A big revolver that deputies never carried anymore.
Alone—a checkpoint with one deputy.
Stromsoe’s vision returned as the deputy turned his light and attention back to Frankie.
The deputy said something and popped his holster strap free.
He drew the big revolver and in an instant Stromsoe understood that Frankie was about to get shot. He also understood that he could never get out of his truck and draw his weapon in time to help her. He was trapped.
Instinct told him to lift his right foot off the brake and that is what he did, coming down hard on the gas and lining up the side of his truck with the deputy, who turned at the shriek of rubber and tried to lean back against the Mustang for space. His head vanished in an explosion of glass when the big side mirror hit him.
Stromsoe slammed the brakes and threw the shifter into park and was out in a second with his .380 up.
Frankie rounded the front of the Mustang, her own weapon wobbling in her hand, but at least she had it out in front of her like it should be and she was plainly terrified but not screaming.
“Down!” Stromsoe yelled. “Get down!”
Frankie dropped and Stromsoe scrambled around his truck, charging the unconscious deputy, who lay flat out on the road. The revolver had landed eight feet away and Stromsoe put himself between it and the man down. Alex burst through the flashing yellow lights, holstered his gun, pulled the deputy over, and put a knee to his back. Janet cuffed him, rolled him onto his back, and got two fingers up to his carotid. The man’s head was bleeding and his jaw was clenched and his eyes were closed.
Frankie came around the front of her car, one hand on the hood for support, her gun shaking in her other outstretched hand. Stromsoe took it.
“I’ll call,” said Janet.
“Wait,” said Stromsoe. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the revolver.
“His gun,” said Alex.
“Frankie, Janet—what is that?” Stromsoe asked again. His hands were shaking and his legs felt flimsy and his heart was pounding in his throat.
“His gun.”
“His gun, Matt.”
“You’re damn right that’s what it is,” said Stromsoe. “Make the call, Janet. Good job, people. Really good job.”
He looked down on the unmoving deputy, saw the man and his gun and the scene chopped into frames by the flashing lights.
“Frankie,” he said. “The police will want to interview you at home. You and Janet can leave now if you want, get yourself together. It’s going to be a long night.”
“What am I going to tell the police?”
“Everything you know.”
“I’ll stay here. I’m with you.”
Stromsoe went to the bogus sheriff ’s cruiser and turned off the flashing lights.
“Hey, look at this guy,” called Alex. He was standing over the deputy, holding up the man’s cuffed arms at a painful-looking angle. Alex had pulled down the right sleeve of the duty shirt.
In the headlights from the Birch cruiser Stromsoe could see the totem pole of black prison tattoos climbing from wrist to biceps and beyond. Alex let go and the arms slapped back into place. The man still didn’t stir.
“Deputy, my ass,” Alex said. “Isn’t the ‘M-13’ La Eme?”
A bright and terrible light suddenly went on in Stromsoe’s head. He walked over to where the man lay and looked first at his face, then at the tattoos.
He didn’t recognize the face but the tats were all La Eme.
Stromsoe pulled the man’s wallet from his trouser pocket, then stepped away from the cars and used his cell phone to wake up Dan Birch at home.
“We just had a close one,” he said.
“I’m listening.”
He told Birch what had happened, patiently repeating several of the details out of deference to friendship and Birch’s training as a law enforcement officer. He heard a keyboard tapping as he talked. He wondered if Birch slept with it next to his bed or if he’d quietly wandered into the den.
Stromsoe assured his boss that Frankie was fine, everyone had performed well, and that Birch had been smart to assign the extra manpower. They’d probably saved her life.
Then Stromsoe asked Birch to get a jacket on Ariel Lejas of Riverside, California. He read Lejas’s numbers off the driver’s license in the wallet. He saw some cash, not much.
“And I want a list of all visitors seen by Mike Tavarez at Pelican Bay Prison over the last two weeks,” he said.
Birch paused. “A little time and I can do that. Who are we hoping to find on it?”
“John Cedros or Marcus Ampostela.”
“Our stalker and our gangster.”
“I’m smelling Mike Tavarez, Dan. He’s all over this.”
Again Birch paused a beat. “Let’s see what we get. If this was Tavarez, it’ll happen again. And again, until he gets what he wants. He’s got endless time and plenty of money.”
“I’m pretty damned clear on that, Dan.”
Stromsoe went back to the island of lights, worked the wallet back into Lejas’s pants, then joined Frankie leaning against her Mustang.
He put his arm around her and felt her body stiff and trembling under her clothes. He held her firmly but not too tight.
“Stand up straight and take a deep breath,” he said quietly. “Don’t want to scratch the paint.”
“No,” she whispered. “Not that.”
She stood straight and took a deep breath but the shivers didn’t stop and her eyes looked glassy and empty.
“I see Lacerta, Pegasus, and Delphinus,” he said. “And Capricornus, Fomalhaut, and Lyra.”
“I don’t see anything but that.”
He followed her gaze to the big revolver lying on Trumpet Vine.
26
Back at Frankie’s house the cops separated them. Frankie got her living room and Stromsoe the dining room. Alex took a bedroom and Janet the room containing Frankie’s bottled rivers.
Stromsoe’s interviewer was Davis, a stocky young detective, early thirties, with doubtful lines in his face and thinning dark hair combed straight back. Davis didn’t show the usual cop disrespect for private detectives. He told Stromsoe he had been fortunate. He also didn’t place Stromsoe as the narcotics deputy whose family was killed by the bomb two years ago in Newport Beach.
Stromsoe said nothing about that or Mike Tavarez. He would cross that bridge when he knew more about Ariel Lejas and had seen the Pelican Bay visitors’ log.
Lead Detective White told Frankie how much he enjoyed her weather reports although he usually watched a different channel. He declined coffee and pointed her to a living-room couch.
Stromsoe watched a uniformed sergeant broodingly shuttle back and forth between Alex and Janet, his holster and cuff case squeaking on his Sam Browne, eyes down, notebook in hand. He seemed preoccupied with something thousands of miles away.
Ace and Sadie wandered from interview to interview with airs of good-natured obligation.
By two o’clock everyone was gone but Frankie and Stromsoe, who sat not close together on one of her living-room couches. The dogs slept at their feet.
“La Eme?” asked Frankie. “Tavarez?”
“I think so.”
“In league with Choat? Impossible.”
“Don’t be naive, Frankie.”
“But why would Tavarez help Choat?”
He looked at her a moment before he spoke. “If it’s Tavarez, it’s personal. It’s about me.”
She looked back at Stromsoe, shaking her head in gathering disbelief. “So he’ll try again and again. He can just sit back in prison and send people here until one of them manages to kill me.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
“It already happened. I was lucky. So were you.”
She was right. Stromsoe could barely stand the sound of his own voice as he spoke those words. I won’t let that happen. How could he promise to her what he hadn’t been able to provide for his ow
n wife and son?
How could he not?
He stood and went to the big sliding-glass door, saw the stars in the storm-cleared sky, the tops of the avocado trees tilting silver in the breeze.
“What are my options, Matt?”
“I’ll make him see the light.”
“What power do you have over a man doing life without parole in the worst prison in the country? In the weirdest of ways, he’s totally free. What can you take from him? What can you offer him? He didn’t do this because he wants something. He did this because he hates you.”
Stromsoe, a man with nothing to offer his enemy and nothing to hurt him with, looked out at the faintly glistening orchard. There were no colors in the night, only black and white and shades of gray. Then the trees gave way to Frankie’s reflection and he watched her without her knowing. She sat on the couch with her knees apart and her elbows on them, leaning forward, looking at her hands. Her hair fell down around her face so that only the curve of her forehead and the tips of her nose and chin caught any light.
He remembered the night the kids had thrown the rocks at the marching band and Mike had helped him chase them down. Back then Stromsoe had felt a great affection for skinny Mike Tavarez—clarinetist, ally, compadre, friend. Now Stromsoe felt the same sense of altered time that he’d experienced five nights ago when he had shown Frankie the pictures of Hallie and Billy. In this new version of time—basic time, pure time, time without watches or calendars or the movements of a solar system upon which watches and calendars are based—one moment Mike was fighting beside him and in the next El Jefe was trying to kill an innocent woman because he hated Stromsoe. And in the new time, Matt Stromsoe, the soft-eyed drum major who had befriended a bandmate and hung out at his house riding bikes and shooting pool and eating his mother’s chile verde, hated Mike Tavarez back.
“Matt,” she said. “I’m not going to back down. I’m not going on a long vacation. I’m not changing my name, my home, or so much as my hair color for that man. I’m going to keep broadcasting. I’m going to make rain. You’ve got to figure something out.”
“I will.”
STROMSOE WAS ASLEEP in the guest room when Frankie woke him up. She stood in the doorway looking uncertain of whether she was staying or going. She was backlit by the hall light but he could see her hair was down and she was wearing a pink satin robe over something black.
When she offered her hand he smelled complexities of skin and lotion and perfume, and saw the glitter in her eyes.
She led him to her bedroom and locked the door. The windows framed the grainy first light of morning.
“This is a first, Matt.”
It took him just a second to get it.
“Don’t ask now,” she said. “Don’t say anything.”
“I’m wordless.”
“I bought this getup for you, the day after we danced and you showed me Hallie and Billy and the flowers at night.”
“I’m extra wordless.”
“Then show me the steps to this one too, if you’d like.”
PART IV
Pistoleros
27
Birch handed Stromsoe a faxed copy of the Pelican Bay Prison visitors’ log for October 18, one week ago.
“Cedros spent thirty-five minutes with Mike Tavarez that afternoon,” said Birch. “They talked privately, in the presence of an attorney—no listeners, no recordings.”
The worst of Stromsoe’s fears brushed up against him like something in deep water: Mike had tried to have Frankie Hatfield murdered. It was outrageously logical. It was how he did his business.
But with Frankie now tossed into this violent river—a psychopath’s notion of poetic vengeance—Stromsoe replaced the word “business” with the word “evil.” Tavarez was evil. Stromsoe hoped this knowledge might be reassuring but it wasn’t. It put Mike in a dark league and gave him invisible allies and powers, as if the tangible legions of La Eme weren’t enough.
“We have to tell the cops,” said Birch. “It will take them weeks to get to this. They’re not looking at Pelican Bay.”
Stromsoe thought. “Let me talk to Cedros first. I want to hear what he’s got to say.”
Birch nodded.
“How come the lawyer isn’t on this list?” asked Stromsoe.
“Different list. Here.”
Birch pushed another sheet toward Stromsoe, Professional Visits. Halfway down the page was the only professional visitor that Mike Tavarez had that day, Taylor Hite of Taylor Hite, LLC, Laguna Beach, California.
“He’s a dope lawyer,” said Birch. “Doing okay for himself. He’s twenty-eight, lives in a modest three-million-dollar home in Three Arch Bay. I’ve got nothing on him. He’ll send us packing.”
“Did Marcus Ampostela show up at Pelican Bay too?”
“No Ampostela. My guess is he’s Tavarez’s bagman. They probably communicate through e-mail or kites. And maybe even through Hite. Stranger things have happened.”
Stromsoe thought for a moment. “Cedros must have offered Tavarez something substantial. Wouldn’t you love to find a pile of DWP cash in one of El Jefe’s accounts?”
Birch shrugged. “I’d love to find anything at all in an El Jefe account. Remember?”
“Yeah—El Jefe gets busted with a total of six grand in a checking account at B of A. Everything else was Miriam’s and even that wasn’t much. He hid the rest.”
Birch tapped on his keyboard and a printer started to whir. “When the cops grill Cedros about the attempted murder of the woman he’s charged with stalking, he might be ready to cooperate with them.”
Something caught in Stromsoe’s mind. “Tavarez will see it that way too. He knows we can get these logs. That might put Cedros in a ditch off the freeway with a couple of bullets in his head.”
Birch considered. “Naw, Cedros isn’t worth it. He’s just the messenger. His visit to Tavarez proves nothing and Tavarez knows that. There’s no recording, no witness. They’ve already agreed on a bullshit line if they’re questioned—you can be sure of that. Mike can’t…well, he can’t kill everybody who breathes the same air he does.”
Stromsoe wondered about that. “I think it was Cedros’s wife, Marianna, who warned us. Maybe he put her up to it. Either way, I couldn’t come up with anyone who knew both sides of this—DWP and Tavarez—until now.”
“Warn him, then. Return the favor.”
Stromsoe used his cell and dialed the Cedros home number. He pictured the pregnant young woman in the Mexican restaurant uniform loading her boy out of the battered old car. He got a recording and hung up. An idea came to him.
“Can you cue up that warning call, Dan?”
Birch fiddled with his keyboard and mouse, then played the call to Birch Security from the unidentified female.
They’re going to get the weather lady and the PI.
Stromsoe pulled Birch’s desk phone over, redialed the Cedros number, then punched on the speaker mode.
You have reached the Cedros family—John, Marianna, and Anthony. If you leave your number we’ll call you back.
Birch played the warning again.
Stromsoe dialed the Cedros number for the third time and they both listened.
Birch was smiling.
Stromsoe nodded.
“You should have been one of the good guys,” said Birch.
“You too.”
“How is Lejas?” asked Stromsoe.
“He’s serious, but stable—broken bones in his face. How’s your mirror?”
Stromsoe smiled, looked out the window at the clear morning. Saddleback Peak, the highest point in Orange County, sat in perfect clarity, its top bristling with antennas and communications clutter.
“Frankie won’t back down,” he said. “She won’t hide out or move away.”
Birch rolled back in his chair and locked his fingers behind his head. “I didn’t think so. A woman who photographs her stalker has some courage. Got a little something for her, don’t you?”
&nb
sp; “Yeah.”
“You don’t look like that guy who sat here two weeks ago. She’s lovely.”
“I’m trying to keep her that way.”
Birch nodded briefly but said nothing and Stromsoe understood that Birch had wanted this to happen.
“How long do you think it will take Tavarez to organize another try?” Birch asked.
“A day or two,” said Stromsoe.
“Then you’ve got a day or two to find a way to change his mind.”
“I need a way into his head, Dan.”
“Personally, I don’t want to go there, but I know what you mean.”
Years ago Stromsoe had searched for a way to manipulate El Jefe Tavarez, and he had found it.
Ofelia had died, but he had found it.
Who does he love now? Stromsoe wondered. What does he fear now? What does he want?
CEDROS MET HIM at Olvera Street, a tourist mercado not far from the DWP headquarters. He looked smaller than Stromsoe had remembered, and more nervous.
They walked past the bright serapes and the leather sandals, the colorful pots and plates, the hats and maracas and marionettes.
Stromsoe told him about Lejas, the fake cop car, the tattooed arm of La Eme. Cedros stared ahead as they walked but Stromsoe could tell he was listening to every word.
“So I decided to work from the top down and guess what?”
“What?”
“You talked to Mike Tavarez at Pelican Bay Prison on October eighteenth. For over half an hour.”
“We’re relatives. Goddamned distant relatives is all we are.” Cedros spit out the words but didn’t look at Stromsoe.
“What did you talk about?”
“Family.”
“I wondered if you might have taken Tavarez an offer from Choat. It makes sense—you got popped by me, and Choat sends you to make a deal with El Jefe.”
Cedros looked at him now, anger in his eyes. “Family is all we talked about.”
“You’re beginning to make sense to me,” said Stromsoe. “If you wouldn’t roll over on Choat, you won’t roll over on Mike. The trouble for you is, Lejas almost killed Frankie, so it looks like someone contracted with Tavarez for murder. Who’s the link between El Jefe and Frankie? You.”
Storm Runners Page 19
