“You were offered the opportunity to call your lawyer three times earlier today, Mister O’Connell. On those occasions you stated for the record in front of several witnesses that you did not wish to avail yourself of counsel.”
Reggie O’Connell did not remember that; which meant nothing. He must have really tied one on last night, sometimes the booze only caught up with a man later.
“Yeah, well,” he retorted, “I want to talk to my attorney now!”
The man in the front seat had already turned away.
At a time like this most men would — naturally — begin to ask themselves what had gone wrong. Captain Reginald Francis O’Connell of the LAPD was not ‘most’ men, leastways he had always considered himself to have been cut from a different, superior fabric from ‘most’ men. His contemplation did not linger on his mistakes, misjudgements, his greed or his scorn for the laws that regulated everybody else’s lives; no, his thoughts focused immediately on the thorny question of exactly who had betrayed him.
In retrospect he had been, albeit mildly, a little thoughtful about letting those fucking bikers torch The Troubadour. However, the money had been okay and he had been tickled to have an excuse to turn over Sabrina Henschal’s little beatnik commune in Laurel Canyon. That woman’s friends at the Los Angeles Times had been sniping at him off and on for a couple of years and the bitch had had it coming to her. At the time he had wondered what the connection between Gretsky’s, Sabrina Henschal’s hideaway in the hills and The Troubadour was but he had not been interested enough to ask. That was careless, his people ought to have warned him.
People had been killed in the fire. Not anybody important and anyway, both the bikers responsible were dead. One had died in the back lot of the club, the other had got into a fight with the wrong people in the holding pen at Irvine. His people said they had made the necessary arrangements to deal with the Brenckmann kid. He should have supervised things personally, especially when he discovered that his people had ‘mislaid’ Doug Weston, the owner of The Troubadour. If Brenckmann or Weston ever got to court a half-way competent Defense attorney was going to make his people and by reflection, him, look stupid.
O’Connell told himself that but for the outbreak of a civil war in Washington DC — and the temporary declaration of a state of emergency — The Troubadour deal would have gone down without a hitch. How was he supposed to know that even before the flames had died down at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard that his station would be crawling with carbine-toting National Guardsmen?
“Where the fuck are we going?” He asked again as the car turned onto Sunset Boulevard.
The driver guffawed.
“San Francisco. The DA’s office has transferred your case to the Attorney General’s Department.”
Reggie O’Connell slumped back in the seat.
He felt like somebody had just kicked him in the groin; for a moment he was afraid he was going to throw up.
While he had been in Los Angeles he had been among friends, people he could buy. Up in the Bay Area he would be beyond all help.
Condemned, in fact.
Chapter 52
Dwight Christie drove south from the city of Houston through an increasingly wrecked urban landscape until he came to ground where no building stood, only ruins. And then he drove farther south into the dead zone. Even though he had been forewarned he was astonished to discover, here and there along the road several houses had been rebuilt since his last visit and verdant green new growth sprouted everywhere across the apparently endless sea of destruction, nurtured on the potassium rich ashes of the former city. As he drove he wondered idly if the devastated cities of Europe and Russia were ‘greening’ over now; if nature was everywhere reclaiming the wastelands uncaring of the radiation or the detritus left over from the war?
Texas Avenue and most of the side streets had been cleared, and great mounds of bulldozed rubble and spoil were heaped on deserted lots. Perhaps, the most disarming aspect of the drive was being able to see clearly for miles in practically every direction when one knew one was driving through what had been a thriving town until that awful day fifteen months ago. He had been told some of the docks had been re-opened and seen trucks rumbled up Interstate 45 towards Houston; in the port the masts of big steamers poked up through the haze.
Big tankers still came into Galveston Bay but not to feed the pre-October War refineries along the foreshore. The refineries and oil storage facilities upon which the wealth and prosperity of Texas City had depended had burned for several weeks after the war. Now the tankers moored out in the bay well clear of the gutted carcasses of the ships trapped inshore by the bomb which had extinguished human existence on Galveston Island and Texas City in the blink of an eye. New long jetties had been built to enable tankers to pump their cargoes directly ashore, into giant new storage tanks or directly through the rebuilt pipelines to the surviving refineries to the north. Tens of thousands had died in this place but the wheels of commerce still turned with ferocious energy.
Tragedy and regeneration had happened before in this place and perhaps, some day Texas City would rise again from the ashes.
In April 1947 Texas City had suffered the worst industrial disaster in American history; but that anybody would want to come back to this blighted place after what had befallen it on 27th October 1962 was beyond Dwight Christie’s understanding. However, if recent events had taught him anything it was that the American soul was nothing if not resilient and in a baffling way, grudgingly optimistic.
Of course the ‘disaster’ of 1947 was as nothing to what had happened here fifteen months ago. Notwithstanding, in its aftermath the city had come to refer to itself as ‘the town that would not die’.
In 1947 a ship loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the French merchantman Grandcamp, had blown up and set in motion a catastrophic chain reaction. The initial explosion had destroyed the adjacent Monsanto office block and its surrounding warehouses and set fire to a second ship, the SS High Flyer, also loaded with ammonium nitrate. The High Flyer, literally blown off its moorings had collided with another ship, the SS Wilson B. Keene — as chance would have it, like the High Flyer and the Grandcamp loaded with ammonium nitrate — and inevitably there was a second and a third devastating explosion. Oil refineries on the foreshore ignited in sympathy, whole neighbourhoods of Texas City were razed to the ground. The force of the first blast was so big that the anchor of the Grandcamp was later discovered several miles away at the Pan American refinery. Nearly six hundred people had been killed and over five thousand injured, the bodies of sixty-three of the dead were never recovered and the entire City and Port fire departments were wiped out in the disaster. In the following years the wrecks had been cleared from the docks, the port reconstructed and the shattered refineries restored.
All that had been comprehensively swept away fifteen months ago; Christie had no trouble finding the Cheney family compound.
Four freshly constructed wooden huts with half-a-dozen vehicles including a big flatbed truck parked up like wagons around a nineteenth century settler camp in Indian territory. Wispy grey smoke rose in the unusually still evening air as Christie’s rattling old Dodge creaked and squealed to a halt outside the encampment.