Storm Runners

by Parker, T. Jefferson

  Then she collected the data from the four towers. Stromsoe and Ted stood and watched over her shoulder as the information was relayed to her computer.

  What looked to Stromsoe like several tables of difficult-to-understand statistical information took her just seconds to read and digest.

  “Gentlemen,” she said quietly. “We just tripled what a rainstorm gave everyone else!”

  She stood up, knocked over her chair, and flew into Ted’s open arms. The dogs hustled over to participate. She slapped her uncle’s back, then released him and turned to Stromsoe.

  She offered her hand and he shook it.

  “This is more than excellent,” she said.

  “Nice to be here for it,” said Stromsoe.

  “You brought the luck,” she said.

  “That doesn’t sound very scientific,” said Stromsoe.

  “What science says is that we have to repeat our results time and time again,” she said. “This could be some of your good luck. This could be an aberration. It’s a beginning. We have to make it work predictably, reliably.”

  “Not right now we don’t,” said Ted. “It’s pushing one in the morning.”

  “Celebration at my house,” said Frankie.

  She righted her chair and sat down in front of her computer again. She leafed through the pages she’d printed, checking the numbers, shaking her head.

  Then she looked up at Stromsoe with one of the nicest smiles he’d ever seen.

  THE CELEBRATION DIDN’T last long. Frankie brought out thick dry socks for the men, traded her work boots for enormous sheepskin lounging boots, and got a fire going in the living room. They pulled the sofa closer to the flame and sat three across, close like children. Ted poured three Scotches, a light one with water for Frankie. The dogs were there too, asleep and stinking of wet hair.

  Frankie told Stromsoe about finding her great-great-grandfather’s laboratory in the old Bonsall barn, how the first time she walked into it she knew it would be hers someday, the smells and the books and the chemicals still in their containers and his mountains of notes and formulas and experimental data. It had been very difficult to find—most of the Hatfield relatives assumed it was long gone. They’d never laid eyes on it. And the published lore that she had unearthed over the years stated—unconvincingly, to Frankie—that Charley had set fire to the lab before he was run out of San Diego for creating too much rain. She was sixteen when she’d found his old laboratory. She said that opening the barn door was opening the rest of her life. She would study weather and accelerate moisture. She was surprised that the other descendants of Charles Hatfield were not particularly interested in the barn or the formulas. To her it was like losing interest in finding the Holy Grail or Noah’s Ark. She told Stromsoe that she’d seen the dumb Burt Lancaster movie The Rainmaker and wished they’d have shown some of Great-great-grandpa’s scientific side rather than his dreamy hustler’s side.

  “He sold sewing machines most of the time he was rainmaking,” she said, yawning. “He never made any real money at it. But he always wore nice clothes, a tie, and a good hat. The movie should have been more…I don’t know, more something…”

  A moment of quiet, then, as the fire burned and popped and Ace’s legs twitched in a dream of pursuit.

  Then Frankie Hatfield’s head lolled onto Stromsoe’s shoulder and she was out.

  Stromsoe looked over at Ted, who sipped his Scotch and looked into the fire. “Par for the course,” he said. “Frances can’t drink more than a thimbleful and stay upright.”

  Stromsoe sat awhile. Ted made another drink and sat on a chair not so close to the fire.

  “I checked you out through the Web and your boss,” said Ted.

  “Good.”

  “Learn to shoot with one eye yet?”

  “I’ll find out soon,” said Stromsoe.

  “I wondered about the two years in Florida.”

  “Lost.”

  “I figured,” said Ted. “I might have done the same.”

  “It’s nice to be back.”

  Ace whimpered and his legs kept twitching.

  “A guy named Choat at the L.A. Department of Water and Power tried to buy her out of the rainmaking formula,” said Ted. “My theory is, if you follow up on this Cedros fellow, he’ll lead you back to DWP.”

  “I have and he did,” said Stromsoe. He told Ted about tracking Cedros to the DWP. “Did Choat threaten you?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. Very civil, in a hard-ass kind of way. He offered Frankie seven-fifty a year and all the support staff she wanted, so long as her procedures and formulas belonged to DWP. Said she could set up shop on any DWP land in the state, and they own thousands of square miles and rivers and lakes and mountains. Three-quarters of a million bucks a year! She turned him down. It drove Choat bugshit that we might have our hands on a moisture accelerator that worked.”

  “How did Choat know about this?” asked Stromsoe.

  “He’d been agitating her and other Hatfield descendants for years, off and on. Always poking around, looking for the barn, the formula, his papers, whatever. Just staying in touch. When he got wind that she’d found the barn, he was all over her.”

  Stromsoe thought. “Cedros was his threat,” he said.

  “Sure,” said Ted. “Shake Frankie up. Take her picture. But I also think he broke into the barn one night. There were footprints, and some of the files were laying out. Like somebody was looking for something.”

  “The formula.”

  “Yup. You’re signed on for a month, right?”

  Stromsoe nodded.

  “If Choat sent Cedros, Choat’s ass is in the wind,” said Ted.

  “Not if Cedros keeps his mouth shut. He didn’t say anything about Choat. He says he stalked Frankie because he likes the way she looks.”

  “A jury could believe that,” said Ted.

  “I almost did,” said Stromsoe.

  They watched the fire burn. Outside the breeze came up and a shower of raindrops hit the roof then stopped.

  “I don’t think this DWP stuff is over,” said Ted. “Choat made my scalp crawl, a quality few men have. Maybe you need to apply some pressure. If Cedros is protecting Choat, there might be a way to pry them apart. Cedros can’t be happy about the charges.”

  “You think like a cop,” said Stromsoe.

  “I’m just a weatherman. Though I did shoot down some planes over Korea in ’51.”

  “I might be able to make Cedros see the light,” said Stromsoe. “If he rolls on his boss, we’ve got what we need.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  “Frankie might have to call Birch Security, make it clear to Dan that she still wants me on the job. When a stalker goes to jail and gets charged, that usually means the PI is done.”

  “She already did that,” said Ted. “Actually, I made the call myself. She thought it would look better coming from a man. Frankie tends to worry. Sometimes she worries too much, and she begins to see herself as hysterical. Which of course makes her hysterical. Gets even more worried.”

  Unworried, Frankie started snoring.

  “There’s been a reporter calling her,” said Ted. “From a local paper. Frankie asked me to put him off, so I’ve been giving him the runaround.”

  “Good,” said Stromsoe. “Let him find another story.”

  Stromsoe got up without waking her and arranged her on the sofa with her head on one of the pillows. He found a throw blanket by the fireplace and covered her.

  “Something I don’t understand,” he said. “If the Department of Water and Power had a way to triple the rainfall, would that help them or hurt them?”

  “Help them, I guess,” said Ted. “Help everybody.”

  “Then why didn’t Frankie let them finance the research, get rich, and make rain for the world?”

  “Because Frankie liked Choat even less than I did. ‘Creeped me out’ is what she said. She thinks Choat would lock up the formula and toss the key.”


  Stromsoe thought about that. Hard to imagine.

  Or was it? With triple the supply falling from the sky, wouldn’t people need you for two-thirds less of it? Triple the supply of Chevys and you have to sell them for a third the price. And what court in the country would hand a utility company the sole right to increase rainfall and reap the rewards? If you couldn’t monopolize the formula—or destroy it—someday you’d be a lot less needed.

  “How come Frankie didn’t tell me about Choat?” asked Stromsoe.

  “She didn’t think he’d stoop so far as to intimidate her. She thought Cedros was just a stalker. She’s naive in a lot of ways, really. And stubborn.”

  Stromsoe nodded. “I like it that she loves the rain and collects rivers.”

  “She’s not like anybody else.”

  He looked at her sleeping under the blanket, fire shadows playing off her face. “Well, ’night, Ted.”

  “Good night,” said Ted. “Be good to her.”

  “You too.”

  Stromsoe drove home with the windows down and the smell of rain and soil and citrus in the cool air. The clouds had blown out and the sky was now black and pricked by stars. He thought of Frankie Hatfield and his heart rose and hovered like he was in an elevator coming to a stop or on a roller coaster when he was young.

  19

  Mike Tavarez lay on his bunk and listened to the steely hum of night-locked Pelican Bay State Prison, the tap of the guard’s boots approaching on the concrete floor, the distant wails of men driven insane in the Security Housing Unit, the X.

  Lunce arrived at El Jefe’s cell with his usual Monday-night pout. This was Tavarez’s “family”—conjugal—visit night, though it would not take place in the Pelican Bay apartments available for such visits, commonly known as the Peter Palace. Lunce was extra sullen on Mondays and Tavarez knew he was envious.

  It was ten o’clock. Tavarez stripped, bowed, opened himself for Lunce’s cursory visual inspection, then redressed and turned his back and put his hands to the bean chute for cuffing.

  They walked wordlessly from the wing, inmates stirring, inmates watching. In the library Lunce released the cuffs and took his seat at the end of the long aisle. Tavarez pulled the world atlas down from the G shelf and went to work on the neat little laptop.

  Much to do.

  El Jefe’s most recent batch of mail had contained a plea from La Eme captains in Los Angeles who wanted to deal with the south-side green lighters more forcefully. Tavarez tapped away in the code he had helped devise, the code based on Ofelia’s impenetrable Huazanguillo dialect, then sent his instructions to five different addresses at once: permission granted.

  He looked over at thick Lunce. The Web was the best thing that had happened to La Eme since the Nahuatl code had been invented. Now, using the two together, it was almost as easy as picking up a phone—and his orders were practically impossible to trace, divert, or crack.

  Thinking about the code brought up memories of Ofelia. And with them came memories of what Stromsoe had done to her. He would deal with Stromsoe soon.

  There was good news from Dallas and the problems with Mara Salvatrucha—La Eme gangsters had canceled two of the Salvadorans in broad daylight the day before—no arrests, no problems.

  Tavarez quickly approved La Eme memberships for a Venice Beach gangster doing time in Corcoran and another who had just hit the bricks back in Ontario after two years in Vacaville. They had proven their loyalty and were willing to swear an allegiance to La Eme that would override their street loyalties once and forever.

  This changing of loyalty, Tavarez knew, was what had turned La Eme from a simple prison gang into an empire of soldiers in every city in Southern California, and in many other states besides. La Eme’s rules for membership were simple and had seemed right to Tavarez from the first time he’d heard them. You cannot be a snitch, a homosexual, or a coward. You cannot disrespect another member. Death is the automatic consequence for violation of any of the first three rules. Only a member can carry out the murder of another. Such murders must be approved by three members.

  He coded his congratulations to the new members, to be passed on by higher associates in Corcoran and on the streets of Ontario, along with the usual warnings to keep close eyes on these new men. Loyalty had a price, just like everything else.

  Tavarez ordered a payment of fifty thousand dollar to the widow of a La Eme OG—original gangster—who had been shot down by La Nuestra Familia gunmen in the “border” city of Bakersfield. He asked that the Bakersfield associates produce the name of the shooter within forty-eight hours. It would be a bloody season up there on the border between La Eme of the south and La Nuestra Familia of the north.

  He approved a one-month extension on an eighty-thousand-dollar payment due from the Little Rascals’ cocaine sales but ordered one of the gang’s members killed each week if the deadline wasn’t met.

  He ordered a five-thousand-dollar withdrawal from a La Eme “regional account” and given to the daughter of a La Eme soldier on her wedding day next month.

  He sent condolences to a new widow in Los Angeles; congratulations to a new father in Riverside.

  Tavarez enjoyed the feeling of his fingers flying over the keys. It was something like playing a clarinet, but instead of musical notes his fingers produced action. It was like fingering a melody that didn’t hover in the air and vanish but rather pushed itself across time and space into the lives of real people and forced them to act the way that Tavarez wanted them to act.

  When his gang business was finished he visited his personal accounts online—three in Grand Cayman and two in Switzerland—and found them to be earning nicely at the usual three percent. He was worth almost $2 million now. Every original penny of it had come from what he collected for La Eme through drug trafficking, tributes from cowed ’hood gangsters twelve and thirteen years old, extortion and protection money, blackmail money, blood money—anytime Tavarez took in a dollar for La Eme he chipped off a few cents for himself. Never enough to show. Never enough to raise an eyebrow. And he quickly delivered the cash to Iris, a Harvard acquaintance who had become an investment banker in Newport Beach and could electronically credit the money to accounts thousands of miles away that only Tavarez had the numbers to access. A few hundred dollars here, a few hundred dollars there. He’d started investing with her secretly right after being released from Corcoran and having seen all of his armed robbery loot taken by lawyers and the cops. He was hugely proud of the fact that, though he was a convicted murderer doing life in Pelican Bay, nobody had been able to locate his money. Amazing, what twelve years of compound interest and steady contributions could do, he thought. He could still remember the rippling of his nerves when he stole his first hundred dollars from La Eme kingpin, mentor, friend, and uncle-in-law Paul Zolorio. It was only a hundred dollars, but it was almost as exciting as knocking off the liquor stores when he was at Harvard, and much more dangerous. He and Ofelia had celebrated that moment with a night of wild lovemaking and huge happiness. Two days later he’d married Miriam.

  Which brought him to Matt Stromsoe.

  Tavarez shook his head again, still not quite able to believe that fate—a distant relative named John Cedros—had delivered Stromsoe back into his hands.

  Tavarez had always been lucky. He was born with a high IQ, musical talent, and a gift for understanding people. He was handsome and women fell for him. He had courage and unusual physical strength. He had 20/10 uncorrected vision. He had met Paul Zolorio and found a direction for his life simply by being in the same prison.

  Then there were other good fortunes too. He’d been shot through the side of his neck once with a .25-caliber handgun and the bullet hit nothing vital. He survived without seeing a doctor, just two painful black-and-red rips at either end of a tunnel that Ofelia had cleaned out by running a piece of alcohol-drenched T-shirt through it with a pencil. And there was the time his warrants had failed to show during a traffic stop and he’d come that close to grab
bing the handgun from the console of his Suburban and killing a CHP officer. He had foreseen in a dream an attempt on his life and saved himself by taking a different road to Culiacán one day while meeting with cartel heavies in Sinaloa. He won at craps in Las Vegas and poker in Gardena. He rarely played the California Lottery games but had won more often than anyone he knew, and for good money—five hundred here, three-fifty there, a thousand once on tickets that had cost him three bucks apiece.

  But this felt like something more than just luck, something heavier and less clever. This was having your life changed by a force intimately familiar with your desires. This was an act of God, his God—the God of Jesus and Mary and Aztlán.

  The question was what to do. There was the obvious: he could have Stromsoe beaten and the weather lady tortured—that would almost certainly get Cedros’s information returned. He would have his two hundred thousand in cash couriered to Newport Beach and Iris would credit his accounts, minus payments wired to his most trusted men. Cedros would move higher into the DWP bureaucracy. Cedros didn’t know it, but he was already the property of La Eme, because the lawyer had tape-recorded the meeting and Cedros’s solicitations were clearly of criminal intent.

  Or he could kill them both, and Cedros too, and be done with it, leaving no trail back to Pelican Bay.

  All of this was obvious.

  But, what if?

  What if he had been correct in sensing that Stromsoe looked at this weather lady in a special way?

  What if that attentive angle of Stromsoe’s head in the picture taken of them outside her house had betrayed a more than casual interest from the newly hired private detective?