Rose City Renegade

by DL Barbur

  “I believe we have a mutual friend,” Bolle continued. “Gina Pace sends her regards.”

  Lubbock looked like he had been punched in the stomach. Bolle turned to Zach, the guard.

  “So, what can you tell me about this place?” he asked.

  Zach knew his stuff. I had to give him that. He pulled out a map, gave us a high level overview of how the system worked. He did an excellent job of explaining where the water came in from giant conduits up in the mountains, how it was stored in a pair of giant underground tanks, and then distributed all over the system. He kept giving sidelong glances at Lubbock as he talked, as if expecting his boss to weigh in on something, but Lubbock stayed silent. Lubbock probably only had a vague understanding of how all this worked.

  “We do a combination of random vehicle and foot patrols through the area,” Zach said. “We can cover more ground in the vehicles, of course, but we need to get out periodically on foot to really see stuff. I was just about to make a round on foot.”

  He looked around, obviously nonplussed at the idea of leading a gaggle around, but willing to do it anyway.

  “I appreciate the briefing, Officer Wilson,” Bolle said. “I have a commitment downtown. I was hoping Special Agent Miller and Special Agent Dalton could accompany you.”

  He looked at us, then unconsciously looked at our shoes. I was wearing a pair of Danner boots and Dalton was wearing a pair of those Scarpa mountaineering boots the Delta Force guys had always loved so much. I saw him relax a little. The guy probably put on some serious miles in this job and didn’t relish slowing down for some office weenies.

  Lubbock begged off too. He seemed hell-bent on getting out of here as quickly as possible. Wilson grabbed a waist pack from his vehicle, checked out on his radio and we were off.

  At first glance, you’d never guess that a substantial chunk of the city’s drinking water passed through this area. The park looked like a series of big, open grassy fields surrounded by patches of woods, but if you looked closely you started to see utility vaults, little concrete bunkers, and the occasional pipe here and there. Wilson went about his job as we shadowed. It was clear the guy knew the place well. He checked lots of nooks and crannies that no one would notice at first glance. In a particularly dense stand of trees, he found the remains of a homeless encampment. There was a small fire ring, some trash, some unburied human waste. He took some pictures and jotted down a few notes.

  “So what’s the biggest problem you guys have out here?” Dalton asked.

  “Graffiti. Vandalism. Issues with homeless people like this. Kids come up here and screw around and smoke dope. We get the occasional lost or injured hiker.”

  “But no real attempts to tamper with the water system?” I asked.

  He almost laughed. “No. This isn’t the place for that. I’m not sure what type of tip you guys got, but there are much more vulnerable places than this.”

  Dalton nodded. “I’ve read the vulnerability assessment.”

  Wilson seemed impressed by that. He and Dalton launched into a discussion about the water system that quickly left me in the dust. They talked about buried and unburied conduits, seismic vulnerability, backflow prevention and a bunch of other stuff that only vaguely made sense to me. It was clear Dalton had studied up.

  The whole trip around the complex took a couple of hours. I wasn’t the expert that Dalton was, but I could tell that breaching the actual reservoir would take massive amounts of explosives, and plenty of time to prepare them. It wasn’t like a guy could drive up with a bomb in a backpack and do significant damage. Wilson showed us some valves and distribution equipment. It would be problematic if they were damaged, but the system could be back up and running in a matter of days.

  None of this made any sense. The only real value of an attack here would be the symbolism. Todd and Marshall were evil. That was an old-fashioned word that people were uncomfortable with these days, but I thought it fit. Maybe there were limits, though. Maybe they balked at the idea of wholesale slaughter and would launch an attack here that would get attention, and cost millions of dollars, but not take many lives.

  Wilson seemed like a steady dude. He obviously took his job seriously but didn’t come up as a hyperactive cop wannabe the way so many security people did.

  “So what did you do before this?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  He gave me a sidelong glance. “I was a licensed clinical social worker for fifteen years. I got burned out and one morning I walked in to work, meaning to ask my boss for a vacation. What came out instead was ‘I quit.’ I’ve got a kid I’m raising, so I took the first gig that came along, which happened to be this.”

  He walked over to a utility vault set in the ground and gave the lid a little tug to make sure it was locked.

  “It’s not the most glamorous thing in the world, but it pays the bills. I get paid to walk around and I don’t have to try to solve anyone else’s problems.”

  That made sense to me. I’d known some social workers during my time as a cop. The young ones always seemed like they were ready to save the world. The older ones all seemed like they would rather have their teeth drilled than go to work.

  After our circuit of the complex, we wound up back in the parking lot by the vehicles.

  “Look,” I said, pulling out my phone. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I need you to look out for two guys for me.”

  I showed him pictures of Curtis and Todd, then forwarded them to his phone.

  “If you see these guys, call us. Don’t approach them. Just give us a call at this number. Somebody will answer 24 hours a day.”

  He nodded and I put the phone away. Zach got in his vehicle and we got in ours.

  I could tell Dalton was a little surprised I was sharing intel with the security guy. In my time as a cop, I often trusted the ordinary people I met on the street with a little information and asked them to help. It had paid off more times than I could count. I had received tips from store clerks, utility workers, mail carriers and nosy little old ladies that helped me put murderers in prison.

  “What do you think?” I asked him as we drove through Portland.

  Dalton shook his head. “It’s not a hard target. Getting in isn’t the problem. It’s doing any damage. I could blow that reservoir. You give me enough explosives and enough time to prep it, I can blow up anything. But the only way to blow that reservoir is to dig some giant holes, lower in hundreds of pounds of explosives, then tamp it all down with earth. I’d need, half a dozen, maybe a dozen charges. Each one would take hours and a backhoe to prepare.”

  He signaled a lane change, accelerated to take us onto the freeway.

  “The distribution stuff? It’s more manageable. I could blow some of those valves and pipes with a cutting charge, take me fifteen minutes to prep it. But there are so many fail safes, you can’t create a flooding event that way. You’d have to blow multiple sites, so then we’re back to the problem of being there for hours, undetected.”

  “All that assumes they have a professional blaster at their disposal,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Dalton said and nodded. “And access to professional grade explosives. If they’ve got an amateur who is making his own stuff with instructions he downloaded off the Internet, that changes everything.”

  “How about poison?” I asked.

  Dalton shook his head again. “It’s a delivery problem. Biologicals like bacteria or viruses, even something like ricin, you’d need massive amounts. We’re talking forty foot tanker truck loads. If you pull an eighteen wheeler in there, somebody is going to notice. Your best bet would be to drop some kind of low yield radiation source in there, like a Cesium-137 capsule from a medical device. It wouldn’t kill anybody right away though. It would take years to figure out what was going on, but that doesn’t work as a terrorist incident either. They want an immediate bang.”

  “I think Powell Butte is a diversion,” I said.

  “Either a diversion or just a s
ymbolic attack,” Dalton said. “It just doesn’t make sense any other way.”

  I felt like there was something I was missing. I just couldn’t see it. Todd had played us before. Last year he lured us into an ambush down at the Albany Airport. It had been a big gamble on his part. It hadn’t really worked out for either side. We’d busted the ambush, well enough to rescue the women before they could be shipped out of the country, but we hadn’t obtained the evidence Bolle needed to go public and start seeking indictments. Todd had dealt us a heavy blow, but he’d also lost the group of middle-eastern men he was shipping into the country for whatever he was planning.

  I wondered if he was playing us now. I remembered Bolle’s onion analogy. I wondered if there was one more layer to the onion we weren’t seeing.

  My phone rang and I dug it out of a pocket.

  “Dent,” I said.

  “Hey.” It was Alex. “Turn your radio onto the Portland Police channel. There’s a big disturbance downtown with a bunch of skinheads.”

  “Wonderful,” I said as I started twiddling dials on the police radio installed in the BMW.

  “Bolle wants everybody to head to the general vicinity of downtown, in case Curtis and his people are there.”

  “Ok. We’re on our way downtown now.” Beside me, Dalton nodded. He couldn’t hear her, but was apparently picking up on the gist of the conversation.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “Will do.”

  There was a long pause. I wasn’t sure what to say next. I wanted to say “I love you” but I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to say, and even if it was, I wasn’t sure if saying it for the first time as I was barreling down the interstate next to a former Delta guy was the right way.

  “Bye Dent.” She sounded a little miffed.

  This was new. I’d never had a romantic relationship with a co-worker. There had been plenty of female cops at the Police Bureau, and a handful of them had expressed what I thought was some interest, but I’d always kept them at arm’s length. Alex and I were going to have a talk soon, and figure some stuff out.

  The BMW had red and blue lights mounted behind the grill. Dalton flipped them on and accelerated around a landscaping truck.

  Apparently, he was also reading my mind.

  “Shouldn’t get your honey where you get your money,” he said in a sing-song voice.

  I just sat there and glowered.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The center of the unrest seemed to be the Plaza Blocks, a park directly across the street from the Portland Justice Center, which housed the Portland Police Bureau’s Central Precinct. As we drove into the heart of the city, I could hear yelling and drums. There were sirens all over the place as police units converged on the area.

  “I saw in the news this morning there was supposed to be some kind of peace rally downtown today,” Dalton said as he weaved around a bicycle courier. A woman in a long flowing dress was walking down the street holding a sign in one hand that said: “give peace a chance.” She was bleeding from the head and had a dazed expression on her face.

  “Let’s get some high ground,” Dalton said and turned into a parking garage at 1st and Jefferson. My heart did a little double clutch when I realized where we were. The sniper that had killed Al had hidden in this parking garage. I broke out into a cold sweat as we drove up the circular ramp to the top floor. I hadn’t been back here since the day Al died. I’d managed to avoid coming downtown until now.

  I felt sick to my stomach and it was hard to concentrate on what we were doing. Dalton drove all the way to the top and stopped the car. He popped the trunk release and got out. I followed him on shaky legs. Dalton pulled a tennis racket bag out of the trunk. It held one of the little .300 carbines he was so fond of. He handed a pair of compact binoculars to me, then pulled out a pair for himself.

  There were three kinds of people moving around on the streets. First were the folks who I figured had been involved in the original march. They were all carrying signs that said stuff like “love wins” and “be the change you want to see in the world.” A good number of them were white and young, with that earnest look I’d come to associate with Reed College and Lewis and Clark College, but there were plenty of black folks, Latinos and a scattering of Asian people as well.

  The second group was the assholes. I could see at least half a dozen skinheads in a tight little knot. Dressed in green bomber jackets, jeans and engineer boots, they were screaming obscenities and racial slurs. A couple of them carried honest to goodness wooden shields, like something an ancient Viking warrior would have carried.

  The third was a handful of cops. Since this was supposed to be a peace rally, the Bureau probably hadn’t pulled in a bunch of staff. They certainly hadn’t called out the Rapid Response Team, our politically correct term for “the riot squad,” so the cops that were out there were in their regular patrol gear, not full armor and helmets. Before I got out of the car, I’d tuned my portable radio to monitor the Portland Police central frequency, and I heard the order for all the cops to pull back and consolidate.

  As I watched, one of the skinheads pulled a string of firecrackers out of a jacket pocket and lit them. The concussions rattled up and down the glass and concrete canyons of downtown, sounding just like gunshots. People screamed and started to run. His buddy flicked open an expanding metal baton and started smashing windows. I heard the sound of glass breaking from other places echoing through the streets.

  “This is bullshit,” I said. I wanted to go down on the street and start breaking some skinheads. As I watched, two of them charged a pair of women in headscarves, shouting obscenities. The women screamed and ran, and they laughed.

  “Yeah, it’s bullshit, but it’s not our problem. Do you see Curtis?” Dalton asked as he scanned the area with his binos.

  Dalton’s detachment from what was unfolding in front of us pissed me off. I wasn’t a Portland cop anymore, but I’d fought and bled and nearly died for this city, and seeing these assholes busting up the town and frightening people made me angry. I also didn’t like bullies. I never had. I’d learned at a young age that the best way to deal with a bully was hit them as hard and as often as you could.

  I made myself scan the street methodically. All the skins I saw were young, in their late twenties at most. They were foot soldiers, sent to go out and do stupid stuff and get arrested for the cause. I doubted Curtis would be out there among them. He’d be behind the scenes.

  As we watched, more police cars started pulling into downtown. I even saw units from outlying police departments and sheriff’s deputies from three counties, along with a couple of State Troopers.

  “Looks like they’re getting this in hand,” I said.

  “Yeah, I think it’s a dry hole for us. I don’t see any sign of Curtis or Todd,” Dalton said. He took his eyes away from the binoculars and looked at me.

  “We should circulate a little bit,” he said. “Let’s switch the radios to our frequency and walk around a little. If one of us sees Curtis, we’ll sing out.”

  I nodded. It made sense. Our view here was limited by the surrounding buildings. Most of the action was happening just a couple of blocks northwest of us. Dalton stowed his tennis racket bag and our binoculars back in the car and we trotted down the stairs of the parking garage.

  “I’ll go north,” I said pointing up the street.

  Dalton headed off. The streets right here were deserted, but over towards the Plaza Blocks I could hear yelling and commands being shouted over a bullhorn to disperse.

  I don’t know why I walked past the spot where Al died, but I did. Thankfully, six months later, there was no stain on the pavement, but I could still see a chip in the concrete where the second bullet had hit. It had narrowly missed my face. I still had tiny little scars around my eye from the flying concrete chips.

  I stood there a minute, acutely aware that there were two cops just on the other side of the glass doors inside Central Precinct. I didn’t re
cognize them, and they stared at me intently. No doubt their job was to keep the violence in the streets outside from spilling over into the building. I knew I probably looked pretty weird, just standing there staring at the pavement. I knew I should move along down the street before they came outside and braced me, but I couldn’t make my feet move. I thought I was over with that day, thought I’d dealt with it, but now that I was back to the spot where Al had died, I felt myself seizing up. For a second I smelled the awful cigars he liked to smoke.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the older of the two cops turn to the younger one. He said something and they both took a step forward towards the door. I willed my feet to move.

  Ahead of me a woman with long blond hair wearing one of those flowing hippie dresses ran across the street, being chased by two of the Hammerheads. She stumbled on the curb and the two guys each grabbed one of her arms and started dragging her down the street.

  That broke the spell. I charged after them. I felt a surge of anger at what I was seeing, but also a surge of gratitude. I desperately wanted to unload on somebody right now, to clear out some of the pent-up frustration and anger I’d been carrying around. Punching the ticket of two skinhead assholes seemed like the perfect opportunity.

  I pulled my radio out as I went.

  “I’m with two at Second and Main,” I said. It was almost like being back on patrol duty again.

  “You see Curtis?” Dalton asked over the radio.

  “Negative,” I said. “Two skins just grabbed a woman.”

  There was a pregnant pause. Then Dalton said, “Ok, I’m on my way.”

  I ran across the street. I was making good time and I was proud to not even be out of breath. The workouts were paying off. I closed to within a dozen feet in a matter of seconds.

  The two skins didn’t see me coming. The woman was kicking and squirming, but not screaming or yelling. I wondered if she was too scared to even say anything.