Bradley had been working on a poem down here for weeks now, but there wasn’t much on the page.
He looked up from his yellow notepad and down the bench to see what was left of his ancestor. He sipped bourbon and read what he had written:
If you were a map and I had drawn you
In my blood, who would know where
Your border became my border or where
Your . . .
What? Where your what became my what? And who was he talking to anyway, Erin or Joaquin or himself or the whole world or maybe no one at all? Why were emotions a flood but words to convey them a dry little creek? He wished he could think and write like Erin, wished he could write something as beautiful for her as the songs she wrote for him.
He looked up at Joaquin. “Thanks for your protection on a dangerous job, El Famoso. There were some moments you would have appreciated. The look on Hood’s face. Priceless.”
He turned back and reread his fragment. Bradley wondered if his problem as a poet was his age. At nineteen he felt huge tidal emotions about many things, not just Erin: the tawny hills around him, the great machinery of the stars at night, the way a river changed every moment, the goofy nod of the poppies in the spring, his mother. He was once brought to tears by a baby horned lizard, a miniature thorn-crowned dinosaur enjoying the warmth of his palm. And not just nature, either: He experienced strong feelings when he saw good paintings and read good poems or saw something physically beautiful like a black Stratocaster with a maple fretboard or a staunch Craftsman cottage in Pasadena or a red Sears Craftsman toolbox or an M5. The trouble with being nineteen wasn’t the feelings, it was the words. He hadn’t lived long enough to get familiar with them. They weren’t his friends yet. They were still formal, standoffish. He sipped the bourbon and wondered if there was a way to hurry things along without getting old. He’d seen old and it looked like hell. What was old if not finally having the words but no passions left to describe?
He looked up again. “They’ll catch me someday like they caught you. I don’t think they’ll get my head. I’ll have lawyers and appeals. You only made it to twenty-three. I’m hoping for ninety-three, Gramps. So, any advice, you just pipe up anytime you want.”
Bradley reread his three lines and one word. Maybe the whole map deal was the problem. Nobody drew maps now. You got them on a cell phone screen. Technology is the end of poetry, he thought. What bullshit.
He thought for a long while with the pencil in his hand and the notepad before him. He opened a workbench drawer and pulled out the shred of cover torn from his LASD Explorer class syllabus on which Caroline Vega had written her phone number. He considered it, then he put the paper back.
Then he covered Joaquin and hit the switch, and the ceiling rose, and he climbed the stairs from the vault toward the few acres of earth that belonged to him.
44
Hood served the dinner outside on his patio after the sun went down. Beth sat in the high-backed rattan chair, her skin moist from the heat and her eyes reflecting the candlelight. Her dog sat beside her, viewing Hood with doubt. Minnie was a Labrador/ golden mix, black and gentle.
“That was a bad scene today in the ER with the sergeant.”
Hood nodded and forked the asparagus onto Beth’s plate. He had noticed over the years that cops and medical professionals often made unusual dinner conversation. Maybe that bode well. As a cop’s daughter, Beth liked to talk crime.
“Did you know him?” she asked.
“No. But I heard he assigned the guards for the hospital that night those two men came for Jimmy. Well, didn’t assign them is more like it.”
“This is cop talk, right—not public knowledge?”
“It’s going to get public.”
“This guy made sure the real guards weren’t on duty, so the fake ones could kill Jimmy? That means he was doing a favor for the Gulf Cartel.”
“Yes.”
“Has there ever been an American cop on the take from a Mexican drug cartel?”
“Not that I know.”
“That’s going to be a huge scandal.”
“It will fit right in with everything else that’s happening.”
“Five cops murdered in Tamaulipas just today, Charlie. Heads in coolers left in a park. Notes on top.”
Today’s body count, thought Hood. Heads. Coolers.
The Imperial County Sheriff’s sergeant had shot himself this morning with his service gun. Hood heard that ICSD’s internal affairs team had been investigating him. Hood had learned that law enforcement rumors were almost always true. It was said that the sergeant had made the overtime deputy assignments for Imperial Mercy that shift, when Jimmy Holdstock’s room had gone unprotected. Investigation ongoing. Beth had seen the sergeant as they wheeled him into ER just moments before he expired.
“I treated a man once who lived through a wound like that,” she said. “But he was never the same. Not even close to the same. Imagine.”
Hood poured the wine. “We have a lighthearted pinot noir for your enjoyment.”
“No absinthe?”
“I’ll make you one later.”
“No. Please no.”
After dinner they sat with their backs to the house and the candles flickering and looked out at the new Buenavista. There was still the border town with its odd clash of old and new—its zocalo and Jack in the Box, the Rite Aid and St. Cecilia’s—and its wall right through the middle dividing Mexico from the United States, but a low wall, where people gathered and talked and exchanged news and sometimes gifts—grapefruit from El Centro, beer from Tecate. Now there was the National Guard headquarters to the west and the sprawl of tents and the mobile command center and field hospital and the new roads scratched through the desert for the convoys and the tanks and the half-tracks and the little machine-gun Jeeps that bounced along the roads with an almost recreational joy. And to the north was the new airstrip that was dozed out of the desert by the big Cats in just a few days’ time, wide and long and flat. And at this hour the town and the camp were alive with lights, headlights and searchlights and house lights and yard lights and landing strip lights and the lights of helos and the lights of Jeeps skidding along the new dirt paths, coming and going like ants, thought Hood, hard to say what they were really doing out there.
“Where do you think he is—Mike.”
“Somewhere in California,” said Hood. “They’ll ditch the stolen plates on the convertible and get others. Or maybe just sell off the car and get a fresh one.”
Of course Hood had gotten LASD to issue an all-units watch for Mike and Owens Finnegan, and a BOLO for Mercedes plates, but he knew these would come up empty.
Unless the little devil gets another flat and a lady runs him down and breaks practically every bone in his body, Hood thought. Yeah, if that happens again, we’ve got him.
“Why California?”
“He seems to like it here.”
Owens had called him earlier in the day.
What are you to him?
An associate. I do what he tells me to do.
How much money does he pay you?
It doesn’t matter.
Where is he?
You don’t know anything.
Since he had seen the drawing that Mike had done, not one waking hour had passed without Hood thinking of him. He propped the drawing up beside the coffeemaker in his kitchen each morning and rested it against the lamp on his bed stand at night. If Mike was a man, then he was certainly the most cunning and intuitive and physically prodigious human being that Hood had ever met. If Mike was a journeyman devil, then almost everything Hood knew and believed was null and void, and he was little more than a blind man trying to read a map. More than once, Hood’s nerves had buzzed with the idea of good and evil walking the earth all around us since the beginning of time, doing their jobs. As the son of only faintly Christian parents, this concept exhilarated him. God and Satan? Angels and devils? Really? Hood felt that he should do something. Talk to
a wise man. Read a truthful book. Skydive.
The one thing he had come up with was that whoever and whatever Mike was, he had wanted Hood for something. Something more than having his brain picked and fouling a bust and letting a thousand guns get through, that is.
A partnership? Mike had joked about that. But maybe it wasn’t a joke.
Hood and Beth took their wine and sat side by side on a wooden bench that had been there when Hood moved in. He heard the snapping of brush off to the south and Minnie growled. Beth shushed the dog and together the three of them listened to the slow sporadic advance of something bulky and large through the brush in the darkness before them. It was followed by a swishing sound, as if made by a tail.
A moment later in the moonlight, Hood saw them moving down in the arroyo, a man in the lead and a woman behind him. The man carried a handful of plastic shopping bags with one hand, their necks stretched and thinned by the weight of their cargo. In his free arm he snuggled an infant up close to his chest. A few steps behind her husband, the woman walked backward with a handled plastic water jug cut down to its shoulders, broadcasting sand to cover their tracks, bending to refill the jug and toeing the dirt to cover the marks made by the bottle, then hurriedly backing to catch up to her family and continuing to spread the sand in their wake.
Hood and Beth and the dog watched them traverse the dry gully south to north and when the couple was directly below Hood’s home, they stopped. Briefly they looked up at the candlelight. The woman slowly straightened and placed her hand against the small of her back. Then they continued. Hood listened to the sowing of the sand in the vast desert, and the warrior engines thrumming at the border and the thump of the helos and the thump of his heart, and to him these were one sound, the sound of human beings scratching along the pathways of their own free will.
Not long after the family had vanished into the northern darkness, a sudden wind came up and blew out the candles. It was a southern wind, monsoonal and sweet. Beth put her hand in his and they watched the lights.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A thousand thanks to John Torres and the Los Angeles field division of the ATF.
A thousand more to those who have written about this before me and often better, among them:
W. Dirk Raat and George R. Janecek, Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara
Richard Grant, God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway
William Langewiesche, Cutting for Sign
Charles Bowden, Down by the River
Frank Latta, Joaquin Murrieta and His Horse Gangs
The terrific reporting team behind the Los Angeles Times series, “Mexico Under Siege”—Josh Meyer, Tony Perry, Ken Ellington, Tracy Wilkinson, Scott Craft, Richard Marosi, Sam Quinones, Christopher Reynolds, Andrew Becker, Patrick J. McDonnell, Evelyn Larrubia, Denise Dresser, Frank James, Paul Pringle, Raoul Ranoa, Richard Serrano, Don Bartletti, Deborah Bonello, Lorena Iñiguez Elebee, Cecilia Sanchez, Miguel Bustillo, and Marla Dickerson.
Norman Mailer, who gave the devils their due in The Castle in the Forest.
Another thousand to Dave Bridgman and Sherry Merryman for answering my endless questions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T. Jefferson Parker is the author of sixteen previous novels, including the Charlie Hood thrillers L.A. Outlaws and The Renegades, and the Edgar Award winners Silent Joe and California Girl. In 2009 Parker won his third Edgar, his first in the short story category. He lives with his family in Southern California.
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