Tahoe Hijack

by Todd Borg

  “What are you going to do about what happened?” she asked.

  “Track down Thomas Watson. See if he might be Grace Sun’s killer. In the process, I might get an idea of who the hostage taker and his partner were.”

  “Don’t you think that’s giving in to the hijacker’s manipulation?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I know your code requires you to honor all promises, but your promise was to a guy who is now dead. A guy who murderered and terrorized people.”

  “Yeah. But the main reason I’ll look up Watson is that if he is in fact Grace’s killer, I want to track him down for her sake. A killer has gone unpunished. I want to rectify that.”

  “How are you going to get to him?”

  “Don’t know,” I said.

  We finished our wine.

  Street said she wanted to sleep at her condo. I took it as her testing her strength and independence. You can get taken as a hostage and threatened with death and still sleep alone.

  I knew not to protest.

  We got in the Jeep and I drove her down the mountain.

  Once inside Street’s condo, she pulled a Night Harvest cab out of her wine rack and went to work with the opener. This was a serious break in pattern for her. A glass and a half at my cabin, then coming home and getting serious about the grapes. I said nothing.

  She poured us each a glass and then proceeded to cook some kind of veggie dinner with spinach and sun-dried tomato in an unleavened dough, one of those meals that sounded drab but tasted wonderful. I always assumed an inverse relationship between taste and healthfulness, but Street was gradually convincing me that it might not be a universal law of food.

  Later, we sat in front of her gas fireplace.

  “Maybe you should give up this pursuit,” she said. “If this Watson turns out to be Grace Sun’s murderer, the case will be closed. Why the hijacker sent you on this chase is something we’ll never know. Isn’t that something you can walk away from?”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling myself. But I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s too messy. Too many unanswered questions.”

  “But most of life is like that, right? Everywhere I turn I see messiness. I try to make some sense of my own little world by selectively shutting off the inputs and putting on some soft music. But outside of these walls, there is so much random chaos. So much danger.”

  “That’s just it,” I said. “Weren’t you the one who told me about finding order in chaos? That chaotic environments are subject to natural order? You said that rushing rivers produce regular eddies. Turbulent, mixing air masses create repeating cloud forms. Eons of shifting tectonic plates produce ordered geologic layers. I still remember that picture you once showed me of a gravel pit where the stones were magically ordered. At the bottom were the smallest pebbles, and as it went higher, the pebbles got larger until the highest layer was made up of cobbles.”

  “And this connects to the killer who took me hostage,” Street said, doubt in her voice.

  “Sort of. I think that what I’m looking for in the hijacker experience is order in chaos. This hijacking seems so random. The man’s apparent purpose, the man’s action, the surprising result. I don’t understand any of it. So I’m hoping I can make some sense out of it. If I keep poking around, asking questions, maybe somebody will say something that will make me see the repeating pattern, see the order.”

  “And if that doesn’t happen?”

  I shrugged. “Always in the past, if I turned over enough rocks, eventually a snake crawled out. As long as it isn’t a rattlesnake striking before I’m ready, it’s a good result.”

  “I don’t want to think that,” Street said.

  “But even then I’d have something to follow.”

  “Or you would die from the bite. Talk about a messy ending.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “Then you’ll think about resuming your previous life?”

  “Yes.”

  We sat in silence in front of the fire, and sipped our wine. Then Street said she wanted to try going to bed. I went with her into her bedroom, tucked her in. Spot put his paw up on Street’s bed, then pushed his head in next to us.

  I rubbed Street’s back, kissed her goodnight, and let myself out.

  Spot and I got in the Jeep and were up the mountain at my cabin ten minutes later.

  SIX

  Before I got to my cabin door, Spot was there sniffing it in the dark, the knob, the lock, the door jamb. He paid particular attention to the knob.

  “You find something, boy?” I whispered. I put the key in and turned the lock. Then I grabbed his chest and shook him a little. “Find the suspect, Spot!” I said in a loud whisper. “Find the suspect!”

  I turned the doorknob with two fingertips, hoping to preserve any existing prints and smacked his rear. But instead of racing into the cabin, he just stood there and continued to sniff the knob.

  No one had burgled my cabin. No crime had been committed. I had little interest and even less justification in calling Diamond or pulling out my fingerprint equipment.

  I went out on the deck and looked at the night sky. Spot pushed at my hand with his nose. I rubbed his head.

  The twinkling stars seemed so calm and peaceful from a distance. Yet I knew from Street that appearances deceive, that the universe was an unimaginably violent place. The stars were seething cauldrons that gave birth to new elements. Some exploded, their end-stage theatrics so dramatic that they annihilated entire solar systems.

  I got the portable and dialed Agent Ramos.

  “Question about Thomas Watson,” I said when he answered. “You said he’s a people person, eats dinner with a group and such. What about when he’s at his new place here in Tahoe? Could a guy get to him? Does he have a bodyguard insulating him from the world?”

  “Yes, he has a bodyguard, and he won’t respond to your knock or call, either. You want to talk to him, you’ll have to catch him when he’s out in public.”

  “Recommendation on where to get to him?”

  “Try the Chips-n-Brew in Tahoe City. He’s a regular around three in the afternoon. Sits at the bar with his bodyguard.”

  “Descriptors?” I asked.

  “Watson’s in his middle thirties, five-eleven, one ninety-five, reddish hair slicked back like a fifties greaser, the kind of skin you get when you take a red-headed Scotsman with no melanin and stick him under the sun for a couple of decades too long.”

  “Clothing?”

  “He’s got two approaches,” Ramos said. “His work style is loose khakis and polo shirts. His party style is tight-crotch jeans and silver cowboy boots.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  SEVEN

  Two hours later the phone rang.

  I fumbled it off the little table I’d made out of stacked art books. “Hello?”

  “This is turning out to be difficult.” It was Street. Typical understatement.

  “Sleeping?” I said.

  “After what happened,” she said.

  “You want to come back up to my cabin?”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  When Spot and I pulled in, Street came out before I could shut off the Jeep. She locked the door, ran out through the wash of my headlights, and got in.

  We drove back up the mountain. As I walked her into my cabin, I could feel the shakes in her body.

  We didn’t talk, just sat together in front of the small fire I’d made in the woodstove. After an hour we went to bed, and I wrapped her in my arms and held her through the night.

  Sleepovers were uncommon for us. My ideal world would have us together every night. Perhaps Street’s model world might include me in the same way, but that would require rewriting a childhood so bleak that she ran away at 15 and vowed never to get very close to anyone again.

  After being with her for a few years, I
was beginning to sense that her fear of loss and betrayal was lessening. But I had no illusions that the trauma her abusive parents had created would ever go away. So I was content to take Street on her terms and be glad for any time that I got with her.

  We slept late, and I made a breakfast of oatmeal with cantaloupe and blueberries on the side. The sun had risen enough that we sat out on the deck, the solar radiation canceling the cold air of a late-September morning at 7200 feet.

  “What’s this?” Street said, sampling her oatmeal. “The bacon-and-eggs carnivore is going healthy?”

  “Don’t sound so skeptical. It was only a couple of weeks ago I ate that veggie tufa thing that Ryan Lear served us for dinner.”

  “Tufa is the name of those limestone formations that have formed over the centuries at Mono Lake. I think you mean tofu,” Street said.

  “Ah.”

  “And now a zero-fat breakfast,” Street said. “Like Alexander the Great becoming a pacifist.”

  “Just what I was thinking,” I said.

  After breakfast, Bains called and asked about meeting with Street. I handed Street the phone and she made a plan to meet Bains at the county offices in South Lake Tahoe where she would give him a statement and then sit down with a local artist the county uses and work up sketches of the hostage taker and his partner.

  Street wanted to shower and change clothes before her appointment with Sergeant Bains, so Spot and I took her back down the mountain to her condo and said goodbye.

  I drove north around the lake to Tahoe City. I found a place to park at one of the shopping areas near the Chips-n-Brew, the place where, according to Agent Ramos, Thomas Watson was an afternoon regular. I told Spot to be good, walked over and looked in through the large front window.

  The restaurant was comprised of a single large room in a Starbucks-meets-brewpub layout, with many small tables made of dark, varnished wood. At the back of the room were three huge stainless-steel tanks that contained the house microbrews. To one side was a long bar made of the same wood as the tables. At the center of the bar were six barstools for people who didn’t want a table.

  Above the bar was a black chalkboard on which an artist had used colored chalk to list the menu items and decorate around the menu with cute pictures of rainbow trout and Kokanee salmon. Across the room was another chalkboard with pictures of beer steins filled with beer. The drawings were organized according to the color of the brew, darkest on the left and palest on the right. Under each beer was the name of the brew.

  At one end of the bar was the order area, and at the other end, the pick-up area from which patrons could carry their food to one of the small tables or over to the bar.

  I continued down the sidewalk, visualizing the restaurant layout, wondering how I might accomplish my task. A UPS driver stepped in front of me. She hauled a two-wheeler loaded with boxes into the Bookshelf bookstore. I stood looking in the window at the books displayed, thinking through an idea.

  Two blocks down, I turned into an alley and found a dumpster behind a store. There were several empty cardboard boxes in the dumpster. I pulled out a smallish one, about ten inches long on each side. Another three blocks down was a shop that sold various sundries including some office supplies. They had a small dispenser of clear packing tape. I carried it and the empty box back to my Jeep.

  Spot wasn’t so interested in the tape as he was in the box, which had no doubt absorbed lots of dumpster smells. While Spot sniffed, I called Jack Santiago, the Placer County sergeant I had met sometime back. The secretary transferred me to someone else who told me that Santiago wouldn’t mind if he gave me Santiago’s cell number. I dialed the number, and Santiago answered.

  “Heard about you on the charter boat, McKenna,” he said when he found out it was me. “Hell of a way to enjoy an outing on the lake. Lemme guess. You’re calling about Watson comma Thomas, AKA Tommy Watts, our new, part-time resident of Placer County, subject of the hostage taker’s ill will.”

  “Good guess.”

  “Lieutenant Davison got the story from Agent Bukowski this morning. We don’t want a murderer in our happy little mountain paradise any more than you do. What can I do for you?”

  “Wondered if you might have time for a quick chat this afternoon,” I said. “I’ll be in the Tahoe City area around three.”

  “I can probably swing that. Where do you want to meet?”

  “How about the Chips-n-Brew?” I said.

  “Three o’clock?” Santiago said. “See you there.”

  “Any chance you could change into your civvies?

  “You watching a drop or something?”

  “No. We can just talk more freely when we’re incognito.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I hung up and spent a little time with my packing tape, carefully sealing the empty box where it had been opened, leaving the old address label in place. I tore off one long piece of tape and two short pieces. I used the short pieces to attach the long piece on the side of the box with the adhesive facing out. Unless you touched it or looked closely, the box looked normal, and the reversed tape was not visible.

  When I was done, I had an extra hour to kill, so I took Spot down to the water at The Commons park where he spent some time playing with a yellow lab. Whenever the lab ran into the water and swam around, Spot ran up and down the water’s edge, making big frustrated woofing sounds. Realizing he was alone in the water, the lab came out, raced around with Spot for a bit, then went back into the water. The lab was unable to resist the water, a foreign concept for most Danes.

  The lab’s owner sat next to me on a bench.

  “We’re breaking the leash law,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Hope the cops don’t come around.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Out on the lake, five Jet Skis put down high-speed S-curves, their wakes intersecting in formation. It looked like a water version of the Blue Angels, frothy waves in place of smoke trails.

  “The thing about cops,” the yellow lab’s owner said, “all they do is try to catch people doing something wrong.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “’Course, I suppose it’s good somebody is after the bad guys,” he said. “Not like we’re bad guys ’cause we let our dogs play.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Not very talkative, are you,” he said. “Or maybe you’re a cop, ha, ha.”

  “Ex-cop,” I said.

  “Oh. Sorry.” He stood up and whistled. “Ochre!” he yelled.

  The yellow lab came running. The man clipped a leash onto his dog and hurried away.

  I put Spot back into the Jeep, picked up my box and walked to the Chips-n-Brew. Santiago was just pulling up in an unmarked. He drove past the restaurant, found an opening half a block down, and parked. I was glad to see that he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.

  We shook hands and went inside.

  “What’s in the box?”

  “Delivery for the manager.”

  “Oh.”

  There were four men at the bar, each with a beer. Two of the beers were brown with heavy foam heads, two yellow with a few wimpy bubbles. The right-most guy had bad skin and red hair slicked back. Thomas Watson getting his afternoon bump just as Ramos had said. He wore a green short-sleeved Polo shirt that contrasted with his red pigmentation. The bodyguard to his left was large the way a walrus is large. Thick and roundish, with no muscle definition. His sides bulged out like they were filled with gel, making a continuous two-foot contact with the men on either side of him. Still, he radiated professional-with-experience. If he got hold of you, you’d be in trouble whether he sat on your chest or snapped your neck. Santiago didn’t react. Probably when Bukowski told him about Watson, he didn’t show him a picture of Watson. Or maybe he did, and Santiago played it very cool.

  There were several vacant tables. I steered Santiago to one near the front. He pulled out a chair that would have him facing the window.

&
nbsp; “Tell you what,” I said. “I’m waiting on someone else who might walk by. Mind if I take that chair?”

  “No problem.” Santiago stepped behind the table, took the chair that backed up to the window, and sat down. He was now facing the bar.

  “Drinks and food on me,” I said. “What’ll you have? I’ll go order.”

  “The special.” He pointed to the chalkboard.

  I stood up. “I’ll give this box to the manager, then be right back with our beer.”

  I carried the box over to the counter near Thomas Watson. He leaned his elbows on the counter. Although tiny compared to the beef pot pie next door, Watson was a thick guy, with meaty forearms below the short sleeves of his shirt. The bare arms were going to make my task easier. I set the box on the counter with the reversed tape facing Watson’s arm.

  I caught the eye of a beer jockey. “I’ve got a delivery for the manager.”

  The kid said, “Stanley is out for the next…” he looked at a clock on the wall, “’bout fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh. Maybe I should come back.” I reached for the box, turned, pretended to bang my knee under the bar, exclaimed and jerked and pushed the box over against Watson’s arm.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. I made like I was losing my balance and grabbed his shoulder with one hand. I used my other hand to push the box and tape firmly against his skin.

  Watson pulled his arm to the side, surprised to see that the box was stuck to him.

  “Your box is stuck to me.” He reached to pull it off. The box separated from the tape, which was plastered to his skin.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. I grabbed the tape and jerked it off his arm. The sound of hair ripping out of skin was audible.

  “DAMN!” he shouted. He rubbed his arm.

  “I’m really sorry. I sure didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  I took the box and tape and hurried back to the table. Santiago was frowning at me.