Fifty thousand dollars, more or less. Green and gray, and full of lovely possibilities. No one would know if I took it. No one would know my noble sacrifice if I didn’t.

Fifty thousand dollars. Give or take. And I was about to take it when I heard the chatter and bang of an old car with a sad muffler as it rolled into Davis’ driveway. By the time it stuttered to a stop and I heard the door slam shut, I had shoved the money back into its box, and the box back into its hiding place. There was a dirty window high in the south wall of the garage. Standing on tiptoe, I could just see out. The car was a Trans-Am, about as ancient as my Pinto and not half as well maintained. The driver was a lean, hard boy of fifteen or sixteen in faded jeans and a ball cap that said, “WEED WORKS WONDERS”. Advertising the company business, I suppose. It didn’t seem wise, but Garberville is a narco-redneck town and probably nobody thought anything about it.

I knew he would find the broken window in the kitchen. I was planning to lay low until he started investigating the inside of the house, then split. Instead, he headed straight for the garage.

It didn’t take long to decide where to hide. There wasn’t all that much choice. I slid in behind the BMW, and reached for the .44. It was a reflex. I caught myself, and left it where it was.

I heard him come in while I hid behind the car, hunched over and keeping my feet behind a tire. The door closed behind him and his sneakers made little noise on the concrete. I could hear the partition being pulled back, and the metallic scrape as he pulled out the ammunition box.

He was taking my money! I almost stood up and challenged him, before I came to my senses.

Finally the garage door closed again, the old car coughed to life, and the boy roared back into the street and off toward the center of town. I straightened up and went to the partition. The ammo can was gone, but a similar one had been put in its place. Inside was an envelope, and in the envelope were pictures Harvey Jacks would have been proud of. They showed an aging, white haired man having sex with a girl who looked to be about thirteen. Whether it was love or rape would probably not matter to the girl. She was sprawled back, semiconscious. What she had been smoking was anyone’s guess, but it had been potent.

I had seen the man before. I couldn’t place him, but I knew that I should be able to.

I took the pictures. Three blocks of skulking through alleys, then I walked back to the motel. It was a hot afternoon and I needed a shower. And food. And time to think. more tomorrow

People make too much of burglary. It isn’t brain surgery. I broke the window in Davis’ kitchen door and let myself in. I was wearing rubber gloves and carrying the .44 out of sight under my shirt, with a pocket full of spare ammo. No alarms sounded as I entered. Either there were no alarms, or they were silent. I went through the kitchen quickly, and moved into the living room, deciding where to begin my search. After the incident in Jacks’ office, I was in a state of high readiness, but nobody came boiling out of the woodwork. In ten minutes I had made one quick pass through the house, memorizing the layout. No one had come to shoot me, so I went methodically to work.

It takes time to properly search a house. Davis’s place had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and all the personality of a Holiday Inn. He had a rack of shotguns and rifles in the hall leading to his bedroom. Recreational weapons: a twenty gauge over and under, a long barreled 12 gauge pump, and a lever action .270 Winchester. His business weapons were in a suitcase at the back of his closet: an assortment of nine mm. automatics and a sawed off double barrel shotgun. There was a bag of suspicious looking white powder taped under the bathroom vanity, and a wad of pot stowed more casually in a shoe box under the sink. 

He had pants and shirts and shoes and flour in a bag, and coffee in a can, and all the thousand and one things we all have in our houses. I looked at it all, and none of it gave me a clue that would help me get Raven out of trouble.

*       *       *

It took hours to search Davis’ house. Then I started on the garage. Fortunately, Davis hadn’t been a keeper. There was a BMW, a bicycle and a lawn mower, a toolbox with wrenches and screwdrivers . . . and fifty thousand dollars in wrinkled bills stuffed down into an ammunition can and hidden behind a false partition.

I say fifty thousand. I didn’t count it, but I counted a handful and did a quick estimate. They were twenties and fifties, and there were a lot of them.

It was interesting fodder for speculation. If Davis was carrying the money for his boss, it certainly would not have been left untouched all these weeks since his death. It could be his share of the profits, but it didn’t look like the place a person would put his life savings. It looked like a hurried hideaway. Was he skimming? Maybe. Did it have any bearing on Raven? Probably not.

I sat for a while, just looking at the money. I’ve gotten used to being broke, but I don’t like it. Fifty thousand is no fortune, but it was more money than I’ve ever seen in one place before. Or might ever see again. And no one else knew it existed. And it was certainly drug money. My enemy had no legitimate claim on it and it could not be returned to his victims. more tomorrow

Ten minutes later I had found a place to hide overlooking her crop. She spent almost two hours pruning and watering. Sometimes I could see her at work; sometimes she was out of sight and I could just hear snipping and rustling. The dogs went to sleep in the shade of a marijuana plant.

Eventually, she went back to her shack and I stayed where I was.

Now I knew that Alan Davis owned at least one pot farm; by extension, the sixteen other plots were each probably just about like this one. I was no closer to knowing who was behind Alan and Susyn, or to knowing how to get him to leave Raven alone. Maybe the woman in the shack knew; maybe she didn’t. I could go down and try to scare some information out of her, but I knew I wasn’t going to. I had gone a little way down that road, years ago, and I didn’t like it.

It starts with frustration. You find yourself in a blind alley, unable to discover some vital fact, and the person who has the answer isn’t talking. So you lean on him. It might be a physical threat, or a threat of bringing in the police. Maybe you find something he doesn’t want known and you let him know that you know. It might be as subtle as a look, or a blunt as a plainly spoken threat. And it works. It is surprising how often it works, and how easy it is.

But when you walk away, you have stolen a bit of your victim’s humanity and bartered away a piece of your own. I would find another way.

*       *       *

Two hours later I was cruising the town again. William Johnson’s place was on Acacia Street, three blocks from the High School, a small one story ranch style house with a lawn that needed watering. No one seemed to be home. James Davis’ house was similar, and deserted. I knew that he wasn’t coming home, but I had wondered if he had a live-in lover or a maid; either one would complicate my life.

I cruised by twice, then drove back to the motel to think things over. The Chicano gang in San Francisco seemed to know who I was, so someone had spread my picture around. I might be spotted any time. The next logical move was to get a new operative from Joe Dias and stake out Johnson and Davis’ houses, but I didn’t want to do that. You get a sense about situations if you work at this kind of thing long enough, and this felt like something I had to do by myself.

I could go down to the High School and snoop around, but that didn’t seem like such a good idea. Too pushy. The opposition – whoever he was – was into bulldozer tactics. I would try for a little finesse.

So I went down to Jim Davis’ house and broke in. more tomorrow

I had to proceed three quarters of a mile up the dry ravine and then go over the right bank. I did that. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t crossing the Rhine, either. When I left the ravine, not much light remained. Two hundred yards on my belly put me in sight of the house. Shack, really. There was light; not the cold light of electricity, but the rich amber of a kerosene lantern. It showed one window clearly in the dark mass of the house, and the crack of a half open door. Nothing moved in the yard. I glassed the place as thoroughly as I could while some light remained; then I waited. Several times, someone walked between the light and the window. Once I heard what sounded like a whine. It was a sound I had been listening for.

Twenty minutes later, a gaunt figure came to the door and set something on the porch. From two places in the yard, heavy shadows lifted themselves up and glided over to eat. I couldn’t tell the breed, but they were dogs, and they were big.

I didn’t need much from this place. I wasn’t gathering evidence for a grand jury. This was Skinny Alan’s property; if they were growing a significant amount of pot here, then I was on the right track. What I didn’t want was to wander around in the dark running into booby traps. Most of the stories about trip wires and shotguns in the California north woods were probably not true. Probably not. But I didn’t want to test the assumption, so I stayed where I was and prepared to wait out the night.

Mosquitoes moved in. They tried their best, but compared to the kind I knew as a child, they were a joke. A Wisconsin mosquito would have eaten them alive. I put on my jacket, ate a No-doze and waited. And waited. The moon came up late and thin and mostly hidden by trees. The dogs down below ate and went back to sleep. Occasionally one of them would snarl low and quick out of reflex. About two AM the inhabitant of the shack came out with a flashlight, stirred them up and cussed them out as she walked to a small building behind the shack. I saw that it was a woman and the building was an outhouse. Five minutes later she went back inside, and that was the high point of the night.

The sky began to lighten about five. By six there was color in the sky and she had a light on inside. About that time I smelled bacon, so I ate another candy bar. At seven fifteen, she came out, lean and hard, dressed in ragged denim and plaid flannel. She was about forty-five, with skin like leather and a graying hair that she had cut short. She gathered up a hose and a bucket, called the dogs, and set off uphill toward the ravine.

I gave her a good start, then followed. Once I had established that she was following a trail, I cut out into the woods so I wouldn’t leave a scent on the ground. The buck brush and manzanita were more than head high, but I could catch a glimpse of her from time to time. It was an easy stalk. more tomorrow

The Chamber of Commerce had an information booth in one of the hardware stores. Between hip boots and manure scoops, I picked up a city map, and bought topographic maps of the surrounding countryside.

This was the valley of the Eel River, and topography dictated the crescent shape of the town. The river itself was across the valley, on the other side of the freeway, and the town filled the remaining space between the ranges of low brown hills. No one was adventurous enough to build houses up where they could overlook the valley, probably because there wasn’t that much to see. I had driven through some pretty country to get here, but Garberville itself was nothing to brag about.

The Thunderbird Motel was just seedy enough for my needs. It looked like a place where fishermen would stay when the steelhead were running. That definitely wasn’t now. By one o’clock the sun was blistering. The motel room air conditioner was tired and noisy; I turned it on high and spread my maps on the bed. Comparing topographic maps to the plat descriptions was no easy task. They operated out of different ways of thinking. I finally found a description of the intersection of two roads on one of the plat descriptions that I could match up with the topo; after that I could locate myself and find some of the properties I had come to see.

Then I used the phone book to check addresses. Only William Johnson was listed. I checked out the location of his house, and of Jim Davis’. Skinny Alan lived in Redway, and I didn’t have a map for it.

I found food, ate, showered, set the alarm, and slept. At six that evening, I was dressed and driving. I figured I had about two hours of useable light left.

Ninety minutes later, I was afoot with the shotgun hanging across my back and the .44 on my belt, hiking up a ravine toward the nearest piece of suspicious property.

The Pinto was stashed out of sight up a dirt road. If anyone saw it, and cared enough to notice, it looked pretty much like an abandoned car. If I left it there long enough, someone would steal the tires. Otherwise, I wasn’t worried about it giving me away.

Remember, this was 1989. There were no Google maps. No Google, in fact, and barely anything resembling the internet. Just topographic maps.

I had studied the topo map with great care. The ravine I was hiking in ran up through the scrub oak and manzanita in the general direction of the only building that showed. Of course, the topo had last been revised fifteen years earlier. There could have been a small town up ahead, and I wouldn’t know it. At least the contours of the land would be the same, barring bulldozers. I had to proceed three quarters of a mile up the dry ravine and then go over the right bank. 750 double steps of a Roman legionnaire. The way I was weaving about to avoid the brush, I would call it a thousand. If I went too far, the ravine cut sharply to the left, and I could backtrack a couple of dozen yards. more tomorrow