by Dave Balcom
Sea
Change
Dave Balcom
Smashwords Edition
License Notes
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Copyright © 2014 Dave Balcom
All rights reserved.
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Dedication
To the men and women all around this nation and the world who keep us safe day after day, be they local, state, or federal. They are entrusted with the honor of protecting and serving their fellow citizens, and the vast majority take that honor to levels few of us ever imagine. I imagine it here. All characters and events in this book are fictional. Real places are mixed with fictitious places.
Prologue
The hottest of my Eastern Oregon morel mushroom spots was off Summit Road in the Blue Mountains. At some 5,000 feet above sea level, spring comes later in that area, and even though it was late May, I figured there would still be big white mushrooms ready for the picking.
I drove down the road with Judy, the Drahthaar pointer riding shotgun, watching every turn in the familiar road. When we got to the spot where we usually park, there was a beat-up truck, one of those small, foreign import jobs that beg the question of pickup trucks.
Respecting another mushroom hunter’s privacy is part of my foraging ethic, so we drove on for about a half mile, where I could pull my truck off the gravel.
I let Judy out as I grabbed my foraging bag and walking stick. We were at the eastern edge of this reliable cover, and I expected to find my prizes just over the first hill south of the road.
As we crested the hill, I saw two men in the distance; one small, dark and wiry; the other a hulk of a figure who was carrying on his backpack what appeared at first to be a chimenea or earthen urn.
I greeted them with a smile and a wave. They saw me, but gave no sign; just veered away and picked up their pace.
I shrugged and started looking at the ground for morels even as I wondered what they were carrying in that urn. A story I’d read about the increasing use of the National Forest grounds by drug farmers leaped into my mind.
The news article had been a cautionary tale for people who recreate in national forests. The point of the article had been that hikers, hunters, and foragers who stumble onto those illicit croplands had found real danger.
That thought process brought me up short, my normal bliss at being in this wild place had been replaced with a prickle of fear. I softly called to Judy, and we headed for the truck. There was a spot further up the road a bit that often furnished me with late morels, and it was a far piece from what might be paranoid drug farmers.
1
My day in court had been long and intense. As I drove into my driveway in the foothills of the Blue Mountains overlooking the Columbia basin, I felt grainy, tired, and old.
I listened to my engine cool as the shadows from the setting sun grew longer in the calm spring evening. I shook myself and got out of the truck, looking forward to a brief walk with Judy, the Drahthaar pointer who shares my home.
The federal prosecutor had been grilling me on my account of the events of May 28 the year prior. He was prosecuting four defendants on charges of growing marijuana in the Walt Whitman National Forest.
My encounter with two of those suspects had shaken me that nice day in May, and after I had filled my bag with plump morel mushrooms, I had driven out of the woods full of questions about that incident.
Then, in the short drive back to the main highway, I had noticed a black Bell helicopter buzzing around the mountain and not one but four different black Suburbans with heavily tinted windows.
Instead of turning west towards home, I had turned east toward La Grande where I knew I’d find Oregon State Police Lt. Stan Liske at his desk, working furiously to get out of the office.
He had started to frown, butt a broad grin took over is face when I appeared in the doorway to his office.
“Jim, you’ve been something of a stranger of late, but it’s great to see you!”
I shook his hand and once again marveled at his strength. He was a huge man, not nearly as tall as my six-foot, five-inch frame, but twice my size through the chest and core of his body.
“What brings you by, not more of your questions I hope?”
“Actually, yeah, I’m a bit curious. Do you know anything about a federal investigation or surveillance operation in the Blues right now?”
The smile disappeared from his eyes, and the corners of his mouth seemed to melt into a thoughtful frown. “Why do you ask?”
I told him of my strange encounter with the two guys and the truck, and then of my seeing the signs of government activity on the way out of the woods.
“Obviously, if it’s a federal operation, I might never know about it. You know how often the locals get a heads up from the State guys? Well, ten times more often than we do from the Feds.
“But please, tell me more about the vehicle you saw.”
I gave him the details I could remember: It was gray, beat-up, a Datsun or some such miniature pickup.
“Anything else?”
I shrugged. “On my way out, I wrote down the license number…”
He cocked his head and looked incredulous, “Why?”
“It’s the way we were trained as reporters, you know? If a dog died in the fire, make sure you have the name of the dog? Or, maybe it was just idle curiosity?
He shook his head, noted the number and then smiled at me. “Here you go again, buddy.”
“Why?”
“Excuse me a minute; I gotta make a call or two. Okay?”
After that, the pace of play went up several notches. Liske put down his phone, and then asked me and an investigator into his office where he started a tape recording: “This is a voluntary statement being made by James Michael Stanton on twenty-eight May, twenty-eleven in the OSP office in La Grande.” He added my age and home address, and asked me to state my name, which I did. He asked me if I was making a voluntary statement, and I said yes for the recording. He then asked me to restate my experiences of that afternoon in the Blue Mountains.
I started talking, but he interrupted several times for me to be specific about what road, how far on that road; he wanted a turn-by-turn account to specifically pinpoint my experience.
When he turned off the recorder, he excused the officer and turned to me, “Thank you, Jim. I expect you’ll be hearing from me or the Feds in the course of time.”
“No details? No explanation?”
He shook his head. “Not my place, but I can tell you your cooperation is really appreciated.”
I was recalling that day and the following events as I walked to the back of the house where Judy keeps her residence when she’s not with me. She came bouncing out of the little door that connects the outside pen to another pen and her house in the garage. She was doing her yo-yo imitation at the gate. As I opened the gate, she started running a manic three-sixty around my feet before bouncing across the yard to relieve herself and check her territory.
While Judy was making her inspection, I went into the house through the back porch, and found two men sitting in my living room. One of them was holding a sawed off shotgun pointed in my general direction.
“Come in, amigo,” said the man with the weapon. “Shut the door and leave the dog outside.”
I closed the slider. The guy holding the shotgun had long, black hair
and a flowing black Zapata mustache. He was wearing khaki shorts, a tee shirt, and a green camouflage Army blouse.
The other man was the huge character I’d seen hauling something like 30 gallons of water on his back the previous spring. He didn’t say anything. He just stood and approached me.
Shotgun spoke, “Atlas just wants to make sure you’re not going to surprise us with some kind of weapon we don’t know about. Put your hands on your head and turn around.”
I did as I was told, and “Atlas” checked all the normal places where he might find a weapon as well as a couple of spots that displayed a well-developed imagination.
He spun me around, dragged a stool from the kitchen island and sat me down on it. I’m a big guy, but I recognized that at my age Atlas didn’t need Shotgun to control me.
“What’s up?” I asked even as I checked my center, finding my pulse approaching normal again; my tai chi chuan training was in full effect.
“You gotta big mouth, mister. You talk to cops and prosecutors. You see things you shouldn’t see, and tell things you shouldn’t tell. We’re gonna shut you up before you talk any more.”
“That won’t make much difference, amigo,” I said. “Everything I had to say is already on tape and on file. This is a bad idea all the way ’round.”
“She said you’d say that. But we know that without you around to say it for the jury, it won’t carry the kind of weight it might carry, you know? And, it’ll send a nice message to anyone else who might be thinking about telling what they’ve seen, you dig?”
I said nothing, and he nodded.
“Atlas, you can go ahead. We don’t want this to be as neat a scene as last year in Granite. You can bust him up a bit.”
My head snapped around at the word Granite. “You did Ron and Liz Pelt in Granite?”
His smile parted his mustache showing bright, white teeth. He held a hand up like a traffic cop in Atlas’ direction. “That was our work. We weren’t sure if they’d told anyone about the meeting they walked into one night up at the camp, and if they hadn’t, we didn’t want to send any signals, you know? We marched them right back into that walk-in cooler, put ’em on their knees and bang, bang. Nice and neat, don’t you think?”
My mind was racing. The double homicide that fall had been the only unsolved homicide in Liske’s career. It had haunted him and me as we determined without question that it hadn’t been any part of what we called the Amble James case.
“Now you’re thinking too much, my friend. There is no way out for you,” he said as he nodded to Atlas. I turned in time to see Atlas’ fist coming toward my gut, and my instinct was to drop my hands and cross my arms in a classic tai chi defense. The thrust of my move deflected the monster’s huge fist down from my solar plexus to my groin. The impact of the blow sent an arrow of intense pain through my body, but my training continued to kick in. I grabbed his wrist in both hands as I rocked backwards with his momentum. It wasn’t the classic move I’d practiced for years. The giant was way too heavy for me in the wake of that punch. As I balled up from the pain in my groin, he fell more on me than behind me.
The whole house shook at the impact of us on the kitchen floor and I felt the air rush out of me even as I felt my ribs buckle under his weight.
Atlas scurried up on his feet, and prepared to kick me. I was doubled in a fetal position of pain so I wasn’t really aware of what was happening when the first shot rang out.
Atlas stopped and turned to see Shotgun slowly folding up, and my neighbor Jack Nelson standing in the living room in a classic, two-hand grip of a marksman.
“No!” Roared the big man as he started toward Jack. I could see Jack’s Taurus Tack Driver, the twin of my own seven-shot, .357 magnum revolver, turn to face Atlas. “Stop there, now!” Jack said louder than necessary. “Now!”
Atlas didn’t hurry or stop; he just walked toward Jack with the determination and confidence borne of a lifetime of fighting and winning. The revolver barked again, and I saw a shudder in the big man’s shoulders, but he didn’t stop. Jack then put two more into his chest, and the exit wounds showered me in blood and matter.
By then the two men were no more than six feet apart and Jack pulled the trigger again, and again and again until there were just clicks on empty chambers.
Atlas put a giant hand out toward Jack’s face, and Jack finally moved sideways to avoid the goliath’s dying on top of him.
There is always what seems like an eternity of silence after the shooting stops. I could hear Judy scratching at the back door, and I heard the clunk of the handgun falling from Jack’s fingers. I could smell the odors of death and cordite, and I could feel the pain from my groin.
“Jack,” I started.
“Stanton? You’re alive?”
“Jack ... nine-one-one? I think I need medical...” The room had been spinning, but then it slanted, dipping west toward the puzzled dog on the porch, and I had a moment to wonder what she would think when I failed to get up, but then the whole world went black and I didn’t care anymore.
2
It had been years since my last encounter with life-threatening injuries. As I lay in the hospital in Pendleton, dreaming the dreams of the near dead and dying, surgeons and nurses worked doggedly to put my pieces back together again.
I had known real injury and pain as a Special Forces warrior, and I had dished it out as well. I had served as best I could, but unlike my comrades, I had come to understand that while God may have given me the tools for such a life, they hadn’t come with the right kind of mentality to sustain the physical activity.
My mates loved the action, wanted the challenge and the rush of adrenaline that came with it. I also knew that they fought with an anger I didn’t feel and couldn’t muster. I had never thrown a punch, jabbed a finger or fired a weapon “in anger.” I looked at combat as my job, and I did it without any passion beyond the fear of letting my teammates down.
I had made the decision to give up that life just as I met Sandy. She had been a civilian summer intern in personnel at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, where I had been rehabbing after my final deployment.
I had fallen for her quiet composure and the brilliant smile that lighted up her eyes. That fall I had left the Navy for college and civilian life, and Sandy had come with me.
She transferred to Central Michigan, and finished her final semester of an elementary education degree even as we were married in a small church near her parent’s home in Maryland during spring break.
She kept me focused on my studies while she got her first teaching job, and after I graduated, we became a much-traveled team: I focused on making small-town newspapers as good as I could while she devoted herself to nurturing young students to become the best they could be.
We moved, raised a family and grew even closer right up until she died in 1999.
I was remembering all this as if in a dream as I slowly came back to the world. I was having a conversation with her, and she was explaining that I couldn’t stay with her yet, and that I had things to do. I was arguing, telling her that I wanted to know the peace and tranquility that being in her arms had always brought to me, and she was the same old Sandy, “Oh, Jim; you don’t need anything more than you need to be alive… you have someone there to love and honor, and that’s fine... you go on now, you go on now, you go on now…” I felt myself separating from her. I reached out to her, and finally I said her name…
“Sandy!”
The noise of my voice brought me out of it, and as I opened my eyes, I was looking directly into the shocked face of Jan Coldwell.
“Jim?”
I was unable to shift gears that fast. I knew she was Jan. I had met her in Mineral Valley, Michigan when I had been grieving the loss of a childhood friend who had business dealings in her town. She was the publisher of a weekly newspaper, and over the course of a few months we had fallen deeply in love.
All this memory was going through my mind at that moment of recognition, but
I couldn’t make a sound.
“I’m Jan, Jim. Jan Coldwell.” There was a distinct pain in her voice. “I’ll call the nurse.”
But that was unnecessary. As I had come out of the coma, the monitors at the nurse’s station had started chirping the changes. As Jan stepped to the door, it opened and a nurse and a doctor stepped into the room.
The doctor came directly to me, and started poking, prodding, and shining light into my eyes all the while talking softly to me. “Hi. I’m Dr. Stands. You’re in St. Anthony Hospital in Pendleton. We’re happy you decided to come see us today.”
He cocked his head a bit at my failure to reply.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“Jim. Jim Stanton.”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“Big bastard hit me and fell on me. Jack killed him.”
“That’s right, and then Jack called for help and an ambulance from Pendleton responded, brought you here and we took care of you.”
I could hear soft sobbing from behind the doctor’s back.
“Jan?”
“I’m right here, Jim.”
The doctor smiled. “She’s been monitoring our performance for a week now. She never doubted you’d come back to us, and she was right.”
With that he stepped away and motioned Jan into my view. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but her eyes were bright and her smile was wide as she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. “Oh, Jim. I knew you’d come out of this, but I didn’t know when. When you woke up, you thought I was Sandy?”
I thought about that; recalled with a small ache the dream that I had been having, of being sent away from the warmth and comfort of Sandy’s arms once more. “It was a dream I was having, I guess.
“How long have I been here?”
“Two weeks tomorrow. Jack and Shirlee called me the day after it happened, and I caught the next flight to Portland, and Randall flew me to Pendleton. I’ve been staying at your house, when I’m not here.
