by Chuck Logan
“You put him through school to cut hair?” asked Danny.
“Nah, he picked that up in the joint.”
“Life is not fair. And anything that can go wrong, will,” he observed.
“A-fucking-men,” said Travis. They drove in silence for a while, entering a built-up area. Travis whipped into another strip mall, but this one was broad, paved, land scaped, full of late-model cars and devoid of Mexicans.
“What is this?” Danny balked as Travis walked him into a tanning salon.
Travis spun on his Spanish heels. “Hector just got his new birth certificate. It took nine months. Yours is in the glove compartment of the truck. Along with a new Social Security card. Tomorrow when you get a driver’s license, they take your picture. Right now your face looks like veal. Comprende?
“After you get your temporary license, we go to the bank and you open a checking account. Then I sell you this truck and the tools in it. Then we take you to look at the house you’re going to buy from us on a land contract. You’re getting it at a steal because of a stipulation we write into the contract, that you rehab it. You with me so far.”
“What about the computer, printer, modem?”
“In the works. The best money can buy.”
Danny pushed past Travis into the salon and walked up to the receptionist. “How long is the wait to get into a booth?”
An hour later they were strolling past an open fish market on the Municipal Wharf that jutted into Monterey Bay from downtown Santa Cruz.
“You don’t need that jacket, it’s warm,” said Travis.
“That’s okay,” said Danny, hugging his jacket.
“See that.” Travis pointed at a large mound of fish flesh on ice. “That’s a bonito, that fish rode El Nino from Hawaii.
Everything here is upside down this winter.”
Danny smiled; the idea that things were upside down put him on top for a change. Soon they were, as Travis had predicted, sitting outside at a picnic table, eating fish and chips.
Lassitude wrapped Danny. He watched the twilight play on his newly grilled arm. His reflection in the restaurant window stared back at him. Tanned, the contacts, the shorter, swept-back hair. Eerie.
“See that big hotel over there on the boardwalk,” said Travis. “That’s where we’ll stay tonight. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the house.”
Danny swung his eyes, saw a lot of hotels. Yawned. There was a beach, but nobody was swimming. And the Coney Island fretwork of an amusement park. And sailboats. Some tourists, Japanese maybe, were tossing shreds of hot dog buns off the pier to sea lions that roared hollowly below them among the pilings. A pelican perched on the railing in back of Travis, and behind the pelican the setting sun smelted the smoky sky and the ocean into a sheet of burning amber chrome.
He had been trained to ruthlessly excise cliches from his writing. But right now, he couldn’t improve on: today is the first day of the rest of your life.
52
Danny woke early, windows thrown open to the swoosh of Pacific surf, and went slowly at the day, one cup of room service coffee at a time. He took the carafe of coffee and the little silver creamer out to the small table on the balcony that overlooked the fog-soaked boardwalk. Wet cement tickled under his bare feet. Mist. Dew. Everything was jeweled. He could make out the ghostly shapes of palm trees and pine trees side by side, and the white tufts of the tall lollipop grass that Travis called pampas grass. Red tile roofs and squared-off hacienda architecture.
The gourmet air smelled like rising tropical dough. Dank.
Humid.
People came here to start over. They had to. No more land to run away on. Me too, he thought.
The fantasy returned. Warm in his lap. As the first blades of dawn stirred the mist he pictured Ida Rain sitting across from him in a silky little bathrobe, kind of a kimono thing.
Saw it draped open to show the one perfect crease that marked her smooth stomach. They’d have hidden the scars on her new face. Tucked them up under new chin. Her wide expressive eyes would be brimming with gratitude.
If I did all this, I can make that happen, too.
The kind of generosity that could make amends for the death of Caren Angland. Yes. Exactly.
Purposefully, he glanced back over the California Rules of the Road booklet Travis had given him to study last night.
An hour later, when Travis called his room, he was showered, shaved, and upbeat.
At breakfast Travis presented him with a new wallet containing a Social Security card, and, nestled between the clean-smelling leather folds, four hundred dollars in cash. And he handed over the Photostat of his new birth certificate. He also gave him an index card on which were written three more pieces of his new identity.
His address: 173 Valentino Lane, Watsonville, California, his phone number, and his employer, Acme Remodeling.
“Which is basically me, Joe Travis, Doing Business As,”
said Travis.
They had a full day. Travis seemed to genuinely enjoy himself. He grooved with quiet glee at being able to move behind the scenery at will-to effect deft custom alterations of reality.
First they stopped at a State Farm office, and Danny purchased auto insurance, which he’d need at the Santa Cruz County Building on Ocean Street, their next stop. Travis preceded him into the license bureau to put the fix in. Then Danny went in and waited in line, then waited in another line with a lot of people talking Spanish. Then he sat in a room with a lot of these people and took a multiple-choice test about the rules of the road in California.
An hour later the test was graded and he stood in a third line. Travis had arranged for him to skip “behind the wheel”
to save time. He surrendered his fake Michigan license Photostat, used his new contacts to read the optical chart, and stood, short haired and tanned, for a photograph.
Then he completed his first transaction as Daniel Storey, paying for his California driver’s license. The clerk filled out a temporary form good for thirty days and told 306 / CHUCK LOGAN
him his license would be mailed within two weeks.
Then they got back in the truck and drove Highway I out of Santa Cruz. Travis joked, calling it Highway 911. “More fact than joke, you get ‘down below,’ that’s what they call fuckin’ L.A.”
Soon they were out of town, into the country. The fog had drifted up to baste the low-hanging clouds. Danny began to sweat.
“Welcome to Steinbeck country, the Pajaro Valley,” waxed Travis. “Strawberries, artichokes, apples, blackberries, lettuce and celery. This, and the Salinas Valley down south, is the stronghold of the United Farm Workers.”
Danny was too drowsy to pursue it, so he nodded and took in a road sign. They’d turned off the highway onto a secondary road named Freedom Boulevard.
“Freedom’s the town this side of Watsonville,” said Travis.
Danny smiled. Took it as a good omen. Another turn onto Varni Road, then a right onto Amesti Road. They were out in the sticks. Danny liked that, too.
Then Travis turned one last time, onto Valentino Lane, and passed a sign: DEAD END. And that’s where they went, past tidy one-story white stucco homes with fanatically manicured cactus gardens, until they ran out of road and stopped in front of a six-foot-tall slat fence overgrown with bushy vines. A whitewashed hacienda was about a hundred yards to the right separated by a corral. But no horses. Danny did see about five cats lolling in the muzzy shadows of the fence posts. The next nearest house was almost five hundred yards away.
Travis got out and turned a key in the padlock on the gate, which was barely visible among the overgrown shrubs. Pulled the gate open, returned to the truck and drove in.
The house was a simple box, flat roof, painted dark brown and tucked under the leaves of a tall spreading tree THE BIG LAW/307
in the backyard. The picture windows along one front side were smoke streaked. A corner of the trim was buckled and charred. The fire had flashed in the kitchen, shot through the
doorway into the attached garage, and burned a hole in the garage roof before it was contained. Plastic sheeting was tacked over the mangled garage shingles.
Once there had been extensive gardens surrounding the place, but they had reverted to thick brush. Tall yucca cacti poked through here and there, and he saw a few smaller prickly pears.
“Are there snakes?” he asked Travis as they got out.
“Nah, bull snakes maybe.”
Travis unlocked the door, and they went into a dirty empty living room that reeked of lingering smoke damage. The hideous orange shag carpet was tinged with soot.
“This end of the place is shot,” said Travis, walking him into the kitchen, where a black slash up one wall revealed charcoal wall studs. A cheap GE electric range and refrigerator were plugged in at the edge of the living room. Neither had smoke damage. Used. Recent additions. The tour continued. “But back here it’s not bad.” They came out of the kitchen onto a broad screened porch that overlooked a tiered redwood deck that fitted around a gnarled spreading oak.
Travis led him down a hall, pointed out the working bathroom and the two bedrooms at the end. One was empty.
The other was stockpiled with furniture, boxes of bedding, utensils, dishes, mattress and springs. It looked new or, at least, not fire damaged.
“We brought all this stuff in to use in a pinch if we have to hide somebody.” He folded his arms and perused Danny.
“You sure you want to do this? It’s going to be hot sweaty work.”
Danny grinned. “Hey, I eat this shit up.”
Travis squinted and cocked his head. “You sure you used to be a reporter?”
“What’s that?”
Grinning, they went out the screened door, down the deck.
The back lawn was knee deep in weeds and ended in an extensive oak woods.
“What’s that way?” Danny pointed past the oaks.
“Just fields. It’s pretty isolated here. That’s what appealed to the asshole who used to own it. Remote. Good place to set up a meth lab. Except he was an idiot who flunked basic chemistry and he burned down his kitchen when we busted the place. We seized the house as assets. Same way we came into the truck out there. We were getting ready to auction them off when your case file came across my desk. And I got to thinking. We sell it to you on paper and you fix it up and sell it back to us-you’d have a legitimate paper trail to fall back on. Plus, you get a quiet place to work. Like in the proposal you put together during your intake interview.”
Danny smiled. “It’s perfect.” He pointed to the white house next door past the corral. “Who lives there?”
“Couple of women.”
“Oh yeah,” said Danny, making a long wolfish face.
“Forget it, they’re lesbians. This is Santa Cruz. Five percent of the county population is registered lickers.”
“That can’t be right?” Out of reflex, Danny questioned the statistics.
“Didn’t say it was right, but those are accurate numbers.
C’mon, we have some serious shopping to do.”
Travis was on a tight time line, so they made whirlwind rounds. Danny opened a bank account in Watsonville. A $6,000 money order from Acme Remodeling signed over to Daniel Storey launched the account. The money was combination living stipend and business expenses to get started on the house. Then Travis sold him the truck and the tools in it for a ridiculous $1,000. They transferred the title and registration in the bank and had the deal notarized. Danny was the legitimate owner of a 1989 Chevy truck. He had a bank account, driver’s license, house, and a phone number.
And the money in his coat.
Danny drove his new truck, feeling his way down the unfamiliar roads back to Santa Cruz to drop Travis at the hotel.
Travis left him with a county map unfolded on the front seat and the route back to Valentino Lane marked in yellow Magic Marker. “Okay. I’ll call every day and be back in a week.
Give you time to settle in. Then we’ll go shopping for a computer. Slightest problem you call Travis.” He waved, turned, and walked away.
Danny put the truck in gear and drove from the hotel, turned up Ocean Street and traveled under mingled palm crowns and tall evergreens. El Nino was taking a lunch break.
The sun peeked out and rolled a blue cobalt sheet of sky in back of the scattering clouds.
People crowded the streets. Aging hippies on skate-boards with sparse ponytails, tourists, cyber millionaires, and Mexican lettuce pickers. And students showing lots of brown California skin. Shorts. Sandals. The clean air had been rinsed in the rain and mist, now the sun cured it. Dizzy on his freedom, he missed the turnoff from Highway 1 and had to backtrack. He stopped at a corner liquor store and bought a six-pack of Coors.
Follow the yellow Magic-Markered twenny-brick road.
He found his way back to the locked gate at the end of Valentino Lane, got out of the truck, held the keys to the truck and the house over his head and shook them in his fist.
Like he’d been handed the keys to all the locks in all the prisons in the world.
Find James.
How the hell do I find James. I’m going home to change diapers. Goddammit. Broker drove north, away from St. Paul, staring ahead into a Minnesota sky that could inspire Sibelius.
He cocked an eye to his rearview mirror to see if any butternut-gray Ford Rangers with tinted windows were behind him. All clear.
On his right, a flock of ravens descended on a snow-covered field like a shower of black arrows. Reflex thought.
Something dead over in those trees.
He continued his argument with Keith.
So you decided to play Holden Caulfield. Catcher in the Russians. Intercepting suitcases? You assigned a role to Caren.
The battered wife. She would tattle on you to a reporter and end your career. You didn’t confide in her. Can’t confide in anyone, can you? But she stuck her nose in.
Then James had bounced weird.
So why find James?
The money is an excuse. James knows what really happened at the Devil’s Kettle. He can blow your cover. So use me.
So maybe I find a thread to follow. Maybe I find James.
Then what, Keith? Your new Russian “buddies” kill him. More credit accrues to your mole account.
Do I owe you that much?
Broker shook his head. He was running out of separate compartments in which to store things.
“You don’t look so hot,” said Jeff.
They sat in Jeff’s office. Kit hugged the Beanie Babies moose she’d acquired from Sally Jeffords. Broker debated whether he should turn in his badge and ID. He nodded his head in agreement. “Didn’t sleep much last night. Motel bed.”
“Well, it’s up to the FBI now,” said Jeff. “Maybe they can tie James to those letters.” His desk was piled with paper.
Petty crime and nuisance complaints go on. Jeff had other things on his mind. He didn’t mention the badge, so Broker kept it.
He reached down and wiped Kit’s runny nose.
“Cold going around,” said Jeff.
Broker went home and called Garrison’s office to see if the FBI had made any progress on the hate letters. An agent informed him that Garrison wasn’t working there anymore and gave no forwarding information. No one in the office knew anything about the letters. Good-bye.
His eyes drifted south, to the cabin on the point. The glow of a TV screen illuminated the windows. Come all the way up here and watch TV.
The next morning he watched the snow melt.
Saber-toothed winter was supposed to keep the riffraff out.
But January slogged into the North Shore like a muddy green tramp, reeking of April. In town, piles of snow dwindled to humps of black cinders.
The second day he was home, Kit woke up coughing, nose plugged. He spent a sleepless night holding her in his arms, fearful she couldn’t breathe lying down. In the morning he called the clinic, made an appointment and took her in. Ear infection. Am
oxicillin, three times a day.
After another sleepless night, he looked out on a damp morning and saw more ground than snow. The next day it was mud.
Kit’s illness gave his mind a rest from thinking about Keith.
A powerful urge to go buy a pack of cigarettes befriended him in the middle of the night. He put on his bathrobe, sat in the kitchen and fought back with frozen yogurt.
Refilling his bowl, he opened the thick volume, DSM-IV, he’d purchased at a Barnes and Noble on the way out of St. Paul. He turned to the section on obsessive-compulsive personalities.
Four days of antibiotics reduced Kit’s infection, and Broker bundled her up to go grocery shopping. Returning home, as he flicked his right turn signal coming up on his driveway, he noticed the truck.
Hidden in the trees, a hundred yards down the road. Right on the edge of his property. New Ford Ranger 250. Tinted windows. Confederate brown-gray. He grimaced, glanced at Kit, who was doing her windshield wiper exercises half-speed in the car seat.
He slowed and passed the vehicle. Damn. No plates.
Dealer’s sticker in the window. He hurried into his turn, gunned the Jeep and nearly rammed the porch because he was reaching over in back, unbuckling her seat straps one-handed.
He swept her over the seat, and she squealed, thinking it was great fun. Up the steps. Plunged in his house key, turned the lock, was inside and reaching into the closet.
One hand in behind the coats, the other high, reaching for the box of shells. Kit stomped at his knee, a tiny Samurai figure armored in Patagonia fleece. Broker loaded the twelve-gauge with double ought buck.
Now what.
With no place to put her, he did the unthinkable, checked his house with her in one arm and the shotgun poised in the other, like an ancient dueling pistol. Satisfied the house was secure, he strapped her in the high chair,
put the chair in the laundry room, and closed the door.
Just for a minute, honey. Promise. She was screaming before he was out the back door.
Broker checked the garage, the workshop, and then ran into the trees. Winded. Even without the cigarettes, he hadn’t really worked out for months. Then he slowed. The truck was gone.