Chapter 76
Police in films and books staked out airports, bus lines, and train stations. In real life, cops watched hours of traffic camera video and pressured snitches. Americans are a nation of drivers with an occasional airplane ride. A few city dwellers used public transportation, or even more un-American, walked or rode bikes, but mostly it was cars.
They took BART under the Bay to the Amtrak station in Oakland and from there boarded the Capitol Corridor to Sacramento. They’d timed their trip to hit early rush hour. Most of the people got off in the East Bay, but a few got off in Suisun and another big chunk got out in Davis. That still left the train almost half full as they pulled out of Davis. They’d bought the Sacramento Bee and the Auto Trader at the kiosk before boarding.
Lee said, “Let the expert do it,” as she grabbed the paper out of his hand and looked through the newspaper. She hummed happily and circled car ads. Even the humming sounded like a gay guy.
When they were in the City she had been content with giving him an occasional pinch on the butt. As they neared Sacramento she turned it up a notch.
“Baby,” Lee asked in a stage whisper, “Why won’t you kiss me? You still love me don’t you?” She said with a particularly whiny voice that carried through the sudden quiet of the car.
He looked up, nervous. No one seemed to take notice except a woman who had Christian Coalition written all over her pinched and glaring face.
“Damn it, are you trying to draw attention to us?”
“I am making us invisible, you just don’t see it. People will look away, normal people, to give lovers the privacy they are due. The few who are left that still judge will look away in discomfort. What people will remember was a gay couple having a little lover’s quarrel. There is no way people are going to connect us with Lee and Jack.”
Jack thought about what smart Lee said. Her over-the-top affection was like a magician’s misdirection on stage. The cop shop in Sacramento was only a block from the Amtrak Station, so they caught the first local bus they could find, heading down J Street toward the college. They had to keep the cash transaction for the car small enough to avoid reporting it, yet they needed dependable transportation. They settled on eight possibilities. The first ads she called said the owners kept tight service records.
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Jack listened to Lee grill the first guy about compression testing and miles on the engine. She didn’t like the answers and hung up. The second one had a message on his cell that said the car had been sold. The third one was a Nissan Maxima. The ad said the owner was an Air Force recruiter who was being transferred. The guy was home, and as Lee went through her checklist she smiled.
“Dwayne, has it ever been wrecked?” She asked.
She frowned at the answer, then covered the mouthpiece and said, “His wife hit the carport with it last week, little ding to the right front quarter panel. Dwayne says it’s not bad. I believe him.”
The first two cabs they called didn’t show. The third asked to see the money.
“It’s a tough neighborhood, mostly black,” he said as he answered Lee’s unasked question. “Imagine how the cabbies in the City would act if you called from Golden Gate Park and said you wanted a ride to Hunters Point or East Oakland.”
They left the tree-lined solidity of J Street for the freeway and took the Fruitridge exit off Highway 99. It was old-home week for Jack. He’d started Judo at the Sacramento Judo Club. The Sensei who became Jack’s surrogate father had been master’s heavy weight champion of the United States. Two and sometime three-a-week ass whippings there toughened him and taught him discipline was the key.
They took a left on a street that was sad enough to make you cry. Two of the first five houses were boarded up and another had been burned to the ground. From the smell coming into the cab, the burn was recent. Further down, the houses were neater with less trash on lawns. The last street they turned on was mostly single-family older homes, with a lot of pride of ownership. The Maxima sat under the carport of the next to the last one on the left. Dwayne’s and his neighbor’s places looked well cared for.
Dwayne sat in a lawn chair, bouncing a girl-toddler on his knee and watching the game through the door open into the living room. He was about the same height as Jack without the boots and about the same weight. He had the perfect body some people seem blessed with and everybody else puts hours in the gym trying for. He had the shaved arms and legs of the serious bodybuilder. His muscles stood out and his veins showed clearly through his skin like he was closing in on contest time.
Dwayne’s wife came out with another baby girl on her hip. Lee did all the talking as Jack stood and played winking, hide and seek with the first little girl. At first she scowled and twined herself through her daddy’s legs. He talked her mom into giving him some rubber balls their Rottweilers hadn’t chewed up yet. He entertained them juggling. He started with a simple fountain and finally broke a sweat juggling three balls one-handed.
It was the cleanest lived-in house he had seen in a long time. His place was cleaner, but he had maid service and didn’t have an infant and a toddler. No, that wasn’t right. His former house was now a messy hole in the ground, covered in rubble.
Aleesha wasn’t obsessed with her body the way Dwayne was. His casual examination of the house revealed the plaque from Mississippi Valley State honoring her efforts in student government. Study books for the LSAT were out and open on the kitchen table.
Lee’s first thought was to give the guy cash so they could get out of town quick. After a heated discussion in the back of the cab, she agreed, if she liked the car, to go to a branch of “her” bank and buy a cashier’s check made out to the fellow for part of the cost and cash for the rest.
They piled into the car, him in the back, Dwayne in the front, with Lee driving. After Lee put the car through its paces, Dwayne said, “You sure can drive.”
They dropped Dwayne off after they took him to his bank to deposit the check. Aleesha and the children waived from the door. Lee hit freeway doing nearly ninety while she whipped into the right lane to pass a gray primer-covered Chevy pickup that hadn’t pulled over quickly enough.
“If you’ll do CHIP watch we can make real time.”
“I have a better idea. Slow down,” he said.
Maybe it was the edge in his voice. Lee looked over at him sheepishly and asked, “I guess we aren’t in a race, are we?”
They were in a race. It was a race they might not win. If his theory were right, losing would mean much more than the end of their lives. Losing the race would leave fanatics with way too much cash to do bad things. The thought he hadn’t shared with Dvora was about something worse. If his theory was right, the Church was doing what the allies had tried to do to the Germans in World War II. The allies had bombed factories, rail-yards, power lines and bridges. They were destroying the enemy’s capacity to do battle. Right before the invasion of Normandy, they had destroyed defenses that might stop them. The Church was doing the same thing. They made sure any promising antiviral research was stopped in the private sector. He was certain that antiviral biotech the world over was being sabotaged. And, he was certain the Church was directing government research and grants to universities into dead ends. This all only made sense if they were destroying defenses in preparation for an attack. And that attack would be a virus. He hoped like hell the virus wasn’t ready yet.
THE HOTEL was called the Starlight Inn. It sounded romantic. After turning down the first two rooms, Jack figured it took its name from how little light there was in the rooms. The smell of the gas heater had him thinking carbon monoxide poisoning, but after he cranked the heat up all the way, his worries about frostbite were stronger. The shower was tepid and took way less time to fill the tub than it did to drain. At least the bed was firm and the sheets weren’t stained. Best yet, according to the What to See and Do in Scenic Manteca pamphlet, there was a Wal-Mart and a Bass Pro Shop in town.
Lee and Jack had been pushed off the news by the boat wreck. Michael Ilyich Riyalin and his rock star wife were both missing. They missed a check-in signal the night before and either ignored or hadn’t heard the calls from the Coast Guard. Their boat ran aground on a sand bar forty miles northeast of their last reported position. No distress call beforehand, lifeboat still tied down.
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
Jack didn’t answer right away. “I have a feeling about this. Call it ESP or my second sight or a hunch, but I don’t see us buying it any time soon. I guarantee if we do go, we’ll take a bunch of these fucking fanatics with us.”
He was going to tell her some bigger lies than the fairy tale he’d just spun before the week was out. His plan didn’t include taking her with him on his final assault. The pervasiveness of their enemies astounded him. The newshounds recycled a quote from Riyalin’s ex-wife. According to her, “The Bitch Goddess” (as she called the rock star) had not only hooked Riyalin with sex, but “He’s been acting so irrationally I am sure he is on drugs.”
Two ex-employees of the company, one the ex-CFO, agreed that Michael had been acting irrationally recently. Reuters had two stories of rumors about quality control of their new AIDS treatment Riyalinaze. In both stories the informants were “highly-placed industry sources who commented only on the condition they remain anonymous.”
There was a voicemail from Bob. The research Bob had done was even more alarming. He was convinced that the Church of the Seven Sisters had deep connections in the Christian Fundamentalist movement in the States. This translated to political pressure, which was why the FBI, SEC, and Treasury Department had gone ahead with their investigations. The agencies pursued inquiries despite there being no evidence to start the inquiries, much less pursue them.
There was a strong streak of homophobia in the Christian Fundamentalist movement. Backlash to liberal support for all things gay was part of it, but the reaction was strong enough to mean real money. The Church of the Seven Sisters had made over $50 million their team knew about simply from shorting a few stocks. Taking into account the gains from even average performance in the market over the last ten years and they had over a hundred million to bribe with. Double that number if they were playing foreign stocks as well.
Judge White’s order moved the boy out of CYA and into isolation at a juvenile facility in Sacramento. Judge White had done this despite Jack becoming, in the eyes of the state of California and now the United States Government, a suspected murderer, kidnapper, and conspirator. If Jack lived through this, he would have to find a way to thank the Judge.