Storm Runners (18 page)

“I’ve got more.”

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

“Good night, Frankie.”

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

STROMSOE HAD JUST pulled up at his guesthouse when Birch called.

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

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

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

“Your name and number, please.”

Click.

“Run it by me again, Dan.”

Birch played it again.

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

“What number did she call?”

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

“They,” said Stromsoe.

“They,” said Birch. “DWP?”

“Maybe.”

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

“For the new friends of the DWP?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know.”

“Ask her.”

“I will.”

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

“Good.”

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

“I’ll cover until they get here.”

“Eight sharp, then.”

“We’ll be here.”

“Keep her safe and warm, Matt.”

“Mind your own business, Dan.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ants going up. Ants coming down.

Push, pull.

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

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

He sipped the drink, watched and waited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An hour later he stenciled on the words:

SAN DIEGO SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

HONOR, INTERGITY, SERVICE

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

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

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

Even up close it looked pretty good.

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