Grgich stood panting, face flushed, hands up in a fighting stance. Then he let them down.
“Next.”
After the weaponless defense class, Grgich approached Bradley at the water dispenser.
“I was there when you met Coleman Draper. At the recruiting booth.”
“I remember.”
“When I saw your name on the trainee roster, I was surprised. I didn’t think a little shit dribble like you could make Explorer.”
“I’ll make Explorer.”
“I can’t believe they let you in.”
“They let you in.”
“You and Draper hit it off?”
“We had beers and that was it.”
“I’ll be watching you, Jones.”
Bradley dropped the paper cup into the trash and headed off for the firearms safety class.
The pretty trainee sat down next to him and introduced herself as Caroline Vega. Her handshake was firm. She was dark-haired and brown-eyed, and even in the unflattering Explorer uniform, she appeared to be built with strength and good form. She had had no trouble learning the wrist break. They watched the handgun demonstration, then shotguns, rifles, and pepper spray. Bradley day-dreamed about Erin. He felt a strong physical desire to be near enough to smell and hear and see her. The first time she had looked at him, Bradley felt like he had walked into a beautiful room. Three years now. They were children then. Erin was the only goodness in the world that interested him now that his mother was gone. He had large appetites for pleasure and for beautiful things, but what he wanted most was to be near Erin and to see her. Nothing else mattered that much. Bradley was not an introspective man, but it amused him to know that only one person on earth owned his heart and that if she were to leave him or vanish or die, he would become nothing more than a scourge upon the land.
“Why are you doing this?” asked Caroline. It was break time and they stood in the shade of an olive tree in a campus quadrangle.
“It might be a decent job someday. You?”
“I want a place to start. Base camp.”
“So you can what, boldly go where no woman has gone before, explore strange new worlds?”
She laughed, but Bradley could tell she felt belittled, which is what he had intended.
“I guess.”
“I know what you meant,” he said. “You meant there’s more to life than a cotton-poly uniform blouse and ten-hour shifts.”
She looked at him with a skeptical lift of an eyebrow. “I’m going to burn through L.A. one way or another. This is just the beginning. There’s money and pleasure and a thousand ways to get them. That’s what I’m doing here, looking for a way. And you want to know something else, Bradley Jones? I know you. I know who you are. Allison Murrieta had it right. And you’re doing the same thing here that I am. Good luck, hombre. By the way, I liked you better with long hair.”
She started across the quad.
“Wait.”
“I don’t wait,” she said over her shoulder.
He watched her walk back into the classroom. When he took his chair, he saw that she had moved to the back of the class. He turned and found her and nodded and she stared him down. She had scribbled a phone number on the cover of his LASD Explorer class syllabus.
For the rest of the firearms safety class and all the way through criminal law, police procedures, and community relations, he pictured Erin at different moments. He could remember the moments clearly, her clothes and her scent and the way she wore her lovely red hair, and he could rerun a particular smile or expression, and he could hear the sound of her clothes sliding off her skin and the sound of her voice onstage as she sang. And as he remembered these things, Bradley smiled inwardly at his outlandish luck. Thousands of young men had seen her perform, and half of them fell in love with her on sight. Bradley had fallen, at the Whiskey on Sunset, before the first song of her first set was over. On his third straight two-show night, he finally caught her eye and she had looked back wholly at him. He was sixteen with good fake ID and a solid vodka buzz on.
—When you look at me it’s like walking into a beautiful room. I’m Brad Jones.
—That’s a pretty thing to say.
—I’m short on words right now.
—I’m Erin McKenna.
—After the last set tonight, we need to talk.
—Oh do we need to, Brad Jones?
—Yes.
—What are you going to talk with if you’re short on words?
—I’ll find something.
She smiled and that was her first real smile only for him and that is what Bradley pictured as he listened to the last remarks about next Saturday’s training sessions. There were to be 184 hours of instruction over eighteen weeks.
Two weeks down, thought Bradley, and less than a million more to go.
Still in his Explorer uniform, Bradley slouched in a chair in the women’s shoe department at Nordstrom. He listened to the music and smelled the medley of perfumes and shoe leather wafting over, and stared at Erin. She was modeling stage boots. She wore a tan miniskirt and her legs were long and pale and the heels of the boots elongated them and coaxed the muscle beneath the skin. She passed so close, he could smell the lotion on her legs. He sighed.
“Too high a heel?”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Too rhinestony?”
“More the merrier.”
“Too something. These are too something.”
Erin strode away from him and left a soft feminine eddy of scent behind her. She pointed out three more pair, and the salesman carried the boxes back to the stock room.
“Four pairs and no dice,” she said. She stood in front of the floor mirror, turning her legs to it this way and that, examining them as if they were accessories and not a part of her.
“It’s impossible to watch you do this,” he said.
“Oh?”
“You know it’s impossible. That’s why you’re with me.”
He heaved up from the chair, went to the couture department and found three beautiful dresses in her size and carried them back to shoes and laid them over the seat beside him. He sat and watched her finger one.
“They’re beautiful. I know what you’re doing.”
“Yes, you do.”
She looked down at him and set her hand on the back of his neck as she flexed her legs again for the mirror. The current boots were black and lightly studded.
“Keepers,” said Bradley.
“I found these, too.” She knelt on both knees in front of him and pulled from a box a short red boot in faux crocodile with little chains for laces. She leaned in and set one hand on Bradley’s leg and held up the red boot with the other.
“It was made for you,” he said.
“I think so, too.”
She looked at the boot, then up at him. The most beautiful room in the world. Bradley felt the surge of emotion, stronger than adrenaline, stronger than violence, stronger than drugs or alcohol.
He took her hand and stood. “We’ll take these two pair,” he said to the salesman.
Erin took off the black boots and handed them to the clerk and followed Bradley to the fitting rooms in couture. He held out the three hangers with the expensive dresses as if bearing a flag or the colors of some exotic authority. He nodded crisply to the couture saleswoman and stood aside to allow Erin to enter first the hallway of fitting rooms. The door to room seven squeaked as Erin pushed through. Bradley hung the dresses on the wall hook, then closed the door and slid the lock. Erin turned his head hard with both hands and rose on her toes to lock her mouth to his.
An hour later, Bradley sat in Rocky Carrasco’s new lair in El Monte. Rocky was Herredia’s California distribution chief, a second-generation Eme captain, compact and knotted with muscle, and covered head to toe in tattoos. He had bullet scars on his arms, and knife scars on his stomach, and a twinkle in his eyes.
“El Tigre will be happy,” he said. “I’m always happy to make money. How about you
, Bradley? Are you happy?”
“Fully satisfied and happy.”
“You’ll make a good husband.”
Bradley studied the illustrated Rocky. There were numbers and letters and an Aztec warrior and a sacrificial maiden and a dripping heart between two hands and knives and the sun, all in color. The chain links around his biceps were etched in rough black, prison-style, and Bradley figured were probably the first tattoos Rocky ever got.
“Did you ever think that you put too much faith in one thing?” asked Bradley.
“You mean like Jesus or money?”
“In a person.”
“Like a brother, man?”
“Like a woman.”
“A woman? Sure, when I was your age. A young man needs to believe. He needs to worship with all of his big heart and small brain. So he dies for love or for his god and country. But can all love and all gods and countries be worth dying for? No. Then you get older and you become disappointed. In her. In yourself. The Mexicans have a saying—it’s not what a woman is worth, it’s what she costs.”
“I don’t understand that. It sounds clever, but I don’t know what it means.”
“It means that you will pay a price for your lovely red-haired tesoro.”
“I believe she really is a treasure. I’d pay everything for her.”
“Then you will pay everything, if that’s what she costs. Simple!”
Rocky drank rum and Coke, and Bradley drank iced tea, as they weighed and pressed and vacuum-packed the cash. Rocky played corridos and love songs on a commercial-grade jukebox brightly illuminated by colored neon lights. From the far corners of the warehouse, gunmen watched.
The cash was drug payment from throughout Southern California, Herredia’s largest market, earned a few dollars at a time by thousands of young homeboys and passed up the line to Rocky’s soldiers and lieutenants and captains until once a week it was consolidated here in the old El Monte warehouse, the last stop before heading south to Mexico. Bradley and Rocky used two expensive digital scales to do the weighing. A pound of twenties was worth $9,600. A pound of hundreds was worth $48,000. Bradley’s first and only partner in this business had once told him that the weights and values made him believe in a just and merciful god, though Bradley saw no god in them at all.
“You need a partner to help you with this job,” said Rocky. “There’s too much at stake for one man. I’m surprised that Herredia doesn’t supply you with one. I can.”
“I don’t work for you.”
Rocky smiled and shrugged. “It’s no less for me. I’m thinking of you, my friend.”
“I understand, Rocky. And I respect that. But I don’t have anyone quite right for this job.”
“You have other partners.”
“They have other skills.”
Bradley thought of Clayton the forger and Stone the car thief and Preston the phone fraud master. Good men but not action men. Men with criminal records, in fact, lightning rods for trouble. Not who you needed sitting next to you on a run through the border into Mexico with hundreds of thousands of dollars at hand. You needed someone capable and calm, someone who would not arouse suspicion. Someone distracting, even. Someone manifestly not guilty. And of course, someone who could pull a trigger if they had to. He thought of Caroline Vega, with her uniform and badge and her avowed passion to burn through L.A. one way or another.
“You need the help,” said Rocky. “If you get tired or sick or late, you can become careless. One mistake and El Tigre is out a lot of money. And he loses trust in you and loses trust in me and we know what happens when trust is gone.”
They compressed and sealed the bills with a vacuum packer made for game meat. This minimized scent and bulk. Finally, they stashed the packs in three large rolling suitcases, then buried them with brand-new clothing still tagged and folded, in case the Federales decided to snoop. Bradley always took several more tubs of the new clothing as a donation to various Baja parishes, along with a note on Los Angeles Diocese letterhead forged by Clayton and identifying Bradley Jones as a representative of All Saints, an El Monte Catholic charity. He had never had a problem heading south through the border, and now that he could wear his Explorer uniform and present a replica LASD badge also made for him by Clayton, he felt even more confident.
Shortly after dark, he left El Monte for Tijuana in a Ford Freestar with twenty-five pounds of cash worth $384,000 and ten plastic tubs of new clothes. Already hidden in the van were the first five production Pace Arms Love 32s for Herredia’s perusal, a deal separate from Rocky and about which Bradley had said nothing. Two carfuls of Rocky’s pistoleros trailed him through the surface streets to the freeway, then fell away. Bradley now wore street clothes instead of the conspicuous and uncomfortable Explorer uniform.
Bradley drove within the speed limit and signaled his lane changes and listened to the radio. His mind was clear and he was alert from the caffeine in the tea. He thought of the Love 32s nearby and could not fail to think of the five men whom Herredia had extinguished using the prototype. He knew that they were Zetas and had chosen to be killers, but he also knew that as men they were conscripted not only by their free wills but by history and the complexities of luck. He believed that those men had died at that time so that he did not have to, and for this they had his respect.
His phone buzzed and he saw the call was from Owens Finnegan and he let it ring. He didn’t know what to make of her and he did not trust her, but he was not in the habit of turning down help from people who offered it. That was how you filled out your team, grew your people, expanded. Clayton. Coleman Draper. Israel Castro. Rocky. Ron Pace. Owens and Mike Finnegan. Caroline Vega? You never knew where you’d find them or where they would find you. He’d met Clayton in jail and found Coleman Draper at a sheriff’s department recruitment booth. Draper introduced him to Israel Castro, Mike Finnegan had introduced himself and his daughter, Owens, at one of Erin’s performances up on the strip. And Caroline Vega was training for Explorer, just like he was.
He pulled over at a rest stop and called Erin and they talked for nearly half an hour. She was performing tonight and this pricked his longing and his anger at having to miss the performance.
Back in the car he thought of her and his heart tripped because his distance from her was growing, but he reminded himself that ten hours from now, befriended by the early morning darkness, he would be driving into his garage at home up in the desert of L.A. County with $15,360 stuffed into a hollowed body panel in the van, his share for the night’s work, his base paycheck for the week, and plenty to cover the stage boots and the couture dress and some of the mounting expenses for the wedding, and Erin would be standing backlit in the doorway between the house and the dark garage, radiant and his.
18
Holdstock tried to smile at Hood as he walked in. He was unshaven and his hair was aslant, his eyes vacant. His hands were heavily bandaged, each finger thickly delineated by gauze, and they rested beside him like the root balls of trees upturned.
Hood held up the music CD he’d bought for Jimmy, then commenced opening it with his pocketknife. It was a collection called The Bakersfield Sound and Hood thought Holdstock would like its emotional straightness and down-and-out humor.
“Thanks,” said Holdstock. “Isn’t that where you’re from?”
Hood sat in a visitor’s chair and yapped about growing up in Bakersfield for a minute or two. Heat, wind, oil fields. Good music and good people. It was late Sunday afternoon, and Imperial Mercy was quiet. He could see Holdstock’s interest drifting, so he stopped talking and looked along with Jimmy through the window to the blue Buenavista sky. They were six stories up.
“The deputies are still here, right?”
“Yeah, Jim. Two of them outside and two inside the stairwell. They checked my badge before they let me in. Don’t worry.”
“When I dream about my family, Gustavo is with them. He holds the girls’ hands. He’s white. He’s in charge of them. He’s going to esc
ort them to either the grave or heaven. I can’t tell by his expression what he’s thinking.”
“You won’t dream about him forever, Jimmy. It was an accident. No one on earth blames you.”
“Benjamin does. Honor. That’s why they’ll come to get me.”
Hood had learned that in his seven days of capture and torture, Jimmy had been injected with adrenaline and other stimulants so he would remain conscious and endure more pain. A doctor said this would induce a psychotic state that would take some time to abate. Not only had his fingernails been pulled out but they had crushed two of his molars and hobbled him by breaking both of his big toes. A psychiatrist had told Ozburn that Jimmy was more devastated emotionally than physically. The doctor had treated prisoners of war and said that in some ways this was worse because Jimmy had been singled out, perhaps by chance only. No fellow soldiers had gone through this with him. He had been utterly alone. He had only himself to blame. That was why it was important to visit him often and let him know that there were other people who were on his side. It was going to take time. Much longer than the fingernails that would or would not grow back, depending on the damage done to the germinal matrix, or the healing of the bones, or the building of crowns to fill the place where his teeth had been.
“Charlie, can you get me a gun?”
“I can’t, Jimmy. Oz and I asked about that, and they turned us down.”
“You’ve got yours.”
“I’m not a patient here, Jimmy.”
The truth was that Holdstock had no way to fire a handgun with the gauzy stumps of his fingers, and the psychiatrist had said that if he could, Jimmy might use it on himself.
“Because if they come after me here, I’m going to need a gun,” said Holdstock.
“They won’t come after you here.”
“I have no defense.”
“You’re not ready to shoot yet, Jimmy.”
Iron River Page 14
