Storm Runners

by Parker, T. Jefferson

  “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 w
as 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.

  The Tavarez children all spoke English and Spanish, and attended expensive private schools. Their gated seaside haven was a place of privilege and indulgence.

  Tavarez had removed his children as far as he could from the barrio near Delhi Park where he had grown up. He wanted them to be nothing like him.

  He fanned through the last of the envelopes, his heart beating with the fierce helplessness of the caged.

  10

  That night at ten Brad Lunce called him out. Lunce was one of Post’s buddies. There were three kinds of guards: the bribable, the sadistic, and the honest. Group One was small but valuable, and Post had introduced Tavarez to a few of his friends.

  Lunce watched Tavarez strip naked, open his mouth wide, spread his toes and butt, then get dressed and back up to the bean chute so Lunce could handcuff him before opening the cell door. Lunce never seemed to pay close attention, Tavarez had noticed, something that he might be able to use someday.

  When Tavarez was handcuffed, Lunce let him out.

  Murmurs and grumbling followed them down the cell block. Any other inmate being led out at this time of night would have brought yelling and catcalls and demands for explanation. But all the Pelican Bay cell blocks were segregated by race and gang. And this block was populated by La Eme and the gangs with which La Eme had formed alliances—the Aryan Brotherhood, the Nazi Lowriders, and the Black Guerillas. So when the inmate was El Jefe, respect was offered.

  Tavarez walked slowly, head up, eyes straight ahead. Something fluttered in his upper vision: a kite baggie on a string floating down from tier three to find its intended cell on tier one. Night was when the kites flew.

  Lunce unlocked the library just after ten o’clock. It was a large, windowed room with low shelves to minimize privacy, pale green walls, and surveillance cameras in every corner.

  Tavarez looked up at one. “Cartwright again?”

  “What do you care?” said Lunce. Lunce was large and young, just like Post. He resented his manipulation more than the other guards and Tavarez was waiting for the day when Lunce would turn on him.

  Cartwright was the night “situations” supervisor, which put him in control of the electric perimeter fence and video for the eastern one-quarter of the sprawling penal compound. This made Cartwright the most valuable of all the cooperative guards, and a kickback to him was included in almost every transaction that Tavarez made with lower-ranking men such as Post and Lunce. There were kickbacks to mid-level COs also, to those lower than Cartwright but above Lunce and Post. That was why favors were expensive. The western, northern, and southern perimeter guard-tower sharpshooters and attack dogs were under the control of other supervisors but Mike had found no way to influence them.

  “He can turn the cameras back on whenever he wants to,” said Tavarez.

  “Not with me in here he won’t. You got less than one hour. I’ll be watching you.”

  Tavarez nodded. Having an L-Wop—life without parole—meant that there weren’t too many punishments they could give him if he was caught. They could move him back to the SHU, which was something he didn’t even allow himself to think about. But he didn’t pay all that bribe money for nothing, and after all, he was only in the library. No violence intended, no escape in mind, no drug abuse, no illicit sex.

  “The cuffs,” said Tavarez, backing over to Lunce. It made the hair on his neck stand up—giving his back to a hostile white man—but if prison taught you anything, it was to overcome fear. Outside, you might have power. Inside, all you had was the bribe and the threat.

  He found the world atlas on top of the G shelf, which he now slid toward him with a puff of dust.

  Both the table and the chairs were bolted to the floor, so Tavarez plopped the heavy book down on the metal table, then worked himself into a chair in front of it.

  He lifted the big cover, then the first hundred or so pages. Sure enough, the laptop sat in an excavated cradle. Post had come through.

  For the next fifty minutes Tavarez sat before the screen, practically unmoving except for his hands, tapping out orders and inquiries in an elaborate code that he had helped devise for La Eme starting way back in 1988, during his first prison fall, before he had become El Jefe.

  The code was rooted in the Huazanguillo dialect of the Nahuatl language that he had learned from Ofelia—his frequent visitor at Corcoran State Prison. The dialect was only understandable by scholars, by a few Aztec descendants who clung to the old language, and a handful of upper-echelon La Eme leaders. Ofelia was both a budding scholar and a nearly full-blooded Aztec. Back then, Paul Zolorio, who ran La Eme from his cell just eight down from Tavarez, arranged to bring Ofelia up from Nayarit, Mexico, to tutor the handsome young Harvard pistolero.

  Now Tavarez’s text messages would soon be decoded by his most trusted generals, then passed on to the appropriate captains and lieutenants. Then down to the ’hoods and the homeboys, who actually moved product and collected cash. Almost instantly, the whole deadly organization—a thousand strong, with gangsters in every state of the republic and twelve foreign countries—would soon have its orders.

  Tavarez worked fast:

  Ernest’s Arizona men need help—everyone had a finger in that pie now that California had been clamped down. Move Flaco’s people from the East Bay down to Tucson.

  The L.A. green-light gangs would have to be punished severely. Green-lights won’t pay our taxes? They’re proud to go against us? Then peel their caps. Cancel one homie from each green-light gang every week until they pay, see how long their pride holds up.

  Albert’s men in Dallas are up against the Mara Salvatrucha. MS 13 has the good military guns from the United States but they don’t get our south-side action. Move ten of our San Antonio boys over to Dallas immediately. Shoot the Salvadorans on sight if they’re on our corners. Not a grain of mercy.

  At the end of his fifty minutes, Tavarez had passed on more information than he could send in a hundred handwritten, coded letters and kites. Which would take him a week and a half to write. And a week to get where they were going. And half would still be intercepted, diverted, destroyed—perhaps even passed on to La Nuestra Familia by people like Ken McCann.

  But with the computer he could write things once, in just a matter of seconds, then send his commands to a handful of trusted people, who in turn would send them down the line. His code was wireless and traveled at the speed of sound. It was practically untraceable and virtually indecipherable. It was clear, concise, and inexpensive.

  Pure, digital Nahuatl, thought Tavarez, beamed exactly where it was needed.

  All it had really cost him was a few months of subtle persuasion, then ten unsubtle grand to help the Post family through Tonya’s cancer.

  Tavarez turned off the computer, closed the screen, and set it back into the hollowed pages of the atlas of the world.

  Like an alert dog who hears his master stir, Lunce appeared from behind the G shelf, dangling the cuffs.

  “Looking at porn?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are they cute as your whores?”

  “Not as cute.”

  “I don’t believe you. I think you’re running your business. La Eme business.”

 
Tavarez just shrugged. He felt the cuffs close around his wrists.

  TAVAREZ LIFTED WEIGHTS furiously that night, putting everything he had into the repetitions, increasing the weight until his muscles gave out, doing sit-ups and crunches between sets, panting and growling and sweating for nearly an hour. Lunce watched him work out and shower but Tavarez was hardly aware of him.

  By the time he was back in his cell, it was well past midnight. His body trembled from the exertion. He lay on his back on the bed and listened to the snoring and the distant wails from the ding wing—psych ward—and the endless coughing of Smith two cells down.

  He closed his eyes and thought back to when he was released from his first prison term and he’d moved into Ofelia’s apartment for six blessed weeks. All of the pent-up desire they’d felt for each other during her visits came charging out like water from ruptured dams. She was only seventeen, hopeful and innocent, a virgin. He was twenty-seven, the adopted favorite of La Eme kingpin Paul Zolorio, and suddenly free. He had been tasked by Zolorio to exact tribute from the Santa Ana street gangs for all drug sales—starting with his own Delhi F Troop. Zolorio had given him a mandate of one hundred percent compliance.

  There was nothing better, Tavarez had realized back then—than to be free, employed, and in love.

  His heart did what it always did when he thought of Ofelia—it soared, then hovered, then fell.

  He pictured her slender young fingers as they traced the Nahuatl symbols across the page in the Corcoran visitation room. He could hear her voice as she translated their sounds and meanings into Spanish and English for him. There was innocence in her smile and trust in her eyes, and luster in her straight black hair.