toward the high rafters.
A tall wooden tower stood beside the old man’s bench, the same type that Stromsoe had noted in Frankie’s photograph of the stalker. It looked larger than the one in the picture. It was newly made. The redwood was still pink and Stromsoe could see the gleam of the new nuts and bolts and washers that held it together. The top was a plywood platform about the right size to hold a person, a fifty-five-gallon drum, or a couple of small trash cans. There was a one-foot-high railing around the edge of the platform, as if to keep something from tipping over or falling off. The tower rose up twenty feet high, at least. Beside it stood another tower that was only about one-third finished.
The old man carried two lengths of wood, joined at right angles, over to the tower in progress. He pulled a socket wrench from his back pocket and began bolting the boards to the tower.
The dogs looked up and the old man’s gaze started his way and Stromsoe moved away from the window.
From this point he could see the west wall of the barn. There were four long benches along it, similar to the workbenches at which Frankie and the old man worked. These were covered not with tools but with books and notebooks, beakers and burners, tubes and vials, canisters and bottles, boxes and bags, all overhung with a series of metal lamps hung by chains from the rafters. There were two refrigerators and a freezer along the far wall. There was a small kitchen area with four burners, an oven, and a sink. A fire extinguisher was fastened to every fifth post of the exposed interior frame. In the far corner was what looked like an office, separated from the main barn by a door that stood open.
Stromsoe thought of the meth labs he’d seen out in the Southern California desert not far from here. Riverside County was ground zero for the labs, but there were plenty in Los Angeles and San Diego and San Bernardino counties, too. Interesting, he thought – except that he was pretty sure Frances Hatfield and the old man weren’t cooking drugs.
He heard Frankie’s saw start up and eased his face back to the window. She pressed the board into the blade, then another. She worked with assurance, and no hurry.
The old man wrestled another set of bolted boards off his bench, walked them across the floor, and fitted them into the growing tower. He took out his socket wrench and looked at the structure appraisingly.
‘Nice, Ted,’ said Frankie. Stromsoe could just barely make out her words.
‘When this one’s finished I’m done for tonight,’ said Ted. ‘Been at it since four.’
‘We’ll be ready for next week,’ said Frankie.
‘I hope so.’
‘We need that jet stream to stay south. Just a little help from the stream is all we need.’
The old man said something back but Stromsoe couldn’t make it out.
He eased away from the barn, found the dark edge of the road, and walked back to his car. Ready for next week, he thought. Need the jet stream to stay south?
He wondered if the wooden towers were a decorative garden item that Frankie and her partner sold to local nurseries. He’d seen little windmills that looked a lot like them, though Frankie’s were four times the height and had no blades to catch a breeze.
Then he thought of water wells and storage tanks and railroad structures and mining rigs and weather stations and airport towers and fire observation decks and oil derricks and guard towers and wind turbines for making electricity.
Ready for next week could mean for the dis tributor, or to complete an order, or…
Frankie, you have some explaining to do.
He smelled the river water again, then the sweet aroma of oranges and lemons carrying on the cool night air.
Mike Tavarez surveyed the exercise yard and listened to the inmates counting off their sit-ups: thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…
Their voices rose in crisp unison into the cold afternoon air of Pelican Bay State Prison. They sounded like a small army, thought Tavarez, and in a sense they were, because the Mexican gangs here in Pelican Bay didn’t stand around like the Nazi Lowriders or the Aryan Brotherhood or the Black Guerillas.
No, La Eme and Nuestra Familia – though they would kill one another if you put them together in the same exercise yard at the same time – worked out here in the general population yard for two hours every day. Different hours, but they worked out hard. They heaved and strained and yelled the cadence, in training to stay alive when it was time to fight.
Give people a beat to follow and they’ll do anything you tell them to, thought Tavarez. Like a marching band.
Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one…
‘Why don’t you work out with them?’ asked Jason Post. Post was one of the correctional officers who had helped get Tavarez transferred from the Security Housing Unit to the general population. That was six months ago. The Prison Guards Union held substantial power at Pelican Bay, and Post was a union activist.
‘I like watching,’ said Tavarez. ‘I like their discipline. I never got to see this in the X.’
The Security Housing Unit was known as ‘the X’ because it was shaped like one. Sometimes it was called the Shoe. Tavarez had spent his first year there. It was a living hell. The SHU was made up of pods – eight glass-faced cells per pod – arranged around an elevated guardhouse. It was always twilight in the X, never light and never dark. Tavarez was watched by guards 23/7 on television. When he used the toilet it was televised onto a guardhouse monitor. The toilets had no moving parts that could be made into weapons. For one hour a day he was allowed to exercise alone in ‘dog run’ – a four-walled concrete tank half the size of a basketball court. A guard watched him do that too, from a catwalk above. In the X, time stopped. His great aloneness swallowed him. There had been days in the X when Tavarez had had to bite his tongue to keep from weeping, and swallow the blood.
It was solitary confinement, but in full view of the guards. The X was designed by an architect who specialized in sensory deprivation. Even the warden admitted that it was designed to make you insane. The feeling of hours stretching into years was indescribable for Tavarez, unbearable. He never thought he would actually feel his mind leaving him. Finally, he found a way to get to Jason Post and Post had begun the process that saved his life.
The difference between the SHU and general population was the difference between hell and freedom. Or at least between hell and the possibility of freedom, for which Tavarez was now planning.
He saw that the count was slowing as his men approached eighty push-ups.
Seventy-six…seventy-seven…
‘Besides,’ he said. ‘I like having the pile to myself.’
‘I’ll bet you do,’ said Post. He was a thick young Oregonian with a downsloping head of yellow hair. ‘Nobody gets that except you.’
Tavarez got an hour a day on the iron pile, where he could lift weights alone and let his mind wander. He had arranged this privilege through Post also, and paid for it by having money wired into various bank accounts.
