Storm Runners (11 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Azusa 13?”

“I said, no one.”

“You know Marcus Ampostela?”

“No.”

“Tito Guzman? Ricky Dogs?”

“No. Sorry.”

Tavarez smiled and nodded.

“You want to talk to Marcus Ampostela.”

“I’ll remember that name.”

“You don’t have to. He’ll find you.”

“Good,” said Cedros.

“You look afraid right now,” said Tavarez.

“Not my kinda place, man.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cedros shook his head. “No.”

“The name of your company?”

“No,” said Cedros.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And the woman?”

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

“She has your valuable company information?”

“Yes, she does.”

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

“He is.”

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

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

“Any more pictures of them?” asked Tavarez.

“None with me,” said Cedros. “Why?”

“Where do you live?” asked Tavarez.

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

“Marcus Ampostela,” said Tavarez.

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

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

Cedros nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only abundance can ruin us
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Acceleration,” said Stromsoe.

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

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

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

Stromsoe thought.

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

“Tell him about the particles,” said Ted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s mine to smell,” said Stromsoe.

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

“Come on, kids,” said Frankie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mostly science,” said Ted.

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

An enemy can live in your heart forever.

“Good job bagging the stalker,” said Ted.

“Thanks.”

“Think he’ll come back?”

“Maybe,” said Stromsoe.

“John Cedros, right?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you make for a day’s work?”

“Three-fifty.”

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

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

“Imagination, well, fine,” said Ted.

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

“She’s a sweet girl,” said Ted.

“I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

AN HOUR AFTER Frankie climbed down from tower four it started raining.