Iron River

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Dear Mom & Dad,

  I hope this note finds you well. I’ve moved into my new home here and I like it. I can see all the way to Mexico if I look south. Buenavista is kind of pretty, though dusty and very hot. Some of it is a sleepy Western town, with a beautiful old church and stone streets in old town, and saloons and outdoor markets, but it has Rite Aid and Dairy Queen and a big new hospital, too. In the old square up on the hill, you can hitch a horse or park a Porsche, and you see plenty of each.

  Things have not gotten off to a good start. I don’t mean to worry you, but I promised to be truthful. My second day here, our task force unit killed two young men. On my fourth day, one of our task force agents was abducted on American soil and I fear that he has been executed but fear more if he has not. This has never been done before. Mom, Dad, there are headless bodies piling up all around Mexico, thirty-four in the last ten days. Nearly 6,000 people have lost their lives to the cartel wars this year alone and the year is far from over. Some are innocents—some are women and children. Things are unraveling here. It’s something larger than the guns and the murders and the mutilations. We’re losing the rules of human being. I feel like there’s a big storm coming, something terrible and cleansing. In some very mysterious way, I feel needed here. What this says about me I don’t know. But I do know I miss you. I hope this note helps in some small way to bridge the miles between us. Give my love to all my brothers and sisters.

  Love,

  Charlie

  Hood readied the envelope and put it in his pocket and slipped his jacket over his gun and drove into Buenavista. This late the town was quiet. Hood parked near the zocalo and walked past the church and the fountain and civic buildings to the post office and dropped the letter in the slot.

  He was surprised to find a postcard in his post office box, likely from his mother. It was a picture of Imperial Mercy Hospital taken on a clear day under blue skies. On the back was a brief paragraph about the state-of-the-art medical facility, and a handwritten note that appeared to be slowly and painfully accomplished:

  Dear Deputy Hood,

  We have some things to talk about. Mornings and nights are best. My daughter vanished six weeks and one day ago and my heart hurts much more than my body. Please come.

  Mike

  Hood pocketed the card and walked up the street where they had chased Tilley and Victor Davis, past the shops and the galleries and the market, all closed now. He stopped within the shadowed columns of the colonnade and looked at the Club Fandango, where a doorman stood outside with his arms crossed and his feet spread as if against a crowd of onrushers, but there was only a blond girl who looked too young to get in and the man was shaking his head no. Music pulsed faintly from inside, and the light behind the shaded windows randomly changed colors and depth.

  As Hood watched, three black Escalades rumbled up the stone street and came to a stop in the No Parking zone at the entrance. They were almost new and the windows were blacked out and the roof-tops bristled with antennae. California and Mexico plates, he saw, Sonora and Sinaloa. Two of the men who got out of the middle vehicle were young and black-haired and trimly dressed. The two others were older and larger and they dressed in looser clothes meant to conceal. There were two women, young and stylish, hair up and earrings dangling and high heels sounding on the street stones, and the trim men offered their arms to steady them for the walk to the door. A similar contingent exited the SUV farthest from the entrance, and Hood heard a quick shriek as one of the women stumbled and was caught by the other. Men commented and laughed. No one left the first vehicle.

  At the door, the young men had words with the doorman and the girl, then the doorman swung open a tall wooden door and the men went inside. Hood watched the girl say something to the doorman, then sling her bag over her shoulder and saunter to the nearest Suburban. Her hair flashed golden in the light of the streetlamp. A back door opened and an arm came from the black interior and helped the girl climb inside. Hood stood unmoving for half an hour and watched, though he didn’t know for what. Then he walked back to his Camaro and drove home.

  9

  Mike Finnegan sat nearly upright in his ICU bed. Hood saw the twinkle of his eyes deep in the gauze. His TV was tuned to the morning news, where a meteorologist called for very warm weather in Imperial Valley, midnineties and humid with subtropical moisture.

  “Why won’t he use the word hot?” asked Finnegan. His voice came tightly from within his wired jaws. “Ninety-five is not very warm. It is hot.”

  “The power of suggestion.”

  “Yes, weathermen come to believe they influence the weather, like craps players with dice or you policemen with crime rates. Her name is Owens and she’s twenty-one. Five seven, one fifteen, brown and gray. She didn’t get my cramped little body and brain. She’s beautiful and smart. Her mother died six years ago. A heart attack.”

  “Did Owens run away?”

  “Vanished. She didn’t run away. She didn’t pack anything. She had just finished her junior year of college with a GPA of 4.25. She was working part-time at a bedroom store and volunteering at a Skid Row soup kitchen in L.A. on Saturdays. When she disappeared, it made the local papers. I filed all the proper police reports.”

  “Was she living with you?”

  “She had an apartment in Glendale.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “No. Some casual male friends. Nice young boys.”

  “You’ve talked to them?”

  “Absolutely. No calls. No ransom demand. No contact whatsoever. . . . I read about the mishap in Buenavista. Two days after you get here, boom—the body count jumps by two. Gustavo Armenta? I shuddered when I read his name in the paper, then I thought, no, certainly he can’t be related to Benjamin of Gulf Cartel fame. But then again, he certainly could be.”

  Hood considered Finnegan. The patient in the next bed lay intubated and unconscious. The other bed in the three-bed pod was empty. Hood used the remote and turned up the volume on the news a little.

  “Why would you shudder?”

  “In anticipation of vengeance.”

  “Gustavo was his son.”

  “Amazing how little we know of the Zetas.”

  “What do you know of them?”

  “Only what I read. Paramilitary. Magnificently armed. Lavishly cruel. Heads over here, bodies over there. I wonder what they dream about. I’d sure keep a weather eye for myself and my task force brethren, too. Benjamin’s honor will demand vengeance for his son. Blowdown. I like the name.”

  Hood listened to Finnegan’s clear and sometimes animated voice. He liked pronouncing words. Hood studied the bedside cart. On the top shelf were three good stacks of hardcover books—history, biography, current events, science and technology, Dog Cartoons, and a novel that Hood was pretty sure had won a big literary prize last year. The second shelf of the cart and the bottom were filled with neat piles of newspapers. One pile was the New York Times, the other the Los Angeles Times, the third stack the Imperial Valley Press.

  “Do you know how tiring it is to hold a hardcover book in one hand, up high enough to read because you can’t raise or lower your head? Then move the book back and forth to read the lines because you can’t move your head back and forth? Then set it down and struggle just to turn a page, then lift it back up? I do not recommend it, deputy.”

  “What are you doing down here in the desert if Owens went missing in Los Angeles?”

  “She called me five nights ago. She was sobbing. She said she was sorry for putting me through this. I only demanded one thing—an address. It’s just inside the Secret Wars of the CIA volume on top there. Get it.”

  Hood moved around the bed to the cart and lifted the cover of the book. The address was written on a Hamburger Hamlet bar napkin: 181 Skylar Road, El Centro.

  “And you were on your way there from L.A. when the tire on your pickup truck blew?”

  “Exactly. Go to that address. Tell her what happened to me. Tell her she is loved beyond
her wildest dreams. Beyond them. Don’t try to get her to come here. She will not do anything unless she wants to. She’s always had a mind one hundred percent her own.”

  Hood took the napkin and slid it into his coat pocket. “Why do you care what the Zetas dream about?”

  “In dreams, men are uncontested. They’re free. A man alone with his soul is pure man. Oh, very revealing what he dreams. Human nature on display. Did you dream last night?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  Finnegan chuckled softly. “They say that both God and the devil can place dreams within a sleeping human. They say it is done less often than you would think. It’s risky because they don’t know how a man will react to it. A dream can be rejected, like an organ. Somewhat prosaically, they call a dream placed within a sleeping human, well, a placement.”

  “Who calls it that?”

  Finnegan lifted his right hand, indicating the book cart. “Oh, some writer in some book in some century in some language. It’s impossible to keep everything straight anymore. It’s all just conjecture, isn’t it? No man has seen God. No man has seen Lucifer. No man that I’ve ever talked to! It’s just a useful way of looking at the world. And seeing into it.”

  Hood wondered if this was Finnegan’s brain damage showing through. It was surprising how lucid and even humorous the little man was, given the severity of his injuries. Hood’s sister had suffered a brain tumor as a teenager, and the first hint that she was afflicted were meandering, dislocated, illogical ruminations on her faith and religion. They happened with growing regularity. Then she had a seizure and they scanned her brain, and the surgery was done, and his sister never warbled on about God and his angels after that.

  “How did you get my name and address?” he asked.

  “I told you. Coleman Draper.”

  “When? How did you know him?”

  “Last winter. He worked on my car.”

  Hood had investigated Draper, a reserve sheriff’s deputy, for Internal Affairs, and discovered that the man had done some remarkably terrible things using his reservist’s uniform, gun, and shield. Draper had owned a thriving German auto repair shop in Venice Beach.

  “He told me of his association with the sheriffs. I told him that my daughter had disappeared. This was the first time Owens had done this, and I had reason to believe she was in Antelope Valley. He gave me your name as a contact at the LASD substation in Lancaster. He spoke highly of you.”

  “But Draper died sixteen months ago. He couldn’t have given you my new address.”

  “No. I cajoled it out of a friend at the USPS. I have my contacts, deputy, just like you have yours.”

  “What do you do for a living, Finnegan?”

  “Bathroom products, wholesale. It’s not as exciting as it sounds.”

  “Which manufacturer?”

  “Most of them. I’m a broker.”

  “What’s the name of your company?”

  “Just Mike Finnegan Bath. I’m known. Bathroom products is a small world once you’ve been in it for a while. I’m in several Los Angeles Yellow Pages if that impresses you. So, has Benjamin Armenta demonstrated his displeasure with the Blowdown team?”

  “Do you know Armenta?”

  “We’ve never met.”

  “That’s not your business, what happens with Blowdown.”

  “No. My business is Mike Finnegan Bath.”

  “And that’s how you earned the ninety grand in the toolbox in your truck?”

  “That’s how.”

  Hood said nothing for a long moment. He saw a momentary blackness within the gauze before the reappearance of the twin glimmers.

  “Much can happen in a blink, can’t it, deputy?”

  “So, Owens vanishes with regularity?”

  “This is the second time.”

  Hood looked at motionless Finnegan, listened to the TV news and the hum of the ICU and the voices coming from the nurses’ station just outside the pod. He felt someone behind him and turned.

  “Dr. Petty,” said Finnegan. “You melt my plaster in that trim white doctor’s coat.”

  “You have too many broken bones to be flirting with me. Good morning, deputy.”

  “Doctor.” Hood watched Beth Petty scan the bedside chart.

  “I’ve managed to offend you again, Dr. Petty,” said Finnegan. “I apologize.”

  “No offense taken, Mike. I enjoy flattery, even if it’s from a bandaged-up little man whose face I can’t see. Okay, as of one hour ago, you’ve got the resting pulse of a Golden Gloves boxer and the blood pressure of a healthy twenty-year-old. How do you do it?”

  “Now who’s flattering?”

  Petty looked from the chart to Hood. She was almost his height and her dirty-blond hair was clipped back and her eyes were brown. “Deputy, I’ll be two minutes here. Can you wait for me in the hallway outside the unit?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Finnegan cleared his throat. “Thank you for talking to Owens, Deputy Hood. I think you know how important it is.” Hood waited in the hall. Two uniformed U.S. marshals stood outside a room and gave him a hard look.

  In the cafeteria, Hood and Petty got coffee and sat across from each other in plastic chairs at a small table by a window. The window was covered with sunscreen peeling at the edges. Two more marshals and two other men wearing suits and ear sets with speaker wires came in behind them and went straight to the coffee dispensers.

  “So you don’t know Finnegan?” she asked.

  Hood shook his head. “He claims to have known a man I used to work with.”

  She looked at him, and Hood wondered what Finnegan had told her about Draper and Draper’s death.

  “He claims to have known Wyatt Earp, too,” she said. “Claims to have had drinks with him in San Diego. Earp ran a saloon with a prostitute named Ida Bailey, says Mike. I checked it out and it’s true. At least according to Wikipedia, it’s true. Anyway, I talked to Gabe Reyes and he’s found out not much at all about Mike Finnegan. Gabe ran his name and numbers through Tucson, Sacramento, and the FBI and they don’t have anything criminal on him. He’s never been fingerprinted. No social security number. No birth record or education records. All he really had was a California driver’s license and a home address in L.A. Sacramento told Gabe that the license was genuine and current. And I’m sure you know that Mike had ninety thousand dollars in a toolbox in his pickup truck.”

  “How long can you keep him here?” asked Hood.

  “As long as he can pay. I’m not supposed to know or tell you this, but his ninety grand is now down to thirty-five. It’ll last about three more weeks if he doesn’t require more surgery or exotic tests. Then he either comes up with more money or insurance or we transfer him over to rehab for a month on the county. At the rate he’s going, he’ll be ready for rehab in three weeks. He’s tough as leather. I was doing an ER shift when they brought him in that morning. I stabilized him and assisted the surgeons who set the broken legs and arm, wired the jaw, and repositioned the cheekbones. We fitted him with the cranial rods and collar because two neck vertebrae showed fractures. We didn’t do anything with his broken ribs—four fractures, thank goodness. The big worry was his skull—two fractures, deep and long on the X-rays. We peeled a portion of his scalp and stapled his skull, loosely. There has to be some give if the edema gets bad. We loaded him with antibiotics and steroids, and so far, no infection and no swelling. Well, very little swelling. That man was busted up something bad, deputy. I didn’t expect to hear a peep out of him for three or four days, and now, well, you’ve seen him in action. He rarely sleeps. If someone is in the room and conscious, he talks to them. If not, he reads. Those are all library books you saw in there. He talked two day nurses into making a run for him, gave them a list of books he wanted. He offered them each a hundred dollars for their time, but they didn’t take it. He keeps telling me how hungry he is, wants us to cut his jaws free so he can eat. He’s slurping down the liquid diet like you wouldn’t believe.”
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  Hood tried adding up all of this but couldn’t even get ballpark. “Oh,” said Beth Petty. “There was a bullet lodged in his face, behind the left cheekbone, below the eye. It looked like it had been in there quite a while. We cut it out. I gave it to Gabe Reyes.”

  “Small caliber, large?”

  “You really are a cop, aren’t you? Can’t a bullet in a man’s face just be a bullet?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. My father was a cop. He . . .”

  Hood waited for elaboration but got none. “Where?”

  “San Diego.”

  He nodded and looked at the doctor, then out the window. The morning was bright, and still early enough for shadows. On the patio outside were tables with built-in metal umbrellas, but the only diners were blackbirds pecking at a syrup tub on an abandoned breakfast plate.

  “Why all the uniforms here?” asked Hood.

  “To protect bad guys from other bad guys. The uniforms are federal and so are the suits. The bad guys are cartel heavies. There’s a deal between the U.S. and the Mexican governments. We treat their VIPs because the Mexican hospitals don’t have the facilities. We do level one trauma here, the only hospital for a hundred miles. It’s hugely profitable for us, I hear. But there’s a lot of security involved. There was an incident.”

  “Incident?”

  “A man with a gun, a criminal record, and a cartel affiliation. There was a rival cartel captain up in the ICU where Mike is now. No shots fired—security did its job. You probably didn’t hear anything. Imperial Mercy does a good job of keeping things upbeat and quiet. We have a PR staff for that, actually. And of course the feds don’t say much to anybody but each other. There’s talk of new security here—scanners and wands, like an airport.”