Deadly Waters (3 page)

“No.”

“Turns out the developer, the one that ended up buying my land at ten cents on the dollar, was the cousin of a congressman on the Interior Committee. He sold the whole thing at market value, and everybody in the media said he was a hero. I suppose one could say he did good while doing well. Not that I want to sound bitter.”

Mondragon smiled over his angry words and buttoned the top buttons of his trench coat. “See you around,” he said and patted Taylor on the shoulder.

“I’ll give you my number,” said Taylor, reaching for the pack of business cards he kept in his coat pocket.

“I have your number,” said Mondragon.

“I don’t believe I have yours,” said Taylor.

“No, no you don’t. I’m around. I’ll be in touch.”

Mondragon was on his way out of the bar before Taylor could ask him another question. John watched the light brown trench coat exit the door and returned to contemplating the bay window.

III

02/17/06 23:14 Arizona Standard Time

Coconino County Deputy Sheriff Bob Mathers parked his patrol car opposite the bar and walked across the empty street to a side door. At that time of night things would be beginning to pick up on the streets of Los Angeles, where Mathers had once been a cop. Here in Page, Arizona, everyone was already abed, save for a few miscreants who kept Bob busy while the other sixty-five hundred citizens in the desert town slept the deep sleep of the righteous. Mathers turned the knob and pushed the door open with his foot. Cautiously, he edged the side of his face around the doorjamb to have a look, always keeping his hand on his holster. A drunkard Mathers recognized as a cowboy from Utah stumbled past him muttering:

“Cops. Good people.”

Freddy, the owner, met Mathers instants after the officer had taken a couple slow steps across the dirty floor. “He’s gone now,” he told Mathers. “He’s got a gun, that old M-1 his uncle brought back from the war.”

“Has he gone to the river?” asked Bob.

“Where else?” said Freddy, not showing much concern about what had happened in his bar a few minutes earlier.

Bob Mathers drove north from town on Highway 89 with his warning lights blazing and his siren turned off. When the road dipped into the Glen Canyon, where a bridge spanned the Colorado a few hundred yards below the mighty dam named after the canyon itself, he turned off his lights and coasted to a stop.

The illuminated streets of Page seemed far away amidst the darkness of the nearly empty countryside. Bob saw Wayland leaning against the bridge’s northern railing and the old World War II rifle propped up on its butt a few feet from the intoxicated young man. Deputy Mathers turned off his engine and took care not to slam the door behind him as he left the car. As he walked along the pavement he could hear the dark river murmuring below him. Unlike the high desert country around Page, where the heat lingered for hours after sunset on a warm winter day, the air on the bridge was kept cool by the icy water rolling south from the snowy Rockies on its way to the Grand Canyon. The chill and the danger made Bob’s hands tingle a bit as he stepped closer. Wayland was singing to himself and to the river as Bob approached. The deputy took care to walk on the balls of his feet and stayed on the far side of the bridge.

“These boots are made for walking,” sang Wayland, making use of only one note.

“And that’s just what they’ll do.

One of these days these boots

Are gonna walk all over you.”

As much as Bob hated the song, he was oddly charmed by Wayland’s drunken enthusiasm and the way the young man swayed while he sang. He let the singing continue and did not make a sound until he had crept across the roadway and grasped the rifle by its barrel.

“Too much beer?” he asked.

His words did not startle Wayland, who finished the final verse in his song and declared, “Once I learn to play the piano, I’m taking this show on the road.”

“Been here long?” said Bob.

Wayland staggered from the railing and sat on the concrete ridge that formed a curb

below the steel buttress. He stretched his legs in front of him and exhaled audibly. “I’ve had quite a day, boss,” he told Bob. “First, there was that fist fight over in the KOA campground—”

“What fight?” asked the deputy.

“Forget I said anything,” said Wayland. “Then Henry got bent out of shape just ‘cause I couldn’t pay for my last eleven rounds. So I came out here to take a couple shots at the dam.’

Mathers glanced up the river to the 708 high foot dam that held back 27,000,000 acre-feet of water and glanced down at the small carbine in his hand. “Did you hit it?”

“I think I winged it a couple times,” said the young man. “Hard to tell with only those spot lights on it at night. The damn thing sure doesn’t seem to be hurt. You think I could get a bigger gun?”

“Not tonight,” recommended Bob.

He helped Wayland Zah stand upright and to walk to the patrol car. Regulations demanded Bob handcuff a reckless endangerment suspect, but he felt sorry for this sad young fellow. Wayland Zah was half Navaho and half something else, no one knew what; people only knew his mother lived on the giant Shiprock Reservation that lay east and south of Page and that his father was someone on America’s endless roadways who had stopped in Arizona for a couple days in the late 1970s.

Because Wayland was wild and irresponsible, both the Navahos and Page’s white, and predominantly Mormon citizens, rejected him. He had, in other periods of his life, tried very hard to ingratiate himself to both groups.

Wayland had once worn a wrinkled suit every Sunday to the Latter Day Saint Church in Page. The others in the congregation had left Wayland sitting by himself in a back pew, and he never got invited to the Wednesday night potluck suppers. When Wayland had grown his hair long and had gone to attend the ancient ceremonies on the reservation, the other Navaho said he was a disgrace to the tribal nation and he should go back to the drug dealers and motorcycle outlaws who were Wayland’s friends when he was a teenager.

Bob Mathers was among the few in Page able to appreciate what it meant to be an outsider in a small town. After he had married Becky and had come to live in her home town, Bob had converted to Becky’s LDS faith--at least formally--and after three years in the local sheriff’s department he was still “the LA cop.” The other deputies made fun of Bob’s fastidious procedural methods and of his eagerness to check everything that appeared out of sorts in the lightly populated and almost crime- free community. “Eager Beaver Bob” the other lawmen called him, the galvanized Mormon known to keep beer in the back of his family’s refrigerator.

Some in the community whispered that Bob had strayed so far as to have been seen smoking a cigarette and drinking a Coca Cola right in front of his infant daughter. The local church elders had told Bob to try harder to be an upright father and husband, even as the sheriff had coaxed him to be a little less serious about his work. Bob Mathers could only be as he was, and he saw the same inability to change in Wayland.

“We need to get you out of this river chill, buddy,” Bob told Wayland as he helped him along. “You could ruin your voice. What would life be around here if we didn’t have you to sing to us?”

“Really?” said the boy. “I’ve been learning some new ones, boss. For Sheriff Anderson. How do you think he feels about show tunes?”

“They would appeal to his feminine side.”

“Even stuff from
Cats
?”

“He’d insist on a whole medley, were he here. He’s down in Flagstaff most of the time.”

Bob put Wayland in the back of the car and the M-1 in the trunk. Wayland was bobbing from side to side and talking about a basketball game he had seen on TV.

“You think I could play in the NBA?” he asked, and laid down in the back seat. “I mean, if I grew another two feet?”

“You’re twenty-eight years old,” said Bob. “I think maybe you’re past your growth spurt.”

“Another dream shot to hell,” said Wayland, closing his eyes. “I would have been great in the NBA. I could dye my hair like Rodman. Be one crazy warhoop with a tiger-stripe do.”

“You shouldn’t call yourself names,” said Bob from the driver’s seat.

“Everybody else does,” said Wayland. “You know what an apple is, boss? It’s somebody red on the outside and white inside. My boys call me that down in Tuba City,” he said, referring to a town on the reservation where his mother lived.

“They don’t know you well enough.”

“My old motorcycle homies, like Jeremy Russleman, they used to call me Tonto.”

“Jeremy Russleman is a punk,” said Bob. “That’s why he’s doing two to four years for distribution of narcotics. Punks end up like that.”

“I was in prison, too,” said Wayland Zah.

“For six months,” said Bob, with a trace of guilt in his voice, since he had made the drug bust that had sent his friend behind bars. “And since you are a Native American—”

“Native American!” sneered Wayland. “That’s Injun to you, kemo sabe. I’m an Injun, boss. Just a plain old vanilla Injun.”

“Since you are a Native American,” continued Bob, “you were transferred to that federal minimum security facility in California, which is hardly the same as real prison. Your permanent record doesn’t say ‘prison’, it says you got treatment.”

“I met a guy in there,” said Wayland. “He called me the other day.”

“Another…” Bob was about to say ‘ex-con’ but he stopped himself, because such a harsh term would have defeated the point he was trying to make. “You need to stay away from bad influences,” he said instead. “Are you still seeing that lady from Chinle? That’s what you need, buddy; get cleaned up, get a job, get married—”

“See, I got a tattoo,” declared Wayland, and he sat upright in the rear seat and rolled up a sleeve to show Bob his wrist through the mesh screen.

Deputy Mathers’ eyes were on the road and he could not have seen much in the darkened interior of the car had he turned to look.

“What is it?” he asked.

“A butterfly, boss. See the wings?”

Bob Mathers stopped the car and turned on the overhead light so he could see the yellow wings depicted on the outside of Wayland’s wrist.

“This means we’re blood brothers,” said Wayland. “Friends forever. He’s a Spanish dude. Not Mexican. Most people calling themselves Spanish are really from Mexico, you know. Why don’t they say ‘Mexican,’ boss? Hell, I would rather say I was from Mexico than Oklahoma.”

“What did this guy... what did you say his name was?” asked Bob.

“Can’t tell you,” laughed Wayland. “I’m sworn to secrecy. I’m the only one knows his true identity.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Bob. “The man was in prison, or rather, a facility. The authorities, they would have records of him.”

The patrol car turned onto Lake Powell Boulevard and toward the jailhouse where the Page branch of the Coconino County sheriff’s department was located.

“When I said ‘identity,’” said Wayland, “I meant I was the one what knew his secrets. A man’s secrets are his real identity. He’s going to get me a job, a good job, one of these days.”

“Punks don’t give anybody good jobs,” said Bob as he parked the car in front of the single-story adobe building. “They only get you into deeper trouble.”

He took Wayland from the back of the car and helped him climb the steps to the doorway. Once Bob had the young man safely inside one of the small holding cells the sheriff’s department reserved for the town’s few habitual drunks, Wayland laid himself on the cot and began singing “Feelings,” a tune he knew Sheriff Anderson hated.

“Feelings, wo-o-o, feelings.

Feeling like I’ll never have you

Again in my life.”

“You sound exactly like Barry Manilow,” Bob told him.

He was not flattering Wayland; the young man had an uncanny talent for imitating the voices of others, and he truly did sound much like the famous crooner. From other portions of the building, from the night guards playing poker in the back and from the two other prisoners in their cells, there arose a loud, pained groan in response to Wayland’s performance.

“Shut that Injun up, Christ’s sake!” yelled the guards. “Why do you keep bringing that son-of-a-bitch in, Mathers? He sings all damned night and gets sick on his bed!”

“For my next number,” announced Wayland in a loud voice, “I will do Kenny Rogers’ ‘The Gambler.’”

“You gotta know when to hold ‘em—”

Bob put a finger to his mouth to signal him to be quiet. “Couldn’t you go to sleep, buddy? Rest up and I’ll see you get out in the morning.”

IV

02/18/06 12:54 Eastern Standard Time

Earnest Gusman opened his mailbox on the ground floor of his decaying tenement building and found the letter he had been hoping for, yet only half expecting. He hid it in the inside pocket of his shiny corduroy coat and quickly glanced around, making certain no one was watching him. Earnest backed up the first steps of the stairwell, keeping one eye on the busy street traffic he could see through the lobby door that was always open.

One of Earnest’s oldest fantasies, the one that kept him awake on hot, muggy nights, was the notion he was being pursued by killers, perhaps by some of the boys who sometimes machine-gunned people from the backs of motorcycles for their paymasters in the drug cartels.

Earnest passed up the five flights of stairs as silently as a ghost, tip-toeing past Senora Mendoza’s apartment on his floor, as he knew she watched him from the peephole in her door if she heard him. Earnest hated her. He hated her with an irrational hatred he had for everything that might harm him, and that was everything and everyone he met during his waking hours, and every phantom he encountered while he slept. He could see, in his mind’s eye, Senora Mendoza spying on him, her tiny white poodle tucked under one flabby arm while with the other hand she made notes that Earnest imagined her handing to the police or--even worse--to members of the underworld.

Earnest counted the steps from the fifth floor landing to his door, as he did every time: sixteen, seventeen...and he wiped away a few drops of sweat from his face as he reached for his key.

“No need to make any phone calls, you old bag,” he mumbled. “See how steady I am. Nothing for me to hide. My hand is barely shaking as I unlock my door.”

Earnest Gusman told himself not to look around like someone with something to fear, even as he glanced at the shadows farther down the hall way, where someone dangerous might be hiding. He undid the thread he strung across the bottom of his doorway each time he went out; it was unbroken, so he knew no one had been there while he was gone.

He bolted the door behind him and propped the diagonal steel bar against the middle of the door to make a secondary barrier against any unwanted entry. The electric lights were not working that day. Earnest had to pull a window shade up half-way to illuminate the room a little. When he had rented the flat the landlord had said he would be able to view the sea, and if Earnest had lived on the other side of the building that might have been true on clear days. From the side he had he could see only Cartagena’s wretched slums huddled against the hills that marked the city’s eastern limits.

Earnest put the envelope on the small writing table near the outside light and cut it open with his treasured mother-of-pearl knife.

Inside the envelope Earnest found a handwritten note that read in Spanish:

“I have found your Russian intelligence officer, namely Vladimir Petrovski, formally of the KGB, Special Operations. I will contact you again, when the time has come for you to recruit the forty select men. Here is some money to keep body and soul together while you wait. I scarce need to tell you that you must destroy this letter immediately.”

There was no signature at the bottom of the note.

In a smaller enclosed envelope were two one thousand American dollar bills, enough for Earnest to live modestly for three months in Cartagena. Because Earnest knew Mondragon would send him more in only two weeks, the money would suffice to let Earnest live like a king in his impoverished neighborhood.