Courage Stolen Read online

  The nearest emergency room was six blocks away, but I couldn’t risk going there. The two Golden Dragons would probably check the closest hospital first.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “Peachy.” Benzer was bent over in the passenger seat. “Goddamn this hurts.”

  We headed towards a hospital across town over in Carmichael. If they decided to look for us at emergency rooms, this would be fourth or fifth on the list, which I hoped would be enough time to get Benzer treated. I couldn’t count on that alone.

  I called Sac PD’s main number and asked for Nick Trujillo. He picked up his line a few seconds later, his usual charming self.

  “What the fuck do you want, Courage?”

  “It’s a pleasure to talk to you, too.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Just saw a naked guy shooting a shotgun on the 2100 block of V Street. Third house in from the corner. If you look into it closely, you might find they are members of an Asian gang called the Golden Dragons wanting to establish a foothold here. This could be your chance to nip that in the bud. They beat the hell out of a guy named Adam Benzer. I’m taking him to the emergency room at Sutter Carmichael. You may want to send a uniform to see him there.”

  He tried to push me for details on why I knew so much about the gangsters, but I told him I had to hang up. Trujillo would get back to me later, and I hoped if my call turned into a significant arrest for him it would offset how pissed off he was at the moment for cutting him off.

  “What was that business all about?” I asked. “Why were you giving them money?”

  The pain must have weakened his will to stonewall me because he replied without hesitating. “Interest.”

  “Let me guess, you borrowed money from them to bribe your clients and the Chinese companies.”

  He nodded. “Fucking Thomas’s idea. Borrowed five hundred thousand. Said we’d make it back in a couple of days and pay it all back.”

  “How the hell were you going to do that?”

  “Said he had a deal lined up.” His voice was thick with pain. “But it fell through. And we owed fifty thousand a week in interest. Can you drive any faster?”

  “What happened to the original amount?”

  “We spent most of it on bribes. I had twenty-five grand left in the safe. That’s what I gave them. Thought it would be okay. They were pissed I shorted them.”

  “What’s the deal Chan had that fell through?”

  “Don’t know.”

  He was lying. A two-person business takes on a risky loan betting on a major deal to make them rich, and one of the partners doesn’t know what the deal is? “Why did you go to SMUD today?”

  He looked over at me from his doubled-over position. “Following up on the printing contract. Wanted to let them know it’s still cool. Even without Thomas.”

  I drove to the ambulance port in front of the emergency room entrance. I went around to the side of the car and helped Benzer out. We headed towards the glass doors when I stopped and returned to the car, opened the trunk, and tossed the three guns inside.

  Thirty minutes later, Benzer was admitted to the emergency room. I hoped the doctors could fix his nose and wondered if he had significant internal injuries. When I walked out of the emergency room entrance, I felt relatively secure, certain Bo and Wu had not tracked me down. At least not yet.

  twenty-four

  The next morning I awoke to rain pounding my roof so hard I gave up falling back to sleep at five o’clock. I retrieved the Sacramento Bee from the front porch, started a half pot of coffee, and then watched through my kitchen window as the rain slanted across the sky, peppering the landscape faster than the drains could handle. From previous rainstorms, I knew another hour like this would flood the street. Gusts of wind battered the trees and power lines, issuing a low-pitched howl, adding voice to the visual and physical assault of the earth.

  Watching the storm, I wondered about Adam Benzer. Had he spent the night in the hospital? How severe were his injuries? Was he holding anything else from me? He and Thomas Chan had gotten in over their heads, costing Chan his life—and Benzer, a beating.

  I put two pieces of wheat toast in the toaster and dropped two eggs into the small pan I’d filled with water. I turned on the gas burner to get the water boiling. The expiration date on the orange juice was a day overdue, so I filled my juice glass and dumped the rest of it in the sink. I took a sip and eyed the prescription bottle on the shelf above the counter. It’d been over a week since my appointment with Dr. Nelson. I regretted going to see him. There had been the nightmares and the day visions. Those had been real. In the days since my appointment, my subconscious had turned over the troubling violent events and transformed them into something else. I smiled and shook my head.

  I read the paper while I ate the soft boiled eggs on toast and drank the coffee. The Sacramento Kings, as usual, were on track not to make the NBA playoffs. The Giants avoided arbitration and agreed to terms with their left fielder on a one-year, eight-million-dollar deal. The guy hit under .250 with three home runs and he gets eight million? Sure wish I could have hit a curve ball in high school. I might have gone on to make more in one season than in twenty-three years of teaching. I searched twice through the front page and the Our Region section of the paper but found no mention of an arrest of two Asian gang members. Damn.

  After breakfast, I went online, logged into my Intellius account, and typed in the name Riley Forrester, the pitchfork-wielding sociology professor. I jotted down his address and then entered it at the progessive.com website. The website revealed Forrester drove a white Honda Insight. I added the license plate number to my notes, folded up the sheet of paper, and tucked it into my shirt pocket. Yeah, the Monarch assignment was over. In common parlance it was a win-win. A win for Wiggin’s team and the investors. A big win for whoever took the project. For me, it wasn’t a win. I shouldn’t have taken it personally, but I did.

  As much as the Golden Dragons kept returning to the top of my suspect list, my mind kept returning to Forrester. The Stone Creek Saviors were in the middle of all this somehow, some way. The bloody SCS on the wall at Chan’s house and the SCS on the signature line of the ransom note kept pointing to the Saviors. My first encounter with Forrester, his evasiveness, his defiance, and his overall prickliness raised my hackles. He’d not admitted to being a member of the Stone Creek Saviors. Nor had he denied it. A twenty-million-dollar score could fund a lot of eco-terrorism. That thought, and having Forrestor think he one-upped all of us, gnawed at me.

  At seven-fifteen, I pulled to the side of the road, a few feet from the entrance to Granderson University, where I could see the administration building and two of the cars marked “Granderson Security.” Langford had warned me to stay off campus. I didn’t fear him, or even believe he would try to arrest me for trespassing, but avoidance still seemed a more prudent path than flaunting my presence. I turned left, away from the administration building towards the Social Science Building.

  The online class schedule had shown Forrester taught an eight o’clock class, followed by another class at ten. As I hoped, he had arrived on campus early for the first class, his Honda sitting in the parking spot closest to the building. I pulled into the space next to it. The rain had turned to a slight drizzle, but it was enough to drive indoors anybody who might be on campus at this hour. As far as I could tell, no one observed me sticking the GPS to the underside of Forrester’s car. It was one of the devices left over from the Monarch drop; I hoped the damn thing might be useful this time. I returned to my car and fired up the app to see the GPS signal coming in strong and clear.

  If Forrester decided to return home early, I would know it and be able to clear out of his house in plenty of time. I didn’t know what I might find there. The perfect scenario would be twenty million dollars in cash and a photo of Forrester standing next to it with a sign reading “Money from the Monarch Project.” I held little hope for that. But if I got lucky, I might
just find the money.

  The rain picked up again as I drove off campus. By now the commute traffic had become heavy. Progress was slow on the backcountry roads. The drive from Granderson took me past Folsom Lake, Folsom Prison, the town of Cameron Park, and to the tiny town of Rescue, whose “downtown” consisted of a post office, fire station, two churches, a restaurant, and a community center.

  My cell phone trilled: Granderson University. As soon as I answered, Jerry Langford started blistering me.

  “Someone said they saw you on campus a few minutes ago. Is that true?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What part about not setting foot on campus ever again do you not understand?”

  “Jerry, calm down. I want to apologize for not clueing you in on what was going on with Wiggin and his team. Even though they told me not to tell anybody, I should have kept you in the loop. I’m sorry for—”

  “It’s a little late for apologies.”

  “Maybe so, but—”

  “Maybe so, nothing. Just stay off campus.”

  Jerk. “Hey, I forgot to give you the address to send my check.”

  “What check?”

  “For services rendered,” I said.

  “For services rendered? I ought to sue your ass for breach of contract.”

  “You hired me to find out what was going on over at Sieboldt with an ‘alleged’ missing project. I did that. And I helped get the thing returned. Mission accomplished. So you can send my check to—”

  He hung up on me. I made a mental note to take Granderson University off my holiday card mailing list.

  About a mile past town, I turned onto a country road that climbed and twisted past a couple of horse and sheep ranches. As I continued on, the trees and brush along the side of the road thickened until it seemed I was driving in a narrow tunnel. Ten minutes later, my GPS delivered me to a spot on the road with no visible homes or other structures, just curtains of thick foliage. I cursed the thing, believing the drive across the foothills had been for nothing. Ahead about a hundred feet there appeared to be a clearing in the road where I could turn around and head back down the hill. At the clearing, I noticed a beat-up old mailbox, canted to one side, a boulder propped against it to keep it from falling altogether. The clearing turned out to be a gravel road swathed in even thicker brush. I stepped out into the mist to see if there was a name or address on the mailbox. If there had been it had since rusted over. Inside the box there were no letters or other items to identify the owner or even if the thing was in current use.

  I returned to the car and eased up the narrow road, branches from the trees and shrubs scraping against the side of my car as I advanced. Deep puddles dotted the road, and at one point I stopped to ponder whether my car could make it past one particularly deep hole stretching across the width of the road. I gave it a shot, my car slogging through with flying colors. A few hundred feet farther, the vegetation cleared, though the ruts became deeper and more frequent. A couple of the deeper ruts rattled my teeth as I traversed them. When I arrived at a house a little over a mile into the journey, I took a deep breath, relieved I’d made it intact.

  The brown, single-story ranch house’s most prominent feature was the attached garage comprising a third of the overall structure. The front door was positioned next to the garage, dwarfed by its scale. As I got out of my car to get a better look, the home appeared to be wider than it was deep. Perhaps because the wide front had only two small windows, or maybe it was the lack of landscaping, but something gave the house an inhospitable appearance. I climbed the cement steps onto the porch and knocked on the door. No one answered. I couldn’t find a doorbell, so I knocked again, louder this time. While I waited for someone to answer, I pulled out my cell phone and was relieved to see I still had a cell signal. The GPS app showed Forrester’s car remained at Granderson.

  When no one came to the door with a plate of cookies or a shotgun leveled at my head, I figured it was safe to give it a go. The front door was locked. I walked around to the back of the unfenced yard. There were no other homes within sight of where I stood, distance and big stands of oak trees providing complete privacy. The plain wooden door in the back was also locked. I took out the lock pick Rubia had given me months before. I’d protested at the time that I wouldn’t ever need the thing. She argued she was tired of always doing my dirty work and insisted I take the pick.

  I lacked the skill she had with the pick but kept at it, recalling the tips she’d given me. A few missed tries and several curses later, the door swung open, and I stuck my head inside, waiting for an alarm or a dog to respond to my intrusion. Thirty seconds later, I walked in, closing the door behind me.

  Before I did anything, I needed to confirm the house I’d broken into was indeed Riley Forrester’s. The living room looked like a graduate student’s with garage-sale-quality furniture, threadbare and mismatched. On the coffee table was a stack of magazines and publications, including several copies of the Journal of Sociology and American Journal of Sociology. At the bottom of the stack were three back issues of a magazine called The Ecologist with Riley Forrester’s name on the mailing label. Bingo. As I was about to set the magazine down, a thought occurred to me. I leafed through The Ecologist but didn’t find what I’d hoped. I looked through the rest of the magazines on the table. Again, nothing. If Forrester had created the notes used to direct me to the ransom drop site, he’d not cut the letters from any of these magazines.

  The floors were hardwood, scraped, and battered, badly in need of refinishing. I checked under the throw rug beneath the coffee table, under the sofa, and under two of the larger chairs, looking for cutouts that might open into a hiding spot beneath the house. I did the same in the kitchen and then looked for any access points to the attic, finding one in a hallway closet. Pulling over a kitchen stool, I pushed aside the flimsy panel covering the square entrance to the attic. My phone’s flashlight app provided plenty of light to confirm the only thing in Forrester’s attic was a sea of pink insulation and silver ducting.

  The house’s layout was a simple rectangle, with a kitchen in front, the living room and dining area behind that, and a short hallway where I found three bedrooms and a hallway bath. The first bedroom contained a desk and several bookshelves filled with sociology-themed books and journals. There wasn’t a computer, though I did see a power cord and a cable leading to a printer on a side table. Forrester must have owned a laptop and had brought it with him to school. I riffled through the three-drawer file cabinet, finding nothing more than syllabi, handouts for courses he taught, and some bills. There were no under-floor storage spaces, and the closet held nothing but a bunch of junk.

  The second bedroom looked like a guest room, though the uncovered mattress plopped on the ground next to a few cinderblocks serving as a nightstand did not provide a welcoming vibe. Forrester’s bedroom was slightly warmer, with an unmade bed, a pair of cheap nightstands, and a pinewood dresser. Forrester didn’t appear to care much for art or ornamentation, as the only artwork in the entire house was a framed poster featuring the black and white image of a Native American man. Around the man’s head circled the words “Man Belongs To The Earth—The Earth Does Not Belong To Man.”

  On my way back to the kitchen, I glanced at the cluttered dining room table, papers scattered across it from one end to the other. I picked up a sheet of paper containing an aerial Google Earth view of Nimbus Dam. Three red X marks on the photo clustered on one end of the dam. Amid the mix of papers, I found several more photos of the dam from the front, back, side, and aerial perspectives. I leafed through the rest of the papers but found nothing more than printouts from a paper Forrester appeared to be working on regarding social injustice and poverty.

  A door from the kitchen led to the garage, where I switched on a light and found a gutted body and frame of a Porsche Carrera. Stacked beside it were several car batteries. On the far side of the garage stood a large workbench. The first thing I noticed was a book, its cover torn a
nd grimy, entitled How to Build Your Own Electric Vehicle. Next to that, I saw something more troubling.

  Bundled together were six nine-inch cylinders I assumed to be dynamite. A circuit board with a digital clock display had been affixed to the bundle, wires running from it to the two ends of the cylinder in the middle of the bundle. Beside it sat two identical bundles. Three bundles in total, each with six sticks of dynamite. It didn’t take a munitions expert to determine eighteen sticks of dynamite could do some serious damage.

  twenty-five

  I sat at the bar at seven o’clock that evening watching Rubia and her new bartender Kenny schlepp drinks to the thirty or so patrons crowding the modest confines of the Say Hey, the bar she’d inherited from her uncle a few years before. Five hundred square feet at most, the place featured 453 photographs her uncle, a Sacramento Bee photographer, had taken of Willie (“The Say Hey Kid”) Mays, an homage inspiring the bar’s name. I often helped her behind the bar, but she’d insisted on hiring Kenny Hayashi, a twenty-three-year-old law student at the University of Pacific. He was a better bartender than I’d ever been, so I salved my bruised ego by doing my best on the drinking side of the bar.

  Benzer hadn’t returned any of my calls, nor had he been at his apartment or office when I tried them mid-afternoon. I needed to talk to him. I had a hunch Benzer knew more than he was letting on. About Monarch. And about Thomas Chan. At the same time, I feared for his safety. If Wu and Bo were still on the loose, they would not be happy. They’d be looking for Benzer. And once they found out my identity, they’d come calling on me.

  “You worried about the Golden Dragons finding you?” Rubia asked, reading my doleful expression. I’d told her all about the encounter with Wu and Bo.

  “Yes. And I’m pissed Trujillo isn’t returning any of my calls. I don’t know if Benzer and I are out of the woods from those two goons or if they’re still at large. It’s frustrating. Any ideas?”