Judas Horse (7 page)

“I was just telling this young lady about Ohio.”

“Is he boring you with his life story?” she asks.

“Yes,” replies Julius, glad for the intrusion.

“Your friend, Rusty, at the bar, he was saying that you rescue animals? At the hazelnut farm?”

Julius’s attention snaps back. “Rusty said that?”

“Why not?” says Megan. “It’s true.”

“I’m a total animal person,” I say, boasting. “I once got arrested for getting into a fight with a dude at a shelter who euthanized this cat I was going to adopt. Because I was
fifteen minutes
late.”

“That’s awful. Where are you from, Darcy?” Megan asks kindly.

“Southern California. Don’t ask.”

“Heat, traffic, smog?”

“And the most repressive attitude toward animal rights. We have to fight for every soul.”

“Are you in the movement?” she asks.

“I show up. Done a lot of cat and dog adoptions. Can I come to the farm and see your operation, maybe help?”

Megan hesitates. “We don’t encourage visitors. It upsets the animals.”

“But don’t you want to adopt them out?”

“Once we get ’em, we keep ’em. We’re not open to the public,” Julius says abruptly, and downs a beer.

Regroup.

“I’ve been reading in the
Oregonian
about the wild mustangs,” I say barreling on. “I think it’s terrible what the government is doing to them.”

“Infuriating,” Megan agrees.

“Ever heard of FAN?”

“Are you a member of FAN?” she whispers conspiratorially.

“Me?” I strike my heart with surprise. “No, are you?”

“No,” she says slowly. “But I don’t condemn what they do. Especially concerning Herbert Laumann,” she adds bitterly.

My stomach goes
whoa!
Angelo’s intel just paid off.

“The deputy state director of the BLM? What’s he up to now?”

“Killing horses.”

“They can’t be killed; it’s the law.”

“He steals them.”

“Steals them?”

“He’s been stealing the horses he’s supposed to protect. Since he’s been deputy director, Herbert Laumann has supposedly adopted one hundred and thirty-five mustangs.”

“What?”

“This is a guy who lives in the suburbs.” Megan nods, disbelieving. “Where is he going to put a hundred and thirty-five horses?”

“The man’s a scumbag,” Julius says, scanning over people’s heads. Waiting for someone?

“Know what he’s been doing?”

I shake my head. My eyes are wide.

Megan’s voice is rising. “Government employees aren’t allowed to bid on the mustangs that are up for auction. So Laumann adopts them illegally under his relatives’ names.” Her cheeks are pink. “Then he sells them to a slaughterhouse in Illinois, where the horse meat is packed and shipped for human consumption in France.”

“They eat horses, don’t they?” comments Julius, not taking his eyes from the crowd.

The scam sounds too bizarre to be radical propaganda.

“Why isn’t this front-page news?”

“It will be. FAN discovered the paper trail and leaked it to the press. It’ll be up on their Web site.”

Two or three Mexican gangbangers jump the bar. Glass shatters with earsplitting blasts as bottles fly off the wall. Omar’s quiets down and roars at the same time—women freeze; men cheer the fight—as Rusty, the friendly bartender, is tossed hand to hand and then trammeled below the mahogany.

“What are they doing?” Megan gasps.

Julius restrains her. “Stay out of it.”

“No! How can you stand there?”

Three on one? My blood is roaring; I’m out of my body with outrage. But this is training: I do not yell
“Freeze! FBI.”
I do not speed-dial 911. I am a witness.

I see that neither Mr. Terminate nor Julius makes a move to intervene, but watch with calm and unworried expressions, as if this were a regularly scheduled TV show.

Sickening thuds. Someone’s turned up the music.

“This is revolting,” Megan says, breaking from her aging boyfriend and elbowing through the crowd, which has gone frenetic, standing on tables, laughing girls waving beer bottles perched on the shoulders of burly guys, like the place is about to erupt in a massive game of chicken. I scramble along with Megan as she pushes her way behind the bar.

Rusty’s arms are pinned and they’ve got his head in the ice bin. They pull it out by his chin hair, repeatedly smash his nose against the chrome, then plunge him into the ice again. His face is a mass of bruises and splintered bone, teeth are gone, and the ice cache has become a hemoglobin cocktail.

Megan is screaming, “Leave him alone,” trying to pry the Mexicans away. A small one jumps on her back and clings.

I’m saying, “Chill out, brother,” but they laugh, so I get the little monkey dude in a rear chokehold and pull him off Megan and maneuver his flailing body around until I can flip him flat onto the wet wooden joists of the catwalk behind the bar. He lies there, stunned as a fish.

There’s a baton Rusty keeps near the cash register. I’ve got it ready for counterattack, when a big warm hand grabs my wrist. Julius has put himself between them and me.

“Don’t worry yourself. Rusty had it coming.”

I stare at the destroyed face of the barely conscious human being slumped in Megan’s lap on the floor, where she kneels in a nest of broken glass. Her shirt is soaked with his blood. The space looks like Laumann’s mustang slaughterhouse—blood on the mirrors, blood in the drains. The attention of the crowd has shifted to the cash register.

“What’d he do?” I shout.

“He’s a cop,” Julius says, and Rusty awakens just enough to roll an eye toward me, piercing as the bloodred sun.

Seven

My grandfather Poppy taught me that everything must be earned. As a lieutenant in the Long Beach police department, he believed in progress through the ranks. But his black-and-white view of the world carried beyond the patrol car, right into our kitchen, where he would subject my young mother and me to sadistic quizzes on current events, or rate her cooking as if he were a restaurant critic.

“Dry as dust,” he’d proclaim about her roast turkey. “You’re stupid,” he’d say, frowning when I failed to name the secretary-general of the United Nations. Give him a sweater for Father’s Day and his face would go into a soft paralysis and his eyes would drift, and he’d give you a neutral “Hmmm.” He literally did not know what to do with a gift.

If you did something bad, like flooding the garage with a garden hose, there would be punishment—washing your mouth out with soap, or making you stand in the scary backyard at night in your pajamas. Like Darcy, I did bad things anyway. Things that tested Poppy’s love against Poppy’s rules. When I was a child, a vein of longing wound through my body, like coveting those ribbons of marshmallow set in chocolate ice cream, and just because he knew I wanted it more than anything, Poppy would never let me have it—no matter how many chances I gave him to say “I was only kidding. You really are okay. Here’s my love, with whipped cream on top.”

Screw you, Grandpa.

The girl who used to stand in awe of you was Ana.

At Omar’s Roadhouse, I was Darcy, acting out like crazy. Darcy, all Darcy.

And I liked it.

Donnato tugs his tie loose and drops into a chair. We have met at a seedy motel near the Portland airport.

“Why wasn’t I told there was a Portland police detective working undercover?”

“Don’t yell,” he says with a sigh. “I just found out myself. They know Omar’s is a nexus of criminal activity. They’ve had undercovers embedded for years—”

I’m pointing a finger, an aggressive habit.

“
Goddamn it,
I should have been told!”

“Look, Ana, it’s the same old tune. The local cops want our assistance on a task force, and then resent the hell out of it when we show up. The cop goes down,” he says tiredly. “And you throw money?”

“They smashed the cash register, so I grabbed a couple of handfuls. It was a diversion. If anyone asks, ‘Who is this new girl in town named Darcy?’ they’ll have an answer. ‘She’s the one who got up on the bar and started throwing cash to the crowd.’ I gave a handful to Megan for the horses.”

“Don’t try so hard is what I’m saying.”

“That’s the juice, Mike. Darcy being out there, that’s the key to this new identity. Will Rusty live?”

“Yes. Was he helpful?”

“Before he almost died of internal injuries? Yes, he put me in bed with Megan Tewksbury. He knows she’s an activist. That’s why he made a big point of introducing us, even though I had no clue what he was doing at the time. He must have thought I was a real lamebrain fed—”

“He accomplished the mission. Calm down. I got Salvador Molly’s.” Donnato opens a fragrant bag of Caribbean takeout. “Have an empanada.”

I do not calm down. “What’s going on? You look wasted.”

There are bruised dark circles beneath his eyes, sweat stains on his white shirt. We have met in a neighborhood of unreconstructed streets, dotted with bakeries and thrift stores, in a working-class part of Portland. The Econo Lodge, situated on a gritty avenue of easy-credit used-car lots, is a stucco relic of the sixties weathered to the color of a strawberry milk shake, a couple of salesmen’s hatchbacks parked outside.

You always have to worry about countersurveillance, so I trudged to the top floor carrying an empty suitcase, and casually unlocked room 224. Using an old FBI maneuver, Donnato was set up two doors down in 228. That way, nobody could put us as meeting together. The average bonehead would not realize the rooms were adjoining, because the Bureau had rented all three.

The connecting doors are still open, creating a triplet of empty cubes identically stocked and sanitized, down to the crispy tissue-wrapped plastic cups. Even the daylight looks dry-cleaned.

“My father-in-law threw a blood clot and had another stroke.”

“I’m really sorry, Mike. How is he?”

“Back in the hospital. It’s touch and go. We’ve been up all night.”

He draws the curtains to discourage telephoto lenses from neighboring rooftops, and turns the clock radio to NPR. Not because he likes their politics but because at this hour they provide a screen of background jabber so nobody can hear us through the walls. With the curtains closed, the place is dark as a theater. Weak pools of light drop from the table lamps like halos.

“I don’t know if we’ve got a cult here, or what,” I tell him. “The female was wearing a triangular silver necklace called a valknot.”

“Asatrú,” says Donnato.

“God bless you.”

“Don’t push it,” he warns.

“What’d I say?”

“Asatrú is a modern-day religion based on ancient Norse beliefs.” He reaches for a habanero and cheese fritter. “Its adherents practice a pagan philosophy that talks about preserving nature. The white supremacists have adapted a form of it and switched it around to justify their views.”

“There were neo-Nazis at the bar.”

“What were they doing?”

“One of them was eating an ashtray.”

This doesn’t register as anything strange.

“Barriers are coming down,” Donnato muses without missing a beat. “Interesting alliances are starting to form between terrorist groups. Right there you have a potential affinity between environmentalists and right-wing thinking. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that these groups could get together. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”

“You have blood enemies at Omar’s who should be tearing each other’s throats out.”

“It’s called business.”

“You can buy anything there. Hookers, dope, hazelnut brittle—”

“Hazelnut brittle? Pretty damn subversive. That’s it. Now I’m hooked.” He rolls his eyes.

“Shut up. Megan Tewksbury is our way in. She will lead us to FAN.”

“Why?”

“She’s accessible. Funny. Openhearted. I liked her.”

“She is not supposed to be your mom.”

“I know that.”

“It’s my job to remind you that in isolation the bad guys can start looking pretty good.”

“That’s not it. Look.”

I flash him the latest issue of
Willamette Week,
a liberal throwaway I snagged at the vegan Cosmic Café. There were piles of it near the bulletin board, underneath an unpleasant chart of a side of beef. The whole front page of the newspaper is a poster in the style of the Old West:
WANTED—FOR GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER,
with a photo of BLM’s deputy state director, Herbert Laumann.

“Megan gave me the heads-up that FAN would break the story, and here it is. Laumann has been illegally adopting mustangs under his relatives’ names and selling them to a slaughterhouse in Illinois.”

Donnato studies the paper.

“She rescues animals on a farm; she’s hooked in. They don’t like visitors, which is an excellent reason for me to get my butt out there and see what’s going down.”

He still doesn’t like it.

“Sounds weak. We commit the resources, and your friend Megan turns out to be a housewife who likes cat calendars.”

Donnato brushes his tie of crumbs. He is maddeningly fastidious about his Calvin Klein suits and fine tasseled loafers, even in a sleazoid motel. But today his meticulous mannerisms are pissing me off.

“What would be solid enough for you?”

“Give me Bill Fontana.”

Bill Fontana is a leader in the movement who did two years in prison for setting fire to 250 tons of hay in an animal-husbandry building at UC Davis. Fontana is a scrawny, bright-eyed kid, still winning hearts and minds with his “fearless saboteur” shtick. The prison sentence only added to the mythology.

“Wonder Boy Fontana is speaking here at a big animal rights convention. I met with the Portland task force that has been assigned to FAN—”

“Wait a minute,” I say stubbornly, interrupting him. “Can we go back to Megan? We’re looking for me to make my bones. This is a legit way in. Megan is a can-do person, the type who gets things done. I’m telling you, she’s good.”

“She may be good, but Angelo will say she’s weak.”

I don’t like the innuendo.
Weak
because we’re talking about the two of us establishing a
female
relationship?
Weak
because she doesn’t fit the prototype of the male junkie informant guys like Angelo understand?

I lift my chin. “I’ve identified a true believer and I’m getting close to her. That’s procedure, absolutely! I need your help to find a way of getting out to that farm.”

Donnato stands, thoroughly irritated.

“Tell me something, Ana. Why is it always your agenda?”

I am dumbfounded. “
My
agenda?”

“You are fixated on this woman, and I know why. Not because it’s a knockout idea, but because it’s
yours.
Yours against mine. You against the badass bureaucracy. It’s been that way as long as I’ve known you.”

My fastidious partner has never attacked me like this before. “What is wrong with you? I thought I was the one with the hormones. You’ve been touchy since I walked in the door.”

Men hate it when you use the word
hormones.

“Omar’s Roadhouse was Steve Crawford’s last known location,” Donnato insists. “And we still don’t know why he was there, and why he was not following procedure.”

“Who said he wasn’t?”

“Marvin Gladstone.”

“You believe that? Marvin’s just covering his ass.”

“Why wasn’t Steve checking in?”

I shrug. “He was running his own game. The old-timer couldn’t keep up.”

“What game?”

I snort slowly through my nose. I become aware of afternoon traffic. I wish we had some beer. Okay, I’ll be the one to say it.

“Maybe he was meeting a woman.”

Now Donnato is incensed. “Steve was a good father and a good man! What on earth would make you say something like that?”

“It’s an idea,” I protest. “I don’t like the implications, either, but I throw it out for discussion, like any other case, and you go off on me. We all love Tina and Steve. Nobody’s trying to stir something up. Him getting it on with someone else—it’s just a theory. Why does it bug you so much?”

The two of us arguing about Steve’s marriage in a sterile box in the middle of a strange city is suddenly absurd and strangely familiar. It reminds me of undercover school, and the dead-serious games they forced us to play. It is almost as if, against our wills, Donnato and I have been cast as a pair of ridiculous personages—I a naïf named Darcy, and he all buttoned up in the Bureau uniform.

Or is it
failure
of will that has ignited Donnato? Could the true source of his distress be the unbearable frisson (God knows, I’m feeling it) of a man and woman who have worked together twelve years, alone in the late afternoon, in not one but
three
empty motel rooms? No, no—of course we have a lid on it. Donnato is back with his wife after yet another separation.
Isn’t he?

If we continue to look at each other in this pleading way a minute longer, one of us will drift over the line, and that will tick off the obsession, and then we will be back in that sweet morass. We have been successful in avoiding it for years now, clean and sober despite the ache. It happened only once, and for good reason, in a wet field of strawberries, beneath the shuddering bellies of helicopters patrolling a military base—the kind of memory you can put on the wall and be happy just to look at for the rest of your life. He was going to leave his wife; then he wasn’t. Finally, we had to put an end to the possibility and soldier on. It is an adjustment we have learned to make, swiftly and silently, a dozen times a day, often right under the noses of our instinctively suspicious FBI colleagues. Nobody is watching us now, which makes it imperative that I sit down in a chair as far away as possible.

“I take it back,” I say, crossing my legs primly. “Steve was not meeting a woman.”

Donnato accepts the move without a blink. “Steve
was
meeting someone, but he misjudged them badly and—”

His Nextel buzzes. It is Special Agent Jason Ripley, calling from L.A. Odd to look at, because his strikingly milky skin and white-blond coloring are like some kind of an albino rose, Jason remains to the bone the lanky son of a Midwest farmer who was raised to behave deferentially around his elders yet give no ground to wickedness or sin. He is, in the FBI garden of belief, a perennial.

Donnato and I are both patched in on our cells to L.A.

I start the debrief. “Julius Emerson Phelps was born in Ohio—”

Donnato: “Based on what evidence?”

“There was a flying ear of corn on his cap. I learned in uc school that when you see a flying ear of corn, ask.”

“Was it red and yellow, with wings?” Jason pipes up.

“How do you know?”

“That’s an old barn sign. The DeKalb Company is a big seed grower. The flying corn is the logo; it used to be on barns all over when I was growing up. But DeKalb is based in Illinois.”