“So if I tell you straight out,” she said, “are you gonna tell me where you got the money?”
“No.”
“Stalemate,” she said.
thirty-three
Right away, out of the money CJ gave me, I put another month’s rent in the mail to Shay, who undoubtedly was pissed at me all over again for disappearing without word. I was sure he’d never offer me work again. I could live with that; I just didn’t want him to pitch my things out in the street.
Then I spent the rest of that day at the library, looking up articles on Tony Skouras.
As Jack had told me, Skouras had been profiled several times in magazines, and he spoke passionately and articulately about his ancestry, his proud fallen family, and his need to grab with both hands at the life he’d come here to attain. But he scoffed at the rumors that he was some kind of gangster.
“In the twenty-first century, that’s an outdated business model,” Skouras said in one article. “Intimidating people you need on your side, always looking over your shoulder for law enforcement and the IRS-what businessman would possibly want to run his operations like that? There’s just no need for it anymore.”
I almost believed him, but I had two bullet holes in me that said otherwise. The times never really get any less rough; the masks just get more civilized.
Straighter, briefer news stories detailed how Tony Skouras sold off the South Asian arm of his imports line-“the profit just wasn’t there”-and mounted a successful takeover bid for a rival shipping line. Nothing in these stories told me anything useful, except that one cited his lawyer, a Nicolas Costa.
At that point, I went outside and called San Francisco directory assistance, getting a number for Nicolas Costa, attorney at law. I programmed it into my cell. Just in case.
In addition to the business stories and the profiles, I found two short articles on Skouras’s heart attack and subsequent quintuple bypass surgery several years ago, and some reviews of his seafood restaurant, Rosemary’s. Skouras was quoted in one review as saying that he and his sons used to fish for their own suppers back when he owned a house in Bodega Bay. The quote made it sound very past tense, though, and I figured he’d probably sold the place long before.
But then, in one piece on Rosemary’s, there was mention of a fund-raiser held there, a six-course black-tie dinner that Skouras had held. The proceeds were to go to the family of a firefighter up the coast in Gualala. The firefighter had been killed on the job and left three kids behind, and it had come to Skouras’s attention because he was having a vacation house built in the steep, forested hills outside of town.
I felt something stir down in my stomach, and I wrote Gualala on my notepad.
“Time for a road trip,” I said to Serena when I got back.
“Yeah? You find something?”
“He used to have a beach house in Bodega Bay, and to be thorough, I’m going to check property tax records there,” I said. “But more recently, he was building a house in Gualala.”
“Where?”
“Exactly,” I said. “If it’s as remote as it sounds, it’d be ideal.”
thirty-four
Two days later, I was under a bush, watching a house I was pretty sure belonged to Tony Skouras.
As I’d predicted to Serena, I’d struck out in Bodega Bay. Property tax records had shown no housing in the area belonging to an Anton Skouras. It would have streamlined things greatly if Gualala and Bodega Bay had been in the same county. They almost were. But “Gualala” comes from an Indian word meaning “water-coming-down place,” and that creek was also the boundary line between Sonoma and Mendocino counties. Which required a trip to a whole new county office to search through records. It had been ten minutes to closing time when I’d finally learned that Tony Skouras owned a house there, not far from the creek.
Gualala itself was a quiet town where steep hills of redwood and manzanita came down almost to the Pacific’s edge. The town had grown up alongside Highway One, a strip of graceful motels and small shops. I’d guessed that the vehicles of choice up here would run to tough, working-class pickups and SUVs. That had influenced my choice when I’d gone car shopping the day before with about half the money CJ gave me.
He’d been generous, but I still couldn’t afford to buy off the lot. I’d used up half a day looking through classifieds and auto-trader magazines before finding what I needed: a late-nineties Ford Bronco, a red-brown SUV with a swath of gray primer paint on the side passenger door, an automatic transmission, and four-wheel drive. It was the kind of car that would fit in on the north coast of California, and with a V6 engine, it wouldn’t outrun everything on the road, but it’d get out of its own way. Serena had looked skeptically at the patch of gray primer and the hundred-thousand-mile-plus odometer, but I’d shrugged off her concerns. “If it weren’t for those things,” I’d said, “I’d never have been able to afford it in the first place. I know the gray paint makes it easy to identify, but when we actually go get Nidia”-by which I meant if-“we’ll be in and out so fast, Skouras’s guys won’t have time to spot us again.”
Now my new ride was parked about a mile behind me, alongside a fire road; I’d hiked from there. Already, the quiet was unnerving, and I knew the coming night would be blacker, and the stars more plentiful, than anything I’d seen in years of city living.
The night before, knowing what lay ahead, I’d dosed up on ghetto pleasures. Serena and I had walked to the liquor store for a bottle of inexpensive tequila, and then we drank and ate her homegirl cooking and played nearly two hours of Grand Theft Auto before crashing a little after midnight.
The next day, I’d driven my new SUV up into the real Northern California.
It wasn’t an easy journey. The gatekeeping mechanism to this rural paradise was Highway One, a mostly single-lane road that devolved into twenty-five-mile-an-hour twists and turns that induced carsickness in nearly everyone but the driver of the car.
If you weren’t distracted by nausea, though, you could enjoy some of California’s most beautiful scenery. Fields of mustard flowers, glimpses of cobalt Pacific and white breakers, farm stands, silver-timbered barns, pumpkin patches, on and on. At intervals, you drove through towns where signs repeatedly invited you to stop for espresso, artisan chocolates, and bed-and-breakfast lodging.
The house below me was a classic mountain vacation place. It was built of what looked like natural redwood timber, with plate-glass windows, a broad deck with a gas grill and a hot tub, both covered for the autumn and winter ahead. I had very little doubt that it was the Skouras house, for two reasons. One, it was occupied; electric light glowed from several windows. At this time of year, most of the houses up here were likely unoccupied and closed up tight. Second, I was pretty confident in the orienteering skills I’d learned back east, despite the well-known NCO joke about GPS devices being “lost lieutenant finders.”
I hadn’t seen Nidia. I hadn’t gotten a good look at anyone. I’d seen figures behind the windows that were clearly grown men, but that was all.
I was not long on patience. This was not a pleasant place to learn it. As I waited, I reviewed the things I was here to find out. Was Nidia here? That was the key question. If so, how many men were guarding her? Was there an alarm system in the house? Was it the kind that went off loudly and alerted the household to an intruder, or was it one that silently tipped off a security team elsewhere? What about the simplest of security systems, a dog?
The night grew darker, making the inside of the house ever more visible through what windows were unobscured by blinds. I trained my binoculars on the window and observed. There were two men inside. Both were white and in their twenties. One was lean and cleans haven with gold-brown hair. The other was shorter, squat, with thinning brown hair and a chin beard. A television flickered in the room they were in. Occasionally one or the other got up, probably to go to the kitchen or the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of the shorter guy with a bottle of beer in his hand.