The border Lords ch-4

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Now he followed the boot prints toward Calexico. Daisy's dainty prints were in the lead. The morning grew hot and by the time Hood came to the last of the tracks, he was standing on Cole Meadows Road looking south to the city.

  The first motel he came to was the Mesa, where the manager recognized Hood's photograph of Sean Ozburn without hesitation.

  "You missed him by two hours," said the manager. She was young and red-haired and reading a paperback vampire novel. When she had thoroughly examined Hood's U.S. Marshal's badge-a deputy was knighted a Federal Marshal when attached to a federal task force-she dug out a registration card. Hood recognized Ozburn's writing: Sean Newman, with an Oceanside address and a 760 prefix. She offered to let Hood have the card and even see the room if he wanted. The maids had not been in yet.

  Hood stood in the upstairs room and saw the unmade bed and the small white towel bunched on the bathroom counter and the clear plastic cup by the faucet and the blow-dryer hanging from the wall. The ice container sat on the bathroom floor with an inch of Daisy's water still in it. The shower door was wet and there were small whiskers stuck along one latitude of the sink bowl. They looked like pepper.

  "Did he do something?" asked the manager.

  "We just want to talk to him."

  "On TV that means yes."

  "You're right-on TV it does."

  "I didn't charge him for the dog."

  "You're sure he walked here? No car?"

  "I watched him come out of the desert and across the parking lot."

  "You work some long hours, don't you?"

  "I don't have much else to do. I just heard a car pull up. Close the door all the way when you leave, would you?"

  Hood thanked her and watched her go, noting the older Chevy Astro Van parking in the shade by the motel office.

  He studied the room and realized that looking for Sean wasn't the same as looking for a stranger. He knew the man. Knew his opinions, his values, his humor, his habits. Or did he? The Ozburn he'd known for almost a year and a half wouldn't have slaughtered three men without a clear reason. So, something was missing. A lot was missing.

  Okay, Hood thought: Sean's clear reason. That he was embittered by his part in a seemingly unwinnable "war" on drugs and guns? Hard to believe. It had never bothered him before. Before what, though? Before going undercover and getting up close and personal with some very bad people. Before being yanked from his life and his wife and plunked down on a hostile planet. Before his nerves began to eat him alive and he found his crossroads on a volcano in Costa Rica and his salvation in a hard-drinking priest who led him back to his faith and his calling as an agent of the ATF. Thus setting the stage for the murders.

  Sean had grown. Changed.

  In many ways, Hood thought, this was the story of every undercover operation. The degrees of difficulty were variable, but they were rarely this extreme.

  So why Ozburn? Hood knew him as tough and funny and typically non-philosophical about his job. It was his work and he believed in it and that was enough. You're out at fifty-five-maybe travel or fix up the house or goof off with the grandkids. Sean wasn't a seeker; he was quietly Christian. He was neither cynical nor subversive. He wasn't overly proud of himself. He wasn't driven by material goods or women not his wife or by alcohol or drugs. So why? Why murder the three?

  It's beginning to dawn on me why I'm here, not in this desert but on the PLANET… perform GOOD ACTS and DEFEAT the forces of EVIL. This is not a Biblical thing but a practical one…

  Hood sat on the bed and looked around the room again. He wondered if Sean's reasons might be less obvious. Maybe his reasons come from the fissures and faults hidden in his heart, the secrets kept even from himself, the seams not quite true. So that when the whole system was sunk to depth, it would come under such pressure that something might give.

  If Ozburn had secrets, he was careful with them, Hood thought. He kept them for himself and for his wife.

  … miss you so much sometimes I want to cut my heart OUT just to make it stop aching…

  Which left him with Seliah and her anger at Blowdown and her puzzlement over her own husband.

  And Ozburn's family back in Texas, and his friends outside of work, if there were any.

  And with four private airstrips Ozburn could fly in and out of whenever he wanted, though Hood knew that bold Sean could set his little plane down in a million unforeseeable places.

  All four of the runways were located outside of municipal borders, which meant they were patrolled by county sheriffs, which meant that Hood as an LASD deputy might get some cooperation from his brethren in other Southern California counties. Might. He began with an acquaintance at Riverside SD.

  "Sergeant Trask."

  "What do you want me to do about it?"

  "Charlie Hood. I thought that was your twang-ass Bakersfield voice. How are you?"

  Hood stood and started yapping while he took one last look around the room, then closed the door behind him.

  By the time he made Buenavista he had arranged for three different sheriff's departments to make occasional patrols of the four strips. He gave them a description and numbers for the Piper. With its classic Cub-yellow paint job and the name Betty painted beneath the fuselage, it would be hard to miss. The deputies couldn't promise anything but they'd try. Hood thanked each and offered his help in return, anytime.

  Find the plane, he thought, find the man.

  He had just pulled into the IHOP parking lot for lunch when Bly called. "At nine o'clock this morning, Sean had himself and his dog baptized by a Mexican priest in Nogales. Sean makes a speech about… Well, I don't know what it's about. He sent a video of the whole thing to Seliah. And some other weird videos, too. What in hell's going on here, Charlie? What in hell?"

  11

  Father Jaime Arriaga of the Church of Santo Tomas in Nogales was young and thin and had a twinkle in his eyes. Hood sat in his office. Arriaga's English was as good as Hood's Spanish and they alternated easily between the two.

  He told Hood he'd watched a yellow airplane land on the dirt road that ran through the desert around the church. This was a curiosity. Arriaga had watched as a very tall man with long blond hair had come walking across the desert toward Santo Tomas. He was dressed like a motorcycle gangster. A black dog trotted along ahead of him.

  When the man walked into his office, Arriaga saw that he had a machine gun of some kind slung over his shoulder. He introduced himself. He said he wanted to be baptized and he wanted his dog to be baptized also. Arriaga said that the man did not seem to mean disrespect to our Lord by having his dog baptized along with him.

  "But you don't just baptize someone into the Catholic Church," said Hood. "Do you? Don't they have to go through certain steps, learn certain things?"

  "Yes," said Father Arriaga. "But he brandished the machine gun instead."

  "Describe it."

  Father Arriaga laughed deeply. Tears of mirth rimmed his clear brown eyes. "I baptize a dog and you ask me to describe a gun! Oh, you have made my day a better one, Mr. Hood. I'm sorry. I mean no offense to you."

  Hood laughed, too. "None taken. His wife sent this to me."

  He set his smartphone on the priest's desk. They watched the tiny screen as the miniaturized priest sprinkled water onto Sean Ozburn's forehead and intoned the baptism with solemnity and feeling. Daisy sat beside her master, looking up. Sean had one of the Love 32s in his left hand, held loosely like an umbrella or a bundle of flowers for a loved one. The strap dangled almost to the floor.

  … in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…

  When it was Daisy's turn the priest's voice became goodhumoredly dubious and he managed to get through the ritual. Daisy lapped the water from his hand, then off the pavered floor. The priest's voice echoed in the empty church and the lapping of the dog was pronounced. A stained-glass window threw a burnished orange light that to Hood lent the proceeding a dignity he had not anticipated.

  "When I saw the w
eapon I had decided that my fear of the gun was greater than my fear of blasphemy," said Arriaga. "I am a man, and weak. But the Lord knows my heart and I know He will judge me with mercy and fairness. Please don't ask me to describe what the dog was thinking."

  Hood smiled again and watched Sean Ozburn face the camera and speak.

  "I, Sean Gravas, have seen all manner of good and evil. And I have seen things that are not good or evil, strange things without values we can assign. At the end of my understanding begins my understanding. At the end of my life begins my life. If every man and woman on earth would do one small good thing each day for someone else, the world would be better. This is my small good thing for today. Just as man is not less than God but only separate from Him, so is Daisy not less than me but separate and distinct from me."

  With this, Ozburn stepped closer to the camera and leaned down and put his face into the lens and growled. It was brief and wild. Then he smiled and reached out and took the camera and aimed it down at the altar boy who had been holding it, and Hood saw fear on the boy's face.

  Please leave us now, said the priest. His voice was tremulous and thin and it seemed brittle coming from the tiny speaker in the empty church. Leave this house to God and His children, Mr. Gravas.

  Hood reclaimed his phone and slid it closed. He followed Arriaga down a hallway and into the vestibule, then into the chapel. They stood on the proscenium where the baptism had taken place. The basin was no longer there but the same warm light came through the stained-glass windows. He smelled incense and burnt candle wax and the smell of decades. Hood felt goodness surrounding him here, a notion that only good things were allowed within this tiny part of the world. He wondered if he was only imagining goodness.

  "What did you talk about besides baptism?"

  "He wanted to know if God communicates directly with some people."

  "What did you say?"

  "I said that this is possible but rare. Mr. Gravas said he has felt the presence of something he cannot understand in his life. This something moves him to emotions and actions. He compared it to an ocean swell that invisibly moves toward land and when it hits the land becomes waves. He said he felt like the waves, propelled by an unknown swell. He suspected that the swell was God. Sean was uncertain about the baptism of the dog. He believed God wanted him to do it, but he wasn't sure."

  Hood considered. He was never a churchgoer and he had never given much thought to God or the devil until fifteen months ago, when he'd met a man who claimed to be a mid-level devil. Mike Finnegan. Mike had talked knowledgeably about doing things he could not have done. He knew things about Blowdown personnel and cartel players that flabbergasted Hood. At times, observing Finnegan, Hood believed he was seeing something outside his experience. Later, of course, Mike had repudiated his devilish claims and chided Hood for even half believing him. And Hood had chided himself.

  "So just how rare is it, that God talks directly to us?" he asked the priest.

  "I honestly don't know. He has never spoken one word to me. That I could actually hear, I mean. I do feel presences. I feel the presence of the Lord when I walk into this church. I have felt evil in certain men."

  "Sean?"

  The priest thought. "Perhaps. But I felt in him the presence of God, too."

  "That's contradictory," said Hood. "That's unhelpful."

  "Good and evil are not always separate," said Arriaga. "They are often together. They are parts of us-present, changing, unequal."

  "A doctor would say that Sean has delusions of grandeur," he said.

  "There are many ways to see a thing," said the priest. "And many words to describe the seeing of it. Sean can hear God and perhaps even a devil inside him. A doctor can hear madness. Either way, Sean is a man driven by things he does not understand. His growl? There was something primitive in it. It was genuine and pure and true. I fear for him and for those around him. And, although his growl frightened little Israel, and although he forced me to commit a venial sin by baptizing his dog, Mr. Gravas was most generous to us."

  Hood waited.

  "Mr. Gravas offered five thousand American dollars to us. I very gratefully accepted. You cannot imagine what good five thousand dollars will do in this parish. We can help feed the hungry and clothe the poor. We can buy desks for the school. And textbooks. The roof needs patching and the parking lot needs a coat of slurry to keep down the dust. It would take us a year to get that in the collection plate. Our faithful are poor. For us, this is a small miracle."

  Hood listened, unsurprised. Sean and Seliah had always been generous-a sponsored child in Somalia, the ASPCA, Big Brothers-even with the beggars who would hit Hood and Ozburn up on the streets of Buenavista.

  Arriaga sighed. "Let us pray for him. And for you to find him before any tragedy takes place."

  Arriaga prayed aloud. Hood closed his eyes and thought of the three assassins blown to smithereens two mornings ago by Ozburn; then he opened his eyes, barely, just enough to see the light coming through the stained-glass window and the dust motes rising up through this light, and the glow of the old oak pews and the floor pavers cracked and crumbling from years of faithful trample, and the tall wooden cross with pale Jesus hung in agony upon it.

  From the shade of the church portico Arriaga pointed to where the plane had landed, and Hood traipsed off through a few hundred yards of hard flat desert to stand on the wide washboard road. He saw Sean's prints and Daisy's prints and the fat tire marks that Betty had left.

  12

  Ozburn circled three times, then put down Betty at a strip two miles south of the fishing village of Puerto Nuevo. This tiny hamlet was just a few miles south of Tijuana, and the small runway that Ozburn now taxied away from was one of Carlos Herredia's exploratory outposts within the territory of the Tijuana Cartel. Mateo had told him about it during one of their meetings. Later he had given Ozburn a key to the simple hangar and permission to use it at his own risk.

  Ozburn left the plane at idle and climbed out and let Daisy free. She bounced about, delighted by terra firma. While he fished the hangar key from his jeans pocket, he watched a white Suburban trundle slowly along a not-quite-distant hillside, then come to a stop. He strapped the Love 32 over his right shoulder and tightened it flush to his body and put on his Chargers windbreaker. He talked to Daisy and glanced over at the Suburban often as he worked.

  The hangar was metal, with large doors that slid on runners and echoed hollowly in the quiet evening. When the doors were open he got back into the plane and taxied in, then cut the engine and shut down the machine and climbed back out. There were no windows in the hangar but Herredia's assemblers had cut small observation slits on all sides, covered by sliding panels. He pulled one open, looked out at the unmoved Suburban. He opened Betty's luggage compartment and from his duffel he took his satellite phone and used this to call a taxi, pronto, amigo! He looked out at the SUV again, then slid the cover shut. Then he hooked the heavy phone to his belt and slung the duffel over his shoulder.

  Back outside he closed and locked the hangar doors, then stood in the eastern shade of the building where he could see the vehicle. It puzzled him. If it was a Herredia gunship, the men inside would know of Ozburn and let him be. It wasn't like he was difficult to identify.

  But if it was a Tijuana Cartel SUV, then as soon as those men realized that this blond gringo and his black dog were no friends of theirs, they would come forward with the intention of rubbing them off the face of the earth. As far as Ozburn could figure, there would be no better time or place to do that than here and now-evening shadows, miles from town. So he thought maybe it was Herredia's people, checking in on their hard-earned property.

  The taxi arrived and off they went. Halfway to town the Suburban came up behind them, lying back a hundred yards, and Ozburn saw it through the dusty taxicab window: late model, Baja plates, blacked-out windows, satellite antenna bristling from the roof. He sat back and patted Daisy's head, the blue XXXL windbreaker easily covering his bul
ky torso, the Chargers' lightning-bolt logo emblazoned across his chest.

  By the time the taxi traded the highway for the rutted road into Puerto Nuevo, the Suburban was gone. Ozburn made the driver wait outside the Restaurant Chela. Tourists chose their lobsters from tanks outside each restaurant. Young Mexican boys and girls walked the streets selling gum and trinkets. An old woman carried a load of folded blankets over one shoulder, an avalanche of colors piled high. A young American couple walked hand in hand across the pitted street, the man slender and the woman curvaceous and curly-haired, both dressed beautifully and both lost to each other in ways that Ozburn recognized from his first years with Seliah, the kind of love that is much bigger than the two people involved, and in some way more fragile. After five minutes outside the restaurant the driver became nervous and asked that he be paid. Ozburn caught the man's eyes in the rearview and growled at him softly. The driver nodded emphatically, then jumped out of the car and onto the wide, uneven sidewalk linking restaurant to restaurant, and disappeared around a corner.

  Ozburn waited another five minutes, petting Daisy's head. No Suburban. Five minutes more. He saw the cabbie peering at him from up the street. He dropped way too many bills into the driver's seat, grabbed his duffel and got out. Daisy sprung after him and he strode up the narrow street, a large man with flowing blond hair and a Chargers windbreaker buttoned against the Pacific cool and a light-footed black dog in the lead. He sat on the upstairs deck of Josefina's restaurant in Puerto Nuevo, Daisy at his feet. It was late and the street outside was nearly empty of the tourists.