If I wanted to be a big pot grower today, I would have lots of little plots of land scattered all over the area . . .”

“Like the seventeen plots owned by the Davises.”

“Yeah, only maybe more so. You know of seventeen. How many are there you don’t know about? Anyway, I wouldn’t want to have too much direct contact with the farming. I’d be management. I’d supply the means, pay salaries, and skim my take off the top.”

Rusty stopped in mid-sentence, then looked at me sharply and said, “Mostly, Gunn, I’d enforce discipline. If your man could do that, he could make millions. But he would have to be ruthless. A guy like that couldn’t hesitate at a few killings.”

Rusty wiped up the last of his eggs with a piece of toast and asked, “How are you armed?”

I told him about the Bulldog. He just shook his head and said, “Wait.” He headed off downstairs to his shop and five minutes later came back with an ancient double-barreled shotgun. It was a basket case. Apparently someone had let it rust and then had sanded the rust off. Instead of having it reblued, they had covered the metal, and half the stock, with black spray paint. The stock was wrapped with duct tape.

Rusty was polishing it with a rag. Not to make it look good; he was removing his fingerprints. He handed it to me along with a couple of boxes of shells.

“I took this in trade, thinking I’d rebuild it in my spare time. It’s old, and it’s never been registered. It’s sound, despite what it looks like. I’d like to give you something better, but you need something that ballistics can’t trace. I’m giving you double-ought buck and in case things get real serious, slugs. They aren’t accurate past twenty yards, but they’ll stop a grizzly in his tracks.”

Chapter Thirty-three

I headed north across the Golden Gate and took Highway 101 through the oak and gold clarity of a Marin County morning. Choosing a speed was a delicate task. The last thing I needed was to be pulled over while I was carrying a pair of unregistered weapons. Cars were slamming past me in true California fashion, going eighty and ninety. Fifty-five miles per hour was the law then, but it would have been suicidal, so I kept pace with the slowest traffic at just under seventy.

I was heading into country that I knew only by hearsay. During all my years in San Francisco, I had not had the leisure or the money to explore the state. I had been to Sacramento a number of times, on business for Joe Dias or doing research for my thesis, but I had only gone as far north as Mendicino once, on a fishing trip. Garberville was about fifty miles inland from there, and further north.

I came off the freeway about noon and rolled through the town from end to end to get a feel for the place. There wasn’t a lot to see. One main street ran north and south, a second dead ended into it and carried traffic back toward the freeway. Restaurants, gas stations, a lumberyard, two hardware stores, a movie theater, two grocery stores, an antediluvian five and dime still hanging on long after the main chain had died, and four or five video rental stores. Since it was California, there were also two health food stores, a new age bookstore, and a palm reader. more tomorrow

“I don’t mean everybody. There are a lot of pacifists up there in the hills. People who still stand by what they stood for twenty years ago – who would rather be robbed than shoot someone. But there are a lot of people squirreled away up there, and if even a small percent is armed, that’s a lot of firepower.

“That’s the little guys. The big growers went Nazi. At harvest time, those counties started looking like Army maneuvers. Everyone wearing camouflage gear and carrying rifles. Outside the town, they were carrying machine guns. Seventeen year old kids dropping out of school to sit out in the forest all dressed up to play soldier with a real Uzi in their hands.

I said, “It sounds like Viet Nam.”

Rusty snarled, “You weren’t there, man, so don’t tell me what Nam was like.”

I just shrugged and hoped I hadn’t set him off. Then he nodded, and said, “Yeah, I guess. No discipline; kids with guns; most of them with no real sense of why they’re there. A little like Nam, but only like a pale shade of it. Way, way watered down.

“Bad enough to make me leave, though,” he added. “I grew up in that area and knew it when you could be free there. When the paranoia set in, I left. It got so I couldn’t walk into the woods to take a pee without worrying if someone was going to shoot me. ‘Course, the chances were nothing would ever have happened. Like living here. Man, people get killed in San Francisco every week, but nobody has taken a shot a me yet. Still, it spoiled things. I used to hunt and fish all over that area when I was a kid and all I ever had to worry about was bigfoot. Now kids the age I was then are driving big cars, carrying AK-47s, and snorting coke bought with their earnings. I just didn’t like living there any more.”

Rusty slammed his chair back from the table and went to the refrigerator. He took out bacon and eggs, and started cooking. I didn’t say anything. He was worked up, and he had to do something with his hands before he could go on. I understood that, and you don’t push Rusty if you want his help.

There was a lot of slamming of frying pans and low voiced cussing. Eventually, he tossed a plate of eggs and bacon in front of me and sat down to eat his. It was edible. Just. I choked it down and waited.

Finally, Rusty said, “About your problem. The man you want would be a big grower, but things have changed in the last few years. About the time things got too weird, a bunch of drug control agencies started working together and put a lot of big growers out of business. They started using helicopters and concentrating on the biggest growers. Some of those guys would clear an acre of timber in a national forest, sell the logs, then plant a whole field of pot. That only worked until they started air surveillance. A lot of big guys went down.

“This was after I left. I only know the details by hearsay. If I wanted to be a big pot grower today, I would find some way to spread the risk around. I would have lots of little plots of land scattered all over the area . . .” more tomorrow

“They wanted to live off the land and be independent. Man, you just can’t do that. It’s fucking impossible. You can make a living in farming – if you’re lucky – if you have a half a million dollar investment in farm machinery and two hundred acres of good, black Kansas land. Not in the hills up north. They starved. And they all grew pot. And they sold a little to get by, just like they had in the cities, only now they were growing their own. Sort of cut out the middle man, see. That started it.”

I said, “This doesn’t sound like what I’m looking for.”

“It isn’t. It’s how most of the pot farmers do business, and why. It isn’t how most of the pot gets grown. You follow the distinction?”

I nodded.

“Most of the growers are small time. They think and act like overage hippies. Or like kids who grew up with hippie parents. Most of them are pretty decent people, really, although their thinking is too damned sappy for me.

“The thing that came later and turned the whole business around was sinsemilla. That’s an improved strain of marijuana and an improved way of growing it. You separate the male and female plants and frustrate the reproduction urge. The plant responds with more of the chemicals that make it good to smoke. It gets real potent.

“Pot was already bringing some money into the back country and keeping the homesteaders afloat, but sinsemilla would sell for real money. That’s when some guys started farming it on a mass basis, with plantations of pot cared for by hired workers. It started to be a real crazy scene. Guys would bring workers out into the back country, especially around harvest time, and leave them stranded miles from nowhere. The workers would make good money, by local standards, but sometimes they got stiffed, and sometimes they were treated no better than slaves. The guys running the show, the plantation bosses and their lieutenants, weren’t your top-of-the-line folks. They had new money and lots of it, and most of them used it to spend their time smashed, sometimes on their own product or booze, but more often on coke.

“It was the money that changed everything. It was still hard work, but now you could hire people to do it, and get rich as ‘management’. It was easier still to wait until someone else had raised a crop, then swoop down at harvest time and throw five thousand dollars worth of plants in the back of your pickup. Or wait until the plants were processed and carry away fifty thousand dollars worth at gun point. So the growers started arming themselves. The big guys were first, but even some of the small time growers started to carry guns. You’d see people who went through the peace movement – who used to shove flowers down the barrels of National Guard rifles – sitting out all night among their plants with a rifle across their knees.” more tomorrow

I knew a bit about Rusty. We weren’t friends – he didn’t have friends – but Joe Dias and I were as close to friends as he had. On the surface, the three of us couldn’t be more different, but Rusty had recognized something at core level that we all shared. I couldn’t say what; Rusty’s mind works too differently from anyone else for me to say with certainty what goes on inside it. I think it might have been a willingness to look life in the face, without illusions.

Rusty was in his forties. He had been in Viet Nam. No one complained louder than Rusty about the mismanagement of that war, but his complaints hadn’t kept him from volunteering for second tour of duty. He came home, as he said, “shot full of holes and leaking like a bloody sieve.” Once he had recovered, he headed north to Fort Bragg where he was born, and spent the next decade or so there. That was right in the heart of the country I was about to enter.

“If you want to understand pot farming, you have to forget what you read in the papers,” Rusty said. “Pot farming is farming. It’s damned hard work. To do it right is not easy and no one in their right mind would work that hard if there wasn’t a big money payoff.

“You hear people talk about throwing out a few seeds and coming back months later to harvest a fortune. That’s bullshit. The land they raise pot on wouldn’t raise anything if they didn’t work it, fertilize it, and irrigate it. And harvest – man, harvest is a bitch. You have to cut it and trim it and dry it and if you don’t do the job just right, it goes moldy and worthless. You have to do all that at just the right time because of the plant, but also because at that time, the weed is worth big bucks and someone will steal it if you don’t stand guard night and day.

“Most of the growers are small time. Some of them just grow a few plants for their own use, and others just try to make enough money to keep them going. You’ve got to understand where these people are coming from.

“People have been growing weed and smoking it since the Indians were there, and nobody thought anything about it. It grew wild and you smoked weed when you couldn’t afford booze. My granddaddy was a deacon in the local Methodist church and wouldn’t touch liquor, but he smoked it just as easy as he smoked cigarettes. It wasn’t illegal. Nobody thought it was wrong. Nobody cared.

“Then along came the sixties. Some of us went off to Viet Nam and landed in pot heaven. Other kids my age went down to the cities and became hippies. When all that peace and love shit started to fall apart, a big bunch of hippies, lots of them from San Francisco and L.A., decided the new big thing was to go ‘back to the land’. Course most of them had never been on the land, so they weren’t really going back to it. If they had, they’d have known better. I mean, I never saw any kid raised on a farm that went in for that shit.” more tomorrow

Now there was a witness who could identify Alan and James Davis for attempted murder, and implicate Susyn as an accessory. A quick flight to Marseilles would solve that problem, except that the pair had once again failed to kill Raven and now they had two witnesses.

My death must have been planned before Susyn and I ever met.

Who was running the show? Not Susyn or Jim or Alan. Seventeen pieces of property that I knew of, and probably more that I hadn’t found, meant an organization with real leadership. Someone running that kind of an organization couldn’t move to another city for years to infiltrate Cabral, and wouldn’t fly across the Atlantic twice to make hits. There had to be at least one echelon above the players I knew, and that was what I had to uncover if I wanted a lever to pry Susyn and Alan off Raven’s back.

Chapter Thirty-two

I called Ed Wilkes again, early, then loaded up the Pinto in the pre-dawn light. I drove to a filling station for gas and a road map, then headed a mile deeper into the city to Rusty Dixon’s shooting range. He lived in an apartment over his business. I walked up the outside stairway and rattled his door, then made sure I was in plain sight through the uncurtained window. Rusty is a bit trigger happy.

A few minutes later he came to the door dressed in ragged jeans and shower sandals. His bare chest was scar pocked and hairless. In the years I had known him, his ponytail had gotten longer, and his hairline had receded, but nothing else seemed to change or age. He had Norman Rockwell red hair and the coldest pair of eyes you would ever want to look into.

He said, “What?” in the same irritated tone I would use on a Jehovah’s Witness.

I said, “Good morning to you, too, Rusty.”

He grunted and stepped away from the door, and I followed him into the ancient kitchen. It was a relief to know that he was going to be in such a good mood. There were weeks at a time that I wouldn’t go near him. This was about as friendly as he got.

“Are you in trouble?” he asked.

“A guy tried to kill me about a week ago, and I had to fight off a small Chicano gang yesterday, but that’s about all. Nothing I can’t handle. I need some information.”

Rusty won’t talk to anyone unless he thinks they’re tough enough to chew up nails and spit out tacks. He said, “What do you want to know?”

“Tell me about pot farming on the north coast.”

Rusty’s eyes went far away and his face became very still. He was going into paranoid mode, and I couldn’t afford that, so I quickly gave him an abbreviated version of Raven’s problem. His face cleared and he became talkative. more tomorrow