Storm Runners

by Parker, T. Jefferson

  If that was true, then Tavarez had a chance to send Stromsoe through the flames of hell on Earth not just once—but twice. By killing his new hopes. His new dreams. By killing his future.

  I would do it right in front of him, Tavarez thought. Let him see and live and remember what it means to lose everything—again!

  It would finally be fair revenge for Ofelia, who left the Aztec gods for Jesus and left Jesus for me and died for it. Fair revenge, because the deaths of insatiable, ignorant, arrogant Hallie and her offspring were almost valueless compared to the life of Ofelia.

  It would be the stuff of a hundred corridos that I could listen to in the shade of my home on the beach in Sayulitos, Nayarit, where I will retire when I’m out of this prison.

  When I’m out.

  He looked over at Lunce. Lunce was reading a car magazine with a bright red roadster on the cover.

  Look at him, thought Tavarez. If he’s the best the norteamericanos have to offer, I can do it. Not long now. Not long. I have what I need.

  Tavarez shook his head and pictured the calm, humorless face of Ariel Lejas, the most capable man he knew. Then his hands began to fly across the keys.

  In a confounding amalgam of Nahuatl, Spanish, and English, Tavarez ordered Lejas to dispatch Marcus Ampostela to the home of John Cedros, 300 North Walton, Azusa. Ampostela would pick up one hundred K and Cedros would handwrite all needed details regarding his request. Ampostela would deliver the money and the information to Lejas and Lejas would FedEx seventy-five-thousand to Newport Beach, keep twenty thousand for himself, and lay off five to Ampostela.

  Tavarez paused and looked down at the screen. The strange Nahuatl words jumped out and reminded him of Ofelia as they always did. Ichpochtli (young woman)…Momatequia (wash your hands)…Tlazocamati (thank you)…Icniuhtli (friend)…

  Interspersed with the Nahuatl was some English: My Dear Friend…PI Stromsoe…possibly armed…barn…Weather Lady…your account…

  Tavarez painstakingly went through the message and rewrote every third sentence backward—both words and the letters of the words. He randomly added three sentences beginning with the Nahuatl word for “to marry”—Monamictia—that contained nothing but Nahuatl-like nonsense that Lejas would know to ignore.

  When Tavarez was finished he looked down on what would be just dizzying blather to anyone but a patient Mexican-American gangster with a knowledge of Nahuatl and Sinaloan slang.

  He took a deep breath and organized his thoughts before he ended the message:

  Ignore Cedros. Kill the woman. Make the PI watch and let him live.

  TAVAREZ WALKED TOWARD the eastern perimeter of the Pelican Bay Prison grounds. He was handcuffed from behind again. The October night was cold and clear and the moon was loitering into its first quarter.

  It was neither dark nor light, but a twilit truce between the blackness of the Northern California forest around them and the muted light straining out from the prison buildings three hundred yards to the west.

  Out here away from the compound, the grass was sprayed with poison once a month so it would not provide cover for even the ground squirrels but the lavish rains dulled the herbicide enough for new shoots to grow and these stunted storm-drenched blades now soaked through Tavarez’s prison sneakers and sent a chill up his shins.

  He saw the North Star shimmering off the lip of the Big Dipper and smelled the wet green density of the Northern California forest that pressed right up to the prison fence line in front of him.

  Lunce followed, tapping the rolled car magazine against his leg.

  Tavarez approached the fence. It was twenty-feet-high, electrified chain link that carried 650 milliamperes and 5,000 volts—nine times the lethal limit for human beings. It was topped with two rolls of razor ribbon in case the electricity failed.

  Seventy-five yards to his left a guard tower stood outlined against the autumn sky. Seventy-five yards to his right was another. The towers were staffed at this hour by one of Cartwright’s loyal men, who included Post and Lunce and a few others. The interior lights brought a quiet green glow to their insides and Tavarez could see in the northern tower the black motion of the guard as he moved within. The floodlights were aimed away from them and they wouldn’t begin their crisscrossing searches for the half hour that Tavarez had bargained for. The video cameras running along the fence were off now, activated when needed only by Cartwright and his “situations” brethren who controlled the three other sides of the perimeter.

  The flashlight flicked twice from the forest. It belonged to Jimmy, who belonged to La Eme. It came from a slightly different place each week, but there was a creek that wandered close to the fence between two stands of cedar trees and in the dark Tavarez could tell from the smell of the trees and the gurgling of the creek where Jimmy and his people would be waiting.

  He came to the fence and stopped. A moment later Lunce stood to one side of him, removing the spare cuffs from the pouch on his duty belt.

  Tavarez watched as Lunce took a step back and tossed the stainless-steel handcuffs against the chain-link fence.

  They clinked lightly then fell to the ground.

  Tavarez had always been curious what the 5,000 volts would have done, had Cartwright or one of his gang messed up, or had left the fence electrified on purpose.

  Lunce collected the cuffs without taking his eyes off of Tavarez.

  Tavarez took a step toward him and Lunce’s hand went straight to his club.

  “I want you to know I appreciate this,” said Tavarez.

  “Live it up,” said Lunce.

  “Thank you,” said Tavarez.

  “I won’t be far away.”

  With this, Lunce took two small steps backward—he always took two small steps backward—then turned from Tavarez and lumbered into the near dark twenty yards away.

  Tavarez turned to the fence. “Jimmy, my friend, is that you?”

  “Your friend it is, Jefe. I brought you something sweet.”

  “Let’s see.”

  A rustling in the cedars produced a figure that came toward Tavarez from the other side of the fence. He smelled her perfume before seeing her clearly. Her shoes glinted in the quarter moonlight and the spike heels sank into the damp earth and she had to lift them up as if from gum to get them free again.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello.”

  “I’m Shavalia.”

  “Great.”

  She was light-haired and slender, nice face. She had costume diamond earrings and her jeans had similar jewels down the legs to where they ended midcalf. She wore a dark camisole under a loose red mesh shawl under a short black leather jacket. There was orange mud on her heels and the sides of her shoes but the rhinestone-studded straps looked bright and clean.

  She smiled prettily. “Hope they don’t turn the fence on. Blow my jewels all the way to Lake Shasta.”

  “Mine too.”

  She smiled. “Here, honey, come a little closer.”

  20

  Early the next day Stromsoe bought rich food and good wine in Fallbrook. The people in the stores and deli were friendly and helpful. He learned that Fallbrook called itself the Friendly Village. Drivers in the parking lots stopped so he could get to and from his car, without the terse hand signals he was used to. He felt as if he should wave and smile to them, so he did. Girl Scouts sold cookies outside the market and he bought some Thin Mints.

  He straightened up his tiny home.

  Then he drove up to Orange County and met with Dan Birch, who agreed that Cedros was probably lying and wanted to know why.

  “Think he’s a danger to her?” Birch asked.

  “I’ve got no reason to trust him.”

  Birch nodded, tapped something onto his keyboard. “Frankie says she’s okay now, to and from work. She’s not worried anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  Birch studied Stromsoe. “Look in on her at work anyway. Drop in. I know that’s a lot of hours. Just keep track of them.”


  “Gladly.”

  “I talked to the publisher of the North County Times—boss of the reporter who’s been calling Frankie. I got the publisher to keep a lid on this for now. I told her about copycat possibilities if the whole world knows there’s a sicko watching a TV celebrity. Fox News double-teamed them with me. They love Frankie. Don’t want to lose her.”

  “That’s good planning, Dan.”

  “Security Solutions, Matt. What do you think of her?”

  “I like her.”

  “I can’t believe this shit about DWP. You’d think she’d have mentioned all that.”

  “Funny what she offers up and holds back,” said Stromsoe.

  “Making rain,” said Birch. “Christ.”

  After that, Stromsoe spent the rest of the morning at the indoor range in Oceanside. It felt good to have a gun in his hand again and to feel the percussive pops through the muffs and smell the gun oil and the solvent and the burned powder. He was surprised how well he shot with only one eye.

  He had been a distinguished expert on the OCSD pistol team for three years running, until workload and fatherhood had squeezed out his recreational time. He had learned to use his eyes and to trust his hands and fingers to do the right things at the right time. Practice, and more practice—range hours, competitions, dry-firing his sidearms whenever he could to build trust and familiarity, helping the new deputies—it was enjoyable.

  Stromsoe had been surprised to see that most law enforcement officers did no more shooting than was absolutely necessary to qualify each year. They took poor care of their sidearms and their skills. They seemed to ignore their guns. Some actually disliked or feared them. He had been surprised too at his own interest in shooting, but he enjoyed using a precisely made tool, liked the hand-eye coordination, the concentration and rhythm.

  Firing a revolver in PPC competition, Stromsoe could get off six rounds, shuck the empties, smack home the speed loader, squeeze off six more, and hit nothing but black at fifty feet without ever looking at anything but his target. The PPC events were almost leisurely because speed wasn’t really important. But shooting an IPSC with an autoloader was about speed and accuracy and it was more exciting because you were moving and shooting at the same time. The magazines were faster than speed loaders, and you got more rounds besides. The secret for either competition was to keep the gun up at eye level during the reload, so if you needed to adjust the speed loader or get the magazine started, your eyes were still near the target. He felt connected to his target by his eyes, tethered almost, and it had been a simple visual skill to discharge the bullet that would follow the invisible connective thread to its mark. His target could be a guy hopping fences at night but Stromsoe had taught himself to truly see with a gun in his hands and to put his rounds where his eyes were looking. He was proud to have placed ninth overall in the Southern California Regional Sheriff ’s Association competition of 1994.

  Now it was different, but not all bad. Two years had given his body time to adjust. His depth perception was not as precise as before and his field of view was smaller. It was like looking down a tunnel. Through his one eye the world looked slightly flat and compressed, as if telescoped back toward him by an invisible hand. But the picture was clear.

  At fifty feet he shot a decent group with his Colt .380. The shots hit right and high of the five-ring but almost all in the black.

  At ten feet his right-side pull was one inch but the group was very tight.

  He practiced his motion with the Clipdraw, first with a sport coat on, then with it off. Smooth was the ticket here, especially with the coat on—no jerks, nothing showy, no mistakes. The Clipdraw rode too high to quick-fire over like a western gunslinger, so it was left hand on the coat then the right arm drawing out the gun and extending while you bent your legs and let your left hand find your right while your eyes—eye—ate the target for lunch.

  Boom. Boom boom boom.

  Still got it, Stromsoe thought. He also thought it was oddly fitting that of all the skills diminished by the bomb, his ability to shoot a gun was pretty much unchanged.

  He shot another six magazines with the Mustang, then fifty rounds from a Smith AirLite .22 that was small and light enough to slip into a pocket and had once saved his life.

  BY FOUR THAT afternoon he was waiting across the street from John Cedros’s house in Azusa. He parked under the same generous acacia tree and noted the fallen flowers collecting again on the windshield wipers and hood of his truck.

  At quarter till five the pregnant young woman he’d seen last week parked an embattled white coupé in the driveway and slowly climbed out. She was dressed in what looked like a waitress’s uniform for a Mexican restaurant—a brightly colored ruffled skirt, a white blouse with puffed sleeves off the shoulders, a comb with a red fan in her dark hair. She flipped the driver’s seat forward, squeezed awkwardly behind it, then emerged with a little boy hiked over one shoulder. She pulled a purse off the front seat and slammed the door with her foot while the boy reached up and fingered the red fan.

  A few minutes later she was back. She had changed to jeans and a flannel shirt rolled to her elbows. She opened the trunk and carried in plastic bags of groceries four at a time, two trips, then shut the trunk and locked it.

  At five-thirty Cedros rolled up beside the coupé in his gold sedan and killed the engine. Stromsoe slid down again and watched through the crescent between the dash top and steering wheel. Cedros popped out of the car and hustled into the house. Stromsoe waited five minutes.

  The security screen door of the Cedros house was closed but the wooden door behind it was open to the cool evening as Stromsoe knocked.

  “Go away,” Cedros said from somewhere inside.

  “I think Frankie will see the light,” said Stromsoe.

  Cedros stood behind the screen door. Bare feet and a beer, a singlet and his blue DWP custodial chinos. Small as ever. “Make sense, pendejo,” he said.

  Stromsoe looked past Cedros to the kitchen, where the woman stood before the seated boy, lowering a bowl to the table.

  Cedros looked at his wife then back at Stromsoe. “She’s my wife, man. That’s my son.”

  “Let’s take a drive.”

  “Let’s.”

  They headed up Azusa Avenue through town. The streetlamps and benches and planters were painted a flagrant purple blue that Stromsoe liked. The little city seemed caught in a time warp, with tenacious mom-and-pop stores downtown instead of the chain everythings he’d become so used to in Southern California. But the stores looked to be struggling. Some were boarded up, right along the main drag. There were lots of liquor stores with their faded cigarette posters and sale signs and Lotto ads fixed to the windows. CAMEL TURKISH BLENDS—CARTON OF 20—$39.99!!!

  A half mile farther and they hit the residential area. The homes were small, some neat and some not. Front yards sat behind iron fences and gates and there were steel safety doors instead of the regular screen doors. The wrought-iron patterns over the windows looked more defensive than decorative. Flat-footed women slowly carried bags of groceries home from the mercado and pretty girls with flashy clothes and smiles crossed the streets away from the homies manning their corners or slinking up and down the avenue in older cars with thumping woofers and bright paint and the windows blacked out.

  Stromsoe saw the contempt and impatience on Cedros’s face as he looked out at the town.

  “Didn’t use to be like this,” said Cedros. “The bangers.”

  “My hometown changed a lot too.”

  “Just the last five years, man.”

  “It doesn’t look so bad.”

  “What do you know? And what do you want? The weather lady is ready to drop the charges?”

  “She might,” said Stromsoe. “But I need some information first.”

  “And if I don’t have it, the charges stick.”

  “Yep. You go on trial.”

  “Name it, man.”

  “You work for DWP, not the hospital.
It took me half a day to figure that out.”

  Cedros shrugged.

  “I think Choat put you up to harassing Frankie.”

  “Choat? I barely know Choat. He’s water operations, fourteenth floor. I’m custodial.”

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “He didn’t put me up to anything. The fuck is wrong with you?”

  Stromsoe looked over at Cedros, who had slipped on a pair of shades.

  “Here’s the deal on Choat,” said Stromsoe. “He wanted Frankie’s rainmaking formula. Offered to pay her a lot of money for it. When she said no, he sent you to frighten her, maybe even steal that formula yourself. I think you got as far as the barn—inside the barn—but you couldn’t find the formula because she’s never written it down.”

  “I didn’t break and enter. Never.”

  “Let’s go back to Choat, then. What did he want you to do with Frankie?”

  “Nothing, man. How many times I gotta tell you that?”

  “You stalked her because you’re obsessed with her?”

  “I didn’t say that either. I didn’t stalk her. I’m not guilty of that.”

  “They got a stack of pictures you took of her. They got pictures she took of you on her property. I caught you trespassing on her private property and handed you over to the cops. John, let me help you out here—you’re toast.”

  Cedros stared out the window.

  Stromsoe said nothing for a minute or two. He pulled over where the San Gabriel River passed under the road, a narrow white-water ribbon racing down from the mountains. They got out and walked to the edge of the drop and watched the river below.

  “You did good,” Stromsoe said. “You pestered Frankie to the point where she hired a PI. You took the pictures of her, had the stalking story ready if you got caught. You even took the rap in court. Good for you. I hope you’re in for a big promotion.”

  Cedros stared down at the water. “I’m waiting for you to say something that makes sense.”