Chapter 17. The Gathering Storm

Mon. 09:15: Nick had gone to Billy’s trailer first. The door was open. It didn’t feel right. Fear had consumed him since he left Jerry’s place. It gripped him, and he couldn’t think at all. Options narrowed and, as he pushed the door, he felt resistance. There wasn’t much of a floor and what there was of a floor, was taken up with a lump of a form once called Billy. Shit. Nick had to think. Billy’s body was fresh… still warm… small entrance hole in the forehead… like a Hindu dot… a black burn-mark halo around it... not much blood at all… no exit wound at all… 22 caliber hollow-point, no doubt. Billy’s pager was beeping. Nick grabbed the bicycle leaning against the trailer and took off for the Rescue Mission.

Mon. 0920: Nick’s next move was to get out of the South side of the freeway’s no-man’s land. He had to call someone and not the police. He dared not go directly to Scolaries and he needed to rest. He rang the buzzer of the office next to the staff dining room at the Rescue Mission on Yananoli Street. His nerves calmed when he recognized one of Max’s friends coming to the door, the office manager, Beverly.

“Bev… I won’t bother you much, Bev. But can I use your phone?” adding, “My battery’s dead.”

She watched him reach in his pocket to pull out the phone that wasn’t there. Bev let out one of her trademark jowly laughs, “You don’t have one, do you?”

“I must have left it some….”

“Nevermind, just don’t use it for any deals, eh?”

He made the call... a payphone on a wall in the staff dining room. Nick was overly cryptic, so Bev went back to her office, shouting, “No drug deals, Nick... Can't call anyone but your sponsor, your boss, or your wife. Right?”

“Sure, Bev. I know the rules.”

Bev's job was to sniff-out uneasiness and tried to tease out the reason why, she hollered, “How is Adrienne anyway?”

“She’s fine,” He was already punching the buttons. The dial tone on the other end could be heard from Bev’s desk. The phone rang the usual four time before the message picked up, “Max, it’s about Adrienne.” He lowered his voice and cupped the phone as he realized Bev was hearing him from the office.

Bev could make out what he was saying. It was her responsibility to make sure none of the house members used the phone for drug deals, etc. and her ears were good at catching important clues.

“She’s been taken, Max... my fault…,” the phone went dead. Nick knew Max screened calls and had hung up on him. He hoped Max would pass it on if Alesandro was still alive.

Bev asked bewildered, “Shouldn’t you be calling 911?”

“No, Bev. I’m only kidding. I need to stay here a while, okay with you?”

“Nick, what have you gotten yourself into? Sure, take a nap. You can use a table. Staff won’t be in for an hour or so.”

Nick left the office and Bev dialed 911.

Nick passed through the dining hall and thought better of it as he heard Bev from the office on the phone. He left through the back and crossed over towards the Zoo.

Max got the call on his answering machine. Since Nick had careened into his cul de sac, Max was reminded of a water spout at sea. He had seen several. It was the way a water spout drops down from the heavens and bursts skyward from the sea simultaneously and dances across the waters that mesmerized him. Max saw the events rolling out as some kind of weird cosmic dance... or to continue the metaphor... a whirlpool sucking him in from below too. Homer’s ear tuned in on him from his perch on top of the consul as Max laughed, “Like Poe or Homer, Homer! Charybdis... or what was it? He’d read one of Poe’s ominous short stories about a maelström... about the Moskoe-ström of Norway, “A descent into the Maelström”. Sucked in by forces arising from the sea of his subconscious and the playgrounds of the gods tugging at him towards the heavens and the demons of a watery hell below, he was given no choice. In Max’s grandiose imagination he was in an epic drama... Odysseus trying to get home after a series of misadventures of his own making and, now of his destiny was getting in his way after he’d tried his best to “do the right thing” as advised by his AA spiritual Sherpa guide and sponsor, Jimbo. Jimbo wasn’t a Sherpa and had never been on this mountain but he was all Max had. He felt strongly that calling the police was a good way to get Adrienne killed. He tried calling Adrienne’s number hoping that Alesandro would be there. The phone rang several times on the other end but there was no answer.

Mon. 10:00: Hank had no reason to believe that he was going to live. He saw the leaves and the branches of the tree above him gently flickering in a light breeze. He thought about the sermons at the Sally and the Mish he’d heard a thousand times before… about sweet Jesus and salvation… salvation from what? He never quite figured.

“If I’m dying, who’s going to find my body?” he asked loud enough for hardly anyone to hear.

“Shit, that you, Hank?”

“Bob-O?”

“Yeh, what the fuck was that about?” Bob-O peered over the root’s knee next to Hank.

“Forget that… can’t you see, I’m dying?”

“What’s this…?” Bob-O picked up the cell phone.

Hank was having a hard time breathing as blood was filling his lungs, “Quit lookin’ at that damned thing like a monkey lookin' at his turds,” he coughed, “Call 911!”

10:15: Hank was loaded onto the Emergency Vehicle on a gurney. There were several Japanese tourists already off the tour bus taking pictures as though they were circled around a fire pit at a Luau only this was more exciting... American gun violence like they’d all read about from their Tokyo homes. They were now in the Wild West and here was a gangster shooting.... crime scene tape and all. Hank wondered what was in their photo albums at home. Bob-O imagined those bored guests watching in near comas the videos of their trip to Hawaii and America. Bob-O was standing nearby but, when the cops showed up, he had begun inching away. It didn’t help his progress, hoping to meld into the tourists with Hank’s shopping cart, that one cop blocked his exit.

Ryan commanded, “Don’t anyone leave, you there.”

Bob-O stopped… “Shit.”

“Haven’t seen you for a while, Bob-O.”

“I was at the gray-bar Bed and Breakfast the last three months.” He’d hoped that Ryan hadn’t noticed him slipping the phone in one of his several pockets. Even though the temperature was in the nineties, Bob-O and Hank wore several layers of shirts and always greasy jackets with plenty pockets in and out.

Ryan had an old cop’s affection for some of these dumpster-divers. As far as he knew, these two didn’t use drugs and, though they did hit the Tokay and smoked some pot to fend off the chill of the night, they weren’t usually a problem. They kept it to themselves and in the bushes out of sight. Bob-O and Hank were the kind of homeless men... mostly men and a few women... that wouldn’t spend a night or sing for their supper at the Mission. He knew they might have once had families that cared. All of them at least had mothers. Some had sisters and brothers that wondered where their brothers went. Fewer still had children looking for them too. Something had gone wrong with the wiring between their ears. It could have been Nam... or some other fulcrum of trauma that levered them off the treadmill of civilized lives... of career and family. Ryan was one of the lucky ones that did come home from Viet Nam to a career he loved... to a home given up to divorce and child-support... to a one bedroom apartment he used just to sleep. Yes, sleep fitfully like in a hotel room... to high cholesterol and blood pressure controlled by meds... meds to shut off the dreams of Marine’s dying around the embassy, shrapnel... a bike bomb that nearly killed him during the Tet... and the VA that had just begun to recognize PTSD as a recognizable diagnosis that was shuffled off to a desk where a clerk moved the flood of compensation claims to the bottom of the stack.

Most Santa Barbara cops let the homeless make their rounds, filling shopping carts in the early morning up State Street and behind the bars for anything that could be recycled. They weren't bothered by most local patrols, except by rookies and out-of-town badges during Fiesta: a time when the streets were cleared of eyesores for the sake of the Chamber of Commerce. Hank and Bob-O knew enough to stay out of sight towards the end of July to the second week of August.

“Did you see anything, Bob-O?”

“Naw… I was asleep between the knees…” he pointed to the spot he’d been laying and looked down at where Hank had landed between the roots next to him, “I woke up when I heard Hank hit the ground there.”

“You didn’t hear gunshots?”

“Naw, nothin’ like that… it was weird,” he puzzled, scratching his dreds as though it was the first time Bob-O thought about what had happened.

Ryan went over to the knees of the roots that had been taped off and Bob-O followed.

Bob-O put the Dodgers baseball cap back on his matted hair… recalling, “There was this big Hawaiian shirt getting in a black Mercedes.”

“And what did you stuff in your pocket?” Ryan didn’t want to take away Bob-O’s prize, but he felt that whatever it was might help with the investigation.

"Shit, busted… Maybe you’ll ‘member me the next time,” he fished the phone out of one of his deeper pockets inside his layers.

Ryan pointed to the black garbage bag bulging with crushed cans in the cart, “You can have Hank’s cart anyway.”

Ryan’s belt buzzed… it was his phone and not the one in evidence. He hated these interruptions while he was thinking. His thoughts were weaving their way through a maze of who, what, when and where. He had a good idea about the black Mercedes. This Miguel character had come to his attention but a punk like this was the business of the Narcotics Enforcement folks until now. An attempted murder, however, was Ryan’s business. The repeated buzzing of his phone was getting annoying. His complete attention was focused on the phone he’d taken from Hank. The setting for the contact list was nearly empty and the few numbers there were listed under initials… no names. However, the call log had a number that was repeated a few times in the last hour… from… what… Adrienne Fournier.

He reluctantly answered his own phone hoping he could get back to thinking, “Yeh, Richards, what do you want?”

“Was it a hit? I just heard… I got a call to the Rescue Mission. A kidnapping at the Bakers.”

Ryan wasn’t quite able to connect the dots, but he could figure out that Richards knew about this mess at the Fig Tree and it wasn’t through regular channels. He hadn’t heard this call go out over the air yet and wished he could play poker with this creep that so easily showed his hand. But he asked anyway, “What about the Bakers?”

“I don’t know... Nick’s gone. No one saw him go. But I’m headed to their house.”

Ryan’s brain was sifting the information like an archeologist looking for a shard... thinking, how would Richards know about this and a kidnapping? A uniform doesn’t get these calls before a call from dispatch. Irene already told him Richards had a hard on for Frenchy. Ryan’s next move, after he’d seen that there was nothing more at this crime scene, would be to get up the hill to the Baker house.

On the way up the hill Ryan’s radio broadcast the emergency code 2 on a PC-207 kidnapping.

Unlike Ryan’s methodically digging and sifting, Richards was plundering clumsily through the evidence like a grave robber. He needed to be able to pass on to Miguel whatever Ryan was finding.

His next thought was to get over to Teresa's place next chance he got to see what she could come up with.