Storm Runners (10 page)

J
ohn Cedros stood with his shoulders stooped and his head down, not quite looking at the director of resources.

Instead he glanced sideways through the blinds and saw Los Angeles below him, sprawling all the way to the ocean under a soft, white, cloudless sky.

Director Patrick Choat sat caged behind the bars of pale sunlight falling on his cherrywood desk and cabinetry. The light was low. He had a corner office at DWP headquarters, fourteenth floor—Water Operations.

“How long did he question you?”

“Half an hour.”

“And the police?”

“An hour. They ask everything twice.”

“What did you tell them?”

“What we agreed I would tell them,” said Cedros. “It wasn’t until I started talking that I saw how bad it sounded. Like I was some guy pulling my pud in the bushes. I wish you and I had worked out a better cover story.”

“You weren’t supposed to need the cover story.”

“They took the pictures,” said Cedros. “Just like we thought they would.”

Director Choat nodded slightly, a barely perceptible disturbance within the slats of light and shadow.

“Were they convinced you were a common stalker?” he asked.

“The sheriffs were. The bodyguard thought I was lying.”

“Then he’ll come to us.”

“I think that’s possible, sir,” said Cedros. “I think it’s also possible that, if I stay away from her, he’ll just leave us alone.”

“You don’t know who we’re dealing with.”

Overhead lights came on and Patrick Choat’s great creased face emerged from the shadows.

Cedros looked at him—the trimmed gray hair, the oft-broken nose, the thick brush of a mustache, the pin-collared dress shirt snug against his thick neck, and the gray, seldom-blinking eyes.

Choat cupped the photographs in one big stubby hand, dropped them to the desk, then fanned them out in front of Cedros.

Cedros saw that they were from the batch he’d shot two days ago in La Jolla, just before the bodyguard had chased him.

“I ran your picture of the bodyguard through our risk assessment program in Security,” said Choat. “His name is Matt Stromsoe. He’s
the cop who got blown up by the bomb a couple of years ago. A drug thing that got personal. His wife and son were killed.”

“I don’t know about any bomb, sir.”

“You wouldn’t. He’s a PI now. She hired him because she’d caught you looking.”

“I tried my best. I’m custodial, not a spy.”

“Indeed. Though now you’ve been charged as such.”

“I’m charged with worse than that. And my only way to protect you is to stick to my story and pretend I was stalking her for personal reasons. It’s a sex crime, sir.”

Choat looked at Cedros. “I can promise that this won’t go to trial.”

“I have a wife and we’re expecting our second child.”

“Everybody has a wife and kids. But you also have my word—this will not go to trial.”

Cedros nodded and looked down at the polished marble floor. He could feel his briefly promising life caving in around him. It was the same feeling as a cell door clanging shut behind you. He had come so far in his twenty-four short years. Only to run smack into this.

“How can we guarantee that?” he asked. “Frankie Hatfield has pressed charges and I’ve been arraigned.”

Choat leaned back. He lay his big leonine head against his chair. “Can you get me Ms. Hatfield’s formula or can’t you?”

“I don’t even know if it’s written down. I’ve been inside the barn, but it’s stuffed with all kinds of things.”

“Well, then, we’re right back where we started.”

“Which is where?”

“She can either accelerate moisture or she can’t.”

“It’s going to be pretty hard to watch her any more, with this bodyguard around,” said Cedros.

Choat nodded. “Prophylaxis.”

“Sir?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Think of a way to make those charges go away.”

“I already have.”

Choat stood. He was a very big man with a barrel chest made even more pronounced by the suit vests he wore.

“Sit,” he said.

Cedros sat and felt the anger spike inside him.

Choat slowly circled the desk and stopped in front of the window facing west.

Cedros looked out at the whitening sky. The news had said that there were three storm fronts forming out over the Pacific and that one might hit L.A. this weekend. Today was much cooler than yesterday, down in cheerful San Diego County, where he’d made his bail, collected his car, and finally gotten away from the PI.

“Rain,” said Choat.

“Only a small possibility, I heard.”

Choat turned to look at him. Cedros was impressed by how much contempt the man could convey with just one expression.

“John,” said Choat. “We need help. We need someone outside our immediate sphere here at DWP. Someone fair and impartial, with the power to help us, and a clear understanding of what a dollar means—and what a promotion can mean to a young family man. You’re twenty-four.”

“Yes.”

“The wife, Marianna, is what, twenty-two?”

“Yes.”

“Mexican-American, like you?”

“She’s Italian-American.”

“And Tony?”

Cedros swallowed and took a deep breath. Back in his badass days he would have been all over this pompous windbag. But you change in jail. You change when the world kicks your butt, seems to enjoy it, and leaves you with nothing. You change when you marry someone like Marianna Proetto and have a boy like Anthony and a daughter on the way.

“What about him?” asked Cedros. “He’s an everyday, four-year-old American boy if that’s all right with you. Sir.”

Choat turned and looked at Cedros. “I can fire you faster than you can get out of that chair.”

“I know. I saw you do it to Larsen and Kuyper.”

“My point is that a lot is riding here.”

“No kidding,” said Cedros.

He watched Choat return to the window, where he adjusted the blinds infinitesimally. Cedros couldn’t tell if it was to let in more light or less. He entertained the wild fantasy of simply telling the truth in a court of law. But it wasn’t hard to predict what that would get him—fired for sure, convicted anyway, and a traitor’s heart to carry around the rest of his life.

“How are we going to get those charges dropped, Director Choat?”

Choat lifted his hand with casual power, like a man shooing a fly. “I don’t traffic in rumor. But I have been told by reliable people that you are related by blood to Mike ‘El Jefe’ Tavarez.”

The name rang oddly in Cedros’s ears. Tavarez and the DWP didn’t belong in the same sentence.

“Very distant blood, sir. No. I won’t consider going to him with this.”

Choat glanced at him, then back to the window. “Would you consider a promotion to maintenance technician grade two, working the Owens Gorge Transmission Line, with a rent-free home? One of the Owens Gorge cabins could be yours, in fact—the two-bedroom, two-bath. And the base compensation is better than you’re making now. Some maintenance techs make supervisor if they’re diligent, and most maintenance supervisors
die
maintenance supervisors—and they’re happy to. MS is the best career the DWP can offer a twenty-four-year-old with as much jail time as he has college. Hell, it’s the best job we can offer anybody, if you ask me. They call themselves ditch riders and they’re proud to. You work outside, in some of the most inspiring land in this state. You’ve got men under you. You’ve got responsibility and the power that comes with it. Sometimes, what happens on the Transmission Line is a matter of life and death. The job certainly beats custodial. You would retire at fifty-five with full salary and full benefits for your wife and yourself. That’s a little better than most of us do here at DWP. But you’re a friend and I will take care of you. As I’ve always said—it’s not about the water, it’s about the power. Christ in heaven, just talking about this promotion makes me jealous of you.”

Cedros swallowed hard. His heartbeat actually sped up with mention of the Owens Gorge cabins up near the Sierra Nevadas, which is where some of the Transmission Line and Aqueduct One employees were billeted. DWP had built the homes decades ago, because DWP employees were often heckled, hassled, and harassed by the Owens Valley locals. The locals thought the DWP was pure evil for putting their river in a tube and sending it south 250 miles to build Los Angeles back in the early 1900s. When that happened, most of the Owens Valley went from being a verdant green paradise
to a thirsty desert dust bowl, and it had never fully recovered.

But the cabins themselves were beautiful and serene, jostled together in the gorge near the DWP power plant, rough-hewn cabins with intersecting lawns of deep soft grass and the snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains shading them from the summer heat. The constant tumult of the Owens River in the background—briefly paroled from its tube to turn the power-plant turbines—was a hypnotic and powerful presence.

He had taken Marianna there once just to see the little community. They were cautiously welcomed onto the private compound by a guy who had helped get him on at DWP in the first place. They’d walked in the shade of the cottonwoods, going from cabin to cabin and house to house, meeting the people who lived there. And to Cedros’s mind this private world, which looked so lovely and peaceful and beautiful from the outside, looked even
better
when you got inside: friendly people, kids playing on the grass, the moms barefoot and smiling, and the men talking water and drinking beer in the shade while the California sky smiled down the most unusual shade of blue that Cedros had ever seen.

It was no L.A.

No guns.

No dope.

No garbage flying and whores dying and junkies lying in their own vomit on the street.

No way.

“That,” Marianna had said later as they walked to their car, “is heaven.”

Cedros pulled himself from the memory to see Resources Director Choat looking down at him.

“Sounds good, doesn’t it?” asked Choat.

“Sure.”

“Joan and I lived there briefly. Some of the happiest days of our lives.”

“I won’t contact Tavarez,” said Cedros. “I can’t go to La Eme, ask for a favor, and come back a free man. You may not understand that.”

“I certainly don’t. And we’re not asking any favors.”

Cedros shook his head and looked away. “What would you expect him to do for us?”

“Neutralize the bodyguard. Discourage the woman from pressing her charges. Retrieve the formula for us to study.”

Cedros just stared at Choat. “What exactly do you mean by neutralize and discourage?”

Choat shrugged. “Maybe El Jefe will have some ideas.”

“What’s in it for him, besides a promotion for a distant relative he’s never even seen?”

“I can divert two hundred thousand dollars from the Resource Emergencies Fund, and replenish it at budget time,” said Choat. “Some of the board of directors have spine. They are trusting and sympathetic. Mr. Tavarez can use the payment for his appeals. Or maybe just to provide for his family.”

Spine was Choat’s word for what it took to run the DWP. Members of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners—citizens elected to “guide” the gigantic utility—either had spine or did not. Spine meant the advancement of the DWP above all else. To Choat, DWP was larger than anything and anyone, even the individuals who ran it, including himself. It was exactly what its name said it was—
power
. Choat had once told Cedros that he was honored to be a pit bull for history.

Cedros thought now, for the thousandth time, that if they could just purchase Frankie’s formula away from her, everything would be fine.

If they could manage that, then there would be no possibility of rain on demand. No “moisture acceleration,” as old Charley Hatfield had called it. Los Angeles would stay as it was. DWP would remain the largest and most powerful water and power utility on Earth, right here in the middle of the desert that made it all possible. Choat could be what he’d always wanted to be—the modern relative of Mulholland and Eaton and Lippincott, the dreamers who first saw the Owens Valley and decided to bring its treasure to Los Angeles. Guys with spine. Guys with their portraits in the lobby. The guys who brought water to the city, but not too much of it. Because, as Choat liked to say—
only abundance can ruin us
.

Of course Choat had already tried the straightforward approach—offered Frances Hatfield a substantial sum of money to do her work under the auspices of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. In fact, Choat had pretty much offered her the farm: a stupendously large salary; a support staff of meteorologists and hydrologists and chemists; virtually unlimited funding for R&D; and practically any DWP land in the state—hundreds of thousands of acres—on which to set up her rainmaking headquarters.

Naturally, if she made rain, DWP would own the know-how and the equipment.

Frankie Hatfield said no.

“I won’t go to Tavarez, sir,” said Cedros. “I know that world. If I step in I’ll never get back out.”

“The alternative,” said Choat, “is to live your life as a known stalker of women. Marianna and little Tony deserve better than
that. And the department, of course, would have to sever all ties with you.”

Choat stared at Cedros then sat back down. “When you meet with Tavarez to explain our proposal,” he said, “make sure he sees your pictures of the bodyguard—the ones they didn’t take away from you. It’s essential that he knows who we’re dealing with. He’ll help us. I promise you. You have thirty seconds to decide what you’re going to do, but don’t even pretend to think about it.”