“These bandages won’t be on forever.”
“I’m not going to bring you a gun.”
“Well, then fuck you, Charlie. And fuck everybody who looks like you.”
“I had a friend in high school who used to say that to me all the time.”
“I’m sorry, man. But you try lying here, can’t pick your own nose. And your wife cries when she looks at you and you know she notices other men. And your kids stare at you like you’re some kind of pathetic freak. And you pray and you pray and you pray, and so what?”
“I know it’s bad, Jimmy.”
“Bad? I’ll tell you what’s bad—I think those Zetas are going to come through the damned door any minute and drag me back down there. It’s irrational. It’s crazy. It won’t happen. But none of that matters. I spend the night with my eyes wide open, and sleep a few minutes during the day. They got into my head, Charlie. I keep hearing ’em.”
Out of respect for what Jimmy believed and heard in his mind, Hood said nothing.
“Would you ask Jan or Oz to bring me a gun?”
“They won’t. It’s not about guns now, Jimmy. It’s about you getting healthy enough to go home.”
“I won’t go home. They’ll break into my house and kill me in front of my wife and girls.”
In fact, Hood knew that this had just happened to a Baja policeman, and that such things were happening to cops and prosecutors throughout Baja, and now that Benjamin Armenta and his Gulf Cartel had crossed the U.S. border to capture Jimmy Holdstock, the rules had changed.
And again, out of respect for Jimmy and the newly possible, Hood said nothing.
“I asked Jenny not to come today,” said Holdstock. “It’s too hard on me.”
“I understand.”
“How can you understand?”
“Sometimes it’s better not to see people. You have to be ready.”
“I love them.”
“They know you love them.”
“I want my life back, Charlie.”
“You can get it back.”
“How?”
“Want it. It’ll just take time.”
Hood heard Luna’s powerful voice: Does hope or lack of hope cause anything that happens?
“I’d still rather have a gun.”
Hood looked out the window to where the vast horizon met the blue heat of the sky. “You know an L.A. guy named Mike Finnegan?”
“No.”
Hood told Jimmy about the small man hit by a car while changing a flat out on Highway 98, and how this man had Hood’s name and his new post office box number written on a piece of paper folded in his wallet.
“Why would I know him?” asked Jimmy.
“He knows your name and a little about you, and who you work for.” Hood immediately regretted his words.
“Then he’s probably a fucking Zeta,” said Holdstock.
Hood saw the fear on Jimmy’s face and it was genuine. “He’s in bathroom products. He’s in a cast pretty much head to toe. His daughter is an actress.”
“Or maybe a reporter snooping around Blowdown, looking for a scandal.”
“I don’t think he’s that important, Jimmy.”
Jimmy looked at Hood, and Hood could see his fear subsiding. Holdstock sighed and shrugged. “Charlie, just tell me some Blowdown stuff. How are the field interviews going? You tried Hell on Wheels? Did you meet Dragovitch and his weird-ass wife yet?”
Beth Petty and Police Chief Gabriel Reyes sat on either side of Mike Finnegan’s bed. There was one window to the north, and Hood could see the distant hills corrugated by centuries of rain now shaded to blue by a great white cloud. He noted the stack of books on a stand by the bed, not one title the same as last week. And a fresh stack of magazines with the latest Scientific American on top. Finnegan’s new head bandage revealed slightly more of his face, but the rest of him was still encased in plaster, and his head was still immobilized by the steel skull clamp and rods.
“Come in, Charlie,” said Finnegan. “They’re interrogating me about the bullet.”
Petty smiled at Hood, and Reyes nodded. They were both in street clothes. Hood had never seen Beth Petty without a white doctor’s coat and a stethoscope. A nurse rolled in a chair, and Hood sat at the foot of the bed.
Finnegan’s eyes were blue and his nose and cheeks were freckled. An orange stubble covered his face. His lips were full, and Hood thought they might be swollen still from the accident. He saw the clench of the wired jaw and the difficulty with which the man spoke.
“There is some problem with the age of the thing,” said Finnegan.
“He means the bullet,” said Petty.
Reyes looked at Hood. “It was manufactured sometime between 1849 and 1862.”
“A cartridge can remain viable for centuries,” said Finnegan. “This idea confounds Chief Reyes.”
“What confounds me is how the bullet got into your face,” said Reyes.
“Isn’t that self-explanatory?” Finnegan smiled fractionally, a labored maneuver of lips and stationary jaws.
“He said he was shot by his lover,” said Reyes. “He said she just happened to be packing an ancestor’s thirty-one-caliber Colt repeating revolver.”
“Percussion repeating revolver,” said Finnegan. “Which was introduced by Colt in 1849. It helped settle the West.”
“Why did she shoot you?” asked Hood.
“Failure to leave my wife. The bullet was deflected by a stout grapevine. Cabernet Franc. Marie was plotting an al fresco suicide scene, I realized later. At any rate, after hitting the vine, the bullet flew with reduced velocity. It knocked me ass over teakettle, but I righted myself and kept running. I made it to a fire station and they took me to a hospital. The doctors believed it would be more dangerous to take it out than to leave it in. That was thirty years ago. In the wilder days of my youth.” Finnegan chuckled.
“The FBI told me that bullet is over a hundred years old,” said Reyes. “You don’t find 1849 thirty-one-caliber Colts just lying around. You find them in museums and collections. Nobody carries them.”
“Marie dug it out of an old trunk,” said Finnegan. “There are thousands of old trunks in this world. And don’t forget that a good gun is eternal. There are harquebuses and snaphaunces still every bit as deadly as they were the day they were forged. In gun years, our history is much shorter and condensed than any of you seem to realize.”
Hood stood and leaned over the bed and on Finnegan’s cheek found the scar attributed by Owens to a Napa vineyard mishap. The little man stared at him.
“No, you misunderstand,” said Finnegan. “The bullet entered from behind. I was running for my life.”
Hood looked into Finnegan’s clear blue eyes. The light that had shone from behind the layered gauze was still as lively now as it was when the darkness had amplified it. He remembered what Owens had said about learning to read the insanity in Mike’s face, but if such a thing was possible, Hood saw none.
“You said Marie was the whore I reminded you of,” said the doctor. “At Wyatt Earp’s saloon in San Diego.”
“Is that so?”
“Charlie was in the room.”
“I think you can solve this mystery, doctor. We’re talking about women living roughly a century apart.”
“Two Maries.”
“You’re a sly one.”
“I think almost everything you say is a lie,” said Reyes. “You’re just making it up.”
“I didn’t make up the bullet,” said Finnegan.
Reyes shook his head, then looked at Petty and Hood and back to Finnegan.
“I don’t mean to exasperate law enforcement,” said Finnegan. “And back to the other night, Gabriel, you must offer all the love you have to your son. All sons need a father’s love. He needs it more because he is a homosexual and the world has little love of them. But you are his father.”
“I never told you he was homosexual.”
“I listened carefully.”
&nbs
p; Reyes sighed. “We got to talking a few nights ago.”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” said Finnegan.
“No, there isn’t. But if that thirty-one-caliber slug entered from the back of your head, it had to pass through your skull and brain to get where Beth found it.”
“I like the way you chew on things,” said Finnegan. “Good lawmen are always good chewers. But it’s common for a foreign object to migrate through the body over the decades.”
“No, really,” said Reyes. “Your X-rays should show a hole where the bullet went through.”
“I’m sure they would,” said Finnegan.
“I’ll get them,” said the doctor.
A minute later, she was attaching them to the reader that hung from the wall. She clipped a series of three across the top and stood back. Hood looked at the contours of Finnegan’s skull, the gradients of light and dark and density.
“There,” said Petty. She pointed out a very faint circle of darkness on the anterior left side of the skull.
“What do I win?” asked Finnegan.
Reyes stood and stepped up close to the X-ray film. “Are you sure that’s a bullet hole? Kind of faint, isn’t it?”
“The bone will heal over time if the wound is small. What we see here is probably regrowth.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know exactly. Years.”
“What about damage to the brain tissue?”
“There is some evidence of disturbance. It appears slight. See the pale finger here?” She tapped her own finger to the film.
“Only slight damage from a speeding bullet?” asked Reyes. “Account for that, doctor.”
“I can’t. But there must have been very little brain damage to begin with because brain cells don’t replicate. The brain is a miraculous organ in the sense that we can live without relatively large parts of it. The compensatory powers are impressive. People live normal lives with bullets and other objects lodged deep in their brains. I’ve seen it.”
Reyes looked at the little man, then back to the film. “You’ve got the worst luck in the world, but you’ve got the best luck, too. You get shot in the back of the head, bullet goes through both skull and brain and should have killed you, but instead the hole heals up just fine. Then you get hit by a two-ton Mercury doing sixty. It breaks your neck and half the other bones in your body and messes up your lungs, kidneys, and liver. It breaks your skull and batters your brains, but you crawl a half a mile through the desert. Now ten days later, you’re offering me advice on how to talk to my son. You’re a strange man.”
“I like you, too, Gabe.”
Reyes took another long look at the X-ray, then turned to the doctor. “So, Beth, how is Mike’s overall recovery coming along?”
“Very well. The swelling was a setback and I can’t account for it.”
“You told me his resting pulse is seventy and his blood pressure is in the normal range for a twenty-five-year-old man in good physical shape.”
“Grandma called that an iron constitution. She said it was fresh vegetables, low salt, no tobacco, prune juice.”
“You subscribe to all that, Mike?”
“Don’t ask me about food. I haven’t eaten real food since I got here. Even prune juice sounds good. I’ve never smoked anything in my life.”
“I’m going to ask you about that ninety grand again,” said Reyes. “Where’d you get it?”
“I earned it. I saved it for this, a rainy day. Mike Finnegan Bath.”
“I got the number and address in L.A. from information,” said Reyes. “I’ve called four times. All I ever get is a recording.”
“The landline and office are formalities, really. I mostly use the cell. My clients all know how to reach me.”
Reyes exhaled, shaking his head. “Is the key in your wallet for the office?”
“None other.”
Reyes stood over Finnegan. “I still don’t believe your story, Mike.”
“Which one?”
19
Hood and Beth Petty stepped into the elevator and when the door shut, Hood felt the sudden pleasure of their aloneness. She wore a yellow dress and her skin was brown with summer and her scent was subtle. In the heeled hemp sandals, she was almost Hood’s height. She smiled at him and looked away.
The elevator stopped at the sixth floor, where two patients in wheelchairs and two nurses and the two deputies who had been outside Jimmy’s door waited.
“We’ll make room,” said Beth Petty and she tugged Hood by his cuff and led him out of the elevator car and around a corner toward the stairs. They came to Jimmy’s room and the door was open, but the privacy curtain was drawn around the bed. Hood stopped and saw the faint shadow of a person leaning over the bed and he heard a woman ask about leg cramps and then Jimmy’s husky response. He heard the swish and ringing of water. Two new deputies stood talking to a pretty woman at the nurses’ station, and the men gave Hood the law enforcement look as he and Petty passed by.
They entered the stairwell. It was very hot. Hood saw that the deputies here had finished shift and vacated their posts and he heard the voices and the sounds of possible replacements coming up at them through the space below the sixth floor.
Hood listened to his and the doctor’s footsteps sound on the metal steps and echo in still flat air. Beth stopped behind him and Hood turned. She looked down at him from five stairs above. She looked inquisitive and lightly irritated.
“I like being where you are,” she said.
“I like it, too. I’ve thought about you.”
She smiled and flushed but didn’t look away this time.
Hood turned and watched the new men arrive on the fourth-floor landing below him, a slight bespectacled older deputy and a big younger man with a head of bleached hair. The size difference made them seem comic. The older man looked up at Hood and nodded and wiped his forehead with a folded handkerchief, then they clanged through the door out of the heat and into the building proper. As the door shut, something Hood had just seen triggered a memory, but the memory was too dim and vaporous to identify. When he got to the landing where the deputies had just stood, the air hung electric and wrong. Hood opened the door and saw the two men walking purposefully down a hospital hall toward the elevator.
“What?” asked the doctor, coming up behind him.
“It’s nothing.”
“Dad used to be like that. Always suspicious. He says it kept him alive.”
“Maybe it did.”
“He’s sixty-five and long retired. His god is golf.”
They descended through the echoes of their own footfalls, poly-rhythms on the steel steps. The deputies still tugged at Hood, but they were only doing their jobs by any rational accounting he could apply. Just some overtime to protect the vulnerable and to guard prisoners, a commonplace paycheck booster for deputies, the bane of administrators in cash-strapped departments. He thought that what Beth Petty had said about liking to be where he was was beautiful. He would tell her that. They continued down.
Hood, like Reyes, was a chewer of things.
The older deputy’s handkerchief, he thought, sureno red. No. The glasses?
No, not the glasses, the other guy’s hair.
When he reached the fourth-floor landing, Hood saw the brassy bleached swirl of hair from one of Sheila Dragovitch’s suspect pictures. Meet Silenced Automatics. Silenced automatics are all he talks about.
Hood wondered if the bleached deputy had been working the Iron River undercover. Certainly Imperial County Sheriff’s had a hand in. Other task forces, other lawmen.
And of course he wondered if the bleached deputy was a deputy at all.
Silenced Automatics.
“What floor is your office on?” he asked.
“Three, down one.”
“Go there and call security for assistance in Jimmy’s room. Lock the door and stay there or get to your car and go home.”
“Charlie?”
“This is probably nothing.”
“What is nothing?”
“The man in the stairwell.”
“The old guy or Pompadour?”
“Pompadour. Go.”
Beth hurried down toward the third floor, her sandals soft on the steel steps. Hood watched her stride across the landing to the door and look up at him before pushing through.
He took the steps three at a time back to the fifth floor and when he looked up to the sixth, the two deputies were not there. He made the landing and popped the strap of his hip rig before going through the door.
The hallway was deserted except for one older man pushing a drip trolley. He wore a hospital gown and white socks and he gave Hood a wintry look. Hood rounded the corner to the hallway and walked fast. It was a big hospital and seemed bigger now on this calm Sunday, and Hood went through double doors that stood open, then past a display of children’s art in a glassed wall case and he continued in a quiet trot. Then he came to a dark round woman in a white dress and a brightly stitched rebozo across her shoulders and a bowler with a beaded headband and she held across her chest in both arms a bouquet of immense paper flowers in purples and oranges and blues and reds and she was telling Hood flowers, beautiful flowers, as he passed her. Far down the hallway, he could see that there were no deputies outside Jimmy’s room and when he asked the pretty nurse where they had gone, she said to the cafeteria for coffee, really good lattes for a hospital if you haven’t tried them, and when Hood came to the closed door of Jimmy Holdstock’s room, he palmed his sidearm against one leg and pushed through.
Holdstock lay partially upright, head back against the pillows, sleeping. His lips twitched lightly and his eyebrows were raised as if he were surprised and his eyeballs quivered beneath their lids. He was cleanly shaven and there were comb lines through his hair and Hood could smell aftershave and shampoo. Hood shut the door behind him and felt for the lock, but the door could not be locked from inside except with a key. He used his cell to call Ozburn and Bly and told them that he was alone with Jimmy and there were a couple of deputies coming on shift who didn’t look right. From the room phone, he called security and described them. He went to the window and looked down at a portion of a side parking lot. He swung one of the visitors’ chairs to the door and worked the back of it up under the knob. At this, Jimmy opened his eyes and lifted his head and found Hood here on the outskirts of his dream. He looked frightened. Hood touched his face with one hand and slipped his gun into his holster with the other.
Iron River Page 15