T. Parker - Storm Runners

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.”