"Let them shoot me and put me out of my misery," he said to his sergeant when he hung up the vest. "I'd rather die once than every day from the heat."
From May until October life on patrol was a constant search for shade, and there wasn't much of it. A uniform would turn salt-white after four hours, and he'd be soaked from his armpits to his knees. He'd developed incurable jock itch, and to his astonishment, his leather gear had independent sweat rings. Well, if his leather was still alive and sweating, maybe he could survive too, Nelson thought, but he doubted it. The boredom would kill him if nothing else did.
When he'd first arrived at that south-end police department -he'd whiled away the hours cruising out onto the desert trying to spot guys stripping hot cars. That was when he'd found a bleached human skull that prompted a big police search in dune buggies. Nelson had hoped for headlines, except that the FBI spoiled his chance for glory when their lab report said that even though there's no statute of limitations on murder, a three-hundred-year-old skull made the case a tough one to solve.
About seventy thousand acres of the southern Coachella Valley-the irrigable parts-were used for crops. Palm trees were grown for landscaping the wealthy country clubs at the other end, but big money in the south end came from asparagus, lettuce, oranges, lemons, grapes, and ninety-five percent of America's dates. And from heroin.
Heroin was the drug of choice in the south end. The DEA estimated that seventy percent of California's cocaine came in through Mexico, and all of the "tar" heroin came from Mexico, a lot of it right there, only a few hours from Mexicali by car. Nelson Hareem's new backyard was an important distribution point for tar.
The tar, or goma, as the Mexicans called it, looked like brown window putty and smelled like vinegar. During recessionary times it cost about two hundred dollars a gram, which resembled a smashed raisin. Twenty dollars would buy one tenth of a gram wrapped in cellophane, covered with aluminum foil. The addict might get four hours of tolerable existence for twenty bucks, but then would need to slam more tar under his "trapdoor" scabs, so called because a convenient place to shoot was under the scab. The trapdoor hid the fresh needle marks from the cops.
Mexican brown and China white were almost never seen in the south end, only the tar, but there was lots and lots of tar. Hence, the south end was a dumping ground for dead human beings.
It was estimated that in those local desert towns there lived the highest concentration of parolees in the United States. Some had a need for speed, and did methamphetamine at a hundred bucks a gram, but heroin was king. The addicts were the kind who moved their lips when they read, but not when they talked. You couldn't understand a word they were saying, but outside of science institutes they were the only class of people in the continental U. S. who could think in grams and kilos.
The population always exploded down there during picking season and not just because of undocumented migrant workers from Mexico. Also in those fields were boat people from the Pacific rim, Laotians and Vietnamese mostly. Gambling squabbles were sometimes settled by machete and generally went unreported.
Local humor: Why does a migrant worker have a nose? So he has something to pick, off season.
The residents in Nelson Hareem's part of the world had to get by with swamp-coolers in summer, but one of the local drug dealers had proper air-conditioning. In fact, his house was fenced and gated, and he even had a swimming pool and spa. Nelson fantasized that he'd catch the guy doing a deal, and the young cop often tailed him when the dealer went to the saloon for a game of snooker, mingling with dogs and men who squatted out front by barred windows; their feet were white from the alkali that rose from the earth and produced a layer of crusty powder in that little bit of purgatory.
Nelson was dreaming of Palm Springs on the afternoon that Lynn Cutter was learning about Clive Devon from his new temporary boss, Breda Burrows.
That same afternoon a single-engine Cessna encountered mechanical trouble over the Anza Borrego mountain range, and the pilot of the plane decided to make an unscheduled stop at a small desert airport. It was one of the hottest spots in the nation, over a hundred feet below sea level. The airport had very little traffic, and absolutely nothing resembling a control tower. Pilots had to see and be seen. But the California Highway Patrol and the Riverside County Sheriff's Department kept a chopper and a fixed-wing aircraft at the airport. Often there'd be a cop, wearing an aviation jumpsuit with police insignia, hanging around the pilot's lounge.
The Cessna sputtered once on approach, but landed perfectly and taxied toward the hangar. A mechanic at the airport later told police that the pilot was a nice-looking blond guy in a designer bomber jacket, and that his passenger had spoken a few words of accented English.