Chapter 4
Warning: This book contains rough language and violent scenes. The rough language is not gratuitous, nor are the violent scenes. ReKill is the second book in the series that started with ReWire
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“Penny for your thoughts,” Lee said. Their forced march into that frozen hell had matured her without taking her youth. They were just falling in love, or at least realizing they were in love, when his sister was nearly killed. At first it looked like a robbery gone bad. Then it looked like industrial sabotage and insider trading. They finally figure out what it really was and nearly lost their lives many times. They fought a plot by The Church of the Seven Sisters, with members and sympathizers everywhere, to cleanse the world of sinners. The shared struggle, facing death time and again, brought them even closer.
Lee wore her hair a little longer now. The doctors fixed the frostbite on her ear, but after her hair grew out, she decided she liked it a little longer and kept it that way. It was shiny, black hair he loved to bury his face in as he drank in her smell. Her eyes held him as if he was some night creature stunned by headlights. The gold flecks in the iris seemed to swim in the warm brown and move together, gathering light before they filmed over.
“Cut that out!” she said.
They didn’t wanted to analyze what they had. He thought that if they looked at what they had too closely, it would go away. They tried to find the words to describe what the other meant to them. They used the same phrase from a film they were surprised to find they both liked. They said it at the same time, having stayed up all night asking questions, making plans, telling their deepest thoughts, darkest shames and wildest hopes. He remembered sitting on the beach looking into her eyes, trying not to go blind from sand blown onshore.
“You complete me,” was the phrase they both used at the same time and then rolled laughing on the beach.
THEY picked a restaurant right on the Sacramento River for a late lunch. There were only ten or so other cars in the lot. A puff of wind carried a breath of smoke from the restaurant’s roof exhaust. Someone with a very sensitive nose might say the restaurant did not change their cooking oil often enough. They stood at the podium for a minute before anyone bothered to seat them. He asked twice before the hostess registered ‘table with a river view.’ The menu stuck to the tacky tabletop. His trousers caught on duct tape covering a tear on the upholstery of his chair. The waitress was indifferent, service was slow, and the food carried a little of the same taste he smelled walking in.
He had paid a heck of a lot more for worse meals and the view was great. He watched a man fly-fishing, hurrying the back cast, but real smooth on his delivery. The man netted what looked like a three-pound rainbow while they ate.
One of the railroads dumped a load of Metham Sodium into the Sacramento River in 1991. The ecologists said the river was essentially dead for a forty-five mile stretch. The naturalists talked about the decades it would take for the river to return to its ‘natural’ state. It certainly hadn’t taken decades. And, none of the naturalists had ever seen the river in its ‘natural state.’
Before the dams and levies, the river turned the Central Valley into a swamp in the spring before it turned into a desert in the summer. Long ago during the rainy season, the natives poled their dugouts from what is now Redding to Bakersfield. Most of the people who lived along the river now didn’t know. They thought the levied-in, dammed-up ditch was the river’s natural state.
After they turned off I-5 onto 299, Lee let the car run a little. The GTR was designed for racing, but she didn’t beat it up throwing it in and out of the too-tight turns that made parts of 299 so frustrating to drive. They made the straight run across the top of Whiskeytown Lake, looking down into its cold, cold blue. They followed the road up toward Buckhorn Summit, all the way to the junction just short of Douglas city and then turned toward Weaverville. She expertly asked the car to do what it was designed to do as he drifted into dreamland.
“SEI CHUN! Sei Chun! Mo Lan! Sek si!God-Damn-it, God-Damn-it.” If she hadn’t been thinking about what she was going to do to her man that night, she would have seen the cop on the motorcycle. She pulled off at the first turnout she came to, luckily only a few hundred meters ahead. She turned on the emergency flashers, rolled her window down, turned off the ignition, and put the keys on the dash along with her license. Her man handed her the plastic folder containing insurance and registration. She placed the folder next to keys and license and put her hands on the wheel at ten and two.
She turned and said, “Do not say a word unless the policeman asks you a direct question. Try to look as if you are very ill in your stomach.”
He opened his mouth to say a word.
Officer Carson was cautious on the way to the car. Once she saw the obvious yuppie driving her man around in a car they probably hadn’t stolen, she relaxed-a little. Officer Carson had full lips, clear olive skin, eyes you couldn’t see behind the mirrored sun glasses, and an incongruous little grin showing toothpaste commercial teeth.
Lee handed over the license and the rest and said, “So sorry I was speeding officer. I know you must check everything, but hurry please? We stopped for food at wrong place in Redding. I told him to stay with something safe, but no. He orders fish! Now he is very sick. We already stopped twice by side of road.”
He bent forward at the waist. She thought he was trying for the stoic look of a strong man trying to hide extreme illness. Officer Carson checked everything quickly and carefully. Then the cop said, with one of the strong northeastern American accents she had trouble with, “Your next place with a bathroom and supplies is Mike’s, about six miles ahead. Buy some Imodium AD for him. You were only nine over the limit in a very good vehicle so I’m not going to ticket you today. But. Don’t even let me catch you speeding in my patch again.”
“Thank you officer,” she said with a smile she made warm and subservient at the same time, started the car, signaled, turned her head to look, and pulled out smartly. She was very pleased to beat the ticket, as it was a game really, but more pleased she wouldn’t have to waste time with the after-effects of a ticket.
HE thought about the conflict. Was it okay to lie to avoid punishment for breaking a stupid rule? Who decided what constituted a stupid rule and when it was okay to break it and when it wasn’t? Speed limits were an arbitrary joke ostensibly designed for public safety. It made no sense to have the same speed limit for a superbly maintained, performance car driven by a professionally trained, young driver, and a seventy-five year old driver in a forty year-old pickup. He felt much better after rationalizing speed limits into big brother’s bureaucrats holding capitalists down.
“When I saw it was a woman cop I thought you were a goner. How did you know your little con would work?”
“I was finishing my Master’s, visiting a friend in Sacramento. She was a medical student at UC Davis and used to study in a coffee house called Temple. I overheard a guy trying to impress a girl. He told her his brother was a cop in Davis. The only time cop brother let anyone off for speeding was if they were in labor or had to get to the bathroom before they soiled themselves. The last time I tried this, it did not work.”
Highway 299 was scenic and well maintained. There were logging trucks, but nothing compared to what it had been like thirty years ago. The spotted owl and foreign lumber took care of that. The mountains were shorter than the Sierra and, because of the lack of skiing and smaller gambling, a lot less traveled. They turned off 299 into Weaverville.
The last time he drove through the town quite a few of the places were boarded up. Most of the lumber mills in the area were still now. A few of them had been disassembled and sold. Some had been sold for scrap. Two of the mills were bartered, including the one he and his partners in DealMaker sent to Siberia. The logging industry in the area was making a little comeback. The town itself was focused more on eco-tourism now, with some light manufacturing and a couple of smaller back office operations.
Loggers had always been proud, independent, and distrustful of government. Most of the people he saw on the streets now didn’t fit that mold. The town was in danger of becoming a parody of itself, with the little houses along the main turned into real estate or law offices and touristy type stores. There were a couple of tiny restaurants, a combination smoothie bar and antique store, and next to it, a little gym. There was another antique store, used books, a rock shop, and a sporting goods store. They drove slowly through town and then turned onto county road 27.
The county road was well maintained except for the occasional giant pothole logging trucks tend to create. The drive was pretty with occasional park-like patches where the forest had been clear-cut. That was before loggers figured out a clear cut close to a watershed destroyed future wood crops. Now they used checkerboard cuts. These cut down on fire danger, still left the forests connected for critters and didn’t hurt the watershed. The road turned gently enough for logging trucks for another six miles. They turned on two different roads, one that wasn’t on their GPS before they finally turned off the BLM road for the four-tenths mile trip up Mike’s drive to his house.