Storm Runners (13 page)

“Because Frankie liked Choat even less than I did. ‘Creeped me out’ is what she said. She thinks Choat would lock up the formula and toss the key.”

Stromsoe thought about that. Hard to imagine.

Or was it? With triple the supply falling from the sky, wouldn’t people need you for two-thirds less of it? Triple the supply of Chevys and you have to sell them for a third the price. And what court in the country would hand a utility company the sole right to increase rainfall and reap the rewards? If you couldn’t monopolize the formula—or destroy it—someday you’d be a lot less needed.

“How come Frankie didn’t tell me about Choat?” asked Stromsoe.

“She didn’t think he’d stoop so far as to intimidate her. She thought Cedros was just a stalker. She’s naive in a lot of ways, really. And stubborn.”

Stromsoe nodded. “I like it that she loves the rain and collects rivers.”

“She’s not like anybody else.”

He looked at her sleeping under the blanket, fire shadows playing off her face. “Well, ’night, Ted.”

“Good night,” said Ted. “Be good to her.”

“You too.”

Stromsoe drove home with the windows down and the smell of rain and soil and citrus in the cool air. The clouds had blown out and the sky was now black and pricked by stars. He thought of Frankie Hatfield and his heart rose and hovered like he was in an elevator coming to a stop or on a roller coaster when he was young.

M
ike Tavarez lay on his bunk and listened to the steely hum of night-locked Pelican Bay State Prison, the tap of the guard’s boots approaching on the concrete floor, the distant wails of men driven insane in the Security Housing Unit, the X.

Lunce arrived at El Jefe’s cell with his usual Monday-night pout. This was Tavarez’s “family”—conjugal—visit night, though it would not take place in the Pelican Bay apartments available for such visits, commonly known as the Peter Palace. Lunce was extra sullen on Mondays and Tavarez knew he was envious.

It was ten o’clock. Tavarez stripped, bowed, opened himself for Lunce’s cursory visual inspection, then redressed and turned his back and put his hands to the bean chute for cuffing.

They walked wordlessly from the wing, inmates stirring, inmates watching. In the library Lunce released the cuffs and took his seat at the end of the long aisle. Tavarez pulled the world atlas down from the G shelf and went to work on the neat little laptop.

Much to do.

El Jefe’s most recent batch of mail had contained a plea from La Eme captains in Los Angeles who wanted to deal with the south-side green lighters more forcefully. Tavarez tapped away in the code he had helped devise, the code based on Ofelia’s impenetrable Huazanguillo dialect, then sent his instructions to five different addresses at once: permission granted.

He looked over at thick Lunce. The Web was the best thing that had happened to La Eme since the Nahuatl code had been invented. Now, using the two together, it was almost as easy as picking up a phone—and his orders were practically impossible to trace, divert, or crack.

Thinking about the code brought up memories of Ofelia. And with them came memories of what Stromsoe had done to her. He would deal with Stromsoe soon.

There was good news from Dallas and the problems with Mara Salvatrucha—La Eme gangsters had canceled two of the Salvadorans in broad daylight the day before—no arrests, no problems.

Tavarez quickly approved La Eme memberships for a Venice Beach gangster doing time in Corcoran and another who had just hit the bricks back in Ontario after two years in Vacaville. They had proven their loyalty and were willing to swear an allegiance to La Eme that would override their street loyalties once and forever.

This changing of loyalty, Tavarez knew, was what had turned La Eme from a simple prison gang into an empire of soldiers in every
city in Southern California, and in many other states besides. La Eme’s rules for membership were simple and had seemed right to Tavarez from the first time he’d heard them. You cannot be a snitch, a homosexual, or a coward. You cannot disrespect another member. Death is the automatic consequence for violation of any of the first three rules. Only a member can carry out the murder of another. Such murders must be approved by three members.

He coded his congratulations to the new members, to be passed on by higher associates in Corcoran and on the streets of Ontario, along with the usual warnings to keep close eyes on these new men. Loyalty had a price, just like everything else.

Tavarez ordered a payment of fifty thousand dollar to the widow of a La Eme OG—original gangster—who had been shot down by La Nuestra Familia gunmen in the “border” city of Bakersfield. He asked that the Bakersfield associates produce the name of the shooter within forty-eight hours. It would be a bloody season up there on the border between La Eme of the south and La Nuestra Familia of the north.

He approved a one-month extension on an eighty-thousand-dollar payment due from the Little Rascals’ cocaine sales but ordered one of the gang’s members killed each week if the deadline wasn’t met.

He ordered a five-thousand-dollar withdrawal from a La Eme “regional account” and given to the daughter of a La Eme soldier on her wedding day next month.

He sent condolences to a new widow in Los Angeles; congratulations to a new father in Riverside.

Tavarez enjoyed the feeling of his fingers flying over the keys. It was something like playing a clarinet, but instead of musical notes
his fingers produced action. It was like fingering a melody that didn’t hover in the air and vanish but rather pushed itself across time and space into the lives of real people and forced them to act the way that Tavarez wanted them to act.

When his gang business was finished he visited his personal accounts online—three in Grand Cayman and two in Switzerland—and found them to be earning nicely at the usual three percent. He was worth almost $2 million now. Every original penny of it had come from what he collected for La Eme through drug trafficking, tributes from cowed ’hood gangsters twelve and thirteen years old, extortion and protection money, blackmail money, blood money—anytime Tavarez took in a dollar for La Eme he chipped off a few cents for himself. Never enough to show. Never enough to raise an eyebrow. And he quickly delivered the cash to Iris, a Harvard acquaintance who had become an investment banker in Newport Beach and could electronically credit the money to accounts thousands of miles away that only Tavarez had the numbers to access. A few hundred dollars here, a few hundred dollars there. He’d started investing with her secretly right after being released from Corcoran and having seen all of his armed robbery loot taken by lawyers and the cops. He was hugely proud of the fact that, though he was a convicted murderer doing life in Pelican Bay, nobody had been able to locate his money. Amazing, what twelve years of compound interest and steady contributions could do, he thought. He could still remember the rippling of his nerves when he stole his first hundred dollars from La Eme kingpin, mentor, friend, and uncle-in-law Paul Zolorio. It was only a hundred dollars, but it was almost as exciting as knocking off the liquor stores when he was at Harvard, and much more dangerous. He and Ofelia had celebrated that moment with a
night of wild lovemaking and huge happiness. Two days later he’d married Miriam.

Which brought him to Matt Stromsoe.

Tavarez shook his head again, still not quite able to believe that fate—a distant relative named John Cedros—had delivered Stromsoe back into his hands.

Tavarez had always been lucky. He was born with a high IQ, musical talent, and a gift for understanding people. He was handsome and women fell for him. He had courage and unusual physical strength. He had 20/10 uncorrected vision. He had met Paul Zolorio and found a direction for his life simply by being in the same prison.

Then there were other good fortunes too. He’d been shot through the side of his neck once with a .25-caliber handgun and the bullet hit nothing vital. He survived without seeing a doctor, just two painful black-and-red rips at either end of a tunnel that Ofelia had cleaned out by running a piece of alcohol-drenched T-shirt through it with a pencil. And there was the time his warrants had failed to show during a traffic stop and he’d come
that
close to grabbing the handgun from the console of his Suburban and killing a CHP officer. He had foreseen in a dream an attempt on his life and saved himself by taking a different road to Culiacán one day while meeting with cartel heavies in Sinaloa. He won at craps in Las Vegas and poker in Gardena. He rarely played the California Lottery games but had won more often than anyone he knew, and for good money—five hundred here, three-fifty there, a thousand once on tickets that had cost him three bucks apiece.

But this felt like something more than just luck, something heavier and less clever. This was having your life changed by a force
intimately familiar with your desires. This was an act of God,
his
God—the God of Jesus and Mary and Aztlán.

The question was what to do. There was the obvious: he could have Stromsoe beaten and the weather lady tortured—that would almost certainly get Cedros’s information returned. He would have his two hundred thousand in cash couriered to Newport Beach and Iris would credit his accounts, minus payments wired to his most trusted men. Cedros would move higher into the DWP bureaucracy. Cedros didn’t know it, but he was already the property of La Eme, because the lawyer had tape-recorded the meeting and Cedros’s solicitations were clearly of criminal intent.

Or he could kill them both, and Cedros too, and be done with it, leaving no trail back to Pelican Bay.

All of this was obvious.

But, what if?

What if he had been correct in sensing that Stromsoe looked at this weather lady in a special way?

What if that attentive angle of Stromsoe’s head in the picture taken of them outside her house had betrayed a more than casual interest from the newly hired private detective?

If that was true, then Tavarez had a chance to send Stromsoe through the flames of hell on Earth not just once—but
twice
. By killing his new hopes. His new dreams. By killing his future.

I would do it right in front of him, Tavarez thought. Let him see and live and remember what it means to lose everything—
again!

It would finally be fair revenge for Ofelia, who left the Aztec gods for Jesus and left Jesus for me and died for it. Fair revenge, because the deaths of insatiable, ignorant, arrogant Hallie and her offspring were almost valueless compared to the life of Ofelia.

It would be the stuff of a hundred
corridos
that I could listen to in the shade of my home on the beach in Sayulitos, Nayarit, where I will retire when I’m out of this prison.

When I’m out.

He looked over at Lunce. Lunce was reading a car magazine with a bright red roadster on the cover.

Look at him, thought Tavarez. If he’s the best the
norteamericanos
have to offer, I can do it. Not long now. Not long. I have what I need.

Tavarez shook his head and pictured the calm, humorless face of Ariel Lejas, the most capable man he knew. Then his hands began to fly across the keys.

In a confounding amalgam of Nahuatl, Spanish, and English, Tavarez ordered Lejas to dispatch Marcus Ampostela to the home of John Cedros, 300 North Walton, Azusa. Ampostela would pick up one hundred K and Cedros would handwrite all needed details regarding his request. Ampostela would deliver the money and the information to Lejas and Lejas would FedEx seventy-five-thousand to Newport Beach, keep twenty thousand for himself, and lay off five to Ampostela.

Tavarez paused and looked down at the screen. The strange Nahuatl words jumped out and reminded him of Ofelia as they always did.
Ichpochtli
(young woman)…
Momatequia
(wash your hands)…
Tlazocamati
(thank you)…
Icniuhtli
(friend)…

Interspersed with the Nahuatl was some English:
My Dear Friend…PI Stromsoe…possibly armed…barn…Weather Lady…your account…

Tavarez painstakingly went through the message and rewrote every third sentence backward—both words and the letters of the
words. He randomly added three sentences beginning with the Nahuatl word for “to marry”—
Monamictia
—that contained nothing but Nahuatl-like nonsense that Lejas would know to ignore.

When Tavarez was finished he looked down on what would be just dizzying blather to anyone but a patient Mexican-American gangster with a knowledge of Nahuatl and Sinaloan slang.

He took a deep breath and organized his thoughts before he ended the message:

Ignore Cedros. Kill the woman. Make the PI watch and let him live.

TAVAREZ WALKED TOWARD the eastern perimeter of the Pelican Bay Prison grounds. He was handcuffed from behind again. The October night was cold and clear and the moon was loitering into its first quarter.

It was neither dark nor light, but a twilit truce between the blackness of the Northern California forest around them and the muted light straining out from the prison buildings three hundred yards to the west.

Out here away from the compound, the grass was sprayed with poison once a month so it would not provide cover for even the ground squirrels but the lavish rains dulled the herbicide enough for new shoots to grow and these stunted storm-drenched blades now soaked through Tavarez’s prison sneakers and sent a chill up his shins.

He saw the North Star shimmering off the lip of the Big Dipper and smelled the wet green density of the Northern California forest that pressed right up to the prison fence line in front of him.

Lunce followed, tapping the rolled car magazine against his leg.

Tavarez approached the fence. It was twenty-feet-high, electrified chain link that carried 650 milliamperes and 5,000 volts—nine times the lethal limit for human beings. It was topped with two rolls of razor ribbon in case the electricity failed.

Seventy-five yards to his left a guard tower stood outlined against the autumn sky. Seventy-five yards to his right was another. The towers were staffed at this hour by one of Cartwright’s loyal men, who included Post and Lunce and a few others. The interior lights brought a quiet green glow to their insides and Tavarez could see in the northern tower the black motion of the guard as he moved within. The floodlights were aimed away from them and they wouldn’t begin their crisscrossing searches for the half hour that Tavarez had bargained for. The video cameras running along the fence were off now, activated when needed only by Cartwright and his “situations” brethren who controlled the three other sides of the perimeter.

The flashlight flicked twice from the forest. It belonged to Jimmy, who belonged to La Eme. It came from a slightly different place each week, but there was a creek that wandered close to the fence between two stands of cedar trees and in the dark Tavarez could tell from the smell of the trees and the gurgling of the creek where Jimmy and his people would be waiting.

He came to the fence and stopped. A moment later Lunce stood to one side of him, removing the spare cuffs from the pouch on his duty belt.

Tavarez watched as Lunce took a step back and tossed the stainless-steel handcuffs against the chain-link fence.