To Main, headed away from the coast, the old Econoline blending with the fog.
Not the way home.
Mindy takes the 405 north to the 22 east, into Garden Grove. Pulls into Store ’N Save, punches something into an intercom keypad on a stanchion outside the office.
Gale glides past in the fog, U-turns, and heads back. The Econoline has already disappeared into the rows of brightly lit concrete bunkers, each with a roll-up door.
The woman answering the intercom asks for Gale’s passcode, and he IDs himself as a sheriff’s deputy. He can see her through the window.
“Is there a crime in progress here?” she asks.
“You better hope not,” says Gale, holding out his badge.
“You’ll need a warrant if there isn’t.”
“This is a murder investigation,” Gale says. “An innocent man has died. Open the gate. Now.”
A beat, then: “Yeah, sure.”
The gate rolls open on small black tires, and Gale hits his fog lights. Then noses his SUV up and down the wide drive, marked with big red arrows for a one-way flow of traffic. There’s a surprising number of vehicles here this late on a Saturday night.
Lights spill from the opened storage units, people move in and out, some taking away, others loading in. Like ghosts, Gale thinks.
Gale goes very slowly, knowing he’ll be on top of the van before he sees it if he goes faster than a crawl.
Rounds a corner and sees the Econoline a few hundred feet ahead, on his right, and strong light coming from inside the unit.
Hulking Vern, cane-free now, sets what looks very much like a rifle case through the van’s side door, Mindy not visible to Gale, perhaps still behind the wheel. The case is relatively short, Gale notes, for a carbine or an AR-style gun, or a cut-down combat shotgun.
Mendez already has her night-vision binoculars up, and Gale worries the darkened lenses will reflect the yellow caution lights illuminating the unit numbers on the walls.
“Steady with the glasses,” he says.
“Got it.”
Jeffs goes back inside his storage box and comes out with a small, thick pistol case in each big hand, puts them in the van one at a time, and closes the door.
Reaches high and pulls down the door by its rope, then leans down to close the padlock.
Before getting into the van, Jeffs looks through the fog at Gale’s Explorer, then awkwardly climbs in, using a hand to hoist in his wounded leg.
A minute later Gale tracks them back onto the Garden Grove Freeway, westbound now.
The fog has lightened and the traffic is light and Mindy holds the Econoline steady in the third lane.
Gale holds three cars back and one lane over.
“Looked like cases for a short assault rifle and handguns,” says Mendez.
“Maybe a cut-down shotgun.”
“That’s a vicious thing. Kept one under my bed until Jesse was born. Now I’ve got a locked 1911 Gold Cup he can’t open.”
“I’ve got one, too. Sweetest shooting handgun there is.”
“Stop a tractor, too.”
Mindy merges with the 405 south, retracing her route from the Bear Cave and, perhaps, home.
“Okay, Gale, are we going to pull them over and rattle their cage? We’ve got no warrant, no cause for a search, not even a broken brake light. No authority to open those cases.”
“And no reason to spook them for nothing.”
“I hate it when people get away with shit,” says Mendez. “And you watch them get away with it. You just sit there like a dumbass with your hands tied.”
In the periphery of his vision, Gale sees that Mendez is looking at him. Sees her sharp dark eyes catching the dashboard lights.
“Thanks for talking to Jesse,” she says. “Best if he thinks I’ve got nothing to do with it. Tell him you’re after Bishop Buendia, which is how you know about their lunch at El Jardin, and the drone and cell phones. He’ll be suspicious of you, but maybe a little scared, too. He also might respect you.”
“I’ll scare him straight.”
In his periphery again, Gale sees a slight smile on her hard, pretty face.
Ahead of them the white van lumbers past the turnoff for the Bear Cave and the Jeffs home.
“Well, well,” says Mendez.
Gale follows.
Forty minutes later he’s headed east/northeast on Ortega Highway, passing the entrance to Caspers Wilderness Park.
“Interesting,” says Mendez. “Tarlow and the Killer Cat and Jeffs’s Econoline, all right here just a few nights ago.”
“I see the cat in my dreams,” Gale says. “I catch him looking at me. Stalking and studying.”
“What about Tarlow and Vern?”
“More the cat.”
“Oh boy.” They climb the steep, fogless mountains of Cleveland National Forest, the sky above them black and alive with stars.
Half an hour later Gale brakes through the Ortega’s treacherous downslope turns, morning’s first light climbing in the east ahead of them.
A sign comes at them in the headlights: LAKE ELSINORE 5 MILES.
The white Econoline pokes in and out of view on the curvy grade and, ten minutes later, Mindy slows and makes a right.
Gale passes the PACWEST MINING sign — a painting of snowcapped mountains and a lake set into a river-rock monument and lit from above.
Makes a U-turn.
“Kyle McNab of PacWest Mining had dinner with Tarlow and Kevin Elder at the Grove, the week before he was murdered,” says Gale. “Velasquez the bartender said McNab was pissed.”
“What’s a biker outlaw like Jeffs have to do with PacWest Mining?” asks Mendez. “And what’s he doing here at five-fifteen in the morning with a van full of guns?”
“Floating them down the iron river,” says Gale. “Our enormous, invisible black market.”
Gale makes the left at the PacWest sign, takes another quick look at the snowy mountains and the blue lake.
“I don’t like this,” says Mendez. “Vern Jeffs and his crazy-ass wife with a van full of guns, out in the middle of nowhere. Calling on a Tarlow Company subcontractor, who, last we heard, was pissed off about something at the Grove. We’re out of jurisdiction here, so if something goes froggy, it’s Riverside Sheriff’s for backup, which of course they may not provide in a timely manner.”
“It’s just a knock and talk. We’re here about McNab’s dinner with Tarlow, and Jeffs came up in the net.”
“No one will believe that at six in the morning.”
“Trust me.”
“I do but I still don’t like it.”
Gale parks on the shoulder, lets his SUV idle. A PacWest pickup truck dims its brights and swooshes past.
Then another.
Followed less than a minute later by a tractor trailer loaded with an immense drilling rig doing less than ten miles an hour up the grade, Gale’s guess. The augur sways and rattles loudly. The Peterbilt engine groans.
“Daniela,” says Gale. “We need to go in now.”
“You’re the boss, boss. Let’s let the sun come up. I want to see what I’m doing. Sorry, just a little nervy about this.”
Ten minutes later Gale pulls into a large gravel parking lot in front of a wooden, Swiss chalet — style building, brown with scalloped white trim. Red geraniums bloom in barrels and flower beds.
The Econoline and three PacWest pickup trucks are parked in front of the office. One of the trucks backs out as Gale and Mendez crunch across the lot.
In a meadow adjacent to the chalet office, Gale notes the battalion of excavators, backhoes, earth-diggers, loaders, boom trucks, and drill platforms, all surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
The office porch light is on and the door is open.
32
The young woman behind the counter eyes the detectives skeptically. Brunette, a black suit. Her countertop nameplate says BELLA.