The Storm Giants Read online

  “Where you going, daddy?” Raymond asked. “Can I come? Do I get a gun like Uncle Rick?”

  “No,” Everett answered. “I need you to help your uncle and make sure Mom is safe.”

  Raymond commenced staring at Kerri as if he wouldn’t take his eyes off her until Everett returned.

  “It’s going to be all right, Kerri,” Everett said. “Everything’s going to be better than right.”

  He trudged up the access road to the highway, with each step getting more into character. Letting despair and defeat infuse his body posture and gait. Kerri barely recognized him from behind. He looked like any other homeless piece of human waste, without resources or future.

  He stopped once at a curve in the road and turned to favor the property with a sweeping gaze. He looked past Kerri at the house and its panorama, then at her and Raymond. His eyes glowed at them like the open door of a furnace.

  And then he was gone.

  Kerri went inside to her easel, which held the promise of taking her mind away from all this. She took down at the painting she’d been working on, replacing it with a fresh canvas.

  “I’m hungry,” Raymond said. “Where’s daddy going? Will he be back before Santa?”

  She stroked his head and rummaged something for him from the fridge, but her eyes were drawn to her virginal new canvas the whole time.

  Rick said something outside on the porch, attempting comfort or strategic advice. She ignored his words as distractions, and found herself considering surprisingly amoral ways to shut him up.

  Was she becoming like Everett? She couldn’t allow that. How could she be there for him or for Raymond if she fell into the same harshness he lived in?

  Still, the impact of Everett’s furtive inaccessibility weighed heavily on her and Raymond. Everett was some kind of tuning fork, giving off a vibration she and Raymond oriented themselves toward without even knowing. They orbited Everett, and his blankness infected them.

  She turned on the Bose, pretending Everett’s brand of numbness was any kind of shield – for today she’d chosen Spice 1, and the plangent Oaktown chaos of ‘Dirty Bay’ seemed a perfect backdrop.

  Running her fingers along the coarse weave of the canvas, she considered just what kind of background wash to use. This wouldn’t be one of her abstracts. She’d make this one photorealistic as possible, so nobody could pretend they didn’t understand what she meant.

  She picked up her charcoal and prepared to sketch in fury, letting the shadows leak from her onto the canvas. This would be her most disturbing piece. The collectors down in San Francisco would pay through the nose for it. If she survived to complete it, that is.

  Her charcoal was poised to touch the canvas when she put it down. She walked out the door, sat down next to Raymond on the stoop, and put her arm around his shoulders. They looked up towards the highway where Everett had disappeared.

  Part Three:

  Chapter 22: An Uncomfortable Ride

  As harvest season was fast approaching, Everett slid into the midst of a pack of trimmers awaiting work south of Garberville. The trimmers all had bonsai clippers dangling from chains around their neck as job applications, and growers would occasionally stop and pick up a carload.

  Everett’s first hitch was easy. A grower from out Whitethorn way, heading north to Eureka so he could spend his illicit cash somewhere larger than a gas station convenience store. After that a retired couple in a Winnebago took pity on Everett’s forlorn appearance and let him deadhead with them across treacherous SR-299, rated as one of the worst stretches of highway in the Nation.

  Highway 299 was 150 miles of hilly asphalt. Besides the steep winding curves of the road itself, much of it was one big dead zone. No cell phone reception for most of it, and no services at all for large stretches between Arcata and Redding. There were five or six tiny speed bump towns along the way, many with only a couple dozen residents.

  Just before Willow Creek they had to stop for an hour while a road crew blasted and bulldozed a major rock slide. The piled up traffic waited in line in front of a bored Caltrans worker holding a traffic sign for about $30 an hour.

  Tired of repaying the couple for the ride by pretending normalcy, Everett hopped out to stretch his legs and have a smoke. Strolling down the long line of waiting cars, his mind examined his current predicament and what was waiting for him in Amicus. He finished the coffin nail as he reached the end of the cars, let it drop and stamped it out. He turned back towards where the Winnebago idled in line, bulking among all the smaller autos like a whale among minnows.

  As he reached the Winnebago there was a rumbling dynamite blast up ahead. It sounded like the storm giants saying hello, and his racing mind became enmeshed in whys and wherefores, ways and means.

  He felt eyes. The wife belonging to the RV stood in the open door of the Winnebago, goggling down at him. Everett’s mask had slipped while he was thinking thoughts. He’d just been standing with one foot on the bottom step staring into space, for how long he couldn’t tell.

  Laura, he reminded himself. The female half of the RV couple’s name was Laura. He forced a smile for her, looking as close to human as he could imitate. After a long few seconds she smiled back.

  But Laura didn’t talk to him much for the rest of the ride, nor look at him. Her husband Ron caught her vibes in the telepathy reached by long married couples, and the final leg of 299 was tense.

  As it was wildfire season, ragged banners of smoke scudded toward them over the hills east of Whiskeytown. The sky overhead was a sullen crimson as they started down off the last summit. Hairpins and blind curves descending 1500 feet in eight short miles, the kind of balls out roller coaster decline that makes any big rig trucker’s sphincter pucker. Ron had to slow the bus length Winnebago to as low as 5 MPH on some of the curves.

  As they drove back, forth and down, burnt areas stretched to the foreshortened horizons on both sides of them. The charred ground looked dead like the moon, and blackened toothpick remnants of once living plant life dotted the ashen expanses. The sun was an oblate spheroid suspended in the red sky, obscured by the scarlet smoke concealing it to the point that old Sol looked like a weird alien gas giant in a sci-fi movie, instead of our nearest star.

  Everett gave up his futile effort to allay their fears and sat in the comfort of blankness, hands folded idle in his lap as he stared at the floor. The couple pretended to ignore him after that, but it was obvious they wondered if Everett was going to make them star in their own episode of Unsolved Mysteries.

  Cha pter 23: Loafers & Averted Gazes

  The Winnebago passed a succession of dairy pastures outside of Amicus proper, all of them crowded with fat brainless milk cows. At the outskirts of town a bluff surmounted by an Indian casino loomed to the left of the highway.

  To the right was an old brick building in front of a low marshy area, with a sign on the roof reading ‘Amicus Cheese Factory – C’mon in and cut some.’ Behind it was more pastureland, sloping down into a soggy flood plain.

  Ron and Laura showed Everett the curb at the town limits. They were visibly relieved when he exited the Winnebago without incident.

  It was sunset, and the sky darkened as Everett strolled past a one room schoolhouse and a couple dilapidated churches. After a volunteer firefighter’s pavilion the through pass narrowed to a boulevard. The main street was named Broadway. Old fashioned parking spaces slanted to either side. Only a few vehicles scattered down the street.

  Amicus had seen better times. As night fell, a few scattered street lights flickered to life. The burg had the sad look of any deteriorating town communally aware that its best days were behind it, and the future would be a downward spiral of disappointment.

  Farm kids tend to gravitate to the bright lights and hard vices of the big city as soon as they’re of an age to pull up stakes and escape the nonstop labor of life on a homestead. A look at the hangers about confirmed who did the bulk of the farm labor in Amicus these days. Most of the vehi
cles Everett saw were big trucks with quad rear tires and garish mud flaps with chrome naked women on them. The kind of neo cowboy look favored by transplanted Mexican campesinos.

  The Hispanic owners lounged around their pimped out trucks, proud of the rides their under the table farm work had earned them. These Mexicans were Citizens as bourgeois as any gringo, law abiding worker bees whether they’d been brought across the border by coyotes or not.

  Just how many of them were legal? What kind of reaction would go down if he shouted ‘La Migra,’ at the top of his lungs? But Everett was here to be incognito, not to make waves.

  There didn’t seem to be enough businesses in operation to justify a downtown. Half the store fronts were closed. Some with white washed windows, others with sheets of plywood over where the plate glass had been smashed out.

  A few places were still open: a grocery store and a meat market, a bakery and a realty office. On the left side of Broadway was a feed store with a creamery co-operative office next door, intended to market local dairy products to the bottomless maw of the American supermarket system.

  On Everett’s side of Broadway was an art deco theater with marquee and movie posters in Spanish. Next door was a bar, the black hole of its open door emitting plaintive old school mariachi.

  The Mexicans huddled by the tavern entrance, talking amongst themselves in Spanish, watching Everett pass with flat incurious glances. ‘You’re just another huero drifter,’ their dismissive looks seemed to say – no one of consequence.

  Everett did his best to reinforce their assumptions, huddling like any other stumblebum loser walking the earth. He was comforted they bought into his disguise.

  On the next corner a liquor store did booming business. The group of grim men loafing about outside suckled at their brown paper bags more from bored desperation than anything else. The drinkers looked too tired to represent whatever passed for the Life in this burg. Everett locked eyes with any that met his gaze as he walked by, then looked away before his polite acknowledgment of their individual existence could be taken for challenge.

  None of them attempted to game. None of them flashed gang signs or such. Everett wasn’t here to interact with the likes of them anyways.

  The people he was here to see lived around the corner from the liquor store. He turned onto the next side street, walked far enough away from the store that none of the loafers would think he wanted to strike up a conversation, and leaned against the wall with hands in pockets.

  The target destination was on the dead end of the street, past where the sidewalk ended. The photos hadn’t done justice to the three-story Victorian behind the spike topped fence, which waded knee deep through its surrounding overgrowth.

  Most of the house’s lights were on. The exterior was draped in multi colored Christmas lights in acknowledgement of the holiday season. Illumination spilled from the windows. The Christmas display lit up a big detached garage, once the old coach house from the days when this Victorian was home to some robber baron and his entourage of servants. Beyond were also several other sheds and out buildings of varying size.

  Even with the interior lights combating the darkness he couldn’t see that much, partly because of distance, partly because of the trees and unkempt shrubbery obscuring the field of view. If this were Kerri’s house, Everett could have lost himself for weeks landscaping and manicuring that yard.

  But it wasn’t hers, of course. Phil lived here, the man that the Widow had sent Everett to recover her gold from and – incidentally – kill.

  After studying the dossier, it was fifty-fifty whether Phil would hide the Widow’s gold far away from himself. Maybe he’d keep it close enough to keep tabs and gloat over it like a fairy tale miser. Everett tended toward the latter view. The house and the property were so chock full of potential hiding places, you’d need a wrecking ball and a backhoe to do a search any justice.

  Why didn’t the Widow just torture the location of the gold out of this Phil? It was doubtful that her hesitance was due to moral compunctions.

  Why had she pegged Everett for this, and not just used her own people? Why didn’t she just kick in the door and do a smash and grab?

  Everett shoulder bumped erect away from the wall. The drinkers were still stationed at the liquor store when he crossed the street kitty corner in front of them.

  “Hey,” one of the liquor store posse said, in an aggressive voice slurred by drinkage. He mistook Everett’s avoidance path for timidity.

  Everett stopped in the middle of the street and rotated to face them. The one who’d called out was in front of the others, taking dog pack lead over the curs he stood with. His buddies all had their stubby little antennae out, waiting to see which way things were going to swing and hoping for a show.

  Everett looked in the guy’s eyes for a bit. The guy got very interested in his bottle, and made a big production of swilling at it as he turned and stared in fascination toward the other side of Broadway. Everett glanced over that way, but all he saw was a vacant lot – as good a parking spot for an averted gaze as any he supposed.

  Ch apter 24: Crimies of Convenience

  Someone had been following him for a while. It was a feeling Everett was well acquainted with. That sense of unwanted and probably malevolent scrutiny aimed between your shoulder blades like a bull’s eye. He found himself glancing in reflective surfaces as he passed, to see what lay behind.

  He stopped and openly looked back along the route he’d taken. Did someone jump out of Everett’s field of vision into a doorway as he turned? Couldn’t be sure without doubling back, and it was always foolish to repeat a route already taken.

  It might be the losers from the liquor store. It could be one of the Widow’s people. Everett didn’t care which. He needed room to maneuver, and he couldn’t afford his rhythm to be broken.

  He strolled around the corner into an alley. Squirming movement led his gaze to a stack of garbage bags teetering by an overflowing dumpster that hadn’t been emptied in a while, judging by the multi generational look of the rat civilization infesting it.

  Everett kicked a couple of times at the sacks, and several rats ran away squeaking protest. He tossed a few bags into a teetering stack and squatted behind the reeking tower of garbage. He breathed through his mouth against the gut wrenching stench, hoping none of the rats would punish his trespass by biting.

  Several minutes went by, and then someone was at the entrance to the alley. They were on the other side of the dumpster so Everett couldn’t see them but the certainty of their presence ran bone deep. The line pointed toward them like a quivering compass needle.

  A sly creaking as the lid of the dumpster lifted, and the moist sodden sounds of shifting garbage. Someone kicked hard at the heap of garbage bags Everett hid behind. The garbage toppled against him with a squelch, pressing him against the wall.

  He stayed still even as the plastic bags bulged against him like the uneven tongue of a huge and malodorous beast. He held a dripping sack with both hands to keep the garbage from toppling to the side and revealing him.

  The kicker continued down the alley. Everett twitched a bag aside to see what kind of numbers needed dealing with. There was only one, a short little guy walking away with his back exposed.

  The stack of garbage bags shed off Everett as he stiff armed the stinking heap away and uncoiled to standing. A chord of memory was struck even as he side stepped toward the little man’s blind side with one fist clenched into a hammer up by his ear, focusing through the cervical column at the base of the neck.

  He reached striking distance and allowed the hand to start its killing blur. The little man began to turn, perhaps hearing the thrum of air resistance surrounding the progressing fist. The little man’s shoulders hunched in spastic, useless reflex. One hand rose in defense, the other shot to his arm pit. Everett saw Tobias’s feral glare, the bony malnourished profile.

  Everett’s fist came to a halt inches from Tobias’s neck, the blow coming to stil
lness in an instant.

  “Everett,” Tobias said, trying to pretend a fist wasn’t poised in his face.

  Everett lowered his hand. “Larry sent you.”

  “I didn’t come on my own hook, if that’s what you mean,” Tobias said, attempting to writhe his glare into an ingratiating smile. His hand still grasped the Desert Eagle parked useless in his shoulder holster. “You might need some backup, and I am at your disposal as it were.”

  “Larry’s no altruist,” Everett said. “You betting your life that’s why he sent you?”

  Tobias snorted. “You’re paranoid Everett. Larry’s got your back and so do I. You call him asking about Nazi gold and Amicus, ask to talk to Israelis, of course he’s gonna involve himself directly. He just wants things to run smooth and see you come straight home to papa after you score. Him being your ‘most favored trading partner’ as it were, Larry knows you want him to broker the gold sale and get his ten point cut.”

  “What if I told you, you might not be making any money here? I was hedging my bets checking in with Larry, just using his contacts to see where I stood,” Everett said. “What if I told you, I may be taking it elsewhere when obtained?”

  Tobias roared in levity. “Say you’re not that dumb. Larry could get millions easy. No discount, the death camp angle makes it a one of a kind piece of history; he could make an auction out of the whole thing. You don’t have to worry about him.”

  “I’m not worried about Larry,” Everett said. “He told you you’re in for a cut?”

  Tobias’s hand stayed on the butt of his Desert Eagle as he kicked the ground like a sheepish little boy. “I’ve wanted to work with you a long time Everett. You think I can’t cut the mustard?”

  “Larry knows talent,” Everett said. “Him sending you after me says more than you know. Ask yourself, when did Larry ever do anyone a favor?”

  “Like you say he’s no altruist. But I am proposing a partnership,” Tobias said, his gaze gone merry. “Sixty fifty split, I’ll watch your back you watch mine, one hand washes the other. You know the drill.”