The gourmet air smelled like rising tropical dough. Dank.
Humid.
People came here to start over. They had to. No more land to run away on. Me too, he thought.
The fantasy returned. Warm in his lap. As the first blades of dawn stirred the mist he pictured Ida Rain sitting across from him in a silky little bathrobe, kind of a kimono thing.
Saw it draped open to show the one perfect crease that marked her smooth stomach. They’d have hidden the scars on her new face. Tucked them up under new chin. Her wide expressive eyes would be brimming with gratitude.
If I did all this, I can make that happen, too.
The kind of generosity that could make amends for the death of Caren Angland. Yes. Exactly.
Purposefully, he glanced back over the California Rules of the Road booklet Travis had given him to study last night.
An hour later, when Travis called his room, he was showered, shaved, and upbeat.
At breakfast Travis presented him with a new wallet containing a Social Security card, and, nestled between the clean-smelling leather folds, four hundred dollars in cash. And he handed over the Photostat of his new birth certificate. He also gave him an index card on which were written three more pieces of his new identity.
His address: 173 Valentino Lane, Watsonville, California, his phone number, and his employer, Acme Remodeling.
“Which is basically me, Joe Travis, Doing Business As,”
said Travis.
They had a full day. Travis seemed to genuinely enjoy himself. He grooved with quiet glee at being able to move behind the scenery at will-to effect deft custom alterations of reality.
First they stopped at a State Farm office, and Danny purchased auto insurance, which he’d need at the Santa Cruz County Building on Ocean Street, their next stop. Travis preceded him into the license bureau to put the fix in. Then Danny went in and waited in line, then waited in another line with a lot of people talking Spanish. Then he sat in a room with a lot of these people and took a multiple-choice test about the rules of the road in California.
An hour later the test was graded and he stood in a third line. Travis had arranged for him to skip “behind the wheel”
to save time. He surrendered his fake Michigan license Photostat, used his new contacts to read the optical chart, and stood, short haired and tanned, for a photograph.
Then he completed his first transaction as Daniel Storey, paying for his California driver’s license. The clerk filled out a temporary form good for thirty days and told 306 / CHUCK LOGAN
him his license would be mailed within two weeks.
Then they got back in the truck and drove Highway I out of Santa Cruz. Travis joked, calling it Highway 911. “More fact than joke, you get ‘down below,’ that’s what they call fuckin’ L.A.”
Soon they were out of town, into the country. The fog had drifted up to baste the low-hanging clouds. Danny began to sweat.
“Welcome to Steinbeck country, the Pajaro Valley,” waxed Travis. “Strawberries, artichokes, apples, blackberries, lettuce and celery. This, and the Salinas Valley down south, is the stronghold of the United Farm Workers.”
Danny was too drowsy to pursue it, so he nodded and took in a road sign. They’d turned off the highway onto a secondary road named Freedom Boulevard.
“Freedom’s the town this side of Watsonville,” said Travis.
Danny smiled. Took it as a good omen. Another turn onto Varni Road, then a right onto Amesti Road. They were out in the sticks. Danny liked that, too.
Then Travis turned one last time, onto Valentino Lane, and passed a sign: DEAD END. And that’s where they went, past tidy one-story white stucco homes with fanatically manicured cactus gardens, until they ran out of road and stopped in front of a six-foot-tall slat fence overgrown with bushy vines. A whitewashed hacienda was about a hundred yards to the right separated by a corral. But no horses. Danny did see about five cats lolling in the muzzy shadows of the fence posts. The next nearest house was almost five hundred yards away.
Travis got out and turned a key in the padlock on the gate, which was barely visible among the overgrown shrubs. Pulled the gate open, returned to the truck and drove in.
The house was a simple box, flat roof, painted dark brown and tucked under the leaves of a tall spreading tree THE BIG LAW/307
in the backyard. The picture windows along one front side were smoke streaked. A corner of the trim was buckled and charred. The fire had flashed in the kitchen, shot through the doorway into the attached garage, and burned a hole in the garage roof before it was contained. Plastic sheeting was tacked over the mangled garage shingles.
Once there had been extensive gardens surrounding the place, but they had reverted to thick brush. Tall yucca cacti poked through here and there, and he saw a few smaller prickly pears.
“Are there snakes?” he asked Travis as they got out.
“Nah, bull snakes maybe.”
Travis unlocked the door, and they went into a dirty empty living room that reeked of lingering smoke damage. The hideous orange shag carpet was tinged with soot.
“This end of the place is shot,” said Travis, walking him into the kitchen, where a black slash up one wall revealed charcoal wall studs. A cheap GE electric range and refrigerator were plugged in at the edge of the living room. Neither had smoke damage. Used. Recent additions. The tour continued. “But back here it’s not bad.” They came out of the kitchen onto a broad screened porch that overlooked a tiered redwood deck that fitted around a gnarled spreading oak.
Travis led him down a hall, pointed out the working bathroom and the two bedrooms at the end. One was empty.
The other was stockpiled with furniture, boxes of bedding, utensils, dishes, mattress and springs. It looked new or, at least, not fire damaged.
“We brought all this stuff in to use in a pinch if we have to hide somebody.” He folded his arms and perused Danny.
“You sure you want to do this? It’s going to be hot sweaty work.”
Danny grinned. “Hey, I eat this shit up.”
Travis squinted and cocked his head. “You sure you used to be a reporter?”
“What’s that?”
Grinning, they went out the screened door, down the deck.
The back lawn was knee deep in weeds and ended in an extensive oak woods.
“What’s that way?” Danny pointed past the oaks.
“Just fields. It’s pretty isolated here. That’s what appealed to the asshole who used to own it. Remote. Good place to set up a meth lab. Except he was an idiot who flunked basic chemistry and he burned down his kitchen when we busted the place. We seized the house as assets. Same way we came into the truck out there. We were getting ready to auction them off when your case file came across my desk. And I got to thinking. We sell it to you on paper and you fix it up and sell it back to us-you’d have a legitimate paper trail to fall back on. Plus, you get a quiet place to work. Like in the proposal you put together during your intake interview.”
Danny smiled. “It’s perfect.” He pointed to the white house next door past the corral. “Who lives there?”
“Couple of women.”
“Oh yeah,” said Danny, making a long wolfish face.
“Forget it, they’re lesbians. This is Santa Cruz. Five percent of the county population is registered lickers.”
“That can’t be right?” Out of reflex, Danny questioned the statistics.
“Didn’t say it was right, but those are accurate numbers.
C’mon, we have some serious shopping to do.”