Where the hell is he going? Boone wonders. Boone drops back a ways because the traffic has thinned out so much.
Then Teddy takes a right and heads inland.
What the hell? Boone thinks.
There's not much out here now. It's one of the few even semi-rural spaces left in metro San Diego County, out here by the old Sakagawa strawberry fields.
47
They cling to the landscape, these pieces of old farms.
They dot the local map like small, shrinking atolls in a roiling sea of real estate development.
In housing-hungry San Diego, buildings are going up everywhere. Housing developments, condo complexes, and high-rise apartment buildings are taking the place of the old fields of flowers, tomatoes, and strawberries. With the residential developments come the strip malls, the high-end shopping complexes, the Starbucks, Java Juices, and Rubio's, the Vons, Albertsons, and Stater Bros.
Once a steady but slow tide, the building boom became a tsunami flooding the little islands of agricultural land. They're still there, but harder to find, especially this close to the coast. Farther inland along Highway 76 are the avocado orchards of Fallbrook, then the vast orange groves among the hillsides and canyons. Farther south, in the flatlands of Carmel Valley and Rancho Peсasquitos, small fields fight a slow, losing war against development, surrounded now by new million-dollar “spec” homes built on the plateaus between the wooded canyons where the illegal workers live in camps of jerry-rigged tents and tin-roofed shacks.
Up here in Oceanside, along the banks of the San Luis River, some of the old strawberry fields stubbornly hold out. Drought, insect infestations, depression, racism, voracious development-it doesn't matter, the farmers hang on. They could easily sell the land for far more than they make farming it, but that doesn't matter, either.
It's a way of life.
Not that you could find a single Japanese-American, a Nisei, actually working these strawberry fields. They're two generations removed from that, the kids and grandkids having moved into the city and the suburbs, where they're now doctors, lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs, and even cops.
The old man who owns these particular fields wouldn't have had it any other way. Upward mobility was always the idea, and now a different generation of immigrants, field hands from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador work his fields, and the kids come to visit for an “afternoon in the country.”
Old man Sakagawa loves seeing his great-grandchildren. He knows that he'll be leaving this world soon, and he knows that when he passes, this world, these fields, this way of life will pass with him. It makes him sad, but he also believes what the Buddha said, that the only constant is change.
But it does make him wistful, that the Sakagawa fields will fade like morning mist under a blazing dawn.
Now Boone follows Teddy east along North River Road, past a gas station and a food mart, then past an old church, and then…
Son of a bitch, Boone thinks.
Fucked-up, lovesick Mick Penner was right.
The motel is one of those old 1940s places with an office and a line of little cottages in the back. Someone has tried to freshen the place up-the cottages have recently been painted a bright canary yellow, with royal blue trim-one of those attempts to make it so retro that it's hip.
Teddy pulls into the gravel parking lot and gets out. He doesn't stop at the office but goes right toward the third cottage, like he knows just where he's going.
“We got her,” Boone says.
“You think so?”
“Yeah, I do.”
He pulls into the parking lot and parks on the other end from Teddy's car. “You have your subpoena?”
“Of course.”
“Then let's deliver it,” Boone says.
Then I'll call Johnny Banzai and let him know that we have a potentially important witness for him in his fresh murder case. Then I'll go home, catch some sleep, and be fresh and ready when the big waves hit.
He's thinking these happy thoughts when Teddy suddenly walks back from the cabin, carrying a small black bag. He walks right past his car; then he crosses the road and walks up about fifty yards to a thick bed of reeds that stands between the San Luis River and the western edge of the old Sakagawa fields.
“What's he doing?” Petra asks.
“I don't know,” Boone says. He reaches behind and grabs a pair of binoculars and trains them on Teddy as the doctor walks to the edge of the reeds.
Teddy looks around, then steps into the reeds. Inside of two seconds, he disappears from sight.
Boone sets the binoculars down and jumps out of the van.
“Go look in the cabin, see if she's there,” he says to Petra, and then he crosses the road and jogs down to the edge of the reeds. Foot traffic has trampled down the front edge of the reed bed, and narrow paths cut into the standing reeds like tunnels. Soda cans, beer bottles, and fast-food wrappers lie among small white plastic garbage bags. Boone picks up one of the bags, unties the top, and then gags, fighting back the vomit.
The bag is full of used condoms.
He drops the bag and steps into one of the tunnels that lead through the reeds. It's like being in another world-dark, narrow, and claustrophobic. The late-afternoon sunlight barely penetrates the tall reeds, and Boone can't see five feet in front of him.
So he doesn't see the shotgun.
48
The curtains on the cabin windows are open, and Petra can see into the small front room, which has a sofa, a couple of chairs, a kitchenette area and a table.
But no Tammy.
Petra walks around to the side, where another window offers a view of the small bedroom, where there is likewise no Tammy.
Maybe she's in the bathroom, Petra thinks.
She walks around to that side, puts her head against the thin wall, and listens. No sound of running water. She waits for a minute, hoping to hear the toilet flush, or the taps running, or anything, but it's perfectly still.
For one of the few times in her life, Petra doesn't know what to do. Should she wait here, in case Tammy is inside? Should she go back to the van and wait, in case Tammy just hasn't shown up yet but is on her way?
And how does she know it's even going to be Tammy, and not some other bimbo that Teddy is shagging in his Bang for Boobs program. And where was Teddy going? What could he possibly be doing in a bed of reeds, looking for the baby Moses, for God's sake? And what, if anything, has Boone found? Should I follow him? she wonders.
She decides to go back to the van and wait.
Except waiting isn't her best thing.
She gives it a shot, she does, but it isn't going to happen. What she really wants to do is go see what Boone is finding out. She makes it about three minutes, then bails.
49
