Then She Vanished

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Gretchen Deuzler’s father was also a former president of the West Texas Blasters and Demolition Union.

  Which would no doubt have given him—and maybe his daughter—easy access to restricted explosives and related materials: blasting caps, fuses, timers, high-nitrogen fertilizers.

  Which sent a cool bristle of nerves down my neck.

  In this age of anger and violence.

  In this age of chaos.

  I finally fell asleep while watching Lark’s surveillance video of possible Jackie O’s mailing the bomb that killed my congressman and his assistant.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Memorial Day morning. Tola Strait opened one of the Nectar Barn safes, entered a second code on her phone, and waited for the go-ahead. A two-combination Outlaw—a hard code to get it open and a cell code to disarm the interior alarm sensors. A moment later she set the two handguns on the safe top, then turned and looked at me.

  “Thank you for taking this little job. You must be very busy with all the violence in the world.”

  “I don’t love the idea of you moving a hundred thousand dollars in cash from one place to another.”

  “The Strait Shooters are terrific but today I wanted you. Sometimes a girl needs a different kind of company. But you’re not cheap, my friend.”

  “Not for this kind of thing.”

  “Have you ever killed a man? In work, I mean, not war.”

  I nodded and caught the hard approval on her face.

  “Well, none of that today!”

  “Do the Strait Shooters know about this?” I asked. Holdups of the kind I feared are often inside jobs.

  “Yes, and I trust them with my life. And yours.”

  Our destination for Tola’s dope loot was the California side of Buena Vista, a small town split roughly in two by the U.S.-Mexico border. I had my suspicions about the Buena Vista Credit Union. For one thing, it didn’t show up on my Internet search. For another, why would it be open on a national holiday?

  But with a hundred thousand dollars under my watch, I wore my Gold Cup in its paddle holster in the small of my back, and a .410/.357 ankle cannon, deadly, small, and smooth. I thought back to Friday and how well I had shot with Mike Lark at Duffytown. But everything changes when your target is firing back at you.

  We loaded the bundles of cash into two large rolling suitcases made of some textile that resembled stamped leather. They were light and probably strong and looked like Mexican saddles—handsome and ornate.

  “Cold feet?” she asked.

  “I get sullen on Memorial Day.”

  “I know that feeling.”

  “How do you know it?”

  “I’m an East County Strait. We like big hats and big emotions.”

  I couldn’t argue that and didn’t try.

  We loaded the two suitcases into the back seat of my truck, exactly $50,000 in each heavy piece. On the passenger seat she set a stubby coach gun I recognized—a Charles Daly Honcho 12 gauge—three very short barrels and a pistol grip. For bad guys after the strongbox. Sling swivels fore and aft, easily concealable under a coat. Designed for short-range killing. Tola high-fived me and kissed me on the cheek.

  “There won’t be trouble,” she said. “But the possibility makes me feel alive.”

  I held open the door and watched her climb in. Jeans and red cowboy boots, a tucked-in snap-button satin blouse the same green as her eyes. Red bangs and a ponytail under a big straw Stetson.

  “Here we go, Rolando!”

  * * *

  From Julian we headed south through the mountains of Cleveland National Forest to Interstate 8, then east into the boulder-piled mountains where I’d called on Virgil Strait and for the first time laid eyes on Tola. We climbed up the steep curves and switchbacks, from San Diego County to Imperial County then back to San Diego again. The temperature rose with our long descent and the interstate flattened into the desert.

  Back straight, hat tilted off her forehead, facing the bright day outside her window, Tola set a hand on my knee.

  “It seems so long since I’ve done something happy and simple,” she said. “I claw all day to make money. After work I catch my buzzes, maybe hang with friends, usually stay home and read a book before bed. Watch something. It’s harder being legal. Mostly legal. Back in the good old days, everything you did could get you prison time. Or worse. An adrenaline high from dawn to dusk. I saw some people go down bad and I always figured I was next. But now I’m legal. Somewhat. I can enjoy this drive and not even miss my morning dose. I can enjoy my company.”

  “You still have a sawed-off shotgun in easy reach,” I said.

  She gave me a smile and I saw Justine as I’d seen her for the very first time, at a dismal county-employee holiday party at the downtown Hyatt. One smile that changed two lives. I wanted to switch off my memory box but I wasn’t sure how. Or if I should. Justine vanished as if she’d read my thoughts.

  “Tell me about Buena Vista Credit Union,” I said. “It didn’t turn up on my searches.”

  “Just chartered last month,” said Tola. “I met one of the partners through Dalton.”

  “The credit union will accept your money?”

  “If it comes through a recognized Indian tribe. I loan the Nectar Barn cash to certain of Granddad’s native friends. They repay the loan to my accounts with my own cash—after taking a handsome percentage. The CU will take a handsome percentage, too. I’m an LLC so my accounts are all business banking, and the words Nectar Barn appear nowhere on the docs. At last, Tola can pay her taxes. Indians happy, governments happy. Everyone wins. A little curvy but technically legal. A state regulator for the southern district is helping us . . . well, understand the rules.”

  Crag Face himself, I thought, Lark’s man, waiting for Tola to offer him a bribe to look away.

  “What about the feds?” I asked.

  “Buena Vista Credit Union doesn’t belong to the Federal Reserve. Thus, open today. And it’s regulated by the California Department of Business Oversight. Which is where my regulator friend comes in.”

  “Friend.”

  “More like a counselor.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  Tola gave me a matter-of-fact look. “So far. I have to, Roland. All this legalized marijuana business is shadow land. So many things are new and unwritten. The law contradicts the law. Talk about chaos. Trust is all you’ve really got.”

  “I fear for you.”

  “Why? What do you know that I don’t?”

  “I know there are DEA and FBI investigators all over the country looking for ways to bust the pot market big boys. Of which you are one.”

  “Don’t call me a boy,” Tola said. “And I’m more than aware of that. I have good instincts about whom to trust. They’ve kept me alive for thirty years.”

  “Smart people are the easiest to fool.”

  “They think they’re too smart to fail?”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I’ve considered every facet of my business, every which way,” she said. “Then I’ve thought it around, over, under, and back again. It’s going to work. Everyone is ready and everything is in place. Every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed. Now I just have to trust me. That I put it together right. That it’s absolutely going to work.”

  “Are you expecting your regulator friend to be present today?” I asked.

  “Why are you so interested in him?”

  “Maybe I’m helping you dot an ‘i.’”

  “No. He won’t get near this until he wants something.”

  “What’s he after?”

  “He has a foundation that he claims does noble work for American Natives. He’s let me know about it. No solicitation yet. I know he needs money. I know his marriage is falling apart and he’s drinking hard and fast.”

  “Don’
t offer.”

  She lifted her sunglasses, gave me another searching look, but said nothing. Then pulled her hat down and looked back out the window.

  * * *

  Tola’s three Native American business partners—I found out later they were Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay Indians—were young men, casually dressed and helpful. At least two of them were armed. They carried the suitcases from my truck into a long-abandoned stucco home that stood inexplicably alone on Luiseño land.

  A Mercedes Sprinter and an unmarked armored car waited on the broken concrete driveway, both facing the road. The armored car driver was barely visible through the bullet-resistant polycarbonate windshield. His partner waited in the shade of a paloverde tree with an open-sight AR-15 cradled in his arms.

  In the living room, I stood behind Tola and watched the four of them sign documents. I could see that some of the papers already bore signatures and notary stamps, now being falsified to anyone who cared.

  All of the players seemed to know just what to do, so there was little discussion, and little small talk, either. The Chaos Committee was mentioned—no bomb today but one man had heard of another peace officer being shot, this time in San Bernardino. Virgil and Kirby were referenced, briefly. Dalton, of course. And the new Nectar Barn being built near the Sycuan Casino. A sense of grave accomplishment seemed to hover in the room. A fence lizard appeared on a glassless windowsill, looked our way, did four push-ups, then wandered back out.

  When the papers were signed and divided, two of the men rolled the suitcases onto the driveway and into the armored car.

  Tola shook hands with each young man, then got into my truck and closed the door. The Sprinter led the armored car toward the road, tire dust drifting east.

  Tola turned my face to hers, leaning in close. Her hand was surprisingly cool and her breath was warm.

  “Follow the money,” she said. “My heart’s pounding right now, Roland. You’re my rock.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The wall is old-school—vertical iron columns spaced wide enough to see and talk through, ten feet high, no concertina. Because the city predates the wall by over a hundred years, its historic downtown, retail, residential, and industrial neighborhoods are divided roughly in half. Small shops, rough cobbles, and dogs. People meet along the wall, trading news and gossip and shopping bags of goods and produce. They talk energetically and touch each other through the rough iron bars.

  I spent some time here, helping Charlie Hood, a friend who’d taken the job of chief of police on the American side. His was not an easy assignment, with Buena Vista being a plaza perennially contested by drug cartels, and Hood himself a troubled soul. I hadn’t told him I’d be coming into his jurisdiction with the outspoken marijuana maven Tola Strait. The less people who knew about this, the better.

  The Buena Vista Credit Union was located in the newer outskirts of the U.S. downtown, in a humble strip mall home to two restaurants, a photography studio, and electronics shop from which Mexican and American pop songs blared, and a women’s boutique with colorful dresses on racks outside the entrance.

  Inside, the building was brightly lit and smelled of new carpet and paint. A counter with three tellers but no customers. On one side of the tellers was a steel gate leading to the vault, on the other side an open seating area built around two impressive wooden desks. No managers on duty. Hand-painted oil copies of Diego Rivera paintings on the walls hung almost straight, potted artificial saguaro cactus with strings of LED lights, magazines on the coffee tables. All three Indians seated and waiting.

  The armed guards, each with a machine gun in one hand, pulled the luggage into the desk reception area, then stopped and looked at the Indians for direction.

  From an open doorway beyond the desks came a stout older Latino in a gray suit, white shirt, and a red tie, who stopped, considered us briefly, then waved us to follow. With him was a young woman he ignored. He introduced himself to each of us as we walked past him into his office—Robert Calderon, general manager, my pleasure to meet you, please have a seat.

  His office was spacious, with hardwood floors and a low ceiling. A wooden desk even larger than the ones out front and plenty of chairs. A sophisticated digital scale, apparently new, sat on the immense desk. Tola and the Indians sat in a line before the desk, the guards retreated to stand on either side of the doorway. I loitered near the guards and their rolling treasures, near the door, another hired hand. PI Ford. Has guns, will travel.

  Then a flurry of folders with metal top-clips, distributed by Señor Calderon’s assistant, the documents signed by all parties, notarized by the woman, who then collected and arranged them on a far corner of the big desk. I detected that she felt this ugly business was beneath her. Next she pulled a sturdy metal cart with plump pneumatic tires into position to her boss’s left.

  The guards rolled the suitcases to the desk, and at Calderon’s nod, tilted them onto the floor, unzipped them and began handing the bundles to him. He in turn handed several randomly chosen bundles to the notary, who counted the bills with blistering speed and placed them on the cart. Calderon himself weighed the others.

  When he was done, Calderon sat down again and slid to Tola a wooden presentation box, open to reveal three tooled-leather checkbooks, six packets of checks, and three elegant-looking pens. He set a business card inside and swung shut the lid.

  “It’s so nice to deal with professionals,” said Tola, to no one in particular. Polite assents. She looked back at me with a demure smile.

  A few minutes later, deep in the shiny steel vault that smelled faintly of burning metal, we watched Calderon and his never-introduced assistant transfer the bundles to the racks.

  Back outside in the bright Imperial County sunshine, we loaded the empty suitcases into my truck. I set Tola’s security shotgun and my uncomfortable ankle cannon in the steel utility box and locked it.

  “I’m starved and coming down,” said Tola. “There’s a great place to eat on the Mexico side. If we use the pedestrian crossing, we won’t get stuck in the traffic.”

  She requested a shady table in the courtyard restaurant of Hotel Casa Grande. Potted palms, eye-shivering violet bougainvillea, a central fountain in which a pair of spotted towhees splashed. As we were being seated, Tola remarked on the English translation of the hotel name, as pertaining to Kirby, and their old running joke about how much longer he could manage to stay out of the “big house.”

  “As it turned out,” said Tola, “not that long at all!”

  We drank a small pitcher of margaritas. Tola paid cash from a fat roll in her purse, turned her face up to the palm-slatted sunlight, and closed her eyes.

  “I am content right now,” she said. “To be imagining pleasant things behind my rose-colored eyelids. And I’m proud that I remind you of somebody you loved.” Her eyes were heavy on mine. “I got us a good room here. We can continue this discussion inside. Or not. Está bien?”

  “More than fine.”

  * * *

  Twenty emotional, pleasure-soaked hours later we were back in the truck and heading for Tola’s pot-growing acres near Palomar Mountain. She consulted the visor mirror and said she looked like a tart, well used.

  The highlight reel kept playing through my mind, courtesy of three or four hours of sleep, if that. We made love as soon as we closed the room door, a trail of clothes marking our way to the bed. Followed by a tender, more civilized event. A nap and a time-out for shopping, dinner, and later some Nectar Barn “Love Bomb,” which lived up to its name. Our third engagement took place in a downy time-warp that seemed to last hours, followed by our hysteria over the room’s focal oil painting, a basket of canna lilies appearing to levitate above a table rather than rest upon it. The French-milled soap just floored us. Tola laughed like a scrub jay. You had to be there. We came together again deep in the morning, sleep-deprived and delirious. At sunrise when I tried for a
nother rematch, Tola locked herself in the bathroom and told me to grow up.

  I felt taken from and added to at the same time.

  In the truck she rambled about girlhood days in the Imperial Valley, how she ran away for San Diego at sixteen, got a job at Taco Bell and a weekly rate room at the Southern Hotel. The job paid $7.25 an hour and no tips, but they’d only give her thirty hours, so the $200 room left her twenty-five bucks for everything else. Wouldn’t have penciled out for long. She’d been eating nothing but Taco Bell until Virgil and Kirby found her a few days later and brought her home. She’d actually put on weight from all the rice and beans and tortillas, had real boobs for the first time, she said. Her mother hadn’t showed for Tola’s homecoming. Mom had divorced Archie by then and had long shed the duties of motherhood.

  “I’m extra hard on Mom because she didn’t like me,” said Tola. “But Dad thought I was a rock star. Daddy’s little girl all the way. When Kirby did that to him I was nine years old and riled up enough to want revenge. In the end, the planning did me in. I just couldn’t decide what to do to him—poison him or let the brake fluid out of his motorcycle or maybe just shoot him in the kneecap. After a few weeks of that I realized, well, he’s my brother and it was an accident and I’d never seen Kirby that depressed and disgusted as then. He was punishing himself. So I let it go. It felt good to forgive him. Blood forgives, for better or worse.”

  I steered up the mountain toward her property as a black-and-white helicopter hovered in the blue a mile away. Found the shortcut around Kirby’s elaborately padlocked gate, bouncing my truck onto the rutted road with a metallic grate of shocks. In the distance I could see Kirby’s gigantic military tent billowing slightly in the breeze, the Indian motorcycle, the four-wheeler, and the pickup truck were all where I’d last seen them.