Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  “The first one you’ve ever admitted to! You nearly scared that poor man to death.”

  “He did look like the Russian,” said Bob, tossing another shirt into the suitcase. “He had an accent, too.”

  “He grew up in Boston,” said Rebecca. “Boston isn’t in Russia.”

  Bob threw a pair of trousers into the case and forced the clasps shut. The past year and a half had not been the best period in his and Becky’s marriage; she had taken a job in a German restaurant and was away from the home more than a religious Mormon wife would want to be. Their daughter Katie had grown to be a tentative, shy little girl, one that was a little frightened of her father, a man obsessed with solving a crime that bore no relationship to her or to anyone she knew. He argued with the other security guards at work; he thought them incompetent and they considered him an ex-cop unsatisfied with his new job. Everyone, including his wife, knew the security job was beneath him.

  “I failed at being a big city cop,” he said, leaning over the suitcase.

  “No, you didn’t,” Becky tried to console him. “You left Los Angeles to marry me.”

  “I failed at being a deputy sheriff in a tiny little town,” Bob went on. ‘I need to make a go of it at least one time. I promise this will be the last time I’ll try your patience. I’ll be better after this; you’ll see.”

  LXIX

  11/16/10 20:20 PST

  “What’s he done now?” Erin Mondragon asked.

  “The usual, sir,” said the security man on the other end of the telephone line. “He’s gone and got dead drunk in one of those funny little lightless bars he likes.”

  “That’s not a problem,” said Mondragon, fingering the Venetian blinds on his office window and catching glances of Market Street twenty-one stories below him. “Follow him, discretely. Be sure he is all right. John Taylor has practiced being a drunk for decades. Get him a cab if he’s too smashed to drive himself home.”

  “Why does he need this much attention, Mr. Mondragon?” asked the security man.

  “You’re not in management, Trey,” said Mondragon. “You’re paid to do as I ask.”

  “He’s headed uptown again, sir,” said the security man. “I think he’s coming to see you again.”

  “Not a problem either,” said Mondragon. “When he’s here, I know where he’s at.”

  Had Mondragon looked up and across the street at that moment, rather than down at the traffic, he might have seen the glint of neon light reflecting off something metallic in the window of a hotel room directly across from him, for Bob Mathers just then had moved his binoculars to his eyes. Bob was a little rusty at surveillance and needed a couple seconds to realize he should step back and put down his own blind before he looked at Mondragon’s office another time.

  For two days he had watched Mondragon at a distance, seeking something that would give him another clue. For two days he had seen Mondragon go to and from the office on the twenty-first floor and the penthouse on the building’s top. Each morning at eight fifteen Mondragon went to have a café mocha and a cinnamon roll at a small coffee bar two doors down the street. Two large bodyguards in black suits accompanied him.

  At nine Mondragon met with his accountants. At eleven his lawyers dropped in to visit him. A delivery boy from Richard’s New York Deli brought him lunch in a white paper bag at noon. His stockbroker came at twelve thirty, and Mondragon’s two business managers and his security personal came to him whenever he called them. The hulking Scandinavian man who was his masseuse came at five to give Mondragon a rub down after the billionaire had spent an hour in his personal gymnasium on the second floor.

  Another delivery boy, this one driving a van from Hong Lee’s Chinese Restaurant, arrived at six bearing an eight course meal. Mondragon was then in his office, alternately making phone calls and working on his computers until nine at night. At that time a limousine from the Famous Models’ Escort Service drove into his basement parking garage. The big car bore a tall blonde who took the elevator clear to the penthouse and left at six in the morning, before Mondragon awoke.

  Bob had seen John Taylor, whom he of course did not know by name, come to Mondragon’s office once before on the Fifteenth. Unlike the other visitors, he did not come and go through the office garage underneath the building; he parked in the space protected by the doorman in front of the main entrance. Taylor called attention to himself by positioning his Buick at a thirty degree angle to the curb and staggering up to the doorman and giving him a hearty slap on the back.

  Bob had guessed Taylor was a drunk in the wrong place the first time he saw him; that was when he appeared at half past ten at night. Because the doorman once more let him enter, Bob knew that this was someone more important than a mere drunk. Mathers watched for a set of lights to come on among the banks of windows in which Mondragon’s office lights were the only ones blazing. Bob surmised that the man could have gone to only one place in the enormous building.

  “He’s in the boss’ office,” Bob mumbled. “Mr. M. doesn’t see nobodies off the street, not at this time of night.” Bob could hear nothing of what was said, albeit he did catch glimpses of two silhouettes in the window.

  Bob thought it more curious that one of the security men he recognized as one of the bodyguards who sometimes accompanied Mondragon to the coffee shop arrived moments after Taylor did. The bodyguard parked his car on Bob’s side of Market Street and waited.

  *

  “Trey tells me you’re drinking again,” Mondragon was saying to Taylor on the other side of the blinds.

  “Trey should drink more himself,” said Taylor. “He looks tense.”

  “You upset him. You upset all my people.”

  “You wouldn’t have anything to drink here, would you?” asked Taylor and poked around the small bar Mondragon had in a corner of his private office.

  “Bottled water,” said Mondragon. “Do you have any friends in those lousy places you go?”

  “The only friend I have is you,” said Taylor, trying to sound flippant but coming off as his usual sad self.

  “Keep it light. Think light. Think happy. Be happy,” advised Mondragon, circling around his old friend, hands forever in motion.

  “That’s kind of hard to do when you’ve got a few million ruined lives weighing on you,” said Taylor. He went to one of the story-high windows in Mondragon’s office and pulled up the shades so he could look at the glistening city.

  “What are you doing?” Mondragon asked. “I keep them closed after sundown. No need to have the whole world looking in.”

  Taylor had no idea that Bob Mathers was at his window across the street looking through his binoculars when the drunken man lifted the blinds. Or that, seeing him at full face, Bob recognized him as the man in the doughnut shop Wayland Zah had said was Vladimir Petrovski.

  “I need to see the lights,” Taylor said. “Lights against the darkness, you know; something like that. The Bible says so. I think.”

  Mondragon produced a small flask from a locked desk drawer to tempt Taylor away from the widow. As soon as John had gone to the mini-bar to get a glass he drew the shades Taylor had opened.

  “They killed another hundred people in Colombia today,” said Taylor, pouring out a generous three fingers of whiskey from the flask. “Those guerrillas on the outskirts of Bogota. I saw it on TV. A big explosion in a marketplace. Women, little babies scattered everywhere. The images were beyond imagining.”

  “We aren’t responsible for that,” said Mondragon.

  “They showed the medical personnel carrying out bodies,” said Taylor as he gulped down mouthfuls of whiskey. “Pieces of bodies. Horrible stuff.”

  “The war down there had been going on long before the U.S. bombed them,” said Mondragon, leading Taylor to a chair; he disliked having anyone other than himself free to walk about the room while he was speaking. “People there have been dying for many years. They look upon their little daily slaughters as we up here in the U.S. look upon ca
r accidents. It’s something that simply happens.”

  “I tell myself that,” said Taylor. “The thought doesn’t help, not during the night. At night I lay awake and I see all those people we’ve killed.”

  “We didn’t kill anyone.” (Mondragon stopped to check his nails. He would have to fit his manicurist into his schedule sometime that week.) “The water killed them, the ones here in America. Bombs killed the people in Colombia. You and I certainly didn’t drop any bombs on anyone, did we? What is this concept ‘alive’ anyway? How can we know anyone is living, has consciousness, other than ourselves? That reminds me. An old philosophy professor of mine used to say, ‘I don’t know why everyone isn’t a solipsist.’ That was a joke, you see. Oh, don’t do that.”

  Taylor had turned away from Mondragon and was weeping. “I see that poor boy, that Indian boy Method killed,” said John through his tears.

  “Yes, that was a rough one,” conceded Mondragon. “We owe it to ourselves not to speak of him. What do you say? Let’s talk about sports. How about those Niners? Isn’t that what they say in the sports bars?”

  “I can’t breathe in here,” said Taylor, and he felt something stiffening his spine and pulling him from his chair. “I can’t stay in one place for long. My wind pipe gets clogged up if I sit. I can’t do any work at the office. You want to go have a drink?”

  Mondragon said he had work to do. He tried another time to shift the conversation toward a subject other than John’s feelings of guilt and asked after Taylor’s ex-wife, a disagreeable woman Mondragon had never had reason to mention previously. He found there was only one matter on Jack’s mind.

  “Did you know the Navaho believe a murdered man’s soul can never rest until justice is done?” asked Taylor.

  “Yeah, I expect they believe a lot of odd things,” said Mondragon, who wanted Taylor out of the building before the girl from the escort service arrived. “Say, you think it’s going to rain? Hadn’t you better get home before it gets bad? If you want, I can call Trey and have him drive you back. You’re a little under the weather, John.”

  “...the soul walks the earth,” whispered Taylor. “You can imagine them, can’t you? The dead souls walking around us?”

  Mondragon picked up his cell phone. “I’m calling Trey now. He’ll be up in a jiff.”

  “I’ll see myself out,” said Taylor and walked toward the elevator.

  Three minutes later Bob Mathers observed Taylor stagger from the front exit and onto the street. The drunk did not enter his ill-parked car, but went down the sidewalk to a bar called the Blue Horn. A blue neon sign shaped like a ram’s curled horn flashed over the entrance. The burley young man named Trey followed after Taylor, and Bob Mathers was already outside his hotel room and running down the stairs to the street by the time the security guard pushed against the saloon’s front door.

  LXX

  11/16/10 23:17 PST

  John Taylor found himself a familiar spot at the Blue Horn’s chrome and crystal bar and quickly imagined he had put himself into a duck pond filled with whiskey. Floating on his back, he coasted past ring-necked mallards and blue-headed teal happily quacking their greetings to him. Trey set at a corner table well behind Taylor and nursed a Coke while he remained in the shadows and watched to see his charge did nothing foolish. Neither man could have recognized Bob Mathers when the ex-cop entered the bar and took a chair that offered him a view of both Taylor and the security man.

  At ten to eleven a woman dressed in a mini-skirt and plying the most popular trade being practiced at that hour on Market Street entered the Blue Horn. She first spoke to a well-dressed man at the bar. He brusquely told her to leave him. A few seconds later she sat down at Bob’s table and asked him if he wanted a date.

  “I wonder if,” said Mathers, “you would do something else for me?”

  He whispered something in the prostitute’s ear and showed her a pair of fifty dollar bills he had in his wallet. She left the bar and five minutes later ran back in and shouted, “If the owner of the red Firebird parked across from the Mondragon Building is in here, somebody’s breaking into your car!”

  Trey realized she meant the car he had left in front of the hotel and ran outside to check. In a flash he was a couple hundred feet down the street, but could see no one at his car’s door. He examined the lock in the bad light and found not so much as a paint scratch. Upon returning to the Blue Note he found the hooker gone. The bartender said he had seen her come in before; her name was Lana or Lucy or something that started with an L. Maybe, said the bartender, her name was Sybil. Trey returned to his Coca Cola on the rear table. He took a few sips, but decided to get another because the soft drink had lost its fizz. He would later decide he had definitely signaled the barmaid. He went to sleep rather than wait for her to respond.

  While Trey had been outside, Bob had slipped a packet of white powder he had purchased from the prostitute into the bodyguard’s unprotected drink. The drug did its work quickly, and Bob Mathers took quick advantage of the opportunity the dozing security man provided him.

  LXXI

  11/16/10 23:20 PST

  “What are you drinking, friend?” Bob Mathers asked John Taylor as he sat on the empty stool next to the drunken businessman.

  “Glenfoidich, my man,” said Taylor, “the hearty gem of the Highlands.”

  Bob ordered a double for both himself and his new acquaintance, and Taylor was but too happy to accept his hospitality. “Can we go somewhere to talk?” Bob asked him.

  Taylor was aware they were in a bar in downtown San Francisco and that there were plenty of men about who asked that question of other men. “Sorry,” said Taylor. “I have nothing against you people. Your way is not my style. I think, if I’m not mistaken, you’ll find one of your bars next door.”

  “No,” said Bob. “I want to talk to you about Wayland Zah.”

  An hour ago Taylor had been telling Mondragon of the unquiet souls walking the earth in search of final justice. Now a stranger had sought him out and was speaking to him a name that had haunted him since that terrible night in Bluff when he had watched the young Navaho die. Taylor felt the leather stool slipping beneath him. His internal organs seemed to soften, and he had to stop to gather in the air he needed to breathe out his next words.

  “Are you an angel...something like that?” he whispered to Bob.

  “Something like that,” said Bob. “We need to be out of here before your friend over there wakes up. Come on. I won’t harm you. I promise. I only want to talk. I think you need to talk too, sir.”

  “Yes,” said Taylor and vigorously shook his head, “I need to say some things.”

  Taylor needed glass upon glass of liquor to steel himself for the trip with the stranger into the San Francisco November night. He remembered--or perhaps he dreamed it--that there was a light rain falling as they walked back to his car. Taylor also thought he saw his suburban home and that he talked far more than he should have.

  In the morning everything was certain again. He awoke on his sofa, and the security man Trey was sitting next to him. John had reached the point in his life when he no longer awoke with a hangover, but rather had only an upset stomach and a taste in his mouth as though he had been chewing on a gob of steel wool.

  “You OK, sir?” Trey asked him.

  “I had the strangest dream,” said Taylor and rolled himself to an upright sitting position. “What time is it?”

  “Nine thirty-seven, in the morning,” said Trey, ashamed to admit it.

  “Where’s that guy?” asked Taylor.

  “What guy? asked Trey. “Did he put something in my Coke?”

  “I had the strangest dream,” repeated Taylor and rubbed his weary eyes. “He was young, in his thirties, I guess. About thirty-eight. Kind of shabbily dressed in a gray jacket. Had short hair like he was in the army. Is my watch on top of the TV?”

  Taylor had noticed that John’s Rolex was gone from his wrist. He and Trey made a quick search of the li
ving room and then of the dresser drawer where John kept his five other expensive timepieces, along with his diamond and emerald cuff links. All of them were missing.

  “So the guy was just a thief,” said Trey, relieved that the stranger had not been something worse. “You know, Mr. Taylor, it would be good idea if you and me didn’t mention any of this to Mr. Mondragon. A man can always get new watches, but, wow, you know, it might kind of upset him if he knew we’d been careless like this. Agreed?”

  LXXII

  11/18/10 10:08 PST

  Felix Collins went to his front door after he had logged off the Internet and had stuffed the notebook full of credit card numbers underneath his sofa.

  “Coming!” he yelled to whomever was knocking. “Doing a little housekeeping.”

  An afterthought caused him to toss a blanket over the computer terminal, although a hard corner of the CPU emerged through a corner of the coverlet. Felix opened the door a couple inches to see his visitor, taking care not to open it enough to grant the visitor a view of his home’s interior.

  “Ah, Officer Mason,” he exclaimed. “Long time no see. What brings you out here to Barstow?”

  “The name is Mathers, Felix,” said Bob. “I’m not a cop anymore.” He brashly pushed past Felix and entered the ill-kept desert trailer house.

  “You have a warrant?” asked Felix. “I know my rights. Not that I’m involved in any of that computer fraud stuff anymore. Did I tell you I found Jesus while I was in Folsum? The terms of my parole say I can’t even own a modem. I really learned my lesson. I’m a changed man. You sure you have a warrant? Why didn’t I hear you drive up?”

  “I have $2,000 and eight names,” said Bob and handed Felix a bundle of large bills from his pants pocket and a piece of paper bearing the names.

  “Is this a sting?” asked Felix. “I was playing solitaire,” he said of the computer under the blanket. “Haven’t been on the Net for six years, no siree.”