Out of Nowhere

by Susan Dunlap

  Point taken. ‘What about Jansen?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who was I going to ask?’

  I felt like the noodle pot lifted off the burner. This couldn’t be a dead end. It just couldn’t! I said, ‘What about the abalone?’

  ‘What about it?’ The words were a brush-off, but his tone was a tease.

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I’ve got time. Might be something up there I recognize.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘Won’t know till I see it.’ He eyed my fine car. ‘Ride in the country? I got nothing better to do.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  If John was answering, I’d have texted him about this trip north with Grouch Marcus. I did text Mike, but got no response. I might have had second thoughts. But Grouch Marcus was the only chance of a lead I had.

  I grabbed a double espresso at Renzo’s Caffe – half for the coffee, and half to show him Grouch. If it had been Wally Ellis instead of Grouch, he and Renzo would still be there, both of them bent forward over the counter, dealing from their stash of connections and secrets and San Francisc-ablia like card sharks. But Grouch Marcus seemed to have nothing to give and no interest in hanging around.

  I headed for the Golden Gate. If taking Grouch Marcus with me to the abalone area was a bad idea, I’d have hours to regret it. I’d hoped Renzo, who collected knowledge of people, would have a snippet on Marcus, but he didn’t. It embarrassed him. It unnerved me. At least, I thought, someone knows where I’m headed and whom I taking.

  ‘That Renzo,’ Marcus said, leaning back against the leather seat of my lawyer brother’s show-’em-who-they’re-dealing-with sedan. The four-door Aston Martin proclaimed, in its subdued and wildly expensive British elegance, that its driver was a man only a fool would oppose.

  I’d done my share of car gags, but if a stunt double’s driving, the car’s a junker. We don’t spin out in quarter-of-a-million-dollar sedans. Gary got his show-’ems used, so make that a hundred thou and change.

  The wheel was on the right. I’d let my hair down and now, as I accelerated on to the Golden Gate, long, curly red strands blew through the window and drivers in the slow lanes stared. I could get used to this.

  ‘That Renzo,’ Marcus repeated, ‘he’s a grumpy bastard.’

  This from a guy nicknamed Groucho. About a man on a first-name basis with half the city. But I understood Marcus’s viewpoint. I’d asked Renzo about Jansen’s Burritos and he’d come up empty. It galled him. I’d shot a glance at Marcus, quick enough to see his mouth tighten before he faux-coughed.

  Still, his dissing my friend Renzo got to me. ‘If there’s anything to unearth about Jansen’s, Renzo will dig it up. He knows everyone.’

  By now Renzo would be canvassing all friends, acquaintances, and barely knowns within a square mile of the old Jansen’s Burritos. With luck my cell would ring before I reached the rainbow tunnel. I could quiz Marcus, but better to do it when I got the right questions.

  Every few minutes my eyes did a three point – road, rearview, road and rest there – checking for a tail that could be Mike. Not expecting to spot him. Not spotting him. He could be following me. He could be anywhere.

  When I headed into the rainbow arch of the Waldo Tunnel, now officially the Robin Williams Tunnel, I altered my hope to: phone would ring before I reached Petaluma. And that to Guerneville … Jenner by the sea. And then the connection failed. Maybe it had failed earlier. Maybe I’d just hit a dead spot. I’d taken it easy on the freeway and through the little towns along the Russian River, but now on the tight curves of Route 1, by the cliffs above the sea, I played the gas against the drag, braked hard, rode the corners. Marcus was good; he didn’t gasp, but he couldn’t keep himself from grabbing onto whatever he could find.

  I said, ‘Tell me about Jansen.’

  ‘I gave you what I knew.’

  ‘Oh come on. You’re hanging out on your porch, next door to a guy who’s strolling around doing nothing. Of course you’re going to talk.’

  ‘Me? Not chatty.’

  True dat! ‘You, not curious? You’d have to be dead to not want to know his deal.’

  ‘I keep my distance.’

  ‘I was there, Grouch. I saw you with him.’ Not true, but could have been.

  He didn’t respond.

  Ahead was a short downhill ending in a sharp right curve. I pressed the gas till the engine roared. As we hit the curve I turned toward him. It was a trick I learned doing a gag in LA, the head-turn while eyes stay just enough on the road. The maneuver had seemed flawed to me, but when I saw the dailies I was surprised at the passenger’s panic.

  ‘Hey, watch the road!’

  ‘Hey, tell me about Jansen and the abalone trade. Who’s his connection up here?’

  ‘Slow down!’

  I eased off the pedal.

  We were in open country now, tall trees on the east side, scrub bushes on the ocean side, the water thirty feet down here, there seventy-five rocky cliff steps. ‘Jansen?’

  ‘Jansen was a middler.’

  Middler? ‘A fence?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Marcus didn’t hide his scorn. I had the feeling he’d demoted me a step or two. ‘Your brother, the tall kid who looks like you, guess he didn’t tell you.’

  ‘He said enough.’ Damn Mike. If he’d deigned to tell me … But he didn’t tell me that, or who knew what else? If he’d … ‘He said he suspected Jansen had some connection—’

  ‘Suspected! Ha! If he wasn’t such a big kid, he never coulda carried the bags of them. Musta been twenty in those bags. Two grand!’ He shifted toward me. ‘You know the legal limit? Three shells a day! Three!’

  ‘You saw him empty the bag?’

  ‘Nah. I’m not a fool. I didn’t poke my head in. But he goes in with the bag; he leaves, a car pulls up, always the same one, black Chevy V-8, Asian guy half his size takes the bag and leaves.’

  ‘So, Grouch, how do you know it was abalone in those bags?’

  ‘What else? You don’t make that kind of drop for clams.’

  ‘You’re saying you assume, right? You just assume.’ I assumed Marcus didn’t fill his bookcase with Zen books, but still he seemed to catch my meaning.

  ‘I saw the daughters – you remember them?’

  ‘Yeah, Sonja, Maria. Nice kids. Hard workers. Not much English.’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘Enough for what?’

  ‘Come on,’ he said mimicking me. ‘Teenage girls, you think they wanted nothing more than to scoop beans? You think they never looked right or left? They saw Jansen strutting around out back. They knew there was more than beans.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So Jansen controlled everything. What could they do for money? What did they have?’

  I held my breath. I didn’t want to speculate.

  ‘Shells. One night I saw one of them leave with a big bag, like the abalone bag. She went into a shop that sold tourist stuff – abalone ashtrays. Polished tourist stuff.’

  ‘How much could she make from that?’

  ‘Compared to the nothing Jansen was offering?’

  ‘Point taken. How many shells?’

  ‘A lot. And I’m not just assuming. I could see in the back of the shop when they unloaded twenty-five, thirty shells. A good haul.’

  I nodded slowly. Abalone poaching is illegal: that’s common knowledge. Transporting illegal abalones is also a crime. But the statute would have run out on both years ago. ‘What else, Grouch?’

  What had Mike said to me in the park last night? Change of clothes that meant change of nationality. American shoes. A fast boat drops an hombre before sunset. I get a ‘local’ to San Fran in time for a late dinner.

  When I’d asked, ‘What kind of men?’ he’d said, ‘Men who could afford to pay.’

  ‘Who did my brother transport to San Francisco, Grouch?’

  He went stiff.

  I pulled a curve. But the motion of the car had no effect. No vehicle danger could mak
e my passenger any more nervous than he was.

  ‘I brought you up here for a reason, Marcus. Who?’

  ‘Which time?’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Are you saying my brother transported wanted men, Grouch?’

  ‘Me? Lips sealed.’

  ‘It’s a little late for that.’

  ‘Never too late—’

  ‘—for second thoughts?’ I laughed. ‘That’s why they’re called second thoughts instead of just thoughts. Because they’re a second too late.’

  He looked over at me and said nothing. Marcus was on the fence, but odds were he’d come down on the side of stubbornness. He’d dig his feet in and just hope no one would add the rest of his body.

  We were coming into a hamlet now – a bar, a general store, gas station and chichi faux rustic restaurant, the kind urban Californians love to discover. Beyond, by the coast and in toward the redwoods, there would be bed-and-breakfasts. The road was straightening, traffic slowing. I was tempted to pull over and lurk in the shadow of a building. But Mike had known this area. I wouldn’t blow his cover here, if he was here at all. I eyed Marcus’ face in time to see his eyes flicker up and back, as if bouncing a new possibility in his mind.

  ‘Why did you come with me?’ I asked as we passed the gas station.

  ‘I don’t get out much.’

  As annoying as the man had become, I could have believed that. But, of course, I didn’t. Was he watching me for someone? Or could he really just be curious about the abalone connection he’d seen all those years ago?

  The pavement so far had been relatively smooth, but now it was pocked, split by earth movements, pasted together or not. A sort of macadam sign of ‘Nothing important from here on.’ To the right, grass led to brush to pines to redwoods all in a hundred yards. To the left was scrub and sea. Ahead, the road squiggled, dipping down into a curve, rising up higher to skim the rocky cliff.

  ‘Where are the abalone?’

  Marcus shrugged.

  I eased around another curve and back up higher. Afternoon gusts smacked the car, shaking the Martin like it was a VW bug. The windows were shut but the cold air seeped in anyway. I pulled over. ‘Get out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Out!’

  ‘What the—’

  ‘Help or walk. Your choice.’

  Marcus looked through the windshield at the barren coast. I could almost see him gauging how long it would take him to shank it back to the town, in the cold and wind, along the raw edge of the pavement as dusk thickened and drivers sped by. Assuming any did. Assuming they didn’t hit him in this place where men don’t walk in the dirt beside the road.

  ‘What do you want?’

  In Zen we’re instructed to ‘see life as it is.’ I gave Marcus points for doing so and wasting no time. But I didn’t fool myself that this moment of realization would last. ‘Who was my brother’s contact up here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Get out!’

  ‘True.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  The man was sorting, sifting data, like an old-time mainframe hoping spitting out a few perforated cards would convince its keepers to keep it plugged in.

  ‘Who owns the Berkeley house?’ I.e., who’s behind Mountain Properties?

  ‘The Sorrento place?’ The words seemed to escape his mouth before he realized the import.

  The rundown house that could be fixed, flipped and sold for close to a million, but was left as is with a ratty basement room available for the needs of one – or more – men who couldn’t stay anywhere they might be noticed.

  I didn’t bother commenting that Marcus knew the place. He didn’t try to walk it back.

  ‘Maria.’

  Of course! Maria Perez. Maria. Marcus, who’d insisted he’d barely spoken to Jansen, much less his wife and daughters who did not speak English, now referred to her by first name.

  ‘Take me to her.’

  He shook his head.

  A couple back-and-forths later he got her on the phone. The number was in his contacts! ‘She’ll be here in five. Pull across the street.’

  Easier said than done on this sharp curve. But, hey, I’m a professional. To whit I cut a tight circle and pulled up half an inch from the trunk needles of a struggling little star pine that had chosen too windy a cliff spot to survive long. ‘You’re staying inside.’

  He tried to turn his surprise into a shrug. I’ve seen better.

  A black, dirt-sprayed Jeep Cherokee slid in behind us. I waited till the driver got out. ‘That her?’

  ‘Who else?’

  You could have called anybody in your contacts list.

  I watched a moment longer, but no one pushed out of the passenger side.

  Dusk falls fast at the edge of the continent. Fog sweeps in, turning the setting sun into a fuzzy opaque blush. Blurring faces.

  I could just make out her hands. Empty.

  I walked toward her. Would I have recognized her, the girl who’d been a teenager when I was twelve? What I recalled from our few hours on the line, me scooping beans, she salsa and guacamole, was her shiny black hair pulled back tight, her face turned down as if salsa were the only important thing in the city. ‘You were so focused,’ I said.

  ‘It pays to keep your head down.’

  I wouldn’t have recognized you. Her skin was weather-stained and her hair streaked with gray. But the biggest difference was in her eyes. Back then when she did look up they shone with eagerness for the opportunities she hadn’t yet imagined. Now they’d seen.

  Back then I assumed she knew almost no English. Now she spoke with no trace of an accent.

  ‘Do you remember my brother?’

  She let out a big laugh. ‘Your big, handsome brother with those yummy blue eyes? My sisters and I, we remembered him a lot. We used to have contests – who could carry their bags of rice fastest, who got the best grade in end-of-the-week test, the winner got him. Then we’d spend the weekend making up stories …’

  The light was almost gone, so I couldn’t be sure she was blushing. Even now I didn’t want to hear details. But I wasn’t surprised. If there’d been a contest, a race, for attracting girls, Mike would have crossed the finish line before the rest of the boys pushed out of the blocks. I remembered him at Jansen’s, moving along the counter before the first 5.00 p.m. customer came in, tossing a comment to Maria as she oiled the grill for the tortillas, flashing a wink at me, pausing just an instant longer before leaning over to whisper to Sonja, then straightening up to give a respectful greeting with just a hint of flirtation for Senora Perez, and if Ynez was in the back, he’d stick his head through the door to say he missed her. All of it focused totally on the receiver; all of it sincere. Why shouldn’t they have fallen for him?

  ‘I don’t remember you sidling closer to me, hoping I’d tell you if he was a baseball fanatic, what movie he was crazy about, where you could run into him by surprise.’ Not the way girls in his school class had.

  ‘We were too busy. Him, he was like the star, you know, on the magazine cover. Far away and all shiny.’

  ‘And yet, Mike was doing the abalone run with you, Maria.’

  ‘You knew about that?’

  I’m not sure what I expected but she smiled the same way she had discussing the sisterly contests for him. What did this woman know about me? From Marcus? From the upstairs tenant in her Berkeley dive? It made me nervous, how easily she talked. Was it just the pleasure of reliving the past with one of the few people who had shared it? My urge was to set my feet, ready to take off. But Maria hadn’t told me anything she’d kill to conceal. Not so far.

  ‘I didn’t know then,’ I said. ‘He never let on. I didn’t find out till now.’

  ‘So long ago. ’nother world back then. It was a game for us, you know? Cloak and dagger. Blanket of risk that wasn’t going to smother you.’ Her cheeks pooched in a little smile. I remembered that about her.

  ‘Really?’

 
‘Well, you know, we were kids, us girls. We weren’t in any real danger and we had no idea how much our parents were. And him … he flew above the law.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Isn’t your brother a cop? Another brother?’

  Was. ‘John? True.’

  She shot me a look that encompassed inbred knowledge of nepotism and corruption. Considering the number of times John had pulled Mike out of the fire just before the flames lit his feet, I couldn’t disagree.

  Considering the times he’d saved me …

  ‘Everybody liked Mike; no one wanted bad for him.’

  I sighed. ‘But now, someone’s threatening him. It’s serious. I need your help.’

  Her shoulders tightened under her Polartec shirt. I could see the blue fabric rising toward her neck, pressing in from the sides, as if to squeeze her throat shut. The wind flicked at her short hair. It leapt like tongues of fire. She didn’t speak. She probably didn’t think she’d moved but I caught her quick glance behind me at Marcus, the shift in expression I couldn’t read. ‘There’s nothing I can—’

  ‘I need you. Mike’s apartment was almost blown up. This isn’t child stuff, Maria.’

  She looked more fully over my shoulder, turned and moved away from the car, from Marcus, from the road, making her way between stiff, prickly bushes that can survive the sharp ocean’s winds and sun that doesn’t break through till late in the day. Runt-of-the-litter plants. They nipped at my pant legs, thorns catching, promising a cluster of tiny holes as I followed her away from the dim light of the open sky above the road, out on to a promontory. A lookout where there was nothing to see.

  Near the edge of the cliff she stopped, not bothering to check the stability of the soil beyond, as if to say we weren’t going any farther. Waves thundered against the rocky cliff and even up here there was a spray. No chance Marcus was going to hear anything against this roar.

  Maria put a hand on my shoulder. ‘We were kids then. It was a game. Roll of the dice. You land on Lose! and you miss a turn. Worst case, you’re out of the game and you have to haul the sodas in from the storage bin. Danger spiced the game but it would go away once we folded up the board and put the dice away. That’s what we “knew.”’