Courage Stolen

by R. Scott Mackey

  “There’ll be others. They’ll want their money.”

  “I don’t know about that, but for now I think you’re safe.”

  He looked around the tiny liquor store. From the size of the store, I could tell the upstairs apartment had to be tiny, maybe the size of a cheap hotel room. Being cooped up there with your mom and dad couldn’t be a load of fun.

  “You’re sure they’re in jail?” he asked.

  “Just talked to the police two hours ago. I wanted to let you know. It’s up to you what you want to do.”

  thirty-two

  On the drive back from Oroville, I stopped at a Taco Bell and a Valero for a late lunch and to fill up my car. I was exhausted when I arrived home, so I allowed myself a thirty-minute nap. When I awoke three hours later, it was dark outside and I was hungry again. I went to Raley’s Supermarket on Freeport and bought some eggs, cheese, and bacon so I could make myself an omelet.

  Rather than drive straight home after completing my shopping, I decided to go by Benzer’s apartment. The night was turning cold, a steady wind buffeting my car. A rainstorm was in the forecast for the next day, but it felt like the storm might come sooner. I cranked up the heater.

  I couldn’t view his unit from the street, so I got out of the car and entered the courtyard where I could see lights on in Benzer’s apartment for the first time since I’d been checking it the last couple of days. I thought about going up to talk to him but figured I’d give him some distance for the time being. I drove around back to the complex’s parking lot and saw Benzer’s car parked in the spot designated for his apartment.

  I called Trujillo and left him a message telling him Benzer was back in town and could be reached at home. Back at my house, I didn’t feel like cooking up an omelet after all. I felt restless and couldn’t figure out why. The missing twenty million still bugged me, but there was more. It was now ten o’clock. I picked up a chicken sandwich and fries at Dad’s Restaurant and took it with me to the Say Hey.

  Two guys and a woman were sitting at a table watching the Kings game on the corner television. The only other customer, a middle-aged guy, was leaving as I entered. Rubia read a paperback as she leaned against the bar.

  “Busy night,” I said, settling on a barstool. “I thought you packed them in when the Kings played.”

  She didn’t look up from her book. “You seen their record? They’ve won twelve games.”

  “If you’re not too busy there, would you mind pouring me a Panic IPA?”

  “Hold on.” She continued to read.

  I frowned at her. “What, are you at the part of the book where the wolf is about to blow down the straw house?”

  “Ha, ha. It just happens to be…oh, fuck you. What’d you want?” She set down the book and moved towards the row of draft beer taps behind her.

  “Panic IPA.”

  She gave me a mock dirty look when she set the beer in front of me. I smiled at her while I pulled out the chicken sandwich and french fries.

  “You got some nerve bringing outside food into my bar.”

  “You don’t serve food. Unless you count those frozen microwave burritos.”

  She reached over and took half my sandwich. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We ate our late dinner in silence for several minutes. Rubia resumed reading while polishing off her half of the sandwich and most of the fries. I watched the game on the TV at the end of the bar. For once the Kings were making it close, trailing by one point with eight seconds to go. They inbounded the ball and passed it to their best shooter, who missed a fifteen-foot jumper. The Kings’s center grabbed the rebound but missed the put back shot and the Kings lost.

  “Anything on Forrester and his compinche?” Rubia asked.

  “Don’t you read the newspaper or watch TV? It’s all over the news. They’ve both been arrested. With the flat tire they didn’t make it two miles before the cops found them.”

  “Still say you should’ve lit up his leg.”

  “They caught them. That’s the main thing.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, why the hell you here at ten o’clock at night? Isn’t it past bed time?”

  “I’m feeling a little restless.”

  “Restless.”

  “I don’t know. I found Benzer. He was up at his parents’ place in Oroville.”

  “Was he cool the guys beat him up are in jail?”

  “Seems so. He’s back at his apartment.”

  “You got it all done, Ray. Got the goons who killed Chan. Got the eco-terrorists. Got Adam Benzer settled into his apartment.”

  I frowned at her. “I’ve got twenty million dollars still missing. And a blown up seed manufacturing plant.”

  “Never said you’re perfect.” She picked up my empty glass, refilled it, and set it back onto the bar.

  “I don’t know. There are so many moving parts on this one, and they have to be connected. I’m just missing how.”

  “Maybe your head’s gettin’ in the way.

  “Maybe.”

  I sat and drank in silence, rolling things over in my mind for a good ten minutes when my cell phone rang in my pocket. I pulled it out and checked caller ID. Sacramento Police Department.

  “When did Benzer return home?” Nick Trujillo asked when I answered, skipping the formalities.

  “Why?”

  “Answer the question?”

  “I don’t know. I saw he was in his apartment when I left you the message. So it was sometime before that. I met with him in Oroville mid-afternoon so sometime between then and when I called you.”

  “Okay,” he said, pausing to write or think it over.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  Rubia looked at me with curiosity. I shrugged at her and mouthed Trujillo’s name.

  “Yeah, be glad to. Benzer’s dead. Somebody shot him in his apartment. After you called, I go over to talk to him, to get a statement about his dealings with the Golden Dragons. He doesn’t answer his door. I can hear music inside, and there’s a gap in his curtains where I can see a lot of blood on his carpet. I call for backup before I bust in. Boom. The guy’s dead with three gunshot wounds in his chest.”

  I was stunned. Benzer dead. And I was the one who told him everything was clear, and it was safe to return to Sacramento. I shoved the glass of beer to the side, my head feeling light all of a sudden. I took a deep breath, but it didn’t help.

  “Do you know who did it?” I managed to ask.

  “No, we don’t have squat. Looks like he let the killer in, and the guy shot him. No signs of a break in or a struggle.”

  I could feel the blood pounding in my head as I tried to put this news into perspective with everything else. “Wu and Bo. Are they still in jail?” I grasped at the notion the two might have been granted an ill-advised bail release.

  “Yeah, locked up tight. But guess what? They didn’t kill Thomas Chan.”

  “Why do you say that? They cut off his fingers and—”

  “They may have cut off his fingers, but they didn’t kill him. We have cell phone records that put both of them in eastern Eldorado County at the time Chan was killed in Sacramento. We have a confirmed sighting at a restaurant about forty miles from Chan’s place. Two eyewitnesses saw both of our guys eating at the Silver Fox Diner at the time the coroner said Chan died. They’re clean on the murder at least. With your testimony, we still have enough to put them away on the Benzer assault. My guess is we’ll end up turning them over to LAPD.”

  We ended the call. Trujillo said he wanted to talk more the next day, but I didn’t know what else I could tell him. I dropped my face into my hands and stared at the top of the bar.

  “What?” Rubia asked.

  I looked at her, my mind turning everything over and over. Benzer was dead. Impossible.

  “I’ve been played,” I said.

  thirty-three

  I waited in the SMUD lobby Monday morning, looking at their la
rge multimedia message board featuring closed captioned videos on energy-efficient products, a weather report, digital clock, and a map showing power outages in their service territory. At the moment, dozens of red dots were indicating customers who were without power. Outside, the predicted storm had hit with a bang, the rain coming down in buckets starting in the middle of the night and with no end in sight. The streets in my neighborhood had started to flood, so the five-mile drive to SMUD took forty-five minutes. The wind whistled through the twin glass doors at the front of the building, and the security guard left his security desk to lock one of the doors to prevent it from blowing open. The second door continued to swing open a foot or two when a particularly strong gust of wind hit. The guard and I exchanged shrugs. Not much he could do short of locking down the building.

  Roger Talbert emerged from an elevator on the other side of the security desk and entered the lobby through a short swinging gate.

  “I figured it would be easier coming down here to meet you than having you clear security all over gain.” Roger and I shook hands. “Helluva storm,” he said, looking through the front glass windows.

  “Thanks for meeting with me on such short notice.” I had called him about an hour before. “I know how busy you are. I wanted to follow up on our conversation the other day about Chan International.”

  “I can’t believe Benzer was murdered. I saw it on the morning news. It’s horrible. Do the police know who did it? It’s got to be whoever killed Thomas Chan.”

  “Yeah, that’d be my guess. They were wrapped up with some loan sharks.”

  “Not good. So, I’m guessing that’s where the payoff money came from?”

  I nodded. “Yep.”

  “So, are the loan sharks the killers?”

  “Nope,” I said, shaking my head.

  He looked surprised. “How do you know that?”

  “It’s a long story. And a complicated one. That’s kind of why I’m here, Roger. I’m trying to figure it out.” A huge gust of wind hurtled against the glass, lurching open the door and littering the entryway with rain and loose leaves.

  “Are you working with the police or something?”

  “Not really. I’m working a different angle, I guess you could say.” I didn’t want to get into the whole backstory, and I doubted he would have been interested anyway.

  “I don’t know if I can provide much help. Our dealings with Chan and the printer in China have been pretty straightforward once we got past the bribe thing.”

  “Benzer came here a couple of days ago,” I said. “What did he want?”

  Roger gave me a blank look. “Are you sure? He didn’t come to see me. I haven’t seen him in weeks.”

  He surprised me, but only a little. “He told me he came to see you, but he could have been lying. Would he have come to see somebody else?”

  Roger thought for a moment, staring vacantly ahead. I could tell he was still shaken up by Chan and Benzer. Then a switch went off in his head, and his eyes regained their focus. “Leo Farrell. He’s the head of our renewable energy program. I ran into him the other day, and he asked me about Benzer and about Chan International. He said Benzer had called him out of the blue and pitched him on something. Benzer used me as a reference to set up the meeting. Leo said he looked at our contract records to validate that Benzer’s firm was doing business with us. Once he confirmed it, he set the meeting. I think they met a couple of days ago.”

  “What did Benzer pitch him?”

  “I don’t know,” Roger said with a shrug. “Leo just said it was a strange meeting. Said Benzer was squirrelly and nervous.”

  “Do you think I could talk to this Leo?”

  “Sure, but probably not today. I heard he went out to our PV farm to make sure they were okay in the storm.”

  “PV farm?”

  “Photovoltaic panels. We have a couple of acres of them out by Rancho Seco. I suppose you could go out there and try and catch up with him.”

  Driving thirty-five miles to Rancho Seco in the worst storm of the winter did not rank high on my list of desired activities. Southbound traffic on Highway 99 crawled along, the road a veritable river. I counted six separate cars that slid off to the side of the road, driving too fast for conditions and colliding with the cement sidewall. It took well over an hour to reach the Arno Road exit in the southernmost part of Sacramento County, a rural, unincorporated area marked by its flat landscape and cattle farms. I feared the fifteen miles of country roads leading to Rancho Seco might be even more problematic than 99 had been. Creeks tended to overflow and spill onto roads in this part of the county. If I encountered a flooded road, I would have to either turn around or risk getting stranded.

  After a few miles, the rain let up, though the wind, if anything, intensified. At one point, a row of four wooden power poles had toppled, their power lines draped over a stretch of barbed wire fencing. In the distance, I could see Rancho Seco, even in the rain not a difficult feat considering the twin cooling towers were more than four hundred feet tall.

  I arrived at the front gate to the shuttered nuclear power plant thirty minutes later. Rancho Seco had been built in the 1970s when nuclear power was being hailed as our energy future, producing electricity that supposedly would be too cheap to even meter. After the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Rancho Seco had its own set of problems, from technical to managerial, and was inactive more than it ran until the voters of Sacramento decided to shut it down for good in 1989. The area around the plant became a recreation area, with fishing, boating, hiking, and picnicking the favored activities around the lake created as the water supply to cool nuclear fuel rods. Somewhere along the line, a photovoltaic farm had been added to the vast acreage. A simple wooden sign pointed me in the direction of the PV site.

  Outfitted in hiking boots, blue jeans, a blue rain slicker, and a San Francisco Giants baseball hat, I set off from my car through the open chain link gate and towards rows and rows of photovoltaic panels. Propelled by the surging wind, the few drops of rain continuing to fall stung my face as I searched for Leo Farrell.

  Each row contained about twenty of the ten-foot-wide panels standing about twelve feet high. Gravel had been laid down between the rows, but the rain had been so heavy, mud oozed up from underneath, and I gave up trying to keep my boots clean. I passed by seven or eight rows, pausing at each one to see if anyone was inspecting the panels. A couple of rows later, I spotted a white pickup truck at the other end. I walked between the two sets of panels and reached the truck, finding it empty. A few feet away, a man dressed head-to-toe in yellow rain gear worked on the underside of a panel. A large red tool kit sat on the gravel beside him.

  “Hey,” I said from a few feet away. He didn’t hear me, the wind too loud as it whistled through the gaps in the panels. “Leo Farrell,” I said, louder this time, moving closer.

  He looked up, saw me, and then continued to work. A minute later, he stood, tossed the wrench into the tool kit, and turned to me. “Damn trackers are always coming loose. The wind does it. Not that it matters much today. It’s not a good day to be generating sun power. But I came all the way out here. May as well make myself useful.”

  I introduced myself, and he confirmed he was indeed Leo Farrell. He was about forty, a big guy, at least six-three and more than two hundred pounds, with a bushy brown mustache.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  I told him I was an investigator looking into recent business dealings involving Chan International. He took the information at face value, expressing no curiosity about what exactly I was investigating. If he knew anything about the Chan and Benzer killings he said nothing about it. We had to speak just beneath a shout to make ourselves heard as the wind slapped our clothes and pounded the photovoltaic panels.

  He pointed at his ear and then at the truck. “Mind if we get in?”

  We walked to his pickup truck, Farrell toting his tool kit. He slung the kit into the large box in back.

 
“I understand you met with Adam Benzer a couple of days ago,” I said once we’d settled into the truck.

  “Yeah, I met with him.” He blew into his cupped hands to warm them.

  “May I ask what you two talked about?”

  “Sure.” He slid back the hood of the slicker to reveal a head of light brown hair as thick as his mustache. “He called me. Said he had a deal for me. I get that all the time. You know, companies trying to sell me this technology or that.”

  “So he was trying to pitch you on a product.”

  “Yep. I don’t meet with people who call me out of the blue, but he said he knew Roger Talbert. Roger’s a good guy. Runs our corporate communications department.”

  “I know Roger. He was a student of mine back at Sac State.”

  “You’re a professor?”

  “Was. Retired now.”

  “Anyway, he checked out. I saw Roger did have a printing contract with him. And their company website looked legit, so I called him back and said I could spare a half hour to talk with him.”

  “So, what was he trying to sell you?”

  “Fuel cells.” Farrell rubbed a hand through his thick mane. “I mean it was more than just fuel cells. It was cutting-edge technology. I’d never even heard of anything as advanced as he described.”

  “Wait a second. He was selling you a cutting-edge fuel cell or the rights to the technology, or what exactly?”

  “He said his client would turn over to me all of their research data, including their sequencing for the microbial genomes and a prototype for the fuel cells themselves. Plus, SMUD would be given the rights to patent everything. The way he described it, the fuel cells were more scaleable than anything else out on the market right now. They could be used for powering anything from a car to a small city.”

  Monarch. “Did he have anything to show you?”

  “No. And I could tell he knew little about the science or technology. He was a business guy, not a scientist or engineer. That made me a little leery. I told him I’d need to see a formal proposal, with specs, drawings, the whole nine yards.”