Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  This was the man his security guard Trey had sought out for him a month earlier. Mondragon knew the stranger as an acquaintance of another man he had met in prison, and he knew a couple of the stranger’s aliases and a little of his terrible reputation. The office had been electronically swept in case the FBI had any bugs in the room, the blinds were drawn shut, and Erin had turned on the radio to mask anything the two of them might say.

  “I should call you...?” asked Mondragon.

  “Carnie,” said the other man. “Like I told you, I was in the carnival, once.”

  Like John Taylor, Mondragon had been in jail for several days until the judge had set bail. The experience had not frightened him; it had left him more restless than before, and while he wanted to present a stoic front to this large and unkempt man, he could not stay off his feet. “Carnie,” as Mondragon had already ordered himself to call the man, put Erin in mind of one of those odd cave creatures that have never felt sunlight and are left pale and misshapen from years of darkness The man had size, bulk, perhaps even considerable strength in his huge frame. For all his mass, as he sat in his chair his white muscles and fat shifted to his right in an unnatural shape that disgusted Mondragon, as this unsightly chunk of humanity sagged against the side of his dirty coveralls.

  Mondragon turned off the overhead lights and left on a single small lamp on the table between the two men. The florescent rods had hurt the newcomer’s little black eyes, and he had shaded his visage with a flat white hand until Erin gave him some comforting darkness.

  “You and I have a mutual friend, Carnie,” said Mondragon, “who says you are the man for the job.”

  Carnie grunted in reply. Mondragon guessed he meant “yes.”

  “It is unfortunate I have had to contact you,” Mondragon continued. “Mr. Taylor is an old friend. Under other circumstances, I would try to protect him.”

  The stranger examined the metal arm of his chair, and grunted another time. “Got anything to drink?” he asked in nearly well enunciated English.

  “Not now,” said Mondragon, unable to read the man’s lackadaisical manner. “I never drink while I’m doing business. Drinking too much is Mr. Taylor’s problem. Much too much drinking. Being away from the bottle too long would get the better of him, eventually. They’ll lock him up in a cell for months next time. He’ll break in time. I know it. He knows as much himself, whenever he is sober. A man in your line of work should have learned, Carnie, that drinking is one of the things that can make you vulnerable.”

  “What’s vulnable mean?” asked Carnie, wiping his mouth and nose with the back of his hand.

  “It means people can screw you,” said Mondragon.

  “I had an old lady like that one time,” said Carnie. “She was vulnable to about anything in pants. Had to shoot the bitch.”

  “Very good,” said Mondragon at the same time he thought, Erin, you are in difficult straits to be trusting in this imbecile. He cleared his throat and went on: “Let’s say you do what I ask of you.”

  Carnie nodded.

  “Here is ten thousand dollars for your expenses, and for the extra friend you spoke of,” said Mondragon and gave the man an envelope filled with cash. “There is also a key inside this envelope that will open a luggage box at a public station somewhere in the Bay Area. The two hundred thousand dollars I promised you will be awaiting you there when the job is completed.”

  “What kind of station?” asked Carnie, examining the key he had found among the wad of money. “Airport, bus, train?”

  “I’ll tell you when the job is completed,” said Mondragon.

  “There ain’t no number on this key. Somebody filed it off or something.”

  “I will tell you the number, too,” sighed Mondragon. “Call me at this number. It’s a pay phone a couple blocks from here. That’s when I’ll tell you where to go.”

  The pale man shrugged, which Mondragon also took as an affirmation.

  “You will leave the building through the parking garage in your cleaning company van, as would a real janitor,” said Erin. “Now then, Mr. Taylor is closely watched. Up to a couple dozen men, both federal agents and local cops. The house itself is bugged. Phone lines, everything. Don’t even think of going near there. Your window of opportunity will be between 11:10 and 11:30 tonight on Highway 101 and Interstate 80 on the way to Oakland. Should you fail to make contact, if you lose him on the Bay Bridge or there abouts, we are dead. Do I need to say any more?”

  Carnie grunted.

  “You can approach, that is, get close to Mr. Taylor’s car only after he gets off the side streets and onto the freeway,” said Mondragon. “He will not be going fast in traffic; he won’t try to lose the cops, you understand. The range of the scrambler is less than fifty yards.”

  “That funny thing that looks like a blow dryer?” asked Carnie.

  “Yes,” said Mondragon, pacing with his hands behind his back. “I don’t understand the physics of it. I know police in Ohio have used it to stop speeders. The thing sends microwaves to mess up the embedded computer chips. Shuts down an automobile in about a minute. Use it when you get near the bridge.”

  He gave the device to Carnie, and took care to add: “Take the device out of town, pour gas on it, and burn it when you’re done.”

  “Why they gonna think this guy jumped?” asked Carnie.

  “Mr. Taylor has been under a lot of stress lately,” said Mondragon, talking to a point above the pale man’s head, as it was unsettling to look into the stranger’s face and see the spider web patterns of his red blood veins beneath his nearly transparent skin. “As I say, he drinks. He might be said to be an alcoholic. I and my attorneys will spin his suicide into an instance where the feds pushed an unstable man too hard.”

  “OK,” said the man, and started for the door, but Mondragon called him back.

  “You are certain you know how to use the device?” Erin asked him.

  “You point it at the car,” said Carnie and pointed the electronic weapon at a chair.

  “You will have to be close,” Mondragon reminded him. “If any other cars get between you and Mr. Taylor’s, you will stop them as well. That will raise questions when the police investigate. I can live with questions, so long as they are left unanswered.”

  “Whatever,” agreed Carnie, and this time when he headed for the door he left for good.

  Mondragon was alone in the office most of that day. By one o’clock his attorneys and business associates were headed home to prepare for holiday parties that evening. Erin phoned the escort service that provided the young women he needed for his everyday and special occasion needs and told them he was not feeling well. Among the impressive-looking but unread leather books on his office shelves, he found during that long afternoon an old copy of the Stanford yearbook, wherein he located a photograph of his pal, John Taylor Jr., Class of 1965.

  “To E.,” John Taylor had written over his picture, “will see you on the farm this summer. Am looking forward to some of your family Cabernet this next fall.”

  How like John, thought Mondragon, snapping the book shut. He never could think more than five months ahead.

  XCV

  12/31/10 20:26

  “Someone’s listening to our conversation,” were Mondragon’s first words over the phone after he had told Taylor who he was.

  “You think so?” said Taylor. “I know I’ve got people parked outside my front door.”

  “We need to talk at your place,” said Mondragon. “Don’t say the name. The place the bikers like. You know which one I mean. I’m going there now myself.”

  John Taylor found his car keys after only a couple minutes of searching. He turned over the coffee table in the living room and the coffee maker in the kitchen, and finally he discovered they had been hiding from him in his jacket pocket.

  “I’ve got to stop drinking so much,” he reminded himself, although five seconds later he thought maybe he would take one more sip of Glenlivet.


  *

  He knew the place Mondragon referred to was the Pirates’ Bar in Oakland, the same biker dive in which his bodyguard had gotten into a scuffle with the tabloid reporters. John Taylor passed out fifty dollar bills to the bar’s patrons every Christmas and once a week bought drinks for the house, thus he was tolerated there and sometimes protected. He took a drink from his flask and made himself think of the green and soggy Scottish Highlands whence the liquor came. How he wished he had gone there once in his life. He closed his eyes and thought of hills the color of billiard felt and of patches of purplish heather swaying in a lonely wind.

  I should have been a whiskey maker, or some other sort of artisan, he thought as he savored the smoky aftertaste. I could have lived in a stone house overlooking the sea, and my son, my loving, hard-working son, would have learned my trade and taken my position when I grew old.

  Armored by that last happy thought, Taylor pushed out his front door and into a misty San Francisco night. Three carloads of federal agents were parked in the street at the sides of his driveway. More watched him from other nearby streets, to say nothing of the local law enforcement groups in the area who could be called onto his trail in seconds.

  This must be one of Erin’s little jokes, thought Taylor. By the time he got to the saloon in Oakland there would be scores of police cruisers waiting for them in the parking lot; Mondragon and he would wave at each other and go home without saying anything of consequence. For the first time in weeks Taylor permitted himself to laugh when he thought of the confusion that would take place in the Pirates’ parking lot on that busy New Year’s Eve. He was wearing only a light cloth jacket as he went into his Buick and drove by the startled agents parked beyond the sidewalk of his street. In his rearview mirror John saw the normally quiet suburban street come to life behind him as agents turned on their headlights and pulled onto the asphalt. He counted four of them in his wake and imagined that the airwaves in his neighborhood must be alive with the news of his sudden movement.

  “Here we go,” said Taylor, and the utter pointlessness of the outing made him feel more relaxed; nothing was going to come of this, so there was no reason to worry.

  The parade of cars swept down El Camino and onto 101, at which point Taylor turned left in the direction of the Bay Bridge. Past San Mateo and past Daly City into the southern edge of San Francisco proper and toward the intersection of I-280, where Taylor turned west toward I-80 and the bridge, the cavalcade rolled on its uneventful way.

  “Subject is weaving again,” broadcast the agent riding shotgun in the lead car immediately behind Taylor. “I could pull him over now.”

  A loud static rasp broke into the airwaves and simultaneously the lead cars, the ones just entering the I-80/I-280 interchange, began having mechanical problems.

  “Something’s going…” lead agent Dollworth heard his foremost car report before the radio went dead.

  “Our car has stopped,” he heard the third car back report. “I repeat, our car has stopped. We are coasting to the shoulder and will need assistance to get this vehicle started again.”

  “What the Sam Hill is going on up there?” demanded Dollworth.

  “We’ve got a problem, chief,” another agent near the front of the pack notified Dollworth. “Cars are stopping all around us, ahead of us, everywhere. We have a traffic jam in front of us. The suspect is continuing toward the Bay Bridge.”

  The agent in charge tried shouting louder at the men in the stalled cars, to no avail. Taylor’s Buick continued on toward the Bay Bridge, leaving a tangle of stalled cars behind it. Only one car, a rusty black Camero carrying two unidentified civilians kept rolling along behind Taylor’s Buick. Unknown to the FBI, police and ATF men, the man known as Carnie and one of his associates had turned on the microwave device Mondragon had given them and had pointed it at the cars around them, leaving their automobile the solitary vehicle left in the pursuit.

  “Like magic,” commented Carnie concerning the microwave weapon. “I got to get me one of these.”

  “I see two more cars,” said the nameless man at the wheel who was glancing in the mirror.

  Seven seconds later another FBI automobile came to a halt and its passengers at once got on the radio to call for assistance.

  “Something is happening here,” Dollworth told the central dispatcher. “Get someone on the other side of the bridge! Helicopter somebody into Oakland if you have to.”

  “We’ll be there when we can be there,” one beleaguered police captain told Dollworth when the latter man pressed him on a cell phone to send someone to the Oakland side. “We’ve got street parties up and down the Castro, and you want us to go after a guy who’s driving somewhere to meet with his co-defendant in a federal case. Come on. Isn’t that your job?”

  *

  Taylor drove on, oblivious to everything happening behind him. He entered the steel boundaries of the four mile long span reaching over the bay and did not look back at the black Camero directly behind him. Seconds later his car started shivering so hard he could feel the throbbing in the steering wheel.

  “American cars,” said Taylor to himself. “You think we might still be able to build something this big and slow.”

  The traffic in the oncoming lanes was heavy, and the blazing headlights and headlong speed of the other cars frightened him. As his own vehicle inexplicably lost power, the other cars somehow seemed to be attacking his Buick as they zipped past at a breakneck clip. Taylor was afraid to open the door and was astonished to see a large man whose pale skin was almost the shade of an albino’s tapping on his driver’s side window.

  “My engine has gone dead,” Taylor said as he rolled down his window.

  John noticed that there were very few cars on his side of the bridge. On the north side the lanes bound for San Francisco were bumper to bumper, while his side, the ones bound for Oakland, had only a smattering of headlights on it. He did not know that most of the interchange to the west was blocked by stalled cars and he was seeing only the vehicles from the north, from which direction drivers still had open passage from I-280 onto I-80 and the bridge.

  “We’ll get you started, sir,” said the pale stranger. “Pop the hood and my buddy will give you a jump start.”

  Taylor saw in his mirror that another man from the Camero was standing behind his left rear bumper and waving the sparse traffic around the stopped Buick.

  “The thing just stopped,” said Taylor.

  “Something must have come loose on the battery,” said the stranger. “Go ahead and pop the hood. We’ll have a shot at fixing it.”

  Taylor did as the man asked, yet remained inside his car. The big stranger glanced at the engine briefly, then returned to the driver’s side window.

  “These new cars,” said the man. “They’re computer chips on top of wires. I can’t see all the connections you’ve got to your battery. Do you have a flashlight?”

  “In the glove box,” said Taylor and got out of the car with the flashlight. “I think there are only the two usual connections.”

  Taylor was about to bend over the front of the automobile and point directly at the positive and negative posts on the battery, but for no reason the stranger slugged him in the stomach and sent him face first into the wet pavement. The man who had been directing traffic quickly bounded around the Buick, and he and the pale stranger together picked up Jack Taylor and tossed him over the steel railing. Everything that happened in those few seconds seemed to Taylor to be happening to someone else, someone he was watching at a distance from a safe place. He did not cry out as he fell toward the black waters of the San Francisco Bay. There was time for him to clench one hand against the other and to chant, one last time, his notion of “one cherishing the other.” His body was moving so fast and the water was so cold he felt nothing an instant after he hit.

  Carnie and his helper re-entered the Camero and drove around the stalled Buick. Other drivers on the bridge at the time later told the authorities they had
seen Taylor’s automobile stranded on the roadway and had seen two, perhaps three men about the car; and while on the day after John Taylor’s death some of the people who had been on the bridge could describe the Camero, not one of them could tell exactly what had happened or give a description of the two killers.

  XCVI

  12/31/10 22:23 PST

  At the Van Ness Bus Station Carnie could not prevent his companion from rushing with key in hand to the banks of luggage lockers in the station’s waiting room. Despite the holiday, only about fifty people, most of them legal aliens bound for jobs somewhere north of San Francisco or returning to Mexico, were milling around the terminal or sleeping on the benches, their belongings stacked in front of them on the red and white checkered floor. A few watched the delayed broadcast from Times Square on the station’s TV monitors.

  “People,” said Carnie as he followed behind his associate.

  “Huh?” said the other in reply.

  He located the square, orange door of locker #351 and inserted the key. His headlong eagerness to get his hands on the $200,000 did not suit his more experienced companion, but the man was oblivious to anything Carnie or anyone else felt.

  “You want the quarter?” he asked Carnie, as the coin had clicked forward in the slot once the key had been returned.

  “Want the quarter?” replied Carnie. “Put it away and get the damned case.”

  The man shrugged and pocketed the coin. He opened the locker door and pulled out the black suitcase that contained their money.

  *

  Bob Mathers had been watching Taylor’s house that evening and had followed the convoy of federal cars to the Bay Bridge. He had driven around the stalled cars in the borrow pit, and got to the middle of the bridge in time to see the black Camero drive away from Taylor’s Buick. He had followed the two killers into Oakland and back across the other side of the bridge into San Francisco and to the Van Ness station. He did not know what he should do next. Like other drivers on the bridge, he was not even certain what had transpired there or what the two men might have done.