Storm Runners
Jefferson Parker

For those who bring the water

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

PART I Marching Bands and Arabian Nights

1

2

3

4

5

6

PART II The Heart of the X

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

PART III Water and Power

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

PART IV Pistoleros

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Jefferson Parker

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART I Marching Bands and Arabian Nights

1

Stromsoe was in high school when he met the boy who would someday murder his wife and son. The boy’s name was Mike Tavarez. Tavarez was shy and curly-haired and he stared as Stromsoe lay the mace on the cafeteria table. A mace is a stylized baton brandished by a drum major, which is what Matt Stromsoe had decided to become. Tavarez held his rented clarinet, which he hoped to play in the same marching band that Stromsoe hoped to lead, and which had prompted this conversation.

‘Sweet,’ said Tavarez. He had a dimple and fawn eyes. He could play all of the woodwinds, cornet and sax, and pretty much any percussion instrument. He had joined the marching band to meet girls. He was impressed by Stromsoe’s bold decision to try out for drum major now, in only his freshman year. But this was 1980 in Southern California, where drum majoring had long ago slipped down the list of high school cool.

A little crowd of students had stopped to look at the mace. It was not quite five feet long, blackhandled, with a chrome chain winding down its length. At one end was an eagle ornament and at the other a black rubber tip.

‘How much did it cost?’ asked Tavarez.

‘Ninety-nine dollars,’ said Stromsoe. ‘It’s the All American model, the best one they had.’

‘Waste of money,’ said a football player.

‘May I help you?’ asked Stromsoe, regarding him with a level gaze. Though he was only a freshman and a drum major hopeful, Stromsoe was big at fourteen and there was something incontrovertible about him. He had expressive blue eyes and a chubby, rosy-cheeked face that looked as if he would soon outgrow it.

‘Whatever,’ said the football player.

‘Then move along.’

Tavarez looked from the athlete to the drum-major-in-making. The football player shrugged and shuffled off, a red-and-leather Santa Ana Saints varsity jacket over baggy sweatpants, and outsize athletic shoes with the laces gone. Tavarez thought the guy might take Stromsoe in a fight, but he had also seen Stromsoe’s look - what the boys in Delhi F Troop called ojos de piedros - eyes of stone. Delhi F Troop turf included the Tavarez family’s small stucco home on Flora Street, and though Tavarez avoided the gangs, he liked their solidarity and colorful language. Tavarez figured that the football player must have seen the look too.

That Saturday Matt Stromsoe won the drum major tryouts. He was the only candidate. But his natural sense of rhythm was good and his summer months of solitary practice paid off. He had been accepted for summer clinics at the venerable Smith Walbridge Drum Major Camp in Illinois, but had not been able to come up with the money. His parents had thought it all would pass.

On Friday, one day before Stromsoe won the job of drum major, Mike Tavarez nailed the third b-flat clarinet spot, easily outplaying the other chairs and doing his best to seem humble for the band instructor and other musicians. He played his pieces then spent most of the day quietly loitering around the music rooms, smiling at the female musicians but failing to catch an eye. He was slender and angelic but showed no force of personality.

Stromsoe watched those Friday tryouts, noting the cool satisfaction on Tavarez’s face as he played an animated version of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ The song was a Santa Ana High School staple. By the time Stromsoe retired his mace four years later he had heard the song, blaring behind him as he led the march, well over five hundred times.

He always liked the reckless joy of it. When his band was playing it aggressively it sounded like the whole happy melody was about to blow into chaos. Marching across the emerald grass of Santa Ana stadium on a warm fall night, his shako hat down low over his eyes and his eagle-headed All American mace flashing in the bright lights, Stromsoe had sometimes imagined the notes of the song bursting like fireworks into the night behind him.

The song was running through his mind twenty-one years later when the bomb went off.

2

Days after the blast he briefly wavered up from unconsciousness at the UC Irvine Medical Center, sensing that he had lost everything. Later - time was impossible to mark or estimate - he fought his way awake again and registered the lights and tubes and the grim faces of people above him, then folded into the welcome darkness one more time.

When he was slightly stronger he was told by his brother that his wife and son were dead, killed by the same blast that had landed him here almost three weeks ago. It looked like we would lose you, said his mother. He could barely understand them because his eardrums had ruptured and now roared. A doctor assured him that a membrane graft would help.

Stromsoe lost his left eye, the little finger of his left hand, most of his left breast, and had sixty-four tacks removed, mostly from the left side of his body. The bomb makers had used three-quarter-inch wood tacks for close-range destruction. His torso and legs were a dense constellation of wounds. His left femur, tibia, and fibula had been shattered. Just as the bomb went off, Stromsoe had turned to his right, away from the blast, so his left side - and Hallie and Billy, who were two steps ahead of him - bore the fury.

A doctor called him ‘beyond lucky to be alive.’ His mother cried rivers. One day his father stared down at him with eyes like campfires smoldering behind a waterfall. Later Stromsoe deduced that his dad’s eyes had been reflecting a red monitor indicator.

‘They got him,’ his father said. ‘El fucking Jefe Tavarez is now behind bars.’

Stromsoe managed a nod before the immensity of his loss washed over him again - Hallie whom he loved and Billy whom he adored both gone and gone forever. The tears would have poured from his eyes but the empty left socket was wet-packed with gauze and saline in preparation for a glass implant scheduled for later that week, and the right eyelid was scorched so badly that the tear duct had yet to reroute itself through the burned flesh.

A month later he was released with one functioning eye and a German-made cryolite glass one, a four-fingered left hand, a surgically reconstructed left breast, seven pins in his leg, sixty-four wounds where tacks had been removed, and two tympanic membrane grafts. He had lost ten pounds and most of his color.

He rode the wheelchair to the curbside, which was hospital release policy. His old friend Dan Birch pushed the chair while a covey of reporters asked Matt hopeful, respectful questions. He recognized some of them from the endless hours of television news he’d watched in the last month. Motor drives clattered and video cameras whirred.

‘How are you feeling, Deputy Stromsoe?’

‘Good to be on my feet again. Well, kind of on my feet.’

‘Do you feel vindicated that El Jefe Tavarez was arrested and charged so quickly?’

‘Sure.’

‘You finally got him,’ said Susan Doss of the Orange County Register.

‘That’s nice of you to say, Susan.’

He rolled along in the lambent April sunshine. Iceland poppies bloomed in the planters. His ears were ringing but he had never in his thirty-five years been more aware of the magnificence of nature’s colors.

‘Do you look forward to testifying against Tavarez?’

‘I look forward to justice.’

‘What’s next for Matt Stromsoe?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

When they reached the car Stromsoe shooed away Dan and his father, and got himself into Birch’s Mercedes without much difficulty. Stromsoe pulled the door shut and Susan Doss leaned in the open window. He flinched because his peripheral vision was bad, then flushed with embarrassment because Susan was a reporter - young and pretty and intelligent - not someone about to kill him.

‘You went to high school with him, didn’t you?’ she asked.

Stromsoe had kept his relationship to Mike Tavarez a private thing, but not a secret.

‘He played clarinet in my marching band.’

‘He and your wife were an item back then.’

‘That came a little later.’

‘Will you talk to me about it? All of it?’

She gave him a business card and asked him for his home and cell numbers. He gave her his home but not his cell.

‘I can’t pay you for the interview,’ she said. ‘But I’d appreciate it if you don’t talk to other media. You’ll have offers from TV - real dollars.’

‘I turned them down.’

She smiled. ‘I’ll call you this afternoon, after you’ve had time to settle in and get some rest. You’re going to need rest, Matt.’

‘Give me a few days.’

‘Absolutely.’

3

It took Stromsoe a full month to find the strength to talk to the reporter. At first he couldn’t say anything to anybody, could hardly order a combo at the drive-through window.

Two weeks after coming home he had scattered the ashes of his wife and son at sea, as Hallie had requested in a living will. The Neptune Society ship was filled with friends and family, and dipped and rolled noticeably in the big swells off of Newport while the minister spoke. Several people became sick. It was the worst two hours of Stromsoe’s life.

He continued to drink on top of the Vicodin, a little more each night. He thought about the big sleep, saw some advantages to it. He thought about a lot of things he’d never thought about before.

Among them was the idea that the only way to save his sanity was to tell the story of his wife and son, staying his execution like Scheherazade.

‘We got to be friends our freshman year,’ he said to Susan.

They faced each other at a picnic table in the small courtyard of his Newport Beach home. Susan’s tape recorder sat between them, next to a cobalt-blue vase filled with cut wildflowers. She also had a pen and notebook.

Across the courtyard from where he now sat, Stromsoe’s garage was still under reconstruction. His parents had begun the project weeks ago as a way of doing something optimistic but there had been some trouble with the original contractor. Around the partially rebuilt garage, trampled yellow crime scene tape had been replaced by very similar construction site tape. The muffled blasts of a nail gun popped intermittently in the cool afternoon.

The bomb had taken out one wall of the garage, blown a big hole in the roof, and shredded the bodies of two cars with thousands of tacks. What it had done to Hallie and Billy was unimaginable, but sometimes, against his will, Stromsoe did imagine it. Billy was ten. Stromsoe hadn’t gone into the garage since that day. He was afraid he’d find something.

Stromsoe inwardly shivered at the sound of the nails going into the drywall. None of the reconstruction men had ever spoken to him or looked him directly in the eye. They were all Mexican, and familiar with the presence of the dead.

Use your words, he thought: tell the story and save your self.

‘The marching band wasn’t a very hip thing back then,’ he said. ‘It was us and them. But I liked us and them. That made it easy for me to become a cop. Anyway, the band members made friends pretty easy. One night some of the football players bombed our practice with rocks. We were under the lights, marching and playing, and these goofballs stood off behind the chain-link fence in the dark and let the rocks fly. A dumb thing to do. We didn’t know what was going on at first - just a bunch of yelling and screaming about what fags we were. But then Kristy Waters sat down on the grass and covered her face and the blood was coming out from between her fingers. Kristy was first flute, a real sweetie, her dad ran a tire shop on First. I jumped the fence and caught up with a couple of those guys. I messed them up fairly well. I wasn’t the type to get angry but I got very angry then. It seemed wrong that they’d thrown a rock into Kristy’s face because she played the flute in the marching band. Three of my musicians stuck with me - he was one of them.’

‘Mike Tavarez?’

Stromsoe nodded and touched the vase. He looked at his four-fingered hand then slid it casually beneath the bench.

‘Yes. It surprised me because he was small and quiet. But he fought like a demon. It said something about him. Anyway, he was a good musician and nice kid, a real wiseass when you got to know him. So we became friends. That seems like a hundred years ago, you know? Part of another world, or someone else’s past.’

‘I can only imagine what you’re going through, Matt.’

Stromsoe met her gaze and looked away. She had arrived today with the wildflowers in the vase, and a bag of fancy cheeses, salami, and crackers from an overpriced market nearby.

For relief he looked at his house. It was an older home on the Newport peninsula, on Fifty-second Street, two blocks in from the ocean. It was white. There was a fence around it and you could hear the waves. It was a nice little place, yet in the month that Stromsoe had been home from the hospital, he had come to hate it because it seemed complicit in what had happened.

But he loved it too - it had been their oftenhappy home - and the power of the two emotions made him feel paralyzed.

He thought about selling the place, fully furnished and as is, and moving away. He thought of selling the place but renting storage space for Hallie’s and Billy’s things, so he could visit them when he wanted to. He thought of just staying here andliving in it as it was. He thought of burning it down and never coming back, and of burning it down with himself in it. The idea of never seeing his son’s stuffed bears again broke his heart a little more, and the idea of seeing them every day broke it again in a different place.

He took off his sunglasses and noted again the odd sensation of breeze cooling his good eye while his prosthetic eye felt nothing at all.

‘How long did your friendship with Mike last?’ asked Susan.

‘Four years. It was a good friendship. We disagreed about a lot of things and argued about everything. But always the big stuff - does God care or does God laugh at us? Is there heaven and hell, do we determine our lives or is there a divine or a satanic plan?’

‘I had a friend like that too,’ said Susan. ‘Funny how we talk about those things when we’re young, then stop talking about them when we get older.’

Stromsoe thought back to the endless games of eight ball on the slouching table in Mike’s garage. The talk, the competition. Two boys looking for a way to face the world.

‘We both went nuts for Hallie Jaynes when she transferred in but we were good friends by then. We figured she was out of our reach. That was our sophomore year. She was pretty and smart. Stayed above things, had an edge. Unafraid. Unfazable. Always said what she thought - called Mike and me the marching gland. Sarcastic twinkle in her eyes. Nice face, curly blond hair, pretty legs. Our senior year, I finally got her to go steady. I knew her heart wasn’t in it, but I was flattered that she’d do it for me. We didn’t want to leave Mike out, so the three of us did a lot of things together. The summer after we graduated, Hallie took up with him.’

Sometimes, as he remembered something good about his wife, terrible visions rushed in and destroyed his pleasant memories. How could he keep Hallie in his heart with these hideous pictures attached?

He cleared his throat and focused his attention on a hummingbird.

Talk on, he thought. Tell the story, shed the skin.

‘That must have hurt,’ said Susan.

‘Sure. But I was busy. I was getting ready to go to Cal State Fullerton. I was set to study prelaw because I wanted to be a cop. He was on his way to Harvard on scholarship because his grades were high and he was a great musician. He made the news - barrio kid bound for Harvard, all that.’

‘Did you see it coming, Hallie and Mike?’

Stromsoe nodded. ‘I wasn’t totally surprised. Hallie always liked the hidden side of things and he had secrets. One of them was that at the same time he took up with Hallie, he was taking up with the Delhi F Troop. He hinted what he was doing. She dug it at first - the secrecy, the whiff of violence.’

‘Unafraid and unfazable.’

‘The minute that game started, she was out of her league.’

Susan finished writing and looked at him. ‘You don’t like to say his name, do you?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Does it bother you when I say it?’

‘That’s okay.’

‘I’ll get you another beer if you’d like.’

A minute later she was back with a cold bottle, then she set out the cheese, meat, and crackers on a plate that she had found in his kitchen. Stromsoe was annoyed that this reporter would commandeer a dish last touched by Hallie.

‘When did Mike join Delhi F Troop?’

‘They jumped him in that summer.’

‘Jumped him in?’

‘They’d beat the shit out of you to see if you fight back. If you fight back, they give you a heavy job to do - an armed robbery, a retribution, maybe a killing. Once you do it, you’re in. Usually, the kid is thirteen or fourteen. He was old. But they wanted him because he was smart. His parents tried to keep him away from the gangsters. They had him attend Santa Ana High instead of Valley, because Valley had the gangs. But Flora Street was Delhi turf, so he was surrounded by them anyway.’

‘What did he do to get in?’

‘He held up three stores at gunpoint down in San Diego, where the Ten Logan 30s would get the blame. He did a good job, got some old plates for his car, cased the stores, waited until the end of the night. He hit the mom-and-pop places that didn’t have fancy safes. He dressed preppie for the jobs, never banger, so it was a big surprise when the gun came out from under his sport coat. He got eleven hundred bucks, something like that. Turned half of it over to his homies, and he was in.’

‘They let him keep half?’

Stromsoe nodded. ‘He was supposed to give them all of it but he learned early to pay himself first.’

Susan wrote quickly. ‘Did Hallie go east with him when school started?’

‘No. But he came back to Santa Ana often while he was a Harvard student.’

‘To run with the Delhi F Troop and rob liquor stores,’ said Susan.

‘And to be with Hallie.’

Stromsoe sipped the beer. He allowed himself a memory, one that seemed useful: after Hallie had taken up with Tavarez, Stromsoe understood that she would come back to him someday. He didn’t know when or why, only that she would.

Susan frowned, tapped her pen on her notepad. ‘How did Mike Tavarez go from being a clarinet player to an armed robber? And so quickly? Why?’

Stromsoe had given these questions more than a little thought over the last fourteen years, since he’d learned that Mike Tavarez had pulled off a string of nine armed robberies in Southern California while posting a 3.0 GPA as a Harvard undergrad.

‘The robberies were a rush for him,’ said Stromsoe. ‘He told me that in jail. He said they were better than coke or meth or Hallie, or any combination thereof.’

Susan nodded. ‘But he was giving up his future.’

‘He thought he was making his future. He hated Harvard. He felt dissed and out of place. He told me he just wanted to be a homie. Not a poster boy for Equal Opportunity. Not a newspaper feature about the poor kid in the Ivy League. He felt like a traitor to la raza, being singled out for all that praise and promise.’

He didn’t tell her that Hallie liked it when Mike came back from those robberies, jacked on adrenaline. She didn’t know exactly what he was doing out there, but the mystery turned her on. Hallie told him so. And Mike had told him how much he enjoyed fooling her. A binding secret.

‘What did he do with the money?’

‘He told the court that he’d robbed to help his mother and father. But he didn’t - he bought stocks and did well for himself. Most of that money he lost under asset forfeiture laws. His attorney got the rest. That was the last time he did anything traceable with cash. Anyway, the judge hit him pretty hard. Mike got ten, did a nickel, and walked in ‘93. By the time he left prison, Mike Tavarez wasn’t a Delhi street hood anymore. He was La Eme.’

‘The Mexican Mafia. The most powerful prison gang in the country.’

‘They made the Delhi F Troop look like Campfire Girls.’

‘And by the time he got out, you were married to Hallie.’

‘Yes,’ Stromsoe heard himself say. ‘Billy was one and a half. It took us a long time to have him. Hallie had a hard time getting pregnant after what he did to her.’

‘Tell me about that,’ said Susan Doss.

‘I can’t,’ said Stromsoe. Exhaustion closed over him like a drawn blind. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe later.’

‘Tomorrow? Same time. I’ll bring lunch, how’s that?’

4

That evening, Dan Birch, Stromsoe’s good friend and former narco partner, arrived unannounced. It was the third time he’d come to the house on Fifty-second Street since Stromsoe had been released from UCI Medical Center. Birch and his wife and children had been guests here for the better part of twelve years. Birch now stood in the kitchen and surveyed Stromsoe with his usual heavybrowed glower.

‘You look bad,’ he said.

‘I feel bad sometimes,’ said Stromsoe.

‘What can I do?’

‘There’s nothing, Dan.’

‘I can put you to work when you’re ready.’

Stromsoe nodded and tried to smile. ‘A one-eyed security guard?’

Four years ago Birch had quit the Sheriff’s Department and started his own security company. Thanks to an engaging personality and some family connections to Irvine high-tech companies, his Birch Security Solutions had billed $1.15 million in its first year, and tripled that number since. They did some of everything: residential and industrial security, patent and copyright protection, patrol, installations, and private investigations.

Birch chuckled. ‘I can do better than that, Matt.’

‘Divorce work?’

‘We’ve got some interesting industrial espionage going down in Irvine. And some jerk-off at the med school selling cadaver parts, but the university can’t afford the scandal of busting him. We’re going to…dissuade him from further business.’

‘No cadaver parts, Dan.’

‘I understand. I shouldn’t have said that. What can I do to help? I’m trying here.’

‘Let me make you a drink. It’s only the Von’s brand. I’m trying to reduce my dependence on foreign vodka.’

They drank late into the night, Stromsoe outpacing his friend roughly two to one. He laid off the painkiller as long as he could but by midnight the pins in his legs were killing him so he took more pills.

‘One for the road?’ he asked Birch.

‘No.’

Birch came over and knelt next to Stromsoe. ‘I didn’t know it was this bad.’

‘It’s temporary. Don’t worry.’

‘I’m so fucking sorry, Matt.’

‘I’ll get there,’ he said, wherever there was.

‘Tavarez is an animal,’ said Birch. ‘And Ofelia’s death wasn’t our fault.’

‘No,’ said Stromsoe. ‘Not our fault at all.’

A long silence lowered over them during which Stromsoe did not hear the waves breaking nearby. ‘Is there any way to get to him?’ he asked.

Birch’s eyes tracked behind his heavy brows. ‘Mike? In Orange County Jail? You might be able to bring some annoyance his way - get his privileges and exercise time cut back. You’d need to get a deputy or two on your side.’

‘I had something more substantial in mind.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Five minutes alone with him.’

Birch stood, shaking his head. ‘The visitation setup is all wrong for that. Besides, the only one who can grant you a visit is Tavarez.’

Stromsoe thought about five minutes with El Jefe.

‘Forget it, Matt. You kill him, you may as well just move right into his cell, put on his jumpsuit.’

When Birch had gone Stromsoe limped through the house with a big vodka in hand. He walked with his head down, focusing on the ice in his drink, and when he came into a room he lifted his head and looked around but then would have to close his eyes against the memories. Every cubic inch of space. Every object. Every molecule of every object, tied to Hallie and Billy. Their things. Their lives. Their life. It was impossible to endure.

He stood swaying in the courtyard for a moment, watching the sliver of moon slip down then rise back into place over and over.

His cell phone pulsed against his hip and Stromsoe slid it off, dropped it, and then knelt and picked it up.

‘The bomb was for you,’ said Tavarez. ‘God put them there for reasons we don’t understand.’

‘You blew up a woman and a little boy.’

‘But you made it possible.’

‘You’ll burn in hell for what you did.’

‘Hell would be better than this,’ said Tavarez. ‘Now you understand how bad it is, don’t you? Living without the ones you love?’

‘If they ever let you out, I’ll find and kill you,’ said Stromsoe.

‘Life can be worse than death,’ said Tavarez. ‘So I’m going to let you live. Live first in the smell of their blood. Then live without them, month after month and year after year. Until you begin to forget them, until your memory is weak and uncertain. Because you know, Matt, wives and lovers and even children can be forgotten. They must be forgotten. But an enemy can live in your heart forever. The more spectacular his crime against you, the more durable your enemy becomes in your heart. Hate is stronger than love. I tried to kill you but I’m much happier that I didn’t. Tell me, are you blinded by fury?’

‘Inspired by it.’

‘Pray to your God for vengeance, to the one who ignores you. And welcome to prison. The bars here keep me from freedom. The bars around your heart will do the same to you.’

With a dry little chuckle, Tavarez clicked off.

Stromsoe hurled his drink against the side of his house. He turned and lurched toward the garage. He pushed through the construction site tape, got tangled and kicked his way out as his legs burned with pain. He pulled open the garage door and flipped on the light.

Here it was, his personal Ground Zero, the heart of his loss.

He forced himself to stand where they had been standing. The concrete floor was thick with drywall dust and he swept aside some of it with his foot. The floor had been bleached. He looked at the wall in front of him – new drywall. And the wall to his left – new drywall too. He looked up at the new framing that was being roofed with new plywood and new paper and new mastic and new tiles. He didn’t see a drop of what he was dreading to find. Not one tiny trace. New was good.

He walked slowly around the Ford to the far corner of the garage. Here were some cabinets he had built many years ago. The bottom cabinet was long and deep and fitted with duckboards. The slats were now stained from years of two-cycle oil spills and gas-can seepages, leaking weed eaters and blowers and chain saws.

Stromsoe bent over and rocked the red plastic gas can. It sloshed, heavy with fuel. He hefted it out, twisted open the cap, and pulled out the retractable spigot. The fumes found his nose.

The smell of escape, he thought.

He backed the Taurus into the driveway, set the brake, and killed the engine. Back in the garage he poured gasoline where Hallie and Billy had last breathed, then across the cement floor, out the door and across the bricks of the little courtyard to the back porch, then through the slider and into the dining room, kitchen, living room, the bedrooms.

He set the can down by the front door, got a plastic bag from under the sink, and slid most of Hallie’s jewelry into it. He found a pack of matches in the coins-and-keys drawer of his dresser. Then, in Billy’s room, he added three of his son’s favorite stuffed bears to the bag.

He went back to the front door, opened it, and continued his gas trail outside to the porch. The door he left ajar. Dropping the gas can and the plastic bag to the porch boards, Stromsoe then fished the matches out of his pocket. The moths and mosquito hawks flapped against the porch lights and the waves swooshed to shore in the dark.

He sat down to think it over.

With his back to the door frame he brought up his knees and rested his face on his forearms.

The nail wounds in his body flared like struck matches. His ears rang. He could feel his glass eye moving against the skin of his arm, but the eye itself felt nothing. The matchbook fell from his hand. He asked God what to do and got no answer. He asked Hallie and Billy what to do and they told him not this – it was dangerous and stupid and wouldn’t help. Hallie’s argument that he couldn’t let his son be without a home made sense to him.

Stromsoe got up and went back inside and fell asleep on the living-room couch with the gas fumes strong around him and the waves breaking in the black middle distance.

He opened some windows before he crashed, a precaution that brought to him both cool night air and a sense of cowardice and shame.

The next morning he woke up with a tremendous hangover, for which he used hair of the dog and more Vicodin. After a shower and shave he dressed in pressed trousers and a crisp plaid shirt and called the neighborhood office of a national realty company.

Twenty minutes later a Realtor showed up, and by 11 A.M. Stromsoe had listed his home for sale. He offered the place furnished and as is. The Realtor’s suggested asking price was so high he could hardly believe it. The Realtor smiled fearfully as they shook hands out by his car. He said he’d sell the place within the week, though an escrow period would follow.

‘I’m sorry for what happened,’ he said. ‘Maybe a new home can be a new life.’

5

By noon Stromsoe and Susan were back in his courtyard, sitting on the picnic benches again. She’d brought a new cassette for the tape recorder and a handful of fresh wildflowers for the vase.

‘When I saw Hallie again it was ‘86,’ said Stromsoe. ‘We were twenty years old.’

Mike’s phone call the night before had convinced Stromsoe that he had to tell what Tavarez had done to Hallie, and how she had survived it. Tavarez could take her life but he couldn’t take her story. Or Billy’s. And El Jefe could not make Stromsoe kill himself, or diminish his memories, or make him burn down his house. Tavarez could not break his spirit.

‘I was at Cal State Fullerton. I was taking extra units, and judo at night, and lifting weights – anything to not think about her. Them.’

His words came fast now, Stromsoe feeling the momentum of doing the right thing.

‘Every once in a while I’d read about Tavarez in the papers – they loved the barrio-kid-conquers-Harvard story – and I’d think about her more. Then one night I just ran into them in a Laguna nightclub, the old Star. She was wearing a gold lamé dress with white and black beads worked into the brocade. Tight, cut low and backless, slit up the side. It was very beautiful. And her hair was done up kind of wild, and dyed lighter than it used to be. She came running over and wrapped her arms around me. I remember that she was wearing Opium perfume. I looked past her at Mike, who was watching us from a booth. He looked pleased. She pulled me over there and he invited me to sit with them but I didn’t.’

Stromsoe remembered how the strobe lights had beveled Hallie Jaynes’s lovely face into something exotic and unknowable.

It was so easy to see her now:

‘You look good,’ she had told him.

‘You do too.’

‘We miss you.’

We.

‘You’re the one who left.’

‘Oh, Matty, you’re much better off without us,’ she said with a bright smile. ‘Mike doesn’t know how to apologize. He doesn’t know what to say. I wish we could laugh again, you and me.’

She looked both radiant and famished. It was an appearance he would see a lot of in his generation as the decade wore on. Looking at her for the first time in almost two years, he realized that she had moved past him in ways that until now he hadn’t known existed.

‘She was different,’ Stromsoe said to Susan Doss. ‘So was Mike.’

He told Susan how Mike had gotten taller and filled out, grown his wavy black hair longer, wore a loose silk suit like the TV vice cops wore. His face had changed too, not just in breadth but in a new confidence. His sense of superiority was the first thing you saw – the quarter smile, the slow eyes, the lift of chin. He looked like an angel about to change sides.

‘They were there with three other couples,’ said Stromsoe. ‘The dudes were older than us by a notch or two – early thirties, good-looking, Latino, dressed expensive. Versace and Rolex. The women were all twentysomething knockout gringas – extra blond. I was there with some friends from school and we ended up sitting across the dance floor from Hallie and them. I could hardly take my eyes off her. You know how it is, that first love.’

‘Sure,’ said Susan. ‘Richie Alexander. I wrote poetry about him. But I won’t quote it for you, so don’t ask.’

Stromsoe smiled and nodded. Susan had freckles on her cheeks and a funny way of holding her pen, with her middle finger doing most of the work. Atop the garage, the crew commenced nailing the plywood to the roof frame and Stromsoe felt his nerves flicker.

He told Susan that on the drive home to his Fullerton apartment that night, he had lost his old faith that Hallie would come back to him someday. It was obvious to him that she and Tavarez were knocking on the door of a world in which Stromsoe had no interest. He had seen enough cocaine use at his high school and in his extended college circle to know the large sums of money attached. He had seen the white powder do ugly things to almost everyone he knew who used it. It made them pale and inward. Everything they did was for the high.

He didn’t tell Susan that when he had imagined Hallie becoming like that – an inversion of everything about her that he loved and lusted for – his heart had hardened against her. But it had broken a little too.

Stromsoe believed back then that people soon got what they deserved.

Now he did not.

Now, sixteen years later, Stromsoe understood that Hallie had become everything he had feared, and that Mike Tavarez had gotten much more good fortune than he had ever deserved.

Tavarez had demonstrated that coke was venom to body and soul, and that anyone who ignores this fact can make many, many millions of good Yankee dollars.

Hallie had demonstrated how right Mike was. She was his first customer.

When they finished the lunch Susan pushed the paper plates away to make room for her notebook. She had brought the plates with her today, and Stromsoe wondered if she had sensed his anger yesterday over Hallie’s dish.

‘I didn’t see her again until the night I graduated from college,’ said Stromsoe. ‘That was June of ‘88. After the ceremony a bunch of us went to the Charthouse here in Newport. We took up two long tables on the far side. Steak and lobster. Cocktails and wine. We blew enough money that night to live on for a semester. Hallie came in around midnight. I saw her spot me and I watched her come through the tables toward us.’

Sitting in his courtyard now, Stromsoe could as good as see her. She was smiling at him but he could tell something was wrong. She walked carefully. She had lost weight. She wore a pink trench coat over a black-and-pink floral-print dress. Her hair was up and her earrings dangled and flashed.

Up close he saw that her face was clammy, with sweat beads at her hairline, that her pupils were big, and behind her pretty red lips her gums were pale.

‘Congratulations,’ she had said, then hugged him. ‘I’m back at Mom’s and Dad’s after a little tiff with Mike. I saw your announcement in their mail pile. Not raining on your parade, am I, Matt?’

‘Not at all,’ he’d said.

She touched his face. ‘I miss you.’

Stromsoe got her seated and ordered her a soda water but Hallie told the waiter to make it a Bombay martini, rocks with a twist. She drank three of them in short order. He introduced her to his friends. The guys smiled and glanced knowingly at Stromsoe when they thought Hallie wasn’t looking. The women were actively disinterested in her. She made several trips to the ladies’ room.

Hallie ordered a double at last call, took one sip, then collapsed to the floor.

Stromsoe carried her back to the restaurant manager’s office while one of his friends called paramedics. She was conscious but stupefied, trying to focus on Stromsoe as he lowered her to a couch and wrapped a blanket around her. Her eyes were swimming and her teeth chattered.

‘Ohhh,’ she whispered, closing her eyes.

He smartly smacked her cheek. ‘Stay awake, Hallie. Look at me and stay awake.’

She was half awake when the paramedics got there and took her away. Stromsoe followed them to Hoag Hospital in his old Mazda, called her parents from the waiting room. His hands were shaking with anger at Mike while he talked to Hallie’s mom.

It took the doctors two hours to stabilize her. Inside Hallie boiled a witch’s brew of Colombian cocaine, Mexican brown heroin, Riverside County methamphetamine, Pfizer synthetic morphine, and Bombay gin.

‘She was okay,’ said Stromsoe. ‘Too much dope.

Too much booze. It wasn’t until later that I saw the really bad stuff.’

Susan looked up from her notepad.

The day after Hallie had gone to the hospital Stromsoe had gotten a call from Sergeant Rich Neal of the Newport Beach police. Neal told Stromsoe to meet him outside Hallie’s room at Hoag at 2 P.M. sharp.

Neal came from her room and shut the door behind him. He was stout and florid and asked Stromsoe what he knew about Hallie’s drug problem. Stromsoe told him what had happened at the Charthouse. Neal asked about Mike Tavarez and Stromsoe confirmed that he knew him, and that Mike and Hallie were a couple.

‘The parents think he supplied her with the drugs,’ said Neal. ‘They think he did that work on her body. She says no. What do you think?’

‘He probably gave her the drugs. I don’t know what bodywork you’re talking about.’

‘Ask her about it,’ said Neal. ‘Where is he? Where’s Tavarez right now?’

‘I have no idea.’

Neal asked Stromsoe about other friends of Hallie’s, other boyfriends in particular. He asked if Stromsoe had met Mike Tavarez’s parents and the answer was yes, Rolando and Reina, he’d spent some time in their home back in high school, eaten dinner with them on rehearsal nights, and sometimes he and Mike would just hang out there on weekends, shooting pool and drinking sodas, maybe ride their bikes or, when they got older, go for a drive. Stromsoe had always liked quiet Rolando and large, expansive Reina.

He asked if Stromsoe had given Hallie any of the drugs she had ingested last night and Stromsoe told him just the last few drinks.

Neal gave Stromsoe a card and an unhappy stare, then walked away.

‘So I went into the hospital room,’ he told Susan. ‘Hallie was sitting up. She had some color back but her eyes were flat and her face was haggard. I held her hand for a minute and we didn’t say much. Then I asked about her body and she told me to give her some privacy. I faced the door and heard her rustling around. When she said okay, try to control your excitement, I turned back and she had rolled the hospital smock just to her breasts, and pulled the sheet to just below her belly. Her torso was pretty much one big black-and-purple bruise, with a few little clouds of tan showing through.’

Stromsoe now remembered the bend of Hallie’s ribs under the livid skin. He remembered the pert Muzak version of ‘Penny Lane’ that was playing while he stared at her. Susan Doss looked up from her notepad.

‘She’d gotten an abortion a month earlier,’ said Stromsoe. ‘She told him it was her body, her decision, that she was a druggie and not ready to be a mother. There was no discussion. Hallie was that way. She said Mike went quiet, didn’t talk for days, didn’t even look at her. One night they went to a club and Hallie drank some, got talking to a guy. For the next couple of days, Mike drank and did blow, and the more loaded Mike got, the more he accused her of having a thing with this guy while he was away at school. She’d never seen him before in her life. Just when Mike seemed to be calming down a little, he and some of the guys drove her out to the middle of nowhere and the men held her while Mike hit her. And hit her some more. She passed out from the pain. They left her by the side of the Ortega Highway in the middle of the night. Mike flew back to Boston the next morning.’

‘My God.’

Talk on, thought Stromsoe. Tell how Hallie handled that pain. Words, don’t fail me now.

‘She hitchhiked to the nearest house, called a friend to pick her up. Stayed in bed for three days at her Lido apartment, medicated herself with antibiotics, dope, and liquor. She forced herself to make an appearance back home for her parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary, saw my graduation announcement, called my folks, and found out where the party was. By the time the doctors saw her, she was bleeding inside, infected, poisoned by the dope. Three of her ribs were broken and there were internal injuries to her spleen and ovaries. They took one ovary and said she’d probably never conceive. Three years later she had Billy.’

‘What did she tell the cops?’

‘That she picked up the wrong guy one night. They knew she was protecting Mike but they couldn’t crack her. Hallie was tough inside.’

‘Why cover for him?’

‘The beating was five days old, so she knew it would be hard to make a case against four friends with their alibis lined up. And pride too – Hallie thought it was a victory not to go to the law. She also realized he might kill her. The cops busted him from a liquor-store videotape a week after Hallie left the hospital. So, she thought Mike would get at least a partial punishment for what he did to her. Big news, when the Harvard boy was popped for a string of armed robberies in California.’

‘I remember.’

He closed his eyes and could see Hallie as she was in high school, and again as she was on the day they were married, and then as she lay in the maternity ward with tiny William Jaynes Stromsoe in her arms.

But again, as had happened so many times in the last two months, his mind betrayed him with a vision of the nails and his wife and son.

He watched a neighbor’s cat licking its rear foot in a patch of sunlight on the courtyard bricks.

His felt his heart laboring and he admitted to himself that telling this story was far more difficult than he had thought it would be. Where he had hoped to find some moments of fond memory, he found the awful truth instead. The truth he thought would set him free.

Then Stromsoe admitted another truth to himself – he was feeling worse each day, feeling farther from shore. It was like swimming against a tide. Wasn’t he supposed to get closer?

He was astonished again, almost to the point of disbelief, that he would never see Hallie or Billy as they were, only as they had ended.

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

‘Maybe we should take a walk on the beach while we talk,’ said Susan.

6

They came to the ocean at Fifty-second Street and turned south. The sun was caught in the clouds above Catalina Island like an orange suspended in gauze. The stiff breeze dried Stromsoe’s left eyelid and the pins in his legs felt creaky as old door hinges. The skin graft on his left breast tended to tighten in the cool evenings. He pulled up his coat collar and slipped on his sunglasses.

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

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

‘Okay.’

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

‘Okay,’ he said.

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

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

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

Billy.

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

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

‘Just me.’

‘Why does he hate you so much?’

‘I loved Hallie and spent my life trying to put him in a cage.’

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

‘You accomplished both,’ she said. ‘You won.’

Stromsoe said nothing.

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

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

‘It helped too.’

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

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

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

He looked at her, not knowing what to say.

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

He smiled.

‘And I only look clean-cut.’

‘I can’t.’

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

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

‘Hallie was the same way.’

‘You’re a beautiful man.’

‘You’re a beautiful woman but I can’t.’

‘I understand, Matt.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He slept in his bed for the last time.

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

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

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

‘What do you want?’

‘Forward motion.’

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

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

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

Two years later Stromsoe woke up to find Dan Birch hovering over him. A potful of cool water hit him in the face.

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

‘Of this?’

‘Get the fuck up. Then we can talk about it.’

PART II The Heart of the X

7

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

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

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

‘How are you feeling, Matt?’

‘Good.’

‘Drinking?’

‘Lightly.’

‘You idiot.’

‘It’s under control.’

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

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

‘No.’

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

Stromsoe nodded as Birch stared at him.

‘Up for this?’ asked Birch.

‘Yes, I am.’

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

‘I understand, Dan.’

‘The best control themselves.’

‘I can do that. I told you.’

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

‘They can’t help her until he assaults her.’

‘More or less.’

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

‘She’s tried to confront him?’

‘Confront him? Hell, she photographed him. Check these.’

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

‘Frances is not a fearful sort,’ said Birch.

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

‘That was taken on her Bonsall property,’ said Birch.

‘How big is the parcel?’ asked Stromsoe.

‘A hundred acres. Says she goes there to be alone.’

‘Where’s Bonsall?’

‘Next door to Fallbrook.’

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

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

‘I can handle it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hello, Mr. Stromsoe. I’m Frankie Hatfield.’

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

‘My pleasure, Ms. Hatfield.’

‘This is Ace.’

‘Hey, Ace.’ He looked up. ‘Nice butterflies.’

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

‘Are these your orchards?’

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

‘Good.’

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

‘Hope you don’t mind dogs,’ said Frankie.

‘I love dogs.’

‘Do you have any?’

‘Not right now.’

‘That’s Sadie.’

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

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

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

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

‘Kind of a shame, actually.’

‘I thought so.’

Stromsoe felt the faraway artillery thundering in his bones.

‘I have no idea who he is, or what he wants,’ said Frankie.

‘He does not seem threatening, although I take his presence on my property as a threat. I have no bad people in my past. I have skeletons but they’re good skeletons.’

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

She shook her head.

‘Brave of you to whip out the camera and start shooting,’ he said.

‘I lack good sense sometimes.’

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

Stromsoe held out the picture and pointed.

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

‘Is that where you go to be alone?’

‘Yes. I escape from me.’

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

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

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

‘GPS?’ She examined the gadget.

‘Yes. It’s always on.’

‘Can it differentiate between all the cities in the county?’

‘Any city in the United States, actually.’

‘Impressive.’

‘Not if you don’t have it with you.’

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

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

‘Do you have a gun?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you good with it?’

‘Yes. I used to be very good,’ he said.

‘Do you adjust for the monovision?’

‘Of course.’

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

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

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

‘Those short barrels make it tough,’ he said.

‘It makes lots of noise though. I feel better with it.’

‘You possibly are.’

‘It’s a very unpleasant feeling, being watched.’

‘Tell me about it.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘No more.’

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

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

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

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

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

8

By 4 P.M. Frankie’s video team had set up on a sidewalk overlooking Seal Rock Reserve in La Jolla. The big elephant seals lolled and roared in the cooling afternoon. The painted-lady butterflies filled the sky by the fluttering thousands. The ocean reminded Stromsoe of Newport, and Newport reminded him of Hallie and Billy, and for a moment Stromsoe was back in an earlier time when he and his wife and son could walk on a beach together. Now, two plus years after their deaths, his memories of them were less frequent but more distinct, and, somehow, more valuable.

Frankie – with a black windbreaker and her hair whipping in the breeze – held up her microphone and explained that the ridge of high pressure would continue through the week, gradually giving way to cooling and low clouds as the marine layer fought its way back onshore. However, a ‘substantial’ trough of low pressure was waiting out over the Pacific. She smiled enthusiastically and said that rain was possible by Sunday, something in the one-inch range, if the current jet-stream pattern held.

‘Now I remember what the farmers used to say about the rain when I was just a girl,’ she told the cameras. ‘Early in, late out. So if we do pick up some serious rain this early in October, we could be in for a long, wet season. Okay with me – we need it! Just be sure to keep your umbrellas handy and your firewood dry. I’m Frankie Hatfield, reporting from Seal Rock Reserve in La Jolla.’

Stromsoe watched almost everything except Frances Hatfield: the families and tourists out enjoying the fall day, the cars parked along Coast Boulevard, especially the single men who perked up when they spotted Frankie and the unmistakable Fox News van. A semicircle of onlookers formed as Frankie finished her report and Stromsoe spotted a dark-haired, dark-complected young man who stood and calmly stared at her. In that moment Stromsoe got a glimpse of what being a public figure was like, the way people assumed they had a right to stare at you. No wonder celebrities wore sunglasses. The young man backed away and continued his walk along the shore.

When Frankie was finished she took a few minutes to talk with the crowd and sign some autographs. She was half a head taller than most everyone. She knelt down to talk to a little girl. After the last fan walked off, she looked at Stromsoe, took a deep breath, then exhaled.

And that was when her secret admirer stepped out from behind the gnarled trunk of a big torrey pine, saw Stromsoe break toward him, then wheeled and sprinted for Coast Boulevard. Stromsoe saw that he looked a lot like his picture – young, dark-haired, and dark-skinned. He was square-shouldered and small, and he ran with rapid, short-legged strokes. He had what looked like a camera in his right hand.

Stromsoe was a big man and not fast. The pins in his legs caused a tightness that hadn’t gone away. A month of jogging and weights and rehab didn’t erase his poor condition after two years of boozing in Florida, and by the time he hit the sidewalk he saw, far down on Coast Boulevard, Frankie’s stalker slam the door on a gold sedan and a moment later steer into the southbound flow of traffic. But the traffic was dense and his truck was parked way up by the Fox van, so Stromsoe powered down the sidewalk as fast as his pinned legs would carry him and almost took out a mom and a stroller but he detoured onto the grass as the gold car stopped behind a blue van about to pass through a stop sign. Stromsoe saw that it would be close. He cut back to the sidewalk then into the street. He ran through a cloud of orange butterflies. The blue van started across the intersection with the gold car glued to its bumper and honking. Stromsoe raised his knees and clenched his fists and charged up near the car just as it screeched around the van in a blast of white smoke that left him blinded and lumbering out of the way of a monstrous black SUV driven by a young man looking down on him assessingly. Stromsoe hailed the young man in hopes of following the stalker but the driver flipped him off and stomped on it right through the stop sign.

Stromsoe stood on the grass, hands on his knees, panting as he watched the gold sedan sweep around a corner. He’d gotten the first four of the seven plate symbols: 4NIZ or 4NTZ. It was hard to get a fix on that license plate with his feet jarring on the asphalt and his one good eye trying for a decent look at the driver.

So, 4NIZ or 4NTZ. Fuck, there were a thousand combinations to check. He kicked a trash can and looked back toward the Fox van. Thirty-seven years old, he thought, and I can barely run two hundred yards.

Furthering his humiliation, Frankie Hatfield was already halfway toward him, loping across the grass while her video man shot away.

He squared his shoulders and tried not to limp as he walked to meet her.

Frankie was rattled but went on to do live reports from downtown La Jolla, Torrey Pines State Park, and UCSD. Stromsoe didn’t see the stalker or the gold sedan again.

Five lousy yards away, he thought. That close.

By nine that night he was following her brilliant red Mustang up the long driveway through the darkened avocado orchard in Fallbrook. Only a sliver of moonlight showed in the black sky.

She pulled into her garage, locked up her car, and came to his truck. He rolled down the window. He heard her dogs barking inside the house.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You gave our little friend something to think about.’

‘I’ll get him next time. Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘I’d feel better if you lived a minute away instead of an hour,’ said Frankie.

‘I’ll park down at the gate for an hour or two, if you’d feel better,’ said Stromsoe.

‘No. It’s okay. That’s not in the contract.’

Stromsoe killed his engine. She took another step toward the truck and crossed her arms.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘The sheriffs are tied to the panic button, and Birch got them to A-list you. The substation is only a couple of miles away.’

Stromsoe had intended this to be comforting but he knew she was calculating response time the same as he was. By the time the alarm came through, dispatch made the call, and the nearest prowl car blundered through miles of unlit country roads and found a home lost on ten acres of grove and orchard?

Who knew.

Stromsoe heard a car engine idling back in the orchard. Then the engine died. He looked at Frankie but she apparently hadn’t noticed it.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And good night.’

‘You’re going to be just fine, Frankie.’

It sounded lame and he wished he hadn’t said it.

‘I know I will.’

When she opened the door he saw the dogs bouncing around her. She looked back at him and he started up the truck.

Stromsoe drove back through the orchards, looking for the car that had been idling. He saw nothing.

When he finally got down to where the orchard ended at the main avenue, he parked and turned off the engine and waited, just to see if someone might start up the slope toward Frances Hatfield’s place.

Half an hour later he’d seen plenty of cars going up and down the avenue, and an opossum that barely made it in front of a tractor trailer with a gigantic bouquet of gladiolas painted on the rear doors, and three coyotes that trotted past the front of his truck with the harried concentration of young executives. The painted ladies billowed by.

But no cars on their way to Frankie’s house.

Five minutes later her flashy red Mustang nosed out from the black orchards, then roared onto the avenue.

Stromsoe brought the truck to life, checked his clearance, and barreled off after her.

True to her word, she drove fast. But it was easy for Stromsoe to see her in the light traffic, so he kept back behind a tractor trailer for a half a mile, then behind a truck very much like his own, then behind a new yellow Corvette.

She took Old Highway 395 south then headed west on Gopher Canyon. She was going toward Bonsall, he thought – her investment property? He glanced at his watch: almost eleven-thirty. Kind of late to be going somewhere to escape from yourself, wasn’t it?

She turned right and left and right again, longer and longer stretches of darkness between the turns, and Stromsoe followed as far back as he could with his headlights off.

The road turned to gravel, rising gently. Stromsoe eased his truck into the wake of Frankie’s dust and crept along in the pale red glow of his parking lights.

When he came over the top he could see down now, to where the Mustang had stopped in a gateway. He killed his parking lights and engine. He watched the driver’s-side door of the Mustang swing out and Frankie pull herself from the little cabin. Her two dogs spilled out behind her.

In the spray of her headlights Frankie lifted a thick chain off a post, then swung open a steelpipe gate. After the Mustang was through, she got out, called the dogs, swung the gate closed, and lifted the chain back into place. She got the dogs back into the car and rolled off.

Stromsoe gave her a few minutes then drove slowly to the gate. He made a U-turn and left his truck parked on the far side of the dirt road, facing out.

He took a small but strong flashlight from his glove box and locked up the truck. A sign on the gate said NO TRESPASSING – VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. He lifted the chain from the gatepost and let himself in.

He limped down the dirt road in the faint moonlight, climbed a rise, and stood now at the top of a hillock looking down on a wide, dark valley. He smelled water and grass and the butterscotch smell of willow trees.

A barn sat a hundred yards off the road. The red Mustang was parked beside it. Next to the Mustang was a white long-bed pickup truck. The barn door was closed but light inside came around the door to fall in faint slats on the ground. A window glowed faintly orange and Stromsoe thought he saw movement inside.

He stayed on the dark edge of the dirt road as he moved toward the barn. Above him the sky was pinpricked by stars and again he smelled water and grass. A horse neighed in the distance. He could hear the ticks and pops of the Mustang’s cooling engine as he approached the barn, crept slowly to the window, and looked in.

Frankie’s side was to him. Ace and Sadie lay on a red braided rug not far from their master. Frankie was standing at a wooden workbench fitted with a band saw, a circular saw, a drill press, and half a dozen vises. She wore jeans and boots again, and a pair of oversize safety goggles. She squared a length of two-by-four on the bench, hooked the end of a yellow tape measure over one end, took a pencil from her mouth, and marked it. Then she pressed the board forward into the circular saw and a brief shriek followed. The motor died and Stromsoe heard the clink of the board on the concrete floor.

Beyond Frankie’s workbench there was a similar bench, at which a white-whiskered old man drilled holes in lengths of two-by-four like the one Frankie had just sawn. He wore safety goggles too, but they were propped up on his head. A cigarette dangled from his mouth and a lazy plume of smoke rose toward the high rafters.

A tall wooden tower stood beside the old man’s bench, the same type that Stromsoe had noted in Frankie’s photograph of the stalker. It looked larger than the one in the picture. It was newly made. The redwood was still pink and Stromsoe could see the gleam of the new nuts and bolts and washers that held it together. The top was a plywood platform about the right size to hold a person, a fifty-five-gallon drum, or a couple of small trash cans. There was a one-foot-high railing around the edge of the platform, as if to keep something from tipping over or falling off. The tower rose up twenty feet high, at least. Beside it stood another tower that was only about one-third finished.

The old man carried two lengths of wood, joined at right angles, over to the tower in progress. He pulled a socket wrench from his back pocket and began bolting the boards to the tower.

The dogs looked up and the old man’s gaze started his way and Stromsoe moved away from the window.

From this point he could see the west wall of the barn. There were four long benches along it, similar to the workbenches at which Frankie and the old man worked. These were covered not with tools but with books and notebooks, beakers and burners, tubes and vials, canisters and bottles, boxes and bags, all overhung with a series of metal lamps hung by chains from the rafters. There were two refrigerators and a freezer along the far wall. There was a small kitchen area with four burners, an oven, and a sink. A fire extinguisher was fastened to every fifth post of the exposed interior frame. In the far corner was what looked like an office, separated from the main barn by a door that stood open.

Stromsoe thought of the meth labs he’d seen out in the Southern California desert not far from here. Riverside County was ground zero for the labs, but there were plenty in Los Angeles and San Diego and San Bernardino counties, too. Interesting, he thought – except that he was pretty sure Frances Hatfield and the old man weren’t cooking drugs.

He heard Frankie’s saw start up and eased his face back to the window. She pressed the board into the blade, then another. She worked with assurance, and no hurry.

The old man wrestled another set of bolted boards off his bench, walked them across the floor, and fitted them into the growing tower. He took out his socket wrench and looked at the structure appraisingly.

‘Nice, Ted,’ said Frankie. Stromsoe could just barely make out her words.

‘When this one’s finished I’m done for tonight,’ said Ted. ‘Been at it since four.’

‘We’ll be ready for next week,’ said Frankie.

‘I hope so.’

‘We need that jet stream to stay south. Just a little help from the stream is all we need.’

The old man said something back but Stromsoe couldn’t make it out.

He eased away from the barn, found the dark edge of the road, and walked back to his car. Ready for next week, he thought. Need the jet stream to stay south?

He wondered if the wooden towers were a decorative garden item that Frankie and her partner sold to local nurseries. He’d seen little windmills that looked a lot like them, though Frankie’s were four times the height and had no blades to catch a breeze.

Then he thought of water wells and storage tanks and railroad structures and mining rigs and weather stations and airport towers and fire observation decks and oil derricks and guard towers and wind turbines for making electricity.

Ready for next week could mean for the dis tributor, or to complete an order, or…

Frankie, you have some explaining to do.

He smelled the river water again, then the sweet aroma of oranges and lemons carrying on the cool night air.

9

Mike Tavarez surveyed the exercise yard and listened to the inmates counting off their sit-ups: thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…

Their voices rose in crisp unison into the cold afternoon air of Pelican Bay State Prison. They sounded like a small army, thought Tavarez, and in a sense they were, because the Mexican gangs here in Pelican Bay didn’t stand around like the Nazi Lowriders or the Aryan Brotherhood or the Black Guerillas.

No, La Eme and Nuestra Familia – though they would kill one another if you put them together in the same exercise yard at the same time – worked out here in the general population yard for two hours every day. Different hours, but they worked out hard. They heaved and strained and yelled the cadence, in training to stay alive when it was time to fight.

Give people a beat to follow and they’ll do anything you tell them to, thought Tavarez. Like a marching band.

Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one…

‘Why don’t you work out with them?’ asked Jason Post. Post was one of the correctional officers who had helped get Tavarez transferred from the Security Housing Unit to the general population. That was six months ago. The Prison Guards Union held substantial power at Pelican Bay, and Post was a union activist.

‘I like watching,’ said Tavarez. ‘I like their discipline. I never got to see this in the X.’

The Security Housing Unit was known as ‘the X’ because it was shaped like one. Sometimes it was called the Shoe. Tavarez had spent his first year there. It was a living hell. The SHU was made up of pods – eight glass-faced cells per pod – arranged around an elevated guardhouse. It was always twilight in the X, never light and never dark. Tavarez was watched by guards 23/7 on television. When he used the toilet it was televised onto a guardhouse monitor. The toilets had no moving parts that could be made into weapons. For one hour a day he was allowed to exercise alone in ‘dog run’ – a four-walled concrete tank half the size of a basketball court. A guard watched him do that too, from a catwalk above. In the X, time stopped. His great aloneness swallowed him. There had been days in the X when Tavarez had had to bite his tongue to keep from weeping, and swallow the blood.

It was solitary confinement, but in full view of the guards. The X was designed by an architect who specialized in sensory deprivation. Even the warden admitted that it was designed to make you insane. The feeling of hours stretching into years was indescribable for Tavarez, unbearable. He never thought he would actually feel his mind leaving him. Finally, he found a way to get to Jason Post and Post had begun the process that saved his life.

The difference between the SHU and general population was the difference between hell and freedom. Or at least between hell and the possibility of freedom, for which Tavarez was now planning.

He saw that the count was slowing as his men approached eighty push-ups.

Seventy-six…seventy-seven…

‘Besides,’ he said. ‘I like having the pile to myself.’

‘I’ll bet you do,’ said Post. He was a thick young Oregonian with a downsloping head of yellow hair. ‘Nobody gets that except you.’

Tavarez got an hour a day on the iron pile, where he could lift weights alone and let his mind wander. He had arranged this privilege through Post also, and paid for it by having money wired into various bank accounts. His iron-pile hour was generally between 11 P.M. and midnight but Tavarez was largely nocturnal anyway. He’d grown very strong.

And one night per week, usually Monday, Tavarez would skip his late-night workout and instead be escorted to the far corner of the southeast compound perimeter, where he would stand handcuffed while a prostitute serviced him through a chain-link fence.

‘How’s Tonya?’ asked Tavarez.

‘Chemo sucks, you know?’

Tavarez figured that Post would need some help.

‘With her not feeling good, you know, the kid doesn’t get decent meals and he doesn’t ever get his homework done. I’m here in this shithole forty-eight hours a week ‘cause we need the money, so I can’t do everything at home, you know?’

‘Sounds difficult,’ said Tavarez.

‘That’s because it is difficult.’

‘As soon as you get me the library, I can make a transfer for you.’

Post was predictable and self-serving as a dog, which was why Tavarez valued him.

‘It’s done,’ said the young guard. ‘You have the library for one hour tonight. The laptop will be inside in the world atlas on the G shelf, down at the end, up on top, out of sight. Lunce will come to your cell at ten to take you in. Then he’ll take you to the iron pile at eleven, then back to your cell at midnight.’

Tavarez suppressed a smile. ‘Batteries charged?’

‘Hell yes they’re charged.’

‘I’ll make the transfer.’

‘Ten K?’

‘Ten.’

Tavarez watched the men labor and count. The ten K infuriated him but he didn’t let it show. Plus, he had the money.

…ninety-eight…ninety-nine…one hundred!

‘Behave yourself, bandito,’ said Post.

‘Always,’ said Tavarez.

‘ You don’t want to go back to the X.’

‘God will spare me that, Jason.’

‘God don’t care here. It’s every man for himself.’

‘That’s why I value our friendship,’ said Tavarez.

‘Yeah, I bet. Make that transfer, dude.’

Prison Investigator Ken McCann delivered a cloth sack full of mail to Tavarez in his cell later that afternoon. Mail was delivered to Tavarez only twice a week because he got so much of it. The Prison Investigation team – four overworked Corrections employees overseeing a prison population of almost 3,500 – had to read, or attempt to read, every piece of Mike El Jefe Tavarez’s incoming and outgoing correspondence.

‘Strip out, Mikey,’ said McCann, making a twirling motion with his finger.

Tavarez faced the far wall and spread his arms and legs. ‘Looks like quite a haul.’

Then the guard unlocked the cell and McCann tossed the sack onto the bed. The door clanged shut with a faint echo, and the lock rang home.

Tavarez backed again to the door slot – it was called the bean chute because meals sometimes came through it too – then went to his bed. The bed was just a mattress on a concrete shelf built into the wall. He dumped the mail onto the thin green blanket. He sat and fanned through the correspondence. True to form, McCann and his investigators had opened every envelope except the ones from law firms. Attorney-client privilege was a constitutional right even in a supermax prison, though Tavarez suspected that McCann opened and read some of them anyway. Which was fair, since several of the law firms with very impressive letter-heads were fictitious, and others were counterfeit. There were fifty or sixty letters in all.

‘How many letters did you write this last week?’ asked McCann.

‘Seventy.’

‘Every week you write seventy.’

‘Ten a day,’ said Tavarez. ‘An achievable number.’

Tavarez knew that most of the inmates got little or no mail at all. He’d seen printouts of the pen-pal ads on the prison Web site, which were full of pleas for letters from inmates who hadn’t received a letter in years, or even decades.

But Tavarez was El Jefe, and he got hundreds of letters every month from friends and relatives – long, usually handwritten tales of life in the barrio, life in jail, life in other prisons, life in general.

‘It’s pure numbers, isn’t it, Mikey?’ asked McCann. ‘Enough mail comes and goes, and you know your messages will get through.’

‘No, Ken. I just have lots of family and friends.’

‘You have lots of business is what you have.’

‘You overestimate me.’

‘Well, the piss trick won’t work anymore.’

‘No. You’re too smart for that.’

Tavarez had used his urine to write a coded message on the back of a letter to a cousin in Los Angeles. The message was about raising ‘taxes’ on a heroin shipment coming north from Sinaloa to Tucson, then on to L.A., though McCann couldn’t decipher it. It was an old prison trick – the urine dries invisible but the sugars activate under a hot lamp and the code can be read. McCann had had the good luck of picking this particular letter for his heat-lamp test.

But Tavarez had written the same message in a kite – a small, handwritten note – that a trustee had smuggled out for him through a friend in the prison kitchen, so the tax hike had gone into effect anyway.

Tavarez noted a letter from Ruben in San Quentin. Always pleasant to know what’s going down on death row.

And one from the nonexistent law firm of Farrell & Berman of Worcester, Massachusetts, which would contain news of La Eme’s East Coast business.

And one from his mother, still on Flora Street, still chipper and full of gossip, no doubt. Money was no longer a problem for his parents, though why they insisted on staying in the barrio Tavarez couldn’t understand.

There was a letter from Jaime in Modesto – trouble with La Nuestra Familia, most likely.

One from a real lawyer – Mel Alpers – who was representing him on appeal. It looked like a bill.

One from Dallas, where the Mara Salvatrucha gang had butchered two local homies in a war for narcotics distribution in the south side. Blood was about to flow. We should exterminate the Salvadorans, thought Tavarez. Bloodthirsty animals with no sense of honor.

And another letter from Ernest in Arizona State Prison, a supermax prison like Pelican Bay. Ernest was doing a thirty-year bounce on three strikes. Tavarez knew that Ernest’s boys in Arizona were busy these days. Since so much attention had been focused on California’s border, Arizona was now the nexus for drugs, humans, and cash going in and out of the United States. In many ways Arizona was better, Tavarez believed – the deserts and mountains were filled with dirt roads and impossible to patrol. Much of the land was Indian, and the state and federal agents were not welcome there. Also, Arizona had one-tenth the population of California, and was closer to good markets like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Business was good. Very good.

Tavarez sighed and picked through more mail, looking for the one letter that never came.

‘What are you worth these days, Mike? Two million? Three?’

Tavarez shook his head, sorting through the mail. ‘Nowhere near the millions you dream of. My life is about honor.’

‘The honor of La Eme. That’s funny.’

‘I don’t think honor is funny,’ said Tavarez.

La Eme’s code of silence forbade him from so much as saying those words – La Eme – let alone admitting membership.

McCann grunted. He had long accused Tavarez of secretly hoarding funds that should have gone into La Eme ‘regimental banks,’ though McCann had no evidence of it.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Lie about your money. But if I do my job right, you won’t have one dollar left to give your children when you die. Undeserving though they are.’

Tavarez looked up from his mail. ‘Leave my family out of it.’

McCann shrugged. He enjoyed chiding Tavarez about the fact that, despite getting hundreds of letters a month, Tavarez’s letters to his own children always came back marked Return to Sender.

In the beginning McCann had opened these letters both going out and coming back, suspecting that the Tavarez children had marked them with coded messages before resealing the envelopes and having their mother write return to sender on the front. But all he’d ever found were heartfelt pleadings from the great Jefe, asking for understanding and a letter back. No urine messages, no pinprick ‘ghostwriting’ that would come alive when a pencil was rubbed over them, no writing in Nahuatl – the language of the ancient Aztec – which was La Eme’s most baffling code.

‘Must be lousy, sitting in a stinkhole while your kids grow up without you.’

‘You’ve said that before.’

‘Better here than in the SHU though.’

Tavarez looked at McCann and McCann smiled. ‘Those millions don’t do you much good, do they?’

‘They don’t do me much good because I don’t have them.’

McCann stared at Tavarez for a long beat. He liked staring down the inmates. It was a way of saying he wasn’t afraid of them. McCann was large and strong. Tavarez had heard the story about the Black Guerilla gangster who had jumped McCann and ended up knocked out and bleeding. McCann loved talking about the SHU. To anyone who had been incarcerated there, it was like having a knife waved in your face. Or worse.

‘Honor?’ asked McCann. ‘How do you stand yourself, Mike? Blowing up a woman and a little boy? A woman you knew, someone you lived with and slept with? The wife of an old friend?’

‘I had nothing to do with that. I was framed by a U.S. government task force. The real killers were his own people, of course – the same task force. Because he was corrupt, on the payroll of La Nuestra Familia. Everyone knows what bunglers the government people are. All this was proven in court by my lawyers. The reason the government sent me here was so they could continue their fictional war on drugs against a fictional gang. It all comes down to dollars, jobs, and budgets. I am good for their business.’

McCann whistled the tune of a corrido. Even the guards knew the corridos – the Mexican songs that romanticized the exploits of criminal heroes who fought against corrupt police torturers and bone breakers, usually Americans. This particular song was very popular a few years ago, and it told the story of El Jefe Tavarez and an American deputy who love the same woman.

Tavarez stared at the investigator.

‘All three of you went to high school together,’ said McCann. ‘Later, the deputy took your girlfriend. So what do you do? You kill her, you fucking animal.’

Tavarez said nothing. What was the point of defending himself to a fool?

‘What did you and Post talk about today?’ asked McCann.

‘Family. He likes to talk.’

‘What’s in it for you?’

‘The X made me talkative. He’s just a kid.’

‘Going to help him out?’

‘My hands are cuffed.’

‘Don’t get any big ideas, Mikey. Behave yourself and who knows? Maybe you’ll actually get a visit from one of your own children someday.’

Tavarez nodded and picked up a letter. Ears thrumming with anger, he could barely hear the sound of McCann’s shoes on the cell-block floor as he walked away.

When he got out of this place, when the time was right, maybe he’d come back here to Crescent City and settle up with McCann.

But McCann was right. Tavarez yearned for letters from them – John, Peter, Jennifer, and Isabelle. John was the oldest at ten. He had gotten his mother’s fretful character. Isabelle was eight and a half, and she had her father’s ambition – she was acquisitive and calculating. Jennifer, only seven, had inherited her father’s lithe build and her mother’s lovely face and was excelling at tae kwon do, of all things. Little Peter had learned to run at nine months and walk at ten. He was three and a half when Tavarez had shuffled through the series of steel doors that took him into the heart of the X.

They still lived in the Laguna Beach mansion he had bought, along with his ex-wife, Miriam, and her parents from Mexico.

Miriam had cut off all communication with him after his conviction for the bombing. She had told him that she forgave and pitied him for what he had done and she would pray for his soul. But she would not allow him to poison their children. No visits. No phone calls. No letters. No communication of any kind. Her word was final. She was filing.

The Tavarez children all spoke English and Spanish, and attended expensive private schools. Their gated seaside haven was a place of privilege and indulgence.

Tavarez had removed his children as far as he could from the barrio near Delhi Park where he had grown up. He wanted them to be nothing like him.

He fanned through the last of the envelopes, his heart beating with the fierce helplessness of the caged.

10

That night at ten Brad Lunce called him out. Lunce was one of Post’s buddies. There were three kinds of guards: the bribable, the sadistic, and the honest. Group One was small but valuable, and Post had introduced Tavarez to a few of his friends.

Lunce watched Tavarez strip naked, open his mouth wide, spread his toes and butt, then get dressed and back up to the bean chute so Lunce could handcuff him before opening the cell door. Lunce never seemed to pay close attention, Tavarez had noticed, something that he might be able to use someday.

When Tavarez was handcuffed, Lunce let him out.

Murmurs and grumbling followed them down the cell block. Any other inmate being led out at this time of night would have brought yelling and catcalls and demands for explanation. But all the Pelican Bay cell blocks were segregated by race and gang. And this block was populated by La Eme and the gangs with which La Eme had formed alliances – the Aryan Brotherhood, the Nazi Lowriders, and the Black Guerillas. So when the inmate was El Jefe, respect was offered.

Tavarez walked slowly, head up, eyes straight ahead. Something fluttered in his upper vision: a kite baggie on a string floating down from tier three to find its intended cell on tier one. Night was when the kites flew.

Lunce unlocked the library just after ten o’clock. It was a large, windowed room with low shelves to minimize privacy, pale green walls, and surveillance cameras in every corner.

Tavarez looked up at one. ‘Cartwright again?’

‘What do you care?’ said Lunce. Lunce was large and young, just like Post. He resented his manipulation more than the other guards and Tavarez was waiting for the day when Lunce would turn on him.

Cartwright was the night ‘situations’ supervisor, which put him in control of the electric perimeter fence and video for the eastern one-quarter of the sprawling penal compound. This made Cartwright the most valuable of all the cooperative guards, and a kickback to him was included in almost every transaction that Tavarez made with lower-ranking men such as Post and Lunce. There were kickbacks to midlevel COs also, to those lower than Cartwright but above Lunce and Post. That was why favors were expensive. The western, northern, and southern perimeter guardtower sharpshooters and attack dogs were under the control of other supervisors but Mike had found no way to influence them.

‘He can turn the cameras back on whenever he wants to,’ said Tavarez.

‘Not with me in here he won’t. You got less than one hour. I’ll be watching you.’

Tavarez nodded. Having an L-Wop – life without parole – meant that there weren’t too many punishments they could give him if he was caught. They could move him back to the SHU, which was something he didn’t even allow himself to think about. But he didn’t pay all that bribe money for nothing, and after all, he was only in the library. No violence intended, no escape in mind, no drug abuse, no illicit sex.

‘The cuffs,’ said Tavarez, backing over to Lunce. It made the hair on his neck stand up – giving his back to a hostile white man – but if prison taught you anything, it was to overcome fear. Outside, you might have power. Inside, all you had was the bribe and the threat.

He found the world atlas on top of the G shelf, which he now slid toward him with a puff of dust.

Both the table and the chairs were bolted to the floor, so Tavarez plopped the heavy book down on the metal table, then worked himself into a chair in front of it.

He lifted the big cover, then the first hundred or so pages. Sure enough, the laptop sat in an excavated cradle. Post had come through.

For the next fifty minutes Tavarez sat before the screen, practically unmoving except for his hands, tapping out orders and inquiries in an elaborate code that he had helped devise for La Eme starting way back in 1988, during his first prison fall, before he had become El Jefe.

The code was rooted in the Huazanguillo dialect of the Nahuatl language that he had learned from Ofelia – his frequent visitor at Corcoran State Prison. The dialect was only understandable by scholars, by a few Aztec descendants who clung to the old language, and a handful of upperechelon La Eme leaders. Ofelia was both a budding scholar and a nearly full-blooded Aztec. Back then, Paul Zolorio, who ran La Eme from his cell just eight down from Tavarez, arranged to bring Ofelia up from Nayarit, Mexico, to tutor the handsome young Harvard pistolero.

Now Tavarez’s text messages would soon be decoded by his most trusted generals, then passed on to the appropriate captains and lieutenants. Then down to the ’hoods and the homeboys, who actually moved product and collected cash. Almost instantly, the whole deadly organization – a thousand strong, with gangsters in every state of the republic and twelve foreign countries – would soon have its orders.

Tavarez worked fast:

Ernest’s Arizona men need help – everyone had a finger in that pie now that California had been clamped down. Move Flaco’s people from the East Bay down to Tucson.

The L.A. green-light gangs would have to be punished severely. Green-lights won’t pay our taxes? They’re proud to go against us? Then peel their caps. Cancel one homie from each green-light gang every week until they pay, see how long their pride holds up.

Albert’s men in Dallas are up against the Mara Salvatrucha. MS 13 has the good military guns from the United States but they don’t get our south-side action. Move ten of our San Antonio boys over to Dallas immediately. Shoot the Salvadorans on sight if they’re on our corners. Not a grain of mercy.

At the end of his fifty minutes, Tavarez had passed on more information than he could send in a hundred handwritten, coded letters and kites. Which would take him a week and a half to write. And a week to get where they were going. And half would still be intercepted, diverted, destroyed – perhaps even passed on to La Nuestra Familia by people like Ken McCann.

But with the computer he could write things once, in just a matter of seconds, then send his commands to a handful of trusted people, who in turn would send them down the line. His code was wireless and traveled at the speed of sound. It was practically untraceable and virtually indecipherable. It was clear, concise, and inexpensive.

Pure, digital Nahuatl, thought Tavarez, beamed exactly where it was needed.

All it had really cost him was a few months of subtle persuasion, then ten unsubtle grand to help the Post family through Tonya’s cancer.

Tavarez turned off the computer, closed the screen, and set it back into the hollowed pages of the atlas of the world.

Like an alert dog who hears his master stir, Lunce appeared from behind the G shelf, dangling the cuffs.

‘Looking at porn?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Are they cute as your whores?’

‘Not as cute.’

‘I don’t believe you. I think you’re running your business. La Eme business.’

Tavarez just shrugged. He felt the cuffs close around his wrists.

Tavarez lifted weights furiously that night, putting everything he had into the repetitions, increasing the weight until his muscles gave out, doing sit-ups and crunches between sets, panting and growling and sweating for nearly an hour. Lunce watched him work out and shower but Tavarez was hardly aware of him.

By the time he was back in his cell, it was well past midnight. His body trembled from the exertion. He lay on his back on the bed and listened to the snoring and the distant wails from the ding wing – psych ward – and the endless coughing of Smith two cells down.

He closed his eyes and thought back to when he was released from his first prison term and he’d moved into Ofelia’s apartment for six blessed weeks. All of the pent-up desire they’d felt for each other during her visits came charging out like water from ruptured dams. She was only seventeen, hopeful and innocent, a virgin. He was twenty-seven, the adopted favorite of La Eme kingpin Paul Zolorio, and suddenly free. He had been tasked by Zolorio to exact tribute from the Santa Ana street gangs for all drug sales – starting with his own Delhi F Troop. Zolorio had given him a mandate of one hundred percent compliance.

There was nothing better, Tavarez had realized back then – than to be free, employed, and in love.

His heart did what it always did when he thought of Ofelia – it soared, then hovered, then fell.

He pictured her slender young fingers as they traced the Nahuatl symbols across the page in the Corcoran visitation room. He could hear her voice as she translated their sounds and meanings into Spanish and English for him. There was innocence in her smile and trust in her eyes, and luster in her straight black hair.

He remembered the simple shock on her face when he told her, six weeks after moving into her cheerful little apartment, that he was going to marry Paul Zolorio’s niece from Guadalajara. He really had to, he explained, really, it wasn’t quite arranged in the old-fashioned way, but his marriage to Miriam would solidify the families and the business they did, it was practically his duty to Paul to…

He remembered how softly she shut and locked the door when he left her apartment that night, and the heaviness in his heart and the painful clench of his throat as he drove south into the night. It was nothing like walking away from Hallie Jaynes and her insatiable desires, her murderous guerra selfishness. No, Ofelia was uncorrupted, untouched except by him. She was drugless and guileless and had the purest heart of anyone he had ever known, and the wildest beauty to her smile.

One year after he had married Miriam, shortly after she had given birth to John, Tavarez secretly traveled to Nayarit to find Ofelia.

With doggedness and patience he was able to learn that she had joined a convent in Toluca, Mexico’s highest city. It took him another day to fly to Mexico City, then rent a car for the drive up to Toluca.

Sister Anna of the Convento de San Juan Bautista scolded him for coming here unannounced with such a request. She said Ofelia never wanted to see him again, after what he had done to her. Yes, she was healthy and happy now in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was not a love given and taken away according to lust, commerce, or advancement. She looked at him, trembling with disgust.

Tavarez set five one-hundred-dollar bills on the desk between them. ‘For the poor,’ he said in Spanish.

‘They don’t need your money,’ Sister Anna said back.

He counted out five more. ‘Let the poor decide.’

‘I have decided for them.’

‘Okay.’

Tavarez rose, leaned across the desk, and grabbed the holy woman by her nose. He pulled up hard and she came up fast, chair clacking to the tile floor behind her. He told her to take him to Ofelia or he’d yank it off.

‘You’re the devil,’ she said, tears pouring from her eyes.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Tavarez, letting go of Sister Anna’s nose. ‘I’m trying to see an old friend, and help the poor.’

She swept the cash into a drawer, then led Tavarez across a dusty courtyard. The other sisters stopped and stared but none of them dared get close. Sister Anna walked quickly with her fist up to her mouth, as if she’d just been given unbearable news.

The vesper bells were ringing when Sister Anna pushed open the door of Ofelia’s tiny cell. It was very cold, and not much larger than the one he’d spent five years in, noted Tavarez. She had a crucifix on the wall. His cell had pictures of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

Ofelia rose from the floor beside her bed. She looked up at Tavarez with a stunned surprise. She was thinner and pale, but her eyes still held the innocent wonder that he had loved. She was not quite nineteen.

In that moment he saw that she loved him helplessly, in the way that only the very young can love, and that the greatest gift he could give her would be to turn around and walk away. It would mean denying himself. Denying his desires, his instincts, his own heart. It would mean giving her life.

He reached out and put his hands on her lovely face. Sister Anna flinched.

‘Love your God all you want, but come with me,’ he said.

‘We’ll both go to hell,’ she said, her breath condensing in the freezing air.

‘We’ve got three days and a lifetime before that.’

‘What about your wife?’ asked Ofelia.

‘I have a son too. Accommodate them. I love you.’

Tavarez watched the struggle playing out in Ofelia’s dark eyes but he never doubted the outcome.

‘I don’t have much to pack,’ she said.

Sister Anna gasped.

Tavarez looked at her and smiled.

Even now, ten years later, Tavarez thought of that moment and smiled.

But finally – as always – he remembered what Matt Stromsoe had done to Ofelia. And with this memory Tavarez canceled her image as quickly and totally as someone changing channels on a TV.

11

The first For Rent sign he saw in Fallbrook was for a guest cottage. The main house was owned and occupied by the Mastersons and their young son and daughter. The Mastersons were early twenties, trim and polite. She was pregnant in a big way. They were willing to rent out the cottage then and there, so long as Stromsoe would sign a standard agreement and pay in advance a refundable damage deposit. The rent wasn’t high and the guest cottage was tucked back on the acreage with nice views across the Santa Margarita River Valley. A grove of tangerine trees lined the little dirt road leading to it. Bright purple bougainvillea covered one wall of the cottage and continued up the roof. It had an air conditioner, satellite TV, even a garage.

Within forty minutes of driving up, Stromsoe had written a check for first and last month’s rent and deposit, and collected a house key and an automatic garage-door opener.

Mrs. Masterson handed him a heavy bag full of avocados and said welcome to Fallbrook and God bless you. Included in the bag was last week’s worship program for the United Methodist Church.

Frankie called him around noon and asked him over for lunch before their drive south to the studio.

‘I just moved to Fallbrook,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘The butterflies sold me. And I’m minutes away if you need me.’

She was silent for a beat. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘What are the wooden towers for?’ he asked when the lunch was almost over.

‘The one in the picture?’

‘The ones in the Bonsall barn.’

Frankie set her fork on her plate. Her expression went cool. ‘For meteorological instruments,’ she said. ‘I study weather. How do you know about them?’

Stromsoe explained waiting for the idling car and seeing nothing until Frankie came blasting out of the dark in her Mustang.

‘So, Mr. Stromsoe – are you a bodyguard or a snoop, or a little of both?’

‘You’re being stalked. I hear a vehicle idling near your house. Half an hour later, you leave your home on a code red. What would you have done?’

‘Followed me.’

Stromsoe nodded. ‘Who’s Ted?’

Stromsoe tracked the emotions as they marched across her face – embarrassment, then irritation, then confusion, then control.

‘Came right up and listened in, did you?’

‘Yep.’

‘I don’t like your attitude right now.’

‘It comes from thirteen years of being a cop.’

‘But you’re a private detective now. You have to act polite and charming.’ She smiled. It reversed the stern lines of her face and Stromsoe remembered a time when he actually had been polite and maybe even a little charming.

‘Ted’s my uncle,’ said Frankie. ‘He’s a retired NOAA guy. That’s National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. They study climate and report weather.’

‘I apologize for following you. I was slightly worried.’

‘I’m glad you were worried. That’s why I pay you. You were curious too.’

He nodded.

‘The towers are made of redwood and finished with a weather seal,’ she said. ‘They’re twenty-two feet high, and we anchor the legs in concrete on-site.’

‘Where do you put them?’

‘Mostly around the Bonsall property.’

‘You sit on the platforms to escape from yourself?’

She smiled and colored. ‘No. I told your boss the property was a place I went to be alone, because I didn’t want him asking the same questions you’re asking now.’

‘Who cares if you study weather?’ asked Stromsoe.

‘I was a lot more relaxed about it until I saw that guy on my fenced, posted property, inspecting one of my towers.’

Stromsoe wondered about that. ‘Are there commercial applications to what you’re studying?’

‘Possibly,’ said Frankie Hatfield.

‘You think the stalker is a competitor?’

‘I don’t believe so.’

Frankie explained the value of weather prediction. Its applications were endless – agriculture, water and energy allocation, public safety and security, transportation, development – you name it. When you studied climate you had long-term charts to go on, she said, and generalities became apparent. But predicting weather