Blood Money

by Doug Richardson

  The Garmin GPS attached to the dash blinked and directed the veteran driver to the 7th Street exit. He clutched, downshifted, and descended the ramp, found the light green and swung south toward the harbor. Scrolling across the bottom of the screen was the destination reminder. Five more minutes to his destination. Five more minutes until Shorty finished the job. Five more minutes and he could steal a guilt-free hit on the pipe. Full load crank followed by a dopamine stupor.

  About the time the drug fantasy was in full bloom, Shorty was turning the corner into the homestretch. But his windshield filled with orange signs and a portable lighted display electronically pointing the way to a detour. Beyond, he could see Department of Water and Power vehicles set up on a worksite.

  Shorty slowed the rig, downshifted once more, then expertly cranked the wheel east onto Queens Avenue. The traffic jam might as well have been a fist to the back of his skull. He instantly began to shake as minutes were added to his subconscious itinerary.

  Fuck no…

  The silly little GPS device attempted to recalculate the new route, then begged Shorty to make a U-turn. Clearly the device didn’t have a clue whether Shorty was behind the wheel of a Prius or a Peterbilt. The Toyota advertised a turning radius of thirty-four feet while the semi would be lucky to carve a circle inside sixty feet.

  “Please make the nearest U-turn,” asked the electronic female voice.

  “Can’t you see I’m drivin’ a fuckin’ semi? Stupid twat!” spat Shorty.

  Ahead. The stoplight at Allen Street. From green to yellow to red. Shorty braked the big fridge truck, clutched the gearbox into neutral and, without thinking, fished into his vest pocket for his pipe. He tapped a small rock of crystal meth into the tip. As he searched for his disposable butane torch to spark a flame, he spotted the cop out of the corner of his eye. A man in black combat fatigues and a bulletproof vest, wielding an assault weapon launched onto his front bumper and leveled the rifle at the window. Shorty heard muffled shouting from outside his window. There was another cop on the passenger running board, ready to open the door. At the same moment, there was a sharp rapping of a gun muzzle touching the glass of his driver’s side window.

  Shorty’s initial instinct was to swallow the pipe. Just suck it into his mouth and chew the glass like it was candy, swallow, and damn the consequences to his colon.

  Too bad for Shorty Reese. Because putting that meth pipe under the crush of his molars was the very last act of his pathetic, drug addled life.

  * * * *

  The fine black hairs on Rey’s arms were at full attention as if he had just grabbed both poles of a car battery. The electricity of the moment was more exhilarating than he could have imagined. Through that pair of FBI binoculars provided by Agent Dulaney, Rey had watched the entire scene at the intersection unfold. How fortunate I am, he thought. Just twenty-four hours earlier he had been tangling with his sport-fishing big brother over a shipping gone wrong. Rey had feared for both his and his longtime girlfriend’s lives. Then as he’d stood over a dining room table stacked with unpaid bills, he had found himself sinking ever deeper into a pit from which he may have never recovered.

  But it was his dead son, Danny, who Rey credited for reaching down and offering him a hand up. The news report about the murders in Kern County followed by his call to the FBI. And though it seemed to take days to get through the one sleepless night, Rey couldn’t believe his good luck in going from criminal conspirator to assisting in the arrest of a suspect in a multiple murder. It was as if since Danny had been killed in Afghanistan, Rey had been on the lookout for something good to believe in. Little did he know that “the good” was within himself.

  “Can you see the driver yet?” asked Dulaney.

  Rey spun the focus wheel on the telephoto specs. The black rig was easing up to a stoplight turned red.

  “There’s some kind of reflection,” said Rey. He anticipated the truck driver was just about to come into some recognizable detail when the windshield appeared to fill with sunlight. “And now I can’t see anything.”

  Dulaney’s eyes instantly tracked the sun, realizing the office building next door, with its windows polished to a mirror finish, was bouncing the high noon rays directly on to the intersection.

  “I don’t have a positive yet,” barked Dulaney into his radio. “We’ve got an obscured windshield.”

  “We can’t hold the stoplight,” squawked the tactical captain.

  “Aw, hell… Move in. Arrest and hold,” said Dulaney, snatching the field glasses from Rey.

  Rey was disappointed. He had so wanted to witness the arrest. Without binoculars, he would miss it all. Later, Rey would realize, this was his moment. Because he was in the hunting and fishing section of the Long Beach Sports Authority, he instantly made a simple calculation. Within steps of the window, there must have been a display case filled with field glasses, plus rifles and spotting scopes. And hell! Rey was with the FBI. Surely a salesperson wouldn’t deny him a quick test drive.

  So Rey wheeled a quick one-eighty, seeking out the nearest available salesperson to assist him in testing a telephoto device.

  Rey’s back was to the window.

  Dulaney, meanwhile, watched through his own binoculars as the takedown unfolded. Six FBI tac cops, weapons raised, rushed the paused semi from both sides. One of the tac cops mounted the front bumper and leveled his weapon. Two more took position in the street while two others, climbed onto the truck’s footboards.

  Then the image through Dulaney’s specs suddenly blurred. As if, from the inside out, the black refrigerated Peterbilt was erasing itself.

  25

  “Stay in the damn car!” said Lucky. The words were meant to be his very last to Gonzo. And once his back was turned, he never expected to see her again.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” asked Gonzo, having barely enough air in her lungs to get the words out. She was launching herself into the passenger door, pushing it open and finding her feet on the ground as fast as humanly possible. When she spun around to look over the roof of the Charger, Lucky was already striding across the street.

  “Goddammit, stop!” shouted Gonzo, jamming her legs into chase mode. She nearly ate the asphalt as her boots slid underneath her. Lucky, though, was not running. He was well underway, walking at a sharp clip toward the intersection.

  Having spotted the helicopter banking into a tight arc overhead, Lucky took his cue. That’s why, despite the oppressive heat, his window had been rolled down. He had been waiting for the sound of the rotors. He knew that there would be a black Peterbilt truck some fifteen hundred feet below the chopper. Lucky was on his feet before clocking the refrigerated rig coming from the west. But once he locked his eyeballs on to the chrome air horns atop the semi’s cab, he ordered Gonzo to stay with the car and began angling for the intersection. Lucky’s right hand instinctively reached backward, lifted his T-shirt to find the butt of his .45. By the time Gonzo dashed past Lucky and turned to block his path, the weapon was coolly hanging bootlegged next to his thigh.

  “You’re not gonna!” Gonzo shouted. Lucky merely sidestepped her and picked up his pace. Gonzo met him shoulder to shoulder. “You’re exhausted and in grief. You are not thinking!”

  And when Gonzo tried to circle around in front of him once more, Lucky just stiff-armed her and tried to spin her out of the way. Instead, Gonzo wind-milled from her shoulder, slipped an elbow inside and popped two open heel palms into his chest. Her intent was to shock the Kern cop out of his trance.

  Big mistake, Lyd.

  Lucky recoiled into a modified firing stance, pistol muzzle trained at Gonzo’s face, his left hand reaching out in her direction.

  “Move! Now!” barked Lucky.

  “Gonna have to waste a bullet on me if you wanna shoot up an arrest scene.”

  “You stupid BITCH! GET THE FUCK—”

  Lucky didn’t hear the explosion as much as feel it. The shock wave hit his face like a hot blast slapping him at
a thousand miles per hour. As he felt his weight thrown backwards, the crown of Gonzo’s head thumped in his chest with an impact that felt like a ship’s cannonball fired broadside.

  Then Lucky blacked out.

  * * * *

  The mixture had been the hardest part. There would be no ball-parking the percentages. At least Beemer knew how to make the numbers work. Nine parts ammonium nitrate fertilizer to point-six parts fuel oil. Then stir, seal, and hope to hell gross fatigue hadn’t affected his calculations.

  The plan itself had formed quickly. No sooner had Beemer escaped the fast evolving estrogen party at Rey Palomino’s than his intent to harm suddenly materialized into a step-by-step plot. The result would be both a distraction to the feds from his truckload of blood money and would place the stink of suspicion on the hapless pool man. With only hours to accomplish the feat, it was imperative that he keep his anger and sense of betrayal suppressed just enough so his head remained clear and his actions concise.

  Both the fertilizer and fuel oil could be procured either north at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley or west in the agricultural belt located between the old California towns of Moorpark and Oxnard. The ammonium nitrate would be easy enough to ferret out of some farmer’s storage shed, which was precisely what Beemer did. But fuel oil is usually in greater supply east of the Rockies where it’s used to heat homes. The veteran then remembered that fuel oil was also utilized to power smudge pots—or choofas—six-foot-tall orchard heaters used on freezing nights to keep frost from settling on the delicate buds of fruit trees.

  So Beemer had motored west and dumped the stolen Honda at a truck stop where he promptly replaced it with the refrigerated Freightliner. He reckoned he had until daylight before some migrant strawberry picker discovered the driver’s body in an irrigation ditch. Throat slit ear to ear. By then Beemer would have returned to his abandoned Burbank warehouse and begun his alchemy project.

  Then it would be all about the size of the pop.

  A fertilizer bomb—or ANFO bomb in the parlance of the jackboots over at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—was considered a threat to national security ever since Timothy McVeigh unleashed his hellish brand of patriotic revenge on the poor occupants of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Unfortunately, the chemical compost was popular with farmers and fuel oil heated half the homes in the American Midwest. So as much as the government kept tabs on the sale of both fertilizer and fuel, they couldn’t be quick enough on the uptake to stop a man who stole the components, mixed the brew, and lit the fuse within a matter of hours. By the time the feds sifted through the wreckage, Beemer figured his frozen blood products would have shipped out of the port at Mazatlan, Mexico. After that, he could hook up to the Internet from just about anywhere in the world and find amusement in all the conspiracy theories trying to explain such a deadly attack.

  Beemer had left the final cocktail to congeal inside three blue chemical barrels Gorilla-glued to the floor of the Peterbilt’s refrigerator trailer. His muscles were so cold and fatigued from transferring all the blood product to the Freightliner that when it came time to fold the fertilizer in with the fuel oil—carefully counting each scoop from an old coffee can—his right arm shook almost uncontrollably, spilling the green ammonium pellets into the deep brown liquid. He mixed the final brew with an old broomstick and scraped the leftover brown goo off the bottom of his Nikes.

  It was approximately around the time the Chippy on the Kawasaki was using the old Freightliner for camouflage that the first tickle of doubt crossed Beemer’s subcortex. The anger, which had taken second place to process, was barely warm on a mental backburner. Fear was now entering the equation.

  Aw, fuck. What the if the igniter didn’t work?

  The whole big bang relied on a crude firing circuit activated by a throw-away cell phone. Two battery wires were rerouted through a three-inch coil of monofilament wire wrapped around a handful of wooden match heads. The phone and the rest of the matches were in a dry plastic baggy suspended just beneath the surface of the ANFO gel. When Beemer dialed the number, the circuit would activate, igniting the matches and, theoretically, a nearly instant detonation. The crude mobile apparatus was a favorite of Iraqi insurgents and their IEDs. But they were known to fail sometimes.

  Yup. The aw, fuck moment Beemer had so earnestly crafted for the Rey-the-FBI-loving-pool-man was residing on technology reserved for a bunch of towel-headed stone-tossers. Where was Plan B if the baggy had sprung a leak and turned the exposed match heads into sulfuric mush?

  No time for so much as a retreat, thought Beemer, wheeling onto the 7th Street off-ramp. His distance from the black Peterbilt was still about a quarter mile. Once he’d hit the first stoplight, the trailing motorcycle patrolman had surged around his left front bumper and roared off to tighten the leash on the target truck. Beemer flipped a coin in his head. It was a matter of chance whether or not the Chippy would survive the next five minutes.

  The DWP detour was a surprise, but not entirely unexpected. And before Beemer had even committed to the left turn onto Queens Avenue, he was able to glimpse the intersection a mere eighth of a mile to the east where the FBI had surely set up its gauntlet. That’s where he would have set up an ambush. Plenty of cover. A funnel of vehicles to slow traffic to an easy, manageable stroll. Perfect.

  Beemer would have preferred to make a U-turn. But the Freightliner was barely able to negotiate a ninety-degree left. Two hundred feet beyond was an alleyway between a remodeled five-story office tower with a “now leasing” banner and a Bob’s Big Boy franchise. Vehicles traveling from the opposite direction were few. The only obstacle was the five-yard wide grass meridian that striped the middle of the boulevard.

  Fine. Hop the center divider and, by the time I fit the truck between the buildings, hit the speed dial.

  Sure. Somebody might notice a big white tractor-trailer rig busting over a six-inch grassy patch. But the following explosion would likely distract and distort any memory. Plus, by the time everybody dug out, Beemer would be asleep with his arms wrapped around an empty bottle of south-of-the-border mescal.

  The Freightliner’s shocks compressed and the springs in the driver’s bucket seat gnashed and bucked as Beemer wheeled the rig onto the meridian. He downshifted, gassed the diesel engine, and pointed the front end at the nearby alley. Next, he grabbed his iPhone. It was set for a one-touch speed dial. Like all violent actions, it all came down to a trigger moment. Shoot, don’t shoot. Kill, don’t kill. Beemer had never, ever flinched at such a crossroads. He pressed the button. He heard the phone dial through the tiny speaker.

  The starboard side of the Freightliner scraped the alley’s cinder-block wall. A tighter fit than he had imagined. Nonetheless, the truck slid between the buildings. He popped the shifter out of gear, set the brake, and waited to feel the earth shake.

  Nothing.

  The only shaking Beemer detected was the shudder of the diesel engine begging for an ounce more of fuel.

  Did I miss the pop?

  Checking his side-view mirrors, he saw road, wall, palm trees and meandering cars.

  God DAMMIT!

  Beemer kicked the door open until it cracked the stucco side of the Bob’s Big Boy. He slipped downward until he felt asphalt under his feet. A quick exam of his iPhone screen showed it fully engaged and “connecting” with the correct ten digit number.

  Cell signal fail.

  Beemer prepared to hang up and redial, all the while gently picking up his pace alongside the Freightliner’s refrigerated trailer.

  He pressed END on the iPhone’s touch screen and peeked his head out of the mouth of the alleyway. From his vantage point he could see the outline of the black Peterbilt, held up by the power of a red stoplight. Then in rushed three armed tactical cops hustling out of a storefront and across the sidewalk.

  Now, Jesus, now!

  He looked to the iPhone screen, straightened his index finger, carefully aimed at the REDIAL fu
nction.

  Beemer never got a second chance to press the button.

  26

  The destructive power of an ANFO bomb is not the resulting incendiary affect. There’s a flash, but no fireball. The speed at which the ammonium nitrate and fuel oil combusts is triple the rate of dynamite’s, forming a catastrophic shock wave that turns tempered glass into popcorn and can easily rupture unprotected eardrums.

  For those close enough to watch, the shock wave moves faster than the snap of a finger. Usually it requires a slow motion camera to capture such a rapid displacement of air. Only at a distance and in the cleanest of atmospheres can the naked eye witness the expanding bubble.

  Pilot Mike Lowe missed it, instantly jockeying the stick to keep the helicopter from spinning out of orbit. But Observer Gerry Bland had a clean view, catching the shock wave from the ignition’s center and witnessing it spreading outward from the intersection, crashing into the buildings like a tsunami of angry air, following the path of least resistance down the boulevards and out to the ocean.

  In later FBI reports, the observer would describe his overhead view of the bomb eruption like that of watching a flower bloom in one of those nature channel films on botany. Filmed in stop frame and sped up for effect. From a tiny bud to petals fully flexed in the near blink of an eye.

  When the shock wave hit the helicopter, it instantly pushed the aircraft up another eighty feet. A lesser pilot might have panicked and overcorrected. But while Bland found his heart suddenly pressed up against his sternum, the expert jockey at the controls nosed the copter off the bubble as if surfing a wave while simultaneously keying his mic.

  “Base. Be advised. We have a detonation of some kind of large explosive device…”