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

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