The Border Lords

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Ozburn now figured three hours max to Buenavista, then another five to Nogales. At a convenience store in Corona he got gas and provisions and two hot dogs each for himself and Daisy. He was famished. He would not let Seliah’s pale sleeping form leave him: He saw the road and the cars and the sky before him through her ethereal, dreamlike face.

  The next thing he knew he was pulling up to Charlie Hood’s home in the foothills outside Buenavista. No cars anywhere, lights on over the garage and the porch and inside the kitchen. He jimmied the side door to the garage and when he and Daisy were inside he laid his shoulder into the door that led to the house and it burst open without much fight. He carried Daisy’s kibble and bowls into Hood’s house and filled a bowl with food and the other with water.

  Ozburn knelt down and opened his arms and Daisy, sensing catastrophe, very slowly walked over, tail low, head down, ears relaxed. He hugged her and told her Hood was a good guy, take care of him and of yourself.

  He petted her for a moment, then stood and swung the splintered door shut behind him and made sure the garage door was closed tight. Daisy started howling. He got back into the van and lifted his sunglasses to empty the tears that had built up behind them, then headed down the dirt road toward the interstate.

  Yuma. Tucson. Nogales. Ozburn crossed the border easily and followed Mexico 15 south from town to a wide dirt road that took him into the hills. He came to Betty and the nice little landing patch. He rousted Miguel from his trailer. The young man was happy to get his money though Ozburn noted that he kept his distance and seemed eager for Ozburn to be on his way. He gave Miguel twice what he’d promised.

  —Where is your dog?

  —She’s with a friend.

  —She will not fly again?

  —Unless she grows wings.

  Ozburn stowed his duffel but stashed a freshly loaded Love 32 up in the cockpit. Miguel had filled the tank. He offered to man the prop but Ozburn waved him away and threw the big propeller himself, thrilled as always at the way his minor strength was magnified by Betty, turned into something that could roar and fly. It took him a few tries. When he walked back around the wing to the cockpit he felt nothing in his feet and little in his legs.

  He settled into the rear seat using his hands to arrange his numb legs, nodded at Miguel in the darkness and taxied out to the flat, groomed swatch of desert. Seconds later he was airborne and climbing, the sound of Betty’s engine right there in front of him like a steady old friend leading the way. He headed west along the invisible border, just sprinkles of lights separated by chasms of darkness. San Miguel was a flicker, Sonoyta a bigger flicker. Then the black bulk of the Agua Dulce Mountains, and the Cabeza Prietas and the Gilas. Later the sprawl of Yuma far ahead and he saw that the dawn was chasing him now, a frail phantom of light gaining from the eastern sky behind him. The needle on his fuel gauge was just above empty.

  He followed the California-Mexico border as the sun rose. The towns became cities and the cities grew and he veered north until he could see San Diego, a panoramic, sun-blasted tangle of buildings and freeways already dense with cars in the clean morning light. He looked down on the graceful blue Coronado Bridge and the flat shimmer of Glorieta Bay, and when Point Loma had scrolled away beneath Betty, there was the vast silver Pacific stretching as far as Ozburn could see and beyond. The engine sputtered and caught.

  His legs and feet were without feeling and even his arms were heavy and dull and slow to obey him. To the north a commercial airbus out of Lindbergh Field began its big U-turn over the water. Far to the south Ozburn saw a small Cessna heading for Catalina Island.

  He called up the image of Seliah asleep in her hospital bed. And although her beauty had long ago burned into his memory, it still caught him by surprise as it so often did—Seliah, the girl with the green hair walking into the lecture hall, Seliah cutting through the water at the Pan Am Games, Seliah on their wedding day, Seliah on their honeymoon beach on Moorea, Seliah combing out her hair or making coffee or polishing her car or fussing with a bouquet of flowers. Even sleeping she had the power to move him.

  Betty coughed and sputtered and started up again but then she fell silent. Ozburn heard the wind whistling past the fuselage and the hiss of air on the wings. The night was immense beyond all his comprehension.

  He felt Betty’s nose turn toward earth but he couldn’t move his arms to correct her course. He looked down at his hands and ordered them into action but they refused. The altimeter reading plummeted and the compass needle circled crazily. He tried to move his feet and raise his knees but they had forsaken him, too. Instead he imagined his first real date with Seliah, breakfast at the Congress Hotel in Tucson, and they ate and sat and drank coffee for two full hours and at the end of it Ozburn knew his life had changed and she was to be the biggest part of it. That was in February and they’d run through a pouring rain to Ozburn’s beat-up Dodge, and halfway back to her place the Dodge stalled at a light and they had to get out and push the thing to the roadside. They were drenched and half-frozen and the gutter was a torrent of brown water that pushed at the car like a big hand. Then their first kiss, both of them trembling with cold with the heater on full blast and the windows fogged and the rain belting the roof of the car. Now Ozburn could feel nothing of his body except the vertigo of that kiss, the warmth and softness of it so startling and right in a cold, hard world. He held his eyes open and steady and watched the spangled Pacific rising up to claim him.

  38

  Ten days later Dr. Jason Witt of UCI Medical Center decided to suspend Seliah’s sedatives and wait for her to awaken from the coma. She had been under heavy sedation for sixteen days, metabolically sustained with infusions. She had been bathed daily, and moved several times each day and night to promote circulation and prevent bedsores.

  Witt wore a linen suit and white court shoes, and his tone of voice was more neutral than hopeful. “We’ve been monitoring regional cerebral perfusion using Doppler ultrasonography. Her serum, saliva and cerebrospinal fluid samples have been tested every other day for immune response and viral clearance. Her rabies-specific IgM and IgG and viral excretions in the saliva have fallen dramatically. The nuchal biopsy shows only very weak rabies virus antigen and the polymerase chain reaction was negative. What all that means is she’s beaten back the virus. It’s almost totally absent now. It has done its damage. If she awakens, she will be insensate to pain and touch, and paralyzed. But she’ll be electrically viable. Her brain is functioning and it should continue to function. She’ll have to learn many things again. She’s going to have to boot up from scratch. So to speak.”

  Witt explained this to Seliah’s parents and two brothers, Sean’s parents and two sisters, and to Charlie Hood, allowed by the families to loiter around the edges of the tense inner sanctum. There had been some long and painful hours. Hood felt spent. But the families had shown strength and deep feelings for Sean, and Hood had not detected any blame for what Seliah was now going through. Not of Sean. Not of ATF. Ozburn had been found by fishermen in the wreckage of Betty, twelve miles west of San Diego, eight days ago.

  “We do know,” the doctor said solemnly, “that only a very few unvaccinated people have survived rabies after symptom onset. Very, very few.”

  “Five,” said Seliah’s father, Glen.

  “Yes,” said Witt. “We embarked on this protocol with both hope and awareness of risk. It has worked in the past. Sometimes it has failed. We’ve hoped and prayed it will work for Seliah. She is obviously loved very much and that is a great help. Now it’s time.”

  There was an uneasy silence during which eyes did not meet. “How long?” asked Seliah’s mother, Shivaun. “If she’s going to wake up, when will it be?”

  “In the best scenario, she should be able to blink or cough within twenty-four hours. After that, the chances of her waking go down significantly. We hope that she will respond to rehabilitation. You’ve been through a lot. So please stay. Wait together. Talk to her. Talk to each othe
r. Pray. We’ll wait for Seliah to come back.”

  Deep into the first night they took turns sitting with her, waiting for her to cough, or maybe even open her eyes briefly. Sixteen hours came and went and she did not move except to breathe. Her pulse, respiration and blood pressure all registered low normal. The flesh of her face looked somewhat slack, as did her arms. Hood saw that she was pale now, beyond just fair, and with her platinum blond hair spilled back on the pillow, she was a ghostly sleeping beauty. And your prince came to kiss you, Hood thought. He heard Janet Bly’s voice: We don’t live in fairy tales, Charlie. She was right. But what did they live in?

  Hour twenty arrived with sunrise at its back and Hood looked out at the gray morning light. Beyond a knot of freeways he could see Arrowhead Pond and Edison Field and to Hood these temples of man seemed vain and superfluous. To the northeast the purple flanks of the Santa Ana Mountains sat heavily against the lightening November sky.

  Hood closed his eyes and listened to the thrum and mew of the intensive care unit. Sean’s two sisters sat to his left and Seliah’s two brothers on his right. He thought of his own brothers and sisters and his mother and father. They were spread across the map but they were still a family. For Hood there was some consolation in this.

  When he looked at her again he saw the glimmer of Seliah’s open eyes.

  A week later she still could not move anything but her eyes. She tracked her visitors and gave no sign of recognizing anyone except her mother, whose little finger she was able to squeeze. The others she regarded with mute but unmistakable fear.

  Over the next eight days she slept in four-hour cycles and cried for hours in between. Witt said she was frustrated with her paralysis. He said she was like a baby, having to learn things again but she was in a hurry because she remembered how she used to be. She would learn patience. She would have to.

  Gradually Seliah began crying less.

  By the end of another week she moved her head, then her hands and feet. Her respiration tube was removed and she breathed on her own.

  She began looking at people with diminished fear, except for her mother, who held her hand and brushed her hair and rubbed the lotion on her body. Seliah stared at her with love unconditional.

  She whispered, then talked very softly, gibberish at first, then words, then sentences.

  She sipped water and broth.

  She appeared to remember some of the deep past but little of the recent.

  She was sleeping less. Slowly she could concentrate on a conversation—ten seconds, then twenty.

  What happened?

  Why am I here?

  I love you, Mom. Is that you, Dad?

  It’s very loud in this place.

  Late one night Hood handed her a plastic cup of ice and water.

  She took it and looked at him with an expression of wonder.

  “Sean,” she whispered.

  “I’m Charlie.”

  She sipped and handed him back the cup and smiled very slightly. Then her eyes closed and she was gone again.

  39

  Bradley Jones met Mike Finnegan at the Bordello after his night patrol shift. Bradley had changed out of his uniform because he was welcome in this bar but his uniform was not. It was one in the morning.

  “I like it better here when Erin plays that stage,” said Finnegan.

  “She can’t play every night.”

  “Of course, I liked it better here when it was a real bordello, too. Fantastic city, Los Angeles in the eighteen hundreds.”

  Bradley looked at him and shook his head. “What can I do for you, Mike?”

  “I just wanted to hear more about the Lancaster shoot-out. The headlines and pictures and news footage have all been very thorough but I wanted your insider’s story. What a mess that must have been.”

  “It’s all old news by now. And I wasn’t there.”

  “But surely you’ve heard a thousand stories. Share some with me!” Finnegan smiled and his face flushed. To Bradley, Mike looked every one of his fifty-two years, except when he smiled. Then he looked like an eighth grader who’d just gotten away with something—delighted and eager to try it again. Bradley realized that Mike’s delight was what made him so easy to talk to. It made you want to help keep that smile on his face.

  So Bradley told him what he’d heard: An informant had told an unnamed LASD deputy that a gunrunner was unloading a hundred new machine pistols to L.A. Mara Salvatruchas working for the Gulf Cartel. The deputy had told his boss and his boss had put together a seven-member take-down team and a cover team of four radio cars and a helicopter.

  “This must have been Commander Dez,” said Mike. “She’s the most quoted LASD officer in the papers and on TV—except for the PR people, of course. Attractive. Ambition written all over her pretty little face.”

  Bradley nodded. “None of that’s a secret.”

  “But who was this mystery deputy, I wonder. The one with the very good information.”

  Bradley shrugged and drank his bourbon.

  “Guess, Bradley. Offer up a guess.”

  “We’re the biggest sheriff’s department in the country, Mike. What good would a guess do?”

  “Just tell me if you know him.” Mike beamed and drank his scotch. He looked like a boy who had just gotten exactly what he wanted for Christmas.

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Well, his informant turned out to have the right stuff, didn’t he?”

  Bradley nodded and smiled. “It was one hundred percent accurate, Mike.”

  Finnegan rubbed his hands together and smiled up at the ceiling, then took another drink. “Two couriers shot dead by Gravas, and another by your people. And two very fine sheriff’s deputies fallen in the line of duty. Five deaths. Five.”

  “Vicky Sunderland and Bob Dunn,” Bradley said, his voice lowered in respect.

  “What a terrible shame. And, to add to it, the precious cargo of machine pistols vanishes with Gravas, only to be intercepted by Charlie Hood and his ATF team two days later. With quite a bit of money, also. I couldn’t help but feel that the glory should have belonged to LASD.”

  Bradley sipped again but said nothing. It rankled him that Hood and ATF had gotten the guns, money and glory. He could live with the rankle. But Dez had quickly handed him over to Internal Affairs for the intel that had led to two dead deputies, and IA had landed hard. IA could exonerate him, or they could discipline him, or they could take his job. Bradley understood that they had power over him even the U.S. Constitution couldn’t deflect. He couldn’t plead the Fifth; he couldn’t hire a lawyer. Larry King could not help now. The IA discussions were secret, their findings not subject to appeal. IA was clearly suspicious of Bradley’s good luck in the Stevie Carrasco kidnapping. They wanted his car-wash shoot-out informant, and they wanted him now. So far Bradley had wriggled out of it by saying his man was back down in Mexico again. He promised to produce him as soon as he returned. He’d have to produce someone. He hoped that Herredia would be able to hook him up with a convincing actor, but Bradley hadn’t seen El Tigre in two weeks, the weekly run to El Dorado now impossible to make with IA shadowing him to and from work and home and anywhere else he went. He worked his patrols diligently, wondering if a departmental suspension was on its way. He felt like a rat being tormented by terriers. All he wanted was to put this suspicion behind him and make his cash runs to Mexico again, bust some of the Gulf Cartel’s L.A. soldiers, love his wife and prepare their lives for the baby to come.

  “Is the wounded courier going to make it?”

  “They say so.”

  “I heard his name is Octavio.”

  Bradley nodded.

  Mike leaned toward him and spoke softly. “Do you feel a division of loyalty?”

  “Division? Between what and what?”

  “Your department and your working relationships south of the border.”

  Bradley shook his head and smiled but he couldn’t stop the jolt of adrenaline that went through h
im. “Mike, you’re an idiot.”

  “Oh, but I did manage to help you and Ron get that product south last year, now, didn’t I? In fact, without me, our friend Charlie would have found you out. Without a doubt. So instead of being a deputy right now, you’d be an inmate somewhere—and I don’t mean in your wife’s band. It’s totally different on the other side of those bars, I can assure you. So don’t call me names, Bradley. It makes you look shortsighted and mean-spirited. The sooner we can become totally honest with each other, the greater things we can do.”

  Bradley said nothing. Rat, he thought. Terriers. He sipped his drink and glanced out at the singer, then looked at Finnegan. Mike’s mouth was tight and concern lined his forehead.

  “Mike, I’ve been wondering about something. I don’t think we met for the first time at the Viper Room last year. I’d never seen Owens before then. But I’d seen you. I’m sure of it now.”

  Finnegan’s blue eyes twinkled. “Well, now that you bring it up, I’d like to let you in on something—you and I first laid eyes on each other when you were less than a year old. I was acquainted with your mother. But I kept my distance as you grew up.”

  Another shot of adrenaline ran through Bradley, this one cold and sharp. “How come you never told me that?”

  “A time for everything and everything in its time.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “I introduced your mother to your father.”

  “Why?”

  “To give you a chance at magnificence.”

  “What shit.”

  “Really? I’m extremely proud of the way you came out.”

  “My father is selfish and unaccomplished. The only skill he ever developed was the seduction of women. Then he exploits them.”

  “But he was also strong and smart and charming and utterly without morals. The perfect partner for a”—Mike cupped his hand to Bradley’s ear and whispered—“Murrieta!”