Judas Horse (9 page)

Ten

Waiting by the window, I keep watch for the connect. Moonlight decants through the slats of the blinds the way I remember moonlight as a child—so steady and substantial, it seemed as if you could wash your face with it, a potion of radiance that seeped through the drowsing windows of the brick house in Long Beach, penetrating the gloom of my grandfather’s world.

From Darcy’s window, I can see two girl punkers with hair like crested Gila monsters locking up the Cosmic Café. Terribly young and terribly thin, one of them is pregnant. Doo-wop resounds from the African drumming center. The girls put their arms around each other, matching steps along the darkened avenue.

The war is escalating in our little world. The techs are calling the attack on twelve-year-old Alex Laumann a “blood bomb.” The best evidence for this comes from analysis of the bloodstain patterns—the “spines” of the splatter pattern on the sidewalk and on the clothing of the victim, which tell you the amount of energy transfer. The smaller the droplets, the greater the force that projected them. The force of cow’s blood as it spat out of the backpack was created by a small amount of gunpowder, detonated by the attacker as he approached the child.

We are back to the signature device that killed Steve Crawford, which is tied to the firebomb that blew up Ernie’s Meats on the docks of Portland, and possibly other unsolved attacks over the past years credited to FAN: a fire at a genetic-engineering company that resulted in fifty thousand dollars’ worth of damage; two explosive devices using Tovex that went off at 3:00 a.m. at the construction site of a new pharmaceutical facility, destroying three concrete trucks and causing the abandonment of a twenty-million-dollar project.

Megan Tewksbury had to have known about the blood bomb and the mysterious young man, which is, finally, the best argument for infiltrating her. At last, the Operation Wildcat team agrees with what I’ve been saying all along—until we can ID the person using the alias Julius Emerson Phelps, Megan is our best way in.

A
black van pulls up and double-parks in the street below, taillights blinking. Angling sideways at the window to get a better view, I see two figures emerge and open the rear doors. This is the unit I have been waiting for. I am at the door to the apartment even before there is knocking, urgent and sharp, like the Gestapo in the night.

“
Darcy?
Are you in there?
Darcy DeGuzman!
Open the door.”

I unlock the door. “People are sleeping!”

Two shaggy hipsters stand in the hall. One is a white male with silver earrings and baggy India-print pants. The other is a gregarious African-American female whose long cornrows are woven with beads. Both wear heavy rubber boots. Their faces are sweaty and streaked with mud. The stench of hay and dead things is a sharp hit to the nose.

“Are you Darcy DeGuzman?”

“Who are you?”

They show their creds. FBI, Portland field office.

“We have your ducks.”

The male agent drags a plastic bin over the threshold. It contains four confused white ducks.

“I didn’t think it would be
ducks.
”

“Those were the orders.”

“Get them out of here. I can’t deal with this.”

“We just stole ’em,” says the female. “
No way
we’re taking ’em back. I’m not crawling through bird poop again in this lifetime.”

“Wait a minute. What’s wrong with
him
?”

One of the ducks is lying down in the bin.

“It’s sick.”

“Why’d you take a sick one?”

“What’s the difference? They’re all gonna die.” He points to green circles drawn around their necks. “That means they’re marked for slaughter.”

Okay, this is absurd.

“What am I supposed to do with a sick duck?”

The female yawns. “Call your supervisor.”

“That is incredibly unhelpful, ma’am.”

“Sorry we woke you up,” she snaps. “We enjoy doing the shit work for Los Angeles.”

And they’re sure to slam the door.

Three ducks are wandering around the apartment. The worst part is, it was my dumb idea to use rescue animals in order to get closer to Megan. I was thinking more along the line of puppies, but I know why Angelo authorized the poultry heist—to make it look like the work of dedicated radicals.

To get foie gras, a gourmet pâté, you force-feed the birds until their livers swell. French farmwives have been stuffing ducks and geese for hundreds of years, but it’s not so quaint when they’re kept in electrified metal cages with tubes down their throats. Activists have long been onto it as a rallying point. Foie gras is gruesome. It’s elitist. It’s what keeps people like Megan Tewksbury up at night.

I call her at Willamette Hazelnut Farm, using the number on the card. It is five o’clock in the morning. The apartment already smells like the monkey house at the zoo.

“Friends of mine broke into a poultry farm last night—”

“What friends?” Megan is on it. She must get these wake-up calls often.

“Freedom fighters, let’s just say. They had no place to take them, so they left them with me. What do I do with a bunch of ducks?”

“This is not an easy time,” Megan says warily. “Are you on a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“We have to hang up.”

“Okay, but listen—here’s why I’m calling—one of the ducks is sick!”

“What’s it doing?”

“Lying down. I think it’s throwing up.”

“Are there whole regurgitated kernels?”

“Seems like.”

There are shifting sounds, as if she’s getting out of bed. The phone cuts out and then comes back.

“I’m very worried about this.” I can hear it in her voice. “We need to find an avian vet.”

I didn’t even know such people existed. “Where?”

“How soon can you get down here?”

Back in L.A., Donnato does not answer his cell. I leave a message that I am heading south with a carload of ducks.

T
hose patches of green I saw from the airplane turn out to be fields of rye slashed by the interstate. They claim this is the “grass-seed capital of the world,” and I can feel the pollen stinging my eyes. For another hour, there is nothing but sheep and rain. The ducks, of course, immediately climbed out of the bin and are now floating around the car like unruly balloons. One of them is flapping away in the passenger seat, and I am getting strange looks from other drivers.

As we pass a massive plywood plant, the cedary scent of sawdust fills the car, and I’m starting to feel relatively optimistic about pulling this off—until catching sight of a large mocking clown face, like the head of a court jester who failed to amuse, stuck on a pole at the entrance to an RV park.

The RV park is ominously called Thrillville.

I turn off the highway onto slick blacktop—another forty miles of vineyards and pastureland, fairgrounds and farm-equipment rentals, into the hills, past lonely ranch houses and ramparts of woods, down a couple of forking unmarked dirt roads, and finally a driveway that bumps into a shabby farmstead.

The two-story house is so deeply settled into the grassy overgrowth, it appears to have absorbed groundwater up the walls and across the roof. Brown rot grows across the siding and spreads along the junction of the gabled dormers, where old shake shingles are peeling up.

I stop the car on a patch of gravel in a light mist, wary of the country quiet. I did not imagine the place would be this isolated. The immense time and distance between here and backup is almost palpable.

The house is neglected, but the farm seems functional. There are red barnlike outbuildings and a large silver greenhouse made of inflated plastic sections, a tractor, buckets, ladders, an old steel swing set, a limp American flag on a pole stuck in a bunker of crumbling concrete.

A fat white cat is ambling across the grass, so I make sure the ducks are safely in the car, careful not to close the door on their silly feet. The effort to contain them, and the long drive with zero sleep, is making me really,
really
want to hand them off to Megan.

The scent of lavender grows stronger and more alluring as I walk down the drive. There, lurking behind the house, is the hazelnut orchard, squatty trees with short trunks and thin branches, planted with mathematical precision, file upon file, clean as a mechanical drawing, every specimen eerily alike.

I see a large man in a blue jacket moving in and out of the rows, carrying something—pruning shears.

He disappears. I follow into the trees.

J
ulius Emerson Phelps snips a bright green sucker. He moves deliberately through the trees, parade perfect and silent. The jaws of the shears snap precisely.

Overcast days like this are flat. They narrow the perspective, as if each of us has been made in two dimensions, like that painting of the lion and the brown-breasted girl with the guitar. Heat rises from the earth and the mind hums with emptiness, like the intervals between the trees, like the leafy spaces through which the sunlight will penetrate, all the way to the ground. That is the tree farmer’s job right now—to thin and sculpt—so the foliage will grow back thickly, so if you stood beneath these canopies four months from today, 100 percent of the sky would be obliterated.

Julius Emerson Phelps is the general, and the young trees are in training. They are training to widen the spread of their branches like bowls to catch the sun. As he leaves a trail of sprouts on the ground like casualties, his face recalls the trancelike look he wore at the jukebox back at Omar’s, lost in the taunting sleaze of Blue Oyster Cult, until suddenly he straightens up. The crows are talking to him no doubt.

Maybe he noticed the nondescript car parked beside the house, a red 1993 Civic, one he has never seen before, with Oregon tags. The lady seems to go with the car—disheveled but clean, long, curly dark hair, a pleasing face, faintly exotic-looking, almond skin (Italian? Spanish?), average frame, or maybe smaller than average, but carrying forward with a confident stride. His eyes drop to the boots: worn. He withdraws behind another row. Observes. The pruning shears are weighty in his hands.

I step through his silent cathedral like a tourist, staring up.

He comes on me from behind.

“You’re trespassing.”

“Sorry! Didn’t see you.”

“Sure you did.”

“I’m Darcy. We met at the bar. I was also at the rally at the school.”

“I have no memory of meeting you anywhere.”

The moment he steps from the trees, a sexual force springs off him like slow claws down your back.

“Really? I’m hurt. What kind of trees are these?”

“Ornamental filberts.”

“Megan said they were hazelnuts.”

“Hazelnuts
are
filberts,” he says impatiently. “One and the same. We just don’t use the word
filberts
anymore. People don’t like the sound of it.”

“Kind of like ‘You’re trespassing’?” I smile. “That doesn’t sound very friendly.”

“How do I know you’re a friend?”

I give him flirty. “I can’t believe you don’t remember—I stole three hundred bucks from the till and gave it to the cause, when I could have gone shopping.” I pretend to be entranced by the willowy branches just sprouting tiny leaves. “This is amazing. How do you do it? Every tree is the same.”

His big developed shoulders shrug. His hair is in a dirty rat tail down the back. He wears a T-shirt under a grimy hooded sweatshirt, and a blue nylon jacket with a stripe down the arm. It was cold this morning. His light-colored jeans are dirt-stained at the knees.

“That’s the way my mind works,” he says.

I let him watch as I take in his eyes. I see a luminous intelligence. Seeking. Perching at a distance. Holding back.

“I brought the ducks.”

“What ducks?”

“They were stolen from a foie gras farm last night. Megan is expecting me.”

“When?”

In the muffled silence of the orchard, our voices are undistorted and strangely intimate.

“She said as soon as possible. One is sick. She was going to get a vet.”

His eyes skim my unzipped windbreaker.

“I need to pat you down.”

“Excuse me?”

“Security check. In case you’re wearing a wire.”

“A
wire
?”

Electric shock goes through me, as if I really am wearing a listening device and he can tell. I stare at the crows walking cocksure across the rows and shrug with absolute wonder.

“What am I, the bird police? Why would I wear a wire? I wouldn’t even know how.”

Don’t make a thing out of it.

“Give me your backpack.”

“Megan didn’t say I’d have to go through a metal detector.”

“Megan likes to think the world’s a happy place.” He finds a wallet. “Darcy DeGuzman?”

“Yes.”

He finds my cell phone and slips it in his pocket.

“Hey! I drove down here in the frigging middle of the night! Megan’s very upset, in case you didn’t know.
There’s a sick bird in the car!
”

“Open your arms and legs.”