Storm Runners (3 page)

T
hat 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 heavy-browed 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.”

B
y 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.