Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

T he fog to which Donnally awoke the following morning encased the ridge like the slumber he’d left behind in the night. The world around him, along with the images that had populated his dreams, was lost in gray.

Water dripping from the oak leaves overhead tapped the plastic tarp protecting him and ran off the edge and down the hillside in rivulets. He reached for his cell phone and searched the Internet for a local weather report.

The coastal range wouldn’t see the sun all day.

Donnally decided that what was concealment for the cabin and Bear was also cover for him, and that it didn’t make sense to lose another day waiting for the weather to clear. He ate breakfast, then packed up his gear and hid it thirty yards farther up the hill under a brush-concealed rock overhang.

The trail near the ridge where he began his descent soon merged with crisscrossing paths cut by growers through the pines, firs, and manzanita. The ten-foot visibility meant that he had to watch his GPS as much as his feet as he worked his way down the gullies and crossed small streams.

Halfway down the mountain, he tripped over a drip line and tumbled forward, rolling and bouncing down through ferns and deer brush. The impact of his shoulder glancing off a tree trunk ejected the GPS from his hand. From his back at the edge of a plot of harvested marijuana stalks, he watched it make a cartoonlike pause in the air, then drop into the mud next to him with a comical smack.

But the Mexican pointing the shotgun at Donnally’s head wasn’t laughing.

Donnally looked past the single barrel at the impassive eyes of the rain-slickered man and then spread his hands in the air.

“ Usted habla ingles? ” Donnally asked.

The man shook his head.

Donnally sat up and glanced around as he wiped his hands on his pants. Bags of fertilizer, jugs of pesticides, and coils of black pipe were stacked under a lean-to fifteen yards to his left. Next to it was a shack constructed of branches and covered by a camouflaged tarp. The grow seemed to possess the sophistication of a cartel operation, and the man’s knockoff jeans and new rain jacket suggested that he had been smuggled in from Mexico not more than a few days earlier.

Donnally cupped his hands and held them in front of his eyes like binoculars and pretended to scan the trees surrounding the field.

“ Pajaros.” Birds.

The Mexican smirked and gestured toward the fog with a dismissive wave of his arm.

Donnally held up one hand, eased it into his jacket pocket, then pulled out his bird-watching book and held it up.

Another smirk and a shake of his head.

“ Policia,” the man said, racking the shotgun.

“ No. No policia.”

The Mexican waved the barrel in a small circle, indicating that Donnally should roll over.

He complied.

Seconds later, Donnally felt his gun jerked out of its holster and his wallet pulled from his back pocket.

Donnally guessed the moment when the Mexican would flip open the wallet and spot his retirement badge, then kicked the man’s kneecap. The leg buckled and the shotgun discharged as he fell backward, sending buckshot skyward. The Mexican grunted when his back hit the ground. Donnally pawed through the mud and yanked the shotgun from his hand and aimed it at his grimacing face.

Bracketing the grower on either side were the angled, four-inch stumps of last year’s harvested pot plants.

Donnally winced when he realized that the Mexican was impaled on the one between them.

After searching him for other weapons, Donnally raised him up and rolled him onto his side. The man gritted his teeth but didn’t scream. A bloody stump matched the hole in his back, just below his ribs on his left side. Donnally knew from observing dozens of autopsies that the wound wouldn’t be fatal if he could get it treated soon enough.

“ Su nombre? ” Donnally asked. Your name?

The man didn’t answer, his expression saying that giving up his name would be the first step in giving up his bosses, and that he was ready to be buried in a nameless grave in an alien land rather than do it.

Donnally remembered a noun from his high school Spanish, but had to struggle to recall the verb tense he needed to assure the man that he meant him no harm.

“ Le llamare Afortunado,” Donnally finally said. I’ll call you Lucky.

The Mexican tried to smile, but it ended again as a grimace.

Donnally worked Lucky’s rain slicker down his arms and spread it out under him. He then unbuttoned the man’s wool shirt and slid it off his shoulders to expose the wound.

The only clean piece of fabric Donnally could find was a towel hanging from a clothesline next to the shack. He used it to cover the wound, then cut a piece of rope from a roll and bound it around Lucky’s torso to hold the bandage in place.

But it wasn’t the external bleeding that worried him, it was the internal.

He checked his cell phone. No service this far down in the canyon. He retrieved the GPS. Muddy, but unbroken. It told him that it was another five hundred feet down the hillside and a quarter of a mile to Trudy’s.

Donnally untied the tarp from the shack, ripped out a couple of supporting posts, and made an Indian-style stretcher. He knew it would be a rough ride, but there wasn’t an alternative.

The stretcher bounced behind Donnally like a buckboard on a rutted road as he dragged it down the deer and grower’s trails, with Lucky grunting and groaning at each bump.

After a fifteen-minute descent, Donnally set down the stretcher among the pine and scrub oak a hundred feet from the edge of Trudy’s clearing, then snuck through the trees until he could see the property.

The truck was missing. The inside cabin lights appeared to be off, and no smoke wisped up from the chimney.

The fact that Lucky was still conscious told Donnally that he probably wasn’t bleeding out internally. At the same time, he hated the idea of rolling the dice with someone else’s life-

But he needed Anna’s papers. Even if the Mexican refused to describe him to Trudy and Bear, they’d know that someone had been in the nearby hills, and increase their vigilance.

There’d be no second chance.

After peeking through the windows and satisfying himself that the cabin was empty, Donnally kicked in the back door. A quick search of the two bedrooms, the upstairs marijuana sorting room, and Trudy’s craft workshop turned up no paperwork other than recent sales records. He took thirty dollars that was lying on the dresser, a bottle of Oxycontin tablets, and a baggie of marijuana, hoping that Trudy and Bear would assume that these items alone were the target of the burglary.

Donnally returned to the Mexican, gave him one of the painkillers, and dragged him to the front steps. He then walked to the outbuilding and broke a back window with a piece of firewood and climbed in. Sheets of dust jumped off the workbench and the stacks of boxes when his feet hit the plank floor, and then plumed into clouds as he scanned the room.

The first boxes he opened contained an archive of Berkeley in the sixties, seventies, and eighties: copies of the Berkeley Barb newspaper, antiwar handouts, Black Panther manifestos, books on colonialism and imperialism: evidence of Trudy’s past, stored away and sealed against time.

In a box on top of the third stack he found Anna’s decades-old lesson plans printed on the Berkeley Unified School District letterhead. He pulled it down and searched through the next and the next, setting aside everything handwritten or typed that didn’t seem related to her teaching. He extracted spiral notebooks, date diaries, and financial records, pausing every few minutes to listen for the sound of Bear’s truck. He piled everything into a suitcase, and when that was full, began a second.