Spooker Read online

  Gary was a UCLA senior in 1981 the night he showed up with a six-pack to find that Halvorsen already had a visitor, one that Halvorsen hadn't expected. Before he could deliver his shave-and-a-haircut knock, Gary heard a firm husky female voice with a growl in it: "Sure I can crash somewhere else, Ampa.

  All you have to do is throw me out." And then Gary knocked.

  Swede let him in, face flushed clear up to his fringe of gray hair, and waved aside Gary's offer to disappear. "Don't you run out on me when I finally need you," the older man warned, not without humor.

  "Damn kids, never appreciate parents as long as they have 'em." And then he indicated the young woman who stood defiantly, arms crossed, with a Nike bag on the floor beside her.

  She was straw blonde, more muscular than willowy, with golden eyes like Swede's, the same strong nose too, not especially pretty in the conventional sense but - So that's what they mean by striking, Gary thought.

  "Don't tell me; you're the jock," she accused.

  "Um," he said, looking toward Halvorsen for help. Halvorsen had told him a little about Janelle Betancourt, as he might have yarned about court intrigue in Monaco. It had never occurred to Gary that Halvorsen, on the rare occasions when he saw his granddaughter, might have mentioned Gary to her.

  "They say grandkids are your revenge on your kids," Halvorsen said. "I dunno, maybe they got it backwards. Gary, meet Jan. Gimme that six-pack if you're not using it." With that, he took the Olys and tossed one to each of them.

  "You're offering me a beer," she said wonderingly.

  "You're over eighteen," Halvorsen grunted. "What're you gonna do, tell your mom on me?" And when she smiled, Gary decided, she was simply bewitching.

  Gary stayed longer than usual that night, uneasy over the issue of a young woman fleeing a wealthy home for freedoms that, Halvorsen kept insisting, were mostly imaginary. She was welcome to stay with the aging cop, he said, but only if she let her parents know. "He may be a lawyer, but as a father, I think Lance Betancourt's done okay by you. And if he's not worried numb by now, Marta will be," he added.

  "You wanta stay, okay. But call 'em, dammit."

  Grudging it, she agreed. An hour later, they had made nachos and settled down to play hearts, a murderous game when three-handed, and between chuckling curses at the hands they drew, each of the young people learned oblique bits about the other. She was less dismissive on learning that Gary, his last football season over, spent time in ground school preparing for a private pilot's license. Her dance classes, he decided, accounted for the tendoned splendor of her throat, arms, and legs.

  In a way, she was more of a jock than he was; though he no longer wanted to be Nolan Cromwell, she still wanted to be Martha Graham.

  Driving his old VW bug back to the dorm alone, Gary reflected on the facts. If Swede had been the sort to take revenge, he might have gloated over his granddaughter's defection. Instead, he had forced Jan to do the responsible thing, though it probably meant taking some unwanted phone calls, and probably some heat with them. Gary realized that he and Janelle Betancourt weren't exactly friends yet. But he knew that Jan's reason for leaving home was Fred Penrose, who played electronic bass in a rock group and who had been ordered out of the Betancourt home for reasons Jan did not mention. And if Jan wasn't exactly a friend, Gary thought, then why had the discovery of Fred Penrose struck him like a karate chop over the heart?

  During the next few months Gary graduated, applied as a police cadet, and soloed in a Cessna. The day after his FAA examiner made the final sign-off in his logbook, Gary tried to interest Halvorsen in a ride - without the least sign of success. Jan, no longer a tenant but an occasional visitor, was at the house and took him up on his offer. It was the first of several quasi-dates between them, though she made it clear that Freddie Penrose was still The Man and managed to avoid any meeting between the rock musician and the police cadet. Swede Halvorsen knew Freddie by then, which made at least two households where Fred the Head was distinctly unwelcome.

  Gary made it onto the force, then through his probationary period, and managed to squeak through the mine fields laid down by generations of cops before him because Swede had told him what to expect.

  Brother officers had their own ways of finding out what a man was made of. Gary proved he wasn't mouse meat, unwilling or unable to wade into a donnybrook, or psycho, downright anxious to provoke one. He applied for openings in various bear-in-the-air programs, though Vietnam vets aced him out every time.

  Then suddenly it was 1984, and one day Gary realized that he hadn't seen old Swede in, what was it, nearly a year? No, over a year.

  He carried a bottle of Bushmill's to the Redondo Beach bungalow as his apology, showing up after his shift, and Swede let him in as though no time had passed. It had, though; Halvorsen's hair fringe was thinner and grayer, and now he walked more slowly, but in the same black shoes and white socks. And Swede had retired, and Janelle Betancourt was now Janelle Penrose, somewhere back east on tour, the last Swede had heard.

  They talked as peers now, mostly cop talk. Drugs had become such a problem that the Narc Division had moved from -Vice to its own division in the LAPD. Already in plainclothes, Gary had worked with his opposite numbers in the Drug Enforcement Administration and liked what he saw of them. "Don't tell me; you're going to apply," Swede guessed.

  "Already did," Gary admitted. "I know I'm still pretty green, but I'm getting good at street work. DEA street guys are more like us than like Feds."

  "With the risks, yeah, just don't forget they're Justice Department. They all wearing their hair like you?"

  Swede's glance at Gary's ponytail was eloquent.

  "Thought that'd get a rise from you," Gary said.

  "Hell, I'd run you in for it. Looks like a screaming bag of assholes." A big hand went up, palm out. "I know, I know. It's supposed to. Well, if it works for you, why not? But listen, just in case you make it: DEA shifts won't be like ours. The older guys don't like night work, so they fill their young bucks with bullshit and make nighthawks out of 'em."

  "I can sleep days."

  "Yeah? You'll come in after a shift at eight A.M. and do paperwork 'til noon. They don't pay overtime.

  With your degree and experience, you might get in as a GS-9 - it's civil service, remember? So a lot of your paperwork will be just cleaning paper trails for fuggin' accountants."

  Gary swirled the Bushmill's, sniffed, cocked his head. "You trying to talk me out of it, Swede?"

  A short pause, deep breath, long sigh. "Nah. Maybe I'm just cynical. You dig deep enough into most law-enforcement bureaucracies, you turn up a lot of shit. Goes with the territory."

  "OCID territory, anyhow," Gary said, making it light.

  He would recall, years later, the way Halvorsen's face changed to expressionless, his gaze hooded.

  Looking away to avoid Gary's eyes, he said, "Don't joke about that around the force. And you know better than to quote me. But you know how Mr. Hoover stayed in place so long in the FBI."

  "They say he had something on every president. Secret files."

  "Just think of that as the rule, not the exception," Halvorsen said carefully. "Files, evidence, whatever works to get some kind of sweetheart deal at the top. The game you play on the street may not be the game the suits are playing. You just never know, Gary. And that's all I ever intend to say about that."

  "And you never mentioned OCID," Gary teased.

  "God - damned - right I didn't. When your mouth gets too smart, you wanta watch your ass." Another pause, and a sip. Then: "So! You still flying those tinfoil airplanes around?"

  "Keeping current when I can afford to rent one. Don't tell me you'd like a ride."

  "I won't," Halvorsen said, and then suggested a fishing trip on the Arizona border. They did not speak again of law-enforcement corruption for years, but Gary would remember the older man's warning at the worst possible time.

  4

  1984 TO 1993

  Some DEA applica
nts are happiest working with computers and paperwork. The agency likes that. Others, like Gary Landis, would rather fly light aircraft or tinker with the engines of their Kawasakis, and the DEA likes that, too. Resident Agent-in-Charge Paul Visconti had run dozens of UC, undercover, street guys in his time but had never met one who needed as little supervision as this youngish retread, Landis, out of the LAPD.

  The San Joaquin Valley wasn't Landis's first choice; but then, it hadn't been Visconti's, either. An enormous fertile floodplain created between California mountain ranges, favored by sunlight and irrigated heavily, the valley became a home to many ethnic groups: Latinos, Japanese, Armenians, Basques.

  Generations of them had tended their orchards and vegetables in relative harmony, and all this success drew more Anglos, and when sleepy little Fresno found itself choking on 600,000 people it also found that it needed men like Gary Landis because, in matters of population density, nothing fails like success.

  Paul Visconti, a trim, onetime Chicago detective with ruddy features and a prow of a nose, found himself a victim of success when his handsome wife, Julia, refused a move east and he chose to turn down a DEA promotion. Thanks to a cool temperament, he had grown accustomed to the suit and the wing-tip oxfords, drove a gray Cimarron, and kept his straight dark hair carefully groomed. Sometimes he still envied the lives of his people.

  Visconti might have a face-to-face with Landis twice a week, though he thought once a week would have been adequate. Visconti told himself the frequent meetings were to keep the division office happy, but he knew better: he simply liked to live the street life again, vicariously, through the yarns Gary spun about his cases.

  Sometimes the story was funny: one perpetrator had brought contraband in from Mexico, all right, but the stuff turned out to be pre-Columbian art and, mistaking Gary for an addict, the man lectured him on the evils of drugs. He was so earnest about it that Gary used his discretion and did not turn this quaint perp over to Customs because, he said, you never knew when a guy that straight might be developed as an informant.

  Sometimes the story was scarifying: Once Gary showed up with eight stitches high on his forehead at the hairline, after ducking away from a waifish four-foot-ten teenybopper who had been carrying a razor blade and a load of PCP. She'd been trying for his throat.

  From all Visconti could discern, the Landis love life was an iffy proposition. Gary dated a secretary in Tulare, a real-estate broker in Fresno, a grammar-school teacher in Merced. If a lady objected too much to being preempted by his casework - as Visconti could have told him, the marriage-minded ones all did, sooner or later - Gary sought other ladies who did not object so much. Gary mentioned once that the Fresno broker was deeply into sculpture. Visconti, a family man now qualifying as a "suit" with predictable hours, said that was good.

  "Yeah?" Gary had rolled his eyes. "You ever waste two hours watching a pretty lady slam clay against a wedging board?"

  "No, but she's got something else that keeps her happy."

  "So what's your point?"

  "If you like things as they are, Gary, that is the point," Visconti said. He decided that his advice must have impressed the younger man because, afterward, Gary Landis occasionally asked his expert advice about the ways of women. And Paul Visconti would always reply that there were no experts in that field.

  It became clear in time that Landis himself had uncommon street expertise. With his hair grown long, on a bike he was a biker. When he combed it and wore a fake Rolex, he was your average street scuffler looking for a connection.

  As one of the more active young DEA nighthawks, Gary was tapped in May 1991 for an interagency task force, code name ENABLE. Working on loan to another Justice Department agency, the FBI, Gary earned a commendation and some friends in the Bureau in a monumental sting operation.

  He was still a nighthawk, one of the street guys, but one night in 1992 he sprinted confidently after a young Latino crack dealer in Tulare. After fifty yards he had lost a step or two; after two blocks down alleys, he had lost his man. That night he called Swede Halvorsen to boost his spirits, and learned that Swede was moving to Bakersfield. A month after that, he visited Swede in his new digs, flying down just for stick time in the Cessna, and learned that Jan Penrose wasn't all that happy with Fred the Head anymore. According to Swede, she had become a health nut. "From what you tell me, she c'd run your butt into the ground, most likely." And he stuck an accusing finger into Gary's softening middle.

  After that visit, Gary did his three-mile runs more religiously, but even the NFL's Nolan Cromwell had slowed down in his thirties. Gary began to rely more on subtlety than on his hawklike swoops. In a way, it was the subtlety that got him nailed.

  The Merced schoolteacher had given up on Gary for a year when he called one evening early in 1993.

  He sweet-talked her into a round of miniature golf, then suggested a pizza delivered to her apartment. With a few limes and a fifth of Cuervo Gold to go with the pizza, he said, who knew what might happen?

  She knew, she said; no, thanks. They compromised on the Pizza Hut at G and Olive: double cheese, pepperoni, while she explained about her new guy and her scruples about double-dipping. Gary had heard it all before but pretended he hadn't, taking it hard because she wanted him to, but scarfing down an awful lot of the Hut's best for a guy with a freshly broken heart.

  Then, perhaps to change the subject, she told him about the sixth graders stoned to their gizzards in Merced. When he forgot the pizza, she knew she had his full attention. "I know what you do, kind of, and we agreed not to talk about it. But my God, Gary, now I'm seeing kids sharing samples in the schoolyard!"

  It was like roaches, he told her; if you saw one, you had a lot more in the shadows. He asked what the school was doing about it, and she told him, and he promised to take a look. "You won't see me, but I'll be there."

  "I don't want to see you," she said, blushing through her smile. "But I'm glad somebody's interested."

  Soon afterward, he took her home, with a hand on her sleeve as she was sliding from the seat of his old Camaro. "Listen: about the schoolyard problem? Don't be too good a citizen. You've told me, but if you get too loud about it,-you could get hurt. People who addict little kids don't give a shit who they destroy. It's not like the Mafia; women are fair game to some of these guys."

  Her eyes got big, and she squirmed back into the seat, then gave him a Harvey Wallbanger of a kiss, maybe the best one she ever gave him. The kind that said, "goodbye," and also "see what you missed out on." And then he drove home to Fresno.

  A few days later, a panel truck parked with its brush trailer less than a block from the schoolyard in question, with "Two Joes Landscape Management" on its sides in artfully aged lettering. One of the joes set about trimming trees near the street. The other joe, with a very long-lensed Nikon and a Porta-John inside the panel truck, was Gary Landis.

  It took Gary a week to identify the young man who was supplying a dead drop for a pair of twelve-year-olds in his employ. The drop was a hollow pile of plastic dog turds placed below schoolyard bushes - not the kind of treasure your average kid would be curious about, and it was serviced at night.

  Once tracked to his Chevy Luv pickup parked two blocks away, the young man was easier to follow, especially with a tracer bug affixed by magnets to the Luv's chassis. A quick DMV check yielded the perp's name: Ralph Guthrie.

  After following Guthrie to three more schoolyard drops, and another week of surveillance to learn who supplied the supplier, Gary removed the tiny transmitter from the Luv's chassis. Bugs of that sort are not cheap, and its discovery would have sent a wake-up call to the wrong people. Guthrie was Anglo, but he seemed to be tapped into suppliers who had all the earmarks of La Familia.

  The DEA has a particular loathing for the Mexican drug organization called La Familia, in part because of Agent "Kiki" Camarena. It was Camarena whose gruesomely tortured body had turned up in Mexico, and La Familia that had killed him. The Mexican godfather o
f it all, Pedro Aviles, had already been submachine-gunned to death in Sinaloa by his own tenientes back in October 1978. Ernesto Fonseca and Caro Quintero, two of those lieutenants, may have grown too fond of their own products and were eventually put behind bars for their carelessness. Another of those top men, however, took over more territory until, finally, he seemed destined to wear the bloodstained mantle of Aviles. This was Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who had excellent connections to the Colombians and Mexican drug-processing plants of his own. Gallardo could hobnob with Mexican politicians while his torture experts clipped pieces from his enemies and recorded the screams for Gallardo.

  In Mexico, La Familia operated freely and even intimidated Mexican federals with the old adage, plata o plombo, silver or lead, an elegant phrase offering silver first; and if you wouldn't take their silver, you would very likely take a few small pieces of their lead. Felix Gallardo and La Familia had connections in the United States, but it was not known to extend far up the San Joaquin Valley.

  Paul Visconti doubted the Familia connection: too far north, he said, and it lacked the volume of a Familia operation. Maybe, Gary replied, they were using our grammar schools to build a hell of a volume.

  Though night patrols in schoolyards put an end to the original problem, Guthrie was still supplying street dealers; why not ease into the hierarchy through him?

  So, in the summer of 1993, a long-haired, gray-eyed specimen took a small apartment in Merced. He cultivated a villainous mustache, drove a pickup, and put in a few weeks with a drywall contractor. His carefully groomed background included an old conviction for DWI and arrests - no convictions - for sale of illegal firearms and for grand theft auto. Inquiries about his police record were flagged to DEA. He began to drink in a bar frequented by Guthrie, and he answered to the name of Chuck Lane. He also kept his face-to-face briefings, as usual, with Paul Visconti.