“He knows too much,” said Reyes.
“He’s obviously very clever,” said Quang.
“He’s more than that,” said Reyes. “He is not us. You can’t understand the world by believing that it is merely like yourself. There is more and there has always been more and not all of it is good. I can’t believe you don’t see it.” Reyes turned and limped away. Hood watched him turn right for the elevator. When he turned to Quang, the padre was looking up at him with a searching expression.
“Since the death of his granddaughter, Gabriel has not been the same,” said Quang. “She was murdered and left in the desert. Unsolved. Now Gabriel expects evil, so this is what he finds. Finding it confirms his hopes. He is still looking for someone to blame. He sits in the fifth row of St. Cecilia’s every Saturday night for mass, and his eyes burn up at me until the service ends.”
Hood watched the priest walk away, following the same route as the snakebit police chief. He reached into his pocket and took out the cell phone he’d swiped from the book stack on his way out of Finnegan’s room. The charge and bars were both full. He searched contacts, new messages, inbox, sent, drafts, and voice mail and found one message, left just an hour ago. He recognized the number as belonging to Owens.
A few minutes later, he was back in Finnegan’s room. Kathy was hanging the monitor back onto its holder. “It must have just been that sensor,” she said.
“No harm done, Kathy,” said Finnegan.
Hood watched her bustle out and turn into the adjacent room.
“That was interesting,” said Hood.
“A quaint little assault by a Mexican cop and a Vietnamese priest. I love America.”
“Why didn’t you tell them what you told me that night we drank the wine?”
“What I told you that night was nonsense, Charlie. I blathered to you under the influence of wine and some sudden impulse that I attribute to another round of swelling in my brain.”
“I watched your vitals race when Quang touched you. And I watched them run off the chart when Reyes set the cross in your hand.”
“I do have strong reactions to certain people. It always helped me in sales.”
“It wasn’t the sensor.”
“I’ll let you experts decide what it was,” said Finnegan.
Hood set the cell phone back on top of the book stack.
“Strictly for emergencies,” said Finnegan. “And, you know, family matters.”
Hood sat on the wheeled stool and watched Finnegan’s vitals on the monitor.
“How was the wedding, Charlie?”
“Terrific. They’re happy.”
“Youth isn’t always wasted on the young. Did you take Beth?”
Hood nodded. “I saw Owens. She said she’d been here to see you.”
“Oh, my. What a girl. She looks better than I’ve ever seen her. Thank you so much for helping me with her.”
“You’re welcome. But there wasn’t really much of a problem between you two, was there?”
“She likes you.”
“Well.”
“Well? Just well? Our lovely Dr. Petty must be a factor here. She’s had a satisfied look about her the last two days.”
“That may be, Mike.”
“I love single-minded, dumb-as-a-dog loyalty in a man.”
Hood looked up at the vitals monitor and saw Finnegan’s usual numbers.
“Charlie, congratulations on the rescue of Jimmy. I saw him on TV. He looks ghastly and lobotomized, but I guess that’s to be expected. Tell me what happened to Raydel Luna.”
“He brokered the deal with Calderón’s government.”
“Was he shot down by Vascano?”
Hood said nothing while the Bakersfield tiger glanced back at him and he again felt no basis for understanding this man before him at this time and in this place.
You can’t know these things, thought Hood.
Finnegan worked up a slow small smile. “I’m surprised they didn’t get to Raydel earlier,” he said. “A principled man is always a valuable target. May I tell you something?”
“You may.”
“It’s never been my wish to exhaust your goodwill.”
“It is exhausted. You know things and people you’re not supposed to know. You’re not affiliated with any law enforcement or intelligence agencies that I can find. You invent histories and stories to obscure your own past, but the histories and stories involve real people and true events and you know details like you were really there.”
“There are unlimited stories and multiple truths. Not many people can let themselves believe this concept. But you can and that’s why I’ve talked with you. Opened up. Offered friendship. Charlie, I value your goodwill. I would like to encourage it. I feel the weight that is on you. There’s something on your mind, isn’t there?”
Neither man spoke for a long while. Hood remembered Finnegan telling him he could hear a man’s thoughts at eight feet or less. Maybe that would account for all he seemed to know. Hood waited.
“Weapons, Charlie? Weapons going south? I’ll bet I’m getting warm.”
“What else would be on my mind, Mike? Guns are my job with Blowdown.”
“Something new? Something value-priced and made locally in, say, Orange County?”
Hood stared at the little man, thinking: If he knows I’m surveilling Pace Arms, then my cover is blown or soon could be. But how can he know? By reading my mind a few minutes ago? We’re less than eight feet apart. Fucking ridiculous.
But Hood tried to keep his mind open and blank. “Why locally? Why Orange County?”
“Speculation only, deputy.”
“Help me, Mike. Like I helped you with Owens.”
“You already know the big picture, Charlie. You know that the other cartels all need firepower against Armenta and his Zetas. And against Vascano, who’s a bigger threat than Armenta because he recruits. Vascano’s band is growing. They’re over two thousand well-armed men. They’ll kill the cartel leaders and consolidate trade. They’ll make a nice profit off American appetites and they’ll try to win the hearts and bellies of Mexico’s poor. They may succeed. Finally they’ll have to do battle with Calderón’s troops. Vascano is already plucking the best poor soldiers from the Mexican Army and the Guatemalan Kaibiles. The rate of defection increases weekly. Everyone needs guns in Mexico. Everyone.”
“Where are they leaving from, these new, locally made products? When?”
Finnegan again went silent. Hood glanced at the vitals, then at the stack of books, then at the flecks on the linoleum floor.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“You owe me, Mike.”
“Yes, I do.”
Hood stood and plucked the phone off the book and tossed it onto the crook of Mike’s good right arm and walked out.
38
I sit in the penthouse and listen to the sounds of the last eighty Love 32s coming to life down in manufacturing. Three more nights should complete the job, and this night is already half over. One thousand units, nine hundred thousand dollars and the promise of more. I am not prone to contentment, but I smile slightly and circle the cold martini glass in my hand. Through the picture window, I look out across South Coast Plaza and the Trinity Broadcasting Center and beyond them I see the bank of pale coastal fog inching in from the night.
Sharon has gone for take-out sashimi and ice cream. I watch the fog drift in, but suddenly the window glass holds another great pale shape that is not fog. Uncle Chester stands before the open penthouse door, left unlocked of course for Sharon. He comes into the room with small steps, his immense bald head catching the light, his unstructured linen suit adding to his enormity. He carries a leather briefcase. He stands in the middle of the room, looking at either the back of my head or the reflection of my front side in the window.
“And where is Sharon?” he says softly.
“Out.”
“That’s too bad. Ron, I have the documents.”
“What d
ocuments?”
“The creation of our new company. You were right about going legitimate again. Utterly right. I was a fool to think we could make a living illegally. What kind of living is that, really? I’ve paid for a battery of lawyers on this one. Expensive lawyers. But they have found ways to re-create what we once had. They can protect us from the past and open up our future. You will be most pleased, I promise—as head of research and development. And Sharon—straight to marketing. Where is the best place for us to sign these?”
“I’m not signing anything.”
“You will change your mind when you see what I have.”
“I doubt it, Chester.” I stand. I do not want to see or hear Uncle Chester.
I lead him to the beveled glass dining room table under the twinkling glass chandelier. Chester is deferential and insists that I sit at the head. He sets the briefcase on the glass and moves his thumbs across the combination locks. The latches spring open.
Sharon bursts through the door with two handfuls of dangling plastic bags. I’ve never been happier to see her, which is saying something. She looks at Chester and her face goes pale, then she glowers at me.
“Sharon, you are beautiful,” he says.
In fact she is. Her summer dress is a weird shade of green that looks ravishing on her, her espadrilles have good heels, her body is tanned beautifully from all the swimming and sunbathing we did down in Laguna this last weekend.
“Help, Ron?”
But Chester is up and there before I am, sweeping the bags from Sharon’s grip and small-stepping across the hardwood floor to the granite countertop, where he gingerly lands the bags and smiles at her. Still smiling and oddly formal, he moves toward the dining room.
Sharon sets her purse on the counter beside the shopping bags and gives me an even darker look than the one she gave me when we were seventeen and I declared my love for her. “Get him out of here,” she whispers. “Fast.”
But Chet has gone back to his briefcase on the table and brought out a bottle of wine. From my occasional splurges at the locked premium rack of the wine store, I recognize it as a two-hundred-dollar bottle of Anderson Valley cabernet sauvignon. Then he’s back in the kitchen again between Sharon and me, twisting the lead cork sealer off the bottle with one little white hand and then pushing the corkscrew in and turning, all the while chattering away about possible names for the new company—Chetronsha Arms being his favorite, a neat compounding of all our names, equal billing with allowances for seniority and . . .
“You’ve got five minutes of my time, Chester,” says Sharon. “Starting right now.”
We sit at the dining room table, and Chester passes the documents to us. The cover sheets bear the name of a prominent Newport Beach business law firm. In a soft voice, Chester summarizes the contents and intentions of each thick clipped packet. He makes them sound logical and simple. There are scores upon scores of thin rubber arrows stuck to the edges of the sheets to mark the places for signature and dating—blue for me, pink for Sharon, and black for Chet. Among the docs are a draft general description of the new Chetronsha Arms, a DBA form, a business plan, a tax plan, an asset sheet describing the real property and furnishings here at the former Pace Arms address, and several shorter agreements, addenda, letters of intent, an applicable compendium of State of California corporate laws, and finally a draft proposal of Chetronsha Arms corporate bylaws.
Sharon has gone silent as she reads. I do, too. I can hear the faint tap-tap-tapping of the gunsmiths downstairs and their music, which I know is loud down there but barely audible up here. When Chester looks at me, his expression tries to confirm my joy and pride in these sounds. I’m not much of a businessman, so I just scan the pages, looking for God knows what. Sharon, on the other hand, is a very attentive and discriminating reader of business documents. She used to drive Contracts crazy with her eye for minutiae when she was tasked with proofing their drafts.
Five minutes comes and goes. I’ve drunk half the wine. I look out the window and see nothing now, just a pale infinity of fog through which come no shape and no light and no color.
Sharon reads on for another five. During the last two minutes, she’s not really reading, just flipping pages with increasing speed and loudness. When she turns the last page, she is shaking her head.
“Thanks for all your hard work, Chester,” she says. “I see you spent a lot of money on good counsel. They’ve been thorough and thoughtful. Ron and I have talked long and hard about this company. We have dreamed about it. We have worked hard to put ourselves into the position of making it a reality. We have a vision for it, and this vision does not include you as the president and CFO. It does not include you at all. With due respect, Chet, I now ask you to take these documents with you and leave this building forever. Ron?”
“She’s right, Chester. I’m sorry. That’s just what it is.”
The great whiteness of Chester’s face has changed to pink, and his small blue eyes blink quickly as if in defense. He sets a hand upon a stack of documents. “I have given you everything you wanted. I’ve provided for your dreams. Surely there can be a place in them for me.”
“I’m sorry, Chester,” I say.
“I’m not,” says Sharon.
“For your father, Ron? My brother? For old times?”
“We’re starting up a company, Chet, not putting a contract out on you.”
“Man to man, blood on blood?”
“No.”
A long pause while Chester stares into space. “I’m very, very disappointed.”
Chester stacks the documents neatly and sets them in the still-open briefcase. He squares them, closes the lid, snaps down the latches, and spins the small steel combination numbers. He stands and sets the briefcase upright before him, both hands on the leather handle. He looks at Sharon, then at me. He bows his head formally. Then he turns and sweeps the briefcase from the table, and when his back is to me, he pivots around once like a discus thrower and slams the corner of it into my head. I get my hand between my skull and the briefcase but not much of it. Then I’m on my back on the floor, looking up at the chandelier. However, the chandelier is not bright and white but the color of my eyelids. I try to open them as in a nightmare, but they will not open. I hear grunts and whimpers and the gagging of strangulation. I hear the tearing of fabric. I hear gasps. Then these sounds lose volume, and I fear that I am losing consciousness. I stand. I fall. I stand again and my eyes open. The penthouse whirls around me. I stagger toward the sounds in the bedroom. I stand in the doorway looking in. Chester has his enormous back to me and he has planted his bulk upon Sharon on the bed, her legs splayed and her heels raining helplessly down against his huge haunches. He’s got her hands pinned over her head to the mattress with one of his own, and with the other he’s trying to get off his belt. They’re both growling.
Without thinking, I throw myself onto him. It takes him a moment to acknowledge me. I smell baby powder. Then he rises up smoothly like a breaching whale and wrenches himself off the bed. I land on the floor. He towers over me. He looks down and his expression is the same as it always is. He pulls me up by my shirt collar, tosses me into the air just a little, and catches my head between the meaty vises of his hands. He holds me up to face him, eye to eye, and I’m struggling and kicking and hanging onto his forearms with both hands to try to keep my skull from buckling. He squeezes. “There are no new ideas. Only old imperatives,” he whispers. I feel my skull plates grinding. My vision constricts, then fractures. All I can see for certain is the bed below me, the blessedly empty bed.
Then I hear three sharp cracks. Through Chester’s palms I register three small tremors. His hands shiver and his eyes widen and he growls again, then grimaces, his small even teeth not a foot away from my face. He drops me to the floor. I roll toward the door and there is Sharon, standing just inside the doorway, her dress ripped and dangling and a Pace Arms Hawk .22 up in both hands, aimed at Chester. He lumbers toward us. I stay down on my knees to giv
e her a clear sight line. If he gets close, I’ll spring onto him to keep him from her. She shoots him three more times and Chester stops. I can see two small bloody circles on his shirtfront and a bright red gash high up on his skull where the bullet has bounced off. He grunts and twists one arm behind his back as if trying to scratch an itch, and I realize this is where the first three shots hit. Sharon has eight shells left if the magazine was full, nine if there was also one cartridge in the chamber. Chester steps forward and Sharon shoots him three more times, pretty much dead center at this close range. He rocks and staggers backward. He sways, then steadies himself. “Nobody does that to me,” Sharon says dreamily. She fires and misses and misses again. The bullets smack the wall. Then she cracks a shot between his small blue eyes. His head shakes and settles and he looks at us. He sits on the foot of the bed and places his hands on his thighs, as if he were about to say something. There’s blood running down his mouth and off his chin. He extrudes a small pointed tongue and tastes it. His torso is drenched in the red blood of his lungs and the black blood of his heart. He collapses then, like a building imploded, his lower body slumping to the floor first and his head whipping down last with a sharp centrifugal splat. The back of his cream linen coat is a bloody thing, too. Sharon hands the gun down to me and walks unevenly away, one shoulder and half her back showing above the flap of her torn green dress, one foot bare and the other still shod.
I find her in the kitchen, wiping out two martini glasses. Her eyes are wide and her hands tremble and she doesn’t look at me. I come up behind her to put my hands on her shoulders.
“Do not approach me.”
“Okay. I won’t. Sharon, he didn’t—”
“No, he did not.”
“I’m thankful for that, Sharon. I’m going downstairs to talk to Marcos while you make those drinks. We’ll need to make some adjustments.”
“The ice cream is melting.”
“I’ll get it.”
“What if he’s not dead.”
“He is dead.”
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