Iron River

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Hood felt the same odd and indescribable sensation that he had felt when he saw the escaped tiger walking the street in Bakersfield. It was the feeling of being unprepared for this experience, ignorant and surprised and awed.

  “We’re six feet apart, Mike. I’ll think a clear thought and you can tell me what it is.”

  “I don’t do parlor tricks. More wine?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “For the best. I’ve already talked too much.”

  Hood took Finnegan’s empty cup and poured some wine into it from his own. “Do you go to hell when you die?”

  “We don’t die. We heal. It’s the one small advantage we have over humankind. There is no hell.”

  “So you saw Tiburcio hang. Personally. You were there.”

  “Oh, yes. Half a century before that, I was helping Father Serra teach agriculture to the Cahuillas. Trying to teach them, I should say. The missions were important to both the King and the Prince because faith is amplified by numbers, but it is also very easy to manipulate and to corrupt. But you know this. I took part in Fremont’s Bear Flag Rebellion, though, to be honest, I was little more than a spectator. Two years later Mexico gave up Alta California and the fun really started. I was at Sutter’s Mill a week after gold was discovered. I rode with Harry Love and the California Rangers and was there at the shoot-out at Cantua Creek. Love never killed or beheaded Murrieta. The severed head that Bradley now possesses belonged to a bandit named Chappo. I knew Bradley’s mother, Allison Murrieta, fairly well. What a woman. She had courage and beauty and such . . . appetites. In fact, I introduced her to the man who first seduced her, Bradley’s father. Nature took its course from there, as it usually does. She shot him in a bit of a rage, though not fatally. I can relate to that, the being-shot part. I’ve kept an eye on Bradley over the years, from a distance. When I introduced myself to him in the Viper Room that night, he had no idea I’d helped his parents meet. But Allison lacked vision. She was a solo artist, not a team player. I know her mother, too, who has vision but no courage and no talent. Their progenitor Joaquin, El Famoso, was blond-haired and gray eyed, nothing like swarthy Chappo. I intercepted Earp late in his days in San Diego, as I did Frank James in L.A. Ditto Bugsy, Dragna, Mickey, Bompisiero, all the gangsters a few years after Frank. Later, Sirhan Sirhan, Manson, I knew them all, some well, some not. Small, selfish criminals don’t interest us because they’re of minimal utility and they’re everywhere. I’m not allowed to go gallivanting across the nation in search of partnerships. I have to look for them nearby. I’ve never been east of Utah. I mention these individuals because they have become known. They were the apparent stars. But the overwhelming majority of my partners you, Charlie, have never heard of. The men and women who make the history books are simply the ones who manage to commit the final act, stumble across the finish line. Unseen machinations both large and small are the stage on which they act. Making history is like painting the inside of a house—it’s mostly prep work.”

  “You’re with the Prince.”

  “Isn’t it interesting that you’re not quite sure?”

  “Then what’s your goal?”

  “Annihilation. The annihilation of the King’s law and all his followers.”

  “You just made a hash of that nondisclosure agreement, Mike.”

  “It was the wine.”

  “No, it wasn’t. So why? If you’re who you say you are now, why tell me all this?”

  Finnegan was quiet for a long moment. “First, because I know you won’t believe me. I’m completely safe with you. I’ve told the truth to law enforcement officers before, but you refuse to listen and hear. Which is half the reason we’re able to get anything at all accomplished—people in general just will not believe. Second, I tell you all this because you are just the kind of person I would love to form a relationship, then a partnership, with. It likely wouldn’t happen—you’re much too strong-willed and law-abiding for the likes of me. Unless, of course, there was something that you wanted very, very badly . . . something I could help you with.”

  Hood thought for a moment. “What about the King’s helpers? Are they like you?”

  “By and large. We follow the same rules. They outnumber us badly. They are not terrifically intelligent, more like frat boys in a way. We have opposing goals, of course. We don’t mix. To us, the King’s men and women smell bad. And we smell bad to them. It’s an evolutionary thing, rather doggish actually. I can ID one of Bigfoot’s helpers just by smell alone from ten, maybe fifteen feet away.”

  “Bigfoot?”

  “We make up other nicknames for the King because we don’t enjoy saying his true name, and to bring some sense of humor to things—Bigfoot is popular now. The Fist, Big Bore, the Fat Lady. These days, Bigfoot’s helpers are calling the Prince the Queen, or the Shitbird, or Slimebucket, things like that. Some of those names they got from you in law enforcement. We all love TV and crime novels. You’ll hear some pretty colorful language fly when we get to drinking.”

  “Like a bar full of you?”

  “Exactly. We socialize some, trade information, mostly just get sloshed and complain about the hours and the bosses. I have my sympathies for the workingman and -woman, I can tell you.”

  “I’d like to sit in on one of those,” said Hood.

  “Those are private, Charlie,” Mike said quietly.

  “What did you do while the Zetas stormed in here?”

  “What do you mean, do? I can’t move.”

  “Did you know when it would happen?”

  “Only that it had to. The nature of things. When I heard the first shots, I summoned the nurse with the CALL button and tried to dial the phone for security, but with one hand it took a while. Five dead. It sounded like many more. I’ll give you some advice if you want it. Don’t count on Luna for help again. Don’t count on him at all.”

  Hood got the tiger feeling again. “How do you know about Luna?”

  “Oh, that’s funny, Charlie. My beat doesn’t stop at the border!”

  Hood took Finnegan’s cup and poured the last of his wine into it. “Has Owens heard all this?”

  “Bits. Hints. I don’t want to burden her. She believes fully in my alleged madness. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t believe she’s your daughter.”

  “She is not. But she believes she is my daughter, Charlie. And my heart sinks every time I see those scars.”

  “Then what is she to you?”

  “Do the scars draw you to her or push you away from her?”

  “Is she a partner?”

  “She’s too damaged.”

  “I went to your place on Aviation. You’re not running a bath products business out of there. If you are, it’s small and disorganized and occasional.”

  “It’s all of that. It’s one of many stories, Charlie, all partially true. The story of the carignane is not totally false.”

  Hood nodded. He watched Finnegan. The little man slurped the last of the wine like a child finishing a milk shake. Then he sighed.

  “What’s that steel mesh vest in your closet for?”

  Finnegan stared at Hood. “It’s to be a gift. It’s bullet- and knife-proof. It belonged to an acquaintance, handcrafted by a Frenchman in Bakersfield. This was some time ago. I know someone who should have it now.”

  “What about the clips in your notebooks—the white-collar criminals, the precocious children, the inventions? All in California, weren’t they?”

  Finnegan exhaled loud and long. “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”

  “Did Bradley tell you he has the head of Joaquin?”

  “Oh, yes. As I said, I could hardly shut the boy up. He thought he was dazzling me.”

  A tiger on the march, thought Hood. His scalp crawled. “Tell me about Ron Pace.”

  “I’ve met him. The last of the Ring of Fire, Ron, a gunmaker extraordinaire. Just a kid. I don’t think I have to explain his potential to a Blow
down agent.”

  “Do you have a partnership with him?”

  “No. He was immature, suspicious, reactionary. When Pace Arms ceased manufacture, I moved him down on the roster. Injured reserve, so to speak. Do you really believe these things I’m telling you?”

  “Why would you help me get Jimmy back?”

  Finnegan stared at him for another long moment. “Mere killers must not always prevail. Our goal is that chaos and strife and enmity prevail. Some good competition. Personally I’d like to see you go forth and kick some ass, Charlie. I understand your problem. You are suffering under the rules of play. I know how badly you’d love to run down there and behead a few of those bad men. And rescue poor Jimmy. I’m on your side.”

  “Then help me do it, Mike.”

  Finnegan’s eyes twinkled back beyond the wraps. “I think I’m beginning to convince you. We have partnerships with law enforcement all over the planet, you know.”

  “I’m too old and stubborn. Old dog, new tricks, all that. What if I got mad and pitched you out a window or something?”

  “I’d come crawling back up.” Mike cackled softly. “Charlie, good partnerships between two beings, whoever or whatever they might be, can be built upon only one thing—truth. We are all of us saddled by this, men and women, the blessed and the damned. Thus do I stand in truth before you. Lay before you, actually.”

  Hood picked up the empty wine bottle and set it in the small wastebasket beside Finnegan’s bed. “Where’s Jimmy?”

  “I’d tell you if I knew.”

  “What good is drinking with the devil if I can’t get some good intel?”

  “Not the devil. A devil. A mere journeyman. But let me see what I can do.”

  From home, Hood called Soriana and told him there was a patient at Imperial Mercy who knew more than he should about too many classified things. He asked Soriana to file a federal request-for-information between ATFE and the FBI, DEA, CIA, military intelligence agencies, the postal service—any federal bodies that may have employed the man. Soriana said that, given the current situation, the request would be low priority and weeks in the filling. He’d try. Hood made a note to petition Sacramento and all Southern California county governments tomorrow morning early.

  He went outside and cracked a beer and sat in the dark heat and watched another Guard convoy rolling in from the west. He thought that Mike Finnegan was probably insane and possibly dangerous. Information could be a weapon. Hood did not believe that armies of devils had worked for centuries on earth to win the hearts and minds of frail and temporary humanity. Stories are lies that lead us to the truth.

  The navy helos prowled above, their searchlights straining to reveal an event that had happened and was now both over and ongoing.

  26

  The next afternoon, Bradley steered his Cyclone GT up the dirt drive toward his mother’s ranch house. It was now two years since her death, and his heart turned heavy and full as his old muscle car rumbled slowly along.

  The ranch was in Valley Center, northeast of San Diego. It was eight acres of savannah and rolling hills, with a stream and a pond, a pasture and a paddock and a barn, and citrus and avocado trees loaded with fruit. It was wedged between two different tribal reservations. One road in, and this road was gated and locked. Upon his mother’s death, the ranch had become the equally held property of her three sons, Bradley, Jordan, and baby Kenny. Bradley had very generously cashed them out six months ago and made it very clear that they were welcome to come back and live there whenever they wanted, rent free, as his guests, in the home that the three boys had spent six happy months before their mother had been killed. He was in negotiations to buy twenty-five adjacent acres, beautiful acres, he thought, acres the color of lions.

  He looked into the rearview and saw Erin in the Cayenne Turbo eating his dust. Her vehicle was loaded to the top with boxes of valuable things, as was his Cyclone, the bulk of their possessions to be coming later by moving van from their former home up north of L.A. Bradley glanced up again at his fiancée and smiled. Without trying in the slightest, she moved him.

  He parked in front of the house, and Erin pulled in beside him. Clayton and Stone wandered in behind them in their own vehicles, also loaded with personal possessions. Two of the casitas at the far end of the barnyard were theirs. Always attuned to appearances, Clayton the forger had already painted his to match the barn—red with white trim. The other three remained pink as Suzanne had liked them.

  Bradley climbed the stairs to the porch and unlocked the front door. This porch needs dogs, he thought. He swung open the door for Erin and he stepped in behind her. The new tiles were in and the house smelled of new paint. Sunlight barged through the windows, no drapes or blinds or curtains needed in this remote place. It had a rambling, open-floor plan thanks to his mother’s knocking out of walls. Her last live-in lover, Ernest, father of baby Kenny, was a full-blooded Hawaiian who was good with his hands and had converted the living room to a kind of tiki room with wood carvings and masks and torches and a bar and a corkboard wall displaying all manner of Hawaiian clubs and axes and spears and knives. She called it the party pit.

  Bradley walked into this room and saw people in it, drinking and eating and carrying on until the early hours. Loud. He saw himself stealing beers and selling them to the other kids. He saw Ernest, on a bet, hurling one of the great spears through a beer can taped to the corkboard wall. Bradley had grown up enamored of the primitive weapons, and Ernest had left the tiki room intact as Bradley had asked him. Ernest was living in Oahu with Jordan and baby Kenny now, and on Bradley’s last visit, two-and-a-half-year-old Kenny was already getting the hang of the skimboard. They would all be at the wedding.

  Erin turned and looked at him. “You okay, Brad?”

  “Perfect.”

  “She’s everywhere. This place has her crazy energy.”

  Bradley found the spear slit in the corkboard, pushed a finger into it. “It came out the other side.”

  “I know.”

  “Mom was pissed. Not because of the hole but because she bet against him, that he’d miss the can from across the room. Lost five hundred bucks.”

  “We’ll have good times here, too.”

  “I wouldn’t mind if my brothers came back. Ernest, too, for that matter.”

  “Just bet on him, not against him.”

  They carried boxes into the big master bedroom in the back. They helped the movers get things into the right rooms, and for every box he carried and every possession the movers brought in, Bradley felt his old life in L.A. growing smaller and his new life in Valley Center growing larger. The only downside was Erin’s long drive for gigs, but like Bradley, she enjoyed fast cars, and a performer’s hours would keep her out of workday traffic.

  The movers were finished by evening. Bradley gave them beers and fifty bucks each for not busting anything. When Clayton and Stone headed out for dinner and gambling, Bradley and Erin ran naked down the dock and dove into the cool pond, then wrapped up in blankets and climbed into the tree house hidden high in the enormous barnyard oak tree. From here they could see the minor lights of Valley Center and part of an Indian casino miles away and the black foothills to the east. Along this skyline, the palms dissolved into the night. Bradley had had the foresight to cache a bottle of tequila and two glasses, so they sipped the agave drink and sat on the old tree house couch, watching an inverted quarter moon float up over the hills like a capsized dinghy.

  Later they set up Erin’s studio in one of the big rooms that Suzanne had made by knocking down walls between three smaller bedrooms. Bradley had installed skylights that opened and closed by remote, and screens to keep the bugs and birds and leaves out, so when they opened them, the warm summer air unfolded down on them, and looking up, they could see stars. The baby grand had been moved in and tuned the day before, so now came the guitars and amps and mikes and recording equipment and, as always in a musician’s life, the miles of black cord needed to energize them all. B
radley knew nothing of this gear, so he simply put things where she wanted them and stole looks at her and felt as he had felt a hundred thousand times before that he had been lucky in her, the luckiest ever.