Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  Bob checked the old service revolver he still carried tucked into the back of his belt. He doubted he would have to use it, especially in a public place as crowded as the station. He halted in front of the building’s thick Plexiglas door and saw on the far side of the interior a greasy haired man in a black sweatshirt opening a large suitcase he had propped against the wall, while a man behind him, an oddly pale man of enormous stature, attempted to reach over the smaller man’s shoulder and close the same suitcase, the fasteners of which had already been flicked open.

  As he put his hand on the transparent door handle, Bob had two simultaneous thoughts in the compressed moments before calamity struck. One, the bigger man was more cautious than his friend. Two, Bob remembered a story in the news a year and a half ago concerning someone named Gusman, a Colombian somehow involved in the conspiracy and the victim of a package bomb.

  Whether it was the memory of that story or the obvious nervousness of the big man that saved Bob, he was unable to decide in the hours of confusion that followed. One thought or the other made Bob let go of the door handle and take one step to his left behind a cinder block portion of the bus station’s exterior wall.

  No one in the station heard the blast. Bob Mathers saw the Plexiglas door leap off its hinges and into the street, and he felt a wave of heat strike his face and hands. He awoke seconds later lying on the sidewalk. Bits of glass littered the pavement opposite of where the station’s windows had been. The exterior walls had not fallen, although a sizeable portion of the roof had collapsed, and columns of black smoke poured from all the building’s openings. Bob heard nothing. People scurried about the edges of his vision; obviously they were moving their mouths and screaming words. To Bob they were figures on television and the sound was off. He stood upright and shook bits of cement and glass off his body. He checked his heart to make sure it was still beating, and while he was cut and bleeding in several places, he was surprised to find that he remained alive. For approximately ninety seconds, Bob was content to lean against the sagging station wall and watch the strange scene playing around him. Then, as if an on switch were thrown inside his head, his hearing returned, and the noise that fell upon him was so loud his inner ears ached.

  “Mi familia!” a woman with a wounded face was shouting straight at him from an arm’s length away.

  Mathers stared at her and wondered why she was upset. He felt no concern for her or for anyone else in the building. He twice entered the ruined station anyway and carried injured people to the street. Everything was lost to him in the confusion. When he heard the ambulance sirens approaching the devastated site from three different directions Bob continued to hear the drone of a bee that somehow had become trapped inside his skull. Uniformed policemen appeared in the building’s open doorways at the same time Bob became preoccupied with the right-hand sleeve of his jacket; the blast had cleanly burned away the fabric up to the elbow, leaving the rest of the cloth to hang free, but the flesh beneath was uninjured. This was, for inexplicable reasons, fascinating to Bob; he flexed his bare forearm several times in the light of a fire burning inside the ruined station and allowed himself to laugh at what he saw.

  “Get out! Everybody back!” a cop screamed at Bob and the other blast victims. “Firemen coming through!”

  When he staggered outside, someone threw a blanket over his shoulders and led him next door to a coffee shop wherein some emergency medical personnel were setting up a first-aid center. New Year’s revelers from nearby bars had hurried into the streets outside to see what had happened while the first fire hose attached to a hydrant gave forth a geyser on the station’s interior and people bearing stretchers massed at the doors and prepared to enter.

  “I thought it was fireworks when I heard it,” several people wearing party hats said

  “A bomb,” said Bob to a medical worker in the coffee shop who was checking his eyes. “Two men in the back had a bomb in a suitcase.”

  Everyone in the coffee shop was either babbling or crying. The worker tending to the wounded did not pay any heed to Bob’s words. Only one party-goer in a tuxedo overhead him and asked Bob to tell more.

  “You saw the bomb, sir?” he said.

  Bob did not feel injured. He felt elated, exhilarated by the experience he had survived. He pushed the medical worker away and went outside to feel a light mist on his face and to breathe the fresh air.

  “Two men took a case from one of the lockers,” he told the man in the tuxedo. “The bomb inside went off right after they opened it.”

  “You saw this?” asked a woman who apparently was with the tuxedoed man. “I’m a doctor,” she added with a tinge of shame, for in her interest to discover what had taken place she had momentarily forgotten her professional duties. “I think you should lie down,” she said and felt Bob’s forehead. “You may be in shock. These people can help you, sir.”

  “Enough,” said Bob and put his hands up to shove the woman doctor away from him. “I need to talk to someone. A policeman.”

  Twenty minutes later, by which time Bob’s head had cleared and the tuxedo man and the woman doctor had long since left to help more seriously injured bomb victims, a detective did come by the coffee shop to question Bob. His interrogation was clearly pro forma, and he had little enthusiasm for talking to another distraught person that night.

  “You say you saw a bomb, sir?” asked the cop, putting his micro recorder up to Bob’s face.

  “I saw two men opening a case,” said Bob, and described how Carnie and the other man looked. “They must have been blown to pieces.”

  “Uh huh,” said the detective. “Did you actually see a bomb?”

  “The explosion seemed to come from their case,” said Bob. The detective had already lost interest in him and was looking into the crowded coffee shop for someone else he could interview. “I can’t give you anything more... I saw them open the suitcase; the next thing I knew the place had exploded.” He suggested the police search the station for a surveillance camera that had recorded the scene.

  “We’ll get around to that,” the cop half-heartedly assured him. “What did you say your name was?”

  “John Taylor,” said Bob, and gave the detective Taylor’s real address and home phone number.

  The cop switched off his recorder and went to talk to an hysterical woman who claimed she saw a lightning bolt strike the station. Bob Mathers meanwhile shuffled back to his truck and drove back to his motel room to sleep until the morning of the Second.

  XCVII

  01/02/11 11:08 PST

  During his long sleep the small seed Bob had planted in the detective’s micro recorder had sprouted into another sensational episode that had quickly reached full blossom in both the national and local media. The police had recovered the bus station’s security camera, and its badly singed tape showed a hulking pale man investigators quickly identified as Jimmy “Quiet Hands” Rogers, alias “Carnie,” and an unknown man opening a suitcase milliseconds before the explosion that had killed eleven people, including the two men on the film.

  Further investigation of the ruined station showed that the corpses of the two men closest to the suitcase had been blown to tiny pieces, indicating the epicenter of the blast had been in their immediate vicinity, making the suitcase the explosion’s likely point of origin. This information likewise was leaked to the news people as soon as it was discovered, and within hours of the surveillance tape being broadcast, two men appeared at a Mission District police station and said the second man with Rogers was one Michael Laskowski, or “the Crow,” as he was known in criminal circles.

  Other members of the general public approached newsmen to proclaim that Rogers and Laskowski or someone who resembled them were on the Bay Bridge on New Year’s Eve when John Taylor died.

  “Thus the two biggest stories in the nation are tied one to the other by two mysterious men found dead in a bus station,” was how Maria Contral, a pretty local news anchor, put it on the New Year’ Day six o
’clock broadcast. “The two career criminals, perhaps responsible for their own deaths and those of eleven others in a downtown bus depot, also may have murdered one of the two businessmen the government is investigating for possible involvement in the 2009 terrorist dam attacks,” she breathlessly told her vast and growing audience.

  By the morning of the Second the police had found Rogers and Laskowski’s black Camero parked near the destroyed station. At least one witness from the Bay Bridge had verified the license plate as that of the car that had been parked behind John Taylor’s Buick. The rumors went into overdrive later that morning when an unknown source told The Chronicle that the late Rogers had once done some work for Erin Mondragon’s security company.

  By eleven o’clock the flock of media folk gathered about the base of the Mondragon Building awaiting the opportunity to get a picture of the notorious Erin had more than doubled. Mondragon no longer went for coffee at the shop down the street; he stayed in the upper stories of his skyscraper and provided no photo-ops or answers to anyone.

  “This unfortunate accident--or possible suicide--that has taken John from us will change nothing,” he told the team of attorneys in his conference room on the twenty-first floor. “There is still no physical evidence tying me to any crime. The federal prosecutors have the testimony of some convicted terrorists. That’s everything they have in their quiver. Then there is this phantom; this Mathers person. It seems, I am told, the feds don’t know who or where he is.”

  “Please, Mr. Mondragon,” protested one of his highly paid lawyers, “you needn’t worry yourself with mapping the legal strategy. We will handle that. You only have to tell the truth, as you know it.”

  “I see us as all being on one team,” said Mondragon, fully aware of the attorney’s meaning and unruffled by the man’s insubordination. “We will fight this battle together.”

  Mondragon went to the window and peeked through the blinds at the never absent crowds on the grounds outside his building. The eleven lawyers and five secretaries present waited in silence until he had finished contemplating the scene.

  “John Taylor was a troubled man,” he said. “He stopped on that bridge. God knows why. Jack tended to frighten in heavy traffic. The authorities were hounding him. He felt they were closing in. That’s why he jumped.”

  “Then you think it was a suicide?” asked one of the braver members of the legal team. “Have you ever known John Taylor to be suicidal?”

  “He knew people were following him,” said Mondragon, rapping his finger on the window pane. “He panicked. What other explanation could there be?”

  Several of the attorneys glanced at each other.

  “Tell us,” said the brave attorney who had asked if Taylor were ever suicidal, “did you know this Rogers person? What did they call him? Carnie? We need to know. For the sake of preparation, you see. Anything you have to tell us is privileged, of course.”

  “Whatever are you driving at, J.C.?” asked Mondragon, deigning to look directly at the man. “You don’t think I had anything to do with John’s death, do you?”

  J.C.’s backside sank an inch deeper in the cushion of his chair. The other lawyers looked to the piles of documents they had before them and pretended Mondragon’s gaze did not frighten them too.

  “We have to ask...” said J.C., and glanced about for support.

  “You have to doubt me?” asked Erin, and turned his eyes back to Market Street, twenty-one stories below him.

  “We don’t doubt your innocence,” said J.C.

  “Then you need not ask me any more questions to which you already know the answers,” said Mondragon, and clapped his hands together, signaling that the matter was closed, never to reopened. “Now, who have the feds tapped to take us on? I need backgrounds, trial records, political connections: everything necessary to fight the whole battle.”

  “They’re a bunch of career government prosecutors, people too dumb to get into private practice and make real money,” stated one attorney, and the others, including the upbraided J.C., smiled in agreement.

  Mondragon was not pleased, for he was not thinking of the trial, which still lay many weeks in the future--if it ever happened--but of the phantom, this Bob Mathers, who Erin knew had contributed to spreading the stories about Taylor and the two murderers. He wished he could find Mathers today, wished to eliminate this unseen opponent more than anything else. He also knew not to undertake a large scale search for Mathers until the question of his trial was past and the media’s attention had shifted elsewhere.

  Already the television networks were filing suits to broadcast Mondragon’s court case, and his high profile, highly photophilic attorneys and the politically ambitious prosecutors could be trusted to preen and perform before the cameras as much as the judge allowed. Mondragon knew that the lawyers’ actions would highlight his every maneuver, making it impossible for him to move against the former sheriff’s deputy for months to come.

  Spring would turn to summer and the cool rains of summer to the colder rains of fall before Erin was a truly private citizen again. Before that time came he must play defense, do nothing to give Mathers another opportunity, let the attorneys drone on and on until the public grew tired of wondering about Mondragon’s guilt.

  “I should be the one to speak first,” one of the lawyers in the conference room said while Mondragon was lost in thought. “I’ve been in front of the Supreme court seven times.”

  “I’ve got the most experience in front of a camera,” said another.

  “The camera doesn’t lie, but it can be fooled,” countered a third.

  Another mental memo to self, thought Mondragon, continuing to watch the restless crowd below him: When this over, fire every last one of these buffoons.

  XCVIII

  01/04/11 10:10 PST

  Bob Mathers was learning that Mondragon left little for others to find in the ashes of his latest crime. Bob tried querying old associates of the late Laskowski and Rogers and discovered that the FBI had contacted the same people within hours of the bus station bombing.

  “You with the cops?” was the first question every tattooed barmaid and junkie asked him when he tried to question them. “I already talked to the feds. I don’t know nothing.”

  “I’m a private investigator,” Bob tried telling them, a bit of information that impressed none of the unwashed denizens of the Bay area’s worst bars and flop houses.

  The first woman he told he was not a cop tried to kick him in the groin. A bartender he questioned pulled a shotgun on Bob and told him to start running. Most of the low lifes he spoke to simply said they had never heard of anyone named Laskowski or Rogers. On the Internet Bob located the address of Carnie Rogers’ half-sister in Oakland. Upon arriving at her door the woman denied she and the late Carnie were related and that if Bob came to her ramshackle house again he better be wearing a badge and have a warrant in his hand. Then in Berkeley, in one of the dirtiest saloons Bob had entered in his lifetime, a place where the floor was slippery from day-old vomit, a prostitute carrying a bat tattoo on her forehead told him he was again wasting his time asking her questions.

  “Unless you’re one of them what pays,” she said to Bob.

  “What?” asked Mathers.

  “On TV,” she said, pausing to take another puff of her cigarette, “they say some of you people pay big money for insider stuff you can put in your papers.”

  It occurred to Bob that because he was not a cop the woman presumed he was from

  one of the tabloids that paid money to its sources. Since he had once worked in co-ordination with Henry Peppers of The Sensation, Bob decided he would not be misleading her too far if he said he was.

  “My people in New York,” he said, “will pay five figures for anything with legs.”

  “Not enough,” she said and swiveled about on her bar stool so that her back was to Bob. “What is five figures?” and did some calculating on her fingers. “Maybe only $10,000. Not enough to risk your li
fe for.”

  “Up to six figures,” said Bob, though he did not know what information she had.

  “You got a deal, Bubba,” she said and raised a drink to him, “provided you get the cash in my hand.”

  Minutes later Mathers was on the phone to Henry Peppers in New York. The veteran newspaper warrior was not enthusiastic about paying money to anybody, particularly a barfly in Berkeley.

  “Buddy,” Peppers told him, “we don’t pay six figures to nobody unless they knew where Bishop Pike is and have pictures of LBJ on the grassy knoll, with the smoking rifle in his hand.”

  “How about $50,000?” asked Bob.

  “Am I Mother Teresa?” said Henry. “You think I’m running a charity here? This little girl will have to give us a red meat exclusive. Even then, fifty is still too much.”

  “Twenty-five?” said Bob.

  “I’ll wire you five thousand,” decided Peppers. “Tell her she’ll get another twenty-five if we can verify her story with two other sources.”

  “You people at The Sensation vet your stories that much?” asked Bob.

  “How would she know one way or the other?” said Peppers. “We got a couple platoons of shyster lawyers here at the paper; they’ll each say a contract isn’t a contract unless there’s mutual benefit. Believe me, sweetheart, we’ve seen the inside of a courtroom before on this same issue. Is she good to go?”

  “You’re sure this is legal?”

  “Bubba, if we worried about legal and not legal,” said Henry, “we wouldn’t get nothing done.”