Humboldt by Emily Brady Page A

the Missing Person posters plastered all over town. A two-day search of the area was conducted by boat and helicopter, but Robert Firestone was never seen again. On this day, however, he raised his arm and waved.
    Next, Bob began to drive around the town’s motels, or “drug fronts,” as he called them. There were four he normally patrolled, including his favorite, Johnston’s Quality Motel, which seemed most popular with the meth freaks.
    Johnston’s Quality Motel was located behind the Getti Up drive-through coffee shack, where girls in low-cut tops served drinks to go. The motel was painted a faded cotton candy pink, and even in the light of day it exuded an ominous vibe, like some kind of backwoods Bates Motel. As Bob pulled past the entrance at a crawl, he greeted the motel manager, a small South Asian man who was standing outside.
    â€œNamaste!” Bob chirped.
    His cruiser crawled along the front of the train-car-shaped building, past doors to rooms where he had made too many arrests to count—for dope, heroin, and meth. Bob shook his head and repeated the name of the hotel over and over again, placing special emphasis on the ill-fitting adjective.
    â€œJohnston’s Quality Motel. Johnston’s Q-u-a-l-i-t-y Motel.”
    From the motel parking lot, Bob spied a woman he knew. She was in front of the Shell gas station across the street, scratching a lottery ticket next to the entrance to the station’s mini-mart. Like a child who didn’t want to be seen, she turned when Bob pulled up alongside her, facing the wall as if she were hiding.
    â€œWhere’s your paint gun, Barbara?” Bob asked.
    â€œYou took it away from me,” she snapped. “Leave me alone.”
    Barbara was missing most of her teeth, and her face was covered in the kind of scabs that indicate heavy methamphetamine use. A couple of miles away, a minivan was covered with splotches of paint. It belonged to Barbara’s daughter. Bob had taken away Barbara’s paint gun after she shot up her daughter’s van.
    â€œWhat a freak,” Bob said as he pulled away and headed past the limestone bluffs and the Eel River and toward Redway.
    The area Bob covered was around 1,200 square miles and, as he saw, it, severely underserved. Sometimes he’d be the only person on call in all of Southern Humboldt. He had no idea how many people lived there; no one seemed to. There were only 135,000 people in the entire county, and most of them lived up north, around the cities of Eureka and Arcata. Some estimated that the population of Southern Humboldt was around 15,000 to 20,000, but there was no good official number, given that many people who lived there weren’t the type who would respond to a census.
    Bob kept track by the communities he patrolled. He carried a slip of weathered yellow paper tucked in his car visor on which he’d composed a list of the various towns and hamlets; some were official settlements, some were not. There were twenty-nine in all: Pepperwood, Redcrest, Holmes Flat, Weott, Myers Flat, Miranda, Phillipsville, Garberville, Redway, Briceland, Whitethorn, Ettersburg, Honeydew, Petrolia, Alderpoint, Harris, New Harris, Shelter Cove, Benbow, Blocksburg, French Camp, Capetown, Bear River, McCann, Eel Rock, Fort Seward, Shively, Ocean House, and Island Mountain, a remote place known to growers as the geographic center of the Emerald Triangle.
    On Sunset Avenue in Redway, Bob pulled his car over in front of a house surrounded by a high fence. Many of the houses in Redway had exceedingly tall, fortress-like fences. Bob had been to this house before, and knew that, come fall, pot plants ten feet tall would poke above the top of the fence. The people who lived in the house sold their pot to a collective, which would distribute or sell it to its members on a nonprofit basis, according to state law. Last year, Bob knocked on the door and informed the people living there that they