Wild Instinct

6

The encampment is deep within the cottonwood forest.

Gale smells fire before he sees the freestanding tents, tarp lean-tos roped to the trees, shacks of plywood scraps and blankets and more tarps — blue, white, gray, and green — and others too old and sun-bleached to be much of any color at all. There’s a small beaten pickup truck with a bug screen improvised over the bed. And a camper shell with no truck to cling to, lying in a neat clearing on which Gale sees broom marks.

Some of the ragged people stare at them, some wave, most of them ignore the detectives. Twenty or thirty by Gale’s estimate. A dog approaches, tail wagging. A tabby cat preens in a patch of sunlight.

Gale notes the smoldering campfires in improvised, rock-ringed pits. And propane stoves and heaters under precarious roofs made of plastic kiddie pools perhaps scrounged from visitors to the campground. And the shopping carts, some of them heavy steel. God knows how they got them here through the wilderness.

Bingham walks between them, heading north toward the far end of the encampment. He smells strongly of a deodorant that Gale used in seventh grade at El Toro Elementary School. His black blanket sprouts holes and his jeans are stained and torn at the knees. Hair to his shoulders, lank and dirty.

“I didn’t see or hear anything unusual that night,” Bingham says.

“A twenty-two pistol makes a sharp, kind of popping sound,” says Mendez. “A rifle a longer swoosh, higher pitched.”

“I know.”

“Were you here the whole time?” Gale asks.

“I used the campground bathroom once.”

“Is that what you were doing just now, in the meadow? Heading for the bathroom?” asks Mendez.

“Yeah. I go when there’s no people.”

Bingham stops and reaches inside the blanket, shows the deputies a triangular shard of white hand soap and a green toothbrush.

“I wash in the sink, but the water’s just a cold dribble.”

“Where were you living before this?” asks Gale.

“Mendocino, in the woods. Before that, Oregon. Before that, Iraq.”

“Doing what after the Marines?” asks Mendez.

“Herb. Got a little weird so I came to Laguna to see a friend. Ended up here.”

Gale smells the sweet stink of pot smoke in the air, and Bingham cuts him a glance. A white-haired woman in a yellow housedress sits in a camp chair outside a red tent. A black pit bull at her feet. She looks over at Gale.

“Three shot dead at a grow a few miles away,” says Gale. “Just a few days ago. Laotians, we think.”

Bingham nods. “Out here it’s LA bangers run by the Mexican Mafia versus white Riverside County guys. Back-and-forth raiding and killing. The Laotians team up with the Riverside guys. Work like slaves for about nothing. Get their passports taken away. Get ripped off and raped. The law runs them out but they come back a half mile away. Different grow, same mess. You people can’t hardly do anything. Nobody can.”

“I know some of those women,” says Mendez. “Most of them are trusting. All of them are desperate. The men and boys, too.”

“Be more ugly until the feds legalize it and the prices come down. Stoners aren’t going to pay dispensary prices with rent high and gas at six bucks a gallon. Until then, mucho dinero in the illegal grass biz.”

The woman in the yellow dress stands and stretches. Takes a hit on the pipe and ducks inside the red tent.

“Did you know any of those people at the grow massacre?” asks Gale.

“No, sir,” says Bingham. “Not my world anymore. I’m just going to live here in peace until you throw us out. Enjoy your investigation. The skinny redhead dude in the gray lean-to does not like to be bothered. There are guns and knives but most of these people aren’t prone to using them. Decent folks, most of them. Bad luck. I’m going to try for that bathroom again.”

Gale and Mendez work the encampment back south toward the meadow, leapfrogging each other, quizzing the tent, lean-to, vehicle dwellers.

Every few interviews, they stop to compare notes. Neither come up with any leads. Most of the homeless have heard of a murder not far from them, a few nights back, a developer of some kind, a rich man.

“I think the gun was too far away to be heard,” says Mendez.

“And the trees, muffling the sound,” says Gale.

“I’m seeing and smelling plenty of dope. Plenty of needles. Filthy clothes and people. A lot of them are probably zonked-out pretty early. I’m surprised we haven’t been ordered to close this place down.”

“That judge won’t let us.”

“Wish he could see this,” says Mendez.

“I’ve seen worse.”

In a lean-to at the southern tip of the encampment, Gale introduces himself to Vito Pesco, a stocky, clean-shaven man with a florid face and thinning, shiny hair combed straight back. Gale guesses him to be forty, but he’s missing some bottom teeth and his face is deeply creased and he looks north of fifty.

Inside the white-tarped lean-to, Gale notes the cot with its bedding neatly made up, a small wooden picnic table, and a bench on which boxes of canned goods sit. Pesco has lots of ravioli, spaghetti, tomatoes, asparagus, and beets.

He’s sitting in a blue, low-slung canvas beach chair, a blue cooler on his left, and a vacant matching beach chair beyond that.

He wears shorts and flip-flops, and a black windbreaker against the fall chill. His legs are thick and suntanned.

“Have a seat,” he says, and Gale settles into the blue canvas chair. “There’s beer in the cooler.”

“No, thanks. Too early.”

“Well, it’s five o’clock somewhere.”

“Were you here the Thursday Tarlow was killed, late afternoon or evening?” asks Gale.

“I haven’t left here in over a month,” says Pesco. “Friends and family bring me food and beer, clothes, and stuff. Where’d it happen exactly?”

“Down in that stand of sycamores by the dry creek bed. It was a twenty-two-caliber gun. Two shots. You might have heard them from here.”

“I play music CDs a lot after dark. There’s radios, too. It’s not loud but I didn’t hear a shot. But I did see something strange around eight that night. I had to use the bathroom there at the campground. Dark out here, so I used a flashlight. I was washing up in the sink and I heard vehicles coming into the campground. Doors opening and closing. Not unusual, really, but there’s not a lot of people coming and going that late. Then voices, men’s voices, kind of low. Sounded friendly, or like they knew each other. I could hear their footsteps on the gravel. They went past the bathrooms and down the trail. When I finished up, I saw the two cars that had just come in. I’m a car guy. Used to be, anyway. I walked over and checked out a shiny new Suburban High Country. Dealer plates still taped to the window. That’s the SUV I’d have if I could afford it. Big enough to sleep in. Pretty good mileage for something that big. The other vehicle was an old white van. A rusty Econoline, not a family van. Had a Bear Cave sticker on the bumper. That’s a biker bar in Huntington Beach. Then I hit the trail and turned on my flashlight and cut back through the meadow for, well, home.”

Pesco takes a beer from the cooler and cracks it open.

“You’re sure it was two male voices?” asks Gale.

“Yeah, I’m sure. I was listening hard, hoping they weren’t headed into the restrooms.”

Gale watches a plump red-shouldered hawk perched in a tree, tugging off shreds of something in its talons and swallowing them down.

“Got to admit, Detective, I never thought I’d call a place like this home. I had my own restaurant in Santa Ana for two years. Pesco’s. I had a decent apartment on Bristol, not far from your headquarters. I had a girlfriend and she had a daughter. We all got along just fine. But I hit the needle and shot up all the money and lost my girl and closed the place. Ann-Marie filed a complaint against me for molesting Analiese, got a restraining order but the DA didn’t file. Lack of evidence.”

Gale looks at Pesco in profile, just a cooler away, sizing up the man’s story. Guilty men rarely confess a crime, but child molestation is in a class of its own when it comes to denial.

Pesco seems to read Gale’s mind.

He turns and looks at the detective with clear, pale blue eyes. “I never touched the girl in any way like that. I really liked her. She told the cops that. It was a vengeance thing. I hit the streets in Tucson, then came back to Santa Ana, then came here. I honestly for the life of me don’t know what’s next.”

Gale’s bullshit monitor sounds only a soft alarm. He’s somewhat trusting — for a cop. And in his twenty years since choosing that path, he’s only been wrong a few times.

“Any convictions?”

“Drunk in public is all. I was always real careful with the H. And lucky.”

Pesco takes a long draw of beer. “I kind of like it here.”

“What color was the Suburban?” asks Gale.

“Midnight blue. I had to see that interior so I used the flashlight. Jet-black leather, perforated. So good looking. Didn’t check out the van because it was old.”

“Did you try to open the Suburban door?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Look at the plates?”

“No, I didn’t. The van’s neither.”

“Did you hear or see the men out there on the trail ahead of you?”

“No,” says Pesco. “It was dark and that trail splits and splits again. Goes forever. What did you think when it turned out the mountain lion didn’t kill the guy?”

Gale thinks about this. “I was happy we didn’t have to shoot him.”

“What if it gets a taste for humans?”

“Well, Mr. Pesco, that could be a real problem.”

“Bears can.”

“I’ve heard it said.”

Gale watches Mendez approaching, checking her phone while she walks, then sliding it back into her rear pocket. She looks at him, her hard face without expression, palms up as if she’s had enough of this place.