Deadly Waters (11 page)

XXIV

7/17/07 03:25 Arizona Standard Time

“--so I bought a year’s supply of powdered pancake batter, and I was thinking: ‘Why not fry it all at once,’” Wayland Zah was telling the night jailer. “I put in a hundred gallons of distilled water. Or was it purified water? I get the two confused. What
is
the difference between them?”

“My wife says the minerals in tap water are good for you,” said the jailer through the bars. “We don’t buy any kind of bottled water.”

“Back to the story,” said Wayland. “When this Y2K thing didn’t pan out and the world didn’t come to an end, I had all this water on hand and all this pancake mix, and seeing the two them together in the storage shed for seven years got me thinking: ‘Wasn’t these things made for each other?’ When I saw Rocky Henderson’s cement mixer parked in the Circle K parking lot, the keys still in it, I figured I pretty much had a sign from God Himself. Whenever it gets real hot, like it was today, you know how people say you could fry an egg on the pavement? Eggs, pancakes, whatever. You have them for breakfast, don’t you? So I borrowed Rocky’s truck. I brought it right back. With the pancake mix and the water rolling round in the back. That stuff about frying an egg turns out to be true. I dumped that stuff and it rose up nice and hot like it was on a big skillet. Free breakfast for everyone. I even brought the sixty-four gallons of syrup. Was anybody at the Circle K grateful? You can see where I am now. This’ll be the last time I ever do them a favor.”

“Those people were pretty upset,” the jailer noted.

“Because they don’t like Indians,” said Wayland. “A white guy could have done this, and they’d want to give him a medal.”

The jailer was not persuaded. Wayland had dumped the pancake mix on the parking lot because he had gotten into an argument with the store manager over whether Jerry Rice was a better wide-out than Don Hutson. Wayland had been in the Coconino County Jail before for performing other grand but idiotic stunts.

Bob Mathers, taking a break from his rounds on the graveyard shift, entered the jail area and told the jailer there was fresh coffee in the lunch room.

“You think you’re being clever, don’t you, buddy?” he said to Wayland.

The jailer rose to get himself to the break room once he saw his presence near the cells was no longer necessary.

“I think I’m a philer--, a phila--, one of those guys that’s all the time doing good for other people,” said Wayland, sitting upright in his cell bed to talk to his friend.

“You don’t let anybody do
you
any good,” said Bob.

How Bob sighed when he spoke disrupted Wayland’s good mood.

“Oh, boss,” said Wayland, “you can’t be that way. You know I like you.” He looked at the black and white checkerboard pattern in the floor and decided he might as well tell the truth. “The clerk and I didn’t get into a fight about football,” he confessed. “The son of a bitch wouldn’t sell me a Freezie. I made it myself, had my money on the counter, and he stood there looking at me. ‘We told you we ain’t gonna serve you,’ he told me. So I fixed his ass.”

“You fixed your own ass, buddy,” said Bob. “What he did was illegal. You could

have called me. One phone call, and this would never have happened.”

“Don’t worry,” Wayland told him. “I’ll be out on bail by noon.”

“What are you talking about? You couldn’t pay a parking ticket. You’re not in for disturbing the peace this time. Rocky is upset about his cement truck. Then there’s the parking lot. They still haven’t got it cleaned up.”

“I have a friend,” began Wayland, and realized he should not mention Mondragon to Bob again.

“One of those creeps at the doughnut shop? You still haven’t told me what they were doing in Page.”

“Like I told you, boss,” said Wayland, laughing to mask his true feelings. “Mr. Corello has never touched—”

“Mr. Charles Corello,” interrupted Bob. “I’ve been doing some research. You were in prison out in California, before you got transferred to the federal place, with a Mr. Charles Corello. Guess what? The one you were in jail with is thirty-six years old, is almost six feet tall and weighs a skinny one hundred and forty-five pounds. Your man was sixty, if he was a day, and he was, I think, about five eight and weighs maybe two hundred and ten.”

“There’s more than one Charles Corello,” insisted Wayland. “Lots of them. Look, there’s a hundred billion people out in California.”

“Not quite that many,” said Bob.

“However many of them there are,” said Wayland, as he stood up and stretched inside his little cell. “I don’t know how big California is or how many of them have been to prison or are named Charles Corello. I know if they go to prison, they can put it behind them. You can’t put being an Indian behind you, boss. You get to be an Indian all your life.” He sat back down on his bed and faced the back wall rather than look at Bob.

“Buddy, I can’t make the whole world right,” said Bob. “I can only be a friend when you need one.” He waited for a reply. Wayland said nothing. “Don’t do this, Wayland. We have to talk.”

Wayland said nothing, and he refused to say anything until Bob Mathers had left him.

As he predicted, he was released before noon. Someone in the San Francisco Bay area wired him two thousand dollars, and he made bail soon thereafter.

*

Bob Mathers made contact with the real Charles Corello’s employer at the halfway house in Fresno and discovered that Corello had not missed a day of work in three years.

“Are you certain of this?” Bob asked the halfway house’s director. “He never was in Arizona on a weekday? It would have been, let’s see, this past April?”

The director assured Mathers that Corello had not gone anywhere in April. At Bob’s insistence he brought Corello to the telephone. The instant Bob heard Corello’s East Los Angeles accent he was certain this was not the man he had met in Page.

“Is there something I can do for you, sir?” Corello had asked.

“No,” said Bob, “I’m sorry to bother you. I called because I think you should know there’s a crook here in Arizona using your identity.”

XXV

8/6/07 00:07 Arizona Standard Time

At a few minutes past midnight on a hot Arizona night, a Peterbuilt semi-truck bearing California plates and pulling a single large trailer pulled into the border check station at Nogales. Customs officer Ralph Gordon set aside his issue of
Institutional
Personnel
and went outside his glass partitioned booth to have a look at the vehicle and its hissing air brakes. The driver was Kenneth Greeley, a resident of Alabama, and he had his truck log and his I.D. cards in order. The trailer door was sealed shut with colored tape, indicating it held container cargo that had been sealed shut in the port of Caracas, Venezuela.

“
Que
tiene
?” Officer Gordon asked the driver.

“I don’t speak the lingo, son,” said Greeley, “In case you’re asking what I’m carrying, I’m to tell you it’s scrap from the oil fields bound for Tucson.”

While they spoke, two other customs agents leading a drug-sniffing German shepherd made a pass around the truck. They let the dog smell along the rear door. One man listened with a stethoscope to the trailer wall to make certain the truck was not carrying illegal aliens. Neither the agents nor the dog sensed anything untoward about the trailer.

“Funny,” said Officer Gordon, checking his clipboard, “I see here I got a notice from up in Phoenix saying I should expect you. They sent me your plates and everything.”

“The head office was being thorough,” said Greeley.

“You must run a tight operation at…,” he rechecked the shipping company’s logo… “Yellow Butterfly Lines,” said the border official.

“We try,” said Greeley, and pulled through the uplifted striped gate.

At seven thirty-five that same morning the Yellow Butterfly truck was parked in a rest area on the Pinal Highway, fifty-two miles north of Tucson. Kenneth Greeley waited for a charter bus driven by Col. Method, which zipped by him at the appointed time of seven forty. Greeley followed the bus north for another three miles up the paved highway and onto a dirt side road that led into a dense thicket of mesquite and Paulo Verde trees. He traveled a short quarter mile on this second trail and emerged into a clearing, wherein the bus, a black Buick and five orange and white U-Haul trucks were parked. The forty Colombians and Method were slowly emerging into the dusty sunlight from the bus. Mondragon, Taylor, Harris, Abe Wilson and Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe were already standing by the Buick. Method quickly arranged the men into four groups of seven and one of twelve and began transferring the empty drums from the large semi into the smaller rental trucks.

“Be careful!” Method counseled them in Spanish. “Move slowly and stay together. The real torpedoes will not forgive stupidity. Pace yourselves, gentlemen.”

The Colombians did not slow down much. They did make serious expressions to show how concerned they were.

“Look at Alfonso in the Glen Canyon team,” Mondragon whispered to Taylor in English. “It will be a miracle if that clown doesn’t shoot somebody before this is over. I wanted to transfer him to the Strawberry group with the other idiots. He wants to be around his cousin.”

“You mean Claudio?” said Taylor.

“Nepotism is forever the enemy of organization,” said Mondragon. “Did you know your old nemesis Benton has an idiot younger brother on his board of directors? Shows how contagious the problem is. Even the evil are susceptible to it. We have to hope Claudio can keep his fool cousin in line long enough to get the job done.”

Sixteen minutes went by, and the men had moved all sixteen empty drums from the semi. In another half an hour they had loaded the drums into the five U-Haul trucks and had only dropped one load.

“Once will kill everyone forever!” Method screamed at the guilty party, so furious he forgot to speak Spanish to the dumbfounded Colombians.

“First, the big truck leaves for the south,” Mondragon told the Colombians. “Ten minutes later, the Fontenelle truck will drive north. Ten minutes after that the Glen Canyon truck will drive south through Tucson and up Highway 17 via Phoenix to Page. The Blue Mesa team will drive north next, and then the Strawberry truck will go through Florence to Phoenix, up Highway 93 to Las Vegas and then up Interstate 15 into Utah. The Flaming Gorge group will go last, traveling northwest to the Navaho Nation and up Highway 191 to your goal.

“You all have your routes, your phrase books, and cash for your expenses. Be polite to everyone you meet, especially to the police. Obey the speed limits. Remember that Russian agents will be watching every step of your journeys. One more thing: I certainly hope none of you are carrying a firearm.”

Mondragon threw in the last comment because he knew that nearly all of the forty men were packing a gun of some sort.

“When you are safely on the plane and flying south to Venezuela, that is when you will get your $10,000,” Mondragon said. “Now, let us see what you have learned.”

Mondragon, Taylor, and the other leading conspirators waited in the black Buick while the U-Hauls pulled away in their allocated order. Col. Method and Erin timed the Colombians and for once were impressed that the men performed nearly on schedule.

“At this rate a couple of them should get through this without screwing up,” said Erin.

XXVI

8/7/07 06:46 Mountain Daylight Time

At the Monday Café in Heber City, Utah, the seven Colombians in the team, bound for the Strawberry Reservoir thirty-five miles to the southeast of that same community, stopped for breakfast. The team leader, Enrique Edolfas, who had insisted to Col. Method and Mondragon that he could speak good English, asked the waitress for “a table round like a dish” and ordered “big club sandwiches” for the entire party.

“I hope you’re hungry, hon,” said the waitress. “I don’t know, though, if we serve sandwiches this early. How about pancakes instead?”

“Yes, cakes,” agreed Enrique.

To Enrique and his six associates “cakes” were either small corn meal staples one ate three times a day or sweet delicacies reserved for holidays and other special occasions. When the waitress brought them each three round fat confections that resembled under-baked tortillas, the men poked at them a while with their forks and asked themselves if there should not be something inside this strange type of food.

“Is not some variety of the fruit of the pig involved?” Enrique asked the waitress.

“You boys ain’t from around here, are you?” she asked.

“We are from Venezuela,” said Enrique. “We have come to Utah for the conviviality of angling...with poles we have come.”

“Have you now?” said the waitress. “What sort of poles did you come with?”

Her question confused the men. They discussed what she was inquiring about and decided, at the suggestion of a man from Calle, that she was flirting with them.

“Please, if you desire,” said Enrique, speaking for the group, “we are each at the moment married men. If you had been born later and had been much more attractive in your bodily person, this would not be so... Whatever you think of us, we are Venezuelans and not Colombians.”

The waitress was a tall, sandy-haired grandmother named Dinah. She was not offended that the seven odd men did not find her attractive.

“All right,” she said, looking at them sideways. “How about some more coffee? What was that last bit you said about Colombia?”

“We were of two brains,” began Enrique, then decided to say something else. “We have never heard of Columbia.”

“I see,” said Dinah.

Mondragon had dressed the Colombians in L.L. Bean leisure clothes for their mission in the United States. The Colombians on the Strawberry team had changed into open collared floral shirts and baggy cargo pants as soon as they reached the first rest area. Sitting in the Monday Café, the facial scars they had earned in street fights painfully visible, and smoking cigarettes--illegal in the public places of Mormon Utah--the men looked to Dinah to be from some other planet.

*

Dinah served the strange men and smiled. Seconds after they had left she telephoned the Wasatch County Sheriff’s office.

“They’re either hauling drugs or people,” she told the dispatcher. “I mean, who rides around seven in a U-Haul truck? That’s right: five of the seven got in the back like they were furniture. They’re headed down Highway 40 toward the Strawberry. The one said they were anglers, whatever the heck that is.”