Storm Runners

by Parker, T. Jefferson

  “I am a scientist.”

  “It clearly shows. Interesting that different rivers have different shades of water.”

  “Isn’t it?” asked Frankie. “Really, a hundred and eighty-two shades of water in one room. And each one is from just one fraction of its river. Some people might consider this a useless collection of jars. But aren’t they lovely? I had this idea of emptying them all into a clear, curvy, tube like they make for hamsters, and running the little river all over the house. World River, I was going to call it. But who wants a river in a tube? They actually have one—the Lower Owens comes out of a concrete tube into the Gorge Power Plant. Then it comes all the way to L.A., mostly in a tube. Weirdest thing to put a river inside something. Makes you want to let it go, like an animal in a cage.”

  Stromsoe saw that there were more tables around the perimeter of the room. These were glass-topped also, and contained rocks.

  “Those are just river, stream, and creek rocks,” she said quietly. “One from each.”

  Stromsoe moved slowly from table to table. Some of the rocks were beautifully shaped and colored; others were dull and common.

  “The Blackfoot in Montana has the best rocks,” she said.

  “Very nice, almost red,” said Stromsoe.

  “If you get that one wet, it has owl eyes.”

  “Unusual.”

  “The Liffey River jar broke on my way home from Ireland,” she said. “Customs at LAX took the Mures River from Romania, which broke my heart because Vlad the Impaler drank from it. They said it was illegal to import because I hadn’t purchased it. Then Security at San Diego confiscated my Congo from Zaire right after 9/11, which you know darn well Conrad touched. So I’ve got some replacements to get.”

  Stromsoe turned to face her. “Is part of your interest which people have touched which river?”

  “Part. A river is liquid history.”

  “I like your collection.”

  “Thank you. What do you think of me?”

  “You’re one of the least ordinary women I’ve ever met.”

  She blushed and shrugged. “When I hit five-ten in the eighth grade I figured, hey, I’m not ordinary. Collecting rivers was easy after that.”

  “Not ordinary is good.”

  She nodded. “Well, I’m great, then. Maybe we’ll finish that tea.”

  AFTER HE LEFT Frankie’s house, Stromsoe waited at the end of her road again but the red Mustang never materialized. He saw no stalkers or suspicious vehicles. The coyotes hustled by.

  He retraced his way out to the Bonsall property, parked in a tight little turnout just past the gate, and walked up the rise. There was no pickup truck out front, no lights on inside. Stromsoe got his flashlight and walked down the dirt road in the waxing moonlight. It had been a while since he’d noticed the difference twenty-four hours can make in the amount of moonlight.

  The sweet smell of water hit him—what little river was it that flowed through here, he thought, the San Luis Rey?—no wonder she bought a parcel. He heard owls hoo-hooing to one another from the trees but they stopped as he got closer.

  The big sliding barn door was locked. So were both of the convenience doors, front and rear.

  He stood on an empty plastic drum and jimmied a window with his pocketknife, climbing through with great slowness and pain. He hadn’t twisted himself into such complex postures in years.

  Inside, as he moved his flashlight right to left, he saw in installments the same basic scene as last night—the workbenches in the middle, the tables along the far wall cluttered with their beakers and bottles and drums, the office in the back.

  But the second tower now stood complete beside the first. Stromsoe went over and touched it, smelling the clean odor of freshly cut redwood and waterproofing compound.

  He went to the tables against the far wall and looked at the labels on some of the containers: sulfates and sulfides, chlorides and chlorates, hydrates and hydrides, iodides, aldehydes, alcohols, ketones.

  This close to the chemical containers the barn smelled different—the air was sharp and aggressive.

  Stromsoe walked over to the corner office, following his light beam. The door was open and Stromsoe went in. He flicked on the lights and the large, neat room came to life. There were bookshelves nearly covering two of the walls. There was a long table with a computer and peripherals, a phone/fax, and a copier. There were four weather-station monitors with current readouts for exterior and interior temperature, humidity, wind velocity and direction, barometric pressure, daily rain, monthly rain, yearly rain. There was a black leather chair on wheels. The top of the table was littered with notebooks, science journals, and loose papers held down by rocks. Stromsoe lifted a piece of gray-and-black granite. The sticker on the bottom said San Juan River, 8/1/2002 in Frankie’s ornate handwriting.

  On the office walls were framed black-and-white photographs of a young man with a thin face and a cutting smile. In most of the pictures he wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a necktie, and fedora. In some he was standing on towers that looked just like the ones out on the barn floor. In others, he was using gloves and longhandled tools to mix something in five-gallon drums. The smile was self-conscious and playful. It was hard to place the year. Stromsoe guessed the 1920s. He could have been Frankie Hatfield’s great-great-grandfather. A moonshiner? A country still? That would explain the containers, the towers, maybe even the guy’s smile.

  Stromsoe went to one of the bookshelves and scanned titles. Most of the books dealt with the sciences—chemistry, astronomy, physics, biology, hydrology, meteorology. Some were state history. But most were about weather and weather forecasting. And most of the volumes appeared to be decades old.

  Stromsoe picked one out: Semi-Tropical California: Its Climate, Healthfulness, Productiveness and Scenery, published in 1874. It was hardcover, with illustrations, charts, and maps. There was a 1907 edition of The Conservation of Natural Resources by Theodore Roo sevelt. And an entire shelf devoted to Weatherwise magazines dating back to 1948.

  But the shelves along the other wall held more recently published books and articles: Deepest Valley: Guide to Owens Valley, 1995; Water and the California Dream, published in 2000; Weather Modification Schemes, 2002; and Cloud Seeding in Korea from 2003.

  There were booklets and stapled abstracts: Daily Weather Maps, Weekly Series, collected since 1990; Making the Synoptic Weather Map, 1998; and Useful Symbolic Station Models, published in 1999.

  Stromsoe moved down the shelf and looked at titles. On one shelf he found a stack of national weather maps. He could hardly make sense of them for all the symbols and designs. On another, two boxes labeled letters from g-g-g’pa. He opened one. The first envelope he lifted out had a return address for Charles Hatfield of San Diego. He set it back in the nearly full box.

  A handsome leather magazine holder caught his eye. The first magazine was The Journal of San Diego History from 1970. On the cover was an illustration of the same man pictured on the office walls—slender, wearing a suit and hat—apparently analyzing the contents of a test tube of some kind.

  The title of the article was “When the Rainmaker Came to San Diego.”

  He scanned through the article. “Professional rainmaker” Charles Hatfield had contracted with the drought-stricken city of San Diego to bring forty to fifty inches of rain to the city’s Morena Reservoir in 1916. He was to be paid ten thousand dollars, but only if he was successful. He set up his wooden towers near the reservoir and mixed his “secret chemicals” that he guaranteed would bring rain. A short time later it started raining and didn’t stop. So much rain fell it overflowed the reservoir, flooded the city, broke a dam, and ruined thousands of acres of property. Hatfield was run out of town without being paid.

  The last part of the article was interviews with experts who said that Hatfield’s success was simple coincidence, that his secret chemicals were bogus, that Hatfield was a hustler who simply studied the weather patterns for San Diego and tried
to defraud the city.

  I’ll be damned, thought Stromsoe. Frankie’s trying to make rain.

  He took the magazine over to the wall where the pictures hung, held it up, and made sure that he was looking at the same guy. No doubt, he thought. Same face. Same hat and clothes. Hatfield, the rainmaker.

  He compared the pictures of the towers to the towers that Frankie and the old man had made.

  Stromsoe shook his head. Frankie Hatfield’s trying to make rain like her great-great-granddaddy did.

  In an odd and admiring way, he wasn’t surprised.

  Stromsoe turned off the office lights, found his way to the leather chair, and sat. He aimed his flashlight beam on one of the photographs of Charles Hatfield. Stromsoe smiled slightly, then clicked off the light and set it on the desk. He locked his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes.

  The weather lady who makes rain, he thought.

  He wondered if she had met with any success in her rainmaking venture, if she’d told anyone about it, if she was sane.

  It was possible that the answer to all three questions was no.

  He sat for a few minutes, thinking about how easy it was for catastrophe and heartbreak to kill your hope and your wonder. The death of hope and wonder was the hidden cost charged by every criminal, torturer, and terrorist. Few wrote about that, how the facts of loss are not the truth of loss. Few seemed to realize how often and easily the beautiful things vanish, except those from whom they had vanished. And most of those people didn’t have much left to say, did they, because without hope and wonder you can’t even move your lips. A lot of them were in their own private Miami hotel rooms, as surely as he had been, ending things slowly, good citizens to the end.

  So why not put a river in a bottle?

  Make it rain.

  Amen, sister.

  A FEW MINUTES later Stromsoe turned off the lights in the office, followed his flashlight to the window, and climbed back out. He landed on the drum with a hollow thud, hopped off.

  When he turned and looked up the dirt road he could see the guy fifty yards out ahead, looking over his shoulder and hauling ass for the gate.

  13

  Stromsoe broke into a run, swinging his arms and getting his knees up as best he could.

  When he came over the rise he saw that he might actually catch up before the guy got to his car, or at least in time to throw himself onto the back of it like a PI in a movie.

  Maybe.

  Pins smarting and joints stiff, Stromsoe dug down for all the speed he could get. The guy hopped the gate. Same guy as in La Jolla, Stromsoe saw—same square shoulders and squat-legged sprint. Same gold sedan.

  The man was at his car, struggling with his keys while he stared at Stromsoe in apparent fear. The car door swung open. Stromsoe timed his stride to launch himself over the gate like a pole-vaulter. It worked. Midair he saw the car door open and the lights flash on but Stromsoe landed square, took three quick steps, and tackled the guy just as he hit the seat.

  Stromsoe immediately felt his weight advantage, so he used it. Covering the struggling man with his big body, he found the guy’s hands and pinned them back onto the passenger seat. It was harder than he thought with his little finger missing—an entire one-tenth of his hand tools gone. The guy yelled in pain and head-butted Stromsoe hard right between the eyes, so Stromsoe butted him hard back. He used his weight to slow the guy’s breathing. When he felt him getting tired he let go and punched him in the jaw and wrestled him over. Then Stromsoe swiped out the plastic wrist restraint from his back pants pocket. He wrenched the guy’s arms back, cinched the restraints with the flourish of a calf roper, dragged the now unstruggling man out of the car, lifted him by his belt and collar, and dumped him facedown across the hood of his own sedan. The guy’s chest heaved and his breath made a patch of fog on the gold paint. Stromsoe patted him for weapons and tossed his wallet onto the front seat. Then he flipped the guy faceup and patted him for weapons again.

  Stromsoe stepped back, panting. “Relax, hot rod. You’re mine now.”

  “Chinga tu madre!”

  “Yeah, sure, first chance I get.”

  “Gimme my lawyer.”

  “I’m not a cop, so you don’t get a lawyer. You just get me. How come you’re following Frankie around?”

  “Frankie who, man? I don’t follow no guys around.”

  “Damn,” said Stromsoe. “I work that hard just to collar an idiot. Look, let me sketch this out for you—I’m calling Frankie Hatfield and the cops, she’ll ID you, and you’re going to jail for trespassing, stalking, and aggravated assault. They’ll set bail sometime tomorrow and it will be high because she’s a star and you’re a dumb-ass. She’s got pictures of you lurking around her property, for chrissakes. So you’re meat. Right now we’re going to my car to get my cell phone.”

  Stromsoe pulled on the guy’s foot to slide him off the hood.

  “No! Okay, okay, okay. I’m just doing what I do, man. Just…don’t call any cops.”

  “So you’re going to talk to me?”

  “Yeah, man, yeah.”

  “Get started.”

  Stromsoe tied the guy’s bootlaces together. They were workingman’s boots, grease-stained suede and soles worn smooth. The laces were regulation brown, not sureño gangster blue or norteño gangster red. He wore jeans and a gang-neutral black T-shirt. The guy was younger than Stromsoe had figured—midtwenties at most. He was short—five foot six, maybe. He looked Hispanic, but could easily be something else. The only accent Stromsoe could detect was Southern Californian. Stromsoe ran his flashlight over the guy’s arms for gang or prison tats but saw none.

  “I saw her on TV, man. I’m her biggest fan. I went to her work and followed her to the different places where she does her show. I used the Assessor’s office to get her parcel numbers and from there I figured out what she owned and where she lived.”

  Stromsoe picked up the wallet and sat in the driver’s seat. He checked the glove box for a gun but came out with a handful of digital snapshots and a cell phone instead. He put the phone back and flipped through the pictures in the poor interior light: Frankie Hatfield outside her home, going into the Bonsall barn, doing a live report from what looked like Imperial Beach. The shots had probably been printed side by side on picture paper, then cut out in a hurry.

  “Yeah, hot rod—Assessor’s office. Keep talking.”

  “So I went and looked at her, man. I just looked. I didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”

  “You just like to look?” asked Stromsoe.

  “You seen her. You know.”

  “Know what?”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “There are lots of beautiful women you don’t stalk.”

  The guy said nothing for a beat. “But she’s totally giant, man. A perfect, giant lady.”

  “You’re stalking her because she’s tall?”

  Again, the guy was quiet for a moment.

  “Because she’s tall and beautiful,” he said. “That’s what it is, all it can ever be, man.”

  Stromsoe used his flashlight and both sides of a business card from his wallet to take down the driver’s-license information:

  John Cedros

  300 N. Walton Ave.

  Azusa, CA 91702

  Sex: M Ht: 5-6

  Hair: BRN Wt: 170

  Eyes: BRN DOB: 12-14-80

  “Yep, she’s six inches taller than you, John.”

  “You see what I mean then, man. You her boyfriend? Or are you a bodyguard she hired?”

  “You like to wag it while you look, John?”

  “It ain’t that! I don’t do that never, ever.”

  Stromsoe counted the money in the wallet—sixty-four dollars, plus an ATM card, a video-store membership, and a car-wash card with three washes punched out and dated.

  “Ever been in her room?” asked Stromsoe.

  “No, man. I’m not a panty bandit. I ain’t that kinda stalker. I can prove it.”

  “W
hat do you do with these pictures?”

  “They’re for me and my own information. That’s my private shit, man.”

  “Private. That’s a good one, John. Where’d you do your time?”

  “Six months L.A. County, that’s all. They said I was a deadbeat dad but I wasn’t. The post office fucked me up. I taught that boyfriend of hers some manners, though.”

  “Way to go, John. Why come all the way to San Diego to stalk a tall woman? Don’t you have any closer to home?”

  “Not like her I don’t. You seen those hats she wears on TV?”

  “What channel is she on up there in Azusa?”

  “Uh, six, I think.”

  “You think.”

  “I got TiVo. I can watch whatever I want whenever I want to.”

  “You can watch Frankie Hatfield over and over.”

  “That’s the truth. What’s your name, man? Who am I talking to, sitting there in my own ride?”

  “Call me Matt.”

  Cedros shook his head slowly. “I call you bullshit.”

  “You got a job, John?”

  “Centinela Valley Hospital. Janitorial.”

  “You can keep up on the child support, then.”

  “Bitch married the punk and I still gotta pay,” said Cedros.

  “Your kid’s worth it,” said Stromsoe.

  “She’s the cutest little thing you ever saw in your life.”

  “Then hope nobody like you follows her around and takes her picture,” said Stromsoe. “What’s your cell-phone number, John?”

  Cedros gave it. He gave the same home address that appeared on his CDL. He knew his employee number by heart, which Stromsoe took down also. The name of his supervisor at Centinela Valley too—Ray Ordell. On still another business card Stromsoe wrote down the name of Cedros’s ex-wife and her new husband and daughter—all residents of Glendora. He even got Cedros’s parents’ phone number. If the statements weren’t true, Cedros was one of the best liars Stromsoe had ever seen.