The Famous and the Dead ch-6

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Herredia tipped the bottle and Bradley saw the downward furrow of his eyebrows as he measured the pour. Watch out, Bradley thought.

  “I truly thank you for your friendship, Carlos,” said Arturo. He burped. “But I am not the man I thought I was. I am an engineer. I am in control of quality. I have skills. I have no nerves for this kind of work.”

  “You had nerves enough for the many thousands of dollars I shared with you.”

  “You bribed me for the use of my automobiles,” said Arturo. “Isn’t that more accurate? In addition, I will pay you back.”

  “Don’t lose your bravery now,” said Caesar. “We’re almost finished here. Senor Herredia only has to fly us home in his jet tomorrow. You drink too much, Arturo.”

  Arturo burped again and knocked back the shot. “When I drink too much the veil is lifted and I see the world for what it is-a cauldron of greed. I want to go home tonight. I want to sleep in my bed and wake in the morning without the stain of greed in my heart. I want to confess my sins to Father Patricio.”

  “Confess?” asked Herredia.

  “Fully and truthfully.”

  “Fully and truthfully. I understand. But you can’t go home tonight. My pilot is drunk and sleeping.”

  “We drove here. And we can drive home.”

  “We cannot drive home the trailer loaded with new Fords,” said Caesar with a smile. “We have made a deal and they are going to El Centro. And we would look crazy driving back to where the cars were manufactured.”

  Herredia studied Arturo in the short silence. “Go to the garage and choose a car to your liking,” said Herredia. “The keys are in the ignitions.” He gestured invitationally but in the candlelight Bradley saw the pronounced blackness of his eyes. Bradley sensed that he was reading a story that would end in blood. Herredia barked an order to the women and they trailed off toward the guest casitas, drinks in hand.

  “You are coming with me?” Arturo asked his friend.

  “No,” said Caesar. “But I will prevent you from driving in your condition.”

  “I shall now be finding a car. Can it be a Ford, El Tigre? So that I can be assured of its quality?” Arturo swayed upright and zigzagged along the pool without falling in, then made it past the cabanas. Bradley heard the crunch of the drunk man’s feet on the dry desert gravel.

  Caesar tried to rise from the table, but Bradley stopped him with a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I will stop Arturo from driving away,” said Caesar.

  “You will sit and stay,” said Herredia.

  Bradley watched old Felipe appear beside Herredia’s chair as if by magic, and lean down close for El Tigre to whisper in his ear. Then Felipe hustled off, bandy-legged, unslinging the shotgun from his shoulder.

  “Caesar,” said Herredia, “we have arrived at a problem.”

  “I know it. He will kill someone on the highway at night. Or be killed.”

  “He will not get to the highway.”

  Caesar’s hopeful expression had fallen away. He looked at Bradley as if for help.

  “Everything Arturo has seen and heard here can be told to authorities,” said Herredia. “He is made rotten by fear and he cannot be trusted with our secrets. Do you understand this?”

  “He is a harmless quality control engineer.”

  “He is a foolish and greedy child. And you, Caesar? What are you?”

  Caesar looked past Herredia, toward the garage, then back to his host. “I am interested in remaining alive.”

  Bradley looked up the drive to see Felipe and Arturo walking back toward the pool. They were little more than faint apparitions but Bradley saw that Arturo was weaving drunkenly and Felipe was well behind him. Felipe’s cackle rode in on the breeze and the two men walked to the barbed-wire pasture fence and stopped.

  “If I cannot trust Arturo, why should I trust you? You are as important a danger to me as he is. You have seen what he has seen. You know what he knows.”

  “His courage failed. Mine has not.”

  “But you are together. You two are a link in the chain. And the chain is only as strong as the weak link. Look how weak Arturo has turned out to be. He wants to go home and confess!”

  “Yes. I see.”

  “And you are a part of him.”

  “But I am not weak.”

  “You say you are not weak.” Herredia reached behind his back and set his Desert Eagle on the table, pointed at Caesar. It was a.50-caliber semiauto, bulky, gleaming, and incontrovertible. Herredia set his big brown hand upon it. “Your words are like drops of rain on the ocean. They fall and can never be found again. But this? This is how words are made to be real. You say you are not weak. This is the true maker of weakness and of strength. Not words.”

  “Why is it pointed at me?”

  “It is judging you.”

  “What are the charges against me?”

  “Weakness. Disloyalty. Betrayal.”

  “I am none of these.”

  Herredia lifted his hand from the gun and rested on his elbows, leaning toward Caesar. “Then use this tool to make your words real. You know what must be done.”

  Caesar glanced at Bradley again and Bradley saw the panic in his eyes. “How? How am I to. .? I have never touched a gun.”

  “It’s the only way to continue your life, you fool.”

  Bradley followed Caesar’s gaze to the Desert Eagle as he drew his own civilian sidearm, a compact nine-millimeter. He set this on the table in front of him with both hands upon it, in case Caesar tried to shoot his way out of this predicament, unlikely though it was. He caught Herredia’s approving glance. Caesar placed both hands against his face and pressed against his eyes as if he could wipe this terrible moment from his vision.

  Bradley looked out to the pasture fence. Arturo was haranguing Felipe but the old man, hunched and gnomelike, stood with his shotgun pointed at the quality control assistant manager.

  “Murder,” said Caesar.

  “Weakness and strength. Loyalty and cowardice. These are only words that stand for something. But they are not what they stand for. They are all equally without meaning. You choose which ones are to be made real and then you make them real.”

  “He is a good man.”

  “He has treated you very poorly. He has forced you to the edge of death with his own weakness and shame. Yet El Tigre has seen a way for you to live.”

  Caesar looked toward the pasture. He wiped a tear from under each eye, then took a deep breath. “You just pull the trigger?”

  Herredia offed the safety and placed the gun in front of the man. Then the tequila. Bradley tapped his fingers on the nine. Caesar drank deeply, then stood. “Only two months ago everything was good. There were no drugs hidden in our cars and my friend Arturo was not about to die.”

  “Think about your debts,” said Herredia. “Think about a future that has great riches no matter how much your wife gambles and spends. Or how many degrees your daughter needs to have. Caesar, be a man. If you hesitate much longer I’m going to be very happy to shoot you both.”

  Caesar took up the.50 caliber and walked past the cantina and the poolside palapas and onto the road. Bradley could see him stop and look back, and beyond him he saw Arturo still gesticulating and Felipe with the shotgun on him. Arturo’s voice, shrill and angry, came in fragments. Caesar trudged toward them and Bradley heard the road gravel rasping under his shoes.

  “Will Felipe kill him?” asked Bradley.

  “Only if he loses his courage.”

  Bradley watched Caesar approach the two men. There were still fifty feet between them. Arturo turned and said something and Felipe didn’t move. Caesar answered, still advancing. Arturo spoke again and his voice ended on the upsweep of a question. Caesar began talking fast but Bradley could only catch a few words, something about the truck and getting back to Hermosillo and their esposas. Arturo exclaimed something to the old man and proudly slammed his fist to his own chest. He took one step toward the new Fords, then an orange blast fro
m the Desert Eagle blew him like a rag into the pasture fence. He shrieked and thrashed awhile, then his head sagged forward with the great exit of his life. His coat sleeves caught up on the barbs so his arms and body slid only partially free and he hung there, half in and half out of his coat, with the dark liquid blooming on his white shirt.

  “Now both men can be trusted!” boomed Herredia.

  Bradley watched as Felipe sprang forward and tore the gun away from Caesar, who did not move to stop him. The old man came scampering down the road toward them, his gargoyle face delighted in the moonlight. Bradley saw that Caesar had knelt and wrapped his arms around his friend. His lamentations arrived in a cadence broken by the breeze.

  26

  Bradley was ready to set off at sunrise on three hours’ sleep, sitting high in the tractor cockpit as Baja California came alive in the clean pink light. He’d always liked driving eighteen-wheelers, and was taught to handle them by one of his uncles, who drove long hauls for a living. At age sixteen, Bradley had stolen a big rig from a drunken operator at a truck stop. Just a joyride, really, though he had gone all the way to Reno. But this morning’s ride was an even bigger joy: $24,000 stashed in a toolbox, another ten thousand cash coming at Castro Ford, followed by the greatest joy of all, Erin. He’d have time to buy her something nice.

  He had a tall mug of strong Mexican coffee between his legs and the nine-millimeter holstered under the seat. Herredia waved like a proud father, two pretty women standing on either side of him, one of them the gringa who’d been knocked into the pool. Bradley picked his way through the first few gears, felt the great tonnage pressing from behind him like something untamed. Two gunships, four men each, rumbled along up ahead, and two more trailed behind. They’d get him as far as the first paved road, then the way north would be secured by various state police. Dust rose around him. The cardon cacti, tall and singular, passed his windows slowly, then less slowly, then not so slowly at all and El Dorado was gone.

  He drove Highway 1 west through the spectacular Baja desert. The clouds were dark blue but through them sunlight slanted down in bright girders. The beauty of it fought his nerves to a draw. He listened to Mexican songs on the radio and thought of Erin.

  Off Highway 3 he stopped in a village with a lovely old church because he suddenly wanted to say a simple prayer in the house of His Lord. Maybe mention poor Arturo. He set his hat on the seat beside him and climbed down from the tractor. He checked the pigtail, then walked the length of the double-deck trailer, eyeing the tie-downs and chains, three per automobile.

  The church was of minor historic note because it was made almost entirely of copper. The door was copper-covered wood inlaid with a full-length stained-glass image of Saint Francis of Assisi. There were birds on his shoulders and a lamb and a lion at his feet. Bradley pulled open the door and stepped inside, smelled the soot and smoke of many candles, the decades of incense, the faint earthy scent of the pavers.

  He sat in the back row of pews and looked at the simple altar and the communion table with its wooden candelabras and folded white towels. High on the chancel a bleeding Jesus hung on his cross. Bradley began the Lord’s Prayer but as soon as he thought Our Father a wave of nausea broke over him and his face went cold. He felt dread. He bent over slightly and looked at the floor, reviewing what he’d eaten for breakfast at El Dorado: ham and eggs and tortillas and grapefruit juice. He had always had an iron stomach and was proud of it. The nausea passed so he knelt as his mother, a very lapsed Catholic, used to do on the family’s rare excursions to church.

  He began his prayer again, but he felt his stomach turning over and the cold flash of sweat on his back, and again he had to stop at Our Father. Bad ham? It had tasted fine. Too much coffee? That was hours ago. Maybe it was just the pressure of smuggling over a ton of drugs into the United States. And all that cash. If convicted he’d get, what, fifteen years? Twenty? He thought of the Blands. What if they really weren’t off the job? What if Dez had changed her mind? Dread nagged him. Could this be some kind of delayed reaction to last night’s murder of Arturo? Certainly not the first killing he’d seen, and he’d never had such a reaction before. Then he wondered if this might be Mike Finnegan’s Declaration of Parity coming back to bite him. Asinine, he thought. The second wave of nausea left him breathing faster and more heavily, and even when he straightened his back and felt all his weight being borne by his knees he couldn’t quite seem to get his breath.

  Movement on the floor beside him caught his eye and he looked down at the red diamond rattlesnake inching toward him across the pavers. It was very small, no more than eight inches long. Wide head, thin neck. It was nearly the same brick red as the floor, but its diamonds were outlined in white and black and its tail had black and white rings. The pupils were elliptical. The rattle was but two small buttons. Bradley was conversant with the behavior of some snakes, having lived on the Valley Center property for much of his life, where he had observed that in spring and summer the rattlesnakes were active, less so in the fall, and in winter were almost never out moving around unless it was very warm or very late in the season. This February activity was unusual. The day was cool. The snake approached slowly with its tiny tongue darting in and out and made small directional adjustments, but its course was directly at Bradley.

  Suddenly the nausea hit again. Using the back of the pew in front of him Bradley pulled himself off the padded prayer kneeler and stepped into the aisle and stumbled for the exit. Outside he rounded the building and bent over with his hands on his knees in the cool shade. But the nausea passed again, and he straightened and felt the blood coming back to his face. Settling into his seat in the tractor, he had a headache but no longer felt sick. He glanced at Saint Francis of Assisi and wondered what had just happened in there.

  • • •

  By eight thirty, he had passed through both Mexican and U.S. customs with only cursory inspections. Both sets of officials had cheerful words about the high quality of the new Fords made in Mexico but neither asked why he’d driven nearly five hundred miles out of his way, or endured the tedious Guaymas-to-Santa Rosalia ferry, instead of just crossing at Nogales. He felt safe in using his cell phone now that he was stateside, and his heart fluttered when he saw that Erin had left him not one but three texts. Thomas turned! No caesarean needed! Due in eight days and I feel very happy right now!

  Shifting quickly through the low gears as he left the customs plaza, Bradley felt the great weight of his dread diminishing and he noticed that his headache was gone and his hands were no longer so tightly clenched to the wheel. El Centro was just little over an hour out. He set his phone on the seat beside him and voice-dialed Erin.

  27

  Hood cruised by Castro Ford and saw that Israel’s Flex was parked up front. He continued down the street and made two right turns that brought him again to the back side of the lot, the parts-and-service yard and the new-car intake bay. The bay looked ready for the nine-thirty delivery-all three rolling doors up and Israel and two other men all standing out in the cool morning sunshine, smoking and checking their watches and kicking around one of the promotional Castro Ford soccer balls that Hood had seen in the showroom. Again he pictured a life as a car salesman should his law enforcement career not pan out.

  He parked well away in the meager shade of a stand of greasewoods and rolled down the windows. The greasewoods gave off a clean scent but Hood knew from a boyhood of shooting doves from the shade of Bakersfield windbreaks that they were greasy and home to all manner of spiders, scorpions, ticks, and other biting things. Dug into the bank of fallen greasewood needles he saw a silk-lined cavern in which a fat spider sat. Then another. Looking through his camera he could see the men still horsing around with the ball, Israel apparently the best athlete. Hood shot a couple of pictures.

  At 9:43, Hood saw the big tractor-trailer coming down the avenue toward him, the new cars catching the sun. He raised the camera and saw the Hermosillo Fusions and Ford Tauruses and Lincoln MK
Zs tethered tightly but still rocking slightly against their moorings. The sun was just high enough now to blast into the powerful lens of the camera, and Hood had to hold it low to get a look at the drivers.

  There was only one driver this time. No man in an olive suit, no man in a blue Ford shirt. Just Bradley Jones, signaling his turn and throwing his weight into the downshift, sending a plume of gray smoke out the stacks above him.

  Hood smiled and let the motor drive rip.

  28

  Bradley and Erin sat in the courtyard of Hood’s Buenavista adobe. Bradley saw Gabriel Reyes loitering in the kitchen inside, peeking through the window intermittently at them. Bradley saluted him. He wondered what Hood was doing on this fine day. Working his ass off for not much reward, was Bradley’s guess; probably wondering where Congressman Grossly had gotten such good documentation of the Love 32 fiasco from three years back. And wait until Hood got a load of Dez’s Yucatan dossier, and a likely investigative expose by his admirer Theresa Brewer at Fox News. Amazing how Mike could look and plan ahead. Not just weeks and months, but years. As he had done for his mother, Suzanne. And if Mike was to be believed, for many others. The biggest question about Mike was, could he be trusted? And the answer was, of course, too late.

  “So, what are bathroom-products people like?” asked Erin.

  “They vary.”

  “I don’t like you spending time with Mike. No matter how many good things Owens has to say about him. I think the truth about Mike is closer to the way Charlie tells it. And he’s got that scar to prove it. Was she there, Owens?”

  “Of course. The two peas.”

  “Did Mike try to get you two together?”

  “Of course not. Why would you ask that?”

  “I always had the feeling that he wished I was her. So he’d have more control over you. She’s very beautiful and mysterious. Are you tempted by her?”