Chapter 16. The Moreton Bay Fig Tree

Planted by an anonymous girl in 1876, and moved to its corner
on Chapala and Montecito Streets by friend Adeline Crabb,
where the Moreton Bay Fig Tree has been an attraction
for tourists and vagrants alike for the past century.

Mon. 08:30: Nick didn’t have much time, but he wanted to try once more to alert Adrienne to the possibilities. He knew that if Miguel’s boys couldn’t find him they’d certainly find her. Adrienne wasn’t aware of the danger his warning was about. He regretted it but hoped she got it. He had no time to explain. He had to disappear before they strung him up by his cajones.

Think, think, think… He had to figure out how to get this deal taken care of. He crossed under the freeway on Chapala Street through the new culverts (before they’d been screened to keep vagrants out) leading to the Fig Tree. He lay there thinking... thinking... maybe a half hour he thought. As soon as he crawled out on the street he got the call from Adrienne’s number.

He was reluctant, but he answered, “Yes.”

The familiar Hispanic voice came from the phone, “Prick, listen to this…. Now say something to your Neecky. Go ahead, say something, anything.”

It was Adrienne, “Neeck, I have been treated badly... they have me in a basement…” Her voice was weak… not at all like her.

Miguel came back on, “Is it clear what you have to do?”

His first thought wasn’t about what he had to do, it was, Shit, I’d better take out the battery from my cell phone… he was sure Miguel has an LBS locator. Better yet, I’ll leave the phone under the tree where maybe a bum, one of the homeless, will pick it up and lead whoever tracks it away…” Then he made his way to a place down to Mason and Chapala to where one of his customers lived. He knocked on the door softly several times…. no one home. He slipped an old plastic library card between the latch and the jamb he kept for these occasions, easily opening it. Thanks to Jerry’s casual attitude, the dead-bolt wasn’t locked.

Jerry was a music industry lawyer who’d fallen onto hard times from using coke and graduating to tar. He once had some high-profile clients but the past two years he’d been representing, barely managing, garage-band local groups, and dealing grams of coke to pay his rent. He had been accustomed to living the high life but was now reduced to scraping by. These apartments by the beach were priced beyond his means but, to Jerry, this was as low as he wished to go. The bedroom door was closed… Nick opened it a crack… Jerry and one of his boys were tangled up in the sheets. Nick picked up Jerry’s phone off a stand next to the couch… held it for a few minutes thinking about who he could call. It was a reflex. He picked up a phone and started calling people… that’s what he does… been doing all his adult life. Under-breath he said, "I'm a salesman, for-crying-out-loud."

He was in survival mode, “Alesandro, Shit, Adrienne’s number...”

Just as Nick started to dial on Jerry’s decorative antique phone, the bedroom door burst open. Jerry was holding an old .357 Ruger Blackhawk single-action revolver, in one hand sideways gangsta-style, directly at Nick’s chest from a foot away. The hammer wasn’t even cocked, and the cylinder was empty. Nick’s first reflex was to flip his arm up and over, slapping it to the side. It spun on the floor like a perverse spin the bottle game.

“Jerry, dammit! You see a punk hold a gun like that in a movie?”

“I don’t care,” Jerry whimpered.

“What’s goin’ on…” the boy from the bed stood naked at the door.

Nick had taken the revolver from the floor by then and tucked it in his belt.

“What are you doing with a toy like this, Jerry?”

“Fucker, get out!”

“Never hold a gun that close to your target and, by the way, it’s a single action, cock it first,” Nick advised, “Lucky it was me.” He tapped out Adrienne’s number.

Voice mail recording started, “Leave a message and number...”

“Shit, this is Nick. Where are you Alesandro? Adrienne has been taken by... shit, I’ll call back after I get to another phone.”

“It wasn’t loaded anyway.” Jerry whined.

“Luckier yet then,” he shrugged, “What good is that? Look, I knocked on your fuckin’ door for…”

“So, I’m busy.”

“Yeah, we’re busy!” bitchily said Snide Boy.

“How old are you boy? Does your mommy know where you are?”

Nick faced Jerry and demanded, “You owe me.”

“I know, I know… I have a client that owes me… I’ll get you back when… I already told you.”

“This will do. You got any ammo for it?”

“Yeh, it’s in that drawer, I promise I will pay,” Jerry pointed to the stand where the phone was kept.

“Good,” he grunted, taking a box labeled Hornady out of the drawer. “I’m not here for money. I just needed your phone and this.”

Nick gestured for them to return to the bedroom… they complied. He loaded the cylinder and dropped the ammo box in one of his front pockets. It was heavy in his parachute style pants with zippers and pockets on each leg. He missed his Walther PPK he’d kept for such emergencies in Adrienne’s garden shed.

Nick stood for a minute staring at the door… “Shit I like ‘em young but that kid can’t be twelve.”

Mon. 09:00: The Moreton Bay Fig Tree was a fixture, a tourist attraction, in Santa Barbara for more than a century. It was mentioned with pride in all the tourist guides: planted by an anonymous little girl at 201 State Street in eighteen-seventy-six. The same brochures would say that two years later her family moved away that her friend, Adeline Crabb, transplanted it to where it stands today at the corner of Montecito and Chapala. A hundred years later; winos, drug dealers and homeless drifters; from the likes of Joe Hill to Jack Kerouac, have rested between its knees in the shade of boughs that now spread wider than any on this continent. Its knees are roots that stand out at least two to three feet from the ground… in the old days before the park was cleaned up, before the freeway went through, one could crawl between its knees, put a piece of cardboard up on the ridges of them, and snuggle down with a blanket to disappear from sight a few hours. By the time Nick’s cell-phone had been dropped and wedged itself in there, those days were over. The area around the tree had been gussied up and patrolled for the tourists. The 101-freeway cut off Chapala Street, making it harder for drug dealers to sell their wares there as traffic was no longer able to pass by as easily as before. Winos, the homeless, and addicts still paused to nap on the lawn but they didn’t stay long… they didn’t hang too close to the tree without getting a vagrancy ticket. The knees of the tree are reserved for tourists to climb on and around during the day.

One of the regulars, Dumpsta-Divin’ Hank, came rolling down the street with his shopping-cart full of bottles and black trash bags jam-packed with crushed cans. The fog had burned off and it had turned into a hot day, he rested on the knees in the shade. A cell phone buzz arose from the crotch of the roots near him. He picked it up, flipped it open, heard a voice come from it, and promptly slammed it shut.

Hank was there for about twenty minutes thinking about where he might be able to get a few bucks for the phone. “Bzzzzzzp… the sound of a bee zipped by his left ear… he didn’t hear the second… his body dropped between the knees of the tree. A hole… mid chest, side-by-side in his jacket … an old tattered sports coat from the Rescue Mission… oozed blood. The cell phone still gripped in his hand. The rear door of the black Mercedes with tinted windows opened. An orange-skinned man in a Hawaiian shirt, a Glock (silencer attached) in his left hand, stepped out towards the tree’s roots where Hank … eyes staring skyward, held his breath.

Hank wasn’t dead but he sure as hell looked dead to the man with the Glock. Otherwise he might have put one in Hank’s head to make sure. He picked up the cell phone… checked the call log… last calls were to Adrienne… received calls were from Adrienne’s phone… nothing went out. He wiped it for prints with a kerchief he always kept handy and dropped the phone next to Hank.

Back at the car, Dmitri slid into the back seat and said with a thick Slavic accent, “It wasn’t Nick.”

“It wasn’t… Who had the phone?”

“A bum.”

“Why didn’t you bring it to me?”

“No reason… there were no calls on it we don’t know about.”

Miguel’s glowering eyes looked past Dmitri seeing a shadow of a man rise-up from the roots next to where Hank had dropped, “You sure there were no other calls?”

“I’m sure.” He turned to see what Miguel was seeing. “I’ll go back and take care of that other bum.”

A tour bus pulled up from through the train station on the Chapala side.

Miguel said, “Which bum is dead?”

“The one with the phone, he’s dead.”

“Then, forget about it.”

The car eased out and turned around away from the scene westward on Montecito Street.