Storm Runners (4 page)

T
hey came to the ocean at Fifty-second Street and turned south. The sun was caught in the clouds above Catalina Island like an orange suspended in gauze. The stiff breeze dried Stromsoe’s left eyelid and the pins in his legs felt creaky as old door hinges. The skin graft on his left breast tended to tighten in the cool evenings. He pulled up his coat collar and slipped on his sunglasses.

He told Susan about taking Hallie into his little college apartment in Fullerton and getting her off the drugs. And about how he had escorted her into court to testify in Mike’s robbery trial, traded mad dog stares with Tavarez, how Mike’s mother sobbed after the sentencing, and how Mike nodded to them—a courtly, emotionless nod—as he was led back to his cell.

“Do you mind?” Susan asked, taking a small digital camera from the pocket of her jacket.

“Okay.”

She set her notebook in the sand with the pen clipped to the rings, and started snapping pictures. “I’d like some candids of you and Hallie and Billy too. From your home.”

“Okay,” he said.

Okay, because their story must be told and their pictures must be seen. Okay, because Tavarez can’t take away their stories or their pictures. Or my memories. Ever.

“I know it hurts,” said Susan, “but face the sun, will you? It lights your face beautifully.”

He faced the sun, his right eye shuddering with the brightness and his left eye registering nothing at all. Susan circled him, clicking away. He turned to face her and he began talking about their wedding and their life while he went through the Sheriff ’s Academy, about their attempts to have a child and the doctors and tests and doctors and tests and the sudden presence of another life inside Hallie, detected by a drugstore pregnancy test on what was probably the happiest day of their life together until then.

Billy.

They walked on, then stopped to watch the sun dissolve into an ocean of dark metallic blue. To Stromsoe none of it looked like it used to. He wondered if this would be the last time he’d walk this beach. That would be okay. That’s why he listed the house for sale. The world was large. A new home can be a new life.

“When Mike ordered the bomb, was it intended for Hallie and Billy, or just you?”

“Just me.”

“Why does he hate you so much?”

“I loved Hallie and spent my life trying to put him in a cage.”

There was Ofelia too, and what happened to her, but that was not something he could tell a reporter.

“You accomplished both,” she said. “You won.”

Stromsoe said nothing.

They started back across the sand toward the houses. Stromsoe looked at the beachfront windows, copper in the fading light.

“Thanks for everything,” she said. “For telling me your story. I know it hurt.”

“It helped too.”

“If you need a friend, I’ll be it,” said Susan Doss.

“Oh?” He glanced at her and saw that she was looking down. “I appreciate that. I really do.”

“What I mean is, this is me. This is what I look like and this is what I am. And I think you’re wonderful and brave and loyal and I’d be proud to be your friend. Maybe more. I’m sorry to be clumsy and insensitive. I think my moment is right now and if it passes I’ll never see you again.”

He looked at her, not knowing what to say.

“Plus, I get four weeks’ paid vacation, great medical, and good retirement. I’ve got good teeth, strong legs, and an iron stomach. I’m relatively low maintenance.”

He smiled.

“And I only look clean-cut.”

“I can’t.”

They came to the street and headed toward Stromsoe’s house.

“I talk too much at the wrong time,” she said. “It’s a problem.”

“Hallie was the same way.”

“You’re a beautiful man.”

“You’re a beautiful woman but I can’t.”

“I understand, Matt.”

Susan lightly held his arm until they came to the house. She waited in the living room while Stromsoe chose a framed picture from the spare bedroom wall: Hallie, Billy, and him on the beach, not far from where he had just watched the sun go down, smiling back at the stranger they’d asked to take the shot.

She looked at the picture then at Stromsoe. “You’ll find all this again. Somewhere, someday.”

He wanted to tell her it was impossible, but saw no reason to belittle her opinion.

One thing Stromsoe knew for certain about life was that things only happen once.

LATER THAT NIGHT he packed and loaded the car. It didn’t hold much, but he got his bare necessities, the bag with Hallie’s jewelry, and the one with Billy’s things.

He cooked canned stew and drank and limped through the house again as the memories collided with one another and the waves roared then hissed against the beach.

He signed a power-of-attorney form downloaded from the Web and left it on the kitchen table with a check for five thousand dollars, made out to Dan Birch.

He’d call Dan from wherever he was tomorrow, explain the situation.

He slept in his bed for the last time.

EARLY THE NEXT morning he gassed up and headed east toward Arizona. By two that afternoon he was in Tucson, where he called
Birch and talked about the selling of his house. Dan was unhappy about Stromsoe’s plans but said he’d handle the sale and have the money deposited in the proper account.

“I want you to call me,” said Birch. “I’m not going to let you vanish.”

“I’ll call, Dan. I don’t want to vanish.”

“What do you want?”

“Forward motion.”

By midnight Stromsoe was outside of Abilene, Texas. He parked in a rest stop, unloaded boxes from the backseat, and slept. At sunrise he was on the road again.

He began drinking in Jackson, Mississippi, ten hours later. In the morning he took a city tour by bus for no reason he could fathom. He threw his cell phone into a trash can on Gallatin Street, then gassed up the Ford and stepped on it.

Mississippi became Alabama, then, troublingly, Indiana. He aimed south again, got a motel for the night, but by then it was morning. Georgia was humid and Florida was flat, then suddenly Miami was wavering before him like the Emerald City itself. He rented an upstairs apartment on Second Avenue, not far from the Miami-Dade College campus. Once he had the boxes upstairs he sold the Ford for five thousand and opened a checking account with fake ID from his undercover days with the Sheriff ’s Department. He got a new cell phone but never told Dan the number. The restaurant below his apartment was Cuban-Chilean and the food was extremely hot. Lucia the waitress called him Dead Eye. He ate and drank, drank and ate. Months later he flew back to California to testify against Tavarez. Other than that one week, he didn’t get farther than walking distance from his Second Avenue apartment. Downtown Miami swirled around him, a heated closed-loop hallucination featuring Brickell
Avenue, Biscayne Bay, and the ceiling fan of his small, box-choked room.

TWO YEARS LATER Stromsoe woke up to find Dan Birch hovering over him. A potful of cool water hit him in the face.

“It stinks in here,” said Birch. He dropped the pot with a clang. “There’s cockroaches all over your floor. Get up, Matt. No more of this.”

“Of this?”

“Get the fuck up. Then we can talk about it.”

S
tromsoe sat in Dan Birch’s Irvine office and looked out at the clear October morning.

It was thirty-two days since Miami and the pot of water in his face. He had come back to California with Birch, completed a monthlong detox program in Palm Springs, then taken a furnished rental in downtown Santa Ana, not far from where he had grown up. He’d started jogging and lifting weights during his detox, with arguable results. Everything hurt.

Today, Monday, he sat in his friend’s office with a cup of coffee, like any other guy hoping for a job. He could hardly believe that over two years had passed since he last talked with Birch in his haunted, long-sold home in Newport.

“How are you feeling, Matt?”

“Good.”

“Drinking?”

“Lightly.”

“You idiot.”

“It’s under control.”

Birch tapped his desktop with a pen. The office was on the twelfth floor and had great views southwest to Laguna.

“We got a call last week from a woman down in San Diego County,” he said. “She’s a weather lady for Fox down in San Diego—Frankie Hatfield is her name. Nice gal. Seen her on TV?”

“No.”

“I hadn’t either, until last night. She’s good. A year ago I did some work for one of the producers there at her channel. Frankie—Frances Leigh is her full name—told him she had a problem. The producer recommended me. I recommended you.”

Stromsoe nodded as Birch stared at him.

“Up for this?” asked Birch.

“Yes, I am.”

“You would be an employee and representative of Birch Security Solutions,” said Birch. “I use the best.”

“I understand, Dan.”

“The best control themselves.”

“I can do that. I told you.”

Birch continued to look at his friend. “So, Frankie Hatfield is being stalked. Doesn’t know by whom. Never married, no children, no ugly boyfriends in the closet, no threats. The last time she saw the guy, she was doing one of her live weather broadcasts. They shoot live on location, various places around San Diego. He might be an infatuated
fan—some guy who follows the Fox News van out of the yard and around the city. I’ve got some letters and e-mails she’s received at work but I don’t see anything to take seriously. She’s caught glimpses of this guy—dark hair and dark complexion, medium height and weight—three times. Twice on her private property. She filed a complaint with SDPD but you know that drill.”

“They can’t help her until he assaults her.”

“More or less.”

Birch tapped his keyboard, adjusted the monitor his way, and leaned back. “Yeah, here. She’s seen this guy outside her studio in downtown San Diego, on her residential property in Fallbrook, on her investment property in Bonsall, and possibly following her on I-5 in a gold four-door car. She hasn’t gotten plate numbers because he stays too far back. He takes pictures of her. He has not spoken to her. He has not called. He has not acknowledged her in any way except by running away from her.”

“She’s tried to confront him?”

“Confront him? Hell, she
photographed
him. Check these.”

Birch flicked four snapshots across the desk to Stromsoe. Stromsoe noted that they were high-pixel digital images printed on good picture paper.

“Frances is not a fearful sort,” said Birch.

Two of the pictures showed a sloping hillside of what appeared to be avocado trees. In a clearing stood a tapered wooden tower of some kind. It looked twenty feet tall, maybe more. In one picture a man stood beside the tower looking at the camera, and in the next three he was running away. He was dark-haired and dark-skinned, dressed in jeans, a light shirt, and athletic shoes. He looked small.

“That was taken on her Bonsall property,” said Birch.

“How big is the parcel?” asked Stromsoe.

“A hundred acres. Says she goes there to be alone.”

“Where’s Bonsall?”

“Next door to Fallbrook.”

Stromsoe pictured a woman sitting in the middle of a hundred-acre parcel to be alone. It seemed funny, but it also seemed like she had a right to her privacy on her own land.

“Frankie has a decent home security system,” said Birch. “I set her up with a panic button that will ring the Sheriff ’s substation in Fallbrook and you simultaneously. I set her up with one month of twice-a-day patrol. I sold her a bodyguard—that would be you—for trips to and from work and while she’s on the job, for the next thirty days. Handle it?”

“I can handle it.”

“This guy is pretty bold, Matt. She’s seen him three times in twelve days, plus the maybe on the freeway. I don’t think he’s a weenie wagger—he’d have whipped it out already. Obsessed fan? Rapist? Find out. Arrest the creep if you can, let the cops chew his sorry ass. Give Frankie some peace of mind. I told her you were our best. She’s expecting you at her home at noon today, to follow her into San Diego to the studio. She starts around one in the afternoon and heads home after the live shoot at eight o’clock. Keep track of your hours. If you shake this guy loose before thirty days are up, we’ll all talk.”

Birch handed Stromsoe the panic button, a concealed-carry sidearm permit for San Diego County, and a sheet of paper with Frances Hatfield’s numbers on it.

FALLBROOK WAS A SMALL town fifty miles north of San Diego, twelve miles inland, tucked behind Camp Pendleton. Stromsoe had
never been there. The road in from Oceanside was winding and the traffic was light. He looked out at the avocado orchards and orange groves, the flowered undulating valleys of the big nurseries, the horses in their corrals, the houses on the hilltops or buried deep within the greenery. There was an antiques store, a feed and tack store, a drive-through cappuccino stand. He saw a tennis court hidden in the trees, and a very small golf course—obviously homemade—sloping down from a house with a red tile roof. He drove through a tunnel of huge oak trees then back into a blast of sunlight and thousands of orange butterflies. The sky was filled with them. A herd of llamas eyed him sternly from an emerald pasture. He rolled down the window of his new used pickup truck and smelled blossoms.

Frances Hatfield’s voice on the gate phone was clear and crisp. She enunciated well. The gate rolled to the side without sound.

Her property was hilly and green, planted with avocado and citrus. The avocado trees were tall, shaggy and heavy with small fruit. Stromsoe had no idea how much of the land was hers because the orchards rambled on, a hilly, fenceless tableau in the clean October sunlight. A hawk shot across the treetops with a high-pitched keen.

Frances Hatfield was a tall woman, dark-haired and brown-eyed. She looked to be in her midtwenties. A straight, narrow nose and assertive bones gave her a patrician face, but it was softened by her smile. She was dressed in jeans, packer boots, and a white blouse tucked in.

“Hello, Mr. Stromsoe. I’m Frankie Hatfield.”

She offered her hand. A golden retriever itemized the smells on Stromsoe’s shoes and legs.

“My pleasure, Ms. Hatfield.”

“This is Ace.”

“Hey, Ace.” He looked up. “Nice butterflies.”

“Painted ladies,” she said. “They migrate by the millions every few years. They’ll be gone with the first rain.”

“Are these your orchards?”

“I almost break even on the avocados,” she said. “They take a lot of water and water is expensive here. Please come in. Want to just go with Frankie and Matt?”

“Good.”

The house was cool and quiet. Through the mullioned windows the orchard rows convened in the middle distance. Ace produced a ball but gave no hint of giving it up. Stromsoe smelled blossoms again, then a recently used fireplace, then brewing coffee. A grizzled gray dog with a white face wandered up to Stromsoe on petite feet and slid her head under his hand.

“Hope you don’t mind dogs,” said Frankie.

“I love dogs.”

“Do you have any?”

“Not right now.”

“That’s Sadie.”

They sat in the living room. It was large, open-beamed, and paneled with cedar. With its many windows the room seemed to be a part of the patio beyond it and the avocado orchard beyond that. The patio fountain trickled faintly and Stromsoe could hear it through the screen doors.

A series of softened explosions seemed to roll across the sky to them, powerful blasts muted by distance.

“That’s artillery exercise at Camp Pendleton,” said Frankie. “The sound of freedom. You get used to it.”

“I used to live near the beach and I got used to the waves. Didn’t hear them unless I tried to.”

“Kind of a shame, actually.”

“I thought so.”

Stromsoe felt the faraway artillery thundering in his bones.

“I have no idea who he is, or what he wants,” said Frankie. “He does not seem threatening, although I take his presence on my property as a threat. I have no bad people in my past. I have skeletons but they’re good skeletons.”

Stromsoe brought her snapshots from his coat pocket and looked at them again. “Does he resemble anyone you know?”

She shook her head.

“Brave of you to whip out the camera and start shooting,” he said.

“I lack good sense sometimes.”

“I’m surprised it didn’t scare him off. What’s this wooden tower for?”

Stromsoe held out the picture and pointed.

“I have no idea. It’s been on the Bonsall property forever.”

“Is that where you go to be alone?”

“Yes. I escape from me.”

Stromsoe noted that the tower didn’t look old enough to have been somewhere forever.

He brought out the panic button and set it on the rough pine trunk between them.

“You flip the cover like an old pocket watch, push the button three times,” he said. “If you hold the button down for five seconds or more, the call is officially canceled but I’ll show up anyway. So will the sheriffs if you’re out here in the county, or the San Diego PD if you’re downtown.”

“GPS?” She examined the gadget.

“Yes. It’s always on.”

“Can it differentiate between all the cities in the county?”

“Any city in the United States, actually.”

“Impressive.”

“Not if you don’t have it with you.”

She smiled. The smile disarmed the angles of her face and brightened her dark eyes. “I will.”

Stromsoe told her he’d follow her to and from work, said not to get out until he’d parked and come to her vehicle, to leave the engine running until then, and if he didn’t get there within two minutes to hit the panic button, drive to the exit, get on the nearest freeway, and call the police.

“Do you have a gun?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you good with it?”

“Yes. I used to be very good,” he said.

“Do you adjust for the monovision?”

“Of course.”

“Your prosthetic is a beautiful match, really,” she said. “A friend of mine in school had one. She was a poet.”

Stromsoe nodded. He reflexively balled his left fingers into a loose fist to obscure the missing one. “I suppose you’ve got a gun.”

“It’s a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight revolver, two-inch barrel. I’ve got a valid CCP and I’ve done ten hours of range training. To be honest I’m shaky outside of twelve feet. Fifty feet, I can’t even hit the silhouette. It kicks like a mule.”

“Those short barrels make it tough,” he said.

“It makes lots of noise though. I feel better with it.”

“You possibly are.”

“It’s a very unpleasant feeling, being watched.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No matter how ready I am, it always comes as a surprise when I see him. And I almost always
feel
watched before I realize I’m being watched. But then, I
feel
watched and a lot of the time I’m not. That’s what it does to you. You begin to doubt your senses. And that makes a person feel weak and afraid.”

Frankie’s hands were large and slender and she used them generously while she talked. Since losing the finger, Stromsoe had paid special attention to people’s hands. He considered the way that weather forecasters like to swirl theirs over the projection maps to show the path of coming fronts and storms.

“Don’t feel weak and afraid,” he said. “My job is to make your job easier. Forget about this guy. He can’t hurt you. Leave him to me.”

She looked at him straight on, no smile, the dark eyes in forthright evaluation.

“I can’t tell you how good that sounds,” she said. “I’ve lost more than a little sleep over this.”

“No more.”

Her intense scrutiny dissolved into a smile. “We should go. It takes an hour to get to San Diego this time of day. We’re going to the Fox building off of Clairemont Mesa. I drive fast.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep up. After you’re past the parking-lot booth, don’t drive to your space. Wait for me while I explain myself to the attendant.”

“He’s a tough old guy,” said Frankie. “Suspicious and not friendly. You drive up for the five hundredth time and he looks at you like
he’s never seen you before. Then he takes an hour to check your number.”

“He’ll see the light,” said Stromsoe. “Your job is to pretend I’m not there. Things will work best that way.”

She half smiled, said nothing. Ace continued to hoard his ball and the artillery went off again in the west.