Deadly Waters (35 page)

XCV

12/31/10 20:26

“Someone’s listening to our conversation,” were Mondragon’s first words over the phone after he had told Taylor who he was.

“You think so?” said Taylor. “I know I’ve got people parked outside my front door.”

“We need to talk at your place,” said Mondragon. “Don’t say the name. The place the bikers like. You know which one I mean. I’m going there now myself.”

John Taylor found his car keys after only a couple minutes of searching. He turned over the coffee table in the living room and the coffee maker in the kitchen, and finally he discovered they had been hiding from him in his jacket pocket.

“I’ve got to stop drinking so much,” he reminded himself, although five seconds later he thought maybe he would take one more sip of Glenlivet.

*

He knew the place Mondragon referred to was the Pirates’ Bar in Oakland, the same biker dive in which his bodyguard had gotten into a scuffle with the tabloid reporters. John Taylor passed out fifty dollar bills to the bar’s patrons every Christmas and once a week bought drinks for the house, thus he was tolerated there and sometimes protected. He took a drink from his flask and made himself think of the green and soggy Scottish Highlands whence the liquor came. How he wished he had gone there once in his life. He closed his eyes and thought of hills the color of billiard felt and of patches of purplish heather swaying in a lonely wind.

I should have been a whiskey maker, or some other sort of artisan, he thought as he savored the smoky aftertaste. I could have lived in a stone house overlooking the sea, and my son, my loving, hard-working son, would have learned my trade and taken my position when I grew old.

Armored by that last happy thought, Taylor pushed out his front door and into a misty San Francisco night. Three carloads of federal agents were parked in the street at the sides of his driveway. More watched him from other nearby streets, to say nothing of the local law enforcement groups in the area who could be called onto his trail in seconds.

This must be one of Erin’s little jokes, thought Taylor. By the time he got to the saloon in Oakland there would be scores of police cruisers waiting for them in the parking lot; Mondragon and he would wave at each other and go home without saying anything of consequence. For the first time in weeks Taylor permitted himself to laugh when he thought of the confusion that would take place in the Pirates’ parking lot on that busy New Year’s Eve. He was wearing only a light cloth jacket as he went into his Buick and drove by the startled agents parked beyond the sidewalk of his street. In his rearview mirror John saw the normally quiet suburban street come to life behind him as agents turned on their headlights and pulled onto the asphalt. He counted four of them in his wake and imagined that the airwaves in his neighborhood must be alive with the news of his sudden movement.

“Here we go,” said Taylor, and the utter pointlessness of the outing made him feel more relaxed; nothing was going to come of this, so there was no reason to worry.

The parade of cars swept down El Camino and onto 101, at which point Taylor turned left in the direction of the Bay Bridge. Past San Mateo and past Daly City into the southern edge of San Francisco proper and toward the intersection of I-280, where Taylor turned west toward I-80 and the bridge, the cavalcade rolled on its uneventful way.

“Subject is weaving again,” broadcast the agent riding shotgun in the lead car immediately behind Taylor. “I could pull him over now.”

A loud static rasp broke into the airwaves and simultaneously the lead cars, the ones just entering the I-80/I-280 interchange, began having mechanical problems.

“Something’s going…” lead agent Dollworth heard his foremost car report before the radio went dead.

“Our car has stopped,” he heard the third car back report. “I repeat, our car has stopped. We are coasting to the shoulder and will need assistance to get this vehicle started again.”

“What the Sam Hill is going on up there?” demanded Dollworth.

“We’ve got a problem, chief,” another agent near the front of the pack notified Dollworth. “Cars are stopping all around us, ahead of us, everywhere. We have a traffic jam in front of us. The suspect is continuing toward the Bay Bridge.”

The agent in charge tried shouting louder at the men in the stalled cars, to no avail. Taylor’s Buick continued on toward the Bay Bridge, leaving a tangle of stalled cars behind it. Only one car, a rusty black Camero carrying two unidentified civilians kept rolling along behind Taylor’s Buick. Unknown to the FBI, police and ATF men, the man known as Carnie and one of his associates had turned on the microwave device Mondragon had given them and had pointed it at the cars around them, leaving their automobile the solitary vehicle left in the pursuit.

“Like magic,” commented Carnie concerning the microwave weapon. “I got to get me one of these.”

“I see two more cars,” said the nameless man at the wheel who was glancing in the mirror.

Seven seconds later another FBI automobile came to a halt and its passengers at once got on the radio to call for assistance.

“Something is happening here,” Dollworth told the central dispatcher. “Get someone on the other side of the bridge! Helicopter somebody into Oakland if you have to.”

“We’ll be there when we can be there,” one beleaguered police captain told Dollworth when the latter man pressed him on a cell phone to send someone to the Oakland side. “We’ve got street parties up and down the Castro, and you want us to go after a guy who’s driving somewhere to meet with his co-defendant in a federal case. Come on. Isn’t that your job?”

*

Taylor drove on, oblivious to everything happening behind him. He entered the steel boundaries of the four mile long span reaching over the bay and did not look back at the black Camero directly behind him. Seconds later his car started shivering so hard he could feel the throbbing in the steering wheel.

“American cars,” said Taylor to himself. “You think we might still be able to build something this big and slow.”

The traffic in the oncoming lanes was heavy, and the blazing headlights and headlong speed of the other cars frightened him. As his own vehicle inexplicably lost power, the other cars somehow seemed to be attacking his Buick as they zipped past at a breakneck clip. Taylor was afraid to open the door and was astonished to see a large man whose pale skin was almost the shade of an albino’s tapping on his driver’s side window.

“My engine has gone dead,” Taylor said as he rolled down his window.

John noticed that there were very few cars on his side of the bridge. On the north side the lanes bound for San Francisco were bumper to bumper, while his side, the ones bound for Oakland, had only a smattering of headlights on it. He did not know that most of the interchange to the west was blocked by stalled cars and he was seeing only the vehicles from the north, from which direction drivers still had open passage from I-280 onto I-80 and the bridge.

“We’ll get you started, sir,” said the pale stranger. “Pop the hood and my buddy will give you a jump start.”

Taylor saw in his mirror that another man from the Camero was standing behind his left rear bumper and waving the sparse traffic around the stopped Buick.

“The thing just stopped,” said Taylor.

“Something must have come loose on the battery,” said the stranger. “Go ahead and pop the hood. We’ll have a shot at fixing it.”

Taylor did as the man asked, yet remained inside his car. The big stranger glanced at the engine briefly, then returned to the driver’s side window.

“These new cars,” said the man. “They’re computer chips on top of wires. I can’t see all the connections you’ve got to your battery. Do you have a flashlight?”

“In the glove box,” said Taylor and got out of the car with the flashlight. “I think there are only the two usual connections.”

Taylor was about to bend over the front of the automobile and point directly at the positive and negative posts on the battery, but for no reason the stranger slugged him in the stomach and sent him face first into the wet pavement. The man who had been directing traffic quickly bounded around the Buick, and he and the pale stranger together picked up Jack Taylor and tossed him over the steel railing. Everything that happened in those few seconds seemed to Taylor to be happening to someone else, someone he was watching at a distance from a safe place. He did not cry out as he fell toward the black waters of the San Francisco Bay. There was time for him to clench one hand against the other and to chant, one last time, his notion of “one cherishing the other.” His body was moving so fast and the water was so cold he felt nothing an instant after he hit.

Carnie and his helper re-entered the Camero and drove around the stalled Buick. Other drivers on the bridge at the time later told the authorities they had seen Taylor’s automobile stranded on the roadway and had seen two, perhaps three men about the car; and while on the day after John Taylor’s death some of the people who had been on the bridge could describe the Camero, not one of them could tell exactly what had happened or give a description of the two killers.

XCVI

12/31/10 22:23 PST

At the Van Ness Bus Station Carnie could not prevent his companion from rushing with key in hand to the banks of luggage lockers in the station’s waiting room. Despite the holiday, only about fifty people, most of them legal aliens bound for jobs somewhere north of San Francisco or returning to Mexico, were milling around the terminal or sleeping on the benches, their belongings stacked in front of them on the red and white checkered floor. A few watched the delayed broadcast from Times Square on the station’s TV monitors.

“People,” said Carnie as he followed behind his associate.

“Huh?” said the other in reply.

He located the square, orange door of locker #351 and inserted the key. His headlong eagerness to get his hands on the $200,000 did not suit his more experienced companion, but the man was oblivious to anything Carnie or anyone else felt.

“You want the quarter?” he asked Carnie, as the coin had clicked forward in the slot once the key had been returned.

“Want the quarter?” replied Carnie. “Put it away and get the damned case.”

The man shrugged and pocketed the coin. He opened the locker door and pulled out the black suitcase that contained their money.

*

Bob Mathers had been watching Taylor’s house that evening and had followed the convoy of federal cars to the Bay Bridge. He had driven around the stalled cars in the borrow pit, and got to the middle of the bridge in time to see the black Camero drive away from Taylor’s Buick. He had followed the two killers into Oakland and back across the other side of the bridge into San Francisco and to the Van Ness station. He did not know what he should do next. Like other drivers on the bridge, he was not even certain what had transpired there or what the two men might have done.

Bob checked the old service revolver he still carried tucked into the back of his belt. He doubted he would have to use it, especially in a public place as crowded as the station. He halted in front of the building’s thick Plexiglas door and saw on the far side of the interior a greasy haired man in a black sweatshirt opening a large suitcase he had propped against the wall, while a man behind him, an oddly pale man of enormous stature, attempted to reach over the smaller man’s shoulder and close the same suitcase, the fasteners of which had already been flicked open.

As he put his hand on the transparent door handle, Bob had two simultaneous thoughts in the compressed moments before calamity struck. One, the bigger man was more cautious than his friend. Two, Bob remembered a story in the news a year and a half ago concerning someone named Gusman, a Colombian somehow involved in the conspiracy and the victim of a package bomb.

Whether it was the memory of that story or the obvious nervousness of the big man that saved Bob, he was unable to decide in the hours of confusion that followed. One thought or the other made Bob let go of the door handle and take one step to his left behind a cinder block portion of the bus station’s exterior wall.

No one in the station heard the blast. Bob Mathers saw the Plexiglas door leap off its hinges and into the street, and he felt a wave of heat strike his face and hands. He awoke seconds later lying on the sidewalk. Bits of glass littered the pavement opposite of where the station’s windows had been. The exterior walls had not fallen, although a sizeable portion of the roof had collapsed, and columns of black smoke poured from all the building’s openings. Bob heard nothing. People scurried about the edges of his vision; obviously they were moving their mouths and screaming words. To Bob they were figures on television and the sound was off. He stood upright and shook bits of cement and glass off his body. He checked his heart to make sure it was still beating, and while he was cut and bleeding in several places, he was surprised to find that he remained alive. For approximately ninety seconds, Bob was content to lean against the sagging station wall and watch the strange scene playing around him. Then, as if an on switch were thrown inside his head, his hearing returned, and the noise that fell upon him was so loud his inner ears ached.

“
Mi
familia
!” a woman with a wounded face was shouting straight at him from an arm’s length away.

Mathers stared at her and wondered why she was upset. He felt no concern for her or for anyone else in the building. He twice entered the ruined station anyway and carried injured people to the street. Everything was lost to him in the confusion. When he heard the ambulance sirens approaching the devastated site from three different directions Bob continued to hear the drone of a bee that somehow had become trapped inside his skull. Uniformed policemen appeared in the building’s open doorways at the same time Bob became preoccupied with the right-hand sleeve of his jacket; the blast had cleanly burned away the fabric up to the elbow, leaving the rest of the cloth to hang free, but the flesh beneath was uninjured. This was, for inexplicable reasons, fascinating to Bob; he flexed his bare forearm several times in the light of a fire burning inside the ruined station and allowed himself to laugh at what he saw.

“Get out! Everybody back!” a cop screamed at Bob and the other blast victims. “Firemen coming through!”

When he staggered outside, someone threw a blanket over his shoulders and led him next door to a coffee shop wherein some emergency medical personnel were setting up a first-aid center. New Year’s revelers from nearby bars had hurried into the streets outside to see what had happened while the first fire hose attached to a hydrant gave forth a geyser on the station’s interior and people bearing stretchers massed at the doors and prepared to enter.

“I thought it was fireworks when I heard it,” several people wearing party hats said

“A bomb,” said Bob to a medical worker in the coffee shop who was checking his eyes. “Two men in the back had a bomb in a suitcase.”

Everyone in the coffee shop was either babbling or crying. The worker tending to the wounded did not pay any heed to Bob’s words. Only one party-goer in a tuxedo overhead him and asked Bob to tell more.

“You saw the bomb, sir?” he said.

Bob did not feel injured. He felt elated, exhilarated by the experience he had survived. He pushed the medical worker away and went outside to feel a light mist on his face and to breathe the fresh air.

“Two men took a case from one of the lockers,” he told the man in the tuxedo. “The bomb inside went off right after they opened it.”

“You saw this?” asked a woman who apparently was with the tuxedoed man. “I’m a doctor,” she added with a tinge of shame, for in her interest to discover what had taken place she had momentarily forgotten her professional duties. “I think you should lie down,” she said and felt Bob’s forehead. “You may be in shock. These people can help you, sir.”

“Enough,” said Bob and put his hands up to shove the woman doctor away from him. “I need to talk to someone. A policeman.”

Twenty minutes later, by which time Bob’s head had cleared and the tuxedo man and the woman doctor had long since left to help more seriously injured bomb victims, a detective did come by the coffee shop to question Bob. His interrogation was clearly pro forma, and he had little enthusiasm for talking to another distraught person that night.

“You say you saw a bomb, sir?” asked the cop, putting his micro recorder up to Bob’s face.

“I saw two men opening a case,” said Bob, and described how Carnie and the other man looked. “They must have been blown to pieces.”

“Uh huh,” said the detective. “Did you actually see a bomb?”

“The explosion seemed to come from their case,” said Bob. The detective had already lost interest in him and was looking into the crowded coffee shop for someone else he could interview. “I can’t give you anything more... I saw them open the suitcase; the next thing I knew the place had exploded.” He suggested the police search the station for a surveillance camera that had recorded the scene.

“We’ll get around to that,” the cop half-heartedly assured him. “What did you say your name was?”

“John Taylor,” said Bob, and gave the detective Taylor’s real address and home phone number.

The cop switched off his recorder and went to talk to an hysterical woman who claimed she saw a lightning bolt strike the station. Bob Mathers meanwhile shuffled back to his truck and drove back to his motel room to sleep until the morning of the Second.