Chapter 10

 

Lee set an alarm for six, wanting to help Heather fix dinner. She woke early as the smell of garlic roasting slipped up the stairs under the small gap at the bottom of the door and leaped into her nose. She knew her man was awake and working away at Mike’s dilemma. And she knew she couldn’t ask about it before he was ready or it might go away. She had watched him struggle out of sleep, thankful the nightmares seemed to be going away, closed her eyes and steadied her breathing so he wouldn’t try to be strong for her. She didn’t want anything to interfere with the solution she was absolutely sure her man would come up with to help his friend.

She lay in bed practicing witchcraft. She was perfectly comfortable calling it witchcraft. She knew most would call it some kind of ESP. One person’s science was another person’s sorcery. She knew basic science, but what happened in an integrated circuit in her iPhone might as well be magic to her. She kept her breathing steady, grabbed the cup on the nightstand with her mind and lifted. She could feel the weight of the cup in her mind as if it were in her hand. She tightened her brain around the cup and lifted with all her mental might. One of the things that made her gift so difficult to control was that she didn’t have time to practice it.

She reached out with her hands to type on her computer, to floss, to apply make-up, to lift weights and a thousand other things. She now did those things unconsciously with a mastery acquired from far more time than it took to master most skills. Life was practice. Her witchcraft was something else.

She discovered her gift as a child and practiced secretly for long hours. In her mind, weight wasn’t weight, size wasn’t size and directions weren’t as simple as up, down left and right. There were no manuals, no Telekinesis for Dummies on Amazon, and no users’ groups she could join. Well, she suspected there were users groups, but she knew better than to join a group of strangers. Jack stirred. She set the cup down, purred and snuggled into the space he made for her.

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JACK MADE a place for Lee to lay her head on his shoulder. She felt great, but after a few minutes Lee slipped out of bed and headed downstairs.

Jack could feel something nagging at him as he lay half-asleep, but he couldn’t grasp it. He knew if he tried to force the thought, it wouldn’t come. He rested under the quilt enjoying the odors and anticipation of a meal thoroughly enjoyed. The faint piano of “Sea” from George Winston’s Autumn came from speakers he didn’t try to locate.

Jack breathed slowly in and out. A very wise woman once told him to concentrate on his exhale and his inhale would take care of itself.

His mind tried to go to work. He talked his brain into indolence.

The thought came back, as Jack had known it would.

Jack remembered Mike saying something about the Real Estate Investment Trust, or REIT, that won the bid to build and run the prison. As Jack recalled, it was called Citizen Safe.

Jack owned some REITS, but not many, and none that owned prisons. REITS had been in vogue in the high-tax, loophole-ridden seventies and into the early eighties. REITs used to have tax breaks of more than the dollar amount invested-at one time, as much as a six-dollar tax credit to each dollar invested. Those tax breaks had slowly been eliminated over the years. That started the slide in popularity for REITs.

The deflation in land and building values in the late eighties and early nineties finished off most of the REITs. The lack of return in the equity markets, along with the bubble in Real Estate prices after the turn of the century, made REITs the rage again. . Then the bubble burst. So most of them weren’t doing so well. This one, CitizenSafe Public Safety REIT, stuck in his mind.

The guy who ran CitizenSafe, Inc. was “Little Gianni” Rizzuto. Gianni was close to Jack’s height, but probably tipped the scales at three-fifty. Gianni had a face that would be described as cherubic until you looked at his eyes. Jack met him at a seminar someone dragged him to a few years back. Gianni had been on the way to legend before he hit some bumps in the road. Some were comparing his knack for picking real estate to Warren Buffett’s in stocks. Gianni’s ego was as big as Buffett’s, but he wasn’t nearly as charming.

Jack had known men and women who were business savants. These people were head and shoulders above their competitors. They shared common characteristics. Their businesses were their hobbies, combining avocation and vocation. They spent long hours six, and many times seven days a week building and running their businesses. They all had absolute confidence in their ability to succeed.

He often wondered what came first: huge ego or huge success? It is a chicken and egg thing. They had enough confidence in themselves to go on in the face of overwhelming odds. Their egos drove them through the exhaustion of late nights and the grind of sales call after sales call. They hung in through endless hours of negotiation and kept their eye on the prize. Success bred ego that in turn bred success. These men and women had another characteristic in common. They were brilliant, and this overall intelligence came through even in every day conversation, if you could get them into everyday conversation, that is. Something about Gianni didn’t fit that mold.

DINNER had been a feast of garlic and a diet for conversation. Lee and Heather talked clothes, soccer, and music. Mike didn’t talk about anything. So they ate. Then they ate some more. They ate roast garlic on hard little breads as an appetizer, Caesar salad, and a chicken dish that seemed to be more garlic than chicken. Heather called it her ‘Chicken Killed Dead by Garlic.’ They had garlic mashed potatoes and garlic fries. They ate garlic ice cream. It was the Gilroy Garlic Festival for four.

 

THE next morning broke crisp and clear. Mike was in his upstairs office working on a project with three other DealMaker partners.. Lee ran Heather over to a girlfriend’s house a half hour away. The girls were practicing for their first performance. They were the only all-girl Ska band in the Trinity Alps. For all he knew, they were the only all-girl Ska band in this spiral arm of the Milky Way. Lee stayed a while and came back to report that the girls jammed at a near professional level and talked about boys as if they didn’t care.

Mike suggested a Boulder Lakes hike. The one they chose was only three-miles in with a seven hundred fifty foot elevation gain. The Trinity Alps were as different from the Sierras as they were from the San Gabriel Mountains. The highest point in the Trinities was a little over nine thousand feet, but the peaks were snow covered until June and in late spring years, July. There were actually a couple of small glaciers. The rain shadow existed in the Trinities, but because the North Coast received so much rain, there was a little rain even in summer. Lee drove them back through town and then up highway 3.

As they drove through town the wave of hatred hit Jack like a fist. He looked around trying to find the source. Nothing. But, it had been there. Jack had a gift, or a curse, depending. He could tell when danger approached, not always, but often. Maybe it was some combination of genetics. He was a mongrel or a hybrid, according to your view. He was Scots, Irish, English, German, Scotch-Irish, French, Native American, and probably, from his mother’s people who thought they had owned slaves, African.

Captain Yan thought it was a mutation caused by radiation from Atomic Bomb tests. Jack didn’t know or care. All he knew was that he had used his gift to keep his A-Team out of three ambushes. Too bad he wasn’t around to save them from the last one. He shook himself and looked to see if Lee had noticed the change in him. She was concentrating on avoiding the random driving of the tourists.

The trail-head was more than an hour away because after the forty miles of good road they hit the turn-off just south of Coffee Creek. Eleven miles later they stopped at the trailhead. It was a beautiful eleven miles, steep, slow, and scenic. They crossed unnamed little creeks and passed a couple of logging operations as they looked out over the Trinity River. Nearer the trailhead they could see granite peaks peering through.

He didn’t mind the loggers because their fees paid for the road. The piles of hardwood logs and slash were called YUM piles. YUM stood for Yarded Un-merchantable Material. The YUM might be ugly, but they cut down on fire danger and insect predation. The young seedlings had an easier time not fighting against opposition that couldn’t go through a mill.

The last three quarters of a mile was rough and narrow enough to make them glad they borrowed one of Mike’s four-by-fours. Cross county driving was nothing like the mad dashes they showed on TV or in the movies. Unless you had stolen the vehicle and wanted to destroy said vehicle, it was slow and careful.

Lee said, “On the surface it seems Mike had a point about it being too pat. American English has many curious idioms. Is that from the poker player’s ‘A pat hand?’”

He wasn’t an etymologist, but it sounded right. “I think it’s from cards. I don’t know enough about construction projects and the effects of the Endangered Species Act on them. It would be an easy thing to check. We’ll have someone work the statistics on big construction projects and the acts. Some association probably already has the data. There are so many word of mouth stories about environmental laws either stopping or modifying construction projects that I don’t think it’s unusual.”

The parking lot, unlike the trail, was wide and flat. There was only one other car. It was next to the stand covering the self-serve station for wilderness permits. They filled out the ludicrous form, left it in the box, and took their copy.

The trailhead was right at 5,000 feet. Two weeks earlier a cold snap dropped eleven inches of snow down to 3500 feet. They checked the weather report very carefully. At the first whiff of moisture they would run for home even though they were right in the middle of what was supposed to be a five-day warming trend. There was only one thing certain about mountain weather and that was uncertainty. Technology was wonderful. In his kit he had a compass, map, GPS and a satellite phone. He would get a text on the satellite phone with any major weather change. Only someone who had been in the infantry knew how important weather could be.

They started slow, more of a stroll than a hike. He loved the clean smell of outside washed by the condensation of the crisp morning. The trail started with a steady three quarter mile climb through woods to the gentle ridge-top. The trees were mostly Western White and Lodge Pole Pine, with some Shasta and White Fir thrown in for variety. Sadler Oaks made up most of the undergrowth. They crossed over the ridge and headed toward Boulder Lake Cirque. The down trail was a little steeper and the view even better with granite domes at the cirque’s head. Pond lilies cover most of the shallow lake they could just make out through the dense woods on its shore. The trail was mostly clear enough of snow for hiking boots but they had to strap on the snow shoes a couple of times in deep shadow.

Watching Lee enjoy herself was a big part of his pleasure.

“What a view!” she shouted as they turned a corner and looked down a thousand feet into the canyon.

“Smell that air! It’s so good. Let’s take some home in a bottle. We could take it out and breathe it whenever we want. Look!” She pointed to gray squirrels arguing over turf in the middle branches of an Oak.

His knee felt good, with the stiffness gone in minutes. It was a great feeling to be bio-mechanically healthier at forty than he had been in his twenties. Lee’s knee needed some work too, but it was fine now. It felt good to do normal, everyday things to work their bodies, instead of rehabilitation at a gym or physical therapist’s office. He knew he’d taken his strength for granted, but stamina was something he never realized he had until it was gone. The hike that day marked his stamina’s return.

They nibbled trail mix on the way up, having finished the thermos of steaming mochas in the car. Lunch was dried fruit, bagels with pistachio butter, Tabbouleh, applesauce, and hard, dark chocolate. They ate sitting in the beautiful wooded flat near the jump-able creek that was the lake’s only outlet. In late spring when the creek was a conduit for snowmelt, it would carry fifty times the water. They drank in its beauty and then destroyed the quiet talking about prisons.

“Why do you need so many prisons here?” Lee asked.

His mind, being a graveyard for useless information, spit out statistics. “There were a little short of 200,000 people in prison, state, and federal, in 1971. By 1990, that number had grown to over seven hundred thousand, and now there are over two million people incarcerated. The US has more people incarcerated, per capita, than any other country in the world. Here in California there are about 120,000 people in prison and it takes almost seventy thousand people to warehouse them.”

“That’s not what I mean. I know there are more prisons and prisoners, but why? Crime is going down, not up, isn’t it?”

“There are a lot more prisoners despite there being less crime. The fascists would say there is less crime because there are more prisoners. In a simplistic way they are right. Many career criminals are in prison because of mandatory sentencing.”

A Red-Tailed Hawk landed in a nearby tree. The other natives went quiet.

“Because of our drug laws, a hard-case ghetto boy, or lately a ghetto girl, can become a millionaire. They simply get a couple of friends to get a couple of friends to sell drugs to hookers, burglars and car thieves. Or, more usually, sell to simple, every day folks who use drugs along with their booze. The rewards are huge and the risks aren’t great. When you get caught enough, you hang out in prison. There you get to enjoy the drama, take good drugs, and learn more about crime. Unfortunately, the fallout from our idiotic laws is toughest on young black men. If current trends continue, one in three black men born today will spend time in prison.”

“What’s the solution?” Lee asked.

“There is no solution. The iron triangle of the lawyers, courts, and ‘corrections officers’ is the most powerful single lobby in California. It’s even more powerful than the California Teachers Association. As long as they are well served by more bodies in the system, there will be more bodies. As long as there is so much profit and employment from having drugs be illegal, they will remain illegal.”

JACK AWOKE from the post-exercise, early evening nap that was becoming a habit with them. He tried to grab part of a thought. His mind was full of ‘beds in operation’ and ‘beds under construction’ and ‘revenue per compensated man/day’ versus ‘expense of compensated man/day.’ He should never nap after reading annual reports. He had downloaded annual reports for The Geo Group, Corrections Corporation of America, and CitizenSafe. CXW appeared to be the most efficient operator, but not by much. When you factored in construction and other fixed costs CitizenSafe Public Safety REIT was the lowest in operating expense.

He fired up his MacBook Air. The amount of information Mike collected was staggering. After an hour’s skimming he didn’t see conspiracy. He saw bad luck and bad timing. Mike had done most of the research himself. He had gone to various online services to download copies of title transfers on tracts of land back to the early nineteen twenties. He organized those into areas, north of Eureka, North-east of Redding, and the area around Weaverville.

Mike had copies of the report from the California EPA and the Federal EPA on numbers for the California Yew and studies of populations of the albino cave shrimp. There was a file dedicated to news stories on various environmental groups and their lobbying for a species to be included on the endangered species list. The list of organizations supporting placing said yew and shrimp on the endangered species list was staggering. Earth First, The Sierra Club, The American Arboreal Trust, The Druid Church of the Northwest, California Spelunkers, LLC, twelve different Native American Tribes, The Elvira Yody Memorial Environmental Trust and thirty-two more.

Sixty-eight individuals and organizations had filed friend of the court briefs in favor of the proposed prison prior to the eminent domain suit to take Mike’s land. The numbers on Mike’s side were thin. The Redding Chamber of Commerce and the McKinleyville Chamber fought a tough fight. The Humboldt County Construction Association spent $21,000 fighting for the project in the Eureka area.

Mike paid for independently audited surveys of the range and location of concentrations of the California Yew and the albino cave shrimp. He had spent $66,200 for his Shrimp survey and then another $77,000 on the Yew survey. Mike wanted no questions about the objectivity of the survey, so he set it up through a blind trust. Jack had to laugh when he saw the trust’s name. Forests Forever.

The conclusions were obvious. The California Yew was not a separate species, but simply a variety of the Pacific Yew. Mike went so far as to set up a tree farm to grow the Yew for Taxonal. In the file was a copy of the citation from the Forest Service for trying to domesticate a plant species that was on the endangered species list. Along with the copy of the citation were the reports from the farm manager, plant growth of seedlings, saplings, mature trees in various public groves, cross-referenced to nursery growth information on other similar species. The reports indicated there was no reason to include it on the endangered species list.

The tree had been on the list a long time. The shrimp was a newcomer, having just been placed on the list a few months after the three sites had been announced. Hmmm? He thought about Mike’s survey. The USFWS, or United States Fish and Wildlife Service, maintained the list for land and freshwater. He wondered if there was any way he could see their survey? Would it make a difference? Mike’s study, and it was a good study, according to the statistics, disagreed completely with the government version. His survey said albino cave shrimp were actually in 61 caves now, with numbers going up, not down.

He closed his eyes and let his mind wander. Mike was going about it wrong. He was trying to prove the prison should be built in another area. Mike had a model for success and didn’t see it. With a little work he could find a local plant or animal he could ‘prove’ endangered. Maybe a spoor! A cover environmental group, “Save the Trinity Spoor,” would be set up through a blind trust. Some anonymous contributions to other environmental groups, a few gifts to political campaigns, and the greens would tie the prison construction project up in litigation until Mike was cold in his grave.

“What are you grinning about?” Lee asked.

He told her. She rolled over on top of him, holding herself above him on locked arms. She lowered her mouth down on his before pulling back up to seeing distance. “You know for a man you have the most insidiously devious mind.”

She walked her mouth down his chest, leaving a trail of moisture that evaporated into the now cool room as goose bumps erupted. “Can you tell what I’m thinking right now?” she asked. Forty-five minutes later they went down to dinner.

Mike didn’t like the idea of using the green’s methods to stop the prison. He sat through Jack’s sales pitch, then pulled off his 49ers cap and rubbed his hand over his head and face hard enough to flush it red.

“I don’t know, Jack, seems like I’d be lying. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Mike had tried to present his information to the EPA. They rejected it, saying none of the studies were valid because the studies had been privately funded. One official finally responded to him, after he camped out in his waiting room for seven hours. The official said they would review the survey when funds became available, perhaps in as little as two to four years. Mike finally gave in and had his legal people ask for a temporary restraining order. His lawyers asked that any site improvement permits for the prison be blocked. They proposed that the court base its decision on his information showing flawed studies of the yew and shrimp. The TRO was denied.

Mike was frustrated, and rightfully. He fought strong stakeholders. The first was Citizen-Safe and that would probably have been enough. The prison would spin off at least $30 million in free cash flow. His next barrier was the bias of state and federal courts to look kindly on any environmentally motivated litigation. The most emotional support for the prison was from the people in and around Weaverville. The town had suffered through many booms and even more busts.

It started out as a logistics center in the gold rush in the 1850s. That didn’t last long. There had been another big boom with the building of the dam between 1938 and 1942. The next big phase was the timber industry that lasted until the late 1980s and then crashed. There was still logging going on, but it was a fraction of what it once was. In the logging days the population of the county had been higher and anybody who wanted a job could get one. Now there were less than fourteen thousand people in the county. The government quoted 11.3% unemployment, but the real number was nearer twenty-two percent. Government was already the biggest employer by far. The folks in the area asked themselves: What was wrong with taking a job building a prison or watching over the scum in it? Who could blame them?

“Mike, there is one other thing, and I’m sure you’ve seen it. The Yew has been on the list for a long, long time, but the shrimp is new. According to your survey, and the stats look good, the government numbers are way off. Maybe somebody tweaked the numbers a little?”

“I thought of that, Jack. I couldn’t find a way to get a copy of their survey. I can’t get the raw numbers, the statistics, anything. And, even if I could, what do I do?”