The Border Lords

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Do they communicate, the Ozburns? E-mail, video perhaps?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Mike was quiet for a beat. “You’re not quite as rule-whipped as I thought you were, Charlie. You’re actually talking instead of interrogating. What if you slip up and let a truth drop?”

  “Keep me talking and maybe I will. Now—an alleged priest at Arenal, Father Joe Leftwich.”

  “I’ve heard of him, of course, but we’ve never met. Different region, obviously. Reputation as a hardnose. Drinker, big temper when it blows. Not afraid to be hands-on. Speaks all of the Caribbean languages, even the unusual ones—Papiamento, Taki-Taki, Hindi, Urdu. Helped the Spanish find gold in Costa Rica—first gold on the American continent. Good move on his part. Nothing like an explosion of wealth to challenge an oppressive religious climate and to finance the chaos that ensues. I remember that Leftwich set back his career by consorting with cutthroats on the Spanish Main. They were small-time men, cruel but ultimately useless to us. Leftwich enjoyed the bloodshed, I heard. Later he upgraded, if you can call it that. Had the ears of Pinochet and Somoza. He’s been using the priest costume off and on for centuries, Charlie. Apparently, it works.”

  Hood watched Seliah walk out to her front porch. She was dressed in a black tee, black jeans, the red sneaks. She wore a black bandana pirate style as her husband sometimes did. She had an overnight bag slung over one shoulder and a canvas book bag in each hand. One of them looked heavy.

  “Next time we’ll talk vampire bats.”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “I’ve got your number now,” Hood said, and punched off.

  He got out of the car and trotted up the steps to the porch. He smiled and approached Seliah and hoped she didn’t just run up and bite him. Instead she smiled weakly, her face very pale and mostly hidden behind big Jackie O sunglasses.

  “Woof,” she said.

  “Seliah. Lemme take those.”

  She let him take the book bags and they walked toward the car.

  “I tried, Charlie.”

  “I know you did.”

  “He wouldn’t come. I couldn’t make him do it.”

  “Let’s get you fixed up, Seliah. We’ll work on Sean next.”

  “I will not betray him to you.”

  “I’m not asking you to. How are you feeling?”

  “I didn’t think I could feel this bad.” She stopped. “Holy crap. I gotta ride in the back of that?”

  “Now you know how the bad guys feel.”

  “That ought to be funny. The fact that I have to ride back there isn’t funny at all.”

  “Maybe it’s best for both of us.” He opened a rear door for her but left it for her to close. Then he went around to the other side and slung in the canvas bags.

  “I wouldn’t try to seduce you in a . . . Never mind. Never mind. I’m sorry for all that. The virus causes it. Dr. Brennan said he’s waiting for me. I like him. And drive fast, Charlie. Because when I left Ensenada I took some pills to keep me calm but you know something? I can feel them wearing off. I feel like Lucy Westenra, changing into a killer vampire slut one cell at a time. You ever read Dracula?”

  “Never.”

  “It’s all told in letters and diaries. It hypnotizes you. None of the movies are as good. Francis Coppola got closest. When this first started happening I wondered if I was turning into a vampire. Then I wondered if all the vampire movies and TV and books were turning me into one. Then, well, it just turned out to be a drunk priest with a fucking bat. What did Sean and I do to deserve all this special treatment?”

  Hood got in and turned to see Seliah through the screen. She looked like a captured mutineer. She reached out and grabbed the strap on the handleless door and Hood knew she knew she could not open it again.

  “You and Sean didn’t do anything to deserve it.”

  “Now’s the time if I’m going to run for it,” she said. “Every time I run I get faster. I bet I can outrun you, Hood. I could give you the slip.”

  “Close the door, Seliah. We’ve got places to go and people to see.”

  She sighed and pulled the door closed.

  Hood took I-5 North for UCI Medical Center in Orange. He adjusted the rearview so he could see her. She looked out the window at the tan hills of Camp Pendleton Marine Base.

  “What they do is pump me full of knockout drugs,” she said. “Out I go. It’s called a therapeutic coma and they keep the ketamine coming so I stay down deep. Then they give me antiviral drugs and antibiotics and immune system boosters. They pump me full of food and fluids. My unconsciousness allows respiration instead of paralysis. They monitor my blood and saliva to see if the protocol is working. They knock out some people just for a few days, and some they’ve left KO’d for almost two months. If it looks like I’m going to survive the rabies, they wake me up. Or at least they try.”

  She checked her watch, then turned her gaze to the bright silver Pacific. Hood tried to imagine what was going through her mind.

  “Of course, if I wake up, I’ll have some brain damage. They can’t predict how much. Jeanna Giese had some, and she spent two months in the ICU. But she worked hard at physical therapy and learned to do most of what she could do before. She still has some difficulty enunciating words and her left foot is weak so she runs funny. She can’t play sports anymore. But she can go to school and drive a car. A bright future, that girl . . .”

  Hood watched Seliah as her voice trailed off. The sunlight stenciled her face through the security screen. She took off the black bandana and wiped her forehead and cheeks with it. She hugged herself and pressed up closer to the door to get away from the sun. For a long while she hung her head, her swaying platinum hair walling off her face from the light and the world. Hood’s heart sank and burst with the clear presence of her peril.

  “So, Itixa the maid found a live bat,” she said.

  “In the trash in Father Joe’s room.”

  “She should have said something.”

  “She told the owner and he told his son to stay away from the priest. But neither of them told you or Sean.”

  “But you know, if she had told me personally that morning that she’d found a bat in Father Joe’s room, I might not have connected it with the blood on Sean’s toe. Down there you could wake up with a howler monkey in your room. Or a boa constrictor in your shower.”

  “It was your description that made me connect the bat to Father Joe and Sean. Something small and heavy wrapped in something loose, like a golf ball wrapped in a washcloth.”

  “I like the way you put it together, Charlie. You and Sean have minds like that. You’re naturally suspicious of just about everything. Me? I was always a face-value kind of person. Whatever it said on the label, I believed. I loved that way of looking at things. If it said ‘new and improved’ I believed it truly was new and improved.”

  Hood caught the past tense.

  “So have you found Father Joe?” she asked.

  “I’m working on him. Nobody I talked to in Costa Rica had any idea where he’d gone. Back home, I went online and found mentions of two Father Joe Leftwiches but only one is Irish Catholic. And neither of them were in Costa Rica in July. I’ve talked to the Irish Embassy, their West Coast consulate, the Catholic Church in Dublin, the Catholic Diocese in L.A. and the Vatican. They don’t just give out information on priests like you think they would. Too many scandals. I’ve checked all the law enforcement databases just in case he’s got a warrant or a record. Nada. I suspect he’s a complete fraud, not a priest at all. Don’t you?”

  She turned her gaze to him. “He looked realistic in the getup, Charlie, in that little black shirt with the round white collar. But there I go again, believing the surface of things. He never mentioned what his plans were.”

  Hood looked back at her reflection in the mirror. “Before I left the Volcano View I got one last look at the registration book. I wrote down the names and addresses of ten of the guests who were there when you were
. I’ve written letters to two and e-mails to eight of them, asking if they remember him, and if he said anything about where he was going. I asked them to e-mail any picture that might have him in it. When I was there, everybody had at least two cameras.”

  “I took a picture of him. Joe said, ‘No, don’t do that, I don’t need my fat little face on film,’ but I shot it anyway. He really didn’t seem to mind very much.”

  “I’d like to see it, Sel.”

  “When we got home it wasn’t on the camera.”

  “Did you ever see it?”

  “Oh, yeah, I know it was there. It was the night we partied. I took Sean’s camera and shot them with their arms around each other and their glasses raised. Father Joe didn’t quite come to Sean’s shoulders. I clearly remember looking at the image to see if I should take another but it was a good enough shot. So I gave the camera back to Sean and he put it in the case on his belt. I shot more pictures the next day. No more of Leftwich. Then we came home. And when I was picking out ones to put on disc, I noticed that the Joe picture was gone. I suppose I could have deleted it by accident.”

  Hood pictured Father Joe’s room at the Volcano View, the screens for windows, the cool tile floor, the bed. And he pictured his own digital camera and the three time-consuming steps it took to delete a picture. “Or, Father Joe could have deleted that picture while Sean was asleep.”

  “Yes, easily. What’s the charge against him if he actually gave us rabies and we die from it?”

  “Neither of you is going to die from it.”

  “Now you sound like Father Joe, telling us how special we are and how we’re headed for great things. How come everyone seems to know my future except for me?”

  “Murder one,” said Hood.

  “I’ll bet there’s never been a murder by rabies. Except when one of us bit someone, or maybe raped or even kissed someone. But it wouldn’t be murder unless you knew you had it, right?”

  “No. It would be something else.”

  “You could never convict Father Joe based on what we know.”

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  Hood watched as Seliah brought one of the book bags to her lap and looked down into it. She held up a Colt Model 1911 .45 semiautomatic and waved it at him.

  “Yours from Sean,” she said.

  “Careful, now.”

  “Not loaded.”

  “I can’t take that. It’s his.”

  “Not if doesn’t get back here in a hurry. He’d want you to have it.”

  She set the .45 back in the bag and brought out a Smith & Wesson .357 K frame, then a Glock .40-caliber. “These, too. I don’t need them. Sorry; I didn’t bring any ammo. I don’t know where he kept it. This is from me.”

  She held up a bottle of wine. “It’s ten years old. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

  “Then keep it for one, Seliah.”

  “If I live to drink another glass of wine, maybe you can be the one to pour it for me.”

  “You can beat this thing.”

  “They’ve used the protocol eighteen times since Jeanna,” she said. “They all died but five. Five, Charlie.”

  His eardrums started ringing. Brennan had said nothing of this and now Hood’s soul felt fooled and helpless and angry. “Five?”

  “Yes. Now, I want you to hang on to these medals and give them to my mom and dad if I don’t wake up. If Sean and I both go, then everything goes to the families. We have a will on file and I left a few numbers for you at home, on the kitchen counter. But I want these medals to come to Mom and Dad personally, and I want you to say thank you for me. These are mostly from college but some from high school. Mom and Dad drove me to every practice and meet you could think of, paid my way across the country and to Canada and Europe, helped me go to a college where I could swim. I was too wrapped up in myself to appreciate it at the time. But I know these trinkets would mean a lot to them. You can have one if you want but not one of the Pan Am games, okay?”

  She held up a handful of them for him to see and dropped them back into the bag and lifted out another batch. In the rearview Hood could see the tears running down her face. Her voice was high and girlish and forced. “Now, I want to have my ashes scattered at sea, of course. So in this other bag I’ve got some stuff I want to be tossed overboard, too. I’m sure there’s a law against that so you just make sure to do it yourself, Charlie. Here’s Daisy, a ceramic horse with a broken tail that I loved, and Sean named the dog after. And here’s a doll named Betty, which is what Sean named the Piper after, and here’s my dried-leaf collection from when I was a girl . . . Just pull out the leaves and throw them in. And this little wooden chest? There’s a lock of Sean’s hair and I’d like you to throw that into the sea, too. I want the hair to float for a while, then sink down with the ashes. In scatterings at sea, if the sunlight is right, you can see down deep into the water and the ashes get suspended in a big swirl where the boat has traveled. It’s a pale streak left by the person, their last track on earth. It widens and lengthens and slowly fades. And that’s where I want the hair to be, mixed in with me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, I don’t think this is likely to happen, but if Sean lives through this thing, and you ever see him again, these are for him.” She reached into the bag and lifted in succession a stack of envelopes, two small ring boxes, a thick black book. “Love letters and poems from when we were dating. His and mine. And my engagement and wedding rings are in the boxes. They’ll make me take them off anyway. If I die, you give them to Sean. There’s also a journal I’ve been keeping for eleven years now. Nobody should read it but him.”

  She pushed the book back into the bag and yanked off her sunglasses and dabbed at her eyes with the black bandana. Her pupils were tiny and the whites were hot red and the irises faint blue. His eyes met hers in the mirror. She stared at him in between dabs, then growled at him and laughed and growled again louder. She pushed the sunglasses back on and stuffed the bandana into one of the bags. She was shivering and he could see the throb of her pulse in her carotid.

  They were halfway there by now. Hood called Brennan on the cell and told him where they were. He told him to have people ready who could handle her in case she was violent. She listened and watched him in the glass. “I can’t do this, Charlie.”

  “You’re doing really well, Sel.”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “You have no choice.”

  “You do not offer or deny me choices.”

  “You can beat it.”

  “Pull over. I want out. Now.”

  “I won’t do that.”

  “I demand that you do it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “As a friend.”

  “A friend would not pull over.”

  “You’re a weak man. It’s all you are or ever were.”

  “Jeanna beat it. You can beat it. There are your parents and friends and Sean and all those things you have in the bags. They’re all more reasons for you to be strong.”

  “Oh, what shit you pretend to believe, Hood. What pathetic, insulting garbage. You know what you are? You’re play money. You’re a boy. Grow some. You ever use that cock of yours to do anything but pee? Pull over and let me out of here!”

  She hit the mesh hard with one fist, then the other. Hood heard the terrific crunch of flesh and bone on steel and when she hit the screen again he saw the blood on her knuckles and the dent in the mesh. She watched him in the glass as she licked her hands; then she wrenched her torso violently and uncoiled her right elbow against the bulletproof window. The impact was heavy. Hood wondered if it would hold. Then again, and again. She flew across the seat and battered the other window and Hood heard her grunting and growling and by the time he got the rearview trained to where he could see her, there were blood smears across the glass.

  Hood hit the lights and gunned the Interceptor up tight onto the SUV ahead of him, whose driver quickly signaled and pulled over to let him pass.


  30

  In the paltry light of an underground security entrance usually reserved for shackled prisoners, five specially trained orderlies in bulky protective suits and visored helmets extracted Seliah from the slickback with long-handled nooses and a large padded blanket. Another stood by with a stun gun. A small gathering of curious doctors and nurses watched. Seliah thrashed and growled, saliva swinging from her chin as she bit at the noose and cursed Hood and her circle of trained tormentors.

  It took them almost ten minutes to get her strapped onto a gurney. Not much of her was visible outside the blanket, only one pale arm, the red canvas sneakers at one end, and a flowing platinum cascade of hair at the other. She continued to struggle and spit out muffled curses from inside. A nurse stepped forward with a syringe and two of the orderlies pinned down Seliah’s arm. Into the crook of her elbow drove the needle.

  Hood watched in shame. A clean-shaven young man in a white coat and athletic shoes hurried over and offered his hand. “I’m Dr. Witt. Did she bite or scratch or injure you in any way?”

  Hood identified himself and said no.

  “Any transference of body fluids from her to you? Blood, saliva . . .”

  “None.”

  “Make sure to clean out your car with a strong bleach and water solution. I’ll have the custodial staff make up a bucket for you. If you have any wounds or open sores, I can get them to clean the car for you.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “We’ll do everything in our power to save her life. We’re ready.”

  Hood sat in the waiting area of the security floor for half an hour. He checked messages and e-mail but couldn’t concentrate. Half an hour after that, Dr. Witt came out and told him they’d stabilized Seliah and were prepping her for the first stage of the protocol, the inducement of therapeutic coma.

  “Can I see her?”

  The room was spacious and had a freeway view through Plexiglas windows. Three doctors talked quietly in one corner as a nurse injected something into the drip system. Seliah was elaborately strapped to the bed frame but Hood saw that she was sedated and her fight was gone. Her knuckles were bandaged. He stood by the bed and touched the fingers of the hand without the IV needle taped into it. “Hey.”