’

‘I used to live near the beach and I got used to the waves. Didn’t hear them unless I tried to.’

‘Kind of a shame, actually.’

‘I thought so.’

Stromsoe felt the faraway artillery thundering in his bones.

‘I have no idea who he is, or what he wants,’ said Frankie.

‘He does not seem threatening, although I take his presence on my property as a threat. I have no bad people in my past. I have skeletons but they’re good skeletons.’

Stromsoe brought her snapshots from his coat pocket and looked at them again. ‘Does he resemble anyone you know?’

She shook her head.

‘Brave of you to whip out the camera and start shooting,’ he said.

‘I lack good sense sometimes.’

‘I’m surprised it didn’t scare him off. What’s this wooden tower for?’

Stromsoe held out the picture and pointed.

‘I have no idea. It’s been on the Bonsall property forever.’

‘Is that where you go to be alone?’

‘Yes. I escape from me.’

Stromsoe noted that the tower didn’t look old enough to have been somewhere forever.

He brought out the panic button and set it on the rough pine trunk between them.

‘You flip the cover like an old pocket watch, push the button three times,’ he said. ‘If you hold the button down for five seconds or more, the call is officially canceled but I’ll show up anyway. So will the sheriffs if you’re out here in the county, or the San Diego PD if you’re downtown.’

‘GPS?’ She examined the gadget.

‘Yes. It’s always on.’

‘Can it differentiate between all the cities in the county?’

‘Any city in the United States, actually.’

‘Impressive.’

‘Not if you don’t have it with you.’

She smiled. The smile disarmed the angles of her face and brightened her dark eyes. ‘I will.’

Stromsoe told her he’d follow her to and from work, said not to get out until he’d parked and come to her vehicle, to leave the engine running until then, and if he didn’t get there within two minutes to hit the panic button, drive to the exit, get on the nearest freeway, and call the police.

‘Do you have a gun?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you good with it?’

‘Yes. I used to be very good,’ he said.

‘Do you adjust for the monovision?’

‘Of course.’

‘Your prosthetic is a beautiful match, really,’ she said. ‘A friend of mine in school had one. She was a poet.’

Stromsoe nodded. He reflexively balled his left fingers into a loose fist to obscure the missing one. ‘I suppose you’ve got a gun.’

‘It’s a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight revolver, two-inch barrel. I’ve got a valid CCP and I’ve done ten hours of range training. To be honest I’m shaky outside of twelve feet. Fifty feet, I can’t even hit the silhouette. It kicks like a mule.’

‘Those short barrels make it tough,’ he said.

‘It makes lots of noise though. I feel better with it.’

‘You possibly are.’

‘It’s a very unpleasant feeling, being watched.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘No matter how ready I am, it always comes as a surprise when I see him. And I almost always feel watched before I realize I’m being watched. But then, I feel watched and a lot of the time I’m not. That’s what it does to you. You begin to doubt your senses. And that makes a person feel weak and afraid.’

Frankie’s hands were large and slender and she used them generously while she talked. Since losing the finger, Stromsoe had paid special attention to people’s hands. He considered the way that weather forecasters like to swirl theirs over the projection maps to show the path of coming fronts and storms.

‘Don’t feel weak and afraid,’ he said. ‘My job is to make your job easier. Forget about this guy. He can’t hurt you. Leave him to me.’

She looked at him straight on, no smile, the dark eyes in forthright evaluation.

‘I can’t tell you how good that sounds,’ she said. ‘I’ve lost more than a little sleep over this.’

‘No more.’

Her intense scrutiny dissolved into a smile. ‘We should go. It takes an hour to get to San Diego this time of day. We’re going to the Fox building off of Clairemont Mesa. I drive fast.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep up. After you’re past the parking-lot booth, don’t drive to your space. Wait for me while I explain myself to the attendant.’

‘He’s a tough old guy,’ said Frankie. ‘Suspicious and not friendly. You drive up for the five hundredth time and he looks at you like he’s never seen you before. Then he takes an hour to check your number.’

‘He’ll see the light,’ said Stromsoe. ‘Your job is to pretend I’m not there. Things will work best that way.’

She half smiled, said nothing. Ace continued to hoard his ball and the artillery went off again in the west.

8

By 4 P.M. Frankie’s video team had set up on a sidewalk overlooking Seal Rock Reserve in La Jolla. The big elephant seals lolled and roared in the cooling afternoon. The painted-lady butterflies filled the sky by the fluttering thousands. The ocean reminded Stromsoe of Newport, and Newport reminded him of Hallie and Billy, and for a moment Stromsoe was back in an earlier time when he and his wife and son could walk on a beach together. Now, two plus years after their deaths, his memories of them were less frequent but more distinct, and, somehow, more valuable.

Frankie – with a black windbreaker and her hair whipping in the breeze – held up her microphone and explained that the ridge of high pressure would continue through the week, gradually giving way to cooling and low clouds as the marine layer fought its way back onshore. However, a ‘substantial’ trough of low pressure was waiting out over the Pacific. She smiled enthusiastically and said that rain was possible by Sunday, something in the one-inch range, if the current jet-stream pattern held.

‘Now I remember what the farmers used to say about the rain when I was just a girl,’ she told the cameras. ‘Early in, late out. So if we do pick up some serious rain this early in October, we could be in for a long, wet season. Okay with me – we need it! Just be sure to keep your umbrellas handy and your firewood dry. I’m Frankie Hatfield, reporting from Seal Rock Reserve in La Jolla.’

Stromsoe watched almost everything except Frances Hatfield: the families and tourists out enjoying the fall day, the cars parked along Coast Boulevard, especially the single men who perked up when they spotted Frankie and the unmistakable Fox News van. A semicircle of onlookers formed as Frankie finished her report and Stromsoe spotted a dark-haired, dark-complected young man who stood and calmly stared at her. In that moment Stromsoe got a glimpse of what being a public figure was like, the way people assumed they had a right to stare at you. No wonder celebrities wore sunglasses. The young man backed away and continued his walk along the shore.

When Frankie was finished she took a few minutes to talk with the crowd and sign some autographs. She was half a head taller than most everyone. She knelt down to talk to a little girl. After the last fan walked off, she looked at Stromsoe, took a deep breath, then exhaled.

And that was when her secret admirer stepped out from behind the gnarled trunk of a big torrey pine, saw Stromsoe break toward him, then wheeled and sprinted for Coast Boulevard. Stromsoe saw that he looked a lot like his picture – young, dark-haired, and dark-skinned. He was square-shouldered and small, and he ran with rapid, short-legged strokes. He had what looked like a camera in his right hand.

Stromsoe was a big man and not fast. The pins in his legs caused a tightness that hadn’t gone away. A month of jogging and weights and rehab didn’t erase his poor condition after two years of boozing in Florida, and by the time he hit the sidewalk he saw, far down on Coast Boulevard, Frankie’s stalker slam the door on a gold sedan and a moment later steer into the southbound flow of traffic. But the traffic was dense and his truck was parked way up by the Fox van, so Stromsoe powered down the sidewalk as fast as his pinned legs would carry him and almost took out a mom and a stroller but he detoured onto the grass as the gold car stopped behind a blue van about to pass through a stop sign. Stromsoe saw that it would be close. He cut back to the sidewalk then into the street. He ran through a cloud of orange butterflies. The blue van started across the intersection with the gold car glued to its bumper and honking. Stromsoe raised his knees and clenched his fists and charged up near the car just as it screeched around the van in a blast of white smoke that left him blinded and lumbering out of the way of a monstrous black SUV driven by a young man looking down on him assessingly. Stromsoe hailed the young man in hopes of following the stalker but the driver flipped him off and stomped on it right through the stop sign.

Stromsoe stood on the grass, hands on his knees, panting as he watched the gold sedan sweep around a corner. He’d gotten the first four of the seven plate symbols: 4NIZ or 4NTZ. It was hard to get a fix on that license plate with his feet jarring on the asphalt and his one good eye trying for a decent look at the driver.

So, 4NIZ or 4NTZ. Fuck, there were a thousand combinations to check. He kicked a trash can and looked back toward the Fox van. Thirty-seven years old, he thought, and I can barely run two hundred yards.

Furthering his humiliation, Frankie Hatfield was already halfway toward him, loping across the grass while her video man shot away.

He squared his shoulders and tried not to limp as he walked to meet her.

Frankie was rattled but went on to do live reports from downtown La Jolla, Torrey Pines State Park, and UCSD. Stromsoe didn’t see the stalker or the gold sedan again.

Five lousy yards away, he thought. That close.

By nine that night he was following her brilliant red Mustang up the long driveway through the darkened avocado orchard in Fallbrook. Only a sliver of moonlight showed in the black sky.

She pulled into her garage, locked up her car, and came to his truck. He rolled down the window. He heard her dogs barking inside the house.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You gave our little friend something to think about.’

‘I’ll get him next time. Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘I’d feel better if you lived a minute away instead of an hour,’ said Frankie.

‘I’ll park down at the gate for an hour or two, if you’d feel better,’ said Stromsoe.

‘No. It’s okay. That’s not in the contract.’

Stromsoe killed his engine. She took another step toward the truck and crossed her arms.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘The sheriffs are tied to the panic button, and Birch got them to A-list you. The substation is only a couple of miles away.’

Stromsoe had intended this to be comforting but he knew she was calculating response time the same as he was. By the time the alarm came through, dispatch made the call, and the nearest prowl car blundered through miles of unlit country roads and found a home lost on ten acres of grove and orchard?