Storm Runners (7 page)

“The X made me talkative. He’s just a kid.”

“Going to help him out?”

“My hands are cuffed.”

“Don’t get any big ideas, Mikey. Behave yourself and who knows? Maybe you’ll actually get a visit from one of your own children someday.”

Tavarez nodded and picked up a letter. Ears thrumming with anger, he could barely hear the sound of McCann’s shoes on the cell-block floor as he walked away.

When he got out of this place, when the time was right, maybe he’d come back here to Crescent City and settle up with McCann.

But McCann was right. Tavarez yearned for letters from them—John, Peter, Jennifer, and Isabelle. John was the oldest at ten. He had gotten his mother’s fretful character. Isabelle was eight and a half, and she had her father’s ambition—she was acquisitive and calculating. Jennifer, only seven, had inherited her father’s lithe build and her mother’s lovely face and was excelling at tae kwon do, of all things. Little Peter had learned to run at nine months and walk at ten. He was three and a half when Tavarez had shuffled through the series of steel doors that took him into the heart of the X.

They still lived in the Laguna Beach mansion he had bought, along with his ex-wife, Miriam, and her parents from Mexico.

Miriam had cut off all communication with him after his conviction for the bombing. She had told him that she forgave and pitied him for what he had done and she would pray for his soul. But she would not allow him to poison their children. No visits. No phone calls. No letters. No communication of any kind. Her word was final. She was filing.

The Tavarez children all spoke English and Spanish, and attended
expensive private schools. Their gated seaside haven was a place of privilege and indulgence.

Tavarez had removed his children as far as he could from the barrio near Delhi Park where he had grown up. He wanted them to be nothing like him.

He fanned through the last of the envelopes, his heart beating with the fierce helplessness of the caged.

T
hat night at ten Brad Lunce called him out. Lunce was one of Post’s buddies. There were three kinds of guards: the bribable, the sadistic, and the honest. Group One was small but valuable, and Post had introduced Tavarez to a few of his friends.

Lunce watched Tavarez strip naked, open his mouth wide, spread his toes and butt, then get dressed and back up to the bean chute so Lunce could handcuff him before opening the cell door. Lunce never seemed to pay close attention, Tavarez had noticed, something that he might be able to use someday.

When Tavarez was handcuffed, Lunce let him out.

Murmurs and grumbling followed them down the cell block.
Any other inmate being led out at this time of night would have brought yelling and catcalls and demands for explanation. But all the Pelican Bay cell blocks were segregated by race and gang. And this block was populated by La Eme and the gangs with which La Eme had formed alliances—the Aryan Brotherhood, the Nazi Lowriders, and the Black Guerillas. So when the inmate was El Jefe, respect was offered.

Tavarez walked slowly, head up, eyes straight ahead. Something fluttered in his upper vision: a kite baggie on a string floating down from tier three to find its intended cell on tier one. Night was when the kites flew.

Lunce unlocked the library just after ten o’clock. It was a large, windowed room with low shelves to minimize privacy, pale green walls, and surveillance cameras in every corner.

Tavarez looked up at one. “Cartwright again?”

“What do you care?” said Lunce. Lunce was large and young, just like Post. He resented his manipulation more than the other guards and Tavarez was waiting for the day when Lunce would turn on him.

Cartwright was the night “situations” supervisor, which put him in control of the electric perimeter fence and video for the eastern one-quarter of the sprawling penal compound. This made Cartwright the most valuable of all the cooperative guards, and a kickback to him was included in almost every transaction that Tavarez made with lower-ranking men such as Post and Lunce. There were kickbacks to mid-level COs also, to those lower than Cartwright but above Lunce and Post. That was why favors were expensive. The western, northern, and southern perimeter guard-tower sharpshooters and attack dogs were under the control of other supervisors but Mike had found no way to influence them.

“He can turn the cameras back on whenever he wants to,” said Tavarez.

“Not with me in here he won’t. You got less than one hour. I’ll be watching you.”

Tavarez nodded. Having an L-Wop—life without parole—meant that there weren’t too many punishments they could give him if he was caught. They could move him back to the SHU, which was something he didn’t even allow himself to think about. But he didn’t pay all that bribe money for nothing, and after all, he was only in the library. No violence intended, no escape in mind, no drug abuse, no illicit sex.

“The cuffs,” said Tavarez, backing over to Lunce. It made the hair on his neck stand up—giving his back to a hostile white man—but if prison taught you anything, it was to overcome fear. Outside, you might have power. Inside, all you had was the bribe and the threat.

He found the world atlas on top of the G shelf, which he now slid toward him with a puff of dust.

Both the table and the chairs were bolted to the floor, so Tavarez plopped the heavy book down on the metal table, then worked himself into a chair in front of it.

He lifted the big cover, then the first hundred or so pages. Sure enough, the laptop sat in an excavated cradle. Post had come through.

For the next fifty minutes Tavarez sat before the screen, practically unmoving except for his hands, tapping out orders and inquiries in an elaborate code that he had helped devise for La Eme starting way back in 1988, during his first prison fall, before he had become El Jefe.

The code was rooted in the Huazanguillo dialect of the Nahuatl language that he had learned from Ofelia—his frequent visitor at Corcoran State Prison. The dialect was only understandable by scholars, by a few Aztec descendants who clung to the old language, and a
handful of upper-echelon La Eme leaders. Ofelia was both a budding scholar and a nearly full-blooded Aztec. Back then, Paul Zolorio, who ran La Eme from his cell just eight down from Tavarez, arranged to bring Ofelia up from Nayarit, Mexico, to tutor the handsome young Harvard pistolero.

Now Tavarez’s text messages would soon be decoded by his most trusted generals, then passed on to the appropriate captains and lieutenants. Then down to the ’hoods and the homeboys, who actually moved product and collected cash. Almost instantly, the whole deadly organization—a thousand strong, with gangsters in every state of the republic and twelve foreign countries—would soon have its orders.

Tavarez worked fast:

Ernest’s Arizona men need help—everyone had a finger in that pie now that California had been clamped down. Move Flaco’s people from the East Bay down to Tucson.

The L.A. green-light gangs would have to be punished severely. Green-lights won’t pay our taxes? They’re proud to go against us? Then peel their caps. Cancel one homie from each green-light gang every week until they pay, see how long their pride holds up.

Albert’s men in Dallas are up against the Mara Salvatrucha. MS 13 has the good military guns from the United States but they don’t get our south-side action. Move ten of our San Antonio boys over to Dallas immediately. Shoot the Salvadorans on sight if they’re on our corners. Not a grain of mercy.

At the end of his fifty minutes, Tavarez had passed on more information than he could send in a hundred handwritten, coded letters and kites. Which would take him a week and a half to write. And a week to get where they were going. And half would still be intercepted, diverted, destroyed—perhaps even passed on to La Nuestra Familia by people like Ken McCann.

But with the computer he could write things once, in just a matter of seconds, then send his commands to a handful of trusted people, who in turn would send them down the line. His code was wireless and traveled at the speed of sound. It was practically untraceable and virtually indecipherable. It was clear, concise, and inexpensive.

Pure, digital Nahuatl, thought Tavarez, beamed exactly where it was needed.

All it had really cost him was a few months of subtle persuasion, then ten unsubtle grand to help the Post family through Tonya’s cancer.

Tavarez turned off the computer, closed the screen, and set it back into the hollowed pages of the atlas of the world.

Like an alert dog who hears his master stir, Lunce appeared from behind the G shelf, dangling the cuffs.

“Looking at porn?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Are they cute as your whores?”

“Not as cute.”

“I don’t believe you. I think you’re running your business. La Eme business.”

Tavarez just shrugged. He felt the cuffs close around his wrists.

TAVAREZ LIFTED WEIGHTS furiously that night, putting everything he had into the repetitions, increasing the weight until his muscles gave out, doing sit-ups and crunches between sets, panting and growling and sweating for nearly an hour. Lunce watched him work out and shower but Tavarez was hardly aware of him.

By the time he was back in his cell, it was well past midnight. His body trembled from the exertion. He lay on his back on the bed and
listened to the snoring and the distant wails from the ding wing—psych ward—and the endless coughing of Smith two cells down.

He closed his eyes and thought back to when he was released from his first prison term and he’d moved into Ofelia’s apartment for six blessed weeks. All of the pent-up desire they’d felt for each other during her visits came charging out like water from ruptured dams. She was only seventeen, hopeful and innocent, a virgin. He was twenty-seven, the adopted favorite of La Eme kingpin Paul Zolorio, and suddenly free. He had been tasked by Zolorio to exact tribute from the Santa Ana street gangs for all drug sales—starting with his own Delhi F Troop. Zolorio had given him a mandate of one hundred percent compliance.

There was nothing better, Tavarez had realized back then—than to be free, employed, and in love.

His heart did what it always did when he thought of Ofelia—it soared, then hovered, then fell.

He pictured her slender young fingers as they traced the Nahuatl symbols across the page in the Corcoran visitation room. He could hear her voice as she translated their sounds and meanings into Spanish and English for him. There was innocence in her smile and trust in her eyes, and luster in her straight black hair.

He remembered the simple shock on her face when he told her, six weeks after moving into her cheerful little apartment, that he was going to marry Paul Zolorio’s niece from Guadalajara. He really had to, he explained, really, it wasn’t quite arranged in the old-fashioned way, but his marriage to Miriam would solidify the families and the business they did, it was practically his duty to Paul to…

He remembered how softly she shut and locked the door when he left her apartment that night, and the heaviness in his heart and the
painful clench of his throat as he drove south into the night. It was nothing like walking away from Hallie Jaynes and her insatiable desires, her murderous
guerra
selfishness. No, Ofelia was uncorrupted, untouched except by him. She was drugless and guileless and had the purest heart of anyone he had ever known, and the wildest beauty to her smile.

ONE YEAR AFTER he had married Miriam, shortly after she had given birth to John, Tavarez secretly traveled to Nayarit to find Ofelia.

With doggedness and patience he was able to learn that she had joined a convent in Toluca, Mexico’s highest city. It took him another day to fly to Mexico City, then rent a car for the drive up to Toluca.

Sister Anna of the Convento de San Juan Bautista scolded him for coming here unannounced with such a request. She said Ofelia never wanted to see him again, after what he had done to her. Yes, she was healthy and happy now in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was not a love given and taken away according to lust, commerce, or advancement. She looked at him, trembling with disgust.

Tavarez set five one-hundred-dollar bills on the desk between them. “For the poor,” he said in Spanish.

“They don’t need your money,” Sister Anna said back.

He counted out five more. “Let the poor decide.”

“I have decided for them.”

“Okay.”

Tavarez rose, leaned across the desk, and grabbed the holy woman by her nose. He pulled up hard and she came up fast, chair clacking to the tile floor behind her. He told her to take him to Ofelia or he’d yank it off.

“You’re the devil,”
she said, tears pouring from her eyes.

“Don’t be silly,” said Tavarez, letting go of Sister Anna’s nose. “I’m trying to see an old friend, and help the poor.”

She swept the cash into a drawer, then led Tavarez across a dusty courtyard. The other sisters stopped and stared but none of them dared get close. Sister Anna walked quickly with her fist up to her mouth, as if she’d just been given unbearable news.

The vesper bells were ringing when Sister Anna pushed open the door of Ofelia’s tiny cell. It was very cold, and not much larger than the one he’d spent five years in, noted Tavarez. She had a crucifix on the wall. His cell had pictures of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

Ofelia rose from the floor beside her bed. She looked up at Tavarez with a stunned surprise. She was thinner and pale, but her eyes still held the innocent wonder that he had loved. She was not quite nineteen.

In that moment he saw that she loved him helplessly, in the way that only the very young can love, and that the greatest gift he could give her would be to turn around and walk away. It would mean denying himself. Denying his desires, his instincts, his own heart. It would mean giving her life.

He reached out and put his hands on her lovely face. Sister Anna flinched.

“Love your God all you want, but come with me,” he said.

“We’ll both go to hell,” she said, her breath condensing in the freezing air.

“We’ve got three days and a lifetime before that.”

“What about your wife?” asked Ofelia.

“I have a son too. Accommodate them. I love you.”

Tavarez watched the struggle playing out in Ofelia’s dark eyes but he never doubted the outcome.

“I don’t have much to pack,” she said.

Sister Anna gasped.

Tavarez looked at her and smiled.

EVEN NOW, TEN years later, Tavarez thought of that moment and smiled.

But finally—as always—he remembered what Matt Stromsoe had done to Ofelia. And with this memory Tavarez canceled her image as quickly and totally as someone changing channels on a TV.