Iron River

by T. Jefferson Parker

  I walk him to the elevator and ride down. No words, just the faint smell of baby powder and gun smoke and Szechuan pork. He keeps half a step ahead of me across the first-floor lobby and he pushes through the doors and into the soft Orange County sunshine without looking back.

  Sharon is at her desk, aggressively tapping away on the keyboard. She does this when she’s angry, much as Mom used to slam pots and pans around in the kitchen.

  I stand there and she glances at the security monitors on her desk. “Here’s what I think,” she says. “I think he can’t march back in here and take over. The Love 32 is yours. This buyer is yours. You’ve kept the doors open here for a year while he’s been out in the world doing, truly, God knows what. You pay his taxes on this place. Pace Arms is yours as far as I’m concerned. I want that man out of here. ‘We have designed a beautiful thing.’ You designed it, Ron. Not him.”

  “He owns the building and the fixtures. He owned the company.”

  “Owned. There wouldn’t be anything left if it weren’t for you. I won’t let you give this away, Ron. You’ve worked too hard for it.”

  “Mind if I sit?”

  “Please do.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  I pour coffees and make hers as she likes it, cream and sugar. I pull up a reception chair close to her desk and sit.

  “What are you going to do?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He knows. He’s going to take over the deal and take over the company.”

  “I see that.”

  “I will not work for him.”

  “Why not?”

  Sharon continues to look at me, and I see the anger come back to her eyes. She has good outward control over her emotions, but her eyes are a dead giveaway, status indicators, like the LEDs that tell you what your TV is doing.

  “You haven’t seen the way he looks at me, have you, Ron?”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s an ugly thing. He looked at me that way the first week I worked here when I was seventeen. It felt like he was injecting a virus into my bloodstream. He’s looked at me that way a thousand times over the years. He looked at me that way today. But he held it longer. Ron, your Uncle Chester is an evil man.”

  In fact Chester was once questioned in a rape but never arrested. This was hush-hush. It never got below the third floor. It was a long time ago. “Describe the look.”

  “It’s a show of strength. Like an army. Weight and power. He sees that compared to him, I have little. He knows that I know it. He loves my fear.”

  I feel my own anger stirring now, low level but with potential, like a nest of wasps feeling the first warmth of spring.

  “And, Ron? I think he drove your mother insane. She was reeling from Tony’s death. She was a little nutty, sure, it runs in her family, but she was smart and lovely and right there in the moment. She had spirit. She worked hard, but she was always ready to have a good time. He bludgeoned her down. He crushed every last bit of hope out of her. He sat on her so long, she forgot how to breathe.”

  “I think that, too.”

  “Everybody did. But nobody said anything and nobody did anything.”

  “She married him.”

  “It wasn’t a marriage, it was a surrender. She was empty by then.”

  We let a moment of silence be. The brothers—my father and Chester—were very different men. Suicide points many fingers and whispers many rumors.

  “Don’t let him have this company,” says Sharon. “If you do, I’ll walk out that lobby downstairs and never come back.”

  “That’s clear.”

  “Stand up for yourself, Ron. Stand up for me, too. Change the locks. Keep him out.”

  “I’m capable of doing that.”

  “I know you are.”

  It’s hard to describe what I’m feeling right now, but as usual I try, not necessarily a good idea. “Sharon, I can feel different rivers and streams of history coming together here. They will move on without us, but they’re here now.”

  “I don’t see a river. There’s no river within miles of here. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “This all matters.”

  “Of course it does. May I have the rest of the afternoon off?”

  “Of course.”

  She shuts off her computer and flips her desk calendar to tomorrow, then rises and slings her purse over her shoulder. She comes around to where I’m now standing and she raises her face to mine.

  “Good. Because I’d like to spend it in your bed with you.”

  It’s not comparable to anything else that’s ever happened to me. Two minutes after we lock the penthouse door, we are in bed, but seconds later I’m uncontrollably spent though still half dressed. I’m not a veteran of love. I feel humiliated, but Sharon finds humor in all this and assures me that things will be looking up soon. And up they do look. An hour later we’re finished again, and two hours after that, again. I call up a sushi place that delivers, then make hot fudge sundaes, and after that we’re back at it. We are electricity. By midnight, we lie in each other’s arms, and Sharon snores on my chest. I look out the window at the lights of the mall and the Christian compound and the freeways red with taillights going one way and white with headlights coming the other, and these are the rivers of the here and now, the rivers I tried to tell Sharon about. I know that we are waist deep in them and getting deeper. I press my nose onto the top of her scalp and breathe deeply. Human female sweetness beyond words. For the first time in my life, I feel absolutely responsible for another person. I know that her welfare is more important than my own. I realize that I am no longer the most important person on earth. In fact, I barely rate a distant second.

  Early that morning while Sharon is sleeping and long after the manufacturing team has gone, I let Bradley Smith into the building through a rear fire exit and we make our way to the manufacturing bay. Here I unlock and open the steel safes that contain the first five hundred Love 32s.

  “You look like you’ve been worked over by the sultan’s harem,” says Bradley.

  “Better than that,” I say.

  “Sharon?”

  I smile and feel myself blush.

  “She’s pretty quick on the rebound,” says Bradley.

  “I take it as a sign of healing.”

  “Well, congratulations. All your tail wagging paid off.”

  I watch Smith examine the weapons. I must admit they are beautiful. Not like a woman is beautiful, or a sunset, but as a car might be, or a laptop. Even with his hair cut short, Smith looks familiar to me. I know I’ve seen him before.

  “You still look familiar,” I say.

  “You’ve said that before, Ron.”

  But the longer I look at him, the less it helps. I have a good memory for faces, yet it does me no good now. I feel drained but in the best of ways.

  “If Herredia will commit to another thousand now, I can come off the price,” I say.

  “How much off?”

  I think Uncle Chet is wrong. You keep your prices down. You build relationships. You make friends. “Three percent. It would save him twenty-seven grand.”

  “Indeed. And put another eight seventy-three in your hot little pocket. How much commitment?”

  “One hundred K. I can deliver them by the end of September. Tell him he can name them something else. He didn’t like the name.”

  Bradley looks hard at me. “What about Harry Love and all that bullshit you call history?”

  “He can name his own gun is what I’m offering.”

  “He’ll want muerte something. I’ll see what he says.”

  Bradley extends the brace rods on one of the Love 32s, sets the gun into the crook of his arm, and sweeps it across the room.

  “He’ll use them against the Zetas, won’t he?” I ask.

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I think—”

  “Do not attempt to think. Stay far away from your customers, Ron. Yo
u are a gunmaker. That’s all. If you go sticking your nose into other people’s business, they’ll chop your head off and mail it to Sharon. I’m serious.”

  The mention of Sharon’s name sobers me. Bradley counts the guns. They’re packed ten to a wooden case in twenty stacks of five. Each gun is housed in a foam envelope and the layers are separated by pasteboard sheets. Of course the lids aren’t nailed on yet. There are four hundred and ninety-five weapons, not counting the first five production-line guns I fronted him last week. The cases smell of freshly milled steel and gun oil and grip rubber. There are little blotches of new-gun oil on the pasteboard packing sheets, a sight that has always pleased me, something akin to a job well done. The noise suppressors are packed separately.

  Bradley steps into a corner of the bay and makes a short phone call. When he’s finished, he wraps his phone in one of the red shop rags from a workstation, then picks up a hammer and pounds it to pieces within the rag. He drops the package into a trash can, then pulls another phone from a pocket and pushes it into the carrier on his belt.

  We sit on patio chairs on the third-floor balcony and watch the sun rise. Highway 55 is already busy and the Santa Ana Mountains to the east are rimmed with light. We drink coffee spiked with whiskey, and Bradley has two good Cuban cigars, so we light up. Breakfast of champions. This is our third such celebration. The first was when he delivered the three hundred thousand start-up money, and the second was when Herredia enthusiastically accepted the production model last week. Now we can celebrate the halfway point.

  What a way to start my first day of being Sharon Novak’s man.

  22

  Mike Finnegan’s Los Angeles apartment building was on Aviation Boulevard near LAX. Hood stood outside and looked at the complex, fifty years old at least and in disrepair, with peeling paint and a grassless dirt courtyard littered with plastic toys and brooded over darkly by a large magnolia.

  Hood climbed the stairs and opened the door with Reyes’s key. He entered and stood in a rhombus of soft L.A. sunlight while the jets rattled the window glass and vibrated the floor.

  The carpet was blue shag and the walls were white. There was a worn red vinyl sofa that sagged and was stretched in the middle, and on the wall behind it a framed print of a big-eyed Mexican girl holding a puppy. The TV was a vintage black-and-white with a rabbit-ear antenna set on top. The walls were taken up with bookshelves that went to the ceiling, mostly inexpensive and unmatched but full of mostly hardcover volumes of history, biography, warfare, natural science, and drama. There were two small stools so the little man could reach the upper shelves. In the middle of the room, between the TV and the sofa, stood a small card table and one folding chair. The table was stacked with books and spiral notebooks.

  The kitchen was neat and foodless. The refrigerator had ice cube trays in the freezer and that was all. There was a small kitchen table and two chairs, and on the table was a telephone and answering machine. Hood pushed the PLAY button and listened to the one new message, from Owens, saying she was sorry to have left so abruptly but she was in a good place in a desert and happy and not to worry. Hood pictured her lovely face and arresting eyes and the scars on her wrists. You will have a reason. There were no old messages.

  The bedroom was curtained with bamboo-look plastic blinds and contained a twin bed neatly made up. The olive-colored bedspread was without wrinkle and the pillow was plump and perfectly centered. Hood saw his own military training in this, wondered if Uncle Sam might have more information on Mr. Finnegan. There was a small dresser and more bookshelves. In the closet were pants and shirts on hangers, a heavy canvas jacket with fleece lining, a few pairs of shoes.

  Hood saw an odd glint beneath the canvas jacket and he lifted it open for a look. Hanging under it was a garment of dull gray mesh. Hood lifted out the coat and the gray garment. They were surprisingly heavy. Hood peeled off the jacket and tossed it to the bed. The garment was a vest, apparently made for a tall and slender man. Hood held it to his nose and smelled the flat metallic scent of steel. Down one side were buttons made from large silver Mexican fifty-peso coins. Down the other were thickly braided steel loops. Hood let the hanger drop and shrugged on the vest and buttoned up the side. It was snug and weighty but also supportive, the tail firm against his lumbar vertebrae. The arm holes were small, so the vest rode up almost to his armpits. He could imagine no use for such a thing except to repel bullets or blades. He wondered if it would work.

  He walked back and stood in the patch of sunlight in the living room, and when he looked down, he could see rounded indentations roughly the size of bullets. The steel mesh had spread and flattened but held. One mark was right over his heart. There were sharper dents that could have been made by knives. He took off the vest and read the date on the top button: 1851. In the bedroom he hung it back up, then photographed it with his cell phone, then hung the canvas jacket over it and set the hanger back on the dowel.

  Hood thought about the 1849 bullet in Mike’s head and the 1851 vest in his closet and Mike’s detailed recounting of the hanging of Tiburcio Vasquez and Mike’s tales of drinking in Wyatt Earp’s San Diego saloon. Here was a pattern that Hood’s ATFE task force trainers would have loved. But a pattern establishing what? Mike the history buff? Mike the collector of Western lore and things? But there were other Mikes. Such as Mike the bathroom products guru who knew far too much about Operation Blowdown and Jimmy and Benjamin Armenta. And Mike who wondered what Zetas dream about. And Mike who had been at the Ambassador Hotel when Bobby Kennedy was murdered and could describe a sunset viewed from Spahn Ranch with Charlie Manson. And of course, perhaps the simplest and most definitive Mike—the Mike pronounced insane by his own daughter.

  But in the second bedroom, Hood found no evidence that Owens or anyone else had recently lived there. The cot bed was neatly made, but the dresser and closet were empty of clothes. There were eight pasteboard boxes stacked in the closet and Hood found them full of books. The walls were bare and there was no TV and no reading lamp and no radio and no clock. He took more pictures.

  Hood walked into the bathroom, wondering what a bath products broker would have in his own home. There were mismatched bath and hand towels, some old enough that threads dangled at the edges, a faded green oval rug, shaving products, and a large bar of blue soap in an upturned clamshell on the sink. The shower had a sliding glass door, frosted and clean, and inside was nothing but one economy-size bottle of shampoo. There was an ornate brass towel hook in the shape of a horse’s head on the wall near the shower, but this single item was the only thing in the room that wasn’t commonplace.

  Back in the living room, Hood sat at the card table and browsed the top notebook. Inside he found a handwritten ledger that was cramped but legible—billables and receivables, dates and dollar amounts, notes. The most recent entry was two months ago and the oldest dated back to early last year. The largest transaction involved $5,999. There were illustrations of various bathroom products, such as shower curtains and rings, soap dishes, standing and built-in toilet paper dispensers, bath mats for tub and shower, medicine chests and wall cabinets, towel racks. These drawings were rendered in the same small tight hand as the notes, but they were simple and expressive. The other ten notebooks stacked there contained nothing but blank pages and folded clippings from newspapers and magazines. Hood opened and read through them. Finnegan had written the source and date on the top of each clip. Most of the stories were from small California towns, many of which Hood had never been in: Ravendale, Tollhouse, Ivanhoe, Trona. He made a note of these.

  Some clippings dealt with small-time crime, most of it white collar—embezzling, fraud, forgery. Most of the perps were women. Some dealt with violent criminals and most of these were men, and educated. Some were about precocious children. Some dealt with quirky inventions such as a personal jet pack, a machine that could synthesize water from the air, a time-released multivitamin and mineral tablet that had to be taken only once a year. One was a feature title
d “Saturday Night Special,” about Ron Pace, a seventeen-year-old high school dropout manufacturing/design whiz who was running his family’s hugely profitable gun company. This was Pace’s second unscheduled flight into Hood’s airspace in the last two weeks, so Hood read the article slowly and carefully. Pace was quoted as saying that “making guns is harder than making pizza but what I’d really like to make is history.” Company president and CEO Chester Pace said that Pace guns were “the workingman’s equalizer.” The article touched on the suicide of Ron’s father. There were pictures of Ron and Chester and Ron’s pretty, unhappy mother, Maureen. Hood rose and stood back from the table and he took pictures of it and of the room.

  He heard the knock on the apartment door and he rose and answered it. A small boy stood outside. He looked ten. He wore a Kobe jersey and shorts to his skinny calves and basketball shoes that made his feet look gigantic.

  “Where’s Finn?”

  “In a hospital.”

  “Been gone a long time. He okay?”

  “He’s doing fine. I’m a friend.”

  “You look like a cop.”

  “What about you? Are you his friend?”

  The boy looked past him into the apartment, then at Hood. “Yeah. He’s gone a lot so this is no surprise. He gave me this.”

  The boy pulled his hand from his pocket and showed Hood the knife. It was an old-fashioned pocketknife with an elk horn-look handle and blades at opposite ends.

  “It needs sharpening. Mike sharpens it. He says a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. He’s got a sharpenin’ stone in the kitchen drawer where the forks are.”

  “Come in.”

  Hood found the stone and whet the knife, circling one blade then the other across the grinding surface while the boy watched.

  “Mike does it slow like that.”

  “There’s no hurry. I’m Charlie. What’s your name?”

  “Marlowe.”

  “Your mom know you have this?”