10 Tahoe Trap (36 page)

“Capsaicin is a serious irritant for lots of animals, so the presumption is that the chili peppers evolved this chemical adaptation so they were less likely to be eaten by animals.”

“You mean bugs,” I said.

“Yeah. Bugs and larger animals. Although, I seem to remember reading that birds aren’t affected by chili peppers. Most animals having grinding teeth and they chew seeds up, destroying them. So it makes sense that capsaicin would be off-putting to animals. But birds can’t chew, so many seeds go through them without being ruined. And, appropriately, capsaicin was an evolutionary adaptation that didn’t bother birds.”

“Ah,” I said. “The bottom line is that whatever traits help a pepper to produce and disseminate seeds are traits that carry on to future generations.”

“See?” Street said. “You could be a scientist.”

“I couldn’t stand the tedium of focused study. Unless I could make a science of studying your attractiveness.”

“You’re talking about sex again,” Street said.

“Why would you jump to that conclusion?” I said. “I’m talking about the science of your romantic aura. The beauty of your line and form. The poetry of your cadences.”

“Like I said, sex.”

“If you insist,” I said.

“Anyway,” Street said. “Commercial pepper spray manufacturers have perfected the techniques of how to collect and concentrate capsaicin. Maybe they’ve even synthesized it. Homemade spray would no doubt be much less potent. But you could probably make something effective. The trick will be keeping the capsaicin in solution.”

“How would you do it?” I asked.

“I would probably just grind up the peppers, strain out the juice, and mix the juice with an emulsifier.”

“What’s that?”

“Something that holds it in solution. Think of how oil and water don’t mix. An emulsifier like detergent will suspend grease and oil in water and allow it to wash away.”

“You think I should mix ground-up peppers with detergent?”

“Possibly. But detergent is such a good emulsifier that it might lessen the effectiveness of capsaicin when it hits someone’s eyes or nose. You don’t want a person’s tears to wash it away. Let me grab one of my books.”

I heard the phone being set down. The thud of heavy book. Rustling of pages.

“Here we are. Let me scan down this. A hygroscopic, miscible... I’ll save you the details. It looks like propylene glycol would be the ticket. Problem is getting it.

“Is it a hazardous material?”

“No. It’s found in cosmetics and food and moisturizers. But you won’t find it on the shelf at the store. You’d have to order it from a chemical company. How soon do you want to do this?”

“Yesterday,” I said.

“Then let’s skip that idea. You could probably use denatured alcohol. Rubbing alcohol.”

“Then I’d have a fire hazard. I don’t want that.”

“Good point,” Street said. “Let’s go back to detergent.”

“Which would lessen the effectiveness?”

“Yeah. But if you used a small amount, just a few drops, it might work well.”

“How would you decide how much to use?” I asked.

“I’d probably add a drop or two of detergent to some water, mix that up and then pour it into the pepper juice. Once you mix that up, you would be able to see if your juice settles out into layers or not. If it stays mixed, then you have enough detergent. You can tell how hot the liquid is by touching a tiny drop to your tongue.”

“Hot sauce with a hint of detergent.”

“Maybe you should just buy hot sauce.”

“Sure. But like pepper spray, they are in little containers. I want a lot.”

“Just be careful,” Street said. “You’re doing this with a little boy.”

“You think I’m corrupting his innocent mind?” I looked at Paco. His face was passive.

“Yeah,” she said.

“I’m also showing him how old-fashioned American ingenuity works.”

“You are indeed.”

I thanked Street, and we hung up.

Spot poked around Diamond’s fenced back yard while Paco and I went to work. I opened the single window in Diamond’s garage and fit Diamond’s window fan into it to vent the fumes. Paco found a couple of pieces of wood and used them to prop the garage’s passage door open about ten inches. It was enough to allow for ventilation but not so much that neighbors could look over the fence and see what we were doing inside the garage.

There was a light breeze, sufficient, I hoped, for any chili pepper aroma to disperse.

I fetched Diamond’s blender from his kitchen and brought it, water, and detergent into the garage. We put on gloves and goggles and loaded the first batch of peppers into the blender.

“Stand back,” I said. Paco moved to the other side of the garage, demonstrating a respect of peppers that came from past experience. I took a firm grip on the lid of the blender to be sure it wouldn’t fly off, and hit the button.

It whirred, and the peppers turned to a blurry orange slurry.

I stopped the machine and took a careful look inside. It looked like a fibrous fruit slurpee. Paco came over to look, too.

“What do you think?” I said. “Will that take down a superhero?”

“Over a million Scoville Units,” he said.

Careful not to splash, I poured the orange slurpee through a strainer and into a clear glass. As we looked at the glass, the juice started to separate just a bit, with the top layer getting a little clearer and the bottom layer a bit denser. I visualized all the capsaicin sitting on the bottom, unable to go through a sprayer.

“Looks like it’s separating,” I said. “Street said we should add some detergent to a little water and mix it up. Can you do it?”

Paco nodded. He picked up a water bottle, poured some into a cup, then picked up the detergent.

“Smallest drop possible,” I said.

Paco tipped the bottle just past horizontal, held it without squeezing. A tiny drop began to form. Paco kept it steady. The drop eventually separated and fell into the cup. He stirred until the water got sudsy.

“Now add the water detergent mix,” I said.

Paco carefully tipped the cup and poured the mix into the glass. I stirred until it was frothy. We watched again. The bubbles all rose to the top, but the mix didn’t separate. We repeated the process a couple of times, straining the slurpee into the 5-gallon bucket. When it came time to mix in the detergent/water mix, I handed Paco the portable cake mixer.

Paco was like a surgeon in his precision as he ran the mixer on slow speed, then increased the speed one notch. The juice turned into orange foam. Satisfied, he turned off the mixer and lifted it out.

Paco continued to stare through his goggles at the orange foam as if he expected a creature to emerge.

“Looks good,” I said.

I found a matchstick on Diamond’s workbench. I dipped the wooden end into the pepper sauce in the five gallon bucket.

“How hot will this taste if I touch it to my tongue?” I asked.

Paco’s eyes got wide. “Real hot,” he said.

I stuck out my tongue and gently touched the matchstick.

At first it just tasted hot. Like hot sauce from the supermarket. Then the hotness grew and spread through my mouth. In twenty seconds my mouth was on fire. My nose burned. My eyes were watering enough to send tears down my cheeks.

“Stay here,” I said. I rushed out of the garage. Spot came running, excited at my fast movement. I ran into Diamond’s kitchen, bent down and stuck my mouth under the kitchen faucet. Spot had come in with me, and he stuck his nose over the sink, sniffing at my head.

The cold water took the edge off. I rinsed thoroughly. When I was done, the hotness came back, searing my tongue.

I re-rinsed. And again.

As I went back out to the garage, I saw an elderly man frowning at me from the upstairs window of the neighboring house. I gave him a little wave. He didn’t wave back.

When I came back to the garage, Paco looked at me.

“Was it hot?” he asked.

“Pretty much,” I said.

“Your eyes are red,” he said.

“Over one million Scoville Units,” I said.

We reloaded the blender and repeated the process.

I had blender and strainer duty. Paco had mixer duty. We stopped adding detergent. The growing volume of juice still seemed to stay mixed.

When we’d gone through the entire stock of chili peppers, we had about a gallon of juice in the bucket.

I took the bucket lid and snapped it on.

I wanted to attach the leaf blowers and test our setup. But I thought of the neighbor man. Leaf blowers make a huge amount of noise. Would the man ignore the sound of a jet plane or two taking off inside of Diamond’s garage? Or would he call the cops to check us out? I couldn’t take the risk. It would be hard to explain why we had such quantities of pepper spray and fire ants. It was risky, but we’d have to wait and test our gear at the tear-down house.

“We now have two formidable weapons,” I said to Paco, my eyes still watering. “Fire Ants and pepper spray. Ain’t no superhero could stand up to those, huh?”

Paco shook his head.

FORTY-ONE

We loaded Diamond’s old pickup with the Cassie’s Viper pepper juice and the fire ants, our extra vent pipe supplies, and several tools. I took care not to drop them. We drove into a cold rain as we climbed Kingsbury Grade back into the Tahoe Basin.

We stopped at Street’s lab.

“On our way to set the trap,” I said. “Wondered if we can leave Spot to help with your entomological studies.”

“Sure.”

“Also wondered if you have some dark construction paper and packing tape.”

She shook her head. “The closest thing to that would be paper grocery bags. Would that work?”

“Yeah.” I told her what I wanted. She helped me cut up some bags, taped them together into large, stiff sheets, then cut shapes out of them as I explained my idea.

“It sounds kind of crazy,” Street said, “but it just might work.”

When we were done, Paco and I left. The pickup was much roomier without Spot.

We stopped at the hospital and got Celeste Redack’s house key from Doc Lee.

As we drove out to the West Shore and around Emerald Bay, I talked to Paco about our plan to entice Salt and Pepper into breaking into a house where they would think Paco was staying.

“We’re going to set a trap,” I said. “And...”

“And I’m the bait,” he finished.

“Yeah. The premise is simple. But pulling it off is complicated. I don’t want you to go into this without understanding that there are risks.”

Paco was quiet.

I stopped talking. I wanted him to sit on the idea. Let it steep. Paco was only ten, and he might not grasp the seriousness of the situation. But I could still remember when I was a kid, and I chafed at adults who didn’t tell me the truth all because they thought I was just a kid and wouldn’t understand. Maybe I didn’t understand important things as fully as an adult did, but I grew up feeling that it was a mistake for adults not to inform kids about serious stuff that affected them.

“They could take me again,” Paco finally said.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. We’ll try very hard to keep that from happening. I can’t guarantee that you’ll be safe. But I’ll do everything possible to keep you safe.”

“You promise?”

It was a question that radiated back through my past to my own childhood. I’d asked the same question when adults had made serious claims to me.

“I can’t promise I can keep you safe. But I promise I’ll try.”

 On the north side of Emerald Bay, we drove past D.L. Bliss State Park and then Sugar Pine Point State Park. I told Paco what I had in mind.

“When I picked up the key,” I said to Paco, “Doc Lee told me that this old house is two stories tall. My idea is to trick Salt and Pepper into thinking that you and Spot and I are upstairs in bed when we will, in fact, barricade ourselves downstairs. We’re going to be like Oz in the Wizard of Oz. Have you seen that movie?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, you’ll see what I mean when we get to the house. When these thugs break in, we can hit them with the pepper spray and the ants.”

I glanced over at Paco. He was staring ahead, frowning.

“After we set up our trap, we’ll take the Jeep so that Salt and Pepper will recognize us. We’ll stake out the vacation house where they’re staying.

“Hopefully, they’ll come out at some point and see us. We’ll make like we’re trying to escape them, but we won’t do a good job of it. As they follow us, we’ll stay in populated areas so they don’t dare try to jump us. They’ll follow us to the trap. I’m hoping that when they see the situation, they’ll decide to wait until night to make their move.”

The turn-off to Doctor Redack’s tear-down was as Doc Lee described, not far from Chamber’s Landing, on the mountain side of the highway.

The house was in a quaint neighborhood of old cabins. To get to Redack’s house, we drove two blocks in from the highway, turned north and went three more blocks. We parked and walked up carrying our supplies in black plastic lawn-and-leaf bags. If anybody saw us, I hoped they would think that we were simply doing fall cleanup work.