THE EMERALD TRIANGLE

by Miles Archer

MILES ARCHER is the pen name of a Pacific Northwest mystery writer. He has accumulated a long list of job titles over the years, mostly because he gets fired a lot (something about his 'attitude'.) He has published short stories in several ezines and occasionally in print, about half of which feature his series private I, Doug McCool. The second novel in The Adventures of Doug McCool series, The Emerald Triangle, is scheduled for publication in June, '03, by NovelBooks, Inc. Readers' comments regarding this story are appreciated. (Well, the good ones, anyway).

 

 

Chapter 1

The Zodiac Strikes

On the night of October 11, 1969, San Francisco taxi driver Paul Stine picked up a fare in Union Square and headed for the Presidio, a tree-studded military outpost occupying the northwestern tip of the city. Police found his cab stopped in front of 3898 Washington Street, where it intersects Cherry. Stine had been shot in the right side of the head. Three teenagers happened to look out a second-story apartment window across the street and saw the passenger remove the dead man's wallet and keys, then cut a large piece from the back of his shirt, which he soaked in blood and took with him.

He wiped down parts of the interior and exterior, briefly leaning on the driver's side doorframe, before walking slowly north on Cherry Street. The teens called the police, who logged the call at 9:58 PM. Unfortunately, an incorrect description of the killer as being a black male was originally broadcast. Consequently, when patrolmen Donald Foukes and Eric Zelms responded in their radio car and noticed a heavyset white man sauntering up Cherry Street, they made no effort to apprehend him. Although the description was quickly corrected, and despite an intensive search of the area that followed, the killer's head start allowed him to escape, probably through the Julius Kahn Playground in the Presidio, where a man was seen running shortly after the shooting.

Foukes made a statement about his recollection of the incident, recorded in a SFPD memo dated November 12,1969:

"The suspect observed by Officer Foukes was a WMA 35-45 yrs., about 5' 10", 180-200 lbs. Medium heavy build... barrel-chested... medium complexion... light-colored hair, possibly graying in the rear. (May have been lighting that caused this effect.) (Navy or royal blue) elastic cuffs, and waistband zipped part way up. Brown wool pants, pleated type, baggy in rear (rust brown.) May have been wearing low-cut shoes. Subject at no time appeared to be in a hurry, walking with a shuffling lope, slightly bent forward, head down. The subject's general appearance, to classify him as a group, indicated he might be of Welsh ancestry.

"Since we were looking for a Negro adult male, we proceeded on Jackson Street toward Arguello, continuing our search. As we arrived at Arguello Street, the description was changed to a white adult male. Believing that this suspect was possibly the one involved in the shooting, we entered the Presidio of San Francisco and conducted a search on West Pacific Avenue on the opposite side of the wall in the last direction we had observed the suspect going. We did not find the suspect."

San Francisco, 1974

The new year crept in, tail between its legs. The economy was lurching from the worst recession in forty years and gas rationing caused by the Arab Oil Embargo. Unemployment was high; there was an improbable economic situation that combined inflation with a stagnant economy, which resulted in people having less money for more expensive necessities. Everyone seemed slightly disoriented by the adoption of year-round daylight savings, another limp attempt to save energy. Every time I flipped on a light I felt I was committing treason.

I met Dave Toschi, the head of the Zodiac investigation for the SFPD, during the Midland Surplus case. He was a good man, dogged in his pursuit and absolutely convinced that sooner or later the serial killer would screw up and they would catch him. The last time we'd had a drink together he didn't want to talk about it much, and I didn't blame him.

Dave would have his hands full anyway, since there had been four shootings and one serious wounding the previous night, the sixth of January, in the Year of Our Lord 1974. Police were mounting one of the largest manhunts in the city's history for two black men committing drive-by shootings of whites. The pattern of murders was strikingly similar to a wave of random shootings that began in late November and accounted for six dead and two wounded in less than a month. The manhunt is named "Operation Zebra", for rather obvious reasons.

The social landscape of the decade seemed to be disintegrating into a surrealistic, macabre parody of the Sixties. Strange people and strange politics abounded. I am a child of the Fifties, raised on 'Leave It to Beaver' and 'Father Knows Best.' Somehow, the America I thought I knew had vanished--lost in a haze of jungle violence called Vietnam and the consequent battle on our cities' streets to end that fiasco, secure racial justice and tame the ravenous beast of free-market capitalism.

The process-serving business was pretty good in ‘74, if you didn't mind serving lawsuits on bankrupted small businesses and people who couldn't pay their credit card bills. The fat labor strikes and big corporate lawsuits where we made the real money had dried up.

 

 

 

Chapter 2

Discretion Is the Better Part of Valor

I was really sick of my job. I'd been to this apartment four times now, trying to serve a summons on a guy named Elisha Cook. Every time I’d been here, no one answered the door, but I'd heard a big dog barking so I knew they had to come home eventually. I had tried seven-thirty in the morning and six-thirty in the evening, with no luck. The apartment was up three flights of stairs around the back side of a six-unit building, located in a maze of little streets that twist about a steep hill. A cold drizzle of rain sent chilly rivulets into the moist valleys of my body.

Thoroughly disgusted with life in general, I climbed out of my VW Microbus, locked the door, marched to the back of the building and started climbing. The steep wooden staircase was slippery and none too sturdy. The building sat high on a hill with a terrific view of the city. I was not inclined to appreciate this; in fact, the height made me a little acrophobic. I kept one hand firmly on the railing and stayed to the inside of the stairs. I have reasons for not liking heights.

Today I was trying a 2 PM shot at this guy. The law says that on the third trip to the same address I can serve anyone who answers the door, if they’re a resident. They can't be a guest. Fair enough, the first son of a bitch that opens that door was getting this paper and I'd be outta here. For a lousy four bucks, I was not making out on this deal. The address was even way out of my way.

After a few seconds to get my breath back, I gave the bell a ring. The dog started barking. I could tell this was a big dog, its voice was deeper than mine. No sound other than the hysterical dog. I gave the door a knock or two. No point wearing out my knuckles for nothing. The dog kept barking. I turned to leave. Then I heard a voice. The dog shut up and the deadbolt started to turn. I faced the doorway again.

The door swung in and was replaced by a figure. I could only see the guy's belt buckle. I had to rotate my head back to full extension, until my neck vertebrae clicked, to see his face. The top of his head was obscured by the doorframe, his shoulders so wide he could not pass through without turning sideways. In his right hand was a leash and at the end of the leash was a Doberman. This Cerberus was almost tall enough to look me in the eye and regarded me contemptuously.

"What the fuck you want?" Mr. Doorway growled. He was black, head bare of any hair except eyebrows and lashes.

"Uh..." I had to clear my throat and bring my voice down an octave so I didn't sound like Mickey Mouse to his basso profundo. "...I have a delivery for Elisha Cook." I figured he was no relation to the actor.

"What kinda delivery?" No fool he.

"Just some papers, I don't really know what it’s about." I ain't tellin' this guy he's being sued. I’m not stupid.

"He ain't here." Now I know I'm talking to Elisha Cook, and he knows I know I'm talking to Elisha Cook.

"Oh, well, in that case..." I tried to sound casual. This guy's fist was the size of my head and his arms were as big around as my thighs. "Look, I can just leave this with you. You live here too?"

"I'm his brother and I'm just visiting. And you ain't leavin' one muthafuckin' thing here, you understand?"

I nodded. "I understand perfectly."

"And don't come back, either. He's outta town for a while."

I considered flipping the papers on the porch anyway and calling his bluff. He read my mind.

"If you try leavin' them papers here, I'll shove them up your ass."

This was an offer I could refuse. "Look, you're not doin' yourself any good. The sheriff will come here and serve them anyway." I ain't comin' back, that's for sure.

"You can send the mothafuckin' sheriff and I'll tell him the same damn thing. Now get the fuck outta here."

I was already reversing. I contemplated some smart-ass Parthian shot but I wasn't sure I could outrun him. And running was the smart thing to do. I was definitely not getting paid enough for this. I only hoped he’d tell the deputy to shove those papers, although I wasn’t sure even an armed deputy would argue. If you shot this guy, you'd only make him mad. My choice of weapon to take this monster down would be a Barrett .50cal rifle at 500 yards, but I didn't happen to have one handy.

I was just hitting this address on my way home from the office. I had my pager in case Lowell Van Duzee, my boss, needed me. Business had been slow lately and I didn't want to hang around downtown. When I did that, I wound up sitting in The Office, drinking more than I should.

My new VW van was a terrific replacement for the previous one, which had been demolished by the well-placed application of C4 explosive. This was a ‘72, with the new disc brakes. For the first time, I could actually bring the thing to a stop without having to plan half a block in advance. A customer of Jerry’s BugWorld had ordered him to put in a Corvair engine and make several improvements to the suspension, so it went like stink and handled much better than the typical breadbox on wheels. Unfortunately for the owner, he ran afoul of the narcotics laws and couldn't pay. It was roomy and comfortable, both strong qualities when you spend fourteen hours a day in your car.

When I got back to the China Basin marina, I opened the locked gate and bounced down the dock to my new home. I used to live in a basement apartment under my pal Rick's house, but funds were running a little short these days. The dock rent was only fifty bucks a month, including all the electricity I could use, so I had moved onboard the Jolly Jim, my forty-five foot motor sailer. The boat was a spoil of war. I had earned her fair and square from her former owner. Shipboard life suited me just fine, unless the damp and cold made my patchwork spine act up.

A big plus of living at the marina was the security. No one can get onto the dock without a key, and now we have Niles, the night watchman. Niles came to the China Basin Marina after the events that delivered the boat into my hands. He was sixty or so, weighed a hundred and thirty-five soaking wet and wore a filthy yachting cap that sagged around the brim perfectly. He looked like a Bogart sidekick and functioned as my personal doorman from eight at night until seven the next day. A bottle of bourbon from time to time was more than adequate to secure the special services I might require, such as letting a lady through the gate--or not letting a lady through the gate, whichever was appropriate.

I was currently using the various means at my disposal to sidestep a lady named Jeanie. She was a nice enough person, and if it weren't for two things, I might have seen more of her. First, her sexual appetite was voracious, and frankly, she wore me out after a day or two. Second, her psychotic biker husband, Don, sometimes arrived in town unexpectedly from his welding job on the Alaskan pipeline. He did not hold the same liberal interpretation of their vows as Jeanie and consequently became easily upset over small transgressions on her part. He tended to blame the guy. Once or twice I had been required to take time away from San Francisco just to avoid crossing his path.

Jeanie had taken umbrage at my recent decision to forego casual recreation and devote more time to my relationship with Barbara. Like most men, I didn't have the guts to tell her I was tired of her. That proved to be a serious character flaw.

 

 

 

Chapter 3

A Stranger Comes to Call

When I arrived downtown the next day, I was sour. My mind ran in ever-smaller circles, chasing itself to nowhere.

I parked in my favorite alley, then saw that the city had changed the signs from four-hour parking to thirty minutes. I know they say, ‘When life hands you lemons, make lemonade’ but if someone had said that just then, I would have sent them straight to Hell. I got back in the bus and wandered three blocks east toward the SoMa until I could find an alley with a two-hour limit. Parking garage fees were an unacceptable overhead. The price of gas was killing my profit already.

I stalked through the sidewalk crowds, the bounce gone from my step. A wet wind gusted unpredictably between the skyscrapers on the downtown side of Market Street, then gained speed when it hit the long, clear straightaway on First.

In those days, downtown San Francisco was clearly demarcated by Market Street. On the north side, great slabs of marble and polished granite were piled to the sky, row after row of dark windows defying the shreds of fog sweeping past.

On the south side, the SoMa (cutesy talk for SOuth of MArket) consisted of old three and four-story brick office buildings, previously elite locations. Now, having witnessed world wars, depressions, booms and busts, they had slid into a resigned neglect. Small hotels, once elegant places for San Franciscans and visitors to take their ease, now offered their marble lobbies and dusty, ornate trappings to broken wrecks destroyed by drugs, booze and their own minds. These new tenants staggered and roared, busy with their personal demons. The businesses that could coexist with such street life dozed, dreaming of the days when the city was flush and their hopes were new. If I could have seen the future, I'd have bought a building there. But then, 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride' as my dear, old gray-haired mother used to say.

AAA Legal Process occupied a rabbit-warren suite at 450 Market, one of the last brick buildings on the north side of Market. The elevator took its leisurely trip to the fifth floor. The halls were filled with the white noise of the IBM Selectrics, tap-tap-tapping away behind the rippled glass door that modestly claimed ‘AAA Legal Process.’

I still expected to see Harry's wrinkled face with the proud nose, tilted back in his chair, the phone cocked to his head. It was Dorothy Silver, these days, and she sat upright, the phone held securely with one hand while she made notes with the other. Harry's death had not changed her all that much on the outside, but she was a little less the Jewish grandmother and a little more the business woman. I was still her favorite, though.

She smiled at me through the glass window in her office, and Barbara gave me her patented hero's welcome grin. Coming into the office was more like going home than going to work. I did my work out in the world, my friends were here. I radiated a false good cheer to Barbara, gave the other women a wink and a smile and followed the path worn in the tired linoleum into Van Duzee's office, where the air was already thick with smoke from his Dorals. A coffin nail smoked in the ashtray while Van listened on the phone, his pensive face lifting when I walked in. Van liked me and I liked him.

He was a husk of a man. I'm sure he was never imposing even when young, and now nearly fifty years of booze, cigarettes and disappointment had burned him out. His thin hair stuck to his small, damp head. Pale blue eyes, on the verge of leaking tears, wavered in a doughy face the color of unbaked bread. His wet lips would tremble on occasion, and his twitching, hesitant hands made me nervous, never knowing if they would succeed at the goal their owner set for them.

I told Van the story of the giant to amuse him. He seemed relieved that for once I hadn't tried to avenge myself by getting him served anyway. He just took the papers and threw them next to the phone. After he sorted the rest of my stuff into the system that he alone understood, he called the attorney for the client attempting to sue this Cook character.

He told the lawyer flatly that Cook was evading and had threatened violence. He let him chew on that for a minute. "We'll send this back to you and you can turn it over to the sheriff for service. Sorry, but that's all you can do now." He listened to the lawyer whine about how long it would take the sheriff's office to serve it, but Van didn't care. We didn't need the money badly enough to risk a server getting killed by some maniac.

I picked up the thin pile of summons and subpoenas and glanced through them. There was one I recognized from before.

"What's the deal with this one? I told you I couldn't find the guy. I made nine calls on this." It was a chain of pizza places being sued by the Examiner newspaper for nonpayment of an advertising bill.

"The client said they would pay for a limited amount of special time on this one."

"How limited?"

"I told them you would put in four hours and then we'd give them a progress report."

Four hours. Forty bucks. Big deal. "Okay, but I don't know that four hours is gonna accomplish a thing. There's five addresses for the pizza joints, a warehouse on Natoma and his house in St. Francis Wood. That's a lot of places to look."

Van nodded. He recognized that four hours was probably a tenth of the time needed, but he shrugged. The client was a cheapskate. If they goofed around long enough, the guy would file bankruptcy or blow town and then where would they be?

I put it in the special spot in my briefcase for this kind of thing, then sorted the rest of the paper by the mental map of San Francisco I carried in my head. There's nothing like driving around a city fourteen hours a day to get to know where things are. I could have been a cabby. Sometimes I considered it. I would probably make more money, but I liked the independence of process serving, and even looked forward to the conflict. Besides, cabbies got shot in the head sometimes. Of course, I was getting my fair share of people shooting at me, too. I hadn't quite worked out the risk-benefit ratio.

I realize that people are unhappy when they're served. Who would be glad to be taken to court? Occasionally, I would serve a divorce paper and the recipient would actually thank me for bringing them tangible evidence that bondage to their spouse was ending. But normally, whatever situation was bringing them to court was one that prompted anger or frustration. Many people felt they had to direct this negative energy toward the bearer of bad tidings. In point of fact, this was why the law required that legal papers be delivered in person by someone who was not a party to the action. That was supposed to prevent violent confrontations between legal adversaries. I was a nobody, just a fancy delivery boy and so should be left out of the path of their spleen. That was seldom the way it worked.

The subjects of our deliveries became a boring repetition of curses, punches, lies and evasions meant to frustrate the law and vent the subjects' anger. We, on the other hand, just wanted to dump the paper and get on with it. Although prices had gone up significantly (I was making four dollars and twenty-five cents a serve now, and only a year ago it had been three-fifty), it still wasn't enough for us to waste time with emotion or too much thought. I had learned to hand over the paper and turn while they were still drawing breath. By the time their bullshit started, I was already climbing in my car, gone with the wind. My own karma is screwed up enough without adding some stranger’s to it.

When I walked through the front office to leave, I saw some guy in Dorothy's office, the door closed. I thought it a little unusual. Our customers were lawyers and their staff. Their time is much too valuable to waste coming to see us. Our messengers picked up the work from them, brought it to the office where the secretaries, Mary, Bernice and Layla, typed it up, then routed it to Van, who organized it by area. Then off it went to the process servers: Bill, Jan and me. There were two or three messengers who did routine filings with the San Francisco court clerk. Barbara Brown, the office manager, saw to it that every piece of paper went where it was supposed to go when it was supposed to go there. She could type, answer phones, solve the inevitable problems and flirt with the guys, simultaneously. We'd been having a hot love affair for about six months. Despite the disparity in age, we were comfortable together. She had reached a point in life where she no longer tolerated crap from men, and I found her middle-aged wisdom a refreshing change from younger women who hadn't seemed to learn who they were yet. I knew who I was. Mortal combat has a way of teaching you about yourself.

I raised my eyebrows toward the stranger with Dorothy and Barbara gave a ‘who knows’ look back. I headed for my hangout, The Office. Sharon, bartender and owner, took care of me. Our clients were eternally forgetting some important deadline or needing some vital witness served and would call with emergency requests throughout the day. So the three of us servers would try to keep close to the office to handle these crises. They were the most lucrative part of the work. Ten bucks an hour and twenty-five cents a mile, usually for something simple, like a court filing or straightforward service on a corporation or another lawyer. The regular serves were a tedious chore.

I spotted Jan and Bill when I walked through the door from the building lobby. They had a booth near the bar, drinks in front of them. I slid in next to Jan, facing Bill, since Jan is skinny and Bill is wide in the shoulders, like me.

We exchanged desultory greetings. We didn't have much to say, since we saw each other almost every day. Like old married people, we already knew whatever we had been willing to share years ago.

Jan spoke up. "I tried one of those ads in the Bay Guardian. You know, those kinky personal ads?" Bill and I nodded. The ads were great reading, but who believed they really worked?

"Some woman called me the other night. She came over about an hour later and we went at it like you wouldn't believe."

I had my doubts. "Oh come on, Jan. You mean to tell me a perfect stranger came over to your place and fucked you? What'd she look like?"

"She was all right, nice looking, about thirty, I guess. Anyway, yeah, she just called up, said something like, 'I read your ad. Do you really want to?' and when I said ‘Yeah, sure' she asked for my address and was there inside of an hour. Walked in, had a little, you know," he accompanied this by closing one nostril and sniffing twice, "then stripped down and screwed me until I thought I would pass out."

Bill and I shook our heads at this. Getting laid used to be a challenge, once upon a time, but with birth control, abortion-on-demand and cocaine, it was like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel. Bill asked, "What the hell did you say in the ad?"

Jan looked innocent. "Blondes with big tits that like to fuck, call--you know, my number. That was all." Bill looked at me. I remembered his latest fling, Carol the Cocksucker.

"How's Carol, you still seeing her?" I had to know, since the girls had told me after they met her that she was not a she but a he. As far as I knew, Bill hadn't known that important fact, even after having had sex with her several times. How? Don't ask me, but some guys don't look too closely and in the dark... Well, let's just say that such impostering was not unknown.

"Carol's great. You know, she's the best chick I ever knew. I mean it. She treats me great, she's easy to get along with, fun to go places with and she knows all kinds of interesting stuff." Sounded like love to me.

"That's great, Bill. I'm glad. She seems nice enough. Maybe you should double with me and BB sometime, might be fun." Barbara first noticed that Carol's Adam's apple was too prominent to belong to someone born with a vagina. She would think nothing of going out on a double date with a transvestite.

"Hey, there's some guy sitting in Dorothy's office talking with the boss. You guys know what's up?" I have an almost paranoid need to know what my employers are up to. Must come from having been canned so many times.

Bill and Jan both shook their heads 'no.’

"Do you think Dorothy will sell out, now that Harry's gone?" Bill asked, like we would know Dorothy's plans better than he did.

"I bet she does," Jan guessed. "But who would buy the business, and how much would she get, do you think?"

"You can figure somebody's got to pay at least three or four times the gross." This was Bill, whose knowledge of finance was limited to how the odds were running on the last race at Bay Meadows.

"Hell, Bill, that would be three or four million, I bet." I was offering a WAG--wild ass guess--but it was as good as any other.

"You think?"

"I think."

Jan's long, sallow face looked gloomier than ever. "I guess that lets us out."

We looked at him like he was crazy. Of course, that left us out. Between the three of us we might, by selling everything we owned, raise a hundred grand. And that would leave me without a place to live or a car. What was the point in thinking about millions of dollars?

 

 

 

 

Chapter 4

A Thief Who Steals From A Thief...
He is Pardoned for One Thousand Years

 

Steve Dodge sat across the table from me in the salon of the Jolly Jim. We had tequila, glasses and the fixings between us. He leaned back, took a long drag on a joint, held it for a time, then exhaled, filling the salon with a fragrant cloud. I turned on the fan that exhausted air from the cabin. It would send a stream of pot odor into the air, but with China Basin more or less devoid of life at this hour, I didn't care. The curtains were drawn and my neighbors could not have cared less anyway.

Steve had left me a message at work saying that he would be down from his Garberville spread and I should keep an eye out for him.

"Okay, now that we have the preliminaries out of the way, what's going on?" I was ready to hear his tale, which I anticipated would be one of woe.

"You know Cindy..." he talked while trying to hold his toke. Not easy. The words came out kind of strangled. I nodded that indeed I did. "Well, she was hanging out in Ukiah a few weeks ago and joined up with some church there." He finally exhaled completely.

"Church?"

"Yeah..." Deep inhale. "...the People's Church, the People's...something." He exhaled another cloud. "Something about ‘the people'."

"The People's Temple?" That name I knew.

"Yeah! That's it. People's Temple. She was in Ukiah doing some business for me and met these people who were raving about how great this preacher was and how all these cool people were joining. They're into getting back to the land and working together to leave behind all the bullshit of the world; you know, capitalism and all those bullshit churches that care more about money than God."

I had read about this outfit and its leader, a preacher originally from Indiana named Jim Jones. He had made a very big splash with the local politicians, apparently bringing together middle-class whites, streetwise blacks, whores, drug dealers and addicts. He preached some self-help, racial-love-end-of-times nonsense. It was the Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic thing. Being naturally cynical, I was waiting to hear how the scam worked, but so far, he got nothing but good press and his picture taken with luminaries like Mayor Joseph Alioto, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and other New Left types.

"So, I assume you weren't caught up in her religious conversion?"

"You know better than that. I think the Catholic Church is a rip-off, let alone some guy living in San Francisco! But she's totally gone over this, man. She was all psyched up about the brotherhood of man, helping the poor, changing society and all that crap." His voice was rising a little, either with indignation or an excess of tequila and pot. He drained his glass, crunched his teeth into the lime, made a face, then swiped his hand across his tongue for the salt. He shook his head.

"Fuck man, she cleaned me out!" He sat across from me with his eyes bugging behind his Coke-bottle-bottom glasses.

I could not believe my ears for a moment. "She ripped you off for...what..." I paused to calculate. "...three hundred and eighty grand?"

Steve nodded, miserable but philosophical. "She knew where the stash was, so one day..." he trailed off. I got the picture.

"I told you..." I couldn't help but rub it in. I had told him to put his loot in a safe deposit box in the bank.

"Don't say it. I just hadn't gotten around to it."

"Yeah, those ‘round to-its’ are hard to find." He gave me a quizzical look, then got it. He was an unreformed procrastinator.

Steve was one of the early computer geeks, programming COBOL. He claimed it was his idea to save extra code by using only two digits instead of four to indicate the year, thus he could eventually establish fatherhood of the great Y2K problem. History turns on such tiny wheels, sometimes.

In any event, Steve also realized that when the banks' software calculated things like compound interest and such for people's monthly statements, the computer calculated to four decimal places. Naturally, the final amount was expressed in two decimal places, thus requiring the computer to round the amounts up or down. It occurred to Steve that he could just as easily program the computers to round everything down when posting to people's accounts, then take the extra fractions of a cent and deposit them into several dummy accounts. So he stole from the banks and all their customers, a fraction of a cent at a time, on every transaction. Nobody missed the money. It was like it never existed.

Within four months, his various fake accounts had amassed nearly one and quarter million dollars. Steve, not being a greedy man, had then changed the computer code to round everything normally. Three and half months later, the accounts liquidated one by one, he ‘retired’ and moved to Garberville, in the heart of Northern California redwood country, bought himself a choice chunk of forest and settled down to grow organic vegetables and play with computers. He also grew a little righteous grass for himself and a widening circle of friends. The leftover cash had been stashed in a duffel bag, then the bag had been placed into a waterproof box. Steve had assured me it was safe from discovery.

"Of course, Cindy knew where it was?" He shrugged a yes. "So these Holy Rollers convinced her to make a big-time contribution to the God business?"

"That's about it. They made her some mucky-muck in their church and now she's here in San Francisco. She wrote me a letter to tell me how she was meeting all these really important people. Cindy's handling the bookkeeping. I was thinking you could maybe get a hold of her and see if you could convince her to give it back."

I pretended to think for a moment. I already knew the answer, I was just stalling.

"Well, you're screwed. There's nothing you can do. Unless you threaten violence, you've got no way to pressure her into giving the dough back. And I don't recommend that. Shit, they could get you for extortion." I paused, giving a sign that I was seriously thinking. "No, once those guys get their hands on your dough, it's gone forever. Besides, what makes you think she'd listen to me?"

Steve put up a hand, as though telling me not to be offended ahead of time by what he was going to say. "I just thought that you might be able to think of some way of pressuring them into giving some of it back."

"Oh no, pal! Jim Jones, he's the head of this thing and from what I can tell, he's really well connected. If I don't watch it, he could nail me for extortion. After all, you can't very well threaten to take them to court. And what're we gonna do, call the paper and tell them how the money you ripped off got ripped off?" I really didn't think there was much hope.

"Well, can you just ask around a little and see what's what?" He wasn't pleading, but asking nicely.

"I’ll go see Cindy and see 'what’s what'. But don't get your hopes up. What was she doing for you in Ukiah when she hooked up with these weirdoes?"

"Offing some grass for me." The hippie drug dealer's chick gets religion.

" 'Frailty thy name is woman'."

Steve must have achieved a certain level of tranquilization from the tequila and grass, because he just shook his head and sighed. He was never one to bemoan his fate for long.

"Look, it's not like I'm happy to lose that money, but what can I do? I've got some partners and we're going to do a major grow this year."

I knew this was coming. After the Haight-Ashbury funeral in ‘67, there had been a steady migration of counterculture types to the region just north of San Francisco. Mendocino and southern Humboldt counties were perfect for their ‘back to nature‘, Whole Earth Catalog ways of thinking: sparsely populated, no industry, no real commercial value to the land. At first, the ranchers and lumbermen were thrilled to unload basically worthless land onto these naive idealists. But soon, when the influx became a tidal wave, there was friction.

As hordes of unemployed long-hairs arrived and found few career opportunities waiting for them in the fishing, ranching and lumbering industries, they realized that they had the ability to raise impressive amounts of cash by doing what they were inclined to do anyway: grow dope. They could get the maximum reward with the minimum effort.

Nixon's War on Drugs was having some success, in a perverse way. The billions being spent on interdicting marijuana from Mexico and Asia had driven the price of marijuana from ten dollars an ounce in 1968 to around sixty an ounce now. Instead of trying to smuggle the stuff into the country--it’s bulky, smelly and hard to conceal--it was easier to load up the old VW Microbus and boogie on down to the city every once in while, or let your entrepreneurial friends drive up for a little visit in the country, taking back a supply for those still trapped in bourgeois urban America. The growers could pick up a few thousand cash to buy groceries, rolling papers and beer, put in wells and pipes, build their geodesic domes and buy their four-wheel drives.

"This year," Steve explained. "there are four of us and we're going to do it right. We've leased a big chunk of ground, seven hundred acres. It's got lots of water. Real rugged and hard to get to."

"What happened last year?" I had been able to trade some ill-gotten cocaine from an incident last year for my six month supply of smoke.

"Well, my patch at home was okay, but several people got ripped off. I had a big garden way off in the hills and it was cleaned out two days before I was going to harvest."

"What do you mean, 'ripped off'? The cops get it?"

"No, the cops are clueless. They only bust growers by accident, like when they go someplace and find the dope out in the open. It's locals. Some are hippies and some of the stuff is being stolen by the rednecks. They know what it's worth, too, you know."

"How much did people lose last year?"

"I don't know. A lot. What pisses me off is that they wait until it's almost ready, you know, so you put all that work in and then, bam, they swoop in a week or two before you're ready, chop it down and haul it away."

"Bummer."

"Tell me. The four of us figure that we lost a total of a hundred thousand among us."

"Are you serious?"

"As a heart attack."

That was a lot of grass. "Why don't you guys guard it?"

"Well, this year we might. But, you know, if the cops show up, you don't want to be there. If they find the plants, they just cut them down. They find you there--you're busted." Made sense to me.

"Well, let me know if there's anything I can do for you."

Steve nodded. "If you have any ideas on security, we could use some help."

We talked about the dope business for the rest of the evening. Steve explained how they picked the right site for the plants, where they would get plenty of sun, but not be too easy to find. They run hundreds of feet of plastic pipe from the water sources to each plant, or water them individually by hand. Each hole has to be dug and filled with compost and quality soil, fenced to keep the deer out of it (deer love marijuana), the plants fertilized and monitored regularly. Male plants are useless and removed when they showed their sex differentiation, thus about half the plants are destroyed.

The highest potency is realized by waiting until the female plants flower. The active ingredient, THC, is concentrated in the flower buds, so the plants were monitored daily at the crucial late-September, early-October period. The declining daylength triggers flowering. It’s a contest between maximum quality and not losing the crop to thieves or cops. It is a fact of life that the group most preyed upon by criminals are other criminals.

              Copyright© 2001 Content Factory

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Read Miles Archer's short story Nobody Gets Outta Here Alive

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