Storm Runners

by Parker, T. Jefferson

  He reached out and claimed one of the envelopes, slid it back into his coat pocket. His fingertips brushed the acetate lining of his jacket, which was soaked through with sweat.

  “Half now,” he said.

  The Olmec head traced the movement of his hand, then aimed its sunglasses at Cedros’s face.

  “This comes back to you the second I know it’s done,” said Cedros. He was surprised at the relaxed strength of his own voice because every muscle in his body felt tight. “And done right.”

  Ampostela drummed his blunt fingers on the envelope. He brought it to his nose and drew in the scent of the money. His tattooed arm rippled and swayed, half muscle and half blubber. The Aztec warrior prepared to bite into the human heart he held in one hand like a peach.

  “Ricky,” said Ampostela. “You trust this guy?”

  The man with the dog shrugged.

  Ampostela reached over and poured Cedros some beer. “Good,” he said. “Drink.”

  AMPOSTELA WAITED FOR Cedros’s gold sedan to roll down Azusa Avenue then he called Jimmy up in Crescent City. He told Jimmy to get a pen and paper and copy down a message word for word.

  Jimmy took the very brief dictation and said El Jefe would have it by eight the next morning.

  Then Jimmy called Shawnelle down in Redding and she took the message word for word too, along with a warning from Jimmy about getting it to El Jefe with speed and accuracy.

  Shawnelle called her sister, Tonya Post, back up in Crescent City even though it was past dinnertime and the chemo made her very tired, but Tonya was actually happy to hear from her big sister and they yapped awhile before Tonya took down the message for her husband, Jason. It was a hassle for him, sure, and it could cost him his job, but it was easy money.

  A message to El Jefe? Two hundred bucks from Shawnelle after Shawnelle took her fifty, and it always came one week later, right on time.

  Tonya wrote slowly and asked Shawnelle to repeat herself several times to make sure it was right.

  Ced wants all done by Sun night. Fifty extra, half here now, smells good. MA.

  A few minutes later she walked in on Jason in the garage, where he was playing “Halo,” blasting alien soldiers into pools of blood hour after hour while the half gallons of supermarket vodka and the cream sodas he mixed them with disappeared at a breakneck rate. She held her robe up snug at the chin but she felt the Northern California cold come instantly through her socks and into her feet then up her legs and into her feminine parts, where the remains of the tumor lay hopefully dead forever.

  Jason wore an old down jacket and a blaze-orange hunter’s cap against the chill. He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. He hadn’t looked at her with much of anything but hostility for a year before her diagnosis, and now all he could muster was a glazed resentment so thorough it sometimes frightened her but most often just made her wish he’d move out, send child support, and leave her and Damian alone.

  “Money, honey,” she said, waving the paper.

  “Put it on the couch. I’m beating this level.”

  “It’s right here.”

  “How you feeling, hon?” he asked, eyes on the screen.

  “Kinda ragged. Damian’s down. I’m thinking I’ll do the same.”

  “I’ll be a while.”

  “It’s for El Jefe. Important stuff.”

  “You don’t know what’s important and what isn’t.”

  “Two hundred is important to me.”

  “I said leave it.”

  “I heard you.”

  “You want us to fight or you want to just go get some sleep?” he asked. He still didn’t take his eyes off the TV. A silver figure of some kind exploded in a storm of blood.

  She turned back into the house without answering, heard another explosion.

  “Ah fuck, I just died.”

  You died a long time ago, Tonya thought, but I’m not going to.

  POST WENT THROUGH Thursday morning with a belligerent hangover. The aspirin bounced off his headache like it was armored but there wasn’t a lot to do after the breakfast mess. There had been rumors of La Eme versus La Nuestra Familia, and he could feel the tension in the yard and the mess hall, an almost audible buzz that the officers learned to listen to like a broadcast from a distant radio. The numbers of officers had been doubled in the mess and yard for a week now and it made you feel better to look through that jungle of orange-clad felons and see the stalwart blue of your fellow bulls lined up along all four walls with bats and hats—helmets, actually—ready to put the wood to somebody if they got the chance.

  He gave Tavarez the message as they walked back to the cells in near privacy, El Jefe given his usual wide berth by the other inmates. Post always memorized the messages rather than writing down something that could be intercepted or traced back to him. Through the headache he conjured the words and relayed them to Mike Tavarez not once but twice. El Jefe walked slowly and stared down at the floor while he listened, then nodded, then picked up his pace again.

  “Can you get me into the library tonight?” asked Tavarez.

  “Five hundred.”

  “I’ll need the laptop charged and ready.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “Then my message back is, yes.”

  “Okay,” said Post.

  “One simple yes.”

  “I can handle that too, El Heffie. Hey, how was your babe last night?”

  “Very nice.”

  TWELVE HOURS LATER Ariel Lejas was rousted from a Spanish-language soap opera by his niece, who rushed into the darkened room to give her tío another message from El Jefe.

  He took the printed sheet and thanked her and waited for her to leave the room. He looked out the windows at the blue-black Riverside sky and the great palm trees of Victoria Avenue drooping in the cricket-loud night.

  The message was four words, all in English:

  Do it by Sunday.

  Lejas looked at his watch. It would be an honor to deal sooner than later with the Big Swine who had brought Mike Tavarez such misfortune.

  23

  Stromsoe trailed Frankie that evening and night on her rounds to report the San Diego weather. His ear rang and his jaw throbbed as regularly as a metronome, which he used as a reminder to be alert, careful, and ready. Choat’s punch had left him spoiling for a fight.

  Earlier Stromsoe told the X-ray tech the jaw ache was a karate-class sparring accident. After pronouncing the jawbone unbroken, he told Stromsoe he might want to try yoga.

  Frankie’s last dispatch was from the Cabrillo Lighthouse on Point Loma, behind which the city sparkled in the October night. Stromsoe stood away from her and the crew and audience, keeping tight to the shadows to watch and see. He felt proud to know Frankie and slightly disbelieving that she had danced with him the night before. He thought of her skin touching his arm. He thought she was interesting, unpredictable, and extraordinarily lovely. He liked being near her, something he could say about only a handful of people on the planet.

  Now let’s get to the rain that’s developing for the weekend…

  Stromsoe wished again that he could tell her a few more things about himself, just to give a balanced picture. It was hard to stand on half of a foundation. The last thing he was was a liar.

  He knew that his affection for her was supposed to make him weak because that’s what manly stories always told you, but he wondered why those feelings couldn’t just as easily help him stay sharp and capable. He felt strong right now as he looked at her and he silently promised her again that nothing bad would happen.

  As he sat across from Frankie at the Top of the Hyatt later that night, his jaw still throbbed and his ear still rang. He had co-opted the pain and noise and made watchdogs of them. Compared to the bomb two years ago, this was nothing.

  “I’ll bet you want a rematch,” she said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Something tells me you’ll get it.”

  They had a light dinner and coffee. Stroms
oe looked down forty stories to the shrunken city, at the bay busy with its ferry and yachts and lights that glittered across to Coronado and Point Loma, beyond which the water became the boatless black Pacific stretching all the way to the sky.

  He quickly noted all of this, then his attention went back to Frankie Hatfield. Again he felt the gap between her innocence and his experience and it made him want to speak.

  THEY WALKED THROUGH the Gaslamp Quarter, had a drink at Croce’s, and listened to the singer.

  She caught the look on his face. “Talk to me.”

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” said Stromsoe.

  “I love secrets and I’m good at keeping them.”

  “I have one to tell you.”

  “Maybe we should go outside,” she said. “Get some quiet and some fresh air.”

  They headed up the avenue past the bars and restaurants. The Gaslamp Quarter was busy with traffic and pedestrians and they could hear scraps of music floating out from the clubs.

  “You don’t have to hear this,” he said. “No happy ending.”

  “You’ve got my curiosity up. Play fair now.”

  “It’s a story that explains some things.”

  They walked on in silence while Stromsoe tried to find the right words.

  “We’d been after Mike Tavarez for eight years,” he said. “From just about the second he got out of Corcoran in ’93. He was rising to the top of La Eme. He was number five in the organization, then number three. By 2001 he was El Jefe, number one boss, undisputed. He got there by being smart and by making people rich. Know what he liked at Harvard? Business and history. Way back in the eighties, in Corcoran, Mike saw that La Eme needed personnel if it was going to reach far beyond the prison walls. And he saw that the barrio street gangs needed direction, motivation, and a business plan. The old gangs, like F Troop that Mike clicked up with? Gangs that fought over turf and honor and girls? Mike came to believe that they were ridiculous. That was a radical thought at the time, for a gangster. He thought they were stupid, counterproductive, and a thing of the past. Reagan was deregulating the country, trying to make healthy competition. Mike, he wanted to do the opposite—get the gangs under one color, get a monopoly. Back then, La Eme was run by Paul Zolorio. He was doing time in the same Corcoran cell block as Mike. Zolorio had the power to make things happen, and believe me, they were happening. Coke was flooding the country big-time by then, and when Zolorio put La Eme’s clout together with the barrio gangbangers, it made the biggest distribution network in the country. La Eme conscripted those gangs, those armies of potential drug salesmen. They killed the resisters, charged their taxes, and watched the money flood in. It was an ingenious move, because Mike and Zolorio were able to get all these factions working more or less together, making money. It was perfect timing, and in a perfect location—Southern California—right on the border and one of the biggest blow markets in the world. The money was phenomenal. And of course Mike learned to put away his share, plus some. Sure, he was La Eme but he was taking care of himself pretty damned well. By ’95 they were bringing in millions of dollars a year in drug distribution taxes alone, and Mike had his finger in most of it. Some ugly things went down—nature of the business. Here I was, tracking my old friend, the guy who played clarinet in my band. The guy who had beaten Hallie half to death. I’d stay up late at night sometimes, thinking of ways to get to him. Sometimes I’d dream about him, what he’d done to Hallie all those years ago. It infuriated me that I was the good guy, a cop, and we had resources and manpower and we couldn’t catch up with him. Hallie told me to take myself off the Narcotics Division, to try Homicide or Traffic or Fraud. I was too stubborn. It was personal and moral. The way I saw it, it was good against bad. Us and them. That was my simpleminded take. I’ve always been uncomplicated about the law, and breaking the law, and what’s right and wrong. It’s a flaw of mine.”

  He felt the great wave of the past towering over him just like the night before, when he’d shown her the pictures. But this wave was even darker and bigger because he was the perpetrator in this story, not the victim.

  “So every time we caught a glimpse of Mike he was farther away, at a different level,” Stromsoe said. “We couldn’t touch him in Mexico—the corruption was too thick. We couldn’t touch him in Colombia—it was another universe down there. And we had a helluva time putting our fingers on him here in the U.S., too. He’d sneak up to Laguna from Tijuana in an old car or in a cigarette boat called Reina, stay with his family for a few weeks. By the time we realized he was under our noses he would be gone again. You have to understand how many people were looking out for him. He had six men living on the Laguna compound alone. They were chauffeurs and gardeners and assistants to his wife and children, but they were pistoleros first and foremost. Mike was El Jefe. If you helped El Jefe you made a powerful friend. Hell, they were writing songs about him. He was a hero. Nobody was going to help us. He was safe in any barrio in the world, unless La Nuestra Familia was in charge.”

  “La Nuestra Familia? Rivals?”

  “Sworn and deadly. LNF is mostly in the northern part of the state.”

  They stopped and looked in the window of a store devoted to lamps made from plaster seashells. The pure white whelks and conchs and abalone shells looked stark and peaceful glowing around their colored bulbs.

  They crossed Island and headed up Fourth.

  “Then, we caught a break,” he said. “Mike had a longtime lover, a woman named Ofelia. She’d visited him a lot at Corcoran when she was just a girl—and coached him in the Nahuatl language. She was a nearly full-blooded Aztec, fluent in a dialect that Tavarez was using to build a language code for La Eme. After he got out of Corcoran in ’93, Mike shacked up with Ofelia for a couple of months. She was seventeen. But Mike had plans—he dumped her and married Miriam Acosta, Zolorio’s niece. Ofelia fled back to Mexico and entered a convent. A year later Mike went down there and talked her out of it. He never stopped seeing Ofelia, even married, even as a father. Which meant we never stopped watching her.”

  “Did she go and come back to the United States?”

  “Not quite that far. Mike set her up in a nice apartment in Tijuana’s Colonia district. You think TJ is all filth and poverty but it’s not. I saw the place and it was nice—up in the hills and gated, always two gunmen outside. Always two. When Mike got more money and power he bought another apartment in Tijuana and one in La Jolla. Ofelia would rotate according to where Mike was going to be. Sometimes she’d rotate according to where Mike wasn’t. They had handfuls of cell phones. They’d use them for a day or two and toss them. So, no way for us to set up good intercepts. It came down to physical surveillance of three known places, plus whatever safe houses we hadn’t discovered yet. Between us, the TJ cops, and the La Jolla PD, it was just about impossible to get every place staked out at the same time to see who was where. Plus some of the TJ cops were on Mike’s payroll. So you’d finally get a couple of TJ detectives to check one of the Colonia apartments and they’d run into two on-duty TJ uniforms who were Mike’s. We’d find out a month later that he wasn’t there anyway—he’d been way up in Laguna with his family. It was crazy.”

  “Cops on the drug payrolls,” said Frankie. “Now that scares me.”

  “Me too. We felt completely handcuffed. Then I got an idea. We picked up Ofelia in La Jolla and flew her up to Santa Ana in a DEA helicopter. This was August 2001, just before 9/11, and we were a multiagency task force—we had a fat budget, toys galore, and latitude. They sat her down in a women’s-jail interview room. I walked in and she recognized me immediately, called me Señor Matt. She was dark and pretty. Wild-seeming. Expensive everything. She had a temper but she was intelligent too. I told her she and Mike had a large problem. She thought that was funny. I told her that she and Mike were being shadowed by soldiers of La Nuestra Familia. She said that was impossible—LNF had no idea where she and Mike would be. I told her that in the course of our surveillance we had id
entified four of them. We had them in our sights, just like we had Mike and her in our sights. I rattled off their names. By then she was listening, sizing up my tale. Yes, I told her, we wanted to arrest Tavarez more than anything, but if we couldn’t get a clean arrest on him, we didn’t want La Nuestra Familia to get him. I was acting as a former friend, I told her, a man who respected Mike. I showed her some of our surveillance pictures of LNF gangsters on a stakeout of their own. We cropped them so you couldn’t tell exactly where they were taken. Ofelia was starting to believe me. She was easy to read, her emotions right there on her face. Then I showed her some mugs of these guys, real heavies, murderers all. She studied them. Then I tossed out some pictures that we’d gotten just a few weeks earlier. They showed the torture and murder of an LNF gangster who had betrayed his boss to La Eme. A big guy, young and strong. The brutality of what they did to him was inconceivable. Unimaginable. They injected him with lidocaine to keep his heart beating every time it looked like he’d die. They kept him alive for three days of that. Three days. They’d sent the video to La Eme as a warning.”

  Frankie stopped and looked at him. Stromsoe lightly took her arm and they crossed the street.

  “What did she do?”

  “Exactly what we hoped she’d do. I drove her back to La Jolla. Took my time, let the pressure build. We’d made the arrangements with the Tijuana police ahead of time so they were ready if Ofelia blew into the Colonia to tell Mike that La Nuestra Familia was after her, which is exactly what she did. TJ police tracked her to a Colonia apartment that night. It was a new one, one we didn’t even know about. It wasn’t even furnished yet. Tavarez was there. It turned into a western. Good cops and dirty cops and Mike’s private army of pistoleros. A mess. Six dead in less than five minutes. Ofelia was one of them. Tavarez got away.”

  Frankie stopped again. “The LNF wasn’t watching Mike and Ofelia at all.”