Above the Law (7 page)

“They were going to kill us in the end, anyhow,” he answered. “We gave ourselves a chance. I wasn’t going to let them kill my family without trying to stop them.”

I was interviewed by dozens of reporters. My face would be plastered all over the tube tonight, tomorrow, for days to come. Newspapers and magazines, too. It was nothing I desired; I’ve had enough notoriety to last me the rest of my life. But this had been a huge big deal. For a week or so, I and my fellow hostages were going to be famous.

The question that hit me the most was asked by a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times:
“Given all the problems these two fugitives had—the storm, running from the authorities—why do you think they raped these women? What was their point?”

I looked at the dozens of cameras and microphones all pointing at me, all waiting to hear what I had to say. “It’s a disease of arrogance certain people in authority get,” I ventured. “They want something—like these two wanted that money they robbed—so they convince themselves that they’re entitled to it. It’s a belief—a dangerous, erroneous belief—that the law doesn’t apply to you like it does to civilians, and you can choose not to obey it, and that’s all right. The rationale is that you’re out there on the streets, putting your life on the line, and you deserve some payback. Which is a very dangerous concept, if you follow it through. Like we saw here.”

The girls were airlifted out on a medevac helicopter. The rest of us would have to wait until the roads were cleared and we could drive. Before they left, the four of us shared a private moment.

“We’re going to be okay,” Marilyn assured me. Once Bill had forced her into the Winnebago, she had taken a cunning tack; instead of fighting him, which would have resulted not only in rape but a brutal beating as well, she had shifted gears and made nice to him, prolonging the foreplay as long as she could. It had worked; she had escaped being raped.

I gave her my card. “Keep in touch. Let me know how Jo Ellen’s doing.”

“I will.”

She lingered a moment while the other two boarded the chopper. “You saved my life,” she said once again. “We’re bonded for eternity.” She smiled. “In many cultures, you’re responsible for us for the rest of your life. Do you think you could handle that?”

I smiled back. I could smile, now that our ordeal was over. “Are you going to hold me to that?”

She shook her head. “We’re not one of those cultures, unfortunately. Anyway…like I said, your wife is a lucky woman. A very lucky woman.”

One kiss before parting, maybe never to see each other again. It was a good kiss, not the kiss a married man should be having with a beautiful woman half his age. But somehow it didn’t feel bad, or wrong. It felt bonded, the right farewell.

Bill’s and Joe’s backpacks were propped up on a table in the middle of the room. Behind them stood all the law enforcement people, while the gathered media were on the other side, cameras at the ready.

“Here we go,” Keller said. He upended the hags, spilling the contents onto the tabletop. The money came tumbling out. Packets of it, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds. The cameras clicked and whirred like crazy. If this picture didn’t make the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek,
for sure it would be on the front of next week’s
Enquirer.

“That’s what two million dollars looks like?” Deedee said.

Keller laughed. “More like half a mil. The banks always exaggerate, ’cause they know Lloyd’s of London will try to squeeze them.”

The FBI people loaded everything, including the corpses, into their helicopters and took off. The CHP and county boys waited with us. Deedee washed down most of the carnage, Ray cooked up a hellacious banquet, and the drinks were on the house. The clock had not yet struck twelve, but no one was holding hack. We all had great cause for celebration.

The roads were cleared for travel by midafternoon. Everyone departed; I was the last one left.

“Thank God for ’ol Brewster,” I told Wally.

“Thank God for ’ol Luke who had the guts to use ’ol Brewster,” he replied.

I broomed the sand off my ancient truck. It started without a hiccup, a deep growl rumbling from the muffler. They’re great beasts of burden, these old American pickups. Letting it idle to warm up, I walked to the rear and pried opened the doors to the trailer.

The seals on the trailer were good. My new prize possession was sitting there all perky, barely a speck of sand on it. I jumped inside, ran my hand along the smooth gas tank, the worn leather seat.

“We’re going to have fun,” I told it. “We’ve earned it. By the way, your name is Marilyn, from you know who, and I am going to ride you hard.”

I closed the trailer up tight, got into the cab of the truck, and pulled out. Deedee, Wally, and Ray were standing in front, waving good-bye. I waved back. For a few moments I could see them in my side-view mirror, receding in the distance. Then I followed the curve of the road, and they were gone.

T
HE OLD MAN STOOD
apart from the others in a grove of old-growth California live oaks, smoking a hand-rolled. The only things here more ancient than me, he thought as he looked at them, their twisted limbs skeletal-like, black against the not-as-black sky of the night still two hours away from the beginnings of a crisp early autumn dawn. He squinted against the smoke as it curled up from the cigarette that was tucked into the corner of his mouth. His eyes, a startling desert-sky pale blue, were narrow anyway. He had been looking at things critically for over fifty years.

The location that he and the others in this raiding party had come to was a heavily wooded area of Muir County, the least-populated and poorest county in the state, situated in the far north, bordering Oregon, Nevada, and nowhere. Over thirty million people live in California, but less than twenty thousand of them live in Muir County, and that’s a generous census. It’s a vast place and difficult to get to. There are no interstate or federal highways running through it, and the county and state roads are poorly maintained; in winter, when there are storms every week, or during spring floods that originate from the rivers that flow down from the Sierras, access in and out can border on the impossible, except by private airplane—the nearest commercial airfield is in Reno, hours away. At any time during the year, you can be driving on one of the county roads and not encounter another car, or see another person, for several miles.

This is the unglamorous underside of rural America, as one finds in pockets of Mississippi or Arkansas and other benighted places; an overall feeling more like Appalachia than California. If you went up to some family sitting on their front porch, took their picture on black-and-white film, and then compared it, side by side, with a photo taken by Dorothea Lange in the 1930s, you’d see strong similarities.

Because of the inbredness of the area, there is a tremendous suspicion of outsiders. Still, it is America at the beginning of the new millennium, with cable television systems and satellite dishes and Internet providers.

A sizable segment of the population is Native American, scattered among four reservations. In recent years, particularly since the passage, in 1998, of Proposition Five, which legalized a myriad of types of gambling on Indian land with virtually no government control or oversight, the tribes have become militant regarding land-use issues, particularly gambling. There have been discussions amongst the various tribal heavies in the county about building a huge, multimillion-dollar resort to attract some of the money that flows into Tahoe, two hundred miles to the south, even though this is a remote area. If you build it, the feeling is, they will come. The gamblers.

There are no other minorities here to speak of. The last census did not list one African-American, and hardly any Latinos or Asians.

Over thirty percent of the permanent residents are on some form of welfare or government assistance. Despite the overall poverty, though, there are pockets of considerable money, based around mining, logging, and ranching operations. That’s the legal stuff. Then there are the illegal enterprises—marijuana growing, a huge industry, one of the largest farming industries in California, major meth labs, similar nefarious enterprises. The remoteness of the region lends itself to such clandestine activities.

This is the underbelly of the modern West: not the duded-up version, the West of the rugged and suspicious individual. There are no proponents of gun control around here, none that are vocal, anyway—these are fiercely independent people. Radical fringe groups abound, the kinds of groups you read about and see on television, hard-core fundamentalism crossed with hatred of anything smelling of government, where revelation is at hand and the fire next time is now.

The old man looked up at the sky, at the millions of stars clustering over his head.

His name was Tom Miller, and he had recently celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday. “Celebrated” is an ironic way of putting it; he had not celebrated anything, in the sense of a joyous occasion, for a long time. Even before his wife died, going on a decade now, he hadn’t celebrated. The closest he would come then was to take her out to dinner on her birthday. But that wasn’t a celebration, it was a ceremony, a ritual from the long-distant past, when there had been cause in his life for celebration.

Which is not to say he didn’t find pleasure in life. He loved his work. It brought him gratification, almost every day. But that wasn’t celebration, that was satisfaction. That he did a good job and knew it, and others knew it, too.

His job was sheriff of Muir County. Forever, it seemed like to most, but in truth, it had been the last thirty years. His story was one of triumph emerging phoenix-like from the ashes of personal tragedy and adversity. Forged from the ashes, because he had rebuilt his life himself, made it happen by hard, dogged work, self-belief, and mental toughness.

In 1949, freshly graduated from George Washington University Law School after serving with distinction as a marine lieutenant in the Pacific during World War II, Tom Miller joined the FBI. Right from the start he attracted Hoover’s eye. He was smart, he was tough, he was incorruptible, and most important, he was loyal. He rose through the ranks like a shot, so that by 1965 he was among the boss’s most trusted aides, one of a handful thought to be a candidate to succeed the little bulldog if and when he ever stepped down (or more likely, as actually happened, died). He loved Washington, the perks of his office, the closeness to power. Although they lived modestly on a middle-class civil-service salary, he and his wife, Dorothy, had a great life in the capital of the greatest country in the world.

And then it all fell apart, overnight. His son, James, his only child, an honors student at MIT, good athlete and musician, wonderful kid, defected to Canada rather than go to Vietnam.

Miller was contaminated. His chance at the big time in the Bureau was over.

He wasn’t fired—there were no grounds for it. Instead, he was exiled. Hoover sent Miller to head the most desolate, out-of-the-way field office that was available: the handful of small-population northern California counties, which included Muir County. He would work in the one-man office, in anonymity and disgrace, for the rest of his professional life.

But something unexpected happened. Miller discovered that he loved the place. The physicality, the enormity of it. The serenity. An urban person his entire life, he learned to fish and hunt, to enjoy long, peaceful hikes in the mountains, to sleep outdoors under a canopy of stars. To his great surprise, he had found his home.

The Bureau’s office was a wasteland. Boring, tedious, unnecessary. He endured it long enough to accumulate the minimum years of service that kicked in his pension; then he quit and ran for the sheriffs job. The reigning sheriff, a lazy, corrupt bastard who had lost contact with everyone, even the rich guys who ran things, never knew what hit him. Miller ran a vigorous, grassroots, door-to-door campaign, in two months putting twenty thousand miles on his car as he crisscrossed the county, meeting and greeting, listening to people’s concerns.

In June of 1969, Tom Miller was elected sheriff of Muir County, California. He’s been reelected seven times since. This is his county, which he runs with unchallenged authority.

But not tonight.

Tonight belonged to the feds, specifically the Drug Enforcement Administration. They were poised to storm a large, low-slung house in the middle of a compound that sprawled out over several acres in the wash below the forest. Ostensibly it was a hunting lodge built by an out-of-state millionaire (what the county was told when it and the adjacent airstrip were permitted and built). In reality, it was a safe house, a refuge for members of one of the biggest drug rings in the country. The men who came and went here with some regularity, about a dozen according to the DEA’s intelligence, were the nucleus of this criminal conspiracy.

The compound is an armed camp, but the men inside have come to assume that they’re safe, because they have taken great precautions to camouflage their being here. This place is too far out of the way to attract attention, and they keep a low profile. Everything comes in and out by airplane, via their own private runway, which is big enough to accommodate jets up to the size of a 737.

This bust had been almost a year in the making. It was going to be one of the biggest in the history of the DEA, a classic the world will be talking about for the ages. It would go like this: A Gulfstream 4 was coming in from Los Angeles with one hundred million dollars in cash, untraceable. Right behind it, a similar Gulfstream, carrying ten tons of Colombian cocaine, was going to fly in from Mexico. No flight plan, nothing on the screen. The coke was coming from this drug ring; the money from a former Iranian arms dealer who now lived in Los Angeles.

The way it was going to go down was, the money people would check out the cocaine, the dope people would check out the money, the pilots would switch airplanes, and then fly away. The entire transaction would take less than an hour.