“They took one bend in a mountain road too fast and went three hundred feet down into a ravine. Burned.

“I was just back from college. I had just started teaching a month before. Susyn and I were dating. She was nineteen, and wild. Really wild. When she got word that Deke was dead, I thought she was going to lose her mind. It just tore her up. Old Man Davis wasn’t any help. Jim and Alan raged around with a big load of mean and no one to aim it at. Finally, she came to me and by the time I had finished comforting her, we were married.”

“When was this?”

“Nine years ago November.”

Johnson was almost pathetically eager to tell his story. I had sympathy for him, within limits. He wore his wounds too much like medals for my taste, but the pain was genuine.

“It didn’t last. She wanted more that I could offer. But she was all I ever wanted.”

“And now you’re her business partner.”

“No, not really. Old Man Davis owns all that property. He just uses my name, and pays me some rent.”

“According to the deed, you own it.”

Johnson shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. Cameron likes me because I was good to his daughter, but if I tried to take away anything he considers his, he would have me killed.”

He said it with no particular inflection, like he might say, “The sun will rise tomorrow.”

It was getting too dark to see Johnson. He fumbled for the makings and put together another joint. He shoved the bundle across the coffee table toward me. It was a test. Was I his enemy, or just another guy like him? I reached for the makings, and said, “Tell me about Cameron Davis.”

Chapter Thirty-four

I don’t know how I got back to the motel. After a certain point, Johnson got hazy, his whole house slid south, and I found myself hallucinating my way back to where I grew up in Wisconsin. Vague images of Donal and Sharon stayed around until morning, and when I found rationality returning, I was on the floor of the shower in my motel room with the water running hard and warm on my face. I had spent the night with shades of my brother and sister, begging Donal to tell me why he ran away when I was young and needed him, and praying forgiveness from my sister for the hell I put her through the year Dad abandoned us. And for abandoning her in turn, when neither of us could stand the other any more.

I turned off the shower and toweled dry. My skin was red and wrinkled. My head was a hot air balloon. I looked out through the curtain and winced at the sunlight. The Pinto was parked neatly between the lines in the space outside. Thank God for reflexes.

It was past ten o’clock. I called Wilkes. He was out. I lay on the bed while I waited for him to return the call, because the room still had a tendency to move. The phone woke me up again three hours later. It was Ed. Through gritted teeth, with a pounding head, I told him what I had learned and what I wanted. more tomorrow

Johnson staggered to his feet and crossed to the library, hesitated and looked over his shoulder. I said, “Go ahead.” I already knew where his stash was, but it had seemed too petty to mention. Everyone in Garberville had a stash.

He came back to the sofa, put bud and papers on the coffee table and built a cigarette. He sucked it in fast, controlling the smoke between puffs, holding his breath as long as he could. When it was gone, he said, “I really love this stuff. I wish I didn’t.”

“She’s killing you, isn’t she.”

He nodded. “She is worse for me than pot, and harder to get loose from.”

“I know.”

“Do you really?”

“Oddly enough, I do.”

I sat down across from Johnson and said, “Tell me about her.”

“Oh, God. I’ve known her all our lives. We grew up together. I fell in love with her when she was twelve and I was sixteen, and I have never gotten over her.”

“Here? Garberville?”

“Here. She had four brothers. Two of them were killed – three of them now. Only Crazy Alan is left. And Susyn, who is as crazy as all four of them put together, but cold. Thinking. Mean, sometimes. And sometimes the sweetest, kindest thing that ever lived. But you never knew, any time you saw her, what way she was going to be.

“Carter – her oldest brother – got killed in a territorial dispute. Someone raided one of his fields, so he raided back. Got the wrong field, hurt a woman who was taking care of it when she tried to stop him. This woman’s old man was just back from Viet Nam. A Marine, unreconstructed. A lot of the unreconstructeds end up in these hills. He caught Carter in a bar down in Leggett and put a knife in him. Susyn was fourteen at the time. Her Daddy, Cameron, the old bull of the woods, put out the word and the Marine who killed his oldest boy disappeared. The cops never found him, and his family never saw him again. Me either; but Susyn told me she went to the shed where Cameron had him taken and saw the body after they had finished with it. If must have been really ugly. Susyn wasn’t herself for months after that.”

Johnson rolled another joint before he went on.

“Susyn was close to all her brothers. Worshipped them, really. She took Carter’s death hard and when Deke got killed a few years later, it really put her over the edge.

“Deke was the second brother; the smart one. He was the one the old man was grooming to take over the family business. Sent him to college down in Sonoma. Made him into an accountant.

“Deke was up in the Sierras. Cameron had expanded his operations, and it was just after harvest. They had a cabin back in some valley somewhere, with a couple of tons of pot getting trimmed out by some itinerants Deke had hired. Deke was cutting corners, using some of that fancy bookkeeping he learned in college to cheat the trimmers. They beat him up, stuffed him into the trunk of his car, and took off for Sacramento. Nobody knows what they had in mind, but they took one bend in a mountain road too fast and went three hundred feet down into a ravine. Burned. Some rangers pulled the bodies out two days later and got a big surprise when they checked in the trunk. more tomorrow

Who is Jim Davis?” I asked.

“Her brother.”

“I killed him. Stomped him into the pavement and left him in a pool of his own blood. Susyn set me up and Davis was going to kill me, but he couldn’t pull it off.”

A little fear couldn’t hurt. Johnson had been about to curl up in a ball and go limp on me. Now he sat up straighter and his sorrow got pushed aside by his instinct for survival.

“I’m going to stop Susyn. I don’t want to kill her – but if I have to, I will. Do you understand?”

“Who are you? How did you get in here?”

Fear was helping Johnson grow a backbone. 

“It doesn’t matter how I got in here. It doesn’t matter who I am. You are going to help me solve my problems and nothing you can do or say will change that.”

“I’ll call the police.”

I could have threatened Johnson. He was a skinny little guy. You could see that he always had been. I could have broken him like a stick. So what? If I threatened him, I would just embarrass myself. I didn’t have the heart to lay a hand on him, and I wasn’t actor enough to convince anybody that I did.

I didn’t have to. I said, “You own five pieces of property on which marijuana is being cultivated. The rent goes to a holding company along with the rent from twelve other pieces owned by Jim and Alan and Susyn, and you get a kickback equal to your school salary every month. I knew most of that before I came here, and your computer records told me the rest. You aren’t very smart, Johnson. The way you keep records, a ten year old boy could find evidence enough to convict.

“I can take everything away from you. I can get your property seized, including this house and your car. I can get your teaching credential revoked. I can take away everything you own and everything you are, and turn you into a skid row bum. So reach for the phone. Go ahead.”

The sun flared suddenly as it found a hole in the trees, setting toward the end of the day. The sky beyond the window was going purple. It would be dark in half an hour. I watched the day die outside because I didn’t want to watch Johnson’s last thin dreams turn to paste in his hands.

Finally he said, “What has she done this time?”

So I told him. The assault on the cruise ship, the assault in Marseilles, her deception, the attempt on my life in Venice. When I finished, it was nearly dark. Charlie was scratching at the door. Johnson made no move to let him in so I went over and pushed the screen open, standing to one side so no one in the street would see me. The old cat rubbed circles around my legs while his master sat with his face in his hands, then went off to pursue his own business. more tomorrow

Johnson was a record keeper, with a tidy mind. It took only a minute to discover that the cabinet was mostly filled with old lesson plans, outdated grade books, notes on projects half completed, and half a hundred personal profiles of his students. Johnson was clearly a good teacher, with a real feeling for his students. After an hour I knew which students were addicts, which ones were being beaten at home, which ones Johnson suspected were being sexually abused, and which ones he thought had a real chance to make it out of Garberville.

I didn’t want to know about his students, but what Johnson chose to say about them told me things I needed to know about him.

At four-thirty, he came home, unlocked the door, dropped a pile of papers on a chair by the door, and called, “Charlie!” The chunky old gray cat that had kept me company while I went through Johnson’s records got out of my lap and loped toward his master. Johnson saw me then, sitting with my back to the wall in a shadowed corner of his living room.

He didn’t say anything. He just opened the screen door and let the cat out. Then he looked at me and waited. He knew his world had just fallen apart. He didn’t know how, or why, but he had known for years that it was coming. I could read that between every line he had written, and I had been reading his life all afternoon.

I gestured toward the sofa. He moved over and sat down.

Silence filled up the room.

I said, “Tell me about Susyn.”

He closed his eyes. Twin tears broke loose and streaked his cheeks. I had hit him hard, where he was most vulnerable. He said, “What do you want to know?”

“When did you see her last?”

“Christmas.”

“Last Christmas? Seven months?”

He nodded.

“Do you know what she has been doing with herself?”

He shrugged. I waited. There was no fight in him. She had torn the heart out of him years ago, and left this shell behind. The divorce had told me part of that. The letters that she had written him after the divorce had told me the rest.

Johnson seemed to sink into the couch. He wiped his face and shook his head. I said, “She has been trying to murder the woman I love.”

The sound that escaped him was somewhere between a whimper and a sigh. It was the saddest sound I had ever heard.

“Who is Jim Davis?” I asked.

“Her brother.”

“He’s dead.”

A look crossed Johnson’s face, like a ripple of wind across still water. Fierce joy. 

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad.” more tomorrow

It is a classic trap. Individual cops fall into it, and so do whole police departments. It’s drug money, so it isn’t real. The drug dealers don’t deserve to have it, so taking it isn’t really stealing. No one knows who the money originally belonged to, so it is free money. Like air, breathed without thought. Or like wild game, belonging to no one and free for the taking.

There is enough truth to the proposition to make it compelling and plausible. But if the money is not genuinely the property of the drug dealer, then what about the things he buys with that money. Like the BMW I hid behind. I could take the money, why not the car? Or the house?

Of course, I couldn’t. But by some new and morally questionable laws, the state of California could, and did. 

If there was a drug bust, and half a million in drugs were recovered, the police eventually have to destroy the drugs. But if half a million in money from drug sales is recovered, they get to keep it. Or if a drug dealer is driving a new car and living in a new house, and the police can make a half way plausible case that they were bought with drug money, they can seize them and sell them. And keep the money.

Joe Citizen wants drugs off the street, but he doesn’t want to pay for more police. No problem. Need a new police car? Catch a few drug dealers and take their houses. Seize and sell. Whole drug enforcement units are financed by confiscation. Never mind what it does to the cops when they know that it doesn’t matter how much drugs they get off the street. It only matters how many airplanes and mansions and BMWs they can confiscate.

Maybe the boy had done me a favor by removing the money before I had a chance to take it. I know that if he had come by ten minutes later, that money would be in my bank account right now. Maybe I was glad he had saved me from making a mistake.

Yeah, sure! 

*       *       *

Some people become addicted to burglary. They get off on the adrenaline rush. Not me. I didn’t like it a bit, but that afternoon I did it again.

William Johnson’s house was easy. He had left a back window open. I went through his house more quickly than I had Davis’. He was further out of the loop, and I had less time. Bedroom, garage with workshop, a spare bedroom set up with a small but elaborate model train layout, kitchen, and a scuttle hole to storage in the attic; none of them held anything of interest. But in a corner of the living room was a battered desk surrounded by a spill of books, with a computer on top and a file cabinet off to one side. 

Meat! more tomorrow

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