T. Parker - Storm Runners

He heard her get out and crunch toward him and he felt her arms spread over him and her sweet soft face press against the reek and blood and trembling of his own.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “Oh, baby, my baby.”

“It’s okay. I’m okay. It worked.”

“You’ve got to get up, baby.”

“Mom? Dad?”

Through the rising curtain of his wife’s hair Cedros saw Anthony’s skinny little legs appear on the ground beside the open door of the family car.

“Anthony Mark Cedros, get back into that car right now.”

“Yes, Mom. Hey, Daddy, what are you doing?”

“Nothing, Tony. I’ll be right there.”

“Stand, John. Hurry. We’ve got to get out of here.”

In the cold northern silence of the Crescent City Travelodge, Stromsoe dreamed that he was back in Newport Beach with Hallie and Billy.

It was a cool March Thursday, a school day. Hallie made them a light breakfast and all three sat at the dining-room table.

“Dad had a dream about driving a car last night,” said Billy.

“How do you know that?” asked Hallie.

“Because I was in the backseat.”

They laughed and Stromsoe felt limitless love for his son.

But even while dreaming this conversation, he had recognized the terrible portent of it. He awakened and made the in-room coffee and sat at the unsteady table by the window with the curtain drawn and the rain tapping against the glass.

Partly as a way to keep alive people he loved, and partly as a way of getting ready to see Mike Tavarez in a few short hours, Stromsoe now let himself remember that morning a little at a time, sipping the memories.

Because I was in the backseat.

Later he had walked Hallie and Billy outside. The van was parked in the drive because the garage of the old Newport house was too small for anything but Stromsoe’s Taurus and a smattering of tools, beach gear, bikes, and boxes of outgrown children’s toys.

Stromsoe closed the door behind him and followed them down the short walkway to the drive. Billy led the march, leaning forward against the weight of his backpack. Hallie followed him in jeans and a flannel shirt and a pair of shearling boots sized for a moonwalk. Stromsoe watched the shape of her and thought it was good. As if knowing this, she turned and smiled at him just as they got to the driveway.

Hallie pressed the key fob and the door locks popped up with a single clunk. Billy slid open the side door. He slung his pack in ahead of him and climbed into the seat. Stromsoe helped pull the seat belt around his son and Billy snapped it shut.

“Have a great day, Billy.”

“Okay.”

“Be nice to Mrs. Winston.”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

“Okay. I mean, I love you too.”

Stromsoe kissed the top of his son’s head, slid the door shut, and stepped back.

Hallie tried to start the van but the battery was so weak it couldn’t turn the starter.

She threw open the door. “I hate this van.”

“Let me try.”

Stromsoe got in and tried but even the small charge was gone and his turning of the key made nothing but a mortal clicking sound.

He opened the hood and looked but the battery terminals were clean and the clamps were tight and little else in the compartment made sense to him. He got back in the cab and tried the radio, which was dead.

“Just take my car,” he said. “I’ll call Auto Club, get a jump, and take this thing down to Pete’s.”

“Ah, can’t you come with us?” she asked.

“I’ll just be that much later to work.”

“Dad! Can’t you just come with us?”

Stromsoe sighed, then reached up to the van’s sun visor and clicked on the automatic garage door opener. The motor groaned and the door lifted open. The tightly packed contents of the garage came into view.

“All right, Dad!” hollered Billy.

“All right, Dad!” hollered Hallie.

As Stromsoe followed them into the garage he had one of those epiphanies common to the family man — that he was blessed to have Hallie and Billy, that he should be more thankful for them and kinder to them, that he should slow down and enjoy the little things like taking your boy to school when the van battery goes dead. And if you’re an hour late to work, who cares?

This happiness hooked another happiness from many years ago when he had led the marching band in “When the Saints Go Marching In” for probably the ten millionth time. It had hit him in an instant back then — just how wonderful and singular this moment was, and now Stromsoe remembered the green grass of the football field in the stadium lights, the thunder of the bass drums and the trills of the piccolos, the heft and rhythm of the mace in his right hand, the weight of the shako hat with its strap snug around his chin.

For a moment the joyful, many-footed song played again in his head.

He was whistling along with it to himself as he stood in his garage and dug the key fob from his pocket.

Billy was just about to veer to the right side of the Taurus because he liked to sit behind his mom. However, there was a bug of some kind on the trunk lid and he had to stop to inspect it. Behind him Hallie went up on her toes in the way that faster adults stuck behind slower children will do. Stromsoe had slowed too, ready to head for the driver’s seat when they got out of his way.

Lord, how I want to be in that number...

He pressed the unlock button and the locks came up. One second later he and his family were blown to rags.

Tavarez was waiting in the visitation room when Stromsoe was escorted in. He looked pale but fit, freshly shaved. He stared as Stromsoe sat in the immovable chair and picked up the telephone. Stromsoe stared back.

Mike was not handcuffed but his ankle irons were in place and a guard stood outside the inmate entrance looking in through the perforated steel door. The visitation room was empty now because only weekends were for visits unless Warden Gyle himself made other arrangements.

Tavarez picked up his black telephone, wiped the mouthpiece on the sleeve of his orange jumpsuit, then put the phone to his head.

“You look the same as always, Matt,” he said.

“You’ve gained weight.”

“Workouts. Good food.”

“I’ll bet.”

“You don’t limp. There are scars on your neck and face and a missing finger. I heard that you have steel pins in your legs.”

“Plenty of them, Mike. They tighten up in cold weather. I carry a document for boarding airplanes. I run even slower than I ran before. The list of my improvements goes on and on.”

“The eye is realistic.”

Stromsoe looked at Mike and for just a moment he appreciated the humor of mad-dogging with only one good eye, figured it was to his advantage to have the glass one staring along blindly like some fearless German sidekick.

He nodded.

Tavarez smiled. “A cold glass eye. Not fair.”

Stromsoe listened to the hum of the great “supermax” prison around him. For the worst of the worst, he thought. The most expensive, efficient, and punishing incarceration yet devised by man. A model for prisons for years to come.

“I dreamed about them last night,” he said. “They were whole and perfect and alive. That’s how they’ll always be for me, Mike.”

“They should be. The bomb was for you.”

Tavarez had not acknowledged this since that very first phone call to Stromsoe on the night he almost burned his house down. In court, Tavarez’s attorneys had fought hard to lay the blame on La Nuestra Familia. In fact, they’d made the beginnings of a good case because Stromsoe and the task force had had as many dealings with LNF as they’d had with La Eme. Stromsoe’s name had appeared in numerous Familia communications. But in the end they couldn’t produce a witness to contradict the low-level La Eme soldier who had turned state’s witness after his life was threatened. The soldier had heard El Jefe discussing the bomb. He had heard the name Stromsoe. He had purchased the nails at Home Depot. He had succumbed to a task force offer to drop murder charges and relocate him and his family after the trial.