Storm Runners (23 page)

C
hoat stepped in front of the maître d’ to guide John and Marianna Cedros into a corner booth. The Madison Club dining room on Third Street was walnut-paneled and windowless, with high ceilings and crown moldings and a stamped aluminum ceiling. The walls were hung with sconces that gave warm orange light, portraits of once-powerful men and fair-faced women, and bucolic plein air paintings of Southern California.

Cedros slid into the booth, amazed that just a few yards away from where they sat, the downtown traffic of Third Street was whizzing along both invisible and inaudible here in this century-old gentlemen’s club. He knew that Choat was occasionally entertained here
by his masters on the Water Board. He never dreamed that he would see the inside of it unless he was hired here as a busboy.

Already seated was Joan Choat, the director’s wife. She was a thin woman with dramatic cheekbones, long brown hair, and a pleasant expression on her face.

She smiled meltingly as Marianna guided her growing body into the booth, and reached across Cedros to lay a hand on her belly.

“Ohhhh…I’m so happy for you. Patrick and I could never achieve this. Another Rob Roy, please.”

The maître d’ nodded and handed out the leather menu books.

Choat ordered a double martini up with a twist. Marianna got lemonade and Cedros a German beer.

When the drinks came Choat lifted his glass to John. The women joined in and Cedros held his mug toward them.

“To your service to DWP,” he said. “No general has ever had a better soldier.”

Cedros felt himself blush, less with pride than with annoyance at Choat’s pomposity. He looked at Marianna, who offered Choat a fixed smile.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

“To dropped charges, a new assignment, and a home in the Owens Gorge,” said Choat.

Earlier in the day, in the privacy of his office, Choat had told Cedros that Frankie almost getting her head blown off was actually a good thing. If that wasn’t enough to dissuade her from making rain, then she simply had no common sense. And the PI? Well, he could loiter around Frankie all he wanted now, so far as Choat was concerned. They could garden together, learn a foreign language.

Choat had also said that the San Diego Sheriff ’s investigators had asked him about his connection to Cedros’s visit to Mike El Jefe Tavarez at Pelican Bay. Choat had, of course, denied knowing anything about it. Mike who? They seemed to believe him because what would a ranking DWP executive need with a prison gangster? Choat told them that a private investigator by the name of Stromsoe had come to his office last week, full of some dumb-ass theory about the DWP harassing a weather lady down in San Diego, and speculated that Stromsoe had pointed the detectives his way as reverse harassment. The detectives had shrugged off the idea.

Cedros had then reassured Choat—for what, the twentieth time?—that he and Tavarez had talked family and family only. Choat had listened closely to this story he already knew, as if to hear in it any falsehood that the police might have heard. Cedros told him that the cops had been suspicious but largely convinced. They had not asked about money passing hands. Cedros told him
again
that the untraceable cash had gone to Ampostela and he had not seen it since. And again, that days later Ampostela had taken him out for a drink at a restaurant in Azusa, but the big man had rudely walked out and that was the last Cedros had seen of him.

You are all that stands between DWP and catastrophe, John,
Choat had said.
You are the bridge between here and tomorrow.

“To a strong and healthy child,” said Joan.

“With the courage of the Mexican and the cleverness of the Italian,” said Choat. “Have you named her?”

Cedros’s scalp crawled, remembering the last time he’d heard that question.

“Cathy,” said Marianna. “We like that name.”

“It’s fabulous,” said Joan.

Cedros watched the sweat roll down the sides of his mug and imagined their cabin in the gorge.

Just a few short days ago it had seemed impossible. Now, with Frankie Hatfield asking the San Diego D.A. to drop the stalking charges, and Marcus Ampostela no longer looming over them, and Choat suddenly doing all the things he’d promised to do, Cedros was having trouble recognizing his own life. His new job assignment was approved. He’d already met the director of maintenance operations and two of his assistant directors. The paperwork for company housing, a company truck—a new Ford F-250—a company cell phone, and the hazardous-duty pay bonus was on its way.

Success was different from failure.

The home in the gorge.

He and Marianna and Tony were set to leave the next morning and drive up to the Owens Valley and see it. And also see the Gorge Transmission Line, which Choat wanted to personally show him. Choat had spent some years tending this “baby” himself as a ditch rider, and it was more to him than just a steel pipe with a river inside it. He’d shown Cedros an impressive book of photographs documenting the project. It had taken ten years to build the entire system. Men from all over the world had come to work there. Loss of life had been minor.

They would then all go to dinner and overnight in Bishop, just a few miles from the gorge, at a nice motel with a trout-filled creek running right through it. Tony would like that. On the way home the next day Choat wanted to show them a photography gallery that would impress him and Marianna “mightily.” He’d said that he and Joan would send John and Marianna home with something special from it.

The roast-beef lunch was the best Cedros had ever had. Since Ampostela, he’d been tremendously hungry, and he ate everything on his plates, three rolls, then dessert.

Choat had another double and talked about the clever but “clearly legal” way that the DWP had deceived the citizens of the Owens Valley back in the early 1900s and “redirected” almost all of their water south to develop small, sleepy, dirty Los Angeles. He talked about the vision of Eaton, who had envisioned the aqueducts, and the gumption of Mulholland, who had built them, and the sacrifice of Lippincott, who had acted as a double agent to make the whole thing work. He talked about the greatness of our current president, and about God and terror and “spine.” He mentioned that Joan was “barren,” and went on to fondly describe a fistfight he’d won against “two men in matching reindeer sweaters.” Joan smiled dreamily through her third Rob Roy. Marianna was unusually quiet. Cedros’s mind kept alternating between images of their new home in the mountains and of Ampostela’s collapsing face.

AT EIGHT THE next morning Cedros was at the wheel of his gold sedan, Marianna beside him and Tony locked snugly into his car seat in the back.

They followed the Choats’ black Lincoln town car up Highway 395 to the eastern side of the state.

Cedros looked out at all the new houses being built in the desert north of Los Angeles, suddenly proud that some hardworking agency such as his own DWP was providing the water to build cities amid the cactus. He had begun to understand Choat’s godlike ego. He had begun to consider himself—John Cedros—one of the men who bring
the water.
The men who bring the water.
As he looked out at the development rising from the sands of the desert he thought of Frankie Hatfield and wondered if she’d ever really make rain. What if she had found a way to accelerate moisture, like her great-great-grandfather Charles Hatfield?
Extra rain.
When Choat first told him about Frankie Hatfield, Cedros had secretly hoped she would make rain—lots of it. She could bring relief to a thirsty world, turn deserts into rich farmland and sunbaked savannahs into thriving suburbs. But now he wasn’t so sure about the value of more rain. Weren’t things working pretty damned well the way they were? Abundance really might be our enemy. A strange shudder issued from his stomach up through his body. He’d never felt anything like it: half hope, half dread, all excitement.

Marianna dozed with her head against the window, the sun warming her beautiful skin and shiny black hair. Cedros saw the pale flesh inside her thighs vibrating with the car, and the gentle, slower rhythm of her breasts, and the solid ball of Cathy riding midway in between.

He put his hand on a sun-warmed leg and glanced back at sleeping Tony, lost in shoulder straps, head forward like a reconnoitering paratrooper.

I’ve been blessed, thought Cedros. I’m a fuckup but God has blessed me anyway.

They pulled into Randsburg, once a gold-mining town and now the smallest and most humble of tourist stops. There was a two-cell jail you could visit, a display of glass bottles turned blue and purple by decades in the desert sun, and an interesting sculpture made of hubcaps and license plates.

At a saloon-turned-diner three young men fretted intensely over
the making of milk shakes, which Marianna and Joan found touching but Choat groused about under his stiff broom of a mustache. Tony drank his whole shake and fell asleep in the chair with his head on Marianna’s lap. Choat laid his right hand on the boy’s beautiful little head. The hand was still bruised from the surprise slugging of the PI. Cedros was relieved when the food came and he took it off.

The rest of the drive to Bishop was the most beautiful that Cedros had ever taken. He’d been to Las Vegas, Tijuana, and Oregon, and even up here once before, but today’s vast tan October desert and blue sky were singular and priceless, and the stretch of 395 where to your left the snowcapped Sierra Nevada Mountains cut their jagged way into the heavens while to your right the White Mountains stood in parched, hulking magnificence, well, Cedros was sure you couldn’t run into scenery like that just anywhere. The aspen trees sprouting in the gorges looked like red-orange dabs from a painter’s brush.

They passed the old Owens Lake bed, just miles of dry white broken by an occasional silver pool. Cedros knew that the DWP had been sued for lakebed dust pollution and been forced to let just enough water back into the lake to turn the dust to a shallow sludge that no wind could lift and carry.

Farther up the highway he finally saw the last of the Owens River bleeding into the tiny remnant of the lake, depleted of its volume far upstream by the DWP transmission lines and aqueducts that were soon to become his responsibility.

He looked out at the pretty blue ribbon of river winding through a stand of bright yellow cottonwoods and wondered what it must have looked like a short century ago.

“I don’t trust him,” said Marianna. “Choat wants something.”

Cedros looked at Tony in the back, deep asleep again, a teddy bear on his lap.

“He’s afraid you’ll tell the cops he sent you to Tavarez,” said Marianna.

“Why would I do that?”

“To save yourself from prosecution.”

“But they’re not prosecuting me.”

“Not for stalking. But you don’t know what they’re doing with regards to attempted murder, do you? Choat doesn’t either. That’s the variable. He has to plan ahead. How good was your story to the detectives?”

“Cops are hard to fool.”

“What will Tavarez tell them?”

“Nothing he doesn’t want to. He’s doing life. San Diego Sheriff ’s can’t touch him.”

“And you believe your secret is safe with him?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What if Choat doesn’t?”

“I spent three hours lying awake last night, thinking about that,” he said. “And three more hours thinking about all the good things that are happening. I’m scared, Marianna. But I’m happy too.”

She reached over and rested her hand on his shoulder.

“Marianna, let me take this one step at a time,” he said. “I can’t see more than one step ahead.”

“Hmmm,” she said doubtfully. “He’s going to ask you for one more thing. It’ll be a whopper.”

Cedros knew that his wife’s nose for intrigue was keen and her eyesight for betrayal and conspiracy was better than 20/20. She always solved the mystery novels she read long before they were over,
always knew who was getting voted off the island next, always seemed to smell their friends’ affairs and divorces before they happened. And her suspicious nature had a practical side. The gun was her doing and she had saved his life. Stromsoe had put the idea in his head, and Cedros had put it in hers, but Marianna had dug the weapon from the upper closet, showed him how the slide and safety worked, told him to hide it in his windbreaker pocket just in case, and instructed him to “empty it” the second Ampostela showed his own killing device—just shoot right through the jacket to save time. An old boyfriend had given her the gun, and hopefully most of the know-how. Cedros had never asked about him.

She had scared him in that moment, and not for the first time in their marriage. Besides her innate cunning, Marianna’s temper was ferocious once it got the better of her. It was a blinding and irrational thing, though she much preferred peace and quiet. She worked very hard for her family. She put them first. Left to her own, she was lazy and horny as a cat.

“We’ll get through this,” said Cedros.

“I wish there was something more I could do,” said Marianna. “Choat scares me because he’s selfish and cruel and he uses people. He’ll do anything in the name of his precious DWP. But the worst part of him is, he’s smart.”

“Let’s trust the PI.”

“So far, I do trust the PI,” said Marianna. “He’s better than the law in some ways.”

Cedros nodded. “Yeah, he’s got no reason to throw me in jail.”

“But notice how the risk always falls on you.”

“Things will be different when we’re up here, honey. We’ll be hundreds of miles from Choat. I’ll be out tending to the water. He’ll be
back in L.A. in his dark office. No more favors. No more rainmakers.”

“Yeah,” she said quietly, lost in thought. “One more thing. A whopper.”

“No more waiting tables for you, honey.”

“Something to do with the rain lady.”

“They say the schools up here are good.”

“What more can he do to her?”

“No bangers, no dope on the streets, no ’hood, no mad dogs, no dissin’, no smog.”