Storm Runners

15

John 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.”

16

Cedros signed in at the Pelican Bay visitors’ room and emptied his pockets, watch, wallet, and shoes into a bin.

They scanned him for metal just as they had scanned him a few hours ago at drizzly LAX. He never thought he’d be an accused stalker, and a suspected terrorist and prison smuggler in the same day.

And he never thought he’d see Pelican Bay as anything but an inmate.

It was Sunday now, six days since he’d been chased by this Stromsoe pendejo down in La Jolla, four days since getting his butt out of jail, three days since getting his orders from Choat.

Now he was about to call on a distant relative he’d never met, one of the most powerful gangsters in the country, doing life for murdering a woman and a child, and ask him for a favor. A favor that would earn El Jefe lots of money, and would set Cedros and his young family free of Los Angeles forever, but a favor nonetheless.

Twenty minutes later Cedros was seated across a steel table from Mike Tavarez and one of Tavarez’s lawyers. His heart pounded with fear of this hideous prison, but also with a deep thankfulness for not being confined to it — yet. He tried to picture the Owens Gorge cabin that he and Marianna and Tony and their daughter would share but he kept being pulled back by the calm, knowing eyes of Tavarez.

Tavarez was very pale, Cedros noted, but there was a sinewy hardness to his neck and arms. He was slender. His face was open and innocent-looking, and his hair was full and curly, which gave him the look of a soccer star. He was handcuffed in the front and his legs were in irons.

The lawyer was a young man with dark glasses and a sly smile. His presence here gave them privacy from the guards and recording equipment, explained Tavarez — attorney-client privilege, constitutionally guaranteed.

Cedros and Tavarez talked for a few minutes about relatives. There was actually only one that both of them had met — a third cousin of Tavarez’s who had married the half sister of one of Cedros’s incorrigible nephews from Azusa.

“Azusa?” asked Tavarez. “Who’d you click up with?”

“No one,” said Cedros. “I stayed out. Some school. A job.”

“Azusa 13?”

“I said, no one.”

“You know Marcus Ampostela?”

“No.”

“Tito Guzman? Ricky Dogs?”

“No. Sorry.”

Tavarez smiled and nodded.

“You want to talk to Marcus Ampostela.”

“I’ll remember that name.”

“You don’t have to. He’ll find you.”

“Good,” said Cedros.

“You look afraid right now,” said Tavarez.

“Not my kinda place, man.”

“The animals treat us like animals,” said Tavarez. “But I’ll hit the bricks soon. My appeal, you know. Now state your business.”

Cedros glanced nervously at the lawyer, who was staring at him, then up at the cameras in each corner of the visits room. He wasn’t sure how to solicit felonies from a convicted murderer without getting caught, but he had given it more than a little thought.

In fact he had spent almost the entire weekend in a break room at DWP, staring at the wall because there was no window, picturing this moment and what he would say. Marianna had given him wide berth the last few days. She knew that he had been trespassing and photographing the news lady down in San Diego at the behest of Director Choat — because the woman was trying to make rain. Now that her husband had been caught, Marianna would have to endure a trial and she was angry about it.

But she had soon sensed a crisis even deeper than the arrest, though she didn’t ask what it might be. Not asking had little to do with fear, something to do with trust, and much to do with the peace and well-being of the baby girl inside her.

“I’d like you to speak to a woman who has stolen something that belongs to my company,” said Cedros. He breathed deeply and continued. “She took information developed by scientists where I work. She hired a private detective for intimidation and to keep us from getting the information back. I tried to get the information from her and she has accused me of stalking her. My employers want the information returned, the bodyguard discouraged, and the charges against me dropped. Promptly. And they want it made clear that none of this will happen again.”

Tavarez frowned and nodded, prying into Cedros’s eyes with his own. “Information about what?”

Cedros shook his head. “No.”

“The name of your company?”

“No,” said Cedros.

Tavarez sat back, looked over at his attorney, then again at Cedros. “Why should your stalking problem become mine, little man?”

“I’ll also be given a very good promotion.”

There was a moment of faintly echoing, metallic silence, then Cedros laughed. Then Tavarez and the lawyer laughed too. For a moment Cedros felt a soaring joy and an unreasonable confidence that everything would be okay. He saw a guard’s inquisitive face appear behind a window to his left.

When the guard moved away, Cedros reached into his pocket and flashed Tavarez the back of a business card on which he had written $200K. Tavarez widened his eyes theatrically, grunted like an ape, and started laughing again.

Cedros brought out the picture of Frankie Hatfield and the PI down by Seal Rock in La Jolla. He set them on the table before El Jefe.

Tavarez stopped laughing and looked at Cedros. Cedros had seen the look before, ojos de piedros — the eyes of stone — and he thought for a moment that Tavarez was about to kill him.

“Do you know who this is?” Tavarez asked.

“He’s the PI working for the woman, Stromsoe,” said Cedros.

“And the woman?”

“Frankie Hatfield, a TV weather chick in San Diego.”

“She has your valuable company information?”

“Yes, she does.”

“And he’s protecting her and the information?”

“He is.”

Then Tavarez laughed again. “Holy Mother. Holy whore of a Mother.”

For a moment Tavarez just looked at the pictures and shook his head in apparent disbelief. Cedros wasn’t sure what Tavarez couldn’t believe — his promotion, the two hundred grand, how tall Frankie was?

“Any more pictures of them?” asked Tavarez.

“None with me,” said Cedros. “Why?”

“Where do you live?” asked Tavarez.

Cedros had dreaded this question but he knew this was how Tavarez would move forward if he chose to move forward at all — through one of his trusted people, not over a steel visitation table in Pelican Bay State Prison. Which presented a problem, because Cedros couldn’t exactly entertain La Eme personnel in a break room at the DWP. If you make a deal with the devil, he thought, you’ll have to shake his hand. He told Tavarez his address on North Walton.

“Marcus Ampostela,” said Tavarez.

“We want things taken care of quickly,” said Cedros.

“No worries, Homes. None at all. That thing on the business card? Have half of it ready for my man.”

Cedros nodded.

“And, John,” said Tavarez. “If anybody wants to know what we talked about in here, let’s say it was personal. We’re relatives, see, but we never met till now. We talked about family. Family. That’s all.”

Cedros drove away from the prison under a pouring Northern California sky. It was still only afternoon but the day was almost black. The rain roared down on his rental car and jumped up from the asphalt like it was boiling.

He squinted through the flashing wipers and felt as if the small, neat box of his life had been pried open and would never fit back together right. La Eme would soon be standing in his living room, breathing the same air as his wife and son. God only knew what they’d do to the weather lady and her bodyguard.

Cedros told himself that he had done the right thing, acted with spine. With storms like this up here, it was obviously possible to get too much rain instead of not enough. Not enough is what had made the DWP. So, two hundred thousand bones to keep extra rain from falling? To keep the DWP in control of every faucet and light switch in Los Angeles, every kilowatt hour, every drop of moisture used by 3.9 million people every second of every day? What a deal. Two hundred grand was like one drop hitting the road out there, one tiny part of the vast cascade of water and money that fell from heaven and surged through the state each second, north to south, the aqueducts mainlining the great thirsty arteries of L.A.

Yes, Cedros thought — money well spent. Choat would be silently rewarded by his masters on the board. They could give their pit bull a shiny new collar. Maybe he’d even get his portrait in the lobby someday.

And practically nobody would know, thought Cedros, that the guy who’d really kept the DWP in charge was a twenty-four-year-old custodial grunt with almost four mouths to feed. Which was fine with him. He didn’t want glory and he never wanted riches. To him, the DWP was not a God. All he wanted was a decent job and a cabin in the Owens Gorge, a place away from L.A. where he would love his wife and raise his children and not go through life as a guy who was tried for stalking a pretty TV personality because he was short. Even if he beat the charge, the stink would follow him forever. He could play golf with O.J. Drink with Baretta. Party down at Neverland.

Cedros wondered if the weather lady could really make rain. Maybe she really was as dangerous as Choat believed. Wouldn’t that be something?

Only abundance can ruin us.

17

Frankie’s uncle Ted drove the white long-bed pickup truck through the failing light of the breezeless, humid evening. The sky above Bonsall was soft and gray as the belly of a rabbit, and the fretful clouds in the northwest looked almost close enough to touch.

Frankie sat beside Ted, and Stromsoe rode shotgun. Stromsoe looked back into the bed of the truck, at the eight five-gallon containers with vented lids that gave off the aroma of copper and chlorine. The containers were steel and rode on pallets that were roped to cleats on the bed sides. There were eight small gas canisters of the kind used to fuel camp stoves, and eight circular steel stands that looked roughly a foot in diameter. An aluminum extension ladder clattered against the pallets. There was an electric lantern and two large metal toolboxes, one red and one black. Three folding beach chairs were tied up snug to the bed and what looked like plastic rain ponchos were stuffed down between them. Ace and Sadie lay on blankets, panting contentedly as the truck bounced down the dirt road.

Stromsoe couldn’t tell exactly where they were, just that they were south of Fallbrook, west of Interstate 15. They’d come here by a series of turns, gates, bridges, and other unmarked dirt roads. The Bonsall hills were dry now in the fall and Stromsoe smelled the clear, quiet sweetness of sage and chaparral coming through the open window at him.

Ted drove fast, a cigarette in his mouth. He had given Stromsoe a firm handshake and a dubious once-over when Frankie had introduced him as Uncle Ted Reed — Frankie’s mother’s oldest brother.

Frankie wore a brown fedora into which she had stuffed most of her hair. The pocket of her dress shirt held a folded handkerchief and three pens. The sleeves were rolled up. She held a jumping laptop to her thigh with one hand and tapped away with the other. Stromsoe spied a Southern California weather map with more contour lines, front indicators, and numbers on it than he could even focus on.

She zoomed in on northern San Diego County, her face bouncing in unison with the computer. Then she turned, looked straight into his eyes, and smiled. Up this close, it was an unexpected and personal thing to Stromsoe.

“It’s moisture acceleration, not rainmaking,” she said. “Great-great-grandpa Charley Hatfield made that distinction. You can’t make rain out of a sky with no moisture in it. It would be ridiculous to try.”

“Acceleration,” said Stromsoe.

“One hundred percent is what we’re after,” said Frankie. “We want to get double the rainfall per event.”

Stromsoe thought. “How do you know what number to double?”

“Because we’ve got four towers spaced three miles apart in the northwest-to-southeast storm line, that’s how,” said Ted. “We bait the two outside towers and compare the rainfall with the two inside towers. We’re plugged into the Santa Margarita Preserve, which is right over the hill. So we get data over their five thousand acres, and real-time video if we want it. And the city, county, state, and federal weather stations are all online now. That’s how we know what number to double.”

Stromsoe thought.

“With a storm of any size, you won’t get a one-hundred-percent fluctuation in that short a distance,” said Frankie. “If we get double the local yield over towers one and four, that’s our system at work. And it’s not really baiting, like Ted says. It’s not really seeding either.”

“Tell him about the particles,” said Ted.

Frankie shut down the computer, folded the screen, and looked at Stromsoe. In spite of the cool evening there were pinpricks of moisture just under her hairline.

“Every raindrop contains a very small particle of solid matter,” she said. “Once an oxygen and two hydrogen atoms bond, you have water. But you don’t have a raindrop. It won’t form, and it won’t fall. We’re not sure why the inert grain is necessary. Maybe it’s the same principle as a grain of sand helping to form a pearl. Way back in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, soldiers noticed that big rainstorms often followed big battles in which cannon and black powder firearms were used. People also liked to say that rain ‘followed the plow,’ because the rainfall records distinctly showed a rise in precipitation over cultivated land. For years scientists thought these beliefs were just superstition about battle and the wishful thinking of land speculators. Now we know that the particulate matter caused by detonation and the dust rising from cultivation accelerated the rainfall.”

Stromsoe nodded and looked out the window to the clouds advancing from the northwest.

“We’re doing something similar,” said Frankie. “But we’ve got something a lot better than heavy carbon molecules or plow dust, and we’ve got a way to put it right where it belongs. The basic formula comes down from Great-Great-Grandfather Hatfield. It’s based on an easily made silver iodide isotope — everybody suspected that’s what it was — but that’s all I can tell you about it. His other ingredients were a secret and people thought they died with him until I found his old lab out in Bonsall. That’s his stuff out there you saw — most of it was his, anyway. He was a genius. Then Ted and I went to work. It’s taken us eleven years but we came up with a lighter, more versatile particle and a much more effective way of dispersing it. Our formula is secret too, so don’t even ask. Charley would have absolutely dug it. We built the towers out of wood just like he did, but that’s because I’m nostalgic and because they look inspiring. If you ever went large scale with this, you’d use cast aluminum if you needed them lighter.”

When she looked over at Stromsoe again he saw the sheen of sweat on her forehead, the tiny droplets of moisture above her lips.

As if seeing what Stromsoe saw, she wiped her face with the hankie. “Man oh man, this might time out just right, Ted.”

“I think it’s going to, Frankie,” said Ted. “Soon as that jet stream started coming south again we were looking good.”

“And you, Matt,” she said. “Maybe you’ll see some history made.”

“We won’t know until after it stops raining,” said Ted. “When we compare the rainfall numbers.”

“But if it pours cats and dogs over towers one and two, I’m going to be one happy girl.”

In the new darkness they parked by tower one and Frankie climbed back, turned on the lantern, then pushed two canisters to the edge of the lowered tailgate.

Stromsoe carried one from the truck to the ladder, handing it up to Ted, who muscled it with a grunt onto the tower platform. The containers were heavy and hard to handle with his modified left hand. The smells of copper and chlorine hung in the dense air.

Before handing up the second canister, Stromsoe tried to peer inside but the vent holes were tiny and the lantern cast only a faint light.

“Don’t,” said Ted. “It’s not yours to know.”

“It’s mine to smell,” said Stromsoe.

“We’ve done this fine a long time without you.”

“Come on, kids,” said Frankie.

Stromsoe heaved the heavy container up to Ted, who jerked it onto the tower platform then shoved it into the corner opposite the first. Frankie handed up two of the gas canisters and two of the circular steel stands.

Stromsoe saw the cluster of meteorological instruments affixed to one corner of the platform. The cups of the anemometer scarcely shifted in the still night.

“That’s going to change,” said Frankie, again seeming to see through Stromsoe’s eyes.

Frankie reached into the truck again and slid out the red toolbox. By the dip of her right shoulder Stromsoe could see how heavy it was.

“Matt, I’m going to ask you to face due south right now and give me some privacy.”

Stromsoe glanced up to find the North Star but the clouds were too low to locate anything at all. He faced what he thought was south and listened to Frankie’s boot steps across the earth, then on the ladder, then the huff of her breath as she hoisted the toolbox to the platform, then the clank of the heavy thing on the redwood.

He heard the lid open, and the sounds of objects being laid out on the platform. The fumes found their way down to him, not a foul smell really, but one that seemed potent.

Ted came over and stood in front of him and offered Stromsoe a smoke, which he accepted. The old man lit it for him and stepped back where he could keep an eye on Stromsoe and still see Frankie up on the tower. “I’m really not doing an antler dance up here,” Frankie called down from the platform. “This is science. Mostly.”

“Mostly science,” said Ted.

Stromsoe heard the sounds of various lids being pried off, then liquid being poured into liquid. The cigarette smoke tickled his memory as he listened to the scrape of something on the inside of one of the big canisters, the sound of Reina Tavarez stirring the pot of chile verde she made on Sundays while the boys watched sports on TV or shot pool on the ancient balding blue-felt table in the Tavarez garage or hung with the other adolescents down at the corner of Flora across from Delhi Park but never actually in the park because Mike’s father, Rolando, threatened to punish his son if he ever set foot in Delhi Park or ran with the bangers in Delhi F Troop, which was why Mr. and Mrs. Tavarez had had Mike transferred across town to Santa Ana High School, because they didn’t want Mike in with the bad boys at Valley High, which was F Troop’s corner. Stromsoe imagined Mike then unimagined him and wished that he could edit that face from his memory forever but knew he never would.

An enemy can live in your heart forever.

“Good job bagging the stalker,” said Ted.

“Thanks.”

“Think he’ll come back?”

“Maybe,” said Stromsoe.

“John Cedros, right?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you make for a day’s work?”

“Three-fifty.”

Ted was quiet a moment. Then, “I thought of police work when I was young. Turned out I was better suited for meteorology. I could do the math but I couldn’t toss people around.”

“I liked tossing around some people,” said Stromsoe. “I never thought of anything but law enforcement. My father told me I lacked imagination.”

“Imagination, well, fine,” said Ted.

“I liked the work okay,” said Stromsoe. “It paid the bills.”

“She’s a sweet girl,” said Ted.

“I know.”

Stromsoe heard Frankie climbing down the ladder. The copper-chlorine smell had changed to a lighter, more ethereal aroma that came and went quickly.

He peeked up at the tower, where the tops of the containers glowed a pleasant shade of light blue, and pale vapors rose into the air. Each container sat atop one of the circular stands, and each had a propane canister attached to its bottom.

When they were finished at tower one, they drove off to tower two, a mile to the southeast. Here, Ted again climbed the ladder and checked the cables and contacts on the meteorological instruments bristling atop the platform.

“The bugs get up in the housings,” said Frankie. “One time we had a bat in the rain collector and another time a bunch of wasps got into the module case.”

“Looking right,” Ted called out from the platform. “Load ’em up here, PI.”

Stromsoe slid the first canister from the truck bed and lugged it over to the ladder.

An hour after Frankie climbed down from tower four it started raining.

18

The three of them sat in the beach chairs in the bed of the pickup truck, the plastic ponchos efficiently shedding the raindrops. The dogs were outfitted in the same gear, with the hoods bunched behind their necks and the tails of the ponchos trimmed for their shorter bodies. They squinted into the rain with the air of veterans. Ted came up with a pint of Scoresby that slowly made the rounds.

Stromsoe looked up at the tower in doubtful wonder. Frankie’s secret brew had been percolating for an hour now. The tops of the five-gallon canisters were still glowing a light blue color as the last of the gases sputtered and hissed and climbed into the air, then wriggled into the sky like smoky embers. Before the rain had started, he’d been able to watch the vapors rise up a hundred feet into the air, but now Stromsoe could follow them only a few yards before they vanished into the wet dark.

A few minutes later the containers rocked and shuddered and the blue light dwindled out. They sat smokeless and silent, no more interesting than empty paint cans.

“What’s your forecast?” Ted asked. “Unaccelerated.”

Frankie was already nodding. “I came up with half an inch. NOAA says half an inch. UCSD says half an inch too.”

“I’m liking this,” said Ted.

“I want double at towers one and four,” said Frankie. “Maybe even triple.”

“Don’t get your hopes too far up.”

“What are hopes for?”

Stromsoe sat with Sadie’s gray muzzle on his leg, feeling the rain hit his poncho. His shoes and socks were soaked. For the first few minutes the rain was light, then it almost imperceptibly gathered force until the drops were springing off the bed and roof. Stromsoe listened to the growing volume of it against the metal and the ground.

Frankie sat next to him with her feet up on the bed side and the rain streaming off the brim of her fedora. Her work boots were heavily oiled and shed the rain.

Ted was on the other side of her, cupping a smoke in one hand and wobbling the Scotch bottle on his knee with the other.

“That’s the most beautiful sound on earth,” said Frankie. “Don’t you think?”

“Chet Atkins,” said Ted.

“And you, Matt?”

“I like how it roars on the truck.”

“I like how much time it took to get here,” said Frankie. “It’s a closed system, you know — and it’s hundreds of millions of years old. We could get hit by a water molecule right now that evaporated up from the Atlantic a few million years ago, rained down in Egypt thousands of years later, ran with the Blue Nile south to Ethiopia, then perked down into the ground. Later it came up in a village well and somebody used it to water a barley plant, so it evaporated again and got swept up by a front that dumped on Bangkok, then it ran off into the South China Sea. Then it wobbled along the Tropic of Cancer over to the North Pacific, where it became part of the ocean for a few million years before the northeast trade winds led the currents all the way to this front off California. Where our little molecule rose up, found a particle, and became a raindrop that hit a dog lying in the back of a truck.”

Silence then, except for the rain.

“Which dog?” asked Ted.

Frankie backhanded his leg.

“Wow,” said Stromsoe. “That’s a mouthful, Frankie.”

“Or not,” she said. “Every drop has a different story.”

She pulled the bottle from Ted, took a small sip, and handed it off to Stromsoe.

“God damn I’m happy right now,” she said.

“You’re a cheap date, Frankie,” said Ted.

“That’s me. Two sips of Scotch and I’m good to go. And I know I’m verbose. It’s bad. I just love this stuff. This.”

She stood up and jumped off the side of the truck bed to the ground. Ace and Sadie took the smart way, off the tailgate.

Stromsoe watched her walk out into the chaparral, raise her face and arms to the sky.

“She got straight A’s at UCLA,” said Ted.

Stromsoe dropped out of the truck, his landing padded by his rain-swollen shoes and socks. He walked over to Frankie and the dogs, stopping not right next to them but nearby.

“What?” asked Frankie.

Stromsoe couldn’t remember being at a simple loss for words in many years.

“Looks like rain,” he said.

Back in the barn office Frankie and Ted pulled the rainfall data off the tower sensors while the dogs sprawled on the red braided rug in front of an electric heater. Stromsoe made instant coffee, took cups to the scientists, then pulled up a chair with the dogs.

He listened to the rain hitting the tin barn roof overhead, an amplified clatter that sounded much wetter than the lessening slant of drops visible against the yard light outside the window.

He thought of a trip he’d taken with Hallie and Billy down to Costa Rica one year to see a live volcano and collect seashells. They got caught in a thunderstorm on the Arenal volcano and Stromsoe had found an old sheet of corrugated tin that he held up as shelter. They sat for a while and watched the big boulders and molten lava heave forth from the cauldron in the distance while the rain thundered down on their roof. Stromsoe had felt particularly strong at that moment, captaining his little family on the journey of life, protecting them, showing them a good time.

Now, a lifetime later, he shuddered.

“It’s going to be a while,” said Frankie. “Don’t feel like you have to wait around in wet shoes. I’ll call you first thing in the morning if you want.”

“I’ll just sit here if you don’t mind.”

“There’s sandwich stuff in the fridge.”

“That’d be good.”

By midnight the rain had stopped, though Frankie said there was probably another cell out there swirling in.

“Come on in here, Matt,” she called to him from the office. “I’ll walk you through this part.”

Stromsoe stood next to Ted and looked over Frankie’s shoulder as she went online and collected the NOAA rainfall data. Then she linked on to the Santa Margarita Ecological Preserve Web site for real-time downloads from their weather stations. She paused on a camera feed from the Santa Margarita river gorge. In the scant moonlight the runoff pounded over the smooth rocks of the old riverbed. Frankie quietly murmured. Then she clicked off, printed some pages, and highlighted certain numbers with a yellow marker. She said the state and county figures wouldn’t be available until morning.

Then she collected the data from the four towers. Stromsoe and Ted stood and watched over her shoulder as the information was relayed to her computer.

What looked to Stromsoe like several tables of difficult-to-understand statistical information took her just seconds to read and digest.

“Gentlemen,” she said quietly. “We just tripled what a rainstorm gave everyone else!”

She stood up, knocked over her chair, and flew into Ted’s open arms. The dogs hustled over to participate. She slapped her uncle’s back, then released him and turned to Stromsoe.

She offered her hand and he shook it.

“This is more than excellent,” she said.

“Nice to be here for it,” said Stromsoe.

“You brought the luck,” she said.

“That doesn’t sound very scientific,” said Stromsoe.

“What science says is that we have to repeat our results time and time again,” she said. “This could be some of your good luck. This could be an aberration. It’s a beginning. We have to make it work predictably, reliably.”

“Not right now we don’t,” said Ted. “It’s pushing one in the morning.”

“Celebration at my house,” said Frankie.

She righted her chair and sat down in front of her computer again. She leafed through the pages she’d printed, checking the numbers, shaking her head.

Then she looked up at Stromsoe with one of the nicest smiles he’d ever seen.

The celebration didn’t last long. Frankie brought out thick dry socks for the men, traded her work boots for enormous sheepskin lounging boots, and got a fire going in the living room. They pulled the sofa closer to the flame and sat three across, close like children. Ted poured three Scotches, a light one with water for Frankie. The dogs were there too, asleep and stinking of wet hair.

Frankie told Stromsoe about finding her great-great-grandfather’s laboratory in the old Bonsall barn, how the first time she walked into it she knew it would be hers someday, the smells and the books and the chemicals still in their containers and his mountains of notes and formulas and experimental data. It had been very difficult to find — most of the Hatfield relatives assumed it was long gone. They’d never laid eyes on it. And the published lore that she had unearthed over the years stated — unconvincingly, to Frankie — that Charley had set fire to the lab before he was run out of San Diego for creating too much rain. She was sixteen when she’d found his old laboratory. She said that opening the barn door was opening the rest of her life. She would study weather and accelerate moisture. She was surprised that the other descendants of Charles Hatfield were not particularly interested in the barn or the formulas. To her it was like losing interest in finding the Holy Grail or Noah’s Ark. She told Stromsoe that she’d seen the dumb Burt Lancaster movie The Rainmaker and wished they’d have shown some of Great-great-grandpa’s scientific side rather than his dreamy hustler’s side.

“He sold sewing machines most of the time he was rainmaking,” she said, yawning. “He never made any real money at it. But he always wore nice clothes, a tie, and a good hat. The movie should have been more... I don’t know, more something...”

A moment of quiet, then, as the fire burned and popped and Ace’s legs twitched in a dream of pursuit.

Then Frankie Hatfield’s head lolled onto Stromsoe’s shoulder and she was out.

Stromsoe looked over at Ted, who sipped his Scotch and looked into the fire. “Par for the course,” he said. “Frances can’t drink more than a thimbleful and stay upright.”

Stromsoe sat awhile. Ted made another drink and sat on a chair not so close to the fire.

“I checked you out through the Web and your boss,” said Ted.

“Good.”

“Learn to shoot with one eye yet?”

“I’ll find out soon,” said Stromsoe.

“I wondered about the two years in Florida.”

“Lost.”

“I figured,” said Ted. “I might have done the same.”

“It’s nice to be back.”

Ace whimpered and his legs kept twitching.

“A guy named Choat at the L.A. Department of Water and Power tried to buy her out of the rainmaking formula,” said Ted. “My theory is, if you follow up on this Cedros fellow, he’ll lead you back to DWP.”

“I have and he did,” said Stromsoe. He told Ted about tracking Cedros to the DWP. “Did Choat threaten you?”

“Oh, no, not at all. Very civil, in a hard-ass kind of way. He offered Frankie seven-fifty a year and all the support staff she wanted, so long as her procedures and formulas belonged to DWP. Said she could set up shop on any DWP land in the state, and they own thousands of square miles and rivers and lakes and mountains. Three-quarters of a million bucks a year! She turned him down. It drove Choat bugshit that we might have our hands on a moisture accelerator that worked.”

“How did Choat know about this?” asked Stromsoe.

“He’d been agitating her and other Hatfield descendants for years, off and on. Always poking around, looking for the barn, the formula, his papers, whatever. Just staying in touch. When he got wind that she’d found the barn, he was all over her.”

Stromsoe thought. “Cedros was his threat,” he said.

“Sure,” said Ted. “Shake Frankie up. Take her picture. But I also think he broke into the barn one night. There were footprints, and some of the files were laying out. Like somebody was looking for something.”

“The formula.”

“Yup. You’re signed on for a month, right?”

Stromsoe nodded.

“If Choat sent Cedros, Choat’s ass is in the wind,” said Ted.

“Not if Cedros keeps his mouth shut. He didn’t say anything about Choat. He says he stalked Frankie because he likes the way she looks.”

“A jury could believe that,” said Ted.

“I almost did,” said Stromsoe.

They watched the fire burn. Outside the breeze came up and a shower of raindrops hit the roof then stopped.

“I don’t think this DWP stuff is over,” said Ted. “Choat made my scalp crawl, a quality few men have. Maybe you need to apply some pressure. If Cedros is protecting Choat, there might be a way to pry them apart. Cedros can’t be happy about the charges.”

“You think like a cop,” said Stromsoe.

“I’m just a weatherman. Though I did shoot down some planes over Korea in ’51.”

“I might be able to make Cedros see the light,” said Stromsoe. “If he rolls on his boss, we’ve got what we need.”

“I like the sound of that.”

“Frankie might have to call Birch Security, make it clear to Dan that she still wants me on the job. When a stalker goes to jail and gets charged, that usually means the PI is done.”

“She already did that,” said Ted. “Actually, I made the call myself. She thought it would look better coming from a man. Frankie tends to worry. Sometimes she worries too much, and she begins to see herself as hysterical. Which of course makes her hysterical. Gets even more worried.”

Unworried, Frankie started snoring.

“There’s been a reporter calling her,” said Ted. “From a local paper. Frankie asked me to put him off, so I’ve been giving him the runaround.”

“Good,” said Stromsoe. “Let him find another story.”

Stromsoe got up without waking her and arranged her on the sofa with her head on one of the pillows. He found a throw blanket by the fireplace and covered her.

“Something I don’t understand,” he said. “If the Department of Water and Power had a way to triple the rainfall, would that help them or hurt them?”

“Help them, I guess,” said Ted. “Help everybody.”

“Then why didn’t Frankie let them finance the research, get rich, and make rain for the world?”

“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.

19

Mike 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.

They clinked lightly then fell to the ground.

Tavarez had always been curious what the 5,000 volts would have done, had Cartwright or one of his gang messed up, or had left the fence electrified on purpose.

Lunce collected the cuffs without taking his eyes off of Tavarez.

Tavarez took a step toward him and Lunce’s hand went straight to his club.

“I want you to know I appreciate this,” said Tavarez.

“Live it up,” said Lunce.

“Thank you,” said Tavarez.

“I won’t be far away.”

With this, Lunce took two small steps backward — he always took two small steps backward — then turned from Tavarez and lumbered into the near dark twenty yards away.

Tavarez turned to the fence. “Jimmy, my friend, is that you?”

“Your friend it is, Jefe. I brought you something sweet.”

“Let’s see.”

A rustling in the cedars produced a figure that came toward Tavarez from the other side of the fence. He smelled her perfume before seeing her clearly. Her shoes glinted in the quarter moonlight and the spike heels sank into the damp earth and she had to lift them up as if from gum to get them free again.

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

“I’m Shavalia.”

“Great.”

She was light-haired and slender, nice face. She had costume diamond earrings and her jeans had similar jewels down the legs to where they ended midcalf. She wore a dark camisole under a loose red mesh shawl under a short black leather jacket. There was orange mud on her heels and the sides of her shoes but the rhinestone-studded straps looked bright and clean.

She smiled prettily. “Hope they don’t turn the fence on. Blow my jewels all the way to Lake Shasta.”

“Mine too.”

She smiled. “Here, honey, come a little closer.”

20

Early the next day Stromsoe bought rich food and good wine in Fallbrook. The people in the stores and deli were friendly and helpful. He learned that Fallbrook called itself the Friendly Village. Drivers in the parking lots stopped so he could get to and from his car, without the terse hand signals he was used to. He felt as if he should wave and smile to them, so he did. Girl Scouts sold cookies outside the market and he bought some Thin Mints.

He straightened up his tiny home.

Then he drove up to Orange County and met with Dan Birch, who agreed that Cedros was probably lying and wanted to know why.

“Think he’s a danger to her?” Birch asked.

“I’ve got no reason to trust him.”

Birch nodded, tapped something onto his keyboard. “Frankie says she’s okay now, to and from work. She’s not worried anymore.”

“Okay.”

Birch studied Stromsoe. “Look in on her at work anyway. Drop in. I know that’s a lot of hours. Just keep track of them.”

“Gladly.”

“I talked to the publisher of the North County Times — boss of the reporter who’s been calling Frankie. I got the publisher to keep a lid on this for now. I told her about copycat possibilities if the whole world knows there’s a sicko watching a TV celebrity. Fox News double-teamed them with me. They love Frankie. Don’t want to lose her.”

“That’s good planning, Dan.”

“Security Solutions, Matt. What do you think of her?”

“I like her.”

“I can’t believe this shit about DWP. You’d think she’d have mentioned all that.”

“Funny what she offers up and holds back,” said Stromsoe.

“Making rain,” said Birch. “Christ.”

After that, Stromsoe spent the rest of the morning at the indoor range in Oceanside. It felt good to have a gun in his hand again and to feel the percussive pops through the muffs and smell the gun oil and the solvent and the burned powder. He was surprised how well he shot with only one eye.

He had been a distinguished expert on the OCSD pistol team for three years running, until workload and fatherhood had squeezed out his recreational time. He had learned to use his eyes and to trust his hands and fingers to do the right things at the right time. Practice, and more practice — range hours, competitions, dry-firing his sidearms whenever he could to build trust and familiarity, helping the new deputies — it was enjoyable.

Stromsoe had been surprised to see that most law enforcement officers did no more shooting than was absolutely necessary to qualify each year. They took poor care of their sidearms and their skills. They seemed to ignore their guns. Some actually disliked or feared them. He had been surprised too at his own interest in shooting, but he enjoyed using a precisely made tool, liked the hand-eye coordination, the concentration and rhythm.

Firing a revolver in PPC competition, Stromsoe could get off six rounds, shuck the empties, smack home the speed loader, squeeze off six more, and hit nothing but black at fifty feet without ever looking at anything but his target. The PPC events were almost leisurely because speed wasn’t really important. But shooting an IPSC with an autoloader was about speed and accuracy and it was more exciting because you were moving and shooting at the same time. The magazines were faster than speed loaders, and you got more rounds besides. The secret for either competition was to keep the gun up at eye level during the reload, so if you needed to adjust the speed loader or get the magazine started, your eyes were still near the target. He felt connected to his target by his eyes, tethered almost, and it had been a simple visual skill to discharge the bullet that would follow the invisible connective thread to its mark. His target could be a guy hopping fences at night but Stromsoe had taught himself to truly see with a gun in his hands and to put his rounds where his eyes were looking. He was proud to have placed ninth overall in the Southern California Regional Sheriff’s Association competition of 1994.

Now it was different, but not all bad. Two years had given his body time to adjust. His depth perception was not as precise as before and his field of view was smaller. It was like looking down a tunnel. Through his one eye the world looked slightly flat and compressed, as if telescoped back toward him by an invisible hand. But the picture was clear.

At fifty feet he shot a decent group with his Colt .380. The shots hit right and high of the five-ring but almost all in the black.

At ten feet his right-side pull was one inch but the group was very tight.

He practiced his motion with the Clipdraw, first with a sport coat on, then with it off. Smooth was the ticket here, especially with the coat on — no jerks, nothing showy, no mistakes. The Clipdraw rode too high to quick-fire over like a western gunslinger, so it was left hand on the coat then the right arm drawing out the gun and extending while you bent your legs and let your left hand find your right while your eyes — eye — ate the target for lunch.

Boom. Boom boom boom.

Still got it, Stromsoe thought. He also thought it was oddly fitting that of all the skills diminished by the bomb, his ability to shoot a gun was pretty much unchanged.

He shot another six magazines with the Mustang, then fifty rounds from a Smith AirLite .22 that was small and light enough to slip into a pocket and had once saved his life.

By four that afternoon he was waiting across the street from John Cedros’s house in Azusa. He parked under the same generous acacia tree and noted the fallen flowers collecting again on the windshield wipers and hood of his truck.

At quarter till five the pregnant young woman he’d seen last week parked an embattled white coupé in the driveway and slowly climbed out. She was dressed in what looked like a waitress’s uniform for a Mexican restaurant — a brightly colored ruffled skirt, a white blouse with puffed sleeves off the shoulders, a comb with a red fan in her dark hair. She flipped the driver’s seat forward, squeezed awkwardly behind it, then emerged with a little boy hiked over one shoulder. She pulled a purse off the front seat and slammed the door with her foot while the boy reached up and fingered the red fan.

A few minutes later she was back. She had changed to jeans and a flannel shirt rolled to her elbows. She opened the trunk and carried in plastic bags of groceries four at a time, two trips, then shut the trunk and locked it.

At five-thirty Cedros rolled up beside the coupé in his gold sedan and killed the engine. Stromsoe slid down again and watched through the crescent between the dash top and steering wheel. Cedros popped out of the car and hustled into the house. Stromsoe waited five minutes.

The security screen door of the Cedros house was closed but the wooden door behind it was open to the cool evening as Stromsoe knocked.

“Go away,” Cedros said from somewhere inside.

“I think Frankie will see the light,” said Stromsoe.

Cedros stood behind the screen door. Bare feet and a beer, a singlet and his blue DWP custodial chinos. Small as ever. “Make sense, pendejo,” he said.

Stromsoe looked past Cedros to the kitchen, where the woman stood before the seated boy, lowering a bowl to the table.

Cedros looked at his wife then back at Stromsoe. “She’s my wife, man. That’s my son.”

“Let’s take a drive.”

“Let’s.”

They headed up Azusa Avenue through town. The streetlamps and benches and planters were painted a flagrant purple blue that Stromsoe liked. The little city seemed caught in a time warp, with tenacious mom-and-pop stores downtown instead of the chain everythings he’d become so used to in Southern California. But the stores looked to be struggling. Some were boarded up, right along the main drag. There were lots of liquor stores with their faded cigarette posters and sale signs and Lotto ads fixed to the windows. CAMEL TURKISH BLENDS — CARTON OF 20 — $39.99!!!

A half mile farther and they hit the residential area. The homes were small, some neat and some not. Front yards sat behind iron fences and gates and there were steel safety doors instead of the regular screen doors. The wrought-iron patterns over the windows looked more defensive than decorative. Flat-footed women slowly carried bags of groceries home from the mercado and pretty girls with flashy clothes and smiles crossed the streets away from the homies manning their corners or slinking up and down the avenue in older cars with thumping woofers and bright paint and the windows blacked out.

Stromsoe saw the contempt and impatience on Cedros’s face as he looked out at the town.

“Didn’t use to be like this,” said Cedros. “The bangers.”

“My hometown changed a lot too.”

“Just the last five years, man.”

“It doesn’t look so bad.”

“What do you know? And what do you want? The weather lady is ready to drop the charges?”

“She might,” said Stromsoe. “But I need some information first.”

“And if I don’t have it, the charges stick.”

“Yep. You go on trial.”

“Name it, man.”

“You work for DWP, not the hospital. It took me half a day to figure that out.”

Cedros shrugged.

“I think Choat put you up to harassing Frankie.”

“Choat? I barely know Choat. He’s water operations, fourteenth floor. I’m custodial.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“He didn’t put me up to anything. The fuck is wrong with you?”

Stromsoe looked over at Cedros, who had slipped on a pair of shades.

“Here’s the deal on Choat,” said Stromsoe. “He wanted Frankie’s rainmaking formula. Offered to pay her a lot of money for it. When she said no, he sent you to frighten her, maybe even steal that formula yourself. I think you got as far as the barn — inside the barn — but you couldn’t find the formula because she’s never written it down.”

“I didn’t break and enter. Never.”

“Let’s go back to Choat, then. What did he want you to do with Frankie?”

“Nothing, man. How many times I gotta tell you that?”

“You stalked her because you’re obsessed with her?”

“I didn’t say that either. I didn’t stalk her. I’m not guilty of that.”

“They got a stack of pictures you took of her. They got pictures she took of you on her property. I caught you trespassing on her private property and handed you over to the cops. John, let me help you out here — you’re toast.”

Cedros stared out the window.

Stromsoe said nothing for a minute or two. He pulled over where the San Gabriel River passed under the road, a narrow white-water ribbon racing down from the mountains. They got out and walked to the edge of the drop and watched the river below.

“You did good,” Stromsoe said. “You pestered Frankie to the point where she hired a PI. You took the pictures of her, had the stalking story ready if you got caught. You even took the rap in court. Good for you. I hope you’re in for a big promotion.”

Cedros stared down at the water. “I’m waiting for you to say something that makes sense.”

“Try this,” said Stromsoe. “You have a nice wife back there at home, and a nice little boy, and another baby on the way. This isn’t going to be easy on them, especially your wife. You get tried as a stalker, there’s no winning it. Even if you’re acquitted, people wonder. They talk. You get passed over. You’re a stand-up guy, John. You can’t live like that. I know you.”

“Bullshit.”

“You’re a lousy liar,” said Stromsoe. “I don’t believe you’d leave that pretty woman back there at home, then drive all the way to San Diego to spy on a weather lady who isn’t even on your channels up here. That’s bullshit, John. You’re covering for Choat and you’re going to take the fall. I’m trying to help you here. Can’t you see that?”

Cedros reached down, picked up a rock, and snapped it out over the river. His motion was compact and angry and the rock jetted far out over the water then vanished into the canyon shadows.

“And you also lied about being a deadbeat dad,” said Stromsoe. “Just the idea disgusts you. You lied about being a janitor in a hospital because you’re DWP and you’re proud of that. You wear your uniform and you polish your shoes and you hope you’re moving up the ladder. And you lied about stalking a woman because you’re still so crazy in love with your wife it’s the last thing you’d ever do. So, why? Choat? You know I’m going to talk to him. How can I help you if you don’t tell me the deal?”

“There’s no deal,” Cedros said with soft-spoken hostility. “There’s just me and something dumb I did. You saw my wife. She’s tall. I like the tall ones.”

“Okay, fine. Get back in.”

Stromsoe punched a U-turn and headed back toward Azusa.

Cedros stared out the window almost the whole way back to his house. He seemed deflated, even smaller.

“I Googled you,” he finally said. “I know all about you.”

“Everybody knows all about me.”

“You got my respect.”

Stromsoe looked at Cedros but couldn’t think of what to say. He just shook his head and opened his hands in frustration.

“You go get another job,” said Cedros. “Get Frankie Hatfield to hand over her formula and promise not to use it to make rain. Everybody will be better off.”

Stromsoe jerked the wheel to the right and his truck careened to the curb and when he slammed on the brakes John Cedros’s head was pressed to the side window. Stromsoe leaned across and felt his pistol press his ribs as he jammed his face right into that of Cedros.

“But that’s not going to happen. Choat doesn’t own the rain. You can’t scare that woman off of her work. You don’t tell me who to work for. Get it? Can I make it any more clear to you?”

“That’s all I’m going to say.”

“No, you’re saying good-bye to your future too, friend. You’re dumber than I thought you were. You want to drag your wife and kids down with you just to kiss somebody’s ass at work, that’s your business. Fuck it, kid, I give up.”

Stromsoe floored the truck from a dead stop and skidded to a halt in Cedros’s driveway a minute later.

Cedros jumped out and slammed the door. He turned back to look at Stromsoe without breaking stride. His wife opened the safety screen door and Cedros blew past her and was gone.

Stromsoe backed out and saw the new Magnum parked under his acacia tree down the street, the pink blossoms littering the black hood, a face behind the wheel scarcely visible through the windshield and the darkly smoked side window.

Everywhere you look, thought Stromsoe.

He drove out to Azusa Avenue, cruised the street with the lowriders and the pretty girls for a few minutes, then circled back and came up on Cedros’s house again. The Magnum was now in the Cedros driveway. Stromsoe parked well away and not under his acacia tree, then got his binoculars from the glove box and wrote down the Magnum’s plates. He waited about twenty minutes until a guy came from the Cedros house with plastic grocery store bags swinging in each hand.

The man was big, his skin the color of heavily creamed coffee. His hair was buzzed. Wraparound shades and a chain with one end latched to his belt loop and the other disappearing into his front pocket. He wore black work boots and chinos and a sleeveless under-shirt and his arm tats included an elaborate Celtic rendition of “13,” the letter S, and something Stromsoe couldn’t quite make out involving an Aztec warrior and a bloody heart.

The “13” was for the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, thought Stromsoe — the letter M. M was for Mexican Mafia. And S for sureño, the gangs of the south that made up the thousands of foot soldiers of La Eme.

The guy swung the bags into the passenger seat of the Magnum and drove off. Stromsoe stayed in his truck, struck by the circularity of what he was doing, by the deadly comedy of it all.

Fourteen years of chasing these guys and I’m still at it, he thought. A wife and a son murdered, an eye lost and a body blown half to bits, no Sheriff’s team around anymore to help keep me alive, but I’m still here, just like I had good sense. For what? Three-fifty a day before taxes, five vacation days your first year, a lousy HMO medical plan, no dental, per diem enough for fast food and a few gallons of gas.

The upside?

It was a short list: doing the right thing, fighting the war that had taken the ones he loved, and Frankie Hatfield.

21

It was almost eight by the time Stromsoe got down to the San Diego waterfront for Frankie’s last story of the night. She stood on the Embarcadero walkway with the yachts bobbing behind her in the marina and a firm breeze ringing the halyard swivels against their naked masts.

She smiled at Stromsoe as he came down the boardwalk, and waved the microphone at him. In the felt fedora and brown overcoat she looked like a gumshoe with big hair.

He stood behind the little audience that had formed, listening to tomorrow’s forecast: clear and breezy throughout the county, with temperatures in the low seventies at the coast and midseventies inland, with the deserts at eighty and the mountains in the midsixties.

“And we’ve got some more rain to go along with that half inch from Sunday, coming along, well... I’m going to say Friday, maybe Saturday. Right now it looks like another substantial storm, and two storms this early in the season is good for our depleted lakes and reservoirs. Rain is life! I’m Frankie Hatfield, reporting live from the Embarcadero.”

“Get ’em, Frankie!”

“Right on, Frankie!”

She signed a few autographs and Stromsoe walked her across the street to the county building parking lot.

“You look nice tonight,” he said.

“Thanks. This was one of Great-great-grandpa Charley’s hats. I’m trying to keep up with Loren Nancarrow on Channel Ten. He’s got the coolest clothes.”

She opened the door of the Mustang.

“I got food and wine for us,” he said. “Even though my whole house is about the size of your living room.”

“You really did?”

“The whole truth.”

“For me?”

He looked at her.

“The shower work?” she asked.

“Perfectly.”

She tossed her fedora into the air, caught it, and set it on Stromsoe’s head. It was warm and smelled of her.

Stromsoe turned the radio on low and got the omelets started while Frankie used the shower. With the windows open the breeze brought in the smell of tangerines from his drive and the distant hiss of the cars on Mission. The cannons boomed out at Pendleton, muffled thuds, the sound of freedom. The landlord’s cat sat on the couch and licked a front paw. The Mastersons had left a red colander filled with homegrown avocados, tomatoes, basil, and cilantro on his doorstep sometime during the day.

He was wiping two wineglasses when Frankie came out in jeans and a silk tank top the same deep brown color of her eyes. She was barefoot and her hair was up and she made the little house seem even smaller. Stromsoe’s heart rocketed.

“Can I go barefoot around here? It makes me shorter.”

“I’ve got you by two inches either way,” he said.

“Mom and Dad used to tape my shoulder blades together so I wouldn’t stoop.”

“Ouch.”

“Not really. It was kind of a joke. But it worked. It reminded me to keep my back straight. If you don’t slouch, the tape doesn’t bother you.”

She turned her side to him and stood ramrod straight.

He looked at her, wishing that she knew him better, that she was aware of the less-than-good things he’d done in his life. Maybe there would be time for that, he thought.

“Can you dance?” she asked.

“Oddly enough, I can. It came easy to me.”

“Me too. Hey, cool place. I love the big windows and the little fireplace and all the bougainvillea. And, God, the smell of tangerine blossoms is like heaven on earth. There’s a million little nooks and crannies like this in Fallbrook. I’ve lived here five years and I keep finding them. My friends all want to move here. Wouldn’t that be great, or maybe not.”

She smiled anxiously at her own nervous chatter.

“I’ll get you a small glass of wine.”

Stromsoe served the omelets, dimmed the lights, and lit two candles. They sat across from each other at a small table in the dining room. The red colander filled with treasures was the centerpiece. Stromsoe had used some of everything for the meal. He thought of Hallie’s lobster extravaganzas and of Susan Doss bringing him the good deli lunch that day when he almost set his life on fire.

He poured Frankie some cool white wine and some for himself.

“I think Choat dispatched Cedros to scare you,” he said.

“Then I was wrong. Ted thought the stalker was DWP all along.”

“It doesn’t matter who was right or wrong. What matters is we blocked someone with power. We busted his man and wrecked his program, and now he’s free to find a new way to deal with you.”

“Can’t you stop him from dealing with me at all?” she asked.

“I think I can.”

“I don’t want people watching me. I don’t want that man to turn my work into his business.”

Stromsoe took a bite of omelet and had a sip of wine. “Frankie, some people don’t discourage. Some people will take things all the way.”

She looked at him and nodded.

“I’ll talk to Choat,” said Stromsoe.

“He’ll just deny Cedros and say he made a generous offer for my work,” she said.

“He did.”

“Please.”

“I understand. It’s your work and your formula and your rain and you aren’t going to sell it to someone who wants to profit by it — whether by using it or destroying it.”

“Right on.”

“You’re not going to budge, Frankie? Not for a million dollars? Ten? Or all the staff and land you need to do your experiments? I have to know if you’ve got a price, and if so, what it is.”

Frankie shook her head. “No price to Choat or the DWP. Ever.”

“Okay,” he said. “You don’t discourage either.”

This brought a smile to her face, then it left and she looked down at the tabletop. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“I think if you can make rain, you’ve got bigger problems than Choat. You’ve got half the power of the Lord Himself, just for starters.”

“I’m getting close, Matt,” she said, looking up at him. “You saw it. We got triple what the rest of the valley did.”

“I saw it.”

“Triple. And I’ll have a chance again by Friday or Saturday.”

They ate for a while in the near silence while the radio played something peppy and light.

“Cedros worries me,” said Stromsoe. “He’s got big things at stake and he’s smart. He’s covering for Choat and he has connections with La Eme.”

She looked at him. “La Eme — I remember them from the stories about you. Your enemy, the guy who played in the marching band—”

“Right,” said Stromsoe. “Cedros knows a guy named Marcus Ampostela. Birch ran him for me while I was driving up from Azusa just now — grand theft auto, extortion, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon — and plenty of minor charges. He’s spent eight of his twenty-five years behind bars. Not bad, compared to some guys.”

Stromsoe had been surprised at Birch’s speed with the records check. Back in Stromsoe’s day with the sheriffs, nobody but law enforcement could come up with a jacket that fast. But Birch was plugged into networks that barely existed two years ago and some that hadn’t existed at all back then. The private was becoming public faster than he could imagine.

Frankie let out a small exhale. “Maybe Cedros was just buying drugs from him. Or a stolen car or something. Nothing to do with the DWP or me.”

“True. But if Choat could get to the right people, he could hire it.”

“Oh,” she said quietly. “Through Cedros?”

Stromsoe nodded and took another drink of wine. “That would be one way. Cedros thinks you’ll drop the charges.”

“Who told him that?”

“Someone he believes,” said Stromsoe. “Look, when I lay out the cause and effect for him, he hears it. He gets it. He knows he’s risking his future, his marriage, his family. But he sticks to his original story — he was stalking you because he’s obsessed with you. That’s not the kind of story you walk into court with.”

Frankie sat back and looked at him. In the candlelight the hollows of her face were both deepened and softened and her eyes shone the brown of polished walnut.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“Wait. If Choat has a new idea, we’ll know soon enough.”

“He could just let the brake fluid out of my Mustang the way I drive. Or have me run over some night walking to my car.”

“He wants the formula. Is it written down?”

“No. Charley never wrote it down either.”

“Keep it that way.”

“That I can do.” She set down her fork, sighed very quietly, and shook her head.

“I won’t let anything happen to you, Frankie.”

She looked at him and Stromsoe had no idea what she was thinking. His own mind was a swirl of hope, fear, and contradiction. How many times had he told Hallie and Billy that, in his heart if not with words?

“Dance?” he asked.

“By all means.”

The song was an old Dire Straits piece, “So Far Away,” and Stromsoe led Frankie in a happy little fox-trot that dismissed the melancholy of the lyrics. At first he was self-conscious about his three-fingered lead, trying to use mostly palm, to keep his touch light but informative. He felt her little finger resting comfortably where his had been. He wished again that she saw him for what he was and was not and wondered if this was a sign that she would be able to. They danced around the table and into the living room, where the floor was cut small by the boxes he’d yet to unpack.

“I think I just bumped into your past,” she whispered.

“I believe you did.”

“Can I see some pictures?”

“Sure. When?”

“Now. After the song, I mean.”

They sat on the couch and he showed her his Santa Ana High School yearbook for his senior year, replete with pictures of himself and Hallie and Mike.

He hadn’t looked at these things in years and to see himself posed before the marching band, mace held high and shako hat worn low, was to see a child living his desires free of self-consciousness and history.

“I recognize you,” said Frankie. “Look what chubby cheeks you had. And so serious!”

“Hey, drum majoring was an important job.”

He showed her the pictures of Hallie — her senior shot, her picture as “Most Sarcastic Senior,” and a candid image of her standing at a pep rally with a doubtful look on her pretty face.

“She was an outsider,” said Frankie.

When Stromsoe turned to the first of the T seniors, he just tapped the page on Mike. Tavarez looked up at them, his expression wholly remote but the half smile in place like a casual piece of armor.

Frankie looked down at the picture and said nothing.

Caught between his desire to reveal and his need to protect, Stromsoe took out a favorite picture — Billy at age four standing on a dock with a yellow child’s fishing rod in his hand.

Stromsoe’s whole world immediately tilted and the questions of what could have been slid down on him with all their awesome weight.

“Billy,” he said. “Four years old.”

“He’s beautiful,” Frankie said quietly.

“He was very beautiful.”

She bowed her head.

Stromsoe continued to look at the picture — it hadn’t been all that long because he had visited these images in their boxes regularly over the last two years — but now, exposed to someone else, Billy seemed to flourish like a plant exposed to fresh air and sunlight and for the first time since Billy’s death Stromsoe was able to see his son’s particular traits instead of his tremendous absence. He saw Billy’s intelligence and shyness. He saw his grave respect for the tiny perch he’d brought out of the pond and now dangled from the rod — the same gravity that his father had brought to drum majoring, of all things, and later to his work. Stromsoe saw too, in the firm set of Billy’s jaw, a conviction that the moment and the fish were important. An attribute, thought Stromsoe, that might have later become valuable to Billy in this world of distraction and diluted faith.

Might have.

Might have later.

Might have later become.

“Not fair,” said Frankie.

Stromsoe saw a tear hit the back of one of her big hands, which were folded on her lap.

“Oops,” she whispered. “Sorry.”

“I don’t mind.”

He selected another picture, Billy dressed in a pirate’s costume for Halloween, brandishing a rubber sword. He was trying his best to look menacing but it was easy to see the self-mockery in him. There was also something seductive in his expression, as if he was inviting you and only you to team up and play along.

“That was the Hallie in him,” said Stromsoe. “The part of him that couldn’t take things too seriously. The part of him that smiled and laughed and played. The part that loved a secret. That Halloween night he finally went out to trick-or-treat with the pirate costume and sword and a pumpkin mask.”

He rewrapped the picture in the crinkled newspaper, slid it back into the box, and took out another.

“Tell me a memory of him,” she said. “The first one that comes to your mind.”

“We used to love going through car washes together. You know, the ones where you stay in your car and pull in and the big brushes wash the car. Billy loved it when the brushes come toward you and it feels like the car’s moving forward. He’d swear the car was moving forward. We started going to different ones. He kept a log. This one in Costa Mesa turned out to be the best all around, based on the amount of soap and how thorough the brushes were and how good the rinse was and how long the dryer would go. Car washes. I miss that.”

Frankie smiled and nodded. “Nice.”

“Here’s Hallie on her thirtieth birthday. I threw her a surprise party in a restaurant. One of our friends is a professional photographer, so this came out real well.”

“She was beautiful too. I see her in Billy.”

The photograph was just face, taken from across the room with a big lens and without her knowing. It captured the obvious — Hallie’s offhand loveliness, her blue eyes and her freckles and easy smile, her sun-lightened hair. It captured her delight in the moment. She didn’t look like she was trying too hard, which was just how she was in life. Pure Hallie. Stromsoe felt for a moment like he could scoop her up out of that frame and set her on the couch next to him, pour her a glass of wine. The image also hinted at another truth about her, which was that Hallie was never content for very long. She was always looking, reaching, tasting, taking. She was always a step ahead, slightly to the side, sometimes miles out of sight. She was a traveler. She went. And if the journey took her to a bad place, then that’s where she went with all of her energy and charm and sometimes reckless gusto. Stromsoe had often thought that if people could sprout wings, Hallie’s would be the first to grow, and the largest.

“She looks hard to catch,” said Frankie.

“She let me when she was ready.”

Stromsoe set the picture back in the box. His heart was beating hard and for just a moment he doubted his location in time and space. For the first time in his life he saw no clear distinction between the past and the present and no meaningful difference between memories and what he could see right now with his one good eye. He felt as if he could stand up and walk into the next room and his wife and son would be there, sitting cross-legged on the bed over a game of Go Fish or reading a bedtime story. Over two years had passed since their deaths and somehow that terrible day seemed both closer than before and further away than it had ever been.

In looking at these pictures with Frankie, Stromsoe understood that he had crossed the great black barrier that he had tried to cross by talking to Susan Doss but couldn’t. He saw that the dead are free only when we remember them without death. Then the living are finally free too.

“Thank you,” said Frankie.

“Thank you. It’s a good thing.”

“Want to be alone?”

“No,” said Stromsoe. “Take a walk with me?”

“Sure.”

“I found a good spot the other day.”

“I got some shoes in my car.”

“I’ll get the wine and something to sit on.”

They set out down the slope of the tangerine grove. The night was cool. A dog barked then lost interest. The moon was small but bright and it lit their way between the rows and along a dirt road and through the lemon trees. Then past an irrigation station and up a hill of chaparral and wild buckwheat from the top of which Stromsoe looked down on the sprawl of nursery flowers stretching all the way to the dark horizon. The colors were luminous in the moonlight and in the lights on the security fence. There were wide avenues of white and yellow and pink on the left, then a central highway of orange and red, then on the right a great boulevard of mysterious blue and purple receding into the distance.

“I’ll have to do a report from here,” Frankie said. “It’s wonderful. Right in my own backyard.”

Stromsoe doubled the blanket twice and they sat and drank the wine side by side with their arms touching, which sent Stromsoe into incommensurate distraction despite the Colt nudging him for attention on the opposite flank.

He told her about learning to drum major — the many hours of solitary marching to a boom box playing marches in his small backyard in Santa Ana, his many hours being drilled by grouchy old Arnie Schiller, who had led the Santa Ana Saints marching band from 1928 to 1930 — and his happy dismay at being the only contestant at the band tryouts the summer before his freshman year. He touched on the basics of cadence and beating time, on downbeats, rebounds, and patterns, as well as the more advanced mace techniques which included tosses, spins, ground jabs, and salutes. He demonstrated a few moves with his wineglass.

Frankie told him about finding Charley Hatfield’s secret lab in the Bonsall barn after following a map attached to an old trust deed she’d found in a Hatfield-family file cabinet. The barn itself was lost in a swale of bamboo and choked over by wild cucumber vines. She used a machete to find a door. When she first swung that door and stepped inside, all of Charley’s stuff was there under decomposing sheets, covered in cobwebs and dust like a horror movie and she understood that she had been born with a purpose — to find this place and continue this work.

“They all thought I was crazy,” she said. “I was fifteen and I believed them for the longest time. Now? I figure what’s so crazy about making rain? It’s a good thing. It’s possible. Somebody’s got to take the job and it may as well be me.”

Later they walked hand in hand back to Stromsoe’s guesthouse. They leaned against the Mustang and looked up at the stars. Frankie, as a meteorologist, knew the night sky well.

Stromsoe followed the line of her finger as she pointed skyward, listened to her voice, smelled her breath as she spoke: Lacerta, Pegasus, Delphinus. Capricornus, Fomalhaut, Lyra.

He wanted to tell her lesser, personal truths, but he didn’t want to damage the moment, then the moment was gone.

She drove away with one bare arm waving back at him out the window.

22

People of your ilk usually have to deal with Security first,” said Choat. He sat recessed in the near dark of his office, big hands folded on his desktop in dim slants of morning sunlight. The hands were practically all that Stromsoe could see of him. “But I agreed to give you a few minutes because you’re a friend of Frankie’s.”

“Thanks,” said Stromsoe. “I’m an employee of Frankie’s.”

“How is she?”

“Worried. She’s been stalked at work, stalked at home. I had the guy arrested and he’s going to stand trial but his story doesn’t wash.”

“Stalked?”

Stromsoe leaned toward Choat, still trying for a good look at the man. “Intimidated. Photographed. Trespassed upon. Watched.” He sat back. “You know what stalking is, Mr. Choat. It’s section sixty-forty-six point nine of the California Penal Code.”

Choat rolled forward from the shadows, giving Stromsoe his first good look at the pugnacious, broken-nosed, battle-scarred face. He was one of those men with a neck as thick as his head. “If he’s been arrested, then her troubles are over, right?”

Stromsoe paused a beat. “There’s a temporary restraining order against him too. But there are plenty of other people besides him who could intimidate a young woman.”

“I don’t understand why you’re here.”

“Look, Mr. Choat,” Stromsoe said calmly. “You don’t fool me. You don’t impress me. Frankie said no to DWP money, so you sent John Cedros to frighten her. You know Cedros — he’s in custodial here. But Frankie hired me and I caught your man. He said he was stalking her because she was tall and pretty. He said that to cover your butt. It’s a lousy story. He’s a family guy. He doesn’t even get Frankie Hatfield on his home TV.”

Choat nodded, leaned back, and crossed his thick arms across his chest. Stromsoe noted the suit vest, the cuff links, the tie pin, the round-collared shirt, and the blunt barbershop haircut.

“I confess,” said Choat. “We offered Frances Hatfield money for research and development of a moisture acceleration system. We are skeptical fans of the work her great-great-grandfather did back in the early 1900s. We are aware that he contracted to make rain for the city of San Diego and it rained so hard the reservoirs flooded, the Morena Dam burst, and people were rowing boats on the streets downtown. That interests DWP. And it was not his only success story — there were several. People have spent R-and-D money on climate manipulation schemes much more outlandish than his, I can tell you — defrocking hurricanes, melting ice caps — schemes that never worked half as well as Hatfield’s secret formula. So when we heard what Ms. Hatfield was doing, well, we were damned curious. She had some promising numbers. But in the end she refused our best and final offer and that was that. Mr. Stromsoe, I’ve got no reason in the world to intimidate that lovely young woman. On the contrary, I’m pulling for her.”

“That’s good of you,” said Stromsoe. He stood and went to the blinds and let some light in. “How come you keep it so dark in here?”

“I have very strong eyes.”

“You’re a lucky man.”

“I was born with them.”

“That’s what luck is.”

“I grew up with the son of a multimillionaire. The boy put a gun to his head when he was thirteen years old.”

Stromsoe left the blinds open and sat back down again. “Maybe I had this wrong. Maybe the fact that Frankie turned you down and a guy who works for you was arrested for stalking her aren’t connected.”

Choat nodded. “It’s a free country. I believe this Cedros fellow if that’s what he told you. You can think what you want.”

“I think Frankie scares the hell out of you and your bosses. Who are probably the people I should be talking to right now anyway.”

“You’re threatening me?”

“With what? You’re Water and Power. I’m a one-eyed, by-the-day PI.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“I want you to know that my bosses and I know who you are and what you did. And we want your guarantee that Frankie Hatfield won’t be bothered anymore. We don’t want another Cedros — or somebody worse — down in San Diego, pestering her. That’s all.”

“That’s not within my power to grant or deny.”

“Then maybe I should talk to somebody who gets things done around here.”

Choat tapped some numbers on his telephone console. “I just called Security. They get things done.”

Stromsoe stood and buttoned his coat. “Thank you for your time. We’ll be watching.”

Choat stood and came around the desk in a kind of swagger. He had an odd smile on his face, something bemused and occult. He was bigger than Stromsoe had thought, and his gray eyes were hard and calm.

“You can do whatever you want, Mr. Stromsoe,” Choat said. “My only regret is that we had to have this conversation here in my office.”

Stromsoe saw the movement on the low left edge of his vision but understood it not quite fast enough.

Choat’s heavy fist clubbed the side of his jaw up high, by the ear, and Stromsoe spun away. Choat caught him by his lapels and drove Stromsoe back against the wall. Stromsoe had just found his vision and balance when Choat dragged him forward and pushed his battering ram of a face into Stromsoe’s.

“Just a little something between men.”

“Don’t touch Frankie.”

“Seize him.”

Choat shoved him back hard and let go and Stromsoe felt the arms clamp around him from behind.

“Son of a bitch threw a punch at me,” said Choat. “Get him out of my sight.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Happy to, sir. Come on, dirtbag. Back outside where dirt belongs.”

Twenty minutes later John Cedros was sitting where Stromsoe had sat. Choat held him with an unhappy stare.

“We need to accelerate the timetable,” said Choat.

“I told them we wanted action fast.”

“The PI knows. A million things can go wrong. You might be called to trial if we don’t get moving here.”

“I told you he knew,” said Cedros.

“Do what you need to do. Tell them we need results quickly. Tell them we can add fifty thousand dollars to the budget, for results on or before Sunday. If they can’t get the formula, they can burn down the barn instead. And I want the PI off the case and the woman fully discouraged.”

Cedros’s heart fell. One week ago he was a DWP custodial-staff flunky trying to raise a family, doing some low-life harassment on the side to please the Director of Resources. Now he was an accused sexual predator contracting for violence and intimidation with the most feared prison gang on Earth.

He thought of big Marcus Ampostela lumbering into his home the day before, leering at Marianna, kneeling to tickle little Tony under the chin, looking over at Cedros as if he owned his family and his life. And Ampostela was just the go-between, not the fearsome ambassador that Tavarez would dispatch for the job on the PI and the weather lady and the barn. Ampostela had actually smelled the cash, pushing his snout into the sacks to sniff the stacks of bills that Marianna had conscientiously double-bagged as if they had been her own. Ampostela had sat staring at her while Cedros painstakingly wrote out everything he knew about Frankie Hatfield and Matt Stromsoe — her address, her work numbers, the plates on her Mustang, the location of her barn in Bonsall, her hours of work and play, even the name of the gym she went to in Fallbrook on Saturdays and Sundays...

A cabin in Owens Gorge, he thought.

Two hundred and fifty miles from here. Marianna and him in the big bed with the curtains moving in the crisp mountain breeze and never once would they have to roll under that bed when the bullets flew, or hear the stupid corridos pounding all night or the scream of sirens or the deafening thunder of the police choppers rattling the walls and blasting their searchlights through the windows.

But just when his heart began to fall, Cedros picked it back up and put it in place again. There were times when a man could not afford to be hesitant or self-pitying. There were times when he had to take care of the ones he loved.

“Yes, sir. We need to move things along. I’ll get the job done.”

“You’re a tough little man. I appreciate that.”

“Does it bother you that Tavarez killed this PI’s wife and son, and now we’re making this happen?”

“Heaven puts people where they need to be.”

“Man, I hope so.”

“We’re just hustling the little PI off to his next case,” said Choat. “It’s not like we’re out to shoot his dog.”

Cedros met Marcus Ampostela at El Matador Mexican restaurant, where the big man had centered himself in a corner booth of the back room. The room was partitioned off with a light chain and a sign that said CERRADO/CLOSED. Ampostela’s table was filled with plates of food.

A skinny gangster in a gray flannel shirt sat at the adjacent booth with two weary-looking women and a heavily muscled pit bull with a blue bandanna around its neck. The dog sat beside the man, snorting down the last scraps off a plate. The women looked bored but the man and the dog stared at Cedros as he walked toward Ampostela.

Ampostela, mouth full, waved him over like an old buddy, made a small show of sitting up a little straighter. He was wearing sunglasses. There was an empty beer pitcher on the table and a half-full one.

Ampostela flicked the empty pitcher with a big finger and said, “And a glass for Mr. Cedros.” One of the women climbed out of the booth.

Cedros sat on the edge of the booth bench but he still felt too close. The big man’s head was shaved but the hairline was a shadow on the prison-paled skin. Being this close to La Eme made Cedros feel even smaller than he was, but even worse, doomed.

Cabin. Owens Gorge.

The woman came back with a pitcher and a glass, set them in front of Ampostela. He slid the glass to Cedros and set the pitcher in front of him.

Cedros immediately got down to business. He explained the hurry in vague terms and quickly offered the fifty-thousand bonus to have everything taken care of by Sunday. There would be a change for the better, however. Instead of obtaining the information that he had talked about with Tavarez, now they would like the barn — it was described in the notes he’d written for Ampostela to pass along — to be simply burned to the ground. Ampostela offered no discernible reaction to the money or change of plan, just a shaved-head glower that could have meant anything.

Cedros thought some actual cash might make the deal. He moved to get an envelope from his breast pocket and the skinny gangster leveled a big automatic at Cedros’s face and the pit bull growled and knocked a plate to the floor.

Cedros slowly pulled out the envelope with just his fingertips and dropped it between himself and Ampostela.

“You people make me nervous,” he said.

“That’s good,” said the gangster. He looked like one of the Olmec heads in the Mexico Anthropology Museum that Cedros had once seen in National Geographic. Except for the shades, thought Cedros.

“This is half,” said Cedros. He removed the other envelope and set it by the first. “This is the other half.”

“Okay, Sunday,” said Ampostela. “I’m taking all of this now. If it doesn’t happen, we’ll make it right. It’s not an easy thing, you know?”

“I’ve got no assurance?”

Ampostela smiled. His teeth were white and straight. “That’s right. No insurance.”

Cedros tried to puff himself up a little but it felt pointless. Still, his respect was in question now and he knew he was expected to secure it.

He reached out and claimed one of the envelopes, slid it back into his coat pocket. His fingertips brushed the acetate lining of his jacket, which was soaked through with sweat.

“Half now,” he said.

The Olmec head traced the movement of his hand, then aimed its sunglasses at Cedros’s face.

“This comes back to you the second I know it’s done,” said Cedros. He was surprised at the relaxed strength of his own voice because every muscle in his body felt tight. “And done right.”

Ampostela drummed his blunt fingers on the envelope. He brought it to his nose and drew in the scent of the money. His tattooed arm rippled and swayed, half muscle and half blubber. The Aztec warrior prepared to bite into the human heart he held in one hand like a peach.

“Ricky,” said Ampostela. “You trust this guy?”

The man with the dog shrugged.

Ampostela reached over and poured Cedros some beer. “Good,” he said. “Drink.”

Ampostela waited for Cedros’s gold sedan to roll down Azusa Avenue then he called Jimmy up in Crescent City. He told Jimmy to get a pen and paper and copy down a message word for word.

Jimmy took the very brief dictation and said El Jefe would have it by eight the next morning.

Then Jimmy called Shawnelle down in Redding and she took the message word for word too, along with a warning from Jimmy about getting it to El Jefe with speed and accuracy.

Shawnelle called her sister, Tonya Post, back up in Crescent City even though it was past dinnertime and the chemo made her very tired, but Tonya was actually happy to hear from her big sister and they yapped awhile before Tonya took down the message for her husband, Jason. It was a hassle for him, sure, and it could cost him his job, but it was easy money.

A message to El Jefe? Two hundred bucks from Shawnelle after Shawnelle took her fifty, and it always came one week later, right on time.

Tonya wrote slowly and asked Shawnelle to repeat herself several times to make sure it was right.

Ced wants all done by Sun night. Fifty extra, half here now, smells good. MA.

A few minutes later she walked in on Jason in the garage, where he was playing “Halo,” blasting alien soldiers into pools of blood hour after hour while the half gallons of supermarket vodka and the cream sodas he mixed them with disappeared at a breakneck rate. She held her robe up snug at the chin but she felt the Northern California cold come instantly through her socks and into her feet then up her legs and into her feminine parts, where the remains of the tumor lay hopefully dead forever.

Jason wore an old down jacket and a blaze-orange hunter’s cap against the chill. He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. He hadn’t looked at her with much of anything but hostility for a year before her diagnosis, and now all he could muster was a glazed resentment so thorough it sometimes frightened her but most often just made her wish he’d move out, send child support, and leave her and Damian alone.

“Money, honey,” she said, waving the paper.

“Put it on the couch. I’m beating this level.”

“It’s right here.”

“How you feeling, hon?” he asked, eyes on the screen.

“Kinda ragged. Damian’s down. I’m thinking I’ll do the same.”

“I’ll be a while.”

“It’s for El Jefe. Important stuff.”

“You don’t know what’s important and what isn’t.”

“Two hundred is important to me.”

“I said leave it.”

“I heard you.”

“You want us to fight or you want to just go get some sleep?” he asked. He still didn’t take his eyes off the TV. A silver figure of some kind exploded in a storm of blood.

She turned back into the house without answering, heard another explosion.

“Ah fuck, I just died.”

You died a long time ago, Tonya thought, but I’m not going to.

Post went through Thursday morning with a belligerent hangover. The aspirin bounced off his headache like it was armored but there wasn’t a lot to do after the breakfast mess. There had been rumors of La Eme versus La Nuestra Familia, and he could feel the tension in the yard and the mess hall, an almost audible buzz that the officers learned to listen to like a broadcast from a distant radio. The numbers of officers had been doubled in the mess and yard for a week now and it made you feel better to look through that jungle of orange-clad felons and see the stalwart blue of your fellow bulls lined up along all four walls with bats and hats — helmets, actually — ready to put the wood to somebody if they got the chance.

He gave Tavarez the message as they walked back to the cells in near privacy, El Jefe given his usual wide berth by the other inmates. Post always memorized the messages rather than writing down something that could be intercepted or traced back to him. Through the headache he conjured the words and relayed them to Mike Tavarez not once but twice. El Jefe walked slowly and stared down at the floor while he listened, then nodded, then picked up his pace again.

“Can you get me into the library tonight?” asked Tavarez.

“Five hundred.”

“I’ll need the laptop charged and ready.”

“I can handle it.”

“Then my message back is, yes.”

“Okay,” said Post.

“One simple yes.”

“I can handle that too, El Heffie. Hey, how was your babe last night?”

“Very nice.”

TWELVE HOURS LATER Ariel Lejas was rousted from a Spanish-language soap opera by his niece, who rushed into the darkened room to give her tío another message from El Jefe.

He took the printed sheet and thanked her and waited for her to leave the room. He looked out the windows at the blue-black Riverside sky and the great palm trees of Victoria Avenue drooping in the cricket-loud night.

The message was four words, all in English:

Do it by Sunday.

Lejas looked at his watch. It would be an honor to deal sooner than later with the Big Swine who had brought Mike Tavarez such misfortune.

23

Stromsoe trailed Frankie that evening and night on her rounds to report the San Diego weather. His ear rang and his jaw throbbed as regularly as a metronome, which he used as a reminder to be alert, careful, and ready. Choat’s punch had left him spoiling for a fight.

Earlier Stromsoe told the X-ray tech the jaw ache was a karate-class sparring accident. After pronouncing the jawbone unbroken, he told Stromsoe he might want to try yoga.

Frankie’s last dispatch was from the Cabrillo Lighthouse on Point Loma, behind which the city sparkled in the October night. Stromsoe stood away from her and the crew and audience, keeping tight to the shadows to watch and see. He felt proud to know Frankie and slightly disbelieving that she had danced with him the night before. He thought of her skin touching his arm. He thought she was interesting, unpredictable, and extraordinarily lovely. He liked being near her, something he could say about only a handful of people on the planet.

Now let’s get to the rain that’s developing for the weekend...

Stromsoe wished again that he could tell her a few more things about himself, just to give a balanced picture. It was hard to stand on half of a foundation. The last thing he was was a liar.

He knew that his affection for her was supposed to make him weak because that’s what manly stories always told you, but he wondered why those feelings couldn’t just as easily help him stay sharp and capable. He felt strong right now as he looked at her and he silently promised her again that nothing bad would happen.

As he sat across from Frankie at the Top of the Hyatt later that night, his jaw still throbbed and his ear still rang. He had co-opted the pain and noise and made watchdogs of them. Compared to the bomb two years ago, this was nothing.

“I’ll bet you want a rematch,” she said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Something tells me you’ll get it.”

They had a light dinner and coffee. Stromsoe looked down forty stories to the shrunken city, at the bay busy with its ferry and yachts and lights that glittered across to Coronado and Point Loma, beyond which the water became the boatless black Pacific stretching all the way to the sky.

He quickly noted all of this, then his attention went back to Frankie Hatfield. Again he felt the gap between her innocence and his experience and it made him want to speak.

They walked through the Gaslamp Quarter, had a drink at Croce’s, and listened to the singer.

She caught the look on his face. “Talk to me.”

“There’s something I want to tell you,” said Stromsoe.

“I love secrets and I’m good at keeping them.”

“I have one to tell you.”

“Maybe we should go outside,” she said. “Get some quiet and some fresh air.”

They headed up the avenue past the bars and restaurants. The Gaslamp Quarter was busy with traffic and pedestrians and they could hear scraps of music floating out from the clubs.

“You don’t have to hear this,” he said. “No happy ending.”

“You’ve got my curiosity up. Play fair now.”

“It’s a story that explains some things.”

They walked on in silence while Stromsoe tried to find the right words.

“We’d been after Mike Tavarez for eight years,” he said. “From just about the second he got out of Corcoran in ’93. He was rising to the top of La Eme. He was number five in the organization, then number three. By 2001 he was El Jefe, number one boss, undisputed. He got there by being smart and by making people rich. Know what he liked at Harvard? Business and history. Way back in the eighties, in Corcoran, Mike saw that La Eme needed personnel if it was going to reach far beyond the prison walls. And he saw that the barrio street gangs needed direction, motivation, and a business plan. The old gangs, like F Troop that Mike clicked up with? Gangs that fought over turf and honor and girls? Mike came to believe that they were ridiculous. That was a radical thought at the time, for a gangster. He thought they were stupid, counterproductive, and a thing of the past. Reagan was deregulating the country, trying to make healthy competition. Mike, he wanted to do the opposite — get the gangs under one color, get a monopoly. Back then, La Eme was run by Paul Zolorio. He was doing time in the same Corcoran cell block as Mike. Zolorio had the power to make things happen, and believe me, they were happening. Coke was flooding the country big-time by then, and when Zolorio put La Eme’s clout together with the barrio gangbangers, it made the biggest distribution network in the country. La Eme conscripted those gangs, those armies of potential drug salesmen. They killed the resisters, charged their taxes, and watched the money flood in. It was an ingenious move, because Mike and Zolorio were able to get all these factions working more or less together, making money. It was perfect timing, and in a perfect location — Southern California — right on the border and one of the biggest blow markets in the world. The money was phenomenal. And of course Mike learned to put away his share, plus some. Sure, he was La Eme but he was taking care of himself pretty damned well. By ’95 they were bringing in millions of dollars a year in drug distribution taxes alone, and Mike had his finger in most of it. Some ugly things went down — nature of the business. Here I was, tracking my old friend, the guy who played clarinet in my band. The guy who had beaten Hallie half to death. I’d stay up late at night sometimes, thinking of ways to get to him. Sometimes I’d dream about him, what he’d done to Hallie all those years ago. It infuriated me that I was the good guy, a cop, and we had resources and manpower and we couldn’t catch up with him. Hallie told me to take myself off the Narcotics Division, to try Homicide or Traffic or Fraud. I was too stubborn. It was personal and moral. The way I saw it, it was good against bad. Us and them. That was my simpleminded take. I’ve always been uncomplicated about the law, and breaking the law, and what’s right and wrong. It’s a flaw of mine.”

He felt the great wave of the past towering over him just like the night before, when he’d shown her the pictures. But this wave was even darker and bigger because he was the perpetrator in this story, not the victim.

“So every time we caught a glimpse of Mike he was farther away, at a different level,” Stromsoe said. “We couldn’t touch him in Mexico — the corruption was too thick. We couldn’t touch him in Colombia — it was another universe down there. And we had a helluva time putting our fingers on him here in the U.S., too. He’d sneak up to Laguna from Tijuana in an old car or in a cigarette boat called Reina, stay with his family for a few weeks. By the time we realized he was under our noses he would be gone again. You have to understand how many people were looking out for him. He had six men living on the Laguna compound alone. They were chauffeurs and gardeners and assistants to his wife and children, but they were pistoleros first and foremost. Mike was El Jefe. If you helped El Jefe you made a powerful friend. Hell, they were writing songs about him. He was a hero. Nobody was going to help us. He was safe in any barrio in the world, unless La Nuestra Familia was in charge.”

“La Nuestra Familia? Rivals?”

“Sworn and deadly. LNF is mostly in the northern part of the state.”

They stopped and looked in the window of a store devoted to lamps made from plaster seashells. The pure white whelks and conchs and abalone shells looked stark and peaceful glowing around their colored bulbs.

They crossed Island and headed up Fourth.

“Then, we caught a break,” he said. “Mike had a longtime lover, a woman named Ofelia. She’d visited him a lot at Corcoran when she was just a girl — and coached him in the Nahuatl language. She was a nearly full-blooded Aztec, fluent in a dialect that Tavarez was using to build a language code for La Eme. After he got out of Corcoran in ’93, Mike shacked up with Ofelia for a couple of months. She was seventeen. But Mike had plans — he dumped her and married Miriam Acosta, Zolorio’s niece. Ofelia fled back to Mexico and entered a convent. A year later Mike went down there and talked her out of it. He never stopped seeing Ofelia, even married, even as a father. Which meant we never stopped watching her.”

“Did she go and come back to the United States?”

“Not quite that far. Mike set her up in a nice apartment in Tijuana’s Colonia district. You think TJ is all filth and poverty but it’s not. I saw the place and it was nice — up in the hills and gated, always two gunmen outside. Always two. When Mike got more money and power he bought another apartment in Tijuana and one in La Jolla. Ofelia would rotate according to where Mike was going to be. Sometimes she’d rotate according to where Mike wasn’t. They had handfuls of cell phones. They’d use them for a day or two and toss them. So, no way for us to set up good intercepts. It came down to physical surveillance of three known places, plus whatever safe houses we hadn’t discovered yet. Between us, the TJ cops, and the La Jolla PD, it was just about impossible to get every place staked out at the same time to see who was where. Plus some of the TJ cops were on Mike’s payroll. So you’d finally get a couple of TJ detectives to check one of the Colonia apartments and they’d run into two on-duty TJ uniforms who were Mike’s. We’d find out a month later that he wasn’t there anyway — he’d been way up in Laguna with his family. It was crazy.”

“Cops on the drug payrolls,” said Frankie. “Now that scares me.”

“Me too. We felt completely handcuffed. Then I got an idea. We picked up Ofelia in La Jolla and flew her up to Santa Ana in a DEA helicopter. This was August 2001, just before 9/11, and we were a multiagency task force — we had a fat budget, toys galore, and latitude. They sat her down in a women’s-jail interview room. I walked in and she recognized me immediately, called me Señor Matt. She was dark and pretty. Wild-seeming. Expensive everything. She had a temper but she was intelligent too. I told her she and Mike had a large problem. She thought that was funny. I told her that she and Mike were being shadowed by soldiers of La Nuestra Familia. She said that was impossible — LNF had no idea where she and Mike would be. I told her that in the course of our surveillance we had identified four of them. We had them in our sights, just like we had Mike and her in our sights. I rattled off their names. By then she was listening, sizing up my tale. Yes, I told her, we wanted to arrest Tavarez more than anything, but if we couldn’t get a clean arrest on him, we didn’t want La Nuestra Familia to get him. I was acting as a former friend, I told her, a man who respected Mike. I showed her some of our surveillance pictures of LNF gangsters on a stakeout of their own. We cropped them so you couldn’t tell exactly where they were taken. Ofelia was starting to believe me. She was easy to read, her emotions right there on her face. Then I showed her some mugs of these guys, real heavies, murderers all. She studied them. Then I tossed out some pictures that we’d gotten just a few weeks earlier. They showed the torture and murder of an LNF gangster who had betrayed his boss to La Eme. A big guy, young and strong. The brutality of what they did to him was inconceivable. Unimaginable. They injected him with lidocaine to keep his heart beating every time it looked like he’d die. They kept him alive for three days of that. Three days. They’d sent the video to La Eme as a warning.”

Frankie stopped and looked at him. Stromsoe lightly took her arm and they crossed the street.

“What did she do?”

“Exactly what we hoped she’d do. I drove her back to La Jolla. Took my time, let the pressure build. We’d made the arrangements with the Tijuana police ahead of time so they were ready if Ofelia blew into the Colonia to tell Mike that La Nuestra Familia was after her, which is exactly what she did. TJ police tracked her to a Colonia apartment that night. It was a new one, one we didn’t even know about. It wasn’t even furnished yet. Tavarez was there. It turned into a western. Good cops and dirty cops and Mike’s private army of pistoleros. A mess. Six dead in less than five minutes. Ofelia was one of them. Tavarez got away.”

Frankie stopped again. “The LNF wasn’t watching Mike and Ofelia at all.”

“No.”

“Mike blamed you for Ofelia because you were the one who frightened her into doing what she did.”

“Correct. My clever plan.”

“And he tried to blow you off the earth,” she said softly. “But got Hallie and Billy instead.”

They continued up the avenue. Frankie held his arm now and he saw that she walked with her head down. He felt primitive and misshapen for having brought her into his world.

“In your line of work,” she said. “You have to figure that things like that will happen. Things like that have to happen. Don’t you accept that when you accept the badge?”

“I did. It helps. But I also know that if I had been smarter, more patient, and luckier, my wife and son would be alive right now.”

“That’s a heavy load for one little soul to bear.”

“I don’t mean to complain. I don’t want sympathy.”

“What do you want?”

“To be seen clearly by you. That’s all.”

Stromsoe followed her home, gunning his truck to keep up with Frankie’s Mustang on the freeways. But when they got near Fallbrook she took the country roads more slowly and Stromsoe fell in behind her on the curves. He lowered his windows and the smells came rushing in as they always did in Fallbrook — oranges and lemons and acres of flowers and the not-too-distant ring of wild sage and chaparral.

He killed the engine and walked her to her door. She let the dogs out.

Then she moved into Stromsoe’s arms and they shared a good long kiss. He sensed consequences and swiftly ignored them. His jaw ached and he forced himself not to flinch. He was tired of being a human shipwreck.

Frankie broke off and whistled up the dogs. They came in a blur of tails and tongues.

She let them into the house then turned to look at Stromsoe. “My heart’s pounding.”

“Mine too.”

“I forgot about your jaw. Sorry. But I won’t forget that kiss as long as I live.”

“I’ve got more.”

“I’ll bet you do, gumshoe. Good night.”

“Good night, Frankie.”

She smiled. “See you tomorrow. And for whatever tiny thing it’s worth, your clever plan with Ofelia didn’t fail — it worked too well. That’s what happened to Great-Great-Grandpa Charley in San Diego. He promised rain and made too much. The city flooded and they ran him out. You got run out too. But now you’re back, and I’m glad you are.”

Stromsoe had just pulled up at his guesthouse when Birch called.

“We got a call on the hotline about five minutes ago. Stand by.”

“Birch Security Solutions, may I have your name and telephone number?”

“They’re going to get the weather lady and the PI.”

“Your name and number, please.”

Click.

“Run it by me again, Dan.”

Birch played it again.

Stromsoe didn’t recognize the voice. It was a young woman. The recording was clear.

“What number did she call?”

“Main number,” said Birch. “She got the menu and used the urgent-message option. Our watch coordinator picked up.”

“They,” said Stromsoe.

“They,” said Birch. “DWP?”

“Maybe.”

“Choat punched you, maybe figures he softened you up.”

“For the new friends of the DWP?”

“Sure,” said Birch. “Maybe they’ve replaced Cedros with someone a little more formidable.”

“I could believe that. You know what bothers me most about that call?”

“Her tone of voice,” said Birch. “She sounds scared shitless. I think she’s scared for you and more scared for herself, for making the call.”

Stromsoe said nothing for a moment because Birch had read his mind so accurately. “Who knows that she’s a weather lady and I’m a PI?”

“Choat, Choat’s bosses, Cedros, some of the people at Frankie’s work, some of us here. The old guy — Ted? Then there’s the San Diego sheriffs, the judges, marshals, and clerks. The courtroom is open to the public. Calls and messages get listened to. Mail and e-mail gets opened. People talk; people hear. It’s worse with a celebrity. Everybody’s interested and word travels fast. Has Frankie told anyone she’s being stalked?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ask her.”

“I will.”

“Look,” said Birch. “It’s early Friday morning right now. She’s got one more shift of work for the week, then Saturday and Sunday off. I’ll send you two Birch people to help out with Frankie — one man and one woman, both clear to carry. I’ll send them in a Birch patrol car, for good measure, and you can use them twenty-four/seven for the weekend. Tell Frankie about the call if you want. If this call is good, we’ve got people where we need them. If it’s just more cheap harassment, then Frankie’s only out another twelve hundred bucks. She can afford it. Monday, we’ll see where we stand.”

“Good.”

“I’ll need some time to get Janet and Alex down there.”

“I’ll cover until they get here.”

“Eight sharp, then.”

“We’ll be here.”

“Keep her safe and warm, Matt.”

“Mind your own business, Dan.”

Birch laughed softly, nothing prurient in it that Stromsoe could hear.

Stromsoe parked in front of his house. Inside he got the same blanket they’d shared the other night, and put into a plastic bag a bottle of water and some crackers, his car cell-phone charger, and an extra magazine of .380 loads for the Colt.

A few minutes later he coasted without lights to a stop on Frankie’s driveway, hopefully far enough away not to wake her up. At the last second he steered the truck left and brought it to a stop in the middle of the narrow drive with a good view of the house.

He got the blanket behind his head for a pillow and sank back, feeling the throb of his jaw and the metallic ping of blood pulsing in his ear.

24

Lejas sat in a big avocado tree watching the changing of the guard at Frankie Hatfield’s house. The tree was thick with young fruit and brown-tipped leaves and it protected Lejas as it might a raccoon or a hawk. Through his binoculars Lejas saw the PI in the yellow truck shake hands with two uniformed rent-a-cops in a Birch Security Solutions cruiser — a red-haired man and a blond woman — both young and armed.

Lejas had driven down from Riverside in the dark. When he rolled into Fallbrook the sun was just rising and now, two hours later, the Friday morning was still cool and the sky that odd shade of white that meant rain coming in from the Pacific. He’d easily found a good place to hide his car and climb into a good, tall tree.

Now the weather lady came from the house, two dogs bouncing out ahead of her like kicked rocks. They looked neither aware nor protective. The woman was very tall and dark-haired and Lejas could see by the way she smiled and shook the PI’s hand that there was something between them. Fine. Distraction. She shook hands with the uniforms and was taller than both of them.

He watched the four people walk inside, followed by the dogs. Stromsoe turned and looked in Lejas’s direction, then closed the door behind them. Lejas slowly let the binoculars down to dangle from the strap around his neck.

He pulled a handful of black licorice twists from the pocket of his blue plaid shirt, picked one out, and stuffed the others back in. The tree was comfortable as far as trees went. He relaxed, balanced in the crook of the trunk and a big branch.

He looked down at his car. It was a five-year-old Ford Crown Victoria Law Enforcement Edition, with a strong V-8, good brakes, and a blotch of gray primer where the Grizzly Security Patrol shields had been sanded off each door. The black-and-white paint job was still decent. The big, hand-levered searchlights were still attached and operable. The light bar on the roof was gone but Lejas bought a used one from a chop-shop friend, welded up some brackets, wired it into the old toggle, put in new fuses, and replaced the missing bulbs. The shortwave radio and siren had been removed too, but he didn’t need those anyway. He’d put new tires on it. The odometer read 223,738 miles. He’d bought it at auction in San Bernardino two days ago using fake ID and real cash — $2,150. Lejas had estimated nine miles per gallon down from San Berdoo. Still, it was the perfect car for the job.

At eight-thirty Stromsoe came from the house, got into his truck, and drove away. A few minutes later Red Hair ambled from the house and got into the security car. He was thin and lanky and looked athletic. Red Hair drove the car about a hundred feet down the drive away from the house and parked it crosswise to take up as much of the drive as possible. He got out, leaned against the side facing away from the house, and made a call on a cell phone.

The weather lady would be tough, Lejas thought, but he could do it. It would take some patience, but because Sunday night was his new deadline, it was going to take balls and luck too. The private soldiers were no doubt competent but all he needed was a moment of disorganization or inattention and he could get it done. The hard part would be having Stromsoe there to witness it. That meant Lejas would have at least one, and maybe as many as three defenders to deal with. He thought of running back up to Riverside to collect two amigos to balance the power but that would mean a lot of guns, and splitting the money. Mainly Lejas liked to work alone, figuring the movements and planning the surprise and getaway, then making it happen and vanishing. When something like this went right it was simple and sudden and final. He was a solitary man and always had been.

Red Hair went around and got in the driver’s side, still talking on his phone. He left the door open. It was a good day to watch from a vehicle, Lejas thought — cool and cloudy and still.

Lejas could see the top of Red Hair’s head. He wondered what type of person worked as a security guard or private investigator. Were they failed police? Did they have a physical or mental defect that kept them from getting hired as law enforcers? He knew they didn’t make much money, so it couldn’t be that.

More importantly, though, how ready were these people? What were they expecting? Men with guns meant nothing if they weren’t ready to use them instantly. Look how often cops got shot with their own weapons. Weather Lady would leave for work around noon. According to the notes from John Cedros, Stromsoe would follow her, shadow her from location to location as she did her reports, then follow her home. It would be nice to be waiting in the hedge by her garage. He could easily disable the automatic garage door opener. Then he could shoot the woman when she stepped out of her car, blast Stromsoe’s truck to keep him busy, then run down the hillside through the avocado orchard to his car waiting on the dirt service road. Stromsoe would attend the woman, no doubt — that much was certain by the way he looked at her as they shook hands. The trouble was Red Hair and Gun Girl because the security cruiser would almost certainly lead the way up the drive, followed by Frankie Hatfield, then the PI. Lejas could still spring out and make the shots — one in the chest, one in the head — but that left Red Hair and Gun Girl to chase him down the hillside. If they were really smart, one could drive the cruiser back down and have a reasonable chance of intercepting him on the road. And there was always the chance that Red Hair or Gun Girl would stay behind to patrol Frankie’s home and prevent just such a thing.

Crowded. Loud. Too many ifs. And too far to run to his car.

No. He dug out another piece of licorice. Separation, he thought. If he could just get everyone separated for a moment. Maybe they would separate themselves for him. When? Why? Well, when they were in their cars going and coming from the weather lady’s work, for one. Lejas pictured it: the security cruiser in the lead. Then Weather Lady. Then the Big Swine. Three separable units. On the road, other cars would naturally get between the three. It wouldn’t be a perfect formation. There was a funny push-pull to the geometry too, because ideally Red Hair and Gun Girl would be far out of the picture, but the PI would be close enough to Frankie to see very clearly what happened to her. Make the PI watch. Push-pull, thought Lejas. Push two away and pull two up close. For some reason he thought of his sister teaching him to rub his tummy and pat his head at the same time. Anna had laughed heartily at his failed first attempts but Lejas did what he had always done with a problem that interested him — he stuck with it until he solved it.

He finished the licorice and set his forehead against a branch for support. Push, pull. He was tiring of the tree. But until the tall weather lady left her house this was where he would stay. He watched a trail of ants climb up and down the tree, wondered why they traveled so close together, two adjacent columns going opposite ways, like commuters backed up on the 91. Except no traffic jams here, no, the ants scurried right along at functional speeds, getting where they needed to go without honking or rage. He also watched a bright redheaded woodpecker as it tap-tap-tapped on a palm down the road. They hid food in the holes, he knew, then came back in the hot dry summer to collect it. A hummingbird landed just a few feet away from him, pointed his long beak at Lejas’s face, then was gone with a brief thrum.

A minute later Lejas carefully climbed down the branches and jumped the last five feet to the ground. His legs were stiff and sore and he had a good kink in his back. He crunched through the fallen leaves and relieved himself under a tree, then fetched a soft drink from the trunk of his car.

He loosened his belt a notch and slipped the can between it and his stiff back, roughly opposite the trim .22 autoloader that rested behind his belt in front. Then he climbed back into the tree, pulled the soda can free, and settled back in.

Apparently he hadn’t missed a thing. Red Hair was still visible in the security cruiser, probably listening to the radio or even napping. Weather Lady and Gun Girl were still inside, probably talking about men, children, or clothes.

Slowly an idea came to Lejas and he pictured it. First it was an image of ants, then the ants became cars, then lights and flares and cops. He imagined it from several different angles and every time it seemed to be simple, sudden, and final.

Ants going up. Ants coming down.

Push, pull.

Lejas saw that he could employ this peaceful little village of Fallbrook as a coconspirator. He could use its dark hills and its sparse traffic and the few cops on its country roads as allies in his work.

And it seemed like such a nice place. Pretty and trusting and fragrant. Overflowing with fruit and flowers, birds and squirrels and rabbits.

He sipped the drink, watched and waited.

At 12:35, the PI came up the drive in his yellow pickup truck, just as Cedros’s notes said he would. He stopped, got out, and talked to Red Hair. A minute later Weather Lady, all dressed up for TV, came from her house with Gun Girl, who got into the security cruiser. The cruiser led the way down the drive, followed by Weather Lady’s beautiful red Mustang, then the investigator.

When they were out of sight Lejas climbed from the tree. He got into his car and spread the San Diego County map across his lap, rechecking Weather Lady’s route to and from work, as established by Cedros.

By one he was driving along the route. He drove it all the way to the freeway and back. Fortunately, there was only one way to her house for the last five miles or so, so that left him plenty of road along which to find the ideal place to position his car, and to have a good view of the road in the direction she would be coming.

Lejas figured that the road leading past Frankie’s driveway was too small. Mission Road, the main artery in, was too broad and too busy on a Friday.

He found his spot on Trumpet Vine, a midsize street that Frankie would have to take to get to her house. For a while he stood up on the little ridge that afforded the long view down the road, breathing in the aroma of the poisonous trumpet vines that grew in profusion along the road.

The smell of the trumpet-vine flowers was the most emotional smell that Lejas had ever experienced. It took him back to his boyhood days in Casa Blanca, a section of Riverside legendary for its family feuds and gang violence but containing a wall along Madison that was completely overgrown with the vine. Lejas’s Casa Blanca smelled of the rich, narcotic flowers that dangled like white trumpets in the branches.

One June night his big brother, Ernest, had been blown into that wall by a hurricane of bullets fired from a car by four Corona Varrio Locos. They had come venturing off their nearby turf and onto Madison for vengeance. Ernest was clicked up with Casa Blanca but he was known as a timid and funny boy. He was fourteen. As soon as Lejas found the courage to crawl from his hiding place in the vines, he had rushed and held Ernest but his brother could do nothing but stare up at him in terror, tremble briefly, then die. It was inconceivable that his brother, once a warm and living thing, had been reduced in a matter of seconds to a lifeless bag of bleeding holes. Lejas was ten years old. He killed the car’s driver two weeks later, after hiding in the bushes for seven hours outside his girlfriend’s door. By the time he was twelve he’d killed two other CVLs he was pretty sure were in the gunship that night. A bicycle and darkness were his best allies. Those, and an unbelievably heavy.40-caliber revolver he’d bought off Tubby Jackson by hawking nickel bags of Mexican brown heroin to yuppies in expensive cars lined up weekend nights on Casa Blanca Street. The fourth gunman had vanished and never been heard from. His name was Rinny Macado and he was still number one on Lejas’s list.

As Lejas took a moment and smelled the trumpet flowers and remembered Ernest and his goofy bucktoothed smile, the same can-do coldness that he’d first felt that night by the wall came back to him again. He had never lost it. He could bring it out and put it away whenever he wanted, a tool of the trade, a skill.

By evening Lejas had parked in the shadows of an oak forest off a remote dirt road not far from Trumpet Vine. The trees were alive with woodpeckers, who paid him almost no attention. There were lovers’ initials inside hearts carved into the huge old tree trunks, and when Lejas looked up into the branches they were so thick the failing sun seemed to be caught in them.

Here, he roughly sketched and taped off the shape of a San Diego County Sheriff Department emblem on both sides of his former Grizzly Security Patrol Cruiser. Then he sprayed on the paint. He knew that most law enforcement emblems were a difficult-to-match shade of brown gold, so Lejas had had to settle on a brighter, showier color with more orange in it. He tossed the can into the bushes and waited.

An hour later he stenciled on the words:

The spelling error made him smile and shake his head but it was too late to correct it. If someone noticed it he would probably be dead by then anyway.

But when Lejas finally untaped the emblem template from the doors, he was pleased to see that in the diminishing twilight his car was convincingly official. Just to make sure, he used a handkerchief to wipe clean the door handles, headlight housings, and spotlights.

He stood back fifty feet and saw that his car was believable. At thirty feet, the same.

Even up close it looked pretty good.

Lejas imagined it parked at an angle in the right lane and shoulder of Trumpet Vine, preceded by five triangle reflector flares to slow and funnel the traffic down to one lane, its yellow warning lights pulsing from the roof while a crisply dressed San Diego County Sheriff’s deputy with a flashlight waved the Birch Security cruiser through but raised a hand and commanded the driver of the red Mustang to stop.

Push, pull.

He took his time putting on the uniform in the darkness beneath the oaks. He’d purchased it at a military clothing store in Oceanside shortly after getting the original information from Ampostela and the assignment from El Jefe. Military uniforms were not exactly like law enforcement uniforms but this one was close enough — long-sleeved, summer-weight cotton/poly in tan. Matching trousers, plain front, hemmed not cuffed. They were an inch or two too long, like the cops in Mexico wore them.

He’d bought the police belt and holster from a Riverside leather smith he’d known for years. It was stiff, functional, reasonably priced, and provided a nice fit for the heavy .357 Magnum revolver.

His badge was from the police department in Fort Kent, Maine, and he’d bought it at a gun show in Ontario, California; the name-plate he’d found there too: SGT.LITTLETON.

He already owned a pair of black steel-toed construction boots and he had polished them for nearly an hour back home to bring out an impressive luster.

The cuffs were toys; the radio was nothing but a defunct walkie-talkie; the flashlight was a good four-battery Maglite he’d had for years.

He added a fake mustache that he’d bought at a costume store, which had a terrific selection with Halloween just a couple of weeks away. He’d chosen a brown one, full but neat, just like American cops wore.

Lejas stood in the darkness listening to the light crackle of the oak leaves in the breeze, and gathered his thoughts.

The weather lady’s last report was just before eight o’clock each week night, and Lejas knew from Cedros’s notes that she usually got home between 8:45 and 10:30.

He also knew it would be foolish to drive this counterfeit Sheriff cruiser any more than absolutely necessary — it was only a matter of time before a real deputy spotted him.

Lejas waited until 8:35 before he pulled his car onto the street and headed toward Trumpet Vine. It would take just three or four minutes to drive there, a minute to park and turn on the warning lights, set out the reflector flares, hop out of sight to the top of the embankment, and use his binoculars to spot them in the occasional oncoming traffic.

And when he spotted them, it would take just a few minutes more. Wave the security car through. Stop the Mustang. One in her heart and one in her head, then two shots into the grille of the yellow truck to put the fear of God into the Big Swine.

Then five steps back to his car, a U-turn and the brights heading back past the yellow truck, out of Fallbrook, and onto Interstate 15 for the short ride down to Escondido, where his ex-brother-in-law was waiting with an empty garage and friends who would scrap the Crown Victoria for parts in less than half a day.

The road unwound before him. The moon was low and stifled in the damp clouds, like a bulb covered by lint. The big Crown Vic swerved and swayed through the curves of the road. Lejas hadn’t noticed what a sloppy ride the car had until now, like he was riding on gelatin instead of steel-reinforced rubber.

He made the turn onto Trumpet Vine, went southeast for a mile to the spot he’d found earlier. He’d marked it with a boulder just off the road. He pulled onto the shoulder then reversed, leaving his car at a half-on, half-off angle in the right lane.

Lejas stepped from the car, shoulders back and head erect. He was law enforcement now. He turned on the yellow flashing lights on the light bar, then set out the triangle reflectors to slow the traffic. Then he stepped up the embankment, moved out of sight from the road below, tucked the Maglite under his left arm, and raised his night-vision binoculars with his right.

The night turned green, a muted but somehow light-filled color. The road was a pale ribbon, both blanched and detailed, winding back into the Fallbrook hills. The trumpet vines were darker patches along the embankments but the flowers themselves were dangling swatches of cool white.

A minivan approached, slowing when the driver saw the flashing lights and the reflectors. Lejas killed his light and moved to the edge and peeked over a fragrant trumpet vine. The van picked its way past the reflectors, stopped inquisitively at the flashing law enforcement car, then swung around it and accelerated on its way.

A station wagon followed a minute later. Then a motorcycle, then a battered old pickup truck.

Then Lejas saw through his nightscope the Birch Security cruiser slowly winding its way toward him.

He stepped down the embankment, tossed the binoculars into his car, turned on the flashlight, and assumed his stance on the road between his car and the reflectors.

The security cruiser dipped out of sight for a second and after this, Lejas knew, would quickly be upon him.

He glanced at his car, just one last check of the scene to make sure it was right.

But the cruiser didn’t look right at all.

It slouched noticeably toward the road. He’d seen this before, dozens of times in his life. It was always bad news but this was not just bad news — it was impossible news.

His eyes went quickly to the new left rear tire, which was flat. The rubber drooled onto the asphalt like something melted.

“Son of the fucked,” he muttered.

All he could do was turn his official attention to the oncoming security cruiser and use his flashlight to wave it through. He used the steady, almost bored motion of law enforcers everywhere. He didn’t look at Red Hair or Gun Girl but he didn’t look away either — just gave them the same noncommittal but alert gaze that a thousand cops and guards had used on him in his lifetime.

Then the Mustang.

Then the yellow pickup truck.

Then their exhaust reached his nose and their lights proceeded away and Lejas stood for a moment in the flashing light of his own fake cop car, staring at the flat tire and shaking his head.

He walked up closer, used the flashlight, and saw the shiny nail head flush against the sidewall.

Son of the fucked.

He collected the reflectors, set them in the trunk, then got in and killed the warning lights. He slammed the door. Then he angrily fishtailed a U-turn in the loose shoulder gravel, throwing up a spray of dust and dirt.

He limped back to the grove of oaks off the dirt road, cursing his luck and the God that made him, but also working on a plan for tomorrow.

25

Late Saturday afternoon the rain began to fall. It was light, just sprinkling the windshield of the pickup as Stromsoe headed out of Fallbrook toward the Bonsall barn.

Frankie was behind him in her Mustang, with Alex and Janet bringing up the rear in the cruiser. Stromsoe led the way because they’d never been to the barn. He had decided to keep the three-car formation because he liked the mobility and the general heft of a column.

If they’re going to get the weather lady and the PI, he thought, they’ll have four people and three cars to deal with. Plus Ted, who would be waiting for them at the barn. Another body, another truck.

He still didn’t like the sound of that caller’s voice. You could hear the truth and fear in it. It didn’t sound familiar to him in any way. Choat’s receptionist came to mind. She had looked like a decent sort, someone who wouldn’t approve of things like this, but you couldn’t tell for sure. Cedros’s wife came to mind too. It was possible that Cedros told her such things, or that she had found out accidentally somehow. Why warn him now? No one had warned anybody before. Maybe Choat had escalated things, as Birch had said.

He pulled to the side of the dirt road and held open the gate. Frankie came through and pulled over too, then Janet brought the cruiser across and continued up the road to where Stromsoe was pointing.

Frankie waited for the cruiser to top the rise then got out of her car, crunched across the road, and kissed Stromsoe unquestioningly. Her hat fell off. The kiss went longer than he thought it should.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing at all.”

“If they’re going to get the PI, they’ll have to get through me to do it.”

“Let’s not make light of things.”

“I’m not — I’ve got the gun. The revolver I can’t hit much with.”

He handed her the hat and she got back into her car.

Ted met them with good cheer and coffee. They loaded Ted’s white truck as they had the week before. Ace and Sadie chased each other through the damp brush then fought it out in the dirt by the barn. Alex and Janet, still dressed in their Birch Security uniforms, sat in their car out of the drizzle, but they kept hitting the windshield wipers to see what was going on.

Twenty minutes later they were parked by tower one. Ted climbed up to check the instruments and when he was ready Stromsoe handed up the drums of unactivated potion. Again he smelled the copper-chlorine aroma of the solution.

Then Frankie dispatched Ted to stand up close to the Birch cruiser, between the window and tower one, so she could climb the tower and work her magic on the formula. Stromsoe wondered what Alex and Janet could have possibly seen through a window dripping with water.

Up on the tower now, Frankie set down her heavy red toolbox and made a little orbit with her finger.

He turned his back to her, smiling.

Again he heard the sound of liquid hitting liquid, of something hard sloshing through the containers, hitting their sides. Then the click of the propane lighter. Then he heard tools clanging back into the red toolbox, the lid coming into place, the latches snapping shut. A moment later the same faint, ethereal odor as before wafted down to him.

When he heard Frankie’s feet on the ladder he finally turned to see the gentle blue glow at the tops of the two drums. Vapor rose into the sky.

She walked by him and put her hand on his shoulder for just a second and looked at him through the rain dripping off her hat.

Thirty-five minutes later they finished up at tower four, then they unfolded their beach chairs in the bed of Ted’s truck and waited for the drizzle to turn to rain.

Ted produced the Scoresby and took an inaugural swig. Frankie sipped. Stromsoe passed. The dogs, again wearing the plastic rain ponchos that Frankie had tailored for them, lay on the pickup bed panting lightly, arguably alert. Alex and Janet sat in the idling cruiser with the wipers cycling occasionally and the defroster on to keep down the condensation.

Stromsoe, Frankie, and Ted sat with the uneasy contentment of teammates with a small lead at the half. Stromsoe accepted a smoke from Ted, which got him poked in the ribs by Frankie. This briefly interested Ace. Frankie pinged the back of a fingernail against the Scoresby bottle but didn’t drink.

The drizzle stopped.

Stromsoe saw it decelerate and heard the slowing patter of it on the brim of his hat, then it simply ended with a puff of cold wind out of the northwest.

Ted took a long thoughtful look up into the sky. “Stars,” he said. “Not what I wanted to see.”

Frankie was looking up too.

Stromsoe saw the clouds thinning and the pinprick clarity of stars against a clear black sky.

“It’s blowing through,” said Ted.

“Damn,” said Frankie. “Damn. All my calcs had half an inch. Weather Service, NOAA, everybody agreed.”

“Hills make pockets,” Ted said uncertainly.

The driver’s window of the Birch cruiser went down.

They gave it an hour but the system kept moving through. In its wake blew a cold north wind that riled the sage and chaparral and filled the air with their clean green smell. The stars twinkled in the newly scrubbed sky.

“Let’s do what athletes do,” said Ted.

“They make adjustments,” said Frankie.

“Always makes me think of knobs,” said Ted. “They go back home, sit on the couch, lift their shirts, and adjust the knobs on their stomachs.”

“Wish I had one,” said Frankie. “I’d make some adjustments. All right. Okay. Not the end of the world.”

“Maybe this is the exception that proves the rule,” said Ted.

“I never understood that sentence,” said Frankie. “I never liked it. Let’s go. I’m cold.” They drove back to the barn, unloaded the drums and ladder, tools and chairs.

“This doesn’t mean anything about the formula or the mode of delivery,” said Ted. “There wasn’t anything for our stuff to hold on to. You can’t accelerate what isn’t up there to start with.”

“I understand that,” said Frankie. “But I wonder if our catalytic matter is too dense. If it couldn’t rise through the moisture.”

“It rose last time.”

“I’m thinking. I’m thinking.”

They caravanned out with the Birch cruiser in the lead, then Frankie in her Mustang, followed by Stromsoe. Ted stayed behind to pull the weather stats off the Santa Margarita Web site and see what happened elsewhere in the area.

Stromsoe never thought he’d feel so bad about rain not falling. Never thought of rain at all until he’d met Frankie Hatfield, and her passion had gotten into him. So had her disappointment tonight.

The blacktop road was wet but not dripping. Stromsoe saw the tight fans of water kicked up by the Mustang’s rear tires. The breeze swayed the roadside oaks and their leaf-held rain dropped onto his windshield.

When Stromsoe turned onto Trumpet Vine he saw the disturbance half a mile ahead, the yellow lights flashing. He went around a curve and they disappeared from his sight.

He thought of the Sheriff cruiser he’d seen in roughly the same place the night before, wondered again what exactly the deputy was doing there except slowing traffic and waving the motorists along. Last night, from a distance, he’d figured a sobriety checkpoint, but the deputy had been sleepily efficient and never even talked to the drivers. Then he thought a registration or safety check of some kind, but the guy didn’t check anything. Then Stromsoe had figured a fugitive alert, or maybe the cool end of a hot pursuit. Maybe even something with INS or Border Patrol — Fallbrook was filled with illegals doing cheap labor.

Regardless, somebody was at it again. He didn’t think that CHP, sheriffs, and cops would set up checkpoints or speed traps the same place two nights running.

INS? Who knew.

Stromsoe thought it telling that a Mexican-American Sheriff’s deputy, like the guy who had waved him through last night, would be out there looking for illegal Mexicans.

He followed Frankie’s Mustang out of the curve. The Birch cruiser was a hundred yards ahead of Frankie, just now heading into the dip before the straight that would lead to the flashing lights.

The cruiser slowed, then headed up the little grade and over. The Mustang followed a moment later, then Stromsoe was cresting the rise that Frankie had just made and he saw clearly the black-and-white patrol car and the lights and I’ll be damned, he thought, it looks like the same guy as last night.

He braked, gave Frankie some room to slow. He saw the security cruiser slow and bend slightly into the left lane, following the red reflectors. The cop stepped out, took a look at Janet at the wheel, then swung his flashlight in the same desultory arc as the night before. The brake lights on the Birch cruiser darkened.

Frankie, no doubt upset about the rain, punched the Mustang quickly to the reflectors, then braked and crept forward.

Stromsoe closed the distance as the deputy walked around to the driver’s side of her car. Stromsoe saw something that at first seemed funny: the guy had the same baggy too-long trousers he was wearing the night before. The funny part was that cops down in Mexico often wore their pants this way because their uniforms weren’t cut like ours and this guy was a Mexican-American, so he looked just like some of the policía municipal guys the task force had used to stake out Mike Tavarez’s apartments in the Colonia.

Funny.

But the kicker was, he also looked just like the policía municipal cops who were guarding Mike’s apartments in the Colonia.

Good guys, bad guys. Bad guys, good guys.

All mixed up.

Stromsoe got a charge of adrenaline he wasn’t expecting. It hit him everywhere at once: suddenly his vision was extra clear and things were happening more slowly than usual, his muscles were tight and ready, and his breath was coming fast.

The deputy shuffled to Frankie’s window and Stromsoe saw the glass go down.

Stromsoe pulled up tight on the Mustang’s tail and the deputy shined the flashlight in his face. Stromsoe’s one good eye fought the light but before he had to squint away he got a good look at the man.

Skinny face, fat mustache.

Pants pooling down over his boots.

A brand-new duty belt, and not a Sam Browne, but a shiny, showy knockoff.

A big revolver that deputies never carried anymore.

Alone — a checkpoint with one deputy.

Stromsoe’s vision returned as the deputy turned his light and attention back to Frankie.

The deputy said something and popped his holster strap free.

He drew the big revolver and in an instant Stromsoe understood that Frankie was about to get shot. He also understood that he could never get out of his truck and draw his weapon in time to help her. He was trapped.

Instinct told him to lift his right foot off the brake and that is what he did, coming down hard on the gas and lining up the side of his truck with the deputy, who turned at the shriek of rubber and tried to lean back against the Mustang for space. His head vanished in an explosion of glass when the big side mirror hit him.

Stromsoe slammed the brakes and threw the shifter into park and was out in a second with his .380 up.

Frankie rounded the front of the Mustang, her own weapon wobbling in her hand, but at least she had it out in front of her like it should be and she was plainly terrified but not screaming.

“Down!” Stromsoe yelled. “Get down!”

Frankie dropped and Stromsoe scrambled around his truck, charging the unconscious deputy, who lay flat out on the road. The revolver had landed eight feet away and Stromsoe put himself between it and the man down. Alex burst through the flashing yellow lights, holstered his gun, pulled the deputy over, and put a knee to his back. Janet cuffed him, rolled him onto his back, and got two fingers up to his carotid. The man’s head was bleeding and his jaw was clenched and his eyes were closed.

Frankie came around the front of her car, one hand on the hood for support, her gun shaking in her other outstretched hand. Stromsoe took it.

“I’ll call,” said Janet.

“Wait,” said Stromsoe. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the revolver.

“His gun,” said Alex.

“Frankie, Janet — what is that?” Stromsoe asked again. His hands were shaking and his legs felt flimsy and his heart was pounding in his throat.

“His gun.”

“His gun, Matt.”

“You’re damn right that’s what it is,” said Stromsoe. “Make the call, Janet. Good job, people. Really good job.”

He looked down on the unmoving deputy, saw the man and his gun and the scene chopped into frames by the flashing lights.

“Frankie,” he said. “The police will want to interview you at home. You and Janet can leave now if you want, get yourself together. It’s going to be a long night.”

“What am I going to tell the police?”

“Everything you know.”

“I’ll stay here. I’m with you.”

Stromsoe went to the bogus sheriff’s cruiser and turned off the flashing lights.

“Hey, look at this guy,” called Alex. He was standing over the deputy, holding up the man’s cuffed arms at a painful-looking angle. Alex had pulled down the right sleeve of the duty shirt.

In the headlights from the Birch cruiser Stromsoe could see the totem pole of black prison tattoos climbing from wrist to biceps and beyond. Alex let go and the arms slapped back into place. The man still didn’t stir.

“Deputy, my ass,” Alex said. “Isn’t the ‘M-13’ La Eme?”

A bright and terrible light suddenly went on in Stromsoe’s head. He walked over to where the man lay and looked first at his face, then at the tattoos.

He didn’t recognize the face but the tats were all La Eme.

Stromsoe pulled the man’s wallet from his trouser pocket, then stepped away from the cars and used his cell phone to wake up Dan Birch at home.

“We just had a close one,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

He told Birch what had happened, patiently repeating several of the details out of deference to friendship and Birch’s training as a law enforcement officer. He heard a keyboard tapping as he talked. He wondered if Birch slept with it next to his bed or if he’d quietly wandered into the den.

Stromsoe assured his boss that Frankie was fine, everyone had performed well, and that Birch had been smart to assign the extra manpower. They’d probably saved her life.

Then Stromsoe asked Birch to get a jacket on Ariel Lejas of Riverside, California. He read Lejas’s numbers off the driver’s license in the wallet. He saw some cash, not much.

“And I want a list of all visitors seen by Mike Tavarez at Pelican Bay Prison over the last two weeks,” he said.

Birch paused. “A little time and I can do that. Who are we hoping to find on it?”

“John Cedros or Marcus Ampostela.”

“Our stalker and our gangster.”

“I’m smelling Mike Tavarez, Dan. He’s all over this.”

Again Birch paused a beat. “Let’s see what we get. If this was Tavarez, it’ll happen again. And again, until he gets what he wants. He’s got endless time and plenty of money.”

“I’m pretty damned clear on that, Dan.”

Stromsoe went back to the island of lights, worked the wallet back into Lejas’s pants, then joined Frankie leaning against her Mustang.

He put his arm around her and felt her body stiff and trembling under her clothes. He held her firmly but not too tight.

“Stand up straight and take a deep breath,” he said quietly. “Don’t want to scratch the paint.”

“No,” she whispered. “Not that.”

She stood straight and took a deep breath but the shivers didn’t stop and her eyes looked glassy and empty.

“I see Lacerta, Pegasus, and Delphinus,” he said. “And Capricornus, Fomalhaut, and Lyra.”

“I don’t see anything but that.”

He followed her gaze to the big revolver lying on Trumpet Vine.

26

Back at Frankie’s house the cops separated them. Frankie got her living room and Stromsoe the dining room. Alex took a bedroom and Janet the room containing Frankie’s bottled rivers.

Stromsoe’s interviewer was Davis, a stocky young detective, early thirties, with doubtful lines in his face and thinning dark hair combed straight back. Davis didn’t show the usual cop disrespect for private detectives. He told Stromsoe he had been fortunate. He also didn’t place Stromsoe as the narcotics deputy whose family was killed by the bomb two years ago in Newport Beach.

Stromsoe said nothing about that or Mike Tavarez. He would cross that bridge when he knew more about Ariel Lejas and had seen the Pelican Bay visitors’ log.

Lead Detective White told Frankie how much he enjoyed her weather reports although he usually watched a different channel. He declined coffee and pointed her to a living-room couch.

Stromsoe watched a uniformed sergeant broodingly shuttle back and forth between Alex and Janet, his holster and cuff case squeaking on his Sam Browne, eyes down, notebook in hand. He seemed preoccupied with something thousands of miles away.

Ace and Sadie wandered from interview to interview with airs of good-natured obligation.

By two o’clock everyone was gone but Frankie and Stromsoe, who sat not close together on one of her living-room couches. The dogs slept at their feet.

“La Eme?” asked Frankie. “Tavarez?”

“I think so.”

“In league with Choat? Impossible.”

“Don’t be naive, Frankie.”

“But why would Tavarez help Choat?”

He looked at her a moment before he spoke. “If it’s Tavarez, it’s personal. It’s about me.”

She looked back at Stromsoe, shaking her head in gathering disbelief. “So he’ll try again and again. He can just sit back in prison and send people here until one of them manages to kill me.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“It already happened. I was lucky. So were you.”

She was right. Stromsoe could barely stand the sound of his own voice as he spoke those words. I won’t let that happen. How could he promise to her what he hadn’t been able to provide for his own wife and son?

How could he not?

He stood and went to the big sliding-glass door, saw the stars in the storm-cleared sky, the tops of the avocado trees tilting silver in the breeze.

“What are my options, Matt?”

“I’ll make him see the light.”

“What power do you have over a man doing life without parole in the worst prison in the country? In the weirdest of ways, he’s totally free. What can you take from him? What can you offer him? He didn’t do this because he wants something. He did this because he hates you.”

Stromsoe, a man with nothing to offer his enemy and nothing to hurt him with, looked out at the faintly glistening orchard. There were no colors in the night, only black and white and shades of gray. Then the trees gave way to Frankie’s reflection and he watched her without her knowing. She sat on the couch with her knees apart and her elbows on them, leaning forward, looking at her hands. Her hair fell down around her face so that only the curve of her forehead and the tips of her nose and chin caught any light.

He remembered the night the kids had thrown the rocks at the marching band and Mike had helped him chase them down. Back then Stromsoe had felt a great affection for skinny Mike Tavarez — clarinetist, ally, compadre, friend. Now Stromsoe felt the same sense of altered time that he’d experienced five nights ago when he had shown Frankie the pictures of Hallie and Billy. In this new version of time — basic time, pure time, time without watches or calendars or the movements of a solar system upon which watches and calendars are based — one moment Mike was fighting beside him and in the next El Jefe was trying to kill an innocent woman because he hated Stromsoe. And in the new time, Matt Stromsoe, the soft-eyed drum major who had befriended a bandmate and hung out at his house riding bikes and shooting pool and eating his mother’s chile verde, hated Mike Tavarez back.

“Matt,” she said. “I’m not going to back down. I’m not going on a long vacation. I’m not changing my name, my home, or so much as my hair color for that man. I’m going to keep broadcasting. I’m going to make rain. You’ve got to figure something out.”

“I will.”

Stromsoe was asleep in the guest room when Frankie woke him up. She stood in the doorway looking uncertain of whether she was staying or going. She was backlit by the hall light but he could see her hair was down and she was wearing a pink satin robe over something black.

When she offered her hand he smelled complexities of skin and lotion and perfume, and saw the glitter in her eyes.

She led him to her bedroom and locked the door. The windows framed the grainy first light of morning.

“This is a first, Matt.”

It took him just a second to get it.

“Don’t ask now,” she said. “Don’t say anything.”

“I’m wordless.”

“I bought this getup for you, the day after we danced and you showed me Hallie and Billy and the flowers at night.”

“I’m extra wordless.”

“Then show me the steps to this one too, if you’d like.”