I headed for home, alone in my truck with the scattered pieces of a puzzle on this moonless night, somewhere in the San Diego County desert. Waiting for the pieces to fall into place, as they sometimes do if you stare at them long and hard enough.
Tried again for radio news; not quite back into range.
Which was when my phone went off. Burt’s name and number and a text message with video attached:
This just in.
10:59 P.M.
The video was brief, clear, and concise:
The three familiar grimly masked actors and two balaclava-hidden operatives standing against a white interior wall. The Chaos Committee in all its deranged and hideous glory.
This time the splatter mask spoke, in the same digitally altered doomsday voice as the Iroquois tribal mask had used during the Local Live! studio takeover.
“We have sent another gift to another government thug in beautiful, deluded California,” he said. “A woman. She cannot be protected. Strike your matches, great state! Burn the disease from this once holy cloth. Burn the government to the ground. Violence is justice. Chaos is purity!”
I called Burt. He’d already talked to Dalton and his campaign headquarters about opening any packages or even mail, especially those addressed to female workers. He’d counseled the Irregulars to stay in rather than go out tomorrow and not to open any unexpected package from any carrier.
I drove fast into radio range, switching from station to station, trying to piece together the chaos.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has furloughed all nonessential state workers for at least two days and will deploy National Guards to search state offices and mailrooms for bombs… KNX News Radio has learned that police and sheriffs are being assigned to some city halls, county offices, and courtrooms… Police officers were shot and killed in Fresno, Oxnard, and Oakland less than an hour ago, bringing the state total to six since The Chaos Committee released its call to violence… dozens of harmless packages apparently mailed to elected officials… widespread tagging of Southland churches and synagogues… library fires set in Hayward, L.A., and Adelanto, heavy damage, officials say… impossible to determine who is responsible… continuing reports of car fires and gunfire throughout the state, Rudy, but the number-one fear here is looting. None of that, yet, thank goodness… So, KFWB’s thanks to the millions of fine people in California who are reaching out to help or at least staying home and away from this unprecedented social upheaval…
I stayed up late in my home office that night, plugged in to the TV, the radio, my computer, and phone — whatever might shed light on the threatened Chaos Committee bomb and the no-longer-simmering violence.
Talked briefly with Lark, Dalton, and Burt.
And later, with Terrell Strait. I’d been thinking about him since Dalton’s misfired press conference. Where Terrell witnessed his father selling his mother down a river.
“It looked like I was on his side,” he said over the phone. “I hope Mom didn’t see it.”
“She knows you better than that,” I said.
The boy was grimly determined that his mother was okay, that she’d walk out of “her latest episode and back to us when she’s ready.”
He asked for a report on his dad, whom he refused to call. I filled him in as best I could. Terrell said he was back at school, packing up to come home for the summer.
It was well after two o’clock. Nowhere near sleep, I sat back down at my desk and considered the newly arrived brown paper shopping bag. Courtesy of Cassy Weisberg, for carrying my many tourist brochures. Upended it over the scarred and venerable desk, a gift of the Timmerman clan, as part of their wedding gift to their daughter and me. I felt a tinge of guilt over wasting so many good pamphlets as a way to keep Cassy talking. What should I do with them now? Return them and say I’d gotten what I needed?
I fanned them out on the table in no order and with no purpose whatsoever. The night sky tours and the hiking trails maps looked promising.
The Bighorn Motel pamphlet pictured the motel in younger days. The parking lot full, kids thick in the pool, moms and dads in ’50s fashions and coifs, sipping colorful drinks. I wondered what had drawn Broadman to a desert like Iraq’s after the terrible thing that had happened to him there. I wondered, too, at a man so disfigured that he felt more comfortable hidden than seen, going into a business that brought in strangers by the carload.
In the wee hours I logged in to IvarDuggans and paid my way into the facial recognition program to run my best photo of Brock Weld’s Tourmaline companion.
Her name was Gretchen Deuzler. The IvarDuggans photos of her were five and eight years old, respectively. A handsome woman, blond then brunette. Age thirty-one, born in Denton, Texas, to a mining engineer and a college math professor. A degree in hydrology engineering from Arizona State. Member of the fencing club. I saw that she had worked as a blackjack dealer on some of the same cruise ships and at the same time as her consort Brock Weld. Tracking her bio against the hard copy of his file, I saw that Gretchen had moved into security work for the same casinos in New Jersey and Las Vegas, again simultaneously with Weld. So, based on shared employment, they’d known each other for at least thirteen years. She’d worked briefly for the United States Post Office. She had never been married and had no children, according to IvarDuggans. She owned a home in Escondido, was certified as a scuba instructor and as a small vessel boat captain by the Coast Guard.
Gretchen Deuzler’s father was also a former president of the West Texas Blasters and Demolition Union.
Which would no doubt have given him — and maybe his daughter — easy access to restricted explosives and related materials: blasting caps, fuses, timers, high-nitrogen fertilizers.
Which sent a cool bristle of nerves down my neck.
In this age of anger and violence.
In this age of chaos.
I finally fell asleep while watching Lark’s surveillance video of possible Jackie O’s mailing the bomb that killed my congressman and his assistant.
Twenty-Eight
Memorial Day morning. Tola Strait opened one of the Nectar Barn safes, entered a second code on her phone, and waited for the go-ahead. A two-combination Outlaw — a hard code to get it open and a cell code to disarm the interior alarm sensors. A moment later she set the two handguns on the safe top, then turned and looked at me.
“Thank you for taking this little job. You must be very busy with all the violence in the world.”
“I don’t love the idea of you moving a hundred thousand dollars in cash from one place to another.”
“The Strait Shooters are terrific but today I wanted you. Sometimes a girl needs a different kind of company. But you’re not cheap, my friend.”
“Not for this kind of thing.”
“Have you ever killed a man? In work, I mean, not war.”
I nodded and caught the hard approval on her face.
“Well, none of that today!”
“Do the Strait Shooters know about this?” I asked. Holdups of the kind I feared are often inside jobs.
“Yes, and I trust them with my life. And yours.”
Our destination for Tola’s dope loot was the California side of Buena Vista, a small town split roughly in two by the U.S.-Mexico border. I had my suspicions about the Buena Vista Credit Union. For one thing, it didn’t show up on my Internet search. For another, why would it be open on a national holiday?
But with a hundred thousand dollars under my watch, I wore my Gold Cup in its paddle holster in the small of my back, and a .410/.357 ankle cannon, deadly, small, and smooth. I thought back to Friday and how well I had shot with Mike Lark at Duffytown. But everything changes when your target is firing back at you.