Storm Runners

27

Birch handed Stromsoe a faxed copy of the Pelican Bay Prison visitors’ log for October 18, one week ago.

“Cedros spent thirty-five minutes with Mike Tavarez that afternoon,” said Birch. “They talked privately, in the presence of an attorney — no listeners, no recordings.”

The worst of Stromsoe’s fears brushed up against him like something in deep water: Mike had tried to have Frankie Hatfield murdered. It was outrageously logical. It was how he did his business.

But with Frankie now tossed into this violent river — a psychopath’s notion of poetic vengeance — Stromsoe replaced the word “business” with the word “evil.” Tavarez was evil. Stromsoe hoped this knowledge might be reassuring but it wasn’t. It put Mike in a dark league and gave him invisible allies and powers, as if the tangible legions of La Eme weren’t enough.

“We have to tell the cops,” said Birch. “It will take them weeks to get to this. They’re not looking at Pelican Bay.”

Stromsoe thought. “Let me talk to Cedros first. I want to hear what he’s got to say.”

Birch nodded.

“How come the lawyer isn’t on this list?” asked Stromsoe.

“Different list. Here.”

Birch pushed another sheet toward Stromsoe, Professional Visits. Halfway down the page was the only professional visitor that Mike Tavarez had that day, Taylor Hite of Taylor Hite, LLC, Laguna Beach, California.

“He’s a dope lawyer,” said Birch. “Doing okay for himself. He’s twenty-eight, lives in a modest three-million-dollar home in Three Arch Bay. I’ve got nothing on him. He’ll send us packing.”

“Did Marcus Ampostela show up at Pelican Bay too?”

“No Ampostela. My guess is he’s Tavarez’s bagman. They probably communicate through e-mail or kites. And maybe even through Hite. Stranger things have happened.”

Stromsoe thought for a moment. “Cedros must have offered Tavarez something substantial. Wouldn’t you love to find a pile of DWP cash in one of El Jefe’s accounts?”

Birch shrugged. “I’d love to find anything at all in an El Jefe account. Remember?”

“Yeah — El Jefe gets busted with a total of six grand in a checking account at B of A. Everything else was Miriam’s and even that wasn’t much. He hid the rest.”

Birch tapped on his keyboard and a printer started to whir. “When the cops grill Cedros about the attempted murder of the woman he’s charged with stalking, he might be ready to cooperate with them.”

Something caught in Stromsoe’s mind. “Tavarez will see it that way too. He knows we can get these logs. That might put Cedros in a ditch off the freeway with a couple of bullets in his head.”

Birch considered. “Naw, Cedros isn’t worth it. He’s just the messenger. His visit to Tavarez proves nothing and Tavarez knows that. There’s no recording, no witness. They’ve already agreed on a bullshit line if they’re questioned — you can be sure of that. Mike can’t... well, he can’t kill everybody who breathes the same air he does.”

Stromsoe wondered about that. “I think it was Cedros’s wife, Marianna, who warned us. Maybe he put her up to it. Either way, I couldn’t come up with anyone who knew both sides of this — DWP and Tavarez — until now.”

“Warn him, then. Return the favor.”

Stromsoe used his cell and dialed the Cedros home number. He pictured the pregnant young woman in the Mexican restaurant uniform loading her boy out of the battered old car. He got a recording and hung up. An idea came to him.

“Can you cue up that warning call, Dan?”

Birch fiddled with his keyboard and mouse, then played the call to Birch Security from the unidentified female.

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

Stromsoe pulled Birch’s desk phone over, redialed the Cedros number, then punched on the speaker mode.

You have reached the Cedros family — John, Marianna, and Anthony. If you leave your number we’ll call you back.

Birch played the warning again.

Stromsoe dialed the Cedros number for the third time and they both listened.

Birch was smiling.

Stromsoe nodded.

“You should have been one of the good guys,” said Birch.

“You too.”

“How is Lejas?” asked Stromsoe.

“He’s serious, but stable — broken bones in his face. How’s your mirror?”

Stromsoe smiled, looked out the window at the clear morning. Saddleback Peak, the highest point in Orange County, sat in perfect clarity, its top bristling with antennas and communications clutter.

“Frankie won’t back down,” he said. “She won’t hide out or move away.”

Birch rolled back in his chair and locked his fingers behind his head. “I didn’t think so. A woman who photographs her stalker has some courage. Got a little something for her, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look like that guy who sat here two weeks ago. She’s lovely.”

“I’m trying to keep her that way.”

Birch nodded briefly but said nothing and Stromsoe understood that Birch had wanted this to happen.

“How long do you think it will take Tavarez to organize another try?” Birch asked.

“A day or two,” said Stromsoe.

“Then you’ve got a day or two to find a way to change his mind.”

“I need a way into his head, Dan.”

“Personally, I don’t want to go there, but I know what you mean.”

Years ago Stromsoe had searched for a way to manipulate El Jefe Tavarez, and he had found it.

Ofelia had died, but he had found it.

Who does he love now? Stromsoe wondered. What does he fear now? What does he want?

Cedros met him at Olvera Street, a tourist mercado not far from the DWP headquarters. He looked smaller than Stromsoe had remembered, and more nervous.

They walked past the bright serapes and the leather sandals, the colorful pots and plates, the hats and maracas and marionettes.

Stromsoe told him about Lejas, the fake cop car, the tattooed arm of La Eme. Cedros stared ahead as they walked but Stromsoe could tell he was listening to every word.

“So I decided to work from the top down and guess what?”

“What?”

“You talked to Mike Tavarez at Pelican Bay Prison on October eighteenth. For over half an hour.”

“We’re relatives. Goddamned distant relatives is all we are.” Cedros spit out the words but didn’t look at Stromsoe.

“What did you talk about?”

“Family.”

“I wondered if you might have taken Tavarez an offer from Choat. It makes sense — you got popped by me, and Choat sends you to make a deal with El Jefe.”

Cedros looked at him now, anger in his eyes. “Family is all we talked about.”

“You’re beginning to make sense to me,” said Stromsoe. “If you wouldn’t roll over on Choat, you won’t roll over on Mike. The trouble for you is, Lejas almost killed Frankie, so it looks like someone contracted with Tavarez for murder. Who’s the link between El Jefe and Frankie? You.”

Cedros glared at him as they rounded one of the Olvera Street alleys and started down the next. He reminded Stromsoe of a cat he used to have as a boy, a big tom named Deerfoot who used to look at him as if to say, If I were a little bit bigger I’d kill and eat you. Same thing now with Cedros, his little man’s rage boiling inside.

“I have to give the cops the visitors’ log for October eighteenth,” said Stromsoe.

“It was just family stuff, man. I’m telling you.”

“Tell the cops that.”

“I’ll make you a deal.”

“You can try.”

“Get the rain lady to drop the stalking charges and I’ll tell you what Tavarez and I talked about.”

Stromsoe saw that Cedros was in much hotter water than stalking charges, though he wasn’t sure that Cedros saw it.

“I think she’ll go for that,” he said. He didn’t say that the D.A. might prosecute Cedros anyway.

Cedros sped up his walk, out of Olvera Street and onto Cesar Chavez Avenue. Stromsoe was a step behind when Cedros wheeled and grabbed his arm.

“Choat wanted Frankie to stop making rain, and he wanted you off the case. He wanted her formula. That was the whole deal. I presented it to Tavarez. Nobody was supposed to get killed, Stromsoe. Ever. I swear to God. That was not the deal.”

“I believe you.”

“Fuck. Shit. Man, I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Did you tell Tavarez that I was Frankie’s bodyguard?”

Cedros looked up at Stromsoe, squinting in the midday sun. “No. Choat said it was important that he see the pictures of Frankie with you in them.”

“I thought they confiscated those down at the Sheriff’s station.”

“I had more.”

So Choat knew, thought Stromsoe. He’d probably read the articles and seen the pictures. He knew Tavarez would jump at the chance to mess with me again.

“You’re a good employee, John. You just choose the wrong bosses.”

“Don’t I know it, man.”

“How much did Choat offer for the intimidation?”

Cedros slowly shook his head. “Two hundred Gs.”

“Christ Almighty. Next time tell him to offer about a quarter of that. You gave it to the big guy, Ampostela, right?”

Cedros looked at the ground, then slowly nodded.

“Now that the job is botched, Tavarez will try to kill you,” said Stromsoe. “You’re the only one who can finger him for Frankie. He’ll probably use Marcus. It could be tonight. It could be next week or next month. It might be good to leave town for a while.”

“Yeah? Quit my job and run away? Go where? Do what? Change my name and get plastic surgery? I got a thousand dollars in the bank and a baby on the way.”

“Get a motel up in Ventura or something. Your life is worth sixty bucks a day, isn’t it?”

“I’ll just be dead in Ventura. He’s the Jefe. He’s a fuckin’ killer.”

Stromsoe knew that Cedros had the score one hundred percent correct. In his years of war against Mike Tavarez and La Eme he had seen the innocent killed and the guilty walk away. He’d seen the good die and the evil flourish. The cops couldn’t protect; they could only sweep up.

Hadn’t he promised protection to Frankie just a few hours ago?

I’m going to keep broadcasting. I’m going to make rain. You’ve got to figure something out.

It angered Stromsoe that he couldn’t offer this decent man any protection at all. It was an old anger but it was still alive and fresh as when he’d been young. It came from the same conviction that had brought him to this life in the beginning — that you had the law and the scoffers, us and them, good and bad.

“Do you have a gun?” he asked.

Cedros, walking fast again, looked straight ahead and didn’t answer.

“Did you have your wife make that call to Birch Security? About them coming to get us?”

“So what if I did?”

“Thanks. Look, Cedros — I can’t stop Tavarez or Ampostela. But I can protect you from Choat. Interested?”

Cedros stopped and glared at Stromsoe. “Hell yes.”

“Let’s walk through the bazaar one more time. I’ve got an idea.”

An hour later, Stromsoe was driving back down to Fallbrook when he asked himself again the important questions about Mike Tavarez: Who does he love? What does he want? What does he fear?

And this time an answer came to him from El Jefe himself, delivered across the years in his own clear and reasonable voice.

God put them there for reasons we don’t understand.

You’ll burn in hell for them.

Hell would be better than this. It’s bad, isn’t it, living without the ones you love?

He called Birch, who called his California assemblyman, to whom he had donated generously for reelection. Later, Birch said they had had a long talk. The assemblyman called a state senator who had recently enlisted his support in getting a gun-control bill into committee to die. The senator was a friend of Warden Gerry Gyle of Pelican Bay State Prison and a big fan of Frankie Hatfield on Fox.

Warden Gyle took Stromsoe’s call just before one o’clock.

Seven hours later Stromsoe met Pelican Bay investigator Ken McCann in the Denny’s restaurant near his Crescent City Travelodge room. The night was cold and the lights of the city blurred intermittently in gusts of fog and slanting drizzle. The restaurant smelled of pine-based cleansers and flat-grilled beef. It was almost empty.

McCann had the V shape of a weight lifter, a small head with flat silver hair, and small eyes set in bursts of wrinkles. He said he was sixty. He’d seen action in Hue, buried one wife and married another, loved his grandchildren, and thought Mike Tavarez was the scum of the earth. He bit into his sandwich, chewed with one side of his mouth, and spoke out the other. He told Stromsoe about the ’Nam, about coming back in ’70 and feeling so jumpy and weird. Doctors called him hypervigilant, which was a pretty darned good word for sleeping with a carbine in the bed next to you and a pistol under the pillow, if you could even call it sleeping. So nervous even the dogs got tired of him and ran off. His wife had a heart attack at the age of thirty, which McCann believed was a direct transfer of his own monstrous fears and worries. He met up with Ellen ten years later, when most of the vigilance had worked its way out, and he finished the psychology degree first in his class and went to work for Corrections.

He described his children and grandchildren.

He ate every bit of food on his plate and ordered peach pie with ice cream.

Stromsoe listened with all of his considerable patience and empathy, then told him what he needed: a way to call Tavarez off a murder-for-hire contract that Stromsoe could not prove he was a part of.

“You can’t prove anything with guys like that,” said McCann, swallowing. “I read two hundred letters a week, either by him or to him — and I don’t know a damn thing about what he’s doing. Little bits of English. Little bits of Spanish. Little bits of Nahuatl. Whole bunches of bullshit lines and coded instructions. Sentences that mean nothing. Sentences that mean something different than what they say. Numbers and more numbers. They won’t talk. You finally get somebody to talk and they torture him, murder him, and post the pictures on the Web. Tavarez? He’s calling shots. I promise you that.”

“I believe you. I don’t need proof. I don’t want it.”

“What do you want, then?”

“I want to save the life of a woman he’s trying to kill.”

McCann looked at him. “The old Eme didn’t pull that friends-and-family shit. You and Mike go way back, don’t you?”

“Way back.”

“I think he’s got some COs on the payroll. Two young guys — Post and Lunce — I’m sure they got their family problems and need the extra money. I don’t know what they do for him, if it’s just kites, or maybe a phone or some Internet time. Mike isn’t interested in getting high. Doesn’t smoke or drink. There’s also a situations man, Cartwright, and I think he’s dirty too, but I’m not sure who he’s down with. I think Gyle could rock Mike’s world just by reassigning the guards. Mikey’s little treats would go away.”

Stromsoe considered. With this information, he could blow some whistles, shut down Mike’s contact with the crooked guards, maybe piss him off some.

“It’s not enough,” he said. “But I had the thought, and this is why Warden Gyle wanted me to talk to you, that Mike didn’t do too well in the SHU.”

McCann smiled and peered at him, eyes twinkling in their nests of wrinkles. “Who would? Mike came out of SHU looking like a half-drowned rat. The inmates, they don’t call it the SHU. To them it’s the X. They hate the X. The X was hard on Mike. The smarter the guy, the harder it is on him. But that’s not my area. I can’t get Tavarez reassigned.”

“You can tell the Prison Board what you told me — Mike is communicating with the outside through coded letters.”

McCann colored slightly, but he held Stromsoe’s gaze. “That’s my watch. I’d be cutting my own throat.”

“You read two hundred letters a week just to and from Mike. You’re understaffed. You’re the kid with his finger in the dike. I know that.”

“And I know it.”

“Well, Gyle knows it too,” said Stromsoe. “He says he’ll recommend SHU for Tavarez if you’ll establish that he’s in touch with criminal associates.”

“That’s the trouble,” said McCann. “I can’t really actually one hundred percent establish it. Which, when you flip it over, is why I got a raise this year for doing my job so well.”

“Gyle wants you for lead investigator when Davenport retires,” said Stromsoe.

“Oh?”

Gyle had volunteered the promotion to his friend State Senator Bob Billiter, as a way of enlisting McCann, and Billiter had offered it back up the pipeline to the assemblyman, who passed it along to Birch. Stromsoe had been impressed that politics could be played so fast. And that three men who had never so much as met Frankie Hatfield would stick out their necks a little for her.

McCann stared hard at him now, set his fork on the pie plate in the last suds of ice cream.

“Why?”

“Because you’re good.”

“No, why did Gyle tell you that?”

“Senator Billiter made a good case to him for the woman that Mike is trying to kill. It shouldn’t have been hard. She’s innocent, good-hearted, bright. One of Mike’s pistoleros was bringing his gun to her head last night when luck intervened.”

McCann looked at him doubtfully. “How?”

“I ran over him with my pickup truck.”

McCann smiled. “I like that.”

“I was too rattled to enjoy it at the time.”

McCann smiled again. “So, you want me to speak to the Prison Board if Tavarez won’t stand down.”

“Only if he won’t stand down. Either way, Gyle wants you in for Davenport.”

“When does the PB meet ne—”

“A week from Thursday,” said Stromsoe.

“When are you seeing Tavarez?”

“Tomorrow morning. Gyle arranged it.”

“You got this timed out.”

“I got lucky. I hope it works.”

McCann shook his head. “Don’t worry. He’ll change his mind about the lady. He won’t go back to the SHU. It drives most people completely crazy. It ruins them. Then we hospitalize them and they scream all day and night in the ding wing. It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard. Even the state doctors know what the SHU does to people. They tried to close it but the courts let it stay open. It’s hell.”

28

John Cedros looked through the peephole of his Azusa home. Marcus Ampostela’s tremendous head filled up the narrowed field of view. He looked listless and tired.

Cedros opened the door before he could ring the bell again.

“Homes,” said the big man. “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?”

Marianna came from Tony’s room and Ampostela smiled. “Hey, coneja. Looking right, aren’t you?”

“Keep your voice down,” she said. “Tony’s sleeping.”

“Anybody got a beer?”

“I’ll get it,” said Marianna.

Ampostela watched her cross the small living room and go through the rounded doorway into the kitchen. Cedros wished she weren’t wearing the cutoff jeans that made her legs look so good, even with the sixth-month stomach building over her waist like a thunderhead.

“What the fuck do you want?” whispered Cedros. “The cops are all over me at work because of you guys and the weather lady. That was not the deal, Marcus. Now you show up at my house. I can’t believe you people.”

Ampostela’s anger flashed through his slow bigness and into his eyes. His bulk seemed to tighten. “You owe me twenty-five.”

“For that?”

“For that. And you and I have some work tonight. I heard from El Jefe this morning. He has a job for us.”

“What?”

“You’ll come home with some money, is all you need to know.”

Marianna came back with the beers. Ampostela took his with both hands and a smile. He swayed a little and Cedros saw that he was drunk or high or both.

“I’m takin’ your husband out for a drink,” he said.

“Not tonight,” she said.

“Yeah, tonight. Tonight is what it is. I’ll bring him home before it’s too late. That’s the deal.”

Cedros’s heart beat wildly, as if it were veering off course, then straightened out and beat evenly again.

Marianna looked at her husband, shook her head, and walked past both men, down the hallway and into Tony’s room.

“Let’s go,” said Ampostela.

“I’m finishing my beer.” His hand was shaking so badly he could hardly get the can to his face, so he turned away from Ampostela and drank it as fast as he could.

“Drink it on the road. We’ll take my car. We don’t have all night.”

“I have to get the money, take a piss, say good night to my boy.”

“Hurry up.”

Cedros didn’t hurry at all. He used the bathroom then put on a light windbreaker, arranged things, and said good-bye to Marianna. He took the envelope of DWP cash from a bowl of fruit on top of the refrigerator.

When they finally got in the car Ampostela drove them around the corner to El Matador restaurant, where the dog had eaten from the table.

Cedros used the bathroom again, then he was led by Ampostela to the same back room where the women and the drowsy gunman had been. They were there tonight too. The dog was up where he’d sat last time, a clean white plate before him.

“Money,” said Ampostela.

Cedros gave him the envelope and stood there while Ampostela counted it.

“Sit,” said Ampostela. “Wait here. Come back outside to the car in twenty minutes.”

Then he left.

Twenty wordless minutes later Cedros rose from the big empty booth, went to the bathroom once again, then walked outside. It took him a minute to spot the big shiny station wagon because it wasn’t in the parking lot but across the street in the faint light of a purple streetlamp.

He got in and it roared onto the avenue.

Ampostela drove them up Highway 39 into the San Gabriel Mountains. Rain had puddled on the roadside from last night’s storm and the stars were bright flickers over the tall mountains. Ampostela studied his rearview mirror. Cedros looked in the passenger sideview but saw nothing behind them.

The last time he had been up this road was with the PI Stromsoe, Cedros thought. When he came that close to just telling him what he knew already — that scar-faced Choat had drafted him into harassing the weather lady in a completely useless attempt to chase her out of the rainmaking business.

“Where are we going?” asked Cedros. “There’s nothing up here.”

“We’re meeting some people at that restaurant over the river.”

“It’s been closed for years.”

“That’s why. Be cool, man. So the cops asked you some questions. Don’t tell them nothing except you didn’t do it. You got a good lawyer?”

“For which charge? I can’t keep track of my own crimes anymore.”

“That’s what lawyers are for.”

They passed the last housing tract, one that was built over the riverbed. You had to use a bridge to get home. Which is why Cedros had looked into buying a place there. The houses were nice and it wasn’t the barrio but they were too expensive.

Now he caught a glimpse of the San Gabriel River, swollen with rain, surging down from the mountains. Some of the guys at DWP talked about a place up there that got five, eight, sometimes ten times the rain that fell down here in the city. He’d heard stories of fifty inches falling in a night, streams swelling, trees falling, Forest Service roads buried by tons of running water — and most of it ending up in the San Gabriel, which would then cascade downhill, race toward Azusa, widen and slow by the time it hit civilization, then be forcibly escorted to the ocean in a concrete chute.

Cedros looked down at the river. It was scarcely visible until it passed the houses, then the neighborhood streetlights revealed its speed and volume. It ran at the bottom of a steep gorge.

How many cubic feet per second were barreling their way to the ocean right now — twelve hundred, two thousand? Why didn’t they capture it? Why were the reservoirs chronically low? Why was Southern California in perpetual drought when even the humble San Gabriel lost so much good wild water after even a small fall rainstorm like the one last night? For that matter, why try to stop a lady who thinks she can make more rain?

Whatever, thought Cedros. He knew the answer and was tired of it by now. The whole thing was crazy.

Because, John, only abundance can ruin us.

It was all really hard to care about right now, sitting next to a giant who was taking him out to kill him. He finally figured out why they’d gone to El Matador first. It was Ampostela’s alibi: he had dropped off Cedros and driven away and they hadn’t seen him again that night. Cedros had wandered off twenty minutes later. Ampostela had three witnesses for all of that. And not one who’d seen Cedros get into Ampostela’s car, tucked back in the darkness as it was.

Cedros felt the looseness in his bowels, the tightness in his chest, and the sharp discomfort of his stomach, right at the belt line.

He looked in the sideview mirror again and saw nothing but darkness behind them.

“The cops said Lejas tried to shoot her,” he said.

“I don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Ampostela. “This is just this. What we’re doing is just this.”

“Yeah,” Cedros said quietly. “This is just this.”

“What’s the baby’s name gonna be?”

Cedros couldn’t believe that Ampostela would ask that question on the way to killing the baby’s father. But Cedros understood that his disbelief meant nothing so he answered. Instinctively, he lied.

“Maria.”

“Cool.”

“We got her some little outfits already. Jammies and stuff.”

“I got two boys and a girl with their mother up in Fresno. I hate that fuckin’ place.”

“Never been.”

“Don’t bother. Where’s Marianna work?”

“Dos Amigos.”

“Which one?”

“Monrovia.”

“We’re not stopping at the restaurant I told you about. We’re meeting these people up a little further.”

“Okay. Whatever you say.”

They wound up into the mountains. Ampostela’s Magnum was a big bad-looking station wagon that hauled ass and held the corners well. He told Cedros it was the most powerful production car in the world for under $30K. It had looked to Cedros like a fat gangster’s ride but he had to confess, he’d love to have one himself. Let Marianna drive it, actually, with the soon-to-be two children in tow.

Ampostela checked the rearview again, then slowed, pulled into a turnout, and stopped. There was no other car in sight. He killed the lights and engine. He leaned across Cedros and pulled something from the glove compartment.

“What’s the gun for?”

“Peace of mind, homeboy. They’re coming. Get out. I’ll talk and you do what I say. Only way it works.”

Cedros got out and stood on shaky legs. He watched the big man come around the front of the car. Ampostela had stuffed the handgun into his pants between the shirttails, not even bothering to cover it.

They stood looking down at the black canyon and the white-capped river barely lit by the moon.

“The river,” Ampostela said.

Cedros heard the roar of the water and he tried to back up imperceptibly in order to keep Ampostela in his vision without looking directly at him.

In the very bottom of his field of focus Cedros registered the protrusion of belly and one shirttail barely covering the dully luminous handle of the automatic.

He wouldn’t take his eye off the gun.

He couldn’t.

To see the gun was to live.

“They’ll be here,” said Ampostela. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I won’t worry.”

“Everything’s gonna be good. This is just this. I’m gonna take care of everything.”

“Sure you are.”

They stood awhile. The river sounded against its banks of rock. Not a single car came up the road or down it.

Far off in his mind Cedros was aware of Ampostela wanting to say something else but not being able to find the right words. Cedros said nothing. It was a matter of self-respect. Ampostela could struggle all he wanted. Cedros pulled his attention away from the big man and directed all of it to the gun.

In his lower vision Cedros saw Ampostela’s hand drift upward. It came up slowly and in its wake the gun had vanished from the waistband.

Cedros fired four shots from the pocket of the windbreaker, angling the barrel of the .22 up into the big man’s chest. Then he brought out the semi and shot Ampostela three more times in the head. The big face shifted and collapsed oddly. Cedros felt the hot mist hit his skin.

The big man dropped to his knees then fell on his face in the gravel.

Cedros staggered into the bushes, where he vomited and barely got his pants down before he lost control of his bowels. Then, talking to himself in a voice that he hardly recognized, he staggered back to the car and braced his feet against a front tire and managed to roll Ampostela’s great body to the edge of the canyon and over. He suddenly remembered the $25K and didn’t care one bit about it. He heard rocks sliding, then the body huffing against something very hard, then silence. Cedros stood and watched as Ampostela rolled off the last outcropping and was swallowed by the roaring darkness.

He threw Ampostela’s gun into the canyon. He had to backtrack to where he’d gotten sick to find Marianna’s .22 then come back and throw it into the river too.

He was shivering in the dirt with his back against the car when Marianna drove up minutes later, her headlights out of alignment and the dust rising into her almost crossed beams, which suddenly died.

He heard her get out and crunch toward him and he felt her arms spread over him and her sweet soft face press against the reek and blood and trembling of his own.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “Oh, baby, my baby.”

“It’s okay. I’m okay. It worked.”

“You’ve got to get up, baby.”

“Mom? Dad?”

Through the rising curtain of his wife’s hair Cedros saw Anthony’s skinny little legs appear on the ground beside the open door of the family car.

“Anthony Mark Cedros, get back into that car right now.”

“Yes, Mom. Hey, Daddy, what are you doing?”

“Nothing, Tony. I’ll be right there.”

“Stand, John. Hurry. We’ve got to get out of here.”

29

In the cold northern silence of the Crescent City Travelodge, Stromsoe dreamed that he was back in Newport Beach with Hallie and Billy.

It was a cool March Thursday, a school day. Hallie made them a light breakfast and all three sat at the dining-room table.

“Dad had a dream about driving a car last night,” said Billy.

“How do you know that?” asked Hallie.

“Because I was in the backseat.”

They laughed and Stromsoe felt limitless love for his son.

But even while dreaming this conversation, he had recognized the terrible portent of it. He awakened and made the in-room coffee and sat at the unsteady table by the window with the curtain drawn and the rain tapping against the glass.

Partly as a way to keep alive people he loved, and partly as a way of getting ready to see Mike Tavarez in a few short hours, Stromsoe now let himself remember that morning a little at a time, sipping the memories.

Because I was in the backseat.

Later he had walked Hallie and Billy outside. The van was parked in the drive because the garage of the old Newport house was too small for anything but Stromsoe’s Taurus and a smattering of tools, beach gear, bikes, and boxes of outgrown children’s toys.

Stromsoe closed the door behind him and followed them down the short walkway to the drive. Billy led the march, leaning forward against the weight of his backpack. Hallie followed him in jeans and a flannel shirt and a pair of shearling boots sized for a moonwalk. Stromsoe watched the shape of her and thought it was good. As if knowing this, she turned and smiled at him just as they got to the driveway.

Hallie pressed the key fob and the door locks popped up with a single clunk. Billy slid open the side door. He slung his pack in ahead of him and climbed into the seat. Stromsoe helped pull the seat belt around his son and Billy snapped it shut.

“Have a great day, Billy.”

“Okay.”

“Be nice to Mrs. Winston.”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

“Okay. I mean, I love you too.”

Stromsoe kissed the top of his son’s head, slid the door shut, and stepped back.

Hallie tried to start the van but the battery was so weak it couldn’t turn the starter.

She threw open the door. “I hate this van.”

“Let me try.”

Stromsoe got in and tried but even the small charge was gone and his turning of the key made nothing but a mortal clicking sound.

He opened the hood and looked but the battery terminals were clean and the clamps were tight and little else in the compartment made sense to him. He got back in the cab and tried the radio, which was dead.

“Just take my car,” he said. “I’ll call Auto Club, get a jump, and take this thing down to Pete’s.”

“Ah, can’t you come with us?” she asked.

“I’ll just be that much later to work.”

“Dad! Can’t you just come with us?”

Stromsoe sighed, then reached up to the van’s sun visor and clicked on the automatic garage door opener. The motor groaned and the door lifted open. The tightly packed contents of the garage came into view.

“All right, Dad!” hollered Billy.

“All right, Dad!” hollered Hallie.

As Stromsoe followed them into the garage he had one of those epiphanies common to the family man — that he was blessed to have Hallie and Billy, that he should be more thankful for them and kinder to them, that he should slow down and enjoy the little things like taking your boy to school when the van battery goes dead. And if you’re an hour late to work, who cares?

This happiness hooked another happiness from many years ago when he had led the marching band in “When the Saints Go Marching In” for probably the ten millionth time. It had hit him in an instant back then — just how wonderful and singular this moment was, and now Stromsoe remembered the green grass of the football field in the stadium lights, the thunder of the bass drums and the trills of the piccolos, the heft and rhythm of the mace in his right hand, the weight of the shako hat with its strap snug around his chin.

For a moment the joyful, many-footed song played again in his head.

He was whistling along with it to himself as he stood in his garage and dug the key fob from his pocket.

Billy was just about to veer to the right side of the Taurus because he liked to sit behind his mom. However, there was a bug of some kind on the trunk lid and he had to stop to inspect it. Behind him Hallie went up on her toes in the way that faster adults stuck behind slower children will do. Stromsoe had slowed too, ready to head for the driver’s seat when they got out of his way.

Lord, how I want to be in that number...

He pressed the unlock button and the locks came up. One second later he and his family were blown to rags.

30

Tavarez was waiting in the visitation room when Stromsoe was escorted in. He looked pale but fit, freshly shaved. He stared as Stromsoe sat in the immovable chair and picked up the telephone. Stromsoe stared back.

Mike was not handcuffed but his ankle irons were in place and a guard stood outside the inmate entrance looking in through the perforated steel door. The visitation room was empty now because only weekends were for visits unless Warden Gyle himself made other arrangements.

Tavarez picked up his black telephone, wiped the mouthpiece on the sleeve of his orange jumpsuit, then put the phone to his head.

“You look the same as always, Matt,” he said.

“You’ve gained weight.”

“Workouts. Good food.”

“I’ll bet.”

“You don’t limp. There are scars on your neck and face and a missing finger. I heard that you have steel pins in your legs.”

“Plenty of them, Mike. They tighten up in cold weather. I carry a document for boarding airplanes. I run even slower than I ran before. The list of my improvements goes on and on.”

“The eye is realistic.”

Stromsoe looked at Mike and for just a moment he appreciated the humor of mad-dogging with only one good eye, figured it was to his advantage to have the glass one staring along blindly like some fearless German sidekick.

He nodded.

Tavarez smiled. “A cold glass eye. Not fair.”

Stromsoe listened to the hum of the great “supermax” prison around him. For the worst of the worst, he thought. The most expensive, efficient, and punishing incarceration yet devised by man. A model for prisons for years to come.

“I dreamed about them last night,” he said. “They were whole and perfect and alive. That’s how they’ll always be for me, Mike.”

“They should be. The bomb was for you.”

Tavarez had not acknowledged this since that very first phone call to Stromsoe on the night he almost burned his house down. In court, Tavarez’s attorneys had fought hard to lay the blame on La Nuestra Familia. In fact, they’d made the beginnings of a good case because Stromsoe and the task force had had as many dealings with LNF as they’d had with La Eme. Stromsoe’s name had appeared in numerous Familia communications. But in the end they couldn’t produce a witness to contradict the low-level La Eme soldier who had turned state’s witness after his life was threatened. The soldier had heard El Jefe discussing the bomb. He had heard the name Stromsoe. He had purchased the nails at Home Depot. He had succumbed to a task force offer to drop murder charges and relocate him and his family after the trial.

“And Frankie Hatfield? Was she going to be for me too?”

“Frankie who?”

“More punishment for Ofelia? Because Hallie and Billy weren’t enough?”

Mike studied him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“We got the visitation logs. We’ve talked to a lot of people, including Lejas and Ampostela. They were all helpful. Here’s the story line: Cedros wanted to keep Frankie from her experiments. He harassed her. He photographed her. When that didn’t work he came to you — a distant relative, a man who can get things done. You saw the pictures of her. I was in some of them. A little miracle for you, some more of the good luck you always thought you had. You figured you’d kill her and let me live with her on my conscience, along with my wife and son. Lejas got close. I got lucky. But there are more out there like him. Which is why I’m here.”

Tavarez said nothing.

Stromsoe turned his attention from Mike to the pale yellow walls of the visitation room, then to the guard behind the steel door, then to the video cameras in each corner of the long, rectangular room.

“They’re going to send you back to the X for the rest of your life,” said Stromsoe.

Tavarez smiled lazily. “You can’t do that. You don’t have the power.”

“I had a lot of help,” said Stromsoe. “A senator, an assemblyman. Judges, lawyers, doctors. Others. One week from Thursday is the Prison Board meeting. By the time it’s over you’ll be reassigned to the X. It’s a done deal. Only you can undo it, Mike. Only you.”

Tavarez tried to bring a stony disbelief to his face but Stromsoe could see the anger in his eyes.

“How?”

“It’s Frankie for the X, Mike. Her safety for your life in the general population. You promise me she’ll be left alone and you can stay right where you are. You can keep getting your little favors from Post and Lunce. But if she’s touched, you go to the X for the rest of your life. If she’s harassed on the phone, you go to the X for the rest of your life. If she gets a cold or trips on a sidewalk or sprains her ankle working out at the gym, you go to the X. And the only way you’ll get out of the X will be on a stretcher or on a pass to the psych ward. I heard them screaming on the way here. Hard to picture you in a straitjacket, Mike. The madman El Jefe, bellowing his life away in the ding wing.”

Tavarez sat back and gave Stromsoe a skeptical look. He furrowed his brow and shook his head as if in amazement.

“You thought of this?”

“After I saw Lejas up close I knew the score.”

“You must like this woman with the man’s name.”

“I hardly know her.”

“Dig her as much as Hallie?”

“She’s young and innocent.”

“Hallie was young but not innocent.”

“No. She was guilty of trusting you.”

Tavarez shrugged.

“This isn’t Frankie Hatfield’s world, Mike. You’re wrong to throw her into it. Cut her loose. You can’t bring Ofelia back. Keep yourself here in the pop where you belong. You don’t need the X.”

Stromsoe watched the bemused expression drop from Tavarez’s face to reveal his murder-one stare. It was a flat look that somehow diffused the light in his eyes and made him look both feral and focused, and ready to act. It was the look that Tavarez had given Stromsoe in court, the look he used on the street, in his business, in prison. It was a look that promised pounds of violence and not an ounce of mercy.

“Your woman is absolutely safe,” said Tavarez. “That’s a promise. And here’s another promise, old friend — the day I see the inside of the X again is the day you both die.”

Tavarez stood, then turned and short-stepped toward the door, chain dragging between his legs.

He arranged to have his lunch served in his cell that afternoon.

When Jason Post had slid the food tray through the bean chute, Tavarez approached the door to collect it.

“Mystery meat,” said Tavarez.

“You eat better than a lot of poor people,” said Post.

“I need to use the library Thursday night. And I want my family visit on Sunday because I wasn’t able to have it yesterday.”

“Why didn’t you? You’re the one who called it off.”

“I was busy.”

“That’s funny. Those two favors are gonna cost you.”

“I’ll have the usual transfer made.”

“Double it, or no deal.”

“Eight hundred dollars for one hour of library time, and a family visit?”

“Lunce told me she was a real cutie last week. So it’s double or nothing.”

“It has to happen just like I told you, Jason. There’s no room for a mistake on this one. Library Thursday night, and my family visit on Sunday.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“There is no hurry.”

“You sound like there’s a schedule.”

Tavarez looked up and shrugged. “All I have in this hellhole is a schedule.”

Post eyed him with his usual latent hostility. “I don’t control this place. Things come up. I’ll do what I can.”

“You will.”

“Hey, they transferred Packtor out of the SHU this morning.”

Post never missed a chance to bring up the X because he knew Tavarez hated the place beyond words. He looked at Tavarez with contempt, and with an uplifting of the chin that hinted at knowledge.

“Why?”

“How would I know? Maybe because he went insane. Or maybe to make room for someone else. But I thought you’d want to know — so you can make your reservations.”

Tavarez looked up from his mystery meat.

“Just kiddin’ you, Heffie.”

Stromsoe touched down in San Diego four hours after leaving Pelican Bay, made Frankie’s five o’clock broadcast from outside the Wild Animal Park. The day was cooling and the eucalyptus trees drooped fragrantly and he could hear the cries of monkeys and birds from inside the park as he walked up to the Fox News van.

Ted was wearing a black leather cowboy hat and a black canvas duster. From within the right side pocket he let go of something to shake Stromsoe’s hand.

“You really strapped, Ted?”

“I’m really strapped, Matt.”

“That’s illegal, you know.”

“So’s murder.”

“Frankie okay?”

Ted jammed his hand back in the pocket. “She’s coming out now.”

Stromsoe watched her step out of the van, mike in hand. She saw him immediately and waved. Her smile made his heart beat harder but in a way that told him all his good fortune with her was borrowed and due back soon.

They were shooting up by the ticket booths at the main entrance and the crowd gathered quickly as they recognized her. She tried her best to autograph a stuffed condor chick and a rubber spear. She knelt to talk to a little girl. She posed for a picture with two blushing soldiers.

Stromsoe saw again how open and good and beautiful she was. And as long as she did her job, how essentially unprotectable she was from Mike Tavarez. It could happen any minute, any day, anywhere.

A moment, then forever.

That night, after her sign-off eight o’clock story, he drove her home to Fallbrook, Ted trailing them in his truck.

“Do you believe Tavarez, Matt? Do you believe I’m safe?”

“I can’t believe him.”

“I’m going to live my life. I’m not hiding. I’m going to keep on forecasting and broadcasting, and making rain.”

“That’s the way it has to be. I’ll do everything in my power to protect you, Frankie.”

“Until our thirty days are up?”

“For as long as it takes.”

She took his hand and they were quiet for a while as Stromsoe’s pickup truck curved through the dark back roads of the north county.

“I’m sorry for all this, Frankie. If it wasn’t for me, he’d have no reason to hurt you.”

“Maybe he’d do it for the money.”

Stromsoe heard the doubt in her voice and, once again, felt the old wave of helplessness and frustration that always rose in him when he thought about Mike Tavarez. It angered him that all his years in pursuit of El Jefe, all of the effort and pain and bloodshed and loss had only brought him and this woman to a place in time where more was sure to happen. There was no real solution, he thought — not even the death of Tavarez — because the strong can reach beyond the grave and the wicked delight in it. Mike was both.

“Will you move in? Stay close for a while?” she asked.

“Sure I will, Frankie.”

They bumped along quietly for a moment.

“I don’t know if it’s because I don’t want to die or because I’m in love with you,” she said.

“Hmmm.”

Another pause.

Their laughter started at the same time, soft and tentative but unsuccessfully hidden. Within a few seconds Stromsoe’s had the better of him. He felt the big swooning stomach and chest spasms he used to get as a kid. He touched the brakes because his eyes were watering.

Frankie’s head was thrown back against the window and her hand was over her mouth. Tears jumped from her eyes. She whinnied then snorted dismayingly.

“I don’t know if it’s because I don’t want to die or because I’m in love with you!” she choked out. “But either way, since I can’t decide, I’m moving you right in like a piece of rented furniture.”

“Furniture with a gun,” Stromsoe added.

“Yeah,” she said. “So just forget Mike and his bad guys because you’re going to kill them all. Every homicidal moron he can come up with!”

“I’ll hang their bodies in your avocado trees as warning.”

“I’ll broadcast with their bodies swinging in the background!”

“They’ll ask you for autographs,” said Stromsoe. “And you’ll do it because it’s part of your job.”

“I’ll sign their foreheads. ‘Love ya, babe, but fuck off and die — from Frankie Hatfield at Fox News!’”

Ted passed them on a long straightaway, looking across at them from the cab of his own truck with a doubtful expression on his face.

31

Choat stepped in front of the maître d’ to guide John and Marianna Cedros into a corner booth. The Madison Club dining room on Third Street was walnut-paneled and windowless, with high ceilings and crown moldings and a stamped aluminum ceiling. The walls were hung with sconces that gave warm orange light, portraits of once-powerful men and fair-faced women, and bucolic plein air paintings of Southern California.

Cedros slid into the booth, amazed that just a few yards away from where they sat, the downtown traffic of Third Street was whizzing along both invisible and inaudible here in this century-old gentlemen’s club. He knew that Choat was occasionally entertained here by his masters on the Water Board. He never dreamed that he would see the inside of it unless he was hired here as a busboy.

Already seated was Joan Choat, the director’s wife. She was a thin woman with dramatic cheekbones, long brown hair, and a pleasant expression on her face.

She smiled meltingly as Marianna guided her growing body into the booth, and reached across Cedros to lay a hand on her belly.

“Ohhhh... I’m so happy for you. Patrick and I could never achieve this. Another Rob Roy, please.”

The maître d’ nodded and handed out the leather menu books.

Choat ordered a double martini up with a twist. Marianna got lemonade and Cedros a German beer.

When the drinks came Choat lifted his glass to John. The women joined in and Cedros held his mug toward them.

“To your service to DWP,” he said. “No general has ever had a better soldier.”

Cedros felt himself blush, less with pride than with annoyance at Choat’s pomposity. He looked at Marianna, who offered Choat a fixed smile.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

“To dropped charges, a new assignment, and a home in the Owens Gorge,” said Choat.

Earlier in the day, in the privacy of his office, Choat had told Cedros that Frankie almost getting her head blown off was actually a good thing. If that wasn’t enough to dissuade her from making rain, then she simply had no common sense. And the PI? Well, he could loiter around Frankie all he wanted now, so far as Choat was concerned. They could garden together, learn a foreign language.

Choat had also said that the San Diego Sheriff’s investigators had asked him about his connection to Cedros’s visit to Mike El Jefe Tavarez at Pelican Bay. Choat had, of course, denied knowing anything about it. Mike who? They seemed to believe him because what would a ranking DWP executive need with a prison gangster? Choat told them that a private investigator by the name of Stromsoe had come to his office last week, full of some dumb-ass theory about the DWP harassing a weather lady down in San Diego, and speculated that Stromsoe had pointed the detectives his way as reverse harassment. The detectives had shrugged off the idea.

Cedros had then reassured Choat — for what, the twentieth time? — that he and Tavarez had talked family and family only. Choat had listened closely to this story he already knew, as if to hear in it any falsehood that the police might have heard. Cedros told him that the cops had been suspicious but largely convinced. They had not asked about money passing hands. Cedros told him again that the untraceable cash had gone to Ampostela and he had not seen it since. And again, that days later Ampostela had taken him out for a drink at a restaurant in Azusa, but the big man had rudely walked out and that was the last Cedros had seen of him.

You are all that stands between DWP and catastrophe, John, Choat had said. You are the bridge between here and tomorrow.

“To a strong and healthy child,” said Joan.

“With the courage of the Mexican and the cleverness of the Italian,” said Choat. “Have you named her?”

Cedros’s scalp crawled, remembering the last time he’d heard that question.

“Cathy,” said Marianna. “We like that name.”

“It’s fabulous,” said Joan.

Cedros watched the sweat roll down the sides of his mug and imagined their cabin in the gorge.

Just a few short days ago it had seemed impossible. Now, with Frankie Hatfield asking the San Diego D.A. to drop the stalking charges, and Marcus Ampostela no longer looming over them, and Choat suddenly doing all the things he’d promised to do, Cedros was having trouble recognizing his own life. His new job assignment was approved. He’d already met the director of maintenance operations and two of his assistant directors. The paperwork for company housing, a company truck — a new Ford F-250 — a company cell phone, and the hazardous-duty pay bonus was on its way.

Success was different from failure.

The home in the gorge.

He and Marianna and Tony were set to leave the next morning and drive up to the Owens Valley and see it. And also see the Gorge Transmission Line, which Choat wanted to personally show him. Choat had spent some years tending this “baby” himself as a ditch rider, and it was more to him than just a steel pipe with a river inside it. He’d shown Cedros an impressive book of photographs documenting the project. It had taken ten years to build the entire system. Men from all over the world had come to work there. Loss of life had been minor.

They would then all go to dinner and overnight in Bishop, just a few miles from the gorge, at a nice motel with a trout-filled creek running right through it. Tony would like that. On the way home the next day Choat wanted to show them a photography gallery that would impress him and Marianna “mightily.” He’d said that he and Joan would send John and Marianna home with something special from it.

The roast-beef lunch was the best Cedros had ever had. Since Ampostela, he’d been tremendously hungry, and he ate everything on his plates, three rolls, then dessert.

Choat had another double and talked about the clever but “clearly legal” way that the DWP had deceived the citizens of the Owens Valley back in the early 1900s and “redirected” almost all of their water south to develop small, sleepy, dirty Los Angeles. He talked about the vision of Eaton, who had envisioned the aqueducts, and the gumption of Mulholland, who had built them, and the sacrifice of Lippincott, who had acted as a double agent to make the whole thing work. He talked about the greatness of our current president, and about God and terror and “spine.” He mentioned that Joan was “barren,” and went on to fondly describe a fistfight he’d won against “two men in matching reindeer sweaters.” Joan smiled dreamily through her third Rob Roy. Marianna was unusually quiet. Cedros’s mind kept alternating between images of their new home in the mountains and of Ampostela’s collapsing face.

At eight the next morning Cedros was at the wheel of his gold sedan, Marianna beside him and Tony locked snugly into his car seat in the back.

They followed the Choats’ black Lincoln town car up Highway 395 to the eastern side of the state.

Cedros looked out at all the new houses being built in the desert north of Los Angeles, suddenly proud that some hardworking agency such as his own DWP was providing the water to build cities amid the cactus. He had begun to understand Choat’s godlike ego. He had begun to consider himself — John Cedros — one of the men who bring the water. The men who bring the water. As he looked out at the development rising from the sands of the desert he thought of Frankie Hatfield and wondered if she’d ever really make rain. What if she had found a way to accelerate moisture, like her great-great-grandfather Charles Hatfield? Extra rain. When Choat first told him about Frankie Hatfield, Cedros had secretly hoped she would make rain — lots of it. She could bring relief to a thirsty world, turn deserts into rich farmland and sunbaked savannahs into thriving suburbs. But now he wasn’t so sure about the value of more rain. Weren’t things working pretty damned well the way they were? Abundance really might be our enemy. A strange shudder issued from his stomach up through his body. He’d never felt anything like it: half hope, half dread, all excitement.

Marianna dozed with her head against the window, the sun warming her beautiful skin and shiny black hair. Cedros saw the pale flesh inside her thighs vibrating with the car, and the gentle, slower rhythm of her breasts, and the solid ball of Cathy riding midway in between.

He put his hand on a sun-warmed leg and glanced back at sleeping Tony, lost in shoulder straps, head forward like a reconnoitering paratrooper.

I’ve been blessed, thought Cedros. I’m a fuckup but God has blessed me anyway.

They pulled into Randsburg, once a gold-mining town and now the smallest and most humble of tourist stops. There was a two-cell jail you could visit, a display of glass bottles turned blue and purple by decades in the desert sun, and an interesting sculpture made of hubcaps and license plates.

At a saloon-turned-diner three young men fretted intensely over the making of milk shakes, which Marianna and Joan found touching but Choat groused about under his stiff broom of a mustache. Tony drank his whole shake and fell asleep in the chair with his head on Marianna’s lap. Choat laid his right hand on the boy’s beautiful little head. The hand was still bruised from the surprise slugging of the PI. Cedros was relieved when the food came and he took it off.

The rest of the drive to Bishop was the most beautiful that Cedros had ever taken. He’d been to Las Vegas, Tijuana, and Oregon, and even up here once before, but today’s vast tan October desert and blue sky were singular and priceless, and the stretch of 395 where to your left the snowcapped Sierra Nevada Mountains cut their jagged way into the heavens while to your right the White Mountains stood in parched, hulking magnificence, well, Cedros was sure you couldn’t run into scenery like that just anywhere. The aspen trees sprouting in the gorges looked like red-orange dabs from a painter’s brush.

They passed the old Owens Lake bed, just miles of dry white broken by an occasional silver pool. Cedros knew that the DWP had been sued for lakebed dust pollution and been forced to let just enough water back into the lake to turn the dust to a shallow sludge that no wind could lift and carry.

Farther up the highway he finally saw the last of the Owens River bleeding into the tiny remnant of the lake, depleted of its volume far upstream by the DWP transmission lines and aqueducts that were soon to become his responsibility.

He looked out at the pretty blue ribbon of river winding through a stand of bright yellow cottonwoods and wondered what it must have looked like a short century ago.

“I don’t trust him,” said Marianna. “Choat wants something.”

Cedros looked at Tony in the back, deep asleep again, a teddy bear on his lap.

“He’s afraid you’ll tell the cops he sent you to Tavarez,” said Marianna.

“Why would I do that?”

“To save yourself from prosecution.”

“But they’re not prosecuting me.”

“Not for stalking. But you don’t know what they’re doing with regards to attempted murder, do you? Choat doesn’t either. That’s the variable. He has to plan ahead. How good was your story to the detectives?”

“Cops are hard to fool.”

“What will Tavarez tell them?”

“Nothing he doesn’t want to. He’s doing life. San Diego Sheriff’s can’t touch him.”

“And you believe your secret is safe with him?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What if Choat doesn’t?”

“I spent three hours lying awake last night, thinking about that,” he said. “And three more hours thinking about all the good things that are happening. I’m scared, Marianna. But I’m happy too.”

She reached over and rested her hand on his shoulder.

“Marianna, let me take this one step at a time,” he said. “I can’t see more than one step ahead.”

“Hmmm,” she said doubtfully. “He’s going to ask you for one more thing. It’ll be a whopper.”

Cedros knew that his wife’s nose for intrigue was keen and her eyesight for betrayal and conspiracy was better than 20/20. She always solved the mystery novels she read long before they were over, always knew who was getting voted off the island next, always seemed to smell their friends’ affairs and divorces before they happened. And her suspicious nature had a practical side. The gun was her doing and she had saved his life. Stromsoe had put the idea in his head, and Cedros had put it in hers, but Marianna had dug the weapon from the upper closet, showed him how the slide and safety worked, told him to hide it in his windbreaker pocket just in case, and instructed him to “empty it” the second Ampostela showed his own killing device — just shoot right through the jacket to save time. An old boyfriend had given her the gun, and hopefully most of the know-how. Cedros had never asked about him.

She had scared him in that moment, and not for the first time in their marriage. Besides her innate cunning, Marianna’s temper was ferocious once it got the better of her. It was a blinding and irrational thing, though she much preferred peace and quiet. She worked very hard for her family. She put them first. Left to her own, she was lazy and horny as a cat.

“We’ll get through this,” said Cedros.

“I wish there was something more I could do,” said Marianna. “Choat scares me because he’s selfish and cruel and he uses people. He’ll do anything in the name of his precious DWP. But the worst part of him is, he’s smart.”

“Let’s trust the PI.”

“So far, I do trust the PI,” said Marianna. “He’s better than the law in some ways.”

Cedros nodded. “Yeah, he’s got no reason to throw me in jail.”

“But notice how the risk always falls on you.”

“Things will be different when we’re up here, honey. We’ll be hundreds of miles from Choat. I’ll be out tending to the water. He’ll be back in L.A. in his dark office. No more favors. No more rainmakers.”

“Yeah,” she said quietly, lost in thought. “One more thing. A whopper.”

“No more waiting tables for you, honey.”

“Something to do with the rain lady.”

“They say the schools up here are good.”

“What more can he do to her?”

“No bangers, no dope on the streets, no ’hood, no mad dogs, no dissin’, no smog.”

“You have to be careful, John.”

“I’ve only been sleeping two hours a night I’m so alert. I’m ready. I’m so ready.”

“Are you thinking clearly?”

“I’m happy and afraid.”

“Maybe that’s as good as it gets for now.”

“I love you. Through all this shit, I love you, Marianna.”

“I love you too, John. You’re my man.”

Late that afternoon they left the women and Tony back at the motel and drove up Highway 395 in Choat’s silent, powerful Lincoln.

Choat was dressed like an Australian adventurer, in shorts and a heavily pocketed shirt, dark socks and chukka boots. His legs were preposterously muscular and white. He wore aviator shades and smoked a big cigar while Cedros drove, the cracked window sucking out the billows of smoke and the air conditioner blasting cold clean air back in.

“I love it up here,” said Choat. “Miss it.”

“I’m lucky.”

“Damned straight. Turn where it says Owens Gorge/Power Plant.”

Cedros caught a glimpse of the little village where he and his family would soon be living. It was nestled between the gorge walls, down by the river, shaded by cottonwoods ablaze in the advancing fall. The power-plant towers and transformers rose high into the air above the village, looking to him like something from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab — all curls and spikes and dire labyrinths of cable and steel. He could picture lightning arcing from one coiled spire to another, giving life to something contained within. Giving power to the city, was more like it, he thought. Power to the city all those hundreds of miles away. It’s not about the water, it’s about the power.

But Choat ordered him to turn away from the power plant and follow the dirt road along the gorge, paralleling the big pipe through which the Owens River was guided into the power-plant turbines.

“Almost a century ago we brought the water,” said Choat. “Wasn’t easy. We built two hundred and fifteen miles of road. And two hundred and thirty miles of pipeline. We built two hundred and eighteen miles of power line and three hundred and seventy-seven miles of telegraph and telephone line. We had fifty-seven work camps for our guys. There were three thousand nine hundred of them and they came from all over the world to work for us — Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Montenegrins, Swiss, Mexicans. We gave them medical for a dollar a month if they made more than forty dollars a month in pay. If they made less, it was fifty cents. Down in the tunnels it hit a hundred and thirty degrees in summer. These guys didn’t just work. They set records. The Board of Engineers estimated we could build about eight feet of tunnel per day — that’s four feet a day at each end. We averaged twenty-two feet. At one point they said it would take five years to finish up the last tunnels and get the water to L.A. We came in twenty months ahead of that schedule. And we killed a lot less people than they did constructing the New York aqueduct, which was built about the same time. They killed a man a week. We killed less than one a month. One was permanently injured. Accidents of a trivial nature totaled one thousand two hundred and eighty-two.”

Choat turned and looked at Cedros as if predicting which category he’d fall into.

“It’s humbling,” said Cedros.

“You know what the DWP’s William Mulholland said at the dedication ceremony on November fifth, 1913? I quote: ‘This rude platform is an altar, and on it we are here consecrating this water supply and dedicating the aqueduct to you and your children and your children’s children for all time.’ I think that’s beautiful. It rivals the Gettysburg Address, in my opinion.”

Choat got out, used a key to open a gate, and Cedros drove the Lincoln through. Choat stood by Aqueduct One holding the gate open and Cedros saw that his head was not nearly as high as the pipe containing the river — it looked close to seven feet tall, not including the short powerful legs on which it was raised. Cedros smiled to himself: the big barrel of Choat’s gut and chest mimicked the curved wall of the pipe behind him, and the bulging calves that supported the man looked something like the staunch legs that held up the aqueduct.

No wonder he loves the damned thing so much, thought Cedros — it looks like his own father, or the child he never had.

As Choat opened the passenger door he gave Cedros the only genuine smile that Cedros had ever seen on the man. Even obscured by cigar and mustache, it was an unmistakable expression of a moment’s happiness that was gone by the time he sat and slammed the door.

Down the dirt road he drove, gravel popping under the carriage like butter in a pan and dust rising behind. The sun was a simple orange ball high in the west but already lowering toward the sharp tips of the Sierra Nevada.

They trundled down the road in silence for nearly half an hour, following the great pale green pipe.

Finally the pipe was replaced by the river itself and Choat told Cedros to pull over.

Cedros cut the engine and got out. He crunched across the desert and looked down to see the Owens River as it blasted into a wide chute, dropped a few feet in elevation into a narrower chute, then charged in a swirling riot against a grate that looked like the bars of a prison cell before being devoured by the huge intake pipe.

It was not so much loud as vibrational, a subwoofing thrum that he felt in his nerves.

“Where the river meets man,” said Choat.

“Impressive.”

“More than impressive. Eight decades of growth for the greatest city on Earth began right exactly here. Movies, television, musical recording, aerospace, the Dodgers, the Lakers, the Philharmonic, the ’84 Olympics — none of them would have happened in Los Angeles without this pipe. History was created by it. The future begins with it. View it. Not many people have.”

Cedros obediently looked down into the rush of water. The river, where it left the earth for concrete, was almost black and it burst into a white boil of protest as it left its bed to be channeled down into the first chute. Then, gathering deeper, it dropped again into the smaller channel and burst into wild, wobbling, glassy shards that slammed against the steel grate and fled down. Cedros wondered how many cubic feet per second were charging through that pipe. He felt the vibrations through the soles of his shoes.

An elevated platform straddled the second intake chute, accessible by metal stairs on either side of the water. The platform had railings to keep anyone from falling to what would be certain death in the water below.

“Let’s go up,” said Choat. “Get a good look at her. You first.”

Cedros looked at his boss. “Okay.”

He led the way up the eight steps. Through the hum of water he couldn’t hear his shoes hitting the stairs, or tell if the gate leading to the platform creaked when he swung it forward and stepped onto the iron-mesh deck. The deck was rusted smooth in the way that only a desert can rust metal.

Cedros walked to the edge of the platform and looked into the swirl. He held on to the railing. He could feel the power of the water all the way up here, miles away from the place where it would formally create power by turning the gorge turbines. Here, the river’s power was invisible — it came off the raging surface as a kind of force field, like when the same polarities of two powerful magnets push stubbornly against each other. Like if you tossed a quarter into this river, thought Cedros, it would float above the water on an impenetrable mattress of pure energy.

Choat moved up close to him. Cedros noted his burly hands on the railing. Cedros had never known that Choat’s calves were three times the size of his own. He thought of Ampostela.

“Right here it’s only seven hundred cubic feet per second,” yelled Choat. His voice seemed unnaturally loud and strong, booming out of him like something amplified. “October, always low. By May, June — one thousand cfs. That’s why we built the power plant and the Pleasant Valley Reservoir. So we can break this reckless mule of a river, make it work for us.”

“I can feel the power coming off it.”

“I want you to burn down Frankie Hatfield’s barn with all her rainmaking stuff in it,” ordered Choat. “Right to the ground. Totally hasta la vista. That will be my good-bye to Miss Hatfield. Do it at night. Use a ton of gas or lighter fluid. Do it quickly and get out fast. Then move up here and do your job. Bone your wife and raise your brats. You’ll be free.”

Cedros looked down at Choat’s hands on the railing. He thought of looking down on Ampostela’s as he waited for the man to draw his gun. He realized that he was in almost as much danger here but he had a choice. Choat was giving him a chance to earn his life whereas Ampostela had valued it at less than nothing.

Cedros looked up at the director. Through the wavering cigar smoke, Choat’s clear gray eyes and forward-tilted head told a clear and believable story: My God, my God. John lost his footing on the platform and the intake chute took him. Cedros saw himself fastened by the river to the grate like a stain on a wall, permanent and unmoving. They’d have to dam the river upstream just to scrape him off.

“Every time I do something for you I have to do something else worse to cover it up,” he said.

“Tavarez made fools of us. We’re done with him. The fire in the barn ends our concern with the rain bitch. You and I go our separate ways. We bear our secrets as gentlemen do. We’ll be judged by God and history, not the changing laws of a squeamish democracy. It’s time for you to demonstrate ultimate spine.”

“Okay.”

“Good. Good, John.”

They stood for a moment and watched the river rage in the chute.

“I love this place,” said Choat. “Some of the happiest years of my life were spent here. I loved being a ditch rider. But Joan hated the cold and much prefers the Madison Club to the Gorge Transmission Line. A happy wife is a clear conscience.”

“It’s special up here. I want to learn how to ride a horse and fish.”

“The simple dreams of a simple man. I hear that cocktail shaker all the way back in Bishop, don’t you?”

“Can we drive by the cabin in the gorge?”

“We can do whatever the hell we want, John. I thought you knew that by now.”

When he got back to the motel, Marianna, already in her little black dinner dress and black heels, pulled the curtains and took John into the spacious bathroom where she untaped the recorder from the small of her husband’s back. They played the conversation on the platform and Cedros was relieved to hear Choat intoning over the deep groan of the captured river. His voice sounded distant, threatened by chaos, but clear.

I want you to burn down...

Marianna then wound up the tiny microphone wire that had ridden up his chest and into his shirt pocket. She put everything into the padded FedEx envelope with the PI’s Birch Security Solutions address and account number on the air bill.

She turned and kissed him hard and deep. He was surprised but in a good way.

Marianna peeked from the bathroom to see Tony still watching TV then quietly locked the door and faced the counter. She flicked off the heels and hiked the black dress to present herself to her husband, leaning forward on the counter with one hand, the other supporting the bulge of Cathy. Marianna pleasurably watched in the mirror as her husband did his thing. They smiled at each other though each was actually looking straight ahead. Then John’s smile went crooked and his eyes fogged up like a beer mug brought from the freezer. The whole thing was over in less than a minute, as she knew it would be. He was never much for endurance when he was terrified, which he had been a lot lately. Get him relaxed, though, and the little bantam could go forever. He was the most generous, thoughtful, and deliciously nasty lover she’d ever had.

A moment later Cedros put on a jacket over his bare trunk, drew open the curtains, cracked a beer, and strode outside. The October trees were a blast of red and orange in the ice-colored sky. The Sierra Nevada Mountains loomed beyond him, snow-dusted and sharp. He smoked a cigarette, which he was doing more frequently the last two weeks. He sucked down the warm smoke and celebrated the fact that he had not only cheated death one more time, but made arrangements so that he would never have to do it again. Plus he’d gotten a nerve-tingling quickie from which his heart was still pounding. He pictured her in the mirror.

He watched the little fish dart away from him in the creek and he engaged Pat and Joan Choat in conversation on their patio as they power-drank cocktails. He glanced back into his room to see Tony smiling at the TV and Marianna with her purse slung over a shoulder, leaving to take the package to the front desk for one-day delivery to Birch Security Solutions.

32

That night Brad Lunce let Tavarez into the library and uncuffed his wrists.

“I heard they’re making room for you in the X.”

“How good is your information?” asked Tavarez.

“It comes down from the guys who know. I heard there’s a senator behind it.”

“State or U.S.?”

“They’re the same, right?”

“What else did you hear?”

“Gyle was for it. He had to be. He’s the warden.”

“I’ve been a model prisoner.”

“Except for shit like this.”

“Nobody knows, do they, Brad?”

“Not about this they don’t. We ain’t telling. Me and Post have families. We just need a little help.”

Tavarez studied Lunce’s unintelligent blue eyes for evidence of betrayal. One word of this and he’d get the X, whether Frankie the weather lady lived or died. He saw nothing in Lunce aside from the usual hostility, resentment, and untargeted meanness.

“You got less than an hour, dude. Enjoy your porn.”

Over the next fifteen minutes Tavarez got terrible news from almost every part of the country, every area of his life.

He read the messages — some in code and some not — his eyes hardly moving from the words, his breath slow and shallow, his heart thumping with the frustration of the captive.

Ruben — his old road dog from the Delhi F Troop — had exhausted his last appeal and would now face the spike at the Q. Tavarez thought of Ruben’s rough voice and hearty laugh, his unquenchable lust for Darla, whom he had impregnated at age thirteen and married three years later after dropping out of Santa Ana Valley High School. It seemed like just a few months ago, not twenty-two years. Tavarez calculated that he hadn’t seen Ruben face-to-face in almost fifteen years. Now he never would.

His mother and father were “okay” according to the men he had assigned to watch over them. Reina cooked constantly, then gave her creations to neighbors, friends, and relatives. She actually socialized very little. Rolando spent most of his time in the garage in a white Naugahyde recliner, watching TV and reading boxing magazines. They missed Mike, and remained angry at his ex-wife, Miriam, for cutting off their visits to the grandchildren. Tavarez’s heart beat with pure fury at the mention of Miriam, then with palpable love at the mention of his children.

His Laguna sources told him that Miriam was selling the Laguna home. She was asking $9 million and likely to get it. She was still seeing a Miami-based immigration lawyer and it appeared that she would be relocating herself and her children and her parents to Florida. He was divorcing. She recently had cosmetic surgery on her legs and lips.

His ten-year-old son, John, had been diagnosed with diabetes. Tavarez’s heart plummeted as he thought of John’s future: daily injections, ill health, impotence, blindness. What had the little boy done to deserve this? Does God never tire of His own ceaseless cruelties?

His second son, four-year-old Peter, had been spending long hours in day care and with nannies, while Miriam shopped and traveled with the lawyer. He was morose.

Isabelle, eight and a half, was making money on the Internet, selling the high-end clothing and electronic discards of her Laguna Beach friends. Her grades were dismal and she called her teachers terrible things in both English and Spanish. Expulsion seemed imminent.

Jennifer had broken her leg at a tae kwon do tournament in Las Vegas.

Tavarez scanned the downloaded e-mails for a note from Isabelle — she was the only one of his children who’d shown the guile and desire to contact him through one of his Laguna men — but she had not written this week. Or the last six weeks, for that matter. Busy making a profit, thought Tavarez. First things first.

Jaime in Modesto had been killed in a shotgun blast Saturday night. La Nuestra Familia, no doubt.

God rest his soul, Tavarez thought. He was a good man — faithful and strong and brave. Mike felt a little more of his own soul crumble, as it always did when one of his brothers or sisters died from violence. Sometimes he believed that the fallen part of his soul grew back strong like scar tissue; sometimes he thought it didn’t grow back at all and his soul had been shrunk by the scores of murders that had become as much a part of his life as births, marriages, baptisms, and quinceaneros.

Tavarez sighed, opened another e-mail, and learned that in Dallas the Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha had killed two more La Eme soldiers. He did not know them. But he did know that Mara Salvatrucha had the most and the best guns, because of the long United States involvement that had left El Salvador awash in weaponry. He also knew that they loved the rustic pleasures of torture, sodomy, and machetes. And there were ten thousand of them in the United States alone, with dozens more flooding up through the borders and recycling through deportation every month. Mara Salvatrucha was smart, thought Tavarez, because they opened their ranks to the thousands of Central and South American criminals that La Eme refused to allow into their own Mexican-American ranks. MS was a pestilence in southern Mexico, of all places. The La Eme soldiers in Dallas were gunned down by a vast mongrel army using weapons they could never afford themselves.

Vermin, thought Tavarez. He bit his lip and closed his eyes in a moment of silence for Jaime and the dead men in Dallas. And he promised to wipe La Nuestra Familia and Mara Salvatrucha off the face of the earth.

Tavarez’s next message told him that Ernest in Arizona State Prison had died Monday in his sleep of apparently natural causes. This was doubly disastrous, because not only was Ernest a good man but his ruthless power along the Arizona-Mexico border had been creating tremendous business for La Eme. Now, who would step into Ernest’s place? How was he, El Jefe, going to replace a man who had been building his strength along that border for ten long, bloody, profit-crazy years?

He said a prayer for Ernest too.

Then he learned that the Los Angeles green-light gangs — those refusing to pay taxes on drug distribution in the barrios — had come together and formally broken all ties with La Eme. In doing so, they had turned themselves from a scattered legion of fearless adolescents into an organization that Tavarez knew would, in the long run, do more damage to La Eme than LNS, Mara Salvatrucha, and all the death rows of the American prison system combined. They were the future. They were undoing everything he had done. They were loyal to nothing but profit. Someday they would piss on his grave, then hop into their BMWs and speed away. They would hear the corridos and explode with laughter.

He learned from one of his Riverside compadres that Ariel Lejas was in stable condition with a broken jaw and an ankle crushed by the rear tire of the PI’s new yellow pickup truck. Six of his teeth had been knocked out. He was reported to be in very good spirits and was offering to kill the woman and the PI for free, though he would have to get out of jail first.

Then, more bad news from Los Angeles: Marcus Ampostela had been found in the San Gabriel River, shot seven times. And no word that he had done his job on John Cedros. Were those two facts connected? Tavarez smiled to himself: facts are always connected.

Tavarez looked over at Lunce, who was staring at him drowsily. It never ceased to amaze him that fools like Lunce managed to advance in the system, and what that revealed about the system.

Tavarez sat back and closed his eyes again for a moment. A great silence spread throughout his body. He listened to the blood surging in his eardrums and to the quiet tap where the heartbeat in his chest met his orange prison suit. He listened to the voices of Ruben and Jaime and Ernest and even Miriam. He heard the voices of his children. He pictured Ofelia, her young fingers underscoring the Nahuatl text, her young eyes on his face. He saw Hallie, so free and careless and willing. And Matt, so strong and righteous and preferred.

The silence became a murmur and the murmur became a buzz and the buzz became a roar and the roar became louder and louder. He felt his blood surging faster and his heart beating harder against his prison suit and he understood that the time had come.

Finally.

It had really come. He knew it. From heart to toe, he was sure.

And, as if it were a sign from God, even his last bit of necessary hardware had arrived just days ago, pushed deep into the tight pages of a thick new paperback, delivered by one of his lawyers, undetected by eye and X-ray.

As a miracle, it would do.

He opened his eyes.

He tapped out his e-mails in the Nahuatl code — condolences regarding Jaime and Ernest — but also brief declarations that he would be handling the various other matters personally and very soon. Until then, he asked for patience from Dallas and Los Angeles and along the Arizona border. He named interim replacements for Jaime and Ernest and ordered allegiance to them and respect for their commands. He ordered one of Ampostela’s men, Ricky “Dogs,” to find out what he could from John Cedros, then put him down. He made sure that Ariel Lejas’s family in Riverside received his share of recently earned money to help pay for his defense. He ordered Lejas to leave the PI alone for now, even though Lejas was in the med wing of San Diego County jail. He asked that his salutations and thanks also be passed along to Lejas. As Tavarez typed the code he had the thought that Stromsoe was not only responsible for Lejas but had possibly helped Cedros with Ampostela. What kind of deal might Stromsoe offer a man like Cedros — a small fish, unconnected and caught in the middle of things — in return for talking about his prison visit? Stromsoe, he thought: the curse of a lifetime, but soon to be lifted.

Then Tavarez ordered his Redding and Crescent City people to make the arrangements for his Sunday family visit. Sundays were slightly relaxed. Sundays were slightly festive. Sundays were chapel privileges and a slightly upgraded menu. Sundays, Tavarez knew, were nights that Cartwright always worked. He made a few additional requests regarding that visit, but nothing that couldn’t be easily accomplished. It shouldn’t be hard to bring bolt cutters instead of a woman.

33

The next evening Stromsoe sat outside Frankie’s office at Fox News while she collected weather data and worked up her charts and tables for the night’s forecasts. Through the window he watched her download the National Weather Service five-hundred-millibar surface maps and consult the Doppler radar, giving them her usual careful scrutiny.

She looked up at him and mouthed one word: rain.

He liked the hustle bustle of the news studio, the good-humored hurry of the people, the smokers’ conclaves in the parking lot, the pronounced facial changes of the newscasters when they went on and off camera.

It was Friday, and the fourth day in a row that he had driven Frankie to work, sat outside her office, loitered about the various locations as she broadcast her stories, then driven her home and slept with her. Since Tavarez’s promise of safety, Stromsoe had watched her even more closely than before. He watched her at work and at home, during errands, at the barn. At times it felt intrusive. But he knew Mike and he knew that Frankie was many miles from safe. At least that was what he had to believe. He enjoyed being around her, couldn’t hide it and didn’t try.

The pretty young receptionist called him “Mr. Stormso” and he could feel her eyes inquiringly upon him as he signed the visitors’ log each day. The misnomer made him think of the corrido in which he played the villain, the evil swine Matt Storm. Three different people had taken him aside to let him know how “happy,” “carefree,” and “together” Frankie had been lately, plainly implying it had something to do with him. Her producer, Darren, had asked to see his gun. The production staff fetched him coffee for a day, then offered him lunchroom privileges. They told him to always make a new pot if he poured the last cup, and to make it strong. They told him that Janice in makeup was the best coffeemaker, so if he wasn’t confident, get her to do it. Stromsoe felt large and out of place but accepted for what he was.

Frankie filed her first weather story of the day — just a more-to-come-later “teaser” — from outside the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park. The afternoon was chilly with a curt breeze off the Pacific and a pale gray sky above. She wore a tweedy trouser-sweater-and-jacket ensemble, vaguely English, which she had purchased by catalog and received two days ago in the mail. Stromsoe thought that all she needed was a bird gun and a dog to be ready for the hunt.

“Rain Sunday, or will it be Monday? I’m Frankie Hatfield in Balboa Park and I’ll have the storm schedule just a little later, right here on Fox.”

A few minutes later she delivered her first forecast story of the evening, which was aired live. She predicted rain by late Sunday night, with showers continuing into late Monday morning, followed by a clear, cool, blustery afternoon and evening.

“The National Weather Service is calling for up to one inch of rain for the city of San Diego, coast and valleys, but up to two inches in the local mountains. So it looks like our wet October is about to continue. Stay tuned and stay dry. Or go out and get wet. Either way works for me. I’m Frankie Hatfield, Fox News, and I’ll be back from the Gaslamp in less than half an hour.”

As Stromsoe drove her to the Gaslamp Quarter downtown, Frankie confessed that she wrote and broadcast only “about three hundred words a night.” Looking out the window, she told him that this number equaled approximately thirty Chinese cookie fortunes or “ten long-winded occasional cards.” She got a calculator from her purse, tapped away. A moment later she announced that she was paid “about three dollars and fifty cents a word — even for ‘a’ and ‘the.’ Am I overpaid?”

“You sign autographs and endorse the paychecks too. That’s two more words, per.”

“I make a lot of dough for writing fifteen hundred words a week. But I tithe very generously to my Fallbrook church though I almost never attend.”

“That’s called covering your bets.”

“No, no. I believe in Him. I believe in all that. Truly. I just hate standing up in a church and saying, hi, I’m Frankie, then shaking hands with strangers. I didn’t go to church to see them, did I? Girls need privacy. Tall ones need extra. I wish there were still drive-in churches. I’d gas up the Mustang and go, never roll down the window except to get the speaker box in and out. Am I antisocial?”

“Overpaid and antisocial.”

“I knew it.”

She seemed to dwell on this. “I need two of me. One can broadcast and go to church, the other can stay in bed with you until noon every day, then collect the rivers of the world and work on the rainmaking formula.”

“I wouldn’t get much done,” he said. “If you didn’t let me out of bed until noon.”

“I know. You’ve got bad men to catch and people to protect.”

Stromsoe guided his truck down Fourth, following the Fox News van into a small parking lot.

“Matt, when you don’t work for me anymore, could you live with me anyway? You could take San Diego jobs. There’s plenty of bad guys for you to fight. I’ve got way too many acres for one person and the dogs like you.”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“I’ve felt your heart beating next to mine, so I know damned well you’ve thought about it.”

Stromsoe hated this conversation as any man would, even one uncomplicatedly in love. “You’re right. I don’t know, Frankie. That’s too far ahead.”

“Bah, humbug, dude. I just asked you to move in with me.”

“Let’s get through this first.”

“I was checking my status with you too.”

“Your status with me is off the charts, Frankie.”

“Time will tell if that’s true.”

Stromsoe turned off the engine and looked at her. “You recently lapsed virgins can be difficult.”

“I could get pissed off at that.”

“I figured you might laugh instead.”

She smiled and blushed magnificently.

Stromsoe flew them to San Francisco later that night, a surprise for which he had only somewhat prepared her.

He thought that a day in a city beyond the immediate reach of Mike Tavarez would be good for Frankie and good for himself. He was tired of guarding and thought she must be tired of being guarded.

Frankie played along with the surprise, pretending to relish the small mysteries of a one-day escape — what city? Warm or cool? Is there a river? When did you think of this? You’re a crafty little Mr. Man, aren’t you? — until he realized she wasn’t pretending. She was happy and playful and in his eyes unconditionally beautiful.

They stayed at the Monaco and ate expansively at the Washington Square Bar and Grill, which was recommended by the concierge. Their room was small and furnished with brightly striped wallpaper, a canopied and lushly pillowed bed, and brass accents and knickknacks. It was dizzyingly erotic and Frankie didn’t pull the “Shhhh...” sign off the outside of their door until noon.

While she showered Stromsoe downloaded to his laptop the audio of Choat and Cedros’s conversation up on the Owens River, forwarded by Dan Birch. He took it down to the lobby and sat by the fire and listened to it twice. Good stuff. I want you to burn down Frankie Hatfield’s barn with all her rainmaking stuff in it. He called Choat’s home number — another trophy ferreted out by Birch Security Solutions — and had a brief conversation with the man.

Then he and Frankie took a taxi to Fisherman’s Wharf for lunch. Stromsoe was impressed by how much a tall, well-loved woman could eat. They drank Mendocino Zinfandel with the meal and Stromsoe gradually felt at one with the padding of the booth. He felt the desire to drink more but not to oblivion — nothing at all like he’d felt in Miami. His pinned bones hurt slightly in the San Francisco chill, and he was aware of places where nails had been removed, and his legs, in spite of the running he’d done since Miami, ached mightily in unusual places.

Thirty-eight years old and counting, he thought.

You are what you are.

Hi, Billy. Hi, Hal. I love you. I will always love you.

“You look relaxed,” she said.

“I could sit here for a week. Like a half-crocked Zen Buddhist.”

“Let’s. I’m not afraid to be lazy.”

She signaled the waiter for another bottle.

That night they had dinner at the restaurant attached to the hotel. Frankie wore a dress that she bought after lunch, a backless black velvet number with a criminally modest neckline above which a string of pearls moved in the candlelight. Stromsoe wore the same new suit he’d worn to Dan Birch’s office three weeks ago to be interviewed for a job involving a weather lady, remarking to himself on the great good fortune it had brought him.

After dinner they walked the busy streets around the Monaco. Stromsoe, a product of ordered suburbs, and Frankie, who grew up in languid Fallbrook, liked the way that contradictory things in downtown San Francisco were packed in together — the theaters right there with the massage parlors, the antiquarian bookstore next to the adult arcade, the high-end restaurants and the hole-in-the-wall tobacco and newsstands. They watched as a tide of released theater patrons flooded the bums on the sidewalk, overcoats and scarves overwhelming the knit caps and cardboard signs. The war on poverty, Frankie remarked. The traffic lurched past them in a frantic parade and the woofers pounded from the youngsters’ cars and the shrieks of the bellmen’s whistles echoed up and down the streets. The city seemed hell-bent, self-important, and wonderful.

They stopped at the Redwood Room for dessert and liqueur. The menu said that the entire room — the bar, floor, walls, ceiling, and columns — had been constructed from the wood of a single redwood tree. Frankie was muttering something against loggers when she read that the tree was actually found in a river, toppled by a ferocious Northern California storm.

“See?” she said. “Behind every good thing there’s a river.”

“Next time we’ll go to a river you haven’t captured,” said Stromsoe.

“I’ve never seen the San Joaquin up by Mammoth.”

“Neither have I.”

“I love you, Stromsoe.”

“I love you, Frankie.”

“I can’t ever be Hallie and Billy.”

“I know.”

“But maybe... who knows?”

He brushed a dark curl from her forehead. “Yeah. Who really does know?”

34

The sky was bowed with clouds when their jet touched down in San Diego on Sunday, Halloween morning. Frankie had spent most of the hour flight craning her neck at the starboard window to watch the storm front lumbering in from the northwest.

“It’s big,” she said. “It’s awesome.”

Stromsoe saw the excitement in her face. She photographed the clouds with the same tiny camera she’d used to shoot John Cedros while he shot her.

When she was finished with the camera Stromsoe scrolled back through the images of Cedros. He was pleased that the young man had shown the courage to wear the wire on Choat. Stromsoe hadn’t thought that Choat would be foolish enough to burn down someone’s property, but he’d also seen the disregard for consequences in his eyes just before Choat had slugged him in the face. This kind of self-granted privilege was a quality shared by nearly every psychopath and violent felon that Stromsoe had ever met, and by several men he knew who were very powerful and had never done one hour in a jail.

They met Ted at the barn. He wore a twelve-gauge shotgun over his shoulder in a sling improvised from leather belts and plastic ties. At his side was a western holster with a prodigious revolver in it. The holster tip was tied to his thigh like a gunfighter’s.

“You kinda scare me,” said Frankie.

“I know what I’m doing.”

She hugged him, the shotgun protruding crosswise between them. “Ted, you’re a true sweetheart,” Frankie said.

“They can’t fool me twice.”

Stromsoe said nothing but in all his years of law enforcement he had never seen anything good happen to a civilian carrying two guns.

He heated cans of stew while Frankie and Ted — shotgun unslung and propped by the door — huddled over surface maps and the real-time weather-station feed coming in from the San Margarita Reserve. NOAA radio babbled on in a stream of static out of San Diego, the meteorologist calling Lindbergh Field Linebergh Field while the Weather Channel played silently from a TV atop one of the refrigerators in which Frankie stored her secret potions.

An hour later they set off in Ted’s pickup truck, Ace and Sadie whining with excitement and a sprinkle of rain hatching the scents of sagebrush and wild buckwheat from the hillsides around them. Stromsoe noted that they now carried twelve five-gallon canisters rather than the usual eight. Ted had installed a gun rack against the rear cab window which now cradled the shotgun and its cobbled strap. Frankie gripped Stromsoe’s knee with a strong hand.

“It’s going to take,” she said. “It’s going to take this time.”

“Did you tighten up the suspension ratios?” asked Ted.

“Yes,” said Frankie. “But that’s all I can say.”

“That’s all I need to know,” said Ted.

At tower one Stromsoe helped Ted get the three heavy canisters onto the platform so that Frankie could activate the solutions. The copper-chlorine smell was clear but not overly strong. This time, it was Stromsoe who climbed the towers and hauled up the containers. Ted wanted both feet on the ground, he said, and Stromsoe noted with respect that Ted never stopped looking around, scanning the bushes and the dirt roads and the hillsides for any sign of Mike Tavarez’s hired killers. Stromsoe’s .380 was on his waist, secured by the Clipdraw, exactly where it had been nearly every waking moment for the last three weeks.

Then Stromsoe climbed down and Frankie climbed up. He handed her the heavy red toolbox, which clunked to the platform with a rattle of steel.

“I think the world of you, you big lug,” said Frankie. “But you know the drill.”

Stromsoe walked nearly to the truck and turned his back while Frankie tended her formula. He heard the clicking sound of a lighter, then the soft ignition of propane. Ted stood guard on the road, the shotgun sling resting over his shoulder.

As before, Stromsoe heard the sound of liquid hitting liquid then the banging of a hard object side to side inside the canisters as she stirred the brew. The copper-chlorine smell weakened.

But unlike before, Stromsoe not quite accidentally wandered to a position that framed Frankie perfectly in the side mirror of Ted’s truck. The second time in a week, he thought, that a side mirror had come in more than handy.

So he watched her stir and add small amounts of something from a shiny chrome can that she kept in the red toolbox. She measured the liquid in a standard kitchen measuring cup, and made some kind of entry with a stylus on a small silver keypad. Then she stirred again. After working on a thick, black rubber glove, she then lowered a small object into the canister and brought it back out. The object looked like the chlorine tester that his neighbor used on his swimming pool back in Santa Ana when he was a kid. He watched Frankie add something from a dropper, then shake the tester, then bring it up to her face for a reading.

She poured more liquid from the chrome can into the measuring cup, poured a little bit back out, held the cup at eye level, then emptied it into the canister.

The blue light almost instantly appeared above the top of the big can. It cast a blue tint on her face as she put on the glove again and stirred. Wisps of pale blue gas began to rise and the altered smell, ethereal and indescribable, came to Stromsoe’s nose in a moment. He watched Frankie watch the smoke, the blue light playing off her throat, her head back and her face to the sky as if to measure its rate of climb.

“Three canisters per tower now?” Stromsoe called back over his shoulder.

“Lucky number,” said Frankie. “We’re going to build another tower starting next week. If we want consistent results we need to cover some sky.”

“I can’t ID that smell,” he said.

“No one can. This stuff hasn’t been named yet.”

By four o’clock they’d finished up at tower four and by five-thirty the rain was falling harder. They sat in the back of the pickup and passed around Ted’s mostly gone bottle of Scoresby. Frankie wore the old fedora, which Stromsoe had seen her spraying with a waterproofer before setting out, and now the water ran in undeterred streams off the brim of it and bounced off her legs in silver comets.

Stromsoe heard and felt the rain accelerate, something like the sound of a jet revving, followed by an ambient heaviness as the volume of water increased until it was roaring against the truck and churning up the ground around them in multitudes of small explosions.

Though outfitted in their tailored raincoats, the dogs looked woefully at Frankie and tried to bend their heads away from the direction of the onslaught but it was coming down almost straight.

Ted pulled at his slicker, trying to get it to stay in place over his holster and revolver. He wore a waxed canvas cowboy hat with a tightly rolled brim that funneled the runoff wherever he was looking, in this case at the gun. He gave up on the slicker and squinted up the road in the direction they had come.

“Take a walk with me, Stromsoe,” said Frankie. “Pardon us just a minute, Ted. We’re okay.”

Frankie splashed out of the truck bed. The dogs followed without enthusiasm. Frankie led the way down the road then up a hillock from the top of which they could see all the way back down the valley to the barn. The air was gray around them and gray above, no difference in shade whatsoever. We are the rain cloud, she said. Then she took off her hat and faced the pouring sky. Stromsoe did too. He closed his eyes and thought a prayer for Hallie and Billy and Frankie as he listened to the rain pounding his face and shoulders and he also heard the higher-pitched slapping sound it made on the dogs’ modified plastic ponchos. He opened his eyes to see Ted in the distance not quite looking on, shotgun in hand and the rain jetting off his hat.

“We should get back,” he said, watching her eyes open and come back into focus.

“I know.”

They trudged back with Ted and decided to sit in the truck a little longer but they only had time to pass the bottle once when the rain shifted into an even higher gear and the water seemed to be solid around them.

“Jeezy peezy,” said Frankie.

They climbed into the cab and set out. The truck tires sank in the mud, so Ted put it in four-wheel and still had to rock it out. It jumped free and the back end came around and the dogs slid across the bed, paws out, through the lake of water and the red toolbox slammed the bed wall. The wipers hacked rapidly back and forth, providing snippets of visibility.

“Eee-haw,” said Ted.

“Take ’er easy, cowboy,” said Frankie.

Ted tried to straighten the truck but the angle was too sharp and the tires dug in again. Stromsoe could feel the vehicle lower. He jumped back with the dogs to improve the weight distribution but the tires sank deeper. He got Frankie to help him push on the tailgate, the two of them working side by side and away from the spinning tires, but the mud still blasted into them while they grunted and heaved and the truck finally climbed out. They clambered back into the cab looking like minstrels in blackface. Halfway to the barn they watched a section of earth detach from an adjacent slope and, sagebrush and lemonade-berry bush and boulders still in place, slide to a stop on the road in front of them. It was four feet high.

“Shit, guys,” said Ted.

“Use the brush off to the right,” said Stromsoe.

But from the dead stop the tires dug into the mud again, and again Stromsoe and Frankie got out and pushed while the truck threw mud back at them. Then, without warning, Ted put the truck into reverse and Stromsoe pulled Frankie out of the way just a second before the truck leaped backward out of the rut and landed left tire then right tire, hard, which launched the dogs in a poncho-wrapped blur. They hit with yipes. Ted emerged from the cab cussing and apologizing.

Stromsoe drove from there, using the roadside brush for lift and keeping the truck way down in first gear. He ground up a rise, made the crest, then looked down at a low spot in the road that was nothing but a red muddy river now, frothing with gravel and plants and sticks.

He could make out the barn by then, a quarter mile out, blurred to a basic barnlike shape by the downpour.

“Let’s just walk it,” said Ted. “Leave the truck here on high ground.”

“The flash flood is too strong,” said Stromsoe.

“I agree,” said Frankie.

“We got to get somewhere,” said Ted.

“This is it,” said Stromsoe.

“No guts, no sausage,” said Ted. “That barn is warm and dry.”

“Don’t you even think of wading that river,” said Frankie. “When the rain lets up we can cross. These things end as fast as they start.”

“I lived in Tucson for five years,” said Ted, seemingly to himself.

Stromsoe put the truck in park, set the brake, and turned the key so the engine went off but the wipers and defroster were still on. The barn blipped into his vision twice per second. Despite the defroster the windshield fogged up, so he wiped it with his hand. They managed to get the dogs into the cab.

“The barn sits near the riverbed,” said Frankie. “It’s a low spot, and flat.”

“Naw,” said Ted. “You can’t fill the San Luis Rey that fast.”

“Look,” she said. “There’s already standing water.”

Impossibly the rain came harder. The water jumped a foot into the air when it hit the truck hood in front of them but Stromsoe couldn’t make out a single drop — it was a solid body of water, like something poured from a gigantic bucket. It was deafening.

“Whoa,” said Ted.

“Man,” said Frankie.

“Maybe should have stayed with two buckets per tower,” said Stromsoe.

“Maybe,” she said.

In brief flashes of visibility Stromsoe saw the water rising around the barn. One minute it looked four inches deep at the door. A minute later it was a third of the way up to the lock.

Ace shook off and the cab filled with wet dog mist. Sadie shook off next. Stromsoe used his fist to clear the windshield again.

Then he saw the barn quiver, as if hit by a bullet. Then the roof buckled and some of the side boards splintered outward. The old building looked as if it were trying to shrug something off. Suddenly it lit up inside as if a single large orange bulb had been turned on.

“No,” said Frankie.

Stromsoe saw what happened next in staggered images separated by the wiper: a dull whuuumph, a burst of black lumber, the roof gone, the flaming guts inside, an orange inferno, a shower of black rubble and books and paper and furniture and a TV falling back to earth, the fire pausing as the rain cascaded down, the fire struggling, the fire low, the fire out except from the chemical containers littered about like wounded dragons belching flames and smoke against the rain.

The dogs looked out the window matter-of-factly.

“My things,” said Frankie in a soft voice. She sounded far away. “Charley’s things.”

They watched in silence for a while as the chemicals burned and the rain pounded out the last of the embers in the roofless barn. The explosion had brought waves to the standing water, chopping the surface into little peaks that gradually wobbled back to raindrop-riddled flatness. It seemed to be boiling around the blackened sofa and the facedown TV.

Half an hour later the rain stopped. Sunlight powered through big cracks in the clouds and they could see the torrents of runoff coming down the gulleys and washes to join up with the swollen San Luis Rey on its way to the ocean.

“That had to be five inches,” said Frankie. “I wonder what everybody else got.”

“I hope there is an everybody else,” said Ted.

“We can sit or walk,” said Stromsoe. “But we won’t be driving this thing for a while.”

They couldn’t get close enough to the barn to go through the remains. The water was two feet deep and fast, and gave no sign of abating soon. Frankie stood knee-deep in it, shooting pictures, feet spread for balance as the current shoved against her. She fished a book from the flood, and what looked to Stromsoe like an old album of weather maps. She shook her head and waded unsteadily back to him.

They hiked across the hills, staying to the brushy sides and stable tops, to a dirt road that was just barely passable on foot. Freed from the slickers to keep them dry, the dogs cavorted and rolled in the mud. They made Gopher Canyon Road. A ranch hand in an old red-and-white Chevy pickup truck gave them a ride to Frankie’s house. He spoke no English but gave them a hearty smile and wave as he drove away.

Stromsoe saw the tears running down Frankie’s cheeks as she dug the keys from her bag.

“It’s gone,” she said. “Everything he did. Everything I improved on.”

“You’re not.”

She nodded without looking at him, then walked to her front door.

35

At seven that evening Stromsoe waited in the hushed immensity of the Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral in Los Angeles. An ocean of pews stretched out before him toward the distant altar and the small red crucifix.

Choat sat down behind him. He wore a black raincoat over a gray suit, a white shirt with a round collar and pin, a wine-colored necktie.

“Feel safer with God nearby?” he asked.

“Less chance you’ll punch me,” said Stromsoe. “Let’s walk.”

“Why the hugger-mugger?”

“You’ll see.”

Stromsoe led the way down the ambulatory and back out the monumental bronze doors. Outside the air was cold and the wind was steady from the west. They entered the cloister garden, where the storm had pounded the flowers flat and raindrops still clung to the tree leaves.

Stromsoe handed Choat four pictures he’d printed from Frankie’s little digital camera, all of the incinerated barn.

Choat’s face went bright red.

“What’s this to me?” Choat asked. “It’s nothing.”

“That’s not what your face says. You know what it is. It’s Frankie’s barn.”

“I don’t care about her barn.”

“You used to. Listen to this.”

He pulled the player out of his pocket and turned the volume up plenty high.

I want you to burn down Frankie Hatfield’s barn with all her rainmaking stuff in it...

Stromsoe watched the doubt, the acceptance, then the anger register on Choat’s big scarred face.

“Cedros,” muttered Choat. “I don’t get it. He tapes me like the little f — pardon me — fellow he is, then does the deed anyway?”

“He got tired of being your bad guy, so he wore the wire. He never touched the barn. Mother Nature did the job. But your solicitation stands. Your bosses might like to hear it. The D.A. might. There are some media people who’d love to hear you. I’ve got ten discs like that one, just waiting to go to loving homes.”

They descended the grand staircase toward the lower plaza. Above them the stars blinked deep in the black sky.

“What do you want?” asked Choat.

“No more contact with Frankie. You so much as think her name and I’ll ruin you. And no more contact with Cedros either.”

They stood on the vast lower plaza, the cathedral towering over them, the palms hissing in the wind.

“What guarantee do—”

“You don’t get any goddamned guarantee.”

Choat stepped forward and stabbed a finger into Stromsoe’s chest.

“Watch your language, security guard. You’re on the holy site of the world’s third largest cathedral and—”

Stromsoe absorbed Choat’s stout finger, and the shift of weight that accompanied it.

Then in one purposeful motion he locked his hands around the big man’s forearm, pivoted, squatted, hauled Choat over his back, and slammed him onto the cement. He really got his shoulders into it.

“I was raised Lutheran.”

Choat lay there gasping, eyes and mouth wide. His looked up at Stromsoe, his face going pale.

“Do we have a deal, Pat?”

Choat glared up at him, mouth open, but all he could do was swallow great lungfuls of air.

“Sure, fine, think about it. You’ll see the light.”

36

In the late-night twilight of Pelican Bay Prison, Lunce gave Mike Tavarez his usual perfunctory weapons check. In all of Tavarez’s years as an inmate he’d never seen an exit-cell search yield a hidden weapon, as if wagging your tongue or spreading your cheeks and taking five deep breaths would magically send a blade clanging to the floor. The inmates always knew when the exit-cell check was coming. Even the dullest and most furious men found ways to have weapons waiting for them when and where they were needed.

Tavarez put his shoes and clothes back on and backed up to the bean chute for the cuffs.

He followed Lunce down the cell-block walkway, heard the whispers of the men, not his men but the others with which La Eme had détente — the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Guerillas and the Crips of the Rollin’ 60s and the Eight Trays and Hoover Street — and the scores of lesser gangs that ruled the prisons like the tribes they were.

“X.”

“X.”

“Who do the SHU? You do the SHU.”

He saw a plastic kite bag on a string lilting down from tier three to tier two, graceful as its handler navigated the internal air currents of the great prison to land it at the proper cell below him.

Tavarez said nothing. He padded along in his canvas slip-ons, handcuffed as always, but his senses keen and his heart beating hard. Lunce stood at the door leading to the back side of the east-wing blocks and nodded up at the security camera. A moment later the door groaned open and Tavarez led the way through.

“You’re walking fast tonight,” said Lunce.

“I enjoy family visits.”

“I’ll bet you do. Wonder if it’ll be the little blonde again.”

“I never know what they’ll come up with,” said Tavarez. He didn’t want to talk to Lunce tonight. It was uncomfortable and he didn’t want a quirk of speech to arouse Lunce’s suspicion. He swallowed a little bit of his own blood.

“Yes, you do. You control everything.”

“If I was powerful, I wouldn’t be walking around in this freezing prison in nothing but peels and slip-ons.”

“With reservations for the SHU.”

“Right.”

“You should have worn a Halloween mask. Scared the shit out of her. Or maybe turned her on.”

“Right.”

“My kid went as a werewolf, got sick on the candy, and wouldn’t eat his dinner.”

Tavarez led the familiar way through the back side of the east wing. The walkway was off-limits to anyone but COs, administrative prison personnel, and escorted suppliers, who could bring their vehicles in only through the double sally ports of the main supply entrance.

When Tavarez stepped outside, the chill hit him like a bucket of ice water down the back. It was a typical post-storm October night in Del Norte County — low forties and damp enough to find your bones. The only good thing was the smell of the great Northern California forest that surrounded them, the aroma of millions of conifers and the square miles of mulch and moss and ferns that made up the forest floor.

They stayed tight to the buildings, stopping midway for Lunce to get the signal from the east perimeter tower — just a flicker of the searchlight — which meant that the electricity to the fence was now turned off and the searchlight would not intrude on Lunce or Tavarez for thirty minutes.

The light winked in conspiracy. Lunce grunted and they struck off as usual across the broad no-man’s-land parched by herbicides, headed for the twenty feet of electrified chain-link fence topped by twin rolls of razor ribbon still shiny through the years of rain and sun and dust. The tower searchlights had found their usual points of focus about fifty yards to his left and right, which put Tavarez and Lunce in an uncertain light augmented only slightly by the glow of the waning moon.

Plenty of light, thought Tavarez.

He saw Jimmy’s flashlight flick on and off twice in the forest, and approached the fence as usual.

As usual, Lunce came up and stood beside him. As usual, he took his spare handcuffs from his duty belt and tossed them against the fence to make sure the electricity was off.

The cuffs clinked to the ground and Lunce bent to get them without taking his eyes off of Tavarez.

Tavarez stared into the forest. Help me, Mother of Jesus.

Lunce took his usual two small steps backward then turned to walk to his place in the near dark from which he always watched Tavarez and the women.

Tavarez listened to Lunce’s footsteps while he worked his tongue against the inside of his cheek. He dislodged the new utility razor blade from its hiding place and clamped it between his teeth, off to the right side, blade out.

Strong and light, Tavarez covered the ground quickly. He gathered himself and leaped high.

Lunce had just begun to turn when Tavarez landed on his back and locked his legs around the big man’s waist. Tavarez squeezed hard and pressed his face into the back of Lunce’s neck. Lunce staggered forward but stayed up, turning his head back to see his attacker, exposing his throat and its pulsing network of life. Tavarez slashed up and fast and deep, then flung his head back the other direction to cut down and across.

The blood blinded him, so he went by feel: up and away again, down and across again, up and away again as Lunce groped back blindly, so he slashed the hands, felt the blade hiss through the flat meat of the palm then ride up when it hit bone.

Lunce went to his knees with a terrified whimper. Tavarez let go with his legs and rolled off, then sprang from in front of the man, burrowing his face in Lunce’s throat, his stainless-steel fang cutting deep and across and again and again. Lunce sprawled backward on the grassless earth, head wobbling loosely, a great wet flapping sound coming faster and faster from the ruins of his neck. Tavarez stood up, eyes wide and bright in a mask of blood, blade still clenched, his breath whistling in and out of his teeth. He threw out his feet and landed butt-first on the guard’s stomach. With the fingers of his cuffed hands he searched patiently for the handcuff keys on Lunce’s belt.

Tavarez saw little but blood, smelled nothing but blood, felt nothing but blood everywhere he touched. Blood was life. He surrendered to it.

He looked over to see Jimmy and a friend, each working at the chain link with a long-handled bolt cutter. The pop of the steel was better than music. Lunce’s breathing was slower now. Tavarez could feel the man’s body under his own, laboring for oxygen through the extra weight and the cut supply lines.

He located the universal handcuff key with his fingertips and pulled it out. He stood and tried to look down into Lunce’s eyes but couldn’t find them through the blood and poor light. He spit the blade to the ground. It took him seconds to get the cuffs off. He dropped them to Lunce’s slowing chest, kept the key for a rainy day, then trotted over to the fence and ducked through the hole.

37

Monday morning John and Marianna Cedros were packing for the movers. The little house smelled like coffee and pasteboard boxes and Cedros had to remind himself several times that this was not a dream.

Marianna worked with determined speed. Tony sat in his nearly empty bedroom watching a Power Rangers video for probably the thirtieth time.

Cedros, carrying a special box of personal things to his car, angled through the propped-open kitchen door that led to the small garage. The garage smelled of clean laundry and the door was open to let in the good morning light.

Ampostela’s gunman from the restaurant, Ricky, was leaning against Marianna’s aging sedan.

“What happened to Marcus?” he asked.

“I remember you.”

“You ought to.”

“Ampostela? Somebody shot him is what the paper said.”

Cedros set the box on the dryer. The load was done, so he swung out the front door. His instincts told him to act unworried, maybe even offended.

He got a better look at the gunman now than in the darkened back room of El Matador. The man was pale-skinned and slender, bald, with a big drooping mustache and tan eyes. He hadn’t brought his dog, which Cedros found important.

“Who did it?” asked Ricky.

“How would I know?”

“You went outside and got in his car at El Matador. Nobody saw him again.”

“I sure as hell did not get into his car. I stood out there like an idiot for half an hour, then I walked home. I didn’t see you anywhere out there, you stayed in with the girls. So don’t tell me I got in his car.”

Ricky looked at him but said nothing. His expression was placid but the tan eyes bored into Cedros. He was wearing a baggy black T-shirt over a pair of sharply creased blue trousers but the shirt wasn’t baggy enough to hide the bulge at his belt line.

“Sounds like you practiced all that,” he said.

Cedros put on a disgusted expression, shook his head slowly, and looked out at Ricky’s lowered red Accord parked across the mouth of his driveway as if to keep anyone from getting away.

“Moving?”

“Just a vacation.”

“Where to?”

“Vegas.”

“With the kid?”

Ricky was looking past Cedros now, through the open door that led to the kitchen.

Cedros turned to see Tony standing in the doorway, brandishing a bright green VHS cassette with yards of tape billowing out.

“Got a problem, Daddy.”

“Go back inside. I’ll be there in a minute. Now.”

Tony turned and walked back in just as Marianna appeared in the same doorway, her face darkly curious.

Cedros held her eye, trying to let his alarm show. Then he looked at Ricky and his fear doubled because he saw not lust in Ricky like he’d seen in Ampostela, but anger. Ricky looked like he wanted to hurt her. He stared at her then smiled, skin wrinkling at the sides of his tan eyes.

“Lena saw you get in Marcus’s car,” said Ricky. “The Magnum.”

“Lena needs glasses.”

“El Jefe needs answers,” said Ricky.

“El Jefe made two hundred and twenty-five grand without doing what he said he’d do.”

“Maybe,” said Ricky. “The word is Marcus had twenty-five grand on him.”

“I gave Marcus twenty-five grand that night. You think I’d go to all the trouble to kill him but not take the money back? How dumb do you think I am?”

For one second Cedros assured himself that Marianna was about to reappear in the doorway with a sawed-off twelve-gauge and either blow or terrify Ricky away. But they had no shotgun and the idea was ridiculous anyway. It was possible she had called 911. All he could think to do was to prolong this conversation, keep Ricky guessing.

“I don’t know yet.”

“That’s right. You don’t. Look, man, I’m going on a family vacation. I don’t know what happened to Marcus. I thought he was actually kind of a cool guy until he left me sitting there. What was that supposed to be — a joke?”

Cedros thought he saw some kind of uncertainty in the tan eyes. Ricky still hadn’t touched his gun, hadn’t even gotten a hand close to it.

Just then the cop car drove up and parked along the curb. His heart sped up — he’d never been so happy to see the cops in his life. When he saw who was inside he couldn’t believe his astonishing good fortune. It wasn’t even the local cops. It was a detective’s plainwrap and Cedros recognized the San Diego Sheriff’s investigators. He heard them shut the doors and start toward him but he never took his eyes off of Ricky’s gun because he figured it was now or never.

“Your lucky day,” said Ricky. “I’ll be back for this.”

He slipped the gun from his waistband and tossed it to Cedros, who caught and dropped it into the dryer with the clean clothes.

“I don’t know anything about Ampostela,” said Cedros. “I swear it to you and El Jefe.”

“Be cool for these guys. You and me are just road dogs.”

“You got it.”

The investigators were Hodge and Morales, the same two who had questioned him about his visit to Mike Tavarez and his knowledge of a gunman named Ariel Lejas.

They came into the garage and their cops’ antennae alerted them to Ricky. They eyed him and both seemed to solve the same equation: 1 gangbanger + 1 relative of El Jefe = 2 gangbangers.

“We have some more questions for you,” said Hodge.

“Me and Mike talked family up in Pelican Bay. That was it. I’ve told you that a thousand times.”

Marianna appeared again in the doorway with a big smile and two cups of coffee. She walked right up to the detectives and delivered the cups, ignoring Ricky. Then she marched over to the dryer, grabbed a load, and went back inside.

“Later, homes,” said Ricky.

“Okay, man,” said Cedros.

The red Honda roared to life, backed up, and low-rode down the street toward Azusa Avenue, the stinger exhaust bragging more horsepower than the car really had.

“La Eme?” asked Morales.

“Just a friend.”

“You being related to El Jefe, that puts you right in the middle of things, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know nothing about no La Eme. I’m not so sure it’s even real. I think maybe you guys make up gang stuff to keep people afraid and make your budgets fat.”

“Let’s talk about Ariel Lejas,” said Morales.

“Fine. Let’s talk. I’ve never seen him or heard of him until you guys came along.”

Marianna appeared in the doorway with a falsely pleasant look on her face, looking for Ricky. When she saw his car was gone her smile became genuine and she got another load of clothes from the dryer.

“You guys might as well come in,” she said.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Hodge.

“More coffee in the pot if you want it. Excuse the mess. We’re moving. We’re getting out of this gang-infested rat hole and we’re never coming back.”

“What do you know about La Eme, ma’am?” asked Hodge.

“Not much,” said Marianna, the load of clothes clutched loosely over bulging belly. “I know they murder and steal. But we can’t help it if we have a distant relative who’s mixed up with them.”

“Well, at least one of you has a grip on reality,” said Hodge. “You might need it, because Mike Tavarez escaped from Pelican Bay last night. He sawed a guard’s head half off with a one-sided razor blade. Some friends cut a hole in the fence and off he went.”

Cedros looked to his wife, then out at the street. It was the same information that Stromsoe had given him two hours ago by phone but it wasn’t hard to look unpleasantly surprised.

“Haven’t seen him, have you?” asked Morales.

“Why would he come here?” asked Cedros.

“You’re blood. You saw him just a few weeks ago up in Pelican Bay.”

“We talked family. Nothing else.”

The cops shrugged. Cedros followed Marianna back inside, the two detectives close behind.

38

At first light Stromsoe was sitting in Frankie Hatfield’s living room, the sun splintering through the avocado trees and the coffeemaker gurgling in the kitchen. Frankie and Ace had slept through the ringing cell phone that woke him half an hour ago. Stromsoe had rolled out of bed and talked to Ken McCann from the dark breakfast nook. Lunce had had a wife and two young children.

Sadie now sat at his feet as Stromsoe loaded Frankie’s double-barreled twenty-gauge. It was a heavy Savage Arms side-by with a blond stock and two triggers that could be simultaneously pulled for a double discharge that at close range would blow a hole the size of a softball in a man. Sadie followed him to the foyer, where he stood the gun upright in the right-hand corner, then set four extra shells behind the butt. He looked out the window. She followed him to the kitchen, where he poured a cup of coffee.

“Don’t worry,” he said to the dog, but the dog looked worried anyway.

Stromsoe walked quietly back to the living room with the coffee, sat on the couch that gave him an easy view of both the front door and the back of Frankie’s sprawling farm.

He thought that if he’d been this ready on behalf of Hallie and Billy, he might have prevented what happened, though he wasn’t sure exactly how. He could have requested a bomb-sniffing dog and the department would have given him one. He could have requested a wheeled mirror with a long handle to slide under his vehicles each morning and the department would have given him one of those too. But the fact was that La Eme didn’t use explosives. It would have been as logical to hire food tasters. The compelling fact was that Stromsoe hadn’t believed Mike would try to kill him at all. He’d believed that Mike would see the accident of Ofelia for what it was and that their bond, forged in the friendship of adolescence and finished by the enmity of manhood, would prevent such blunt, mortal action. It seemed almost silly now, because he understood their differences in a way that he hadn’t when he was young. Mike’s blood was heavier than his own. Mike was Spaniard and Aztec, the conquistador and the warrior. He was the serpent and the eagle. He was Montezuma, who had ruled Tenochtitlán, who offered gold to Cortés and was murdered for his generosity. Mike was the pyramids where thousands of human hearts were cut out and held up beating to the sun; he was the young women thrown into sacrificial cenotes loaded with gold and jewels that took them straight to the green depths, where they were reduced to bones and soon to not even that.

Stromsoe remembered something that Mike had told him years ago, just after Hallie had brought her bruised and broken body back to him.

Keep her. You’re the romantic, not me.

Frankie came out in her blue terry robe and sat next to Stromsoe on the couch. He told her about McCann’s call.

“How fast could he get here?” she asked quietly.

“Late morning, if he flies.”

“But he wouldn’t fly, would he? They’ll watch the airports up there.”

“He probably won’t fly. I put your shotgun in the foyer, Frankie. It’s loaded and on safe. Either trigger and it fires.”

“What if he drives?”

“Early afternoon.”

“Is he going to come after me, Matt?”

“He will.”

“He won’t just hire it out like before?”

“I doubt it.”

She nodded and bit her lip, dark hair dangling down.

“Can you take a week off?” he asked.

She shook her hair back behind her shoulder and looked at him. “I will not take a week off. I don’t budge.”

“He could come today, Frankie. Or it could be a year from today.”

“Which is more likely?”

Stromsoe thought about it. “A year. He’d want us to be afraid.”

“Can he stay lost for a year?”

“If he makes it past the first eight hours. All he had on them was about an hour head start.”

“But they haven’t caught up with him yet, have they?” she asked. “He’s been gone since eleven last night? That’s eight hours ago, exactly.”

“If he makes it past the Mexican border, he can stay lost forever.”

“And it’s easy to get back in,” said Frankie.

“Children do it.”

“Oh, man.”

“Frankie, you’re going to have to stay alert to stay alive. Every second, every minute. You can do it if you stay patient and relaxed. Don’t let it hurry you. Eyes open. Mind open. Always thinking. It isn’t a bad way to live once you get used to it. I did it for years undercover. You have to understand it’s a long run. You have to slow everything down.”

“I’m getting my own carry permit.”

“You should.”

“We’ll practice every day at the range, then come home and make loud, explosive, ballistic love.”

He smiled.

“I need a cup of coffee,” she said. “Hopefully Tavarez isn’t waiting for me in the kitchen.”

“I checked it out. You’re good.”

“You’re good.”

Ace arrived on scene, yawned, then stretched out in a bed of sunlight coming through an east window.

“I just had an idea,” said Frankie. She was halfway to the kitchen. “What if we get an apartment downtown? But instead of living there, we just sleep there, and spend the rest of our free time rebuilding the barn?”

Stromsoe considered. “You’re just as exposed downtown as you are here. It wouldn’t take him long to figure out the change of address.”

“Right, but we just sleep there. Then, bright and early, we get up and head for the barn. We’ll get the gate lock fixed so only we can get in. There’s only the one road. And once we’re there we can see in every direction, you know? If anyone came walking up or came in off road, we’d see them way early. Ted can stand guard. He’d love to. And we work outside until I have to go to work, we build a new barn and I can set up all the stuff. My formula works, Matt. It works.”

“I saw it work, Frankie. I can vouch for that.”

“We got four and three-sixteenths inches in two hours. Santa Margarita Preserve, right next door, they got two and three-tenths. Fallbrook got two and one-tenth. San Diego got two. Temecula, Valley Center, and Escondido got two and a quarter.”

“I know, Frankie.”

“What I’m saying is I’ve got the real thing, Matt. The real, actual thing that Charley was almost onto. I’m going to be a genuine, legitimate rainmaker.”

“I’m a believer.”

“You are?”

“I am.”

“Then wait right where you are,” she said. “I’ve got something for you.”

She went down the hall and into the river room. He could hear the closet open, then the sound of objects being moved. A few minutes later he heard the closet door slide shut.

She came back with a sheaf of stapled papers in her hand.

“I had to make some small changes after last night. It’s all here — the components and where to get them at the best prices, how to make it, how to disperse it. It’s everything Charley started and I continued. You might need Ted or a chemist to figure out some of it. Oh, and when you stir the final mix don’t get the fumes directly in your face and don’t stir too fast. It’s not like whipping egg whites — if you go too fast the hydrogen atoms bond up too early with the chlorides and it gets mucky. Watching me in the truck mirror wasn’t quite enough for you to learn it right. There’s touch involved, and concentration.”

She handed the booklet to Stromsoe.

He looked up at her. “I never thought a few sheets of paper would make me feel so honored.”

She sat down next to him. “Look, I can probably get the rest of the week off, but they’ll need me for tonight. I’ll call Darren.”

“That’s a smart thing, Frankie. It’s not surrender.”

“I might do some of that. Where shall we go?”

“The mountains. You’ve never bottled the San Joaquin River.”

“I’m there.”

Ten minutes later it was set. Darren gave her four days off so long as she could broadcast this evening. And a dog-friendly cabin with a view of Mammoth Mountain was on hold with Stromsoe’s credit card.

Stromsoe packed a week’s worth of things then talked to Dan Birch, Ken McCann, and Warden Gyle. Tavarez had not been seen. Gyle learned that Lunce had been in El Jefe’s pocket and this was not the first time that Lunce had escorted Tavarez outside his cell for “unauthorized activities.” Some CO heads would roll, he said — the union be damned. His most trusted situation manager, Cartwright, was a good ear inside the guard union. Gyle was still not sure whether Lunce had uncuffed the prisoner and allowed himself to be surprised by the razor blade, or if Tavarez had concealed and wielded the blade with his mouth, then let himself loose using the guard’s key. It was also possible that the second or third parties who had cut the hole in the fence had subdued Lunce. He said it was the bloodiest thing he’d ever seen.

“The guards are going to set up a fund for the family,” said Gyle.

“I’ll kick in,” said Stromsoe.

“I’ll let you know when we pick him up.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

He called John Cedros’s cell phone. Cedros said he and Marianna and Tony were already halfway to Bishop. Stromsoe said there was a GPU homing device under the rear bumper of his car, please pull it off and mail it to Birch Security. Stromsoe wished him luck and asked Cedros to give him his home address when he got a chance.

“I’m mailing you the evidence against Choat,” said Stromsoe. “I’ve got copies and so does Birch Security. Choat clearly solicits you to burn down the barn. He roars it out, over the sound of the river. The fact that Mother Nature did it for him doesn’t change anything. I doubt he’ll ever bother you again.”

“Thanks, man. I really mean it.”

“Thank Marianna for making that call to Birch. It saved at least one life. Take care of your family.”

“Vaya con Dios, PI.”

“Always.”

Stromsoe sat in the living room for a moment, listening to the hum of water going through the pipes to Frankie’s shower. They’d be leaving for her work in less than an hour. The thought of Frankie Hatfield cheered his heart and he looked through the windows. The guns of Pendleton began thundering away in the west.

A faint feeling of relief came to Stromsoe, and he was surprised by how large and welcome it was.

He loaded his bags into the pickup, then Frankie’s as she got them packed.

Frankie was in the kitchen packing up some food to take when Stromsoe’s cell phone rang.

“Hello, Matt.”

“Hello, Mike.”

Frankie looked up and her face went pale.

“I’m out.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t think it would feel this good.”

“Enjoy it while you can.”

“I’m going to come see you sometime soon.”

“Let me know when you’re in town.”

The artillery went off again. Stromsoe heard the concussion of it hit his chest like a bass drum in a marching band.

He also heard it coming through the cell phone into his ear.

He motioned Frankie to the floor. She pulled the gun from her purse and sank down, her back to the refrigerator. The dogs waddled over and Frankie had the presence of mind to reach up and set the gun on the counter then take each animal by its collar.

Think of something. Keep him on.

“I heard you made a real mess up there,” said Stromsoe.

“I can’t get the smell off.”

“The ocean can.”

“First things first.”

Stromsoe went to the foyer and looked out the windows to the avocado orchard.

“That razor-blade-in-the-mouth trick,” said Stromsoe. “I read about it years ago in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin.”

“I did too.”

“You going to kill Frankie, or both of us?”

“Frankie.”

“Weren’t Hallie and Billy enough?”

“Nothing is enough.”

The artillery sounded against his body and through the phone. From the corner of the foyer Stromsoe scooped up four shot shells and stuffed them into a pocket. Then he tucked the butt of the blond shotgun under his right arm, slid off the safety, and trotted down the hallway.

“You’d like Frankie,” said Stromsoe. “You wouldn’t hurt her if you just knew her a little.”

“That’s very Matt, Matt.”

The master bath was damp and still smelled of soap and shampoo from Frankie’s shower. There was a sliding-glass door leading outside to a small patio with wooden furniture and a chimenea. Beyond the patio was a stand of eucalyptus trees, and beyond them the orchard. Stromsoe believed that Mike was in that orchard, watching the front of the house. He was armed and intended to kill them both when they came out the front door. This was only a guess but a guess informed by the twenty-four years he’d known the boy and the man he became. It was possible that Mike had someone with him but Stromsoe believed he was alone. In his own way, Mike had always been alone. Stromsoe’s plan was to get fifty yards into the looming avocado trees without being seen, then come up on Mike from behind.

He quietly slid open the door and stepped outside.

“How many times do I have to tell you that Ofelia was an accident? I wasn’t there, Mike.”

“You created the there,” said Tavarez. “You made it what it was. At a certain point, the only thing that can happen is what does happen. This is called consequence and it’s a simple concept, my old friend.”

Stromsoe passed through the eucalyptus and into the fragrant shade of the orchard, balancing the shotgun on the meat of his right arm like a bird hunter, left hand raised to his ear with the cell phone, eyes searching the orchard beyond the drive. His heart was pounding wild and fast.

The cannons boomed through the sky from Pendleton.

And echoed through the speaker of the phone.

“Why don’t we make a deal?” asked Stromsoe.

“You don’t have anything I want.”

“We were friends once, Mike.”

“You’re not asking for mercy, are you?”

“Haven’t you had enough blood?”

The guns of Pendleton thundered and again Stromsoe heard them in his chest and in his ear.

“I mean, you’re free now, Mike. Why not just head to Mexico, find Ofelia’s ghost, or her sister, marry her, spend your millions?”

“What are your plans? Do you love this tall news lady?”

Stromsoe stayed to the middle of one row, moving deeper into the orchard. The fallen leaves were thick on the ground but they were soaked from the recent storm and allowed him to pass quietly. Led by faith and instinct, Stromsoe made the turn that he hoped would lead him to Mike. He had never missed his left eye like he did now.

“Yes, I do.”

“You’re very lucky to love twice. You must say your prayers every night, and pay your taxes, and go to church on Sundays.”

Stromsoe saw Mike standing beside the trunk of an avocado tree, facing the driveway and the house, his back to Stromsoe, an arm raised to his ear. Alone.

Stromsoe looked down before each step, keeping away from the leaves and on the damp silent earth left by the heavy rain.

“I’m not much of a churchgoer,” he said.

“Can she really make it rain?”

“She really can. It’s impressive.”

“Think how valuable she would be to the deserts of Mexico. Think of the thousands of acres of poppies.”

“Bring us down as your guests when you get settled. She’ll make some rain. Funny, though — I have the feeling you’re already there.”

“I went north. Everyone will be looking south.”

“That was smart.”

“Enjoy your time with the rainmaker. I’ll see you when you least expect it. And I’ll make you one promise, Stromsoe, for an old friend — I’ll never use another bomb.”

“Maybe a razor, like the guard?”

“Too wet, even for me.”

Stromsoe was seventy feet from Mike now. Mike had on a white dress shirt tucked neatly into his jeans, and cowboy boots. The sun hit him in a shifting pattern allowed by the big-leafed trees. He leaned on one elbow against a low tree limb and he looked like a gentleman farmer sizing up this year’s crop.

The artillery thundered again.

Sixty feet.

Mike hummed a few bars of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Every nerve in Stromsoe’s body stood up and listened.

Lord, how I want to be in that number...

Fifty feet.

“Adios,” said Mike. “Always watch your back, my friend.”

“Good-bye,” said Stromsoe. “Don’t forget to watch your own.”

He guessed that Mike had heard him, but Tavarez was still and silent for a moment.

Then Mike wheeled quickly to his left and Stromsoe saw a flash of steel in the sunlight.

Stromsoe swung his left hand up to the gun stock as Mike dropped and rolled and fired.

The double blast took out the limb. The bullet from Mike’s handgun screamed past Stromsoe’s head. Tavarez zigzagged into the grove, his white shirt flickering amid the tree trunks.

Stromsoe barreled after him, reloading the twenty-gauge without looking at it.

Tavarez scrambled up a hillock, made the top, and whirled around. Stromsoe saw the muzzle flash and heard the wooden knock of the round hitting the tree beside him. Mike was gone by the time he had the shotgun to his shoulder.

Stromsoe thought ambush as he reached the hillock, knew that if he rounded the crest he’d catch a bullet, so he veered out around the rise and tried to do it fast so as to keep Mike at least guessing.

He came around the back with the shotgun held out and two fingers on the two triggers but Mike had already made the road. Stromsoe charged ahead. Through the trees he watched Mike lope across the asphalt into more orchard and he could see the blood on the white shirt.

Mike made straight between the trees now, trying to stretch his lead, but Stromsoe stayed heavy upon him. Bars of shadow and sunlight held Mike as if inside a large cage but Stromsoe knew that if Mike could get out of sight, Mike could surprise and kill him, so he willed his legs to do more.

Then he came up a gentle swale. The grove ended abruptly at a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Beyond the fence were rolling hills of flowers — an ocean of reds and yellows and white stretching all the way back to the blue Fallbrook sky.

Mike ran parallel to the fence but geometry was on Stromsoe’s side now and he closed the distance.

Mike fired but Stromsoe could hear only the roar of the two barrels and feel the sharp kick of the butt against his shoulder.

He stepped behind the trunk of an avocado tree, reloaded the side-by, and flicked the safety off. He could see Mike outstretched on the ground. Stromsoe aimed down the barrels as he walked.

Mike’s chest was a bloody mess and he was breathing fast. One arm was out and one was trapped beneath him. His legs were spread. His pistol was on the ground by his right boot. Stromsoe lowered the shotgun but kept it pointed at Tavarez’s head as he kicked away the handgun. Mike’s eyes followed him but he didn’t move.

Stromsoe went to his knees beside Mike and looked at his white, blood-splattered face. “Mike.”

Mike opened his hand and Stromsoe wondered what he meant by it. It’s over? I have nothing? You mean nothing to me?

The eyes stared at him with the same broad mysteries. Stromsoe saw nothing cruel or furious in them, nothing illuminated or forgiving — just the partial understanding that is all a man can have.

“This isn’t how I pictured it, Matt.”

“Me neither.”

Mike stared straight ahead and said nothing for a moment, as if listening to the speed of his own breathing.

He blinked. “We did our best with what we were given.”

“We were given everything, Mike. This is what’s left of it.”

“I never once felt like I had enough. Never.”

The breeze stirred Mike’s hair and something in his throat rattled and caught.

“It doesn’t hurt, Matt.”

“Good.”

“Come closer. I can’t hear you. All I hear is wind.”

Stromsoe moved closer.

With a groan Mike freed his hidden fist and swung but Stromsoe caught the wrist and slowly turned it back on itself until the switchblade slipped from Mike’s hand.

“Your luck will run out,” hissed Tavarez. “And the luck of your pale race and your soulless country. And the devil will then fuck you to death one at a time then all at once.”

“Yes. He’s practicing on you right now.”

“You still believe in the God who ignores you?”

“I believe, yes.”

“My faith isn’t strong like it used to be.”

“Faith doesn’t make God.”

“Or hell.”

“That either,” said Stromsoe.

Mike tried to slow his breathing but this made his throat stutter like a truck on a washboard road. He gagged and swallowed loudly. “Tell my children I loved them. Tell my wife I’m waiting in hell for her.”

“I’ll tell the children. But you’ll have to pass along your own curses, Mike. You always find a way.”

“You were never as smart as me,” said Mike.

“Never. But I’ll be here an hour from now and you won’t.”

“That’s an arguable privilege.”

“It’s not arguable to me at all.”

Mike took a series of very shallow breaths, then coughed weakly. His voice was a whisper. “We did have everything, didn’t we?”

“Everything.”

“I don’t have a single regret.”

“I’ve got a million,” said Stromsoe.

“Except that I didn’t shoot you first.”

Mike managed to lift his head off the ground. His eyes searched for the pistol but his head lowered back down to the leaves. Then his fists slowly opened and the light left his eyes.

Stromsoe sat for a long while. He could smell the blood and the rich earth. It was cool in the orchard with the sun streaking the leaves. A painted lady landed on the toe of Mike’s right boot, fanned its wings in a spot of sun.

Stromsoe remembered the time Mike had helped him run down the kids who threw the rocks at the marching band, and how surprised he’d been at Mike’s ferocity as well as his own. He thought again of the abandon, when every nerve and muscle was needed for that good fight, when he was stronger and faster than he would ever be. What a pure thing, what a rarity as the years had gone by — a moment to be right, and to have a friend there with you.

He looked down at the body and thought of the many people who had died so that he could sit here in this dappled garden. Long ago, standing in the burnished afternoon light of a Southern California cemetery with his father and mother, Stromsoe had understood with a child’s simple wonder that some lives end so that others may continue. Later he came to understand that a man’s life can be made rich through love as by Hallie and Billy and Frankie, or cursed through hatred as with Tavarez, but it was all their lives that coursed through him now as he reached out and closed Mike’s eyes forever.