Iron River

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Hood rested on his elbows and felt the gravel trying to get him through the blanket. Ozburn had told him that gun buys could go from boring to violent in the blink of an eye, so Hood wanted an edge but not too much of one. Weapons freebooters like Tilley were generally considered higher risk than drug runners—unpredictable, amply armed, often skilled in the use of their products. This was their first buy from him.

  Hood panned the camcorder from the peak of the Guns a Million roof. He saw the tow truck with the blackout windows that housed Agent Bly, parked on a diagonal across three spaces in the far corner of the back lot, closer to a Dairy Queen than to the gun store. It had the look of an operator on a dinner run.

  Then he saw the Dumpster that was temporary home to the unlucky Jimmy Holdstock. It stood behind the store near the two real trash bins. Known as Hell on Wheels, it was clean and outfitted with holes for ventilation, vision, and taping, and with padding to dampen sound. But the holes were no match for the border heat. Young Holdstock had gotten the Hell on Wheels gig by losing a game of butts ’n barrels to Janet Bly. The game was like spin the bottle but played with a handgun. A small parabolic mike fed into a recorder that sat on the padded floor, and the concave receiver dish just barely cleared the top through a cutaway. The plastic lid had been drilled with a three-quarter-inch bit and had padding at the contact points to muffle the exit if Holdstock threw open the lid and charged. These modifications had been done over beers and a boom box in Holdstock’s El Centro garage while Jimmy’s daughters splashed in the yard pool and his wife, Jenny, kept an eye on both activities. For transport, the Dumpster fit nicely onto Bly’s tow truck.

  Tilley came in ten minutes later, cruised the lot in his blue Trooper, stopped beside the tow truck and hit it with a mounted handheld searchlight. Hood tracked the bright circle as it moved across the cab window, then stopped on the windshield. Then the beam raked the back end of the DQ, turned to the Guns a Million, and came up the roof at Hood. He flattened and wriggled down a couple of feet, almost dropping the camcorder. His sidearm dug into his ribs, but the blanket saved his cheek from the gravel. When he crept to the peak again, the Trooper was pulling in slowly beside Sean Ozburn’s van and he zoomed in to get a good shot of Tilley as he stepped out.

  Tilley was squat and muscular, with a black T-shirt and an Orioles baseball cap. Hood guessed late thirties. He had a wallet chain and a knife on his belt, and biker’s boots with brass rings on the sides.

  Hood could hear his voice as he approached Ozburn, but the words weren’t clear. Tilley looked pissed off. Ozburn was looking around like a hunted man. His eyes looked weirdly blue and murderous. Hood admired the acting.

  The two men made their way to the back of the Trooper, and Tilley swung open the back doors. The back of the vehicle had been outfitted with sliding wooden drawers. Tilley pulled one out and Hood saw the shotguns gleaming dully in the lot lights.

  Hood’s heart caught when a second man hopped out of the Trooper. He was slender and young and he wore a trim black suit, a white shirt, and a tie. Hood guessed the guy’s age at twenty-five. A damned suit in this heat, he thought. Buttoned.

  Ozburn got loud, lumbered over and gave him a shove. The young man backed up lightly and his suit coat fell open and his hand went inside. Hood heard Ozburn’s curses. Tilley stepped between them with his hands placating, and Ozburn pushed him, too. Then he turned and went back to the drawers of shotguns. He looked down at the guns, then up at the men, and he shook his head. Hood tried to read his lips through the camcorder. It looked like: Let’s do business, assholes.

  Enough, thought Hood. Close the deal. We’ve got audio and video, and Tilley is good for a bigger payday.

  Tilley slid the sawed-offs into an old duffel bag and carried them to the van. Ozburn stood by the open back door with the cigar in his mouth, watching the guns go in. While they worked, Tilley seemed to be telling Ozburn something long and detailed, a joke or a story maybe. Ozburn handed him a wad of money. Black Suit stood a few feet away, scanning the lot.

  Tilley went back to the Trooper and bagged up more product. Hood couldn’t make them out, but they were handguns. Tilley was still jabbering away, like the deal had suddenly become minor and what was really important was what he had to say. Hood guessed he was talking about the next deal. Good.

  Ozburn gave Tilley another wad of bills, then slammed the van doors shut. Tilley worked the money into his jeans pocket and walked back to the Trooper. The young man in the black suit closed the doors, and the three men stood facing each other in the poor light of the parking lot.

  Hood saw that all three men were more relaxed now. There was a postgame feel in their postures, and Ozburn seemed to be telling some tale of his own. He reached out and straightened the young man’s necktie.

  Then Black Suit stepped forward and pulled at something on the chest of Ozburn’s flannel shirt. Tit for tat, thought Hood. It looked like a button string unraveling.

  Then it caught the light and Hood realized what it was.

  Black Suit gave it a yank and the wire lengthened.

  Hood knew that this was where they either killed Ozburn or ran for it. They ran for it: Tilley barging through the hedge of spindly oleander and off into the darkness, and Black Suit right past the tow truck and into the DQ lot. Ozburn spat out his cigar and went after Tilley, and Hood slid down the back side of the Guns a Million rooftop, dangled from the service ladder, and dropped hard to the pavement.

  He followed Ozburn and Tilley. From the corner of his eye he saw Bly jump from the tow truck with her weapon drawn and Holdstock pinwheel over the top of the bin like a gymnast and run toward Bly.

  Hood left his weapon holstered, tucked his elbows in tight and made time. Past the oleander was one of the large vacant lots common to desert towns, vast, for sale, lumped with sage and cholla in the slight moonlight. Beyond the lot was a stout adobe wall and within the wall was old Buenavista—the town square, the bars and restaurants and the hotel. And beyond the heart of the city was the border fence.

  Big Ozburn plodded along a hundred yards ahead of Hood. Hood couldn’t see Tilley. When he pulled up even, Ozburn pointed and Hood saw Tilley another hundred yards ahead, coming up on the wall.

  A few seconds later Hood scrambled gracelessly over the rough adobe and plopped down into the town square. There were lanterns in the trees and a fountain gurgling and lovers walking and sitting on the benches, the women sleek and the white shirts of the men faintly luminescent. Through them barged Tilley, then he rounded the statue of Buenavista’s founder and turned up the street toward the restaurants.

  Hood gained. The street was narrow and steep and the desert cobblestones were uneven. He heard Ozburn huffing along behind him and he felt the sweat burning into his eyes. He saw the crowd breaking up ahead of him, parted by stout Tilley. Hood ran past an ice cream shop and a festively lit bar and a leather shop and a jewelry store, though he was barely aware of them.

  At the first intersection, Black Suit appeared from a side street and fell in next to Tilley. Both men looked back at Hood, and when he saw Black Suit reach inside his coat, Hood dove behind a decorative clay planter filled with succulents and yelled back at Ozburn to get down. A little bullet grazed the planter and ricocheted, buzzing like a fat hornet. A twenty-two, thought Hood. He heard a sharp crack, and another bullet took a chip off a paver and whined off into the darkness.

  Then there was silence, and Hood looked through the succulents and saw the empty street ahead. He drew his sidearm and came up running.

  Bly and Holdstock merged from the side street. Ozburn caught up with the other three, muttering curses, a big automatic in his hand. They followed the gunrunners through an outdoor marketplace that was shutting down, dodging stalls of Coachella Valley dates and Imperial Valley grapefruit. The shoppers were gone by now, but the vendors ducked quickly and efficiently because they had seen this kind of thing before. Up ahead, one of the bad guys upturned a table of cantaloupe, which rolled toward Hood,
but he long-jumped them and saw that he was catching up. The gunrunners took to the sidewalk that ran behind a colonnade of rounded arches facing the street. Hood heard music. Near the top of the gentle hill that Buenavista was built upon, the road ended in a large open square ringed by restaurants and bars. There were tables with white linen set up in the patios of the restaurants and there were horses tethered to hitching posts amidst the gleaming sports cars and SUVs and luxury sedans.

  As Hood entered the square the music was louder, a disco tune throbbing from Club Fandango at the far end. Ahead of him he watched Tilley and Black Suit shove through the small crowd waiting to get into the club. The revelers hustled away under the protective archway columns of the colonnade and the gunrunners disappeared inside.

  Hood figured they were headed out the back into an alley, so he ran left around the building. He saw Ozburn split off the other way, and Bly and Holdstock heading straight in.

  Behind the building was another dining patio, quieter here, tables lit by candlelight, and a fountain gurgling. Hood leaped the short adobe wall and waved his hand for the young couple to get up and out. They scrambled over the wall and headed off into the darkness.

  Then Hood was aware of two new things at once: Black Suit and Tilley heaving toward him through the open back doors of the building, and a young teenaged couple rising from their table in the private far corner of the patio. The boy held the girl’s hand in an elevated, courtly way. The girl looked frightened, but the boy looked cool. Hood waved them to his left and the boy nodded to him, steadying his date toward the short wall.

  Ozburn rounded the building just as Black Suit and Tilley burst onto the patio from inside, and Ozburn yelled, Drop the guns! Tilley dropped his weapon. Hood set Black Suit’s chest atop his front sight and waited for him to drop his pistol. Black Suit was deciding when three shots roared from inside and the young dealer collapsed in a dark heap.

  Tilley was jumping up and down, hands up: Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!

  Bly and Holdstock stumbled through the open doors and fell into shooter stances.

  In the abrupt silence, a girl screamed from the darkness beyond the wall.

  3

  So I’m sitting at my desk on the third floor of Pace Arms and studying the guy across from me. He says his name is Bradley Smith. He’s even younger than me, which pleases me because I think the young should grab what’s left of this world before the old piss away every last bit of it.

  “Your company is French?” I ask.

  “The management is French. I already told your secretary that.”

  “With how many armed employees?”

  “Two thousand.”

  “That’s a lot of armed guards.”

  “We’re international. I told your secretary that, too.”

  “Sharon relayed everything to me with perfect accuracy, Mr. Smith.”

  “She has nice paint, as the Mexicans like to say.”

  I smile at this. “No kidding. And she composes letters, figures out my calendar, and keeps the assholes out of here.”

  “Quite a woman.”

  “She’s engaged,” I say, wishing it were to me.

  “I am, too.”

  “Really? I wouldn’t mind that someday.”

  “What kind of thing is that to say? You get what you take, my man.”

  I nod and silently cede the point. I look out the window to the mild Orange County morning. The blinds and the glass are dirty because we quit paying the custodial contract ten months ago, not long after Pace Arms was sued into bankruptcy. But to the east I can still see the swirl of concrete where the 405 meets the 55, and the malls stretching into the distance, the mirrored corporate buildings, the Performing Arts Center and the evangelical Christian broadcasting compound. Uncle Chester showed me pictures of that land when it was still bean fields, and gave me a stern warning that laziness never turned a bean field into a shopping mall. I was six. And Chester said if I wanted my piece of the American dream someday, it was going to take energy, vision, balls. It would take Pace. He usually smiled after saying that, not a pleasant thing. He’s huge but his teeth are small and even, like infant teeth. Back then, Pace Arms was making 145,000 handguns a year, right here in Orange County, right here in this building. Hardly anybody knew what we did. The guns were semiautomatic, semidependable, and dirt cheap. The workingman’s equalizer was what Chet called them. Most everybody else called them Saturday Night Specials. Uncle Chester is a lecher and a bore, but he knew how to make a buck on cheap guns.

  “Okay, Bradley Smith,” I say. “Director of North American operations for Favier and Winling Security of Paris, France. You made this appointment. You were late. You tell me my secretary is stupid but hot. You tell me I’ll get what I take, my man. Maybe you should tell me something that might be worth my time, like, for instance, what do you want?”

  “Time? You’ve got time. You’re bankrupt. But maybe I can help you with something else.”

  “Help away.”

  Bradley gets up and goes to the dirty window and looks out. He’s wearing the five-hundred-dollar Jimmy Choo boots I tried on a few months ago but had to get less expensive ones. And pricey jeans and a white shirt that’s cleaned and pressed, and a leather vest. He’s got long dark hair and a goatee and something about him besides his attitude bothers me but I don’t know what.

  “You ought to get these windows cleaned.”

  “We fired the custodians.”

  “They fired you, actually, because you failed to pay them. Look, Ron, I did my due diligence on Pace Arms. I always liked your products. The twenty-five Hawk was decent, and the twenty-two LR was better. The nines weren’t bad, either. If you’d have gotten the design on the forty caliber right, your gun wouldn’t have killed the little boy, and Pace Arms would still be cranking out guns, money, and happiness. But . . . well, no need to rehash all that.”

  “No.”

  “So. In the course of my research, I reviewed the court transcripts and the financial declarations and the terms of the corporate dissolution. And I got out my trusty calculator and pushed a few keys, and guess what I saw.”

  “Numbers?”

  “Inventory still unsold.”

  I figured this was where Bradley Smith was going. “And you’re going to help me by taking it off my hands.”

  “Maybe I should know what it is.”

  “Maybe I should know what you want it to be.”

  “We’ve got two thousand men on the business end of things, all over the world. Some are in the most vile places on earth, some are in the most beautiful. Some in cities, some in mud. They go where they are needed. And what they all need is short-range stopping power, concealability, and one-hundred-percent reliability.”

  “That would be the Hawk nine. We have a few. Thirty or so.”

  “I need a thousand.”

  My heart does a quick little somersault. “That’s quite an order for a bankrupt company, Mr. Smith.”

  “And if the Hawk nines do what they’re supposed to do, we’d like to have all our people carrying them by the end of next year. So, a thousand more.”

  Now, I attended church this last Sunday. I’ll admit it was to meet available women in the singles ministry, but it was church nonetheless. Thank you, God in heaven is all I can think.

  I nod and push back in my rolling chair and glide across the carpet protector. “Come with me.”

  I raise my eyebrows at Sharon on the way to the elevator. She smiles at Bradley Smith in a way that she has never smiled at me. But I knew she would smile at Smith that way because Smith has the thing that most women can’t resist. The thing. I’ve been trying to develop it for my entire adult life but I can’t even define it, so there’s no place to start. I once reverse-engineered an Egyptian submachine gun, and it was easy compared to developing the thing. You can’t reverse-engineer what you can’t define. Maybe it’s his goatee. I don’t know.

  The elevator takes us down to the basement. The door opens
and it’s dark. The basement is almost wholly below ground level, so the only natural light slips in through the long narrow windowpanes up top. I step out and key on the lights. I light only the lobby and part of the third floor these days. No use wasting money. My secretary, Sharon of my heart—Sharon Rose Novak is her full name—is my last pretense at solvency. Last week she actually braced me for a raise to help her pay for her wedding, which is set for next month. I haven’t met the groom, though I dislike the way he talks to her on the phone. She’s normally talkative but during their calls there are long silences on her part, then short, quiet replies. He takes something out of her. They registered at Bloomingdale’s and I bought them all twelve of the requested service settings, a Wedgwood design that was not cheap. Maybe they’ll have me over for dinner someday. She’s a blue-eyed blonde and has the prettiest face I’ve ever seen.

  Anyway, I’ve spent almost all of what little money I had on keeping the doors open here at Pace Arms. Eighteen months ago when we correctly foresaw the courtroom mud bath, Chester got some building department friends to fast-track a city permit for a small penthouse up on the third floor, making the building a residence, which is outside the terms of the settlement. So I sold my home and bought the penthouse from Chet and I live here now. Chet holds the deed on the office footage. He left the country before the judgment and there have been only three postcards from him since—Thailand, Berlin, and Tahiti. They were addressed to “All” at Pace Arms. He took the last of the company cash with him, thirty grand. I pay his property taxes. Before leaving, he told me that any dreams of saving Pace would be foolish pride, but I still think there’s a way to salvage the business.

  And I think the way to salvage it is now standing right next to me.

  We pause in the basement vestibule for a moment. It used to be a waiting area for customers about to test-fire one product or another. Gone are the genuine 1878 walnut bar from a saloon in Bodie, the King Ranch furniture and the Remington bronzes and the framed Catlin lithos and the big-screen hi-def and the bear and bison mounts. Uncle Chet also made off with the proceeds from the sale of these beauties, approximately eighteen paltry grand. Now all we have here in the vestibule are cobwebs and daddy longlegs. The air is stale and warm.