Storm Runners

by Parker, T. Jefferson

  Cedros glared at him as they rounded one of the Olvera Street alleys and started down the next. He reminded Stromsoe of a cat he used to have as a boy, a big tom named Deerfoot who used to look at him as if to say, If I were a little bit bigger I’d kill and eat you. Same thing now with Cedros, his little man’s rage boiling inside.

  “I have to give the cops the visitors’ log for October eighteenth,” said Stromsoe.

  “It was just family stuff, man. I’m telling you.”

  “Tell the cops that.”

  “I’ll make you a deal.”

  “You can try.”

  “Get the rain lady to drop the stalking charges and I’ll tell you what Tavarez and I talked about.”

  Stromsoe saw that Cedros was in much hotter water than stalking charges, though he wasn’t sure that Cedros saw it.

  “I think she’ll go for that,” he said. He didn’t say that the D.A. might prosecute Cedros anyway.

  Cedros sped up his walk, out of Olvera Street and onto Cesar Chavez Avenue. Stromsoe was a step behind when Cedros wheeled and grabbed his arm.

  “Choat wanted Frankie to stop making rain, and he wanted you off the case. He wanted her formula. That was the whole deal. I presented it to Tavarez. Nobody was supposed to get killed, Stromsoe. Ever. I swear to God. That was not the deal.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Fuck. Shit. Man, I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Did you tell Tavarez that I was Frankie’s bodyguard?”

  Cedros looked up at Stromsoe, squinting in the midday sun. “No. Choat said it was important that he see the pictures of Frankie with you in them.”

  “I thought they confiscated those down at the Sheriff ’s station.”

  “I had more.”

  So Choat knew, thought Stromsoe. He’d probably read the articles and seen the pictures. He knew Tavarez would jump at the chance to mess with me again.

  “You’re a good employee, John. You just choose the wrong bosses.”

  “Don’t I know it, man.”

  “How much did Choat offer for the intimidation?”

  Cedros slowly shook his head. “Two hundred Gs.”

  “Christ Almighty. Next time tell him to offer about a quarter of that. You gave it to the big guy, Ampostela, right?”

  Cedros looked at the ground, then slowly nodded.

  “Now that the job is botched, Tavarez will try to kill you,” said Stromsoe. “You’re the only one who can finger him for Frankie. He’ll probably use Marcus. It could be tonight. It could be next week or next month. It might be good to leave town for a while.”

  “Yeah? Quit my job and run away? Go where? Do what? Change my name and get plastic surgery? I got a thousand dollars in the bank and a baby on the way.”

  “Get a motel up in Ventura or something. Your life is worth sixty bucks a day, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll just be dead in Ventura. He’s the Jefe. He’s a fuckin’ killer.”

  Stromsoe knew that Cedros had the score one hundred percent correct. In his years of war against Mike Tavarez and La Eme he had seen the innocent killed and the guilty walk away. He’d seen the good die and the evil flourish. The cops couldn’t protect; they could only sweep up.

  Hadn’t he promised protection to Frankie just a few hours ago?

  I’m going to keep broadcasting. I’m going to make rain. You’ve got to figure something out.

  It angered Stromsoe that he couldn’t offer this decent man any protection at all. It was an old anger but it was still alive and fresh as when he’d been young. It came from the same conviction that had brought him to this life in the beginning—that you had the law and the scoffers, us and them, good and bad.

  “Do you have a gun?” he asked.

  Cedros, walking fast again, looked straight ahead and didn’t answer.

  “Did you have your wife make that call to Birch Security? About them coming to get us?”

  “So what if I did?”

  “Thanks. Look, Cedros—I can’t stop Tavarez or Ampostela. But I can protect you from Choat. Interested?”

  Cedros stopped and glared at Stromsoe. “Hell yes.”

  “Let’s walk through the bazaar one more time. I’ve got an idea.”

  AN HOUR LATER, Stromsoe was driving back down to Fallbrook when he asked himself again the important questions about Mike Tavarez: Who does he love? What does he want? What does he fear?

  And this time an answer came to him from El Jefe himself, delivered across the years in his own clear and reasonable voice.

  God put them there for reasons we don’t understand.

  You’ll burn in hell for them.

  Hell would be better than this. It’s bad, isn’t it, living without the ones you love?

  He called Birch, who called his California assemblyman, to whom he had donated generously for reelection. Later, Birch said they had had a long talk. The assemblyman called a state senator who had recently enlisted his support in getting a gun-control bill into committee to die. The senator was a friend of Warden Gerry Gyle of Pelican Bay State Prison and a big fan of Frankie Hatfield on Fox.

  Warden Gyle took Stromsoe’s call just before one o’clock.

  SEVEN HOURS LATER Stromsoe met Pelican Bay investigator Ken McCann in the Denny’s restaurant near his Crescent City Travelodge room. The night was cold and the lights of the city blurred intermittently in gusts of fog and slanting drizzle. The restaurant smelled of pine-based cleansers and flat-grilled beef. It was almost empty.

  McCann had the V shape of a weight lifter, a small head with flat silver hair, and small eyes set in bursts of wrinkles. He said he was sixty. He’d seen action in Hue, buried one wife and married another, loved his grandchildren, and thought Mike Tavarez was the scum of the earth. He bit into his sandwich, chewed with one side of his mouth, and spoke out the other. He told Stromsoe about the ’Nam, about coming back in ’70 and feeling so jumpy and weird. Doctors called him hypervigilant, which was a pretty darned good word for sleeping with a carbine in the bed next to you and a pistol under the pillow, if you could even call it sleeping. So nervous even the dogs got tired of him and ran off. His wife had a heart attack at the age of thirty, which McCann believed was a direct transfer of his own monstrous fears and worries. He met up with Ellen ten years later, when most of the vigilance had worked its way out, and he finished the psychology degree first in his class and went to work for Corrections.

  He described his children and grandchildren.

  He ate every bit of food on his plate and ordered peach pie with ice cream.

  Stromsoe listened with all of his considerable patience and empathy, then told him what he needed: a way to call Tavarez off a murder-for-hire contract that Stromsoe could not prove he was a part of.

  “You can’t prove anything with guys like that,” said McCann, swallowing. “I read two hundred letters a week, either by him or to him—and I don’t know a damn thing about what he’s doing. Little bits of English. Little bits of Spanish. Little bits of Nahuatl. Whole bunches of bullshit lines and coded instructions. Sentences that mean nothing. Sentences that mean something different than what they say. Numbers and more numbers. They won’t talk. You finally get somebody to talk and they torture him, murder him, and post the pictures on the Web. Tavarez? He’s calling shots. I promise you that.”

  “I believe you. I don’t need proof. I don’t want it.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  “I want to save the life of a woman he’s trying to kill.”

  McCann looked at him. “The old Eme didn’t pull that friends-and-family shit. You and Mike go way back, don’t you?”

  “Way back.”

  “I think he’s got some COs on the payroll. Two young guys—Post and Lunce—I’m sure they got their family problems and need the extra money. I don’t know what they do for him, if it’s just kites, or maybe a phone or some Internet time. Mike isn’t interested in getting high. Doesn’t smoke or drink. There’s also a situations ma
n, Cartwright, and I think he’s dirty too, but I’m not sure who he’s down with. I think Gyle could rock Mike’s world just by reassigning the guards. Mikey’s little treats would go away.”

  Stromsoe considered. With this information, he could blow some whistles, shut down Mike’s contact with the crooked guards, maybe piss him off some.

  “It’s not enough,” he said. “But I had the thought, and this is why Warden Gyle wanted me to talk to you, that Mike didn’t do too well in the SHU.”

  McCann smiled and peered at him, eyes twinkling in their nests of wrinkles. “Who would? Mike came out of SHU looking like a half-drowned rat. The inmates, they don’t call it the SHU. To them it’s the X. They hate the X. The X was hard on Mike. The smarter the guy, the harder it is on him. But that’s not my area. I can’t get Tavarez reassigned.”

  “You can tell the Prison Board what you told me—Mike is communicating with the outside through coded letters.”

  McCann colored slightly, but he held Stromsoe’s gaze. “That’s my watch. I’d be cutting my own throat.”

  “You read two hundred letters a week just to and from Mike. You’re understaffed. You’re the kid with his finger in the dike. I know that.”

  “And I know it.”

  “Well, Gyle knows it too,” said Stromsoe. “He says he’ll recommend SHU for Tavarez if you’ll establish that he’s in touch with criminal associates.”

  “That’s the trouble,” said McCann. “I can’t really actually one hundred percent establish it. Which, when you flip it over, is why I got a raise this year for doing my job so well.”

  “Gyle wants you for lead investigator when Davenport retires,” said Stromsoe.

  “Oh?”

  Gyle had volunteered the promotion to his friend State Senator Bob Billiter, as a way of enlisting McCann, and Billiter had offered it back up the pipeline to the assemblyman, who passed it along to Birch. Stromsoe had been impressed that politics could be played so fast. And that three men who had never so much as met Frankie Hatfield would stick out their necks a little for her.

  McCann stared hard at him now, set his fork on the pie plate in the last suds of ice cream.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re good.”

  “No, why did Gyle tell you that?”

  “Senator Billiter made a good case to him for the woman that Mike is trying to kill. It shouldn’t have been hard. She’s innocent, good-hearted, bright. One of Mike’s pistoleros was bringing his gun to her head last night when luck intervened.”

  McCann looked at him doubtfully. “How?”

  “I ran over him with my pickup truck.”

  McCann smiled. “I like that.”

  “I was too rattled to enjoy it at the time.”

  McCann smiled again. “So, you want me to speak to the Prison Board if Tavarez won’t stand down.”

  “Only if he won’t stand down. Either way, Gyle wants you in for Davenport.”

  “When does the PB meet ne—”

  “A week from Thursday,” said Stromsoe.

  “When are you seeing Tavarez?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Gyle arranged it.”

  “You got this timed out.”

  “I got lucky. I hope it works.”

  McCann shook his head. “Don’t worry. He’ll change his mind about the lady. He won’t go back to the SHU. It drives most people completely crazy. It ruins them. Then we hospitalize them and they scream all day and night in the ding wing. It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard. Even the state doctors know what the SHU does to people. They tried to close it but the courts let it stay open. It’s hell.”

  28

  John Cedros looked through the peephole of his Azusa home. Marcus Ampostela’s tremendous head filled up the narrowed field of view. He looked listless and tired.

  Cedros opened the door before he could ring the bell again.

  “Homes,” said the big man. “What are you doing?”

  “What are you doing?”

  Marianna came from Tony’s room and Ampostela smiled. “Hey, coneja. Looking right, aren’t you?”

  “Keep your voice down,” she said. “Tony’s sleeping.”

  “Anybody got a beer?”

  “I’ll get it,” said Marianna.

  Ampostela watched her cross the small living room and go through the rounded doorway into the kitchen. Cedros wished she weren’t wearing the cutoff jeans that made her legs look so good, even with the sixth-month stomach building over her waist like a thunderhead.

  “What the fuck do you want?” whispered Cedros. “The cops are all over me at work because of you guys and the weather lady. That was not the deal, Marcus. Now you show up at my house. I can’t believe you people.”

  Ampostela’s anger flashed through his slow bigness and into his eyes. His bulk seemed to tighten. “You owe me twenty-five.”

  “For that?”

  “For that. And you and I have some work tonight. I heard from El Jefe this morning. He has a job for us.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll come home with some money, is all you need to know.”

  Marianna came back with the beers. Ampostela took his with both hands and a smile. He swayed a little and Cedros saw that he was drunk or high or both.

  “I’m takin’ your husband out for a drink,” he said.

  “Not tonight,” she said.

  “Yeah, tonight. Tonight is what it is. I’ll bring him home before it’s too late. That’s the deal.”

  Cedros’s heart beat wildly, as if it were veering off course, then straightened out and beat evenly again.

  Marianna looked at her husband, shook her head, and walked past both men, down the hallway and into Tony’s room.

  “Let’s go,” said Ampostela.

  “I’m finishing my beer.” His hand was shaking so badly he could hardly get the can to his face, so he turned away from Ampostela and drank it as fast as he could.

  “Drink it on the road. We’ll take my car. We don’t have all night.”

  “I have to get the money, take a piss, say good night to my boy.”

  “Hurry up.”

  Cedros didn’t hurry at all. He used the bathroom then put on a light windbreaker, arranged things, and said good-bye to Marianna. He took the envelope of DWP cash from a bowl of fruit on top of the refrigerator.

  When they finally got in the car Ampostela drove them around the corner to El Matador restaurant, where the dog had eaten from the table.

  Cedros used the bathroom again, then he was led by Ampostela to the same back room where the women and the drowsy gunman had been. They were there tonight too. The dog was up where he’d sat last time, a clean white plate before him.

  “Money,” said Ampostela.

  Cedros gave him the envelope and stood there while Ampostela counted it.

  “Sit,” said Ampostela. “Wait here. Come back outside to the car in twenty minutes.”

  Then he left.

  Twenty wordless minutes later Cedros rose from the big empty booth, went to the bathroom once again, then walked outside. It took him a minute to spot the big shiny station wagon because it wasn’t in the parking lot but across the street in the faint light of a purple streetlamp.

  He got in and it roared onto the avenue.

  Ampostela drove them up Highway 39 into the San Gabriel Mountains. Rain had puddled on the roadside from last night’s storm and the stars were bright flickers over the tall mountains. Ampostela studied his rearview mirror. Cedros looked in the passenger sideview but saw nothing behind them.

  The last time he had been up this road was with the PI Stromsoe, Cedros thought. When he came that close to just telling him what he knew already—that scar-faced Choat had drafted him into harassing the weather lady in a completely useless attempt to chase her out of the rainmaking business.

  “Where are we going?” asked Cedros. “There’s nothing up here.”

  “We’re meeting some people at that restaurant over the river.”
r />   “It’s been closed for years.”

  “That’s why. Be cool, man. So the cops asked you some questions. Don’t tell them nothing except you didn’t do it. You got a good lawyer?”

  “For which charge? I can’t keep track of my own crimes anymore.”

  “That’s what lawyers are for.”

  They passed the last housing tract, one that was built over the riverbed. You had to use a bridge to get home. Which is why Cedros had looked into buying a place there. The houses were nice and it wasn’t the barrio but they were too expensive.

  Now he caught a glimpse of the San Gabriel River, swollen with rain, surging down from the mountains. Some of the guys at DWP talked about a place up there that got five, eight, sometimes ten times the rain that fell down here in the city. He’d heard stories of fifty inches falling in a night, streams swelling, trees falling, Forest Service roads buried by tons of running water—and most of it ending up in the San Gabriel, which would then cascade downhill, race toward Azusa, widen and slow by the time it hit civilization, then be forcibly escorted to the ocean in a concrete chute.

  Cedros looked down at the river. It was scarcely visible until it passed the houses, then the neighborhood streetlights revealed its speed and volume. It ran at the bottom of a steep gorge.

  How many cubic feet per second were barreling their way to the ocean right now—twelve hundred, two thousand? Why didn’t they capture it? Why were the reservoirs chronically low? Why was Southern California in perpetual drought when even the humble San Gabriel lost so much good wild water after even a small fall rainstorm like the one last night? For that matter, why try to stop a lady who thinks she can make more rain?

  Whatever, thought Cedros. He knew the answer and was tired of it by now. The whole thing was crazy.

  Because, John, only abundance can ruin us.

  It was all really hard to care about right now, sitting next to a giant who was taking him out to kill him. He finally figured out why they’d gone to El Matador first. It was Ampostela’s alibi: he had dropped off Cedros and driven away and they hadn’t seen him again that night. Cedros had wandered off twenty minutes later. Ampostela had three witnesses for all of that. And not one who’d seen Cedros get into Ampostela’s car, tucked back in the darkness as it was.