Iron River

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “She’s dead so she don’t know anything. Dad’s cool.”

  “How long have you known Mike?”

  “Since forever. He sleeps all day sometimes. Mostly he’s gone at night. Sells them towel holders and dishes you put your soap in.”

  “He got hit by a car down in the desert. Lots of damage but he’s healing up.”

  “Mike’s good at healin’. I seen him with a cut on his lip once, and it was so deep you could see his teeth through it. Said he got punched. Two days later it was almost all healed up and after that no scar or nothing. He don’t hardly eat. He’s read every one of these books and more. I’ve been coming up here for maybe five years now, yeah, ’cause I’m ten, and let’s see . . . three . . . no, four times Mike’s packed up all his books in boxes and took ’em away. Because he read them all. I helped him load up his truck. Then he gets all new books and reads those. We watch TV sometimes. My dad and uncle come over and Mike gets beer. He listens to stories, but he almost never tells one. He asks a lot of questions. He wants to meet certain people. He says he likes getting people together. He brought over a kid one day for me to hang with. We’re friends now. Mike understands kids. He told me if I got straight A’s next year, he’d give me a hundred bucks for each one, and if I don’t get straight A’s, he won’t give me nothing.”

  “Have you met his daughter?”

  “I can’t because he doesn’t have one.”

  “Does he ever have friends over, or family?”

  “Sometimes I seen a person here. But not much. He’s mostly alone, sleeping all day and doing his bathroom things at night. He says there’s certain kinds of people he can’t be around.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “I never ast.”

  Hood handed Marlowe the knife. The boy licked his forearm and shaved off some thin hairs with the long blade, then the short one.

  “Mike’s got red hair. When the knife is sharp, it leaves an empty spot with freckles. And guess what, the next day all that hair is back. Every hair of it. He doesn’t know I know it.”

  Hood thought about this.

  “Thanks, man. You did a good job on this. It ain’t as good as Finn can do, but it’s still good.”

  “Don’t take it to school.”

  “A knife ain’t nothing.”

  “It’s enough to get you kicked out. Then you won’t make the big money from Mike.”

  “Oh, I’ll get that money. I’m getting all A’s and Mike always does what he says. He’s never lied to me, not once.”

  Owens Finnegan answered the door of her El Centro home. Her face was made up and her lipstick was red. She was wearing a sleeveless white dress and wide carved African tribal bracelets and she was barefoot again. Hood stepped in and saw no change: same boxes stacked, same bare walls, same director’s chairs. The kitchen was still bare as she led him outside to the picnic table.

  “I made some iced tea since I knew you were coming.”

  She poured two tumblers from the glass pitcher. There was a sugar bowl and spoons on the table.

  Hood brought up the image of the steel mesh vest on his cell phone and set the phone on the table in front of Owens. She turned it and shaded the small screen with one hand.

  “That’s from your father’s closet in L.A. What is it?”

  “A vest of some kind. I’ve never seen it.”

  “You never lived in that apartment on Aviation, either.”

  “No.”

  “But he’s been there since the 1960s, when that black-and-white TV was new and he was ten years old?”

  “That’s always been his place of business, Charlie. Since seventy-something. He buys old stuff because he likes it. That old TV never even worked. We lived in various places—Sierra Madre, Glendale, Los Angeles—not on Aviation.”

  “I don’t enjoy being lied to. It wastes my time and it pisses me off.”

  “I never told you I lived in that apartment. I can’t control what Dad said. I’m sorry if I’ve never seen that article of clothing before.”

  “What about the clips? The stories from the small towns in California? All the inventors and promising children and small-time criminals?”

  “Dad’s interests are across the board.”

  “No shit, Owens.”

  Hood drank some tea and put his glass down, then stood and walked across the dead brown grass and looked out to the desert beyond the wall. To the southeast, thunderheads loomed out of Mexico, great white anvils climbing the blue.

  She stood facing him and handed him his tea.

  “Mike knows way too much about Mexican drug cartels, and the ATF,” said Hood. “He seems almost fixated on a man I work with. Mike knows things about him he just shouldn’t know. Did he do investigations? Do you have law enforcement in the family?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “Government, military, intelligence?”

  She shook her head, and the dry desert breeze lifted her hair. “It was always passion and bluff. He wants to be an insider. He has an extravagant and sometimes powerful mind. I’ve never known anyone as intelligent as he is. Or as crazy. I’ve seen him lie in bed for days, crying and never eating. I’ve seen him stay awake for days, making phone calls and doing sketches and reading, reading, reading. He doesn’t invent stories or friends or incidents. He invents entire worlds. They are populated and specific.”

  Hood looked into her eyes, now almost silver in the bright sunlight. She took his glass and flung the tea and ice against the wall and dropped the glass to the dry grass. He felt her hands cool on his cheeks again and the warmth of her breath on his face, then the softness of her lips on his. He lifted her hands off his face and felt the risen cords of scar-flesh under his fingers.

  “They’re me, Charlie. Past, present and future, all in one. Don’t be afraid of them.”

  “I respect them.”

  She took his face in her hands again and kissed him again. Hood broke it off and lifted her hands away and kissed the underside of the left wrist, then the right wrist, and as he did this she closed her eyes and exhaled quietly.

  “There might be another day for this,” he said.

  “Tell me when you find it, Charlie.”

  23

  Holdstock lay awake and listened to the late-night sounds of the hospital. His door was closed. He was taking less medication for pain and to sleep, so his native energy had started to flow again.

  He got up and used his crutches to make the toilet, clumsily balancing on his armpits while parting his gown with the thick gauzed trunks of his fingers. His broken big toes were operational for indoor distances. The crushed molars had already been replaced by crowns, and his swollen face had almost returned to normal size. Frank the security guard had confiscated his gun, and two nurses had rebuilt the right-hand bandage that Charlie Hood had so trustingly modified. Jimmy’s hospital gunslinging days were over and this left him feeling naked and defenseless again.

  He managed to get the gown closed, then he worked his bandaged hands back into the crutches. With his weight born by his palms and the crutch handles, his fingers throbbed with pain, but it was a bearable pain. On his crutches he shouldered his way through the half-open door and into the hallway. There was only one deputy on duty at this hour and he sat with his head bowed to the Car and Driver spread across his lap, but he was asleep.

  Jimmy labored down to the nurses’ station and talked with Lourdes for a minute or two. Standing at rest he used his armpits to bear his weight and was able to lift his hands upright to let the blood drain back down from the infernal fingertips. With his hands up like that, Jimmy thought he must look like a man being arrested. There was a Dodger game on the little TV in the station, so Jimmy somewhat illogically told Lourdes about a touchdown he’d scored for Wisconsin, a last-second reception and twenty-three-yard run that put them past rival Indiana 21-14. When he was done, Holdstock felt a little short of wind and he made a joke about getting more tired talking about the touchdown now than
actually scoring it. He breathed deeply and noted the simple pleasure of feeling fresh air coming into him.

  He continued down the hall. Slow going. This was his fourth exercise session in four days. Ever since Hood had spotted the two fake deputies, Jimmy had understood that he’d have to get his strength back in order to survive. He needed to get out of here. He needed to be home with his wife and daughters, no matter how much of a burden he might be, no matter that their pity shamed and angered him. It was only in the last four days that Jimmy had begun to truly want to live. He had not dreamed of the blue-faced werewolf in five nights. Sometimes he would lie in the bed smug and satisfied that the beast wasn’t there. Then he’d glance up at the ceiling to make sure.

  He passed through the open double doors and stopped at the children’s art display, breathing hard again. He transferred his weight to his armpits and raised his hands and felt the pain drain down. He looked at the display. T. Ford’s airborne skateboarder was still his favorite, with A. Anthony’s cotton field and M. Gonzalez’s fire-breathing monster right up there, too. He wondered what Patricia and Matilda would come up with when they were a few years older. Hopefully not their father lying in a hospital bed. He wondered if Gustavo Armenta had made drawings as a boy, if he had made his father proud. What would a son need to do to make a drug trafficker feel pride? Jimmy had heard that Gustavo was college-bound, a business major, a good young man. He repositioned his hands on the crutches and continued on.

  At the far end of the hallway, he came to the waiting area alcove. There was a suite of chairs and two tables of magazines and good windows. This was as far as he’d made it in the past. He was tired by now, so he hobbled over and plunked down into the orange fabric chair he liked and he looked down through the big window. The sky was black and pricked by stars up high. No moon. Lower in the window, the hospital lights were strong and Jimmy could see the big concrete overhang that shaded the main entrance below, the palms uplit, the sweeping drive. There were no cars parked in the drive now, no admissions or discharges in this early morning.

  Jimmy lifted his feet one at a time and put them on the matching orange ottoman. It took only a few minutes upright to send the blood hard south and inflame his broken toes with pain. Now they cooled. He read the magazine titles. He looked down at the driveway. He dozed. A big silver tour bus lumbered onto the drive from Second Avenue. It was covered with bright pictures of red hibiscus flowers and dancers in colorful dress and a jumping marlin and a beach at sunset. Holdstock knew that Buenavista was an alternate border crossing to busy Tijuana but he’d never figured Imperial Mercy Hospital as a point of interest. The tour buses always passed through but never stopped. Maybe doctors, he thought, part of a convention or professional program of some kind. He thought he was dreaming, but his eyes were open.

  The bus pulled up to the curb just short of the overhang and it parked. He could barely make out the letters on the side: AMERIGO. The graphics were bright and clear in the driveway lights, and the windows were darkened for privacy and cool. Holdstock saw the tall door buckle open and watched men bristling with armament pour from the vehicle and flow thick-booted and single file across the concrete toward the hospital lobby one after another, man upon man, ordered and many.

  “Zetas,” he said.

  Holdstock lurched up, his feet hitting the floor with shocks of pain, hoisted himself onto the crutches, and nearly lost his balance as he made the difficult pivot. He strained forward recklessly but managed to look back out the window at the line of men still trotting into the lobby. He took the floor in big crutchfuls. There were no patient rooms along this section of hallway, and Jimmy had no cell phone, and there were no pay phones or house phones or fire alarms and no doctors or nurses or patients or janitors, not even Frank, here at this hour, only the wide empty hallway and the shining floor before him. He saw the open double doors and the children’s art exhibit far ahead and he committed himself to this distance just as he had done as a Badger tight end running a downfield pattern. The aluminum crutches creaked and rattled as he whapped them to the floor and he was thankful for the rubber grips.

  He lunged past the art. Looking down to his left he could see the back end of the bus but he couldn’t see the door, so he turned his attention back to the hallway and stretched out his stride, reaching far ahead with the crutches and holding them down true with his big strong arms while he swung his legs between them like a pendulum, landing on his heels and rolling forward upon his toes, ignoring the pain, then butterflying the crutches through the air to begin again.

  He made the turn at the elevator bank. He pushed the DOWN buttons on all four cars, but this took time. He heard automatic gunfire below. Coming back to the hall, he could see the nurses’ station far away, but he saw no nurses. At the first patient room he came to, Jimmy swung in, yelling at the man in the bed to call security. The man raised his head and when he saw Jimmy, he scrunched back on his elbows in surprise and he reached for the phone on the stand beside the bed but knocked it to the floor. Jimmy couldn’t grasp it with his bandaged hands, and the man said he couldn’t leave his bed, just a day out of surgery, and Holdstock could hear the dial tone humming up at him, but there was no way he could punch a number, so he heaved back out into the hallway. He heard gunfire again, much closer now, probably on the sixth floor. Lourdes ran toward him with a cell phone to her ear and the sheriff’s deputy from outside his room followed her, broad-shouldered, his hands held out from his sides like a gunfighter and Holdstock could tell from his posture that the man had no idea what to do.

  When Lourdes got closer, he heard her say “Frank where are you we hear guns,” then the deputy was upon them, guiding them into the nearest patient room, where a woman with a tube in each nostril stared at them while her young roomie announced that she had 911. Lourdes and the deputy lowered Jimmy into one of the visitors’ chairs, then the deputy pulled it to the far wall between the beds, facing the door. He commanded Lourdes to lie down behind the same bed, then he drew his sidearm and stepped out of the room and shut the door. There was another volley of automatic fire, jagged and brief. It came from the far side of the sixth floor. Then more shots. Holdstock realized they’d found his room empty and were now going room to room down the hallway, looking for him. The fire alarm shrieked to life and the patient told the 911 operator that Imperial Mercy was under attack and slammed down the phone. The woman lay back and stared at the ceiling and prayed out loud.

  “They want me,” said Holdstock.

  “They’ll kill you,” said the young woman.

  “. . . into the valley of the shadow of death,” said the older one.

  Jimmy climbed up onto his crutches and lurched across the room, banging hard into a steel bed stand and clanging into a wastebasket. He couldn’t open the door, but the young woman got it for him, and when Jimmy had cleared the threshold, she closed it hard.

  He stood still in the hallway while people ran past him, going both directions, some screaming and some grimly silent and some with cell phones pressed to their ears and some pushing drip trolleys before them like stubborn children, but all with their hair wild and their eyes wide and their gowns flapping. Another burst of automatic fire rattled from around the corner. People reversed direction at the sound and surged back toward Jimmy, knocking him to the floor and stampeding by. Getting back onto the crutches was one of the hardest things he’d ever done in his life, with his ruined hands and throbbing toes and his heart pounding and the treachery of the aluminum crutches as they shirked his weight and skittered out from under him. A woman helped him and finally he was up and wavering. He clambered forward into the storm. Three Zetas rounded the corner, then three more. They wore camouflage fatigues and military-style boots and black handkerchiefs over their mouths, and Jimmy could tell by the sudden cocking of his head that the lead man recognized him, and Holdstock swung faster toward the man, thinking they can kill me but they can’t stop me, and he roared forward on the crutches ready to die. The Zetas
knocked him down again and swarmed him and they held his arms and legs and head and they carried him to the stairway and into the stairwell, then down the steps. Their boot echoes were faint as they rapidly descended, swiveling him on the landing and descending again and rotating him again on the next landing, down and down, until Jimmy looked up to see the high ceiling and the dramatic lobby lights above him and he realized now that they were taking him again and that the death he had just accepted would have been a far better thing than the days of life to come.

  24

  The monsoon struck well before first light, the sky opening like an enormous black blossom, and great torrents of rain slanting down through the wind. Rivulets poured through the serrated arms of the fan palms along the hospital driveway and cascaded silver down through the lights. The downsloping drive was a smooth rapid that threw up wakes against Hood’s boots as he ran.

  He was drenched by the time he made it up the long Imperial Mercy driveway. He passed the police and sheriff cruisers and the paramedic squads pushing the gurneys into the building.

  Reyes led him into the lobby. A gurney stood near a pool of blood on the polished granite floor where Frank the security guard had been slain. The blanket was up over him now and his hand protruded from under it, and Hood saw the wedding ring still on the old man’s finger. Reyes took Hood to the staff elevator and they headed up.

  “They’ve got Holdstock. They knew right where he was and they took him.”

  Hood’s heart sank to have this confirmed. In his call, Ozburn hadn’t been willing to believe it. He heard Mike Finnegan: My number one concern, if I were you, would be that the Zetas will simply storm the hospital and take him again.

  “Five dead,” said Reyes. “They threw enough lead to stop an army, but only five are dead. Maybe that’s a miracle by today’s standards.”

  “Was Beth here?”