Storm Runners

Who knew.

Stromsoe heard a car engine idling back in the orchard. Then the engine died. He looked at Frankie but she apparently hadn’t noticed it.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And good night.’

‘You’re going to be just fine, Frankie.’

It sounded lame and he wished he hadn’t said it.

‘I know I will.’

When she opened the door he saw the dogs bouncing around her. She looked back at him and he started up the truck.

Stromsoe drove back through the orchards, looking for the car that had been idling. He saw nothing.

When he finally got down to where the orchard ended at the main avenue, he parked and turned off the engine and waited, just to see if someone might start up the slope toward Frances Hatfield’s place.

Half an hour later he’d seen plenty of cars going up and down the avenue, and an opossum that barely made it in front of a tractor trailer with a gigantic bouquet of gladiolas painted on the rear doors, and three coyotes that trotted past the front of his truck with the harried concentration of young executives. The painted ladies billowed by.

But no cars on their way to Frankie’s house.

Five minutes later her flashy red Mustang nosed out from the black orchards, then roared onto the avenue.

Stromsoe brought the truck to life, checked his clearance, and barreled off after her.

True to her word, she drove fast. But it was easy for Stromsoe to see her in the light traffic, so he kept back behind a tractor trailer for a half a mile, then behind a truck very much like his own, then behind a new yellow Corvette.

She took Old Highway 395 south then headed west on Gopher Canyon. She was going toward Bonsall, he thought – her investment property? He glanced at his watch: almost eleven-thirty. Kind of late to be going somewhere to escape from yourself, wasn’t it?

She turned right and left and right again, longer and longer stretches of darkness between the turns, and Stromsoe followed as far back as he could with his headlights off.

The road turned to gravel, rising gently. Stromsoe eased his truck into the wake of Frankie’s dust and crept along in the pale red glow of his parking lights.

When he came over the top he could see down now, to where the Mustang had stopped in a gateway. He killed his parking lights and engine. He watched the driver’s-side door of the Mustang swing out and Frankie pull herself from the little cabin. Her two dogs spilled out behind her.

In the spray of her headlights Frankie lifted a thick chain off a post, then swung open a steelpipe gate. After the Mustang was through, she got out, called the dogs, swung the gate closed, and lifted the chain back into place. She got the dogs back into the car and rolled off.

Stromsoe gave her a few minutes then drove slowly to the gate. He made a U-turn and left his truck parked on the far side of the dirt road, facing out.

He took a small but strong flashlight from his glove box and locked up the truck. A sign on the gate said NO TRESPASSING – VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. He lifted the chain from the gatepost and let himself in.

He limped down the dirt road in the faint moonlight, climbed a rise, and stood now at the top of a hillock looking down on a wide, dark valley. He smelled water and grass and the butterscotch smell of willow trees.

A barn sat a hundred yards off the road. The red Mustang was parked beside it. Next to the Mustang was a white long-bed pickup truck. The barn door was closed but light inside came around the door to fall in faint slats on the ground. A window glowed faintly orange and Stromsoe thought he saw movement inside.

He stayed on the dark edge of the dirt road as he moved toward the barn. Above him the sky was pinpricked by stars and again he smelled water and grass. A horse neighed in the distance. He could hear the ticks and pops of the Mustang’s cooling engine as he approached the barn, crept slowly to the window, and looked in.

Frankie’s side was to him. Ace and Sadie lay on a red braided rug not far from their master. Frankie was standing at a wooden workbench fitted with a band saw, a circular saw, a drill press, and half a dozen vises. She wore jeans and boots again, and a pair of oversize safety goggles. She squared a length of two-by-four on the bench, hooked the end of a yellow tape measure over one end, took a pencil from her mouth, and marked it. Then she pressed the board forward into the circular saw and a brief shriek followed. The motor died and Stromsoe heard the clink of the board on the concrete floor.

Beyond Frankie’s workbench there was a similar bench, at which a white-whiskered old man drilled holes in lengths of two-by-four like the one Frankie had just sawn. He wore safety goggles too, but they were propped up on his head. A cigarette dangled from his mouth and a lazy plume of smoke rose toward the high rafters.

A tall wooden tower stood beside the old man’s bench, the same type that Stromsoe had noted in Frankie’s photograph of the stalker. It looked larger than the one in the picture. It was newly made. The redwood was still pink and Stromsoe could see the gleam of the new nuts and bolts and washers that held it together. The top was a plywood platform about the right size to hold a person, a fifty-five-gallon drum, or a couple of small trash cans. There was a one-foot-high railing around the edge of the platform, as if to keep something from tipping over or falling off. The tower rose up twenty feet high, at least. Beside it stood another tower that was only about one-third finished.

The old man carried two lengths of wood, joined at right angles, over to the tower in progress. He pulled a socket wrench from his back pocket and began bolting the boards to the tower.

The dogs looked up and the old man’s gaze started his way and Stromsoe moved away from the window.

From this point he could see the west wall of the barn. There were four long benches along it, similar to the workbenches at which Frankie and the old man worked. These were covered not with tools but with books and notebooks, beakers and burners, tubes and vials, canisters and bottles, boxes and bags, all overhung with a series of metal lamps hung by chains from the rafters. There were two refrigerators and a freezer along the far wall. There was a small kitchen area with four burners, an oven, and a sink. A fire extinguisher was fastened to every fifth post of the exposed interior frame. In the far corner was what looked like an office, separated from the main barn by a door that stood open.

Stromsoe thought of the meth labs he’d seen out in the Southern California desert not far from here. Riverside County was ground zero for the labs, but there were plenty in Los Angeles and San Diego and San Bernardino counties, too. Interesting, he thought – except that he was pretty sure Frances Hatfield and the old man weren’t cooking drugs.

He heard Frankie’s saw start up and eased his face back to the window. She pressed the board into the blade, then another. She worked with assurance, and no hurry.

The old man wrestled another set of bolted boards off his bench, walked them across the floor, and fitted them into the growing tower. He took out his socket wrench and looked at the structure appraisingly.

‘Nice, Ted,’ said Frankie. Stromsoe could just barely make out her words.

‘When this one’s finished I’m done for tonight,’ said Ted. ‘Been at it since four.’

‘We’ll be ready for next week,’ said Frankie.

‘I hope so.’

‘We need that jet stream to stay south. Just a little help from the stream is all we need.’

The old man said something back but Stromsoe couldn’t make it out.

He eased away from the barn, found the dark edge of the road, and walked back to his car. Ready for next week, he thought. Need the jet stream to stay south?

He wondered if the wooden towers were a decorative garden item that Frankie and her partner sold to local nurseries. He’d seen little windmills that looked a lot like them, though Frankie’s were four times the height and had no blades to catch a breeze.

Then he thought of water wells and storage tanks and railroad structures and mining rigs and weather stations and airport towers and fire observation decks and oil derricks and guard towers and wind turbines for making electricity.

Ready for next week could mean for the dis tributor, or to complete an order, or…

Frankie, you have some explaining to do.

He smelled the river water again, then the sweet aroma of oranges and lemons carrying on the cool night air.

9

Mike Tavarez surveyed the exercise yard and listened to the inmates counting off their sit-ups: thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…

Their voices rose in crisp unison into the cold afternoon air of Pelican Bay State Prison. They sounded like a small army, thought Tavarez, and in a sense they were, because the Mexican gangs here in Pelican Bay didn’t stand around like the Nazi Lowriders or the Aryan Brotherhood or the Black Guerillas.

No, La Eme and Nuestra Familia – though they would kill one another if you put them together in the same exercise yard at the same time – worked out here in the general population yard for two hours every day. Different hours, but they worked out hard. They heaved and strained and yelled the cadence, in training to stay alive when it was time to fight.

Give people a beat to follow and they’ll do anything you tell them to, thought Tavarez. Like a marching band.

Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one…

‘Why don’t you work out with them?’ asked Jason Post. Post was one of the correctional officers who had helped get Tavarez transferred from the Security Housing Unit to the general population. That was six months ago. The Prison Guards Union held substantial power at Pelican Bay, and Post was a union activist.

‘I like watching,’ said Tavarez. ‘I like their discipline. I never got to see this in the X.’

The Security Housing Unit was known as ‘the X’ because it was shaped like one. Sometimes it was called the Shoe. Tavarez had spent his first year there. It was a living hell. The SHU was made up of pods – eight glass-faced cells per pod – arranged around an elevated guardhouse. It was always twilight in the X, never light and never dark. Tavarez was watched by guards 23/7 on television. When he used the toilet it was televised onto a guardhouse monitor. The toilets had no moving parts that could be made into weapons. For one hour a day he was allowed to exercise alone in ‘dog run’ – a four-walled concrete tank half the size of a basketball court. A guard watched him do that too, from a catwalk above. In the X, time stopped. His great aloneness swallowed him. There had been days in the X when Tavarez had had to bite his tongue to keep from weeping, and swallow the blood.

It was solitary confinement, but in full view of the guards. The X was designed by an architect who specialized in sensory deprivation. Even the warden admitted that it was designed to make you insane. The feeling of hours stretching into years was indescribable for Tavarez, unbearable. He never thought he would actually feel his mind leaving him. Finally, he found a way to get to Jason Post and Post had begun the process that saved his life.

The difference between the SHU and general population was the difference between hell and freedom. Or at least between hell and the possibility of freedom, for which Tavarez was now planning.

He saw that the count was slowing as his men approached eighty push-ups.

Seventy-six…seventy-seven…

‘Besides,’ he said. ‘I like having the pile to myself.’

‘I’ll bet you do,’ said Post. He was a thick young Oregonian with a downsloping head of yellow hair. ‘Nobody gets that except you.’

Tavarez got an hour a day on the iron pile, where he could lift weights alone and let his mind wander. He had arranged this privilege through Post also, and paid for it by having money wired into various bank accounts. His iron-pile hour was generally between 11 P.M. and midnight but Tavarez was largely nocturnal anyway. He’d grown very strong.

And one night per week, usually Monday, Tavarez would skip his late-night workout and instead be escorted to the far corner of the southeast compound perimeter, where he would stand handcuffed while a prostitute serviced him through a chain-link fence.

‘How’s Tonya?’ asked Tavarez.

‘Chemo sucks, you know?’

Tavarez figured that Post would need some help.

‘With her not feeling good, you know, the kid doesn’t get decent meals and he doesn’t ever get his homework done. I’m here in this shithole forty-eight hours a week ‘cause we need the money, so I can’t do everything at home, you know?’

‘Sounds difficult,’ said Tavarez.

‘That’s because it is difficult.’

‘As soon as you get me the library, I can make a transfer for you.’

Post was predictable and self-serving as a dog, which was why Tavarez valued him.

‘It’s done,’ said the young guard. ‘You have the library for one hour tonight. The laptop will be inside in the world atlas on the G shelf, down at the end, up on top, out of sight. Lunce will come to your cell at ten to take you in. Then he’ll take you to the iron pile at eleven, then back to your cell at midnight.’

Tavarez suppressed a smile. ‘Batteries charged?’

‘Hell yes they’re charged.’

‘I’ll make the transfer.’

‘Ten K?’

‘Ten.’

Tavarez watched the men labor and count. The ten K infuriated him but he didn’t let it show. Plus, he had the money.

…ninety-eight…ninety-nine…one hundred!

‘Behave yourself, bandito,’ said Post.

‘Always,’ said Tavarez.

‘ You don’t want to go back to the X.’

‘God will spare me that, Jason.’

‘God don’t care here. It’s every man for himself.’

‘That’s why I value our friendship,’ said Tavarez.

‘Yeah, I bet. Make that transfer, dude.’

Prison Investigator Ken McCann delivered a cloth sack full of mail to Tavarez in his cell later that afternoon. Mail was delivered to Tavarez only twice a week because he got so much of it. The Prison Investigation team – four overworked Corrections employees overseeing a prison population of almost 3,500 – had to read, or attempt to read, every piece of Mike El Jefe Tavarez’s incoming and outgoing correspondence.

‘Strip out, Mikey,’ said McCann, making a twirling motion with his finger.

Tavarez faced the far wall and spread his arms and legs. ‘Looks like quite a haul.’

Then the guard unlocked the cell and McCann tossed the sack onto the bed. The door clanged shut with a faint echo, and the lock rang home.

Tavarez backed again to the door slot – it was called the bean chute because meals sometimes came through it too – then went to his bed. The bed was just a mattress on a concrete shelf built into the wall. He dumped the mail onto the thin green blanket. He sat and fanned through the correspondence. True to form, McCann and his investigators had opened every envelope except the ones from law firms. Attorney-client privilege was a constitutional right even in a supermax prison, though Tavarez suspected that McCann opened and read some of them anyway. Which was fair, since several of the law firms with very impressive letter-heads were fictitious, and others were counterfeit. There were fifty or sixty letters in all.

‘How many letters did you write this last week?’ asked McCann.

‘Seventy.’

‘Every week you write seventy.’

‘Ten a day,’ said Tavarez. ‘An achievable number.’

Tavarez knew that most of the inmates got little or no mail at all. He’d seen printouts of the pen-pal ads on the prison Web site, which were full of pleas for letters from inmates who hadn’t received a letter in years, or even decades.

But Tavarez was El Jefe, and he got hundreds of letters every month from friends and relatives – long, usually handwritten tales of life in the barrio, life in jail, life in other prisons, life in general.

‘It’s pure numbers, isn’t it, Mikey?’ asked McCann. ‘Enough mail comes and goes, and you know your messages will get through.’

‘No, Ken. I just have lots of family and friends.’

‘You have lots of business is what you have.’

‘You overestimate me.’

‘Well, the piss trick won’t work anymore.’

‘No. You’re too smart for that.’

Tavarez had used his urine to write a coded message on the back of a letter to a cousin in Los Angeles. The message was about raising ‘taxes’ on a heroin shipment coming north from Sinaloa to Tucson, then on to L.A., though McCann couldn’t decipher it. It was an old prison trick – the urine dries invisible but the sugars activate under a hot lamp and the code can be read. McCann had had the good luck of picking this particular letter for his heat-lamp test.

But Tavarez had written the same message in a kite – a small, handwritten note – that a trustee had smuggled out for him through a friend in the prison kitchen, so the tax hike had gone into effect anyway.

Tavarez noted a letter from Ruben in San Quentin. Always pleasant to know what’s going down on death row.

And one from the nonexistent law firm of Farrell & Berman of Worcester, Massachusetts, which would contain news of La Eme’s East Coast business.

And one from his mother, still on Flora Street, still chipper and full of gossip, no doubt. Money was no longer a problem for his parents, though why they insisted on staying in the barrio Tavarez couldn’t understand.

There was a letter from Jaime in Modesto – trouble with La Nuestra Familia, most likely.

One from a real lawyer – Mel Alpers – who was representing him on appeal. It looked like a bill.

One from Dallas, where the Mara Salvatrucha gang had butchered two local homies in a war for narcotics distribution in the south side. Blood was about to flow. We should exterminate the Salvadorans, thought Tavarez. Bloodthirsty animals with no sense of honor.

And another letter from Ernest in Arizona State Prison, a supermax prison like Pelican Bay. Ernest was doing a thirty-year bounce on three strikes. Tavarez knew that Ernest’s boys in Arizona were busy these days. Since so much attention had been focused on California’s border, Arizona was now the nexus for drugs, humans, and cash going in and out of the United States. In many ways Arizona was better, Tavarez believed – the deserts and mountains were filled with dirt roads and impossible to patrol. Much of the land was Indian, and the state and federal agents were not welcome there. Also, Arizona had one-tenth the population of California, and was closer to good markets like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Business was good. Very good.

Tavarez sighed and picked through more mail, looking for the one letter that never came.

‘What are you worth these days, Mike? Two million? Three?’

Tavarez shook his head, sorting through the mail. ‘Nowhere near the millions you dream of. My life is about honor.’

‘The honor of La Eme. That’s funny.’

‘I don’t think honor is funny,’ said Tavarez.

La Eme’s code of silence forbade him from so much as saying those words – La Eme – let alone admitting membership.

McCann grunted. He had long accused Tavarez of secretly hoarding funds that should have gone into La Eme ‘regimental banks,’ though McCann had no evidence of it.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Lie about your money. But if I do my job right, you won’t have one dollar left to give your children when you die. Undeserving though they are.’

Tavarez looked up from his mail. ‘Leave my family out of it.’

McCann shrugged. He enjoyed chiding Tavarez about the fact that, despite getting hundreds of letters a month, Tavarez’s letters to his own children always came back marked Return to Sender.

In the beginning McCann had opened these letters both going out and coming back, suspecting that the Tavarez children had marked them with coded messages before resealing the envelopes and having their mother write return to sender on the front. But all he’d ever found were heartfelt pleadings from the great Jefe, asking for understanding and a letter back. No urine messages, no pinprick ‘ghostwriting’ that would come alive when a pencil was rubbed over them, no writing in Nahuatl – the language of the ancient Aztec – which was La Eme’s most baffling code.

‘Must be lousy, sitting in a stinkhole while your kids grow up without you.’

‘You’ve said that before.’

‘Better here than in the SHU though.’

Tavarez looked at McCann and McCann smiled. ‘Those millions don’t do you much good, do they?’

‘They don’t do me much good because I don’t have them.’

McCann stared at Tavarez for a long beat. He liked staring down the inmates. It was a way of saying he wasn’t afraid of them. McCann was large and strong. Tavarez had heard the story about the Black Guerilla gangster who had jumped McCann and ended up knocked out and bleeding. McCann loved talking about the SHU. To anyone who had been incarcerated there, it was like having a knife waved in your face. Or worse.

‘Honor?’ asked McCann. ‘How do you stand yourself, Mike? Blowing up a woman and a little boy? A woman you knew, someone you lived with and slept with? The wife of an old friend?’

‘I had nothing to do with that. I was framed by a U.S. government task force. The real killers were his own people, of course – the same task force. Because he was corrupt, on the payroll of La Nuestra Familia. Everyone knows what bunglers the government people are. All this was proven in court by my lawyers. The reason the government sent me here was so they could continue their fictional war on drugs against a fictional gang. It all comes down to dollars, jobs, and budgets. I am good for their business.’

McCann whistled the tune of a corrido. Even the guards knew the corridos – the Mexican songs that romanticized the exploits of criminal heroes who fought against corrupt police torturers and bone breakers, usually Americans. This particular song was very popular a few years ago, and it told the story of El Jefe Tavarez and an American deputy who love the same woman.

Tavarez stared at the investigator.

‘All three of you went to high school together,’ said McCann. ‘Later, the deputy took your girlfriend. So what do you do? You kill her, you fucking animal.’

Tavarez said nothing. What was the point of defending himself to a fool?

‘What did you and Post talk about today?’ asked McCann.

‘Family. He likes to talk.’

‘What’s in it for you?’

‘The X made me talkative. He’s just a kid.’

‘Going to help him out?’

‘My hands are cuffed.’

‘Don’t get any big ideas, Mikey. Behave yourself and who knows? Maybe you’ll actually get a visit from one of your own children someday.’

Tavarez nodded and picked up a letter. Ears thrumming with anger, he could barely hear the sound of McCann’s shoes on the cell-block floor as he walked away.

When he got out of this place, when the time was right, maybe he’d come back here to Crescent City and settle up with McCann.

But McCann was right. Tavarez yearned for letters from them – John, Peter, Jennifer, and Isabelle. John was the oldest at ten. He had gotten his mother’s fretful character. Isabelle was eight and a half, and she had her father’s ambition – she was acquisitive and calculating. Jennifer, only seven, had inherited her father’s lithe build and her mother’s lovely face and was excelling at tae kwon do, of all things. Little Peter had learned to run at nine months and walk at ten. He was three and a half when Tavarez had shuffled through the series of steel doors that took him into the heart of the X.

They still lived in the Laguna Beach mansion he had bought, along with his ex-wife, Miriam, and her parents from Mexico.

Miriam had cut off all communication with him after his conviction for the bombing. She had told him that she forgave and pitied him for what he had done and she would pray for his soul. But she would not allow him to poison their children. No visits. No phone calls. No letters. No communication of any kind. Her word was final. She was filing.