Hailey's War (21 page)

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.”

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.

Except there was someone in the upstairs bedroom as well. There was light shining there, and a blue flicker as of a TV, but maddeningly, nothing was visible through the window except an expanse of beige wall and part of a sliding closet door. No one came to the window to look out. Dammit, weren't prisoners always supposed to be looking out the only windows available to them, gazing in great melancholy at the outside and freedom?
Nidia, come to your window
.

She did not. The night grew darker still.

Finally the lights in the house went out. I gave the inhabitants of the house about twenty minutes to fall asleep, then I came out from under the bush to do my close-up reconnoitering. My legs shook underneath
me and my muscles groaned from being folded for so long. I took the SIG out of my backpack and slipped it into the waistband of my cargo pants, and carried my flashlight in my hands.

The temperature had already fallen under the dew point, and the natural grasses were wet under my feet as I crossed the yard. Quietly, I circled the house. There was no chance of my getting inside tonight, nor climbing up to that window to see who was in the guarded bedroom. This was just reconnaissance of the outside, the doors and windows.

I saw no telltale wires or window stickers that would have suggested a security system, and that made sense. Most security systems were wired into a central office that would send out an armed guard when the alarm was tripped. If Skouras's men were holding a hostage here, it wasn't like they were going to want some rent-a-cop charging up here. Skouras's men would TCB by themselves.

All the locks that I could see were standard, a dead bolt on the front door and a plain knob lock. Regular locks on the sliders. Nothing on the windows. A break-in would be child's play for Payaso or Serena, if only I could predict whether the guys ever left Nidia here by herself. They might never do so.

I walked the driveway. It was a good quarter-mile long, all dirt, and about half that length was visible from the front of the house. So we'd be able to get halfway up in the Bronco before the guys inside would even know strangers were coming. All the way, if they weren't looking out the windows and they had the TV or stereo on loud enough not to hear the engine.

The garage had a window. I looked inside and saw the looming shape of a black SUV, newer than the one I was driving. I raised the flashlight and aimed the beam down at the license plate, repeating the seven digits to myself several times until they were locked in my memory.

As I headed back up the hill to my bivouac, it occurred to me that everything about the house spoke of confidence. They didn't have
special locks and security. There was no dog. It was clear that they knew—or rather, thought—that no one was looking for Nidia.

That was probably the only thing we had on our side.

It was midmorning the next day when I finally saw Nidia
.

I was under my sheltering bush, stiff, tired, and still hungry after eating two energy bars. The bright light of day made it hard to see anything that was going on inside the house. I'd only caught glimpses of the same two guys, moving back and forth, typical morning stuff.

And then motion outside the house caught my eye. I grabbed the binoculars.

Two people were walking the rolling unfenced land. One was the tall young clean-shaven guy. The other was Nidia. She was not only recognizable, she was recognizably pregnant, her stomach full and round.

Her reddish hair had not been cut, so that it now hung well past her shoulder blades. I couldn't see her expression clearly through the glasses, and I was glad about that. Because this was an abomination. They looked like they could have been lovers, or a young husband and wife expecting their first child. He was close by her side, almost solicitous, in case she stumbled.

It sickened me. Three months of that. She'd lived in the hands of strange young men who pretended to be taking care of her, when I suspected they'd be ready and willing to kill her when the time came. Three months without contact with anyone who cared about her, her family, her friends. If I'd had a rifle, I might have shot him. I had been a good enough shooter at school to do it.

Taking a steadying breath, I lowered the binoculars and withdrew deeper into the bush.

“Tell me again, why you didn't stay up there another day?” Serena asked me
.

“I could have,” I said. “But even if I'd spent three or four days in research, there's no guarantee their schedule wouldn't change the day we go up there. I just want to go up and do this, soon.”

We were in a narrow, windowless theatrical-supply store. I was watching what I said, not wanting the clerk to overhear anything suspicious.

Serena was looking at a lovely and fairly authentic-looking diamond choker. Paste, of course. All around us were romantic things: jewelry and feathers, yards of satin, glass slippers. It was dissonant in the extreme with everything else Serena and I had purchased today. That list would have given anyone pause: pepper spray, duct tape, gloves, ski masks, handheld radios, and another pair of binoculars.

“You and me always make the most interesting shopping trips together,
prima,”
Serena told me, raising her eyebrows. She was thinking, I knew, of the trip we'd made a year ago to the Beverly Center.

“I hope we live to make a few more,” I told her.

I'd planned the raid on the drive home, and had quickly realized that I wouldn't need as much gang backup as I'd thought. Later, if we got Nidia out safely, we'd need more guys, to guard her in shifts. But for now, based on my reconnaissance, we were only going to be taking down two unsuspecting guys in an isolated house. What it would require was a fire team, not a squad. If Payaso, Serena, and I couldn't do this by ourselves, we probably couldn't do it at all.

The clerk ambled down the counter toward us. “What can I help you girls with?” he said.

“Stage blood,” I told him.

Two days later, I was lying by the edge of the road in Gualala. It was the only
road down to Highway One from the Skouras place, the only one the tunnel rats could take to get groceries and supplies. It was also very lightly traveled, which was why I could lie on the roadside, stage blood staining my cheap disposable jacket, as though I had been in a hit-and-run.

Serena had wanted to play the victim. Her argument had been convincing: It was likely that the guys guarding Nidia were part of the ambush team in Mexico, therefore they'd seen me before. They'd seen me in the exact same position, at roadside. She'd worried that it'd be a tip-off.

I'd considered it but argued her down. “I'll have my face turned away from him,” I'd said. “He'll never make the connection to Mexico. It's way too bizarre. You're overthinking this.”

The truth was, this part was dangerous. I'd wanted Serena safe on the hillside, watching the house. Payaso and I would be the first team.