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Prologue
Sunday, September 7
Alec Hoxley sat in his old Volvo
watching the tractor's headlights bob in the distance. Its beams
pointed his way. The scream from its turbine sprayer filled
the night.
Dove had told him where to find
the insecticide canisters–and what to do with the farmer.
Hoxley took one last toke from
the joint cupped in his palm, then flicked it into the road
and opened the car door. As long as he could hear the sprayer,
he knew the farmer would be too busy to notice. Soon it would
be over. After tonight, he'd never need to do this again.
He hit the farm's gate at a lope,
grabbing the top rail with both hands. His boots raked the chain-link
fabric as he hoisted his bony frame up and over the top.
No light from the street made
it into the wooded lot, no one would see the glow from his flashlight.
If he worked fast, he'd be out before the moon rose.
Pushing through hot, wet air into
the six-foot pines, Hoxley shook a trickle of sweat from his
brow. His nostrils tingled from the scent of resin. He moved
at a half-jog, sweeping the ground between the trees with the
beam of his flashlight, searching for the irrigation line. A
breeze stirred from the north, carrying the smell of a solvent.
Cultivated soil shifted like sand
beneath his feet and slowed his progress, but he soon found
the aluminum pipe and turned to follow it towards the ditch
Dove had described.
Something brushed Hoxley's calf.
He froze. In late summer rattlesnakes migrated down from nearby
hills, searching for water. He turned his light toward the ground
by his foot. Only a long branch. Not until his heart calmed
did he resume his forward movement, then only cautiously, scouring
the route with the flashlight.
When the ditch finally loomed
ahead, he relaxed. The chemical's odor was strong, but Hoxley
ignored it. He'd been through this before. He picked up his
pace until, at the dry channel's edge, he saw that dead, waist-high
grass blocked his crossing. He stopped. The parched stalks clattered
in the breeze, reminding him of a snake's rattle. His jaw tightened.
The sound from the farmer's sprayer
died.
"Screw it," Hoxley said.
He darted down one side of the ditch and up the other, but didn't
get far into the trees before he felt a stinging in his lungs.
He stopped and squinted at the
ground. Where was the goddam pipe? He spun around in a circle
and nearly fell. He was losing the feeling in his feet.
Panicking, Hoxley turned his face
to the sky. The star field had shrunk to a point. His flashlight
fell to the ground. Which direction had he come from?
He tried to run but stumbled and
grabbed hold of a branch to catch himself. Bent at the waist,
he panted while a sickness swept over him.
In a minute the nausea turned
to exhilaration, and Hoxley sensed the presence of another.
Wiping a thick strand of mucus from his mouth, he looked up.
Someone stood before him. He shouldn't be able to see in the
dark, but he could.
"Momma?"
he said and pressed closer.
Chapter 1
Monday, September 8
A
spray tractor rolled from the Christmas trees and stopped fifty
feet from the street. Mark Redmon twisted in the seat to watch
the cloud of poison collapse behind him, then turned forward
and flexed his forty-five-year-old spine. A sweat-soaked shirt,
beneath plasticized paper coveralls, clung to his back. Twenty
straight hours in a tractor seat just didn't fit him like it
used to.
Redmon squinted back at the tank.
Only ten gallons of insecticide stood between him and sleep.
He could blow the leftovers into the big trees at the north
end.
He waited at the curb of Balboa
while a dour-faced woman with a van full of kids slowed to gawk.
Decked out in his white spray suit, goggles, rubber gloves and
a respirator, Redmon knew he looked more like a nuclear waste
handler than a Christmas tree grower.
Once the van passed, Redmon released
the clutch, zipped across the street, through the farm's main
gate and up the gravel road.
Eleven A.M. seemed like dusk.
Sultry spillover from a Labor Day storm off the Mexican coast
had driven away the dryness that made this inland valley's heat
bearable. A congealed mat of clouds blotted up the sun over
Los Angeles County.
From the side road leading to
the equipment yard, a battered GMC pickup turned toward him,
then stopped. The eighteen-year-old Mexican who drove it waited
for Redmon to kill the little tractor's engine.
Redmon pulled his respirator beneath
his chin. "You clean up that tank last night, Chuy?" he
asked, seeking a piece of small talk to diffuse the awkwardness—the
sadness of parting.
The youth nodded.
"And you got your check?"
Another nod.
Redmon scratched his head and
smiled. "Then I guess it's so long."
He felt like hugging the kid. Instead,
he loosened the collar of his spray suit and fished the hundred
dollar bill from the pocket of his soggy shirt. "Here.
Take this," he said. "A little damp, but it'll spend."
Chuy shook his head.
"Go on, take it." Redmon
forced it into his hand.
Chuy stared back like he was trying
to memorize Redmon's face. "You are a good friend, Mark," he
said in his ever-improving English.
Redmon shrugged off the compliment.
"You just take care of yourself, kid. And if working the
vineyards isn't the picnic you figured, you got a job waiting
for you here."
Chuy nodded one last time, gave
him a lonesome smile and drove away. Redmon watched the truck
until it vanished, then, dodging his own feelings, turned back
to his task, restarted the tractor and headed north.
Rolling along the drainage ditch,
he cursed himself for not having tilled under the overgrown
Johnson grass. One of many undone chores. Redmon took a deep
breath. Don't think so damn much. Just blow out the Dimeldin.
Go home.
His farm sat on a utility right-of-way
that cut through an industrial park. Above the tractor, 220,000-volt
power lines crackled in the moisture-laden air. Three feet beneath
its tires, a river of natural gas surged southward, through
huge pipelines, on the last brief leg of its journey to Los
Angeles. Not exactly a pastoral setting, he knew, but the acres
of lush pines mitigated it. And, even after three years, Holly's
hand still showed in the sprinkling of wildflowers among the
trees.
This morning, with Chuy gone,
Redmon felt her absence all the more. His memories of Holly
were often visual. Holly on the tractor—or hunched over
their big walnut desk, balancing accounts into the night. The
way she stood with her hands on her hips when she watched him
work. The trees and flowers were the last living link.
The tractor continued east. Redmon
approached an aluminum irrigation line stretched across the
drainage ditch. Speculation about why Chuy had put it there
replaced his thoughts of Holly.
Ignoring the gnats biting his
ears and a paste of dust and sweat plastering his neck, he reconnected
his respirator. Redmon turned into a nearby row, engaged the
blower and switched on the juice. He glanced over his shoulder.
A fog of insecticide filled the air behind him.
The tractor threaded into a corridor
of unpruned, ten-foot trees so dense their branches laced across
the aisle. The traveling speed, three miles-per-hour, seemed
breakneck. Sunlight favored growth on the trees' south and west
sides. Trunks seldom were where one might expect. No soil showed.
Redmon relied on dead reckoning to keep his front fenders from
damaging the occasional misaligned trunk.
When he ducked a spider web stretching
between two trees, the tractor veered slightly to the left,
snagging a long, soft shoot on its upright muffler. The branchlet
drew back and, as the tractor passed, let loose, slapping him
in the face.
A few feet ahead a badly curved
trunk squeezed the passage to a width Redmon wasn't sure he
could clear. With little time to think, he cranked the wheel
hard to the left and as quickly back to the right.
The maneuver seemed to work, but
just when Redmon thought he had succeeded, the right front wheel
froze for an instant, spun the steering wheel from his hands,
then climbed six inches off the ground. The right fender smacked
into a trunk, and the tractor stopped with a lurch. Before he
could push in the clutch, the engine died. The machine had tried
to climb the limber tree, half pushing it over.
Redmon restarted the motor, cranked
hard on the wheel and backed off the rise. With the engine idling,
he climbed from the tractor and went to the base of the tree
to move the rock.
When Redmon pulled the branches
back, it was no rock he saw. At first his brain refused to register
what his eyes told him. As recognition kicked in, he jerked
the respirator from his face before it filled with vomit.
Chapter 2
Chuy's confused feelings about
leaving his job at Mark Redmon's farm faded when his ride north
arrived at the San Fernando McDonald's. Yago, the driver, ordered
him and the two other Mexican boys into the camper, then padlocked
the door.
When the truck began to roll,
Chuy asked the others, "Why did he lock us inside?"
"The migras," said
Gerardo, who seemed to be the smarter of the two.
"That makes no sense. What
good would locking the camper do if Immigration did pull us
over?"
"Chingale, guey,"
Lupillo, the second boy, said. "Who cares?"
Chapter 3
A half-dozen police cars,
an ambulance and two ladder trucks clogged the street outside
Holly Farm's entrance. Uniformed people milled everywhere.
The driver of a fire department Hazardous Materials van waited
inside the main gate, drumming his fingers on the steering
wheel.
Mark Redmon stood in a small
circle of men, fifty feet from his spray tractor. "Trust
me," he said, watching the fire captain who was watching
him. "The man is dead."
The captain, mustachioed and
every crease in his uniform razor sharp, scrutinized Redmon's
scruffy white spray suit.
"You some kind of expert?"
"No, but the guy isn't breathing
and he's stiff as a board."
Ignoring Redmon's remark, the
captain turned to his paramedic. "Suit up, Dexter. I'm
sending you in with HazMat."
Redmon watched the young man
jog to the hazardous materials van. The third fireman, an older
black guy wearing a rubber suit and air tanks, stood fast.
"If the man's dead," said
a baby-faced police sergeant even taller than Redmon, "our
homicide boys won't want anyone messing with the scene until
they go over it."
"Screw your homicide boys," the
fire captain said. "I've got a man down in a toxic situation,
and I'm not assuming a damn thing." He gave Redmon an
accusing look. "God only knows what this character's sprayed
out there."
"Jesus," Redmon said, "it's
just a measly pyrethroid. The ant spray you use around your
house is thirty times stronger. The first thing I did when
I saw the body was take off my respirator."
The black guy in the rubber suit
stirred.
"He's probably right, Captain. I wouldn't worry—"
"Save it, Johnson," the
captain said.
Redmon knew it made no difference
what killed the guy in the trees. To these men—already
covering their asses—this was the first death in a year-long
string of pesticide poisonings. He cursed the handful of growers
in the San Joaquin Valley—reckless bastards who'd managed
to terrify the entire country and make life shit for every
farmer in the state.
"No one goes in unprotected," the
fire captain said. He glowered at the police sergeant. "Not
my people. Not yours. We all clear on that?"
The big cop shrugged. "Hey,
pal, you're in charge. It's your nuts."
The fire captain looked at the
farm's entrance.
"And get somebody on that goddam gate." He took undisguised
pleasure in his authority. "The media's going to want
to turn this place upside down."
Redmon shook his head. Why had
he even mentioned pesticides when he called 911? Why hadn't
he just hidden the tractor among the tallest trees, cleaned
up and then called? It sure as hell wouldn't have made any
difference to that poor bastard in the field.
* * *
Once the emergency workers
moved into the field to retrieve the body, Redmon parked his
tractor in the equipment yard. As he shut down the engine,
two men walked toward him through the compound's gate.
One man, short and grim, toted
a small aluminum case. His uniform shirt looked far too warm
for muggy weather. The other, sporting tie, shirtsleeves, and
a thinning crew cut, walked a few paces ahead.
"You Redmon?" Shirtsleeves
called, lifting a clipboard and adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses.
"Yeah, that's me."
"Inspector Manfred, State
Bureau of Pesticide Control." He flashed an ID that meant
nothing to Redmon but did not offer his hand. He eyed the spray
tractor.
"The fire captain tells me we have a pesticide poisoning
here."
Redmon felt his face flush. "Whatever
killed that guy, it wasn't anything I sprayed."
Manfred gazed over the rims of
his glasses to the farm's substantial gate. "You keep
that locked?"
"When I'm spraying I do."
Manfred's lips tightened. "Then
perhaps some gang members tossed the victim over a six foot
fence? Dragged him a thousand yards into your trees?"
"I couldn't tell you. Maybe
he was poking around and had a heart attack," Redmon said. "Maybe
someone killed him in the field."
"But you were spraying when
you found him?" the smaller man asked.
Redmon nodded toward the tractor. "Just blowing out the
last of that tank. Spray left over from the two-year-old trees
across the street."
The twenty acre planting—only
six hundred feet wide—stretched a half mile along a right-of-way
on soil where no building was permitted. Factories and warehouses
flanked the run. Two city streets and a hill broke its length.
"I finished the big trees
before noon yesterday," Redmon said.
"Using what?" Manfred
asked.
"Dimeldin."
Manfred looked up, cocked an
eyebrow, then lowered his clipboard. "Bream,"
he said, "get me a sample of that solution."
The shorter man snapped open
his aluminum case, donned protective gear similar to Redmon's,
unscrewed the tank lid and filled a large syringe with fluid.
As he squirted the sample into
a marked vial, Redmon watched Manfred walk to his second sprayer
parked inside the open-faced shed.
"You use this?" Manfred
asked, staring up its ten foot vertical boom.
"On my tall trees I do."
"The trees where you found
the dead man?"
Redmon nodded. Manfred motioned
to Bream.
"You won't find anything
in there but water," Redmon said. "One of my men
cleaned it out last night." But as Bream undid the second
tank's lid, an acrid scent hit Redmon. Manfred lifted his clipboard
and resumed writing.
"Do you want to change your
story on the contents of this tank?" Manfred asked without
looking up.
Redmon glared at him. "It's
not a story!"
"You smelled it."
"I smelled it," Redmon
said,
"but if there's anything in that tank besides water, I
didn't put it there."
"Then get me the man who
cleaned it."
"I can't. He left this morning
for a job in Fresno."
Manfred gave him a malignant
grin.
"That's convenient." He turned to Bream who was undoing
his respirator. "Leave that on. I need foliage samples."
"Foliage samples?" Redmon
asked. "For what?"
"You don't get this, do
you, Redmon?" He signaled for his assistant to leave.
"What's to get? I haven't
done a goddam thing."
Manfred pushed in closer. "I
don't know what you sprayed out there, but we'll find out.
And if that man died from a misused poison, I personally guarantee
that you'll lose a lot more than your crop and farm." He
lowered his voice. "How about manslaughter charges, Mr.
Redmon? Would a prison term get your attention?"
The pulse pounded in Redmon's
neck, but he held back his words. His mood blackened as Manfred
and Bream set off for the spot where the emergency vehicles
had converged. He tore off his sweat-soaked paper coveralls,
slammed them into a trash barrel and doused his neck and head
beneath a nearby faucet.
As he chained the gate of the
equipment yard, his gaze settled on the tall sprayer. What
was that smell? It made no sense. No one but he and Chuy ever
handled that tank.
Chapter 4
"Excuse me."
The voice startled Redmon as
he turned from the equipment yard gate. Only
feet away, half-hidden inside the tree line of the adjacent
three-year-old planting, a woman stood watching him.
"Who the hell are you?"
he asked, wondering how much she'd
seen and heard.
The woman's clear green eyes
did not blink. "Leila Sinclair. I'm a journalist," she
said. "For the Milton Beacon."
"A reporter." Redmon
knew his voice betrayed annoyance.
"Afraid so," she said. "The
first drop of a tsunami headed your way." Trim and leggy,
probably in her late thirties, Leila Sinclair moved her gaze
to the activity up the road. Thick blonde hair, tinged with
red and laced into a single braid, trailed down her back and
swung as she turned her head. He'd seen her somewhere before.
"Look, Miss," Redmon
said as he pushed back his wet hair, "the last person
I need to talk to right now is a reporter."
His words did not faze the woman.
She looked around.
"You're Mark, aren't you?"
She didn't wait for a reply. "I knew your wife."
The words rattled Redmon. "Holly's—"
"I know. I'm sorry." Leila
Sinclair's voice softened. She turned her eyes back on him. "My
son and I have bought our tree from your farm for years."
Redmon thought for a minute. "The little guy with the
curly red hair?"
The woman's face broke into a
grin.
"Not so little anymore."
He gave her a weary smile. "Pretty
tough time for this farm right now."
"What happened?"
Redmon looked up the road. "I'm
going this way. Walk along, if you want."
They set off on foot toward the
ditch. A leaden sky had only darkened since early morning,
and the air had jelled with moisture. Ahead, lights from emergency
vehicles pulsed. The reporter listened while Redmon recounted
finding a body in his trees and calling 911.
"So they think you killed
him with insecticide?"
"I didn't," Redmon
snapped. A stretch of uneasy silence followed. Had she watched
and listened when Bream uncapped the tall sprayer's tank?
"How can you be sure?" she
asked, producing a small notepad from her purse.
Redmon scrutinized her face again,
found no guile, then described the safety of Dimeldin, the
pyrethroid insecticide he had used.
"Pyrethroid? The insecticide
they extract from a daisy?"
Her knowledge surprised him. "That's
pyrethrin," he said. "A pyrethroid is the man-made
version but with the same low order of human toxicity." He
saw the woman glance up from her notes for a quick reappraisal. "There's
no
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way it could have killed the man in
the field. You'd have to drink a pint of what I sprayed to hurt
you." Redmon paused. "Trouble is, it doesn't seem
to annoy the bugs much, either."
They reached the ditch. Rescue
workers, too engrossed in their jobs to notice their arrival,
gathered a distance from the pines.
Two men, encased in rubber suits,
wearing air tanks, backed out of the trees, dragging something
behind them. The rescuers pulled their load into the open, away
from unprotected observers.
Redmon walked closer. Leila Sinclair
stayed near him.
The paramedic, now in protective
clothing, knelt over the man on the ground to probe for a pulse.
Some idiotic legal requirement, Redmon suspected. Even from
here death was obvious.
As the medic rolled the body over,
the head flopped to one side. Part of the scalp was gone, stripped
from the skull by the tractor's tread.
Leila Sinclair breathed in sharply. "I know who he is."
* * *
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