Storm Runners (22 page)

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

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

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

“How do you know that?” asked Hallie.

“Because I was in the backseat.”

They laughed and Stromsoe felt limitless love for his son.

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

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

Because I was in the backseat.

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

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

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

“Have a great day, Billy.”

“Okay.”

“Be nice to Mrs. Winston.”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

“Okay. I mean, I love you too.”

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

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

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

“Let me try.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Dad! Can’t you just come with us?”

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

“All right, Dad!” hollered Billy.

“All right, Dad!” hollered Hallie.

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

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

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

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

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

Lord, how I want to be in that number…

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ve gained weight.”

“Workouts. Good food.”

“I’ll bet.”

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

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

“The eye is realistic.”

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

He nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Frankie who?”

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

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

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

Tavarez said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

“How?”

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

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

“You thought of this?”

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

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

“I hardly know her.”

“Dig her as much as Hallie?”

“She’s young and innocent.”

“Hallie was young but not innocent.”

“No. She was guilty of trusting you.”

Tavarez shrugged.

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

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

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

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

HE ARRANGED TO have his lunch served in his cell that afternoon.

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

“Mystery meat,” said Tavarez.

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

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

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

“I was busy.”

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

“I’ll have the usual transfer made.”

“Double it, or no deal.”

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

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

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

“What’s the hurry?”

“There is no hurry.”

“You sound like there’s a schedule.”

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

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

“You will.”

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

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

“Why?”

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

Tavarez looked up from his mystery meat.

“Just kiddin’ you, Heffie.”

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

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

“You really strapped, Ted?”

“I’m really strapped, Matt.”

“That’s illegal, you know.”

“So’s murder.”

“Frankie okay?”

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

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

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

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

A moment, then forever.

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

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

“I can’t believe him.”

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

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

“Until our thirty days are up?”

“For as long as it takes.”

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

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

“Maybe he’d do it for the money.”

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

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

“Sure I will, Frankie.”

They bumped along quietly for a moment.

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

“Hmmm.”

Another pause.

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

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

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

“Furniture with a
gun
,” Stromsoe added.

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

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

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

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

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

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