Hood stood and watched Bly use a pry bar to open another gun crate. More denim. A man in a passing car asked if they had a pair of thirty-six/thirty-fours. Hood told him to move his fat ass along. Bly looked up at Hood with dampened fury in her eyes, then shoved away the case, toppling its contents into the shoulder dirt. She cursed and used the crook end of the pry bar to yank the next crate toward her.
Hood gazed down at the bounty of new pants. Bradley and Clayton and Ron faked the weight of the boxes, Hood thought. They had known they were being watched. They had acted their parts. And he had watched them do it but not understood what he was seeing.
Hood found Ozburn in his SUV, tapping on his laptop. Ozburn was getting ready for an undercover assignment and trying to make his face scarce. He rolled down the darkened window. “The Econoline had a blowout in Temecula, so Frank made his move. It was loaded with bags of ready-mix concrete. Ninety pounders and lots of them. Charlie, these dolts had some help. They could never have pulled this off on their own. Pace just drove that motor home right into a transport helo?”
“It had a cargo lift.”
“Then a thousand guns just crossed the border by air while we got a hundred crates of jeans. Who are these guys?”
“Bradley is Allison Murrieta’s son.”
“The teacher? The armed robber?”
Hood nodded. “Clayton is a forger.”
“They say they’re volunteers with All Saints. They say they’ve been doing this for two years and they’ve got priests and social workers and towns full of poor people who will tell us so.”
“They probably do.”
Bradley sat handcuffed in the back of one government SUV and Clayton in another, each watched by an ATFE agent. Bradley shook his head as Hood walked up and swung open the front door and looked in.
“Charlie. Tell these guys who I am.”
A videographer had escaped the media area and came crunching along the shoulder toward Hood and Bradley, camera up, shooting as he walked. “Gentlemen—let’s have a shot of the good Samaritan here.”
Hood wrenched away the recorder and popped the video card out before tossing the camera back at the stunned man. “Get back where you belong or I’ll arrest you, too.”
Hood was watching the man retreat when his phone rang. It was Beth Petty. “Charlie, something’s happened to Mike.”
“What?”
“He, um . . . he walked out.”
41
The nurses trailed along wordlessly as Hood and the doctor hurried through the ICU. Beth opened Mike’s room door and pulled back the privacy curtain. Hood looked at the chunks of plaster, some on the bed and some on the floor, some in the wastebasket, some pieces separate and some still attached by gauze. The girdle stood whole on the floor where Mike had apparently stepped out of it. Hood saw the dressing gauze ripped and wadded and strewn about the room. The collar and blood-smeared cranial rods were set in a corner. There were a few drops of blood on the floor. The catheter tube was tied around the bedrail uphill of the bag so it wouldn’t leak. The room smelled bad.
“Who was with him?”
“No one. He tore out of his cast and walked out alone.”
“Wearing what, a hospital gown?”
“Owens came yesterday. She brought him some new clothes, though I told her he was far from ready for discharge. She said she knew that, but maybe the clothes would inspire him. I thought that was fine. She had a Hawaiian shirt, a navy windbreaker, a pair of chinos, a pair of Vans slip-ons, underwear and socks, and a Padres hat. She put them all in the closet there. She used hangers for the shirt and jacket and pants. Later in the day, Mike asked me to show them to him and he said he hoped they weren’t too big, that Owens always bought a size too big. I thought it was endearing, a guy in a full-body cast worrying about the fit of clothes he wouldn’t be able to even put on for weeks.”
Hood looked at the closet, empty except for four metal hangers, the shoulder of one uplifted and caught on the shoulder of another as if a garment had been yanked off in a hurry.
“He walked out of the room to the nurses’ station,” said Beth. “It took them a moment to realize who he was. They ordered him back into his bed, but he politely refused. He thanked them graciously for all they had done, especially all the good books, and as soon as he left ICU, they called security. Security caught up with him in the lobby and he explained that his account was paid in full and that he was feeling very good. He did a little dance that left him with the toe of one shoe pointed up and his hands spread out. He smiled. Security said the smile looked weird. It was probably because his jaw is still wired shut. Outside he got into a black Mercedes convertible possibly driven by his daughter. I have the plate number.”
“You’re telling me he ripped out of that cast on his own?”
“Yes. Nobody could have helped. Nobody can get past the station without being seen.”
“Why the blood?”
“From the cranial rods. The flesh heals over them, but when they’re removed there’s bleeding. You see, there isn’t much blood here. About right. The hat would hide those wounds.”
Hood squatted and picked up a piece of plaster cast. It was slightly concave and roughly the size of a paperback book and ragged on all four sides. White mesh dressing clung to the inside and extended past the torn edges of the plaster. It smelled of unwashed cotton and an unwashed human being. Hood turned it over and saw the sweat-stained gauze and the four crushed indentations where Mike had torn away this section of solid plaster as if it were a piece of bread.
“I wouldn’t believe a single word of what I just said except I saw half of it,” said Beth. “The other half I believe because I know these nurses.”
“It was the strangest thing I ever saw in my life, deputy,” said one.
“When he came through that door all dressed and I realized who he was, this giant cold shudder went through me,” said another.
“He really did manage to smile,” said another.
Hood stood and tossed the piece of plaster onto the bed. “Nurses, doctors, security, cops, deputies, marshals, and two thousand Guardsmen, and he walks right out.”
“We can’t keep him,” said the first nurse. “We can’t hold anyone against his will. That’s what you do.”
Hood parked across from Owens Finnegan’s El Centro home just after three o’clock. The desert lay darkening beneath the stacked thunderheads, and a heavy wind had picked up. Her garage door was open, but the black Mercedes convertible was gone.
He knocked at the front door and waited but she didn’t answer, as he knew she wouldn’t. The door was unlocked. Hood walked in and closed it behind him and stood for a moment in the empty living room, then walked through the empty kitchen and down the hall to the once beautiful bedroom into which he had been invited, and this was vacant now, too. The bathroom was cleaned out, but on the counter was a wedding absinthe goblet, and beneath the goblet were two sheets of paper. Hood moved the goblet and looked down at a drawing. It was done in charcoal, masterfully rendered, sharp true lines and deep smudges of shadow pierced by light. It depicted Bradley Jones inside the Pace Arms manufacturing bay, dressed in his smart Explorer uniform, examining the newly born firearms as he walked along the workstations, his face locked in the exact speculative, lost-in-thought expression that Hood had seen that night through the window.
Exactly as I saw it, thought Hood. Every detail, every mood.
In the bottom right corner, the name Mike was written in a neat, forward-slanting draftsman’s hand.
I can hear what they think and see what they see. Sometimes very clearly. It’s like hearing a radio or looking at a video.
Hood slid the drawing to the side to see the paper under it. It was a note written in the same neat hand:
Charlie:
I took from you. Next time, and there will be a next time, I will give back. Something you desire, something you need.
MF
That evening when Hood finally got to Mi
ke Finnegan’s apartment across from LAX, he pulled up, saw the FOR RENT sign in the window, and kept on going all the way to Bakersfield.
He sat with his mother in his boyhood home and they talked until late and he slept in the same bed he had slept in as a high schooler. He woke up early and left a note for his mother and father, then drove home as the darkness evaporated. As it often had been in his life, the passing of time and miles was a comfort to Hood, a man navigating an iron river, adrift with blunt instruments and crude charts.
42
You haven’t lived until you’ve sat next to Sharon Rose Novak in a Sun King motor home carrying one thousand machine pistols and one iced, four-hundred-pound corpse, being swept away from ATFE agents in the belly of a relic Red Cross Chinook helicopter.
The helo briefly landed way out in the Southern California desert and I backed the motor home down the cargo lift and onto a decent dirt road that Bradley had said would lead us to a Joshua tree with a white ribbon tied to one cluster of spines. No sooner had I driven the motor home outside the rotor diameter than the CH-47 lifted off again. Bradley believed that a Sun King driven by a well-groomed young man and his lovely companion would draw less attention than a Red Cross helicopter thundering through U.S. air space over Norton, Pendleton and Miramar military bases, etc., on its way south. Especially if no one was looking for the motor home to begin with. One of Herredia’s helo crewmen had put on new Arizona plates while Sharon and I sat thousands of feet in the sky, experiencing the hypnotic, otherworldly, and slightly nauseating feeling of being inside a motor home inside a transport chopper doing a hundred fifty knots over God knows where.
Sharon spotted the white ribbon a few minutes later, and I backed the Sun King to it and with some difficulty we managed to push/ drag/drop Uncle Chester’s tarped and dry-iced remains into the waiting hole. Bradley’s men had left one shovel that Sharon and I used to cover Chet. I offered to do the spadework myself, but Sharon insisted on doing half of it, and I watched her during her turns from the meager shade of the Joshua tree. She was grim and silent and determined about it. I could tell that every shovelful of sand she put between herself and Chet was something she needed to do to keep him away from her, literally and symbolically, too. I closed with the Lord’s prayer though I kind of hurried through it. I thought of my mother.
The Love 32s were more or less loose in the Sun King, since the wooden gun crates had been used for the new jeans for charity. The ruse was Bradley’s idea, though how he learned that ATFE agents were surveilling Pace Arms I’ll probably never know. Sharon had found late-summer bargain beach blankets on sale at a supermarket for three ninety-nine each, and in these forty blankets we wrapped and folded and duct-taped our thousand guns. We had guns under the motor home beds, guns in the overhead sleeper, guns in the cupboards and closets, guns in the bathroom and shower, guns in the bench seat storage chests, guns under the dining table and upon it and piled on the padded seating around it, guns in the walkway from cab to bath. The silencers and extra-capacity magazines, being smaller and more conveniently shaped, fit nicely inside the new but inexpensive pillow cases that Sharon found at Big Lots, and these we stashed anyplace that wasn’t already filled with guns.
We crossed into Mexico at Nogales, were stopped briefly for the usual questions by the U.S. ICE agents, and were simply waved through by their Mexican counterparts. Shortly we were intercepted by a small flotilla of Suburbans that escorted us into the middle of Baja California. The flotilla personnel were either Mexican Federal Judicial Police or narcos dressed in the uniforms of the MFJP. Bradley had told me that both were in the employ of Carlos Herredia.
After two hours of driving, we were suddenly run onto the very narrow shoulder of the road by several of the Suburbans. We were boarded, and at gunpoint we were herded back into the vehicle, where the policemen blindfolded us. I held hands with Sharon as they did this, wondering if we were about to be shot. I honestly couldn’t figure what we had done to deserve that. But we were then politely helped out of the Sun King and into one of the Suburbans, and a short hour later we were unblindfolded within Herredia’s compound, known as El Dorado.
I got out of the Suburban and helped Sharon down, then I looked out at the beautiful hacienda and the adobe outbuildings and the casitas and the glimmering pool beneath the palapas, and beyond that the airstrip with its sock luffing in the breeze, and all of this surrounded by green ranchland dabbed with cattle, and I wondered how a country with such a rich pastoral soul could have descended into such brutality. You don’t have to be a student of history to realize that it has more than a little to do with people like me.
Late that first night when Sharon and I went back to our casita with the six hundred thousand dollars, I sat for a long while looking at the four rolling suitcases that contained it and I felt briefly discontent. I love the Love 32. I know it will become a part of history. I loved designing it. I loved procuring its elements and recruiting its builders. I loved making it. I love shooting it. I even loved smuggling it down here. I know that lives will be taken with my creations—the lives of the bad and the good. The destruction is only just beginning. It will grow. But I am an American and I believe we choose our actions and I believe that the business of America is business. We are free. I’ve made my fortune and I’ve made myself and for this I will not apologize. We all need a break in these tough economic times.
Right now I’m sitting by the El Dorado swimming pool. It’s late morning and warm but not hot. Herredia is doing laps. He doesn’t really swim, he pounds. He’s terrifically strong and he’s been at this for forty minutes.
Bradley left last night to reunite with Erin in Valley Center. He was particularly moony and distracted yesterday, a newlywed pining for his bride. And he was richer.
Sharon is in our casita, soon to arrive. She slept late, as usual, and it will take her a while to get ready to face the world. Her ruined wedding and Chester weigh heavily on her.
When she gets here, I’m going to ask her to take a short walk with me, just down the road a bit. I’m going to tell her what it was like the first time I saw her sitting there at her new workstation at Pace Arms, a seventeen-year-old girl who said she was eighteen because she needed the money. I’m going to tell her how it felt when we hardly talked for a year after I told her I loved her. I’m going to tell her what it was like seeing her sitting there at her old workstation at defunct Pace Arms, a twenty-one-year-old woman who had just had her heart broken. I’ve got the ring, a carat and a half, near colorless, SI1, brilliant cut, set in platinum, in a box in the pocket of my cargo shorts. I’m no genius, but I’m not going to make the same mistake that idiot Daryl made.
43
Bradley came home to Valley Center late at night after a ten-hour patrol shift in L.A. County. He parked his Porsche out front of the ranch house and stood for a moment on the deck. Erin would be home soon from her own L.A. gig.
He looked out at the three-quarter moon and heard the breeze hissing across the hills. The rodeo arena was still up from the wedding, and the bunting still dangled in places from the buildings, and the tiny lights still twinkled in the big oak tree in the barnyard. It was Bradley’s job to get the place back to normal, but he liked the wedding stuff, wanted it around for a while. What a great three days those had been.
Tonight he’d been assigned to a humorless old veteran named Spencer, and the first thing Spencer had said to him was Boy Scouts don’t touch my radio unless I tell them to. Boy Scouts being his name for Explorer cadets. Over the hours, Spencer had lectured Bradley on the dangers of female deputies, use of intimidation during citizen interviews, and the use of force in detaining suspects. I’m still quite fond of the old baton, he rhymed with an asinine grin. Spencer coached third base in the department slow-pitch league and took offense when he invited Bradley to try out and Bradley told him he had better things to do with his time. After shift, the big deputy wordlessly left Bradley with the car and gear check, then shuffled into the substation,
headed for the shower. Bradley had stood in the parking area for a long moment, considered the substation and the deputies coming and going, the fleet of aging patrol cars, felt the cotton-poly blend of his uniform shirt on his skin and thought: I’m lucky to have more than this. He’d seen Caroline Vega in the lunchroom before shift again, always a good thing, and they had continued their ongoing dialogue about the bad guys having all the fun but being too dumb to enjoy it. Just kidding. Of course. He’d use her someday. He had the feeling their lives would cross, and he was almost never wrong when he felt this way. Draper had taught him that the power of one was one, but the power of two was many times greater, and the power of three many times greater than that. And so on.
He showered and changed, then went into the barn and cleared the Ping-Pong table and found the switch. The table rose and revealed the stairs. He walked down into the vault and hit the wall switch, and the floor/ceiling replaced itself over him, Ping-Pong table and all.
He opened one of the safes to look again at his ninety-thousand-dollar transport payment from Herredia. You bet it looked good, and Bradley felt that low-down grinning happiness of cash on hand. He uncovered Joaquin and poured himself a bourbon and sat down at the workbench. Beside the bottled head now rested the chain mail vest, Joaquin’s own, a gift from Mike Finnegan, delivered by Owens, on Bradley’s wedding day. Bradley knew the story of the vest, how Joaquin had commissioned it from an arrogant French armorer, and how Joaquin had not trusted the armorer, so before he would make payment on the allegedly bulletproof vest, Joaquin had made the Frenchman put it on himself, then drawn his revolver and shot him in the heart. The speechless Frenchman collected his payment, and Joaquin rode the rest of his brief life protected by this armorer’s art. Bradley loved the story, but he loved even more the mystery of how Mike Finnegan had gotten the vest. Owens wouldn’t say. He could see that she knew, but she protected her knowledge with armor of her own—her pewter eyes and her damaged beauty. Bradley believed he would see those most strange people again. He all but knew it. He’d have a crack at the little guy, maybe trade him something precious for the story of how he had gotten the vest, maybe just hold him up by his throat until he was ready to croak out the truth.
Iron River Page 31
