Storm Runners

by Parker, T. Jefferson

  “Rain,” said Choat.

  “Only a small possibility, I heard.”

  Choat turned to look at him. Cedros was impressed by how much contempt the man could convey with just one expression.

  “John,” said Choat. “We need help. We need someone outside our immediate sphere here at DWP. Someone fair and impartial, with the power to help us, and a clear understanding of what a dollar means—and what a promotion can mean to a young family man. You’re twenty-four.”

  “Yes.”

  “The wife, Marianna, is what, twenty-two?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mexican-American, like you?”

  “She’s Italian-American.”

  “And Tony?”

  Cedros swallowed and took a deep breath. Back in his badass days he would have been all over this pompous windbag. But you change in jail. You change when the world kicks your butt, seems to enjoy it, and leaves you with nothing. You change when you marry someone like Marianna Proetto and have a boy like Anthony and a daughter on the way.

  “What about him?” asked Cedros. “He’s an everyday, four-year-old American boy if that’s all right with you. Sir.”

  Choat turned and looked at Cedros. “I can fire you faster than you can get out of that chair.”

  “I know. I saw you do it to Larsen and Kuyper.”

  “My point is that a lot is riding here.”

  “No kidding,” said Cedros.

  He watched Choat return to the window, where he adjusted the blinds infinitesimally. Cedros couldn’t tell if it was to let in more light or less. He entertained the wild fantasy of simply telling the truth in a court of law. But it wasn’t hard to predict what that would get him—fired for sure, convicted anyway, and a traitor’s heart to carry around the rest of his life.

  “How are we going to get those charges dropped, Director Choat?”

  Choat lifted his hand with casual power, like a man shooing a fly. “I don’t traffic in rumor. But I have been told by reliable people that you are related by blood to Mike ‘El Jefe’ Tavarez.”

  The name rang oddly in Cedros’s ears. Tavarez and the DWP didn’t belong in the same sentence.

  “Very distant blood, sir. No. I won’t consider going to him with this.”

  Choat glanced at him, then back to the window. “Would you consider a promotion to maintenance technician grade two, working the Owens Gorge Transmission Line, with a rent-free home? One of the Owens Gorge cabins could be yours, in fact—the two-bedroom, two-bath. And the base compensation is better than you’re making now. Some maintenance techs make supervisor if they’re diligent, and most maintenance supervisors die maintenance supervisors—and they’re happy to. MS is the best career the DWP can offer a twenty-four-year-old with as much jail time as he has college. Hell, it’s the best job we can offer anybody, if you ask me. They call themselves ditch riders and they’re proud to. You work outside, in some of the most inspiring land in this state. You’ve got men under you. You’ve got responsibility and the power that comes with it. Sometimes, what happens on the Transmission Line is a matter of life and death. The job certainly beats custodial. You would retire at fifty-five with full salary and full benefits for your wife and yourself. That’s a little better than most of us do here at DWP. But you’re a friend and I will take care of you. As I’ve always said—it’s not about the water, it’s about the power. Christ in heaven, just talking about this promotion makes me jealous of you.”

  Cedros swallowed hard. His heartbeat actually sped up with mention of the Owens Gorge cabins up near the Sierra Nevadas, which is where some of the Transmission Line and Aqueduct One employees were billeted. DWP had built the homes decades ago, because DWP employees were often heckled, hassled, and harassed by the Owens Valley locals. The locals thought the DWP was pure evil for putting their river in a tube and sending it south 250 miles to build Los Angeles back in the early 1900s. When that happened, most of the Owens Valley went from being a verdant green paradise to a thirsty desert dust bowl, and it had never fully recovered.

  But the cabins themselves were beautiful and serene, jostled together in the gorge near the DWP power plant, rough-hewn cabins with intersecting lawns of deep soft grass and the snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains shading them from the summer heat. The constant tumult of the Owens River in the background—briefly paroled from its tube to turn the power-plant turbines—was a hypnotic and powerful presence.

  He had taken Marianna there once just to see the little community. They were cautiously welcomed onto the private compound by a guy who had helped get him on at DWP in the first place. They’d walked in the shade of the cottonwoods, going from cabin to cabin and house to house, meeting the people who lived there. And to Cedros’s mind this private world, which looked so lovely and peaceful and beautiful from the outside, looked even better when you got inside: friendly people, kids playing on the grass, the moms barefoot and smiling, and the men talking water and drinking beer in the shade while the California sky smiled down the most unusual shade of blue that Cedros had ever seen.

  It was no L.A.

  No guns.

  No dope.

  No garbage flying and whores dying and junkies lying in their own vomit on the street.

  No way.

  “That,” Marianna had said later as they walked to their car, “is heaven.”

  Cedros pulled himself from the memory to see Resources Director Choat looking down at him.

  “Sounds good, doesn’t it?” asked Choat.

  “Sure.”

  “Joan and I lived there briefly. Some of the happiest days of our lives.”

  “I won’t contact Tavarez,” said Cedros. “I can’t go to La Eme, ask for a favor, and come back a free man. You may not understand that.”

  “I certainly don’t. And we’re not asking any favors.”

  Cedros shook his head and looked away. “What would you expect him to do for us?”

  “Neutralize the bodyguard. Discourage the woman from pressing her charges. Retrieve the formula for us to study.”

  Cedros just stared at Choat. “What exactly do you mean by neutralize and discourage?”

  Choat shrugged. “Maybe El Jefe will have some ideas.”

  “What’s in it for him, besides a promotion for a distant relative he’s never even seen?”

  “I can divert two hundred thousand dollars from the Resource Emergencies Fund, and replenish it at budget time,” said Choat. “Some of the board of directors have spine. They are trusting and sympathetic. Mr. Tavarez can use the payment for his appeals. Or maybe just to provide for his family.”

  Spine was Choat’s word for what it took to run the DWP. Members of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners—citizens elected to “guide” the gigantic utility—either had spine or did not. Spine meant the advancement of the DWP above all else. To Choat, DWP was larger than anything and anyone, even the individuals who ran it, including himself. It was exactly what its name said it was—power. Choat had once told Cedros that he was honored to be a pit bull for history.

  Cedros thought now, for the thousandth time, that if they could just purchase Frankie’s formula away from her, everything would be fine.

  If they could manage that, then there would be no possibility of rain on demand. No “moisture acceleration,” as old Charley Hatfield had called it. Los Angeles would stay as it was. DWP would remain the largest and most powerful water and power utility on Earth, right here in the middle of the desert that made it all possible. Choat could be what he’d always wanted to be—the modern relative of Mulholland and Eaton and Lippincott, the dreamers who first saw the Owens Valley and decided to bring its treasure to Los Angeles. Guys with spine. Guys with their portraits in the lobby. The guys who brought water to the city, but not too much of it. Because, as Choat liked to say—only abundance can ruin us.

  Of course Choat had already tried the straightforward approach—offered Frances Hatfield a substantial sum of money to do her work under
the auspices of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. In fact, Choat had pretty much offered her the farm: a stupendously large salary; a support staff of meteorologists and hydrologists and chemists; virtually unlimited funding for R&D; and practically any DWP land in the state—hundreds of thousands of acres—on which to set up her rainmaking headquarters.

  Naturally, if she made rain, DWP would own the know-how and the equipment.

  Frankie Hatfield said no.

  “I won’t go to Tavarez, sir,” said Cedros. “I know that world. If I step in I’ll never get back out.”

  “The alternative,” said Choat, “is to live your life as a known stalker of women. Marianna and little Tony deserve better than that. And the department, of course, would have to sever all ties with you.”

  Choat stared at Cedros then sat back down. “When you meet with Tavarez to explain our proposal,” he said, “make sure he sees your pictures of the bodyguard—the ones they didn’t take away from you. It’s essential that he knows who we’re dealing with. He’ll help us. I promise you. You have thirty seconds to decide what you’re going to do, but don’t even pretend to think about it.”

  16

  Cedros 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 A
mpostela,” 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.