The Famous and the Dead ch-6

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “No kidding it was,” Rovanna answered softly, though he rarely heard his own voice and couldn’t hear it now. He felt the black paint scalding down through him. He took the Love 32 from the backpack and stood and fired an automatic burst at Dr. Walter Freeman, then another one at his nurse and another at the big orderly who was already racing across the stage toward him.

  30

  Ten minutes later Hood got a call from Janet Bly, with a sketchy report about a political shooting on the SDSU campus. Bly forwarded a bystander’s video to Hood’s phone. Hood peered at the chaos onscreen-screams and a rush of bodies, then two men fighting over a gun, with a third man down and bleeding. “Channel Ten should have it any minute,” said Bly. She sounded breathless. “That was a Love Thirty-two, wasn’t it?”

  “I think so,” Hood heard himself say. Beth and Erin came in quietly from the living room, drawn by his tone of voice. The dogs looked at him alertly as he turned on the kitchen TV. They watched the special bulletin. Channel 10 had been covering the book fair for the six-thirty news, and doing a sidebar on Scott Freeman. What Hood saw took his breath away: a gunman spraying bullets at the representative and others. The Love 32 was easy to recognize, and when the gunman’s wig was ripped off in the fight, Hood recognized Lonnie Rovanna. His heart fell. Yorth called next, then Frank Soriana from San Diego, then the SAC in L.A., then Fredrick Lansing back in D.C., who thundered into the phone: “Was that one of your goddamned Love Thirty-twos?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The ones that got past you and disappeared in Mexico?”

  “I can’t answer that yet.”

  “Answer it! What the hell is going on out there with you goddamned people?”

  Hood stayed by the TV with Beth and Erin. Freeman, he thought. Representative Scott Freeman. Dr. Walter Freeman, Finnegan, the Identical Men. He remembered Rovanna’s soft voice. My very deepest fear is of Dr. Freeman and his orbitoclasts.

  Congressman Scott Freeman had been rushed to Sharp Medical Center with multiple gunshot wounds. He was alive, in critical condition. His wife, Patricia, had been wounded as well and was listed as serious. Freeman’s assistant, who wrestled the gunman to the stage and disarmed him, had also been shot, condition critical. Three others, all book fair attendees, had been hospitalized and were listed as stable.

  “The suspect is a Caucasian male, five feet ten, one hundred seventy pounds, in his mid-twenties. He is currently in the custody of the San Diego Police. .”

  Hood walked outside into the cool Imperial County desert. The dogs bounded out ahead of him. He watched the cloud shadows move across the flanks of the Devil’s Claws and he wondered how Rovanna could have deceived him, how he could have missed the violence brewing inside the man. So much evidence: insanity, aloneness, delusions, violence, the bat, the confiscated guns. Hood had instinctively understood that Finnegan had given Rovanna something. He’d known it. He’d asked Rovanna more than once what Finnegan had offered him. Hood had thought that maybe it was only something for Rovanna to think about, something to be afraid of, or a task to do. Mike loved trading favors, tit for tat. It gave him control, a way into you. Now Hood realized that Mike had given him something much heavier. Something physical. And Rovanna had just used it on six innocent people at a book fair. Hood felt small and hapless and fooled. He had failed to listen to his own voice. He’d let it be smothered by his sympathy and sad affection for disturbed, delusional Lonnie Rovanna. “You should have listened,” he muttered. He called the dogs, and when he turned to go back inside, his phone rang again.

  “Hood, this is Detective Rich Benson at San Diego PD. We met at Lonnie Rovanna’s home six days ago. That’s where I am now. We need to talk. It’s urgent.”

  By the time Hood was halfway to El Cajon, Scott Freeman and his assistant had died. Patricia Freeman was stable and the three wounded bystanders were soon to be released. The suspect in custody was identified as Lonnie Dwight Rovanna.

  • • •

  San Diego PD had Rovanna’s house taped off and a half dozen uniformed patrolman stood in the driveway near the front porch. The mayor stood among them, arms crossed, nodding. More officers stood along the crime-scene tape that ran from the main house to the fence of the house next door, talking with the media crews and the neighbors. Hood badged a sergeant as a photographer shot him, then he stepped over the tape and walked beneath the towering sycamore tree.

  Benson and the San Diego County district attorney, Lisa Alex, met Hood on the porch and escorted him inside. Hood stepped into the familiar room and saw the dusty piles of books and magazines, and the slouching plaid couch and the white chair and the low coffee table between them. A police videographer came down the hallway behind a camera and a wall of bright light and a still photographer patiently framed a shot of the plastic vodka bottle on the coffee table, then set loose the motor drive.

  Benson led Hood down the short hallway and into the unused bedroom. DA Alex came in last and shut the door. Benson looked forty, freckled and red haired, with big shoulders and a paunch. Lisa Alex was tall and slender and sharp faced.

  “Tell me what you know about Rovanna,” said Benson.

  Hood told them about his web and social media search for Mike Finnegan, a man he suspected of being involved in illegal enterprises in both the United States and Mexico. Then about Finnegan’s surprise visit to Rovanna as Dr. Todd Stren. He told them about his own interview here in Rovanna’s home and the follow-up phone call he’d made later that night to the troubled young man. He told them what he’d found out about Rovanna’s mental health problems. He admitted that he’d seen the indicators for possible violence in Lonnie but had no legal way of detaining him.

  “Tell us about that gun he used,” said Alex.

  Hood told them about now-defunct Pace Arms of Orange County, the one thousand Love 32s smuggled south under ATF’s noses three years ago, then the discovery that some of the guns had been brought back into the United States and used in drug gang killings.

  Lisa Alex and Rich Benson looked at each other. “Let me get this right,” said Benson. “Mike Finnegan-a bathroom-products wholesaler in L.A., who has no criminal or any other kind of record-is the connection between Rovanna, the guns, and ATF?”

  “I think Finnegan gave Lonnie the gun he used.”

  Again the detective and the DA exchanged looks. Benson looked long at Hood. “Rovanna told me he got it from you.”

  Hood confronted their doubt with a slight shake of his head. “He hears voices. He’s delusional.”

  “But you were here in his home just a few days ago,” said Lisa Alex. “And he said you two talked at some length about Iraq, and this Dr. Stren and Mike Finnegan, and he said you drank vodka.”

  “Yes. He told me about the U.S. Army brigade that he never was a part of. And about the Identical Men who followed him, and the fake Jehovah’s Witnesses he attacked. I didn’t give him a gun. Don’t make me say that again.”

  “Why would he say it?” asked Benson.

  “Ask him,” said Hood.

  “We did, and he said you have been badgering him since your days together in Iraq. That you have been inciting him to political violence for years. And, lately, specifically toward Scott Freeman.”

  “He was never in Iraq. I only met Rovanna six days ago. But Lonnie was phobic about a Dr. Walter Freeman. Walter Freeman was the so-called father of the prefrontal lobotomy.”

  Alex cleared her throat softly. “Mr. Hood, what in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “Lonnie conflated the two men-the two Freemans. I didn’t stir him to violence. His terror of lobotomy did. Mike Finnegan did, and he supplied the instrument to carry it out. Lonnie thought Freeman was after him. He was fixated on the instruments and the procedure. Dr. Freeman’s first patient was named Alice Hood. So, somehow, Rovanna associated me with her. And her with Scott Freeman as Walter Freeman. So he claimed to be Scott Freeman’s protector, as a way of getting physically close to him. Delusion fed delusion. Ro
vanna heard voices, imagined people who were not real. I don’t think anyone knew how crazy he was. I didn’t.”

  “Clear as mud,” said Lisa Alex, standing. “And unless the feds beat me to it I’m going to put Lonnie Rovanna on death row. If you supplied him that firearm, we may have a conspiracy and you may well join him on said row. If not, my office will depose you at some point and you may well find yourself on my witness list. All yours, Rich.”

  Alex marched out, leaving the door open. “You’re a person of interest in this investigation,” said Benson. “You know the drill. Don’t leave California without notifying me.”

  31

  Clint Wampler lay on his trailer bed in Bombay Beach, peacoat buttoned against the desert cold, head against the buckling wallpaper, watching yet another news story on the shooting of the congressman in San Diego. He thought, The federal government sucks and Freeman deserved it. The next story was of course about him and the “cold-blooded murder of Agent Reggie Cepeda.” They showed the same picture of Clint they’d been showing for seven straight days.

  He answered his phone to good news.

  “Clint, I have a buyer at thirty-five thousand.”

  “It costs forty.”

  “It’s a solid offer from a dependable client.”

  “Solid shit is what I call it.” Wampler rang off and dropped the phone to the bed beside the.44 Magnum. Of course Castro called back ten minutes later.

  “He wants three.”

  “I ain’t got but one.”

  “He can go forty on the one if you can get two more at thirty-seven five.”

  “Nope. These things are hard to come by. If they’re worth thirty-seven five, then they’re worth forty. Tell him to go to hell.”

  “Let me tell you something about business, Clint. You have to learn to be flexible. You have to offer up a little bit to keep your customers happy. You take care of them and they take care of you. Sometimes you take a little more and sometimes you take a little less. This is how things get done.”

  Wampler did the math while Castro lectured him. “This is the deal, then: forty for one, thirty-eight each for two more. I need the money up front for the second two. I don’t get ’em on promises and you aren’t either.”

  Clint hung up again and dropped the phone and went to the front door window. He cracked the curtain and looked out at the late morning. He saw the dirt patch with the derelict cars, some up on concrete blocks, some resting on their wheels or rust-eaten brakes. Not a one of them less than thirty years old, he thought. He hated this place, hated living locked down like a criminal. But this hole was hard to find and cheap. And the old lady who took his cash was so blind she made him fish out the key with the TRAILOR tag on it, though not too blind to count the money.

  And near blindness was a virtue because, even though the murder of the congressman in San Diego had knocked Clint out of first place on the news, Clint was still everywhere Clint turned. For two straight days after he’d killed Cepeda, he had made the front page of all four newspapers for sale outside the Bombay Beach convenience stores. He bought some to see what they were saying about him. His picture was shown and his name bellowed out on every news show he watched on the wretched little TV in his trailer, and every radio station he could get, from Yuma to San Diego, L.A. to San Bernardino. But even with the fresher dead congressman to prey on, they were still yapping on about the fallen hero, Cepeda, and showing his official fed mug shot and a portrait from his wedding day, over and over. And of course, most of the focus was on the growing manhunt for Clint Wampler, a militia-affiliated extremist who had thus far escaped arrest. The papers and TV kept showing his worst picture, the one that made him look like some kind of rotten-toothed sixties rock star, with stupid bangs and big ears and an IQ of ten.

  In the few brief minutes that he’d spent outside this miserable aluminum refrigerator over the past three days, he’d personally seen more cops per mile of road than anywhere he’d ever been. It was like a convention of them. He saw local police, sheriffs from God knew how many California and Arizona counties, Highway Patrol, Tribal Police, even Fish and Game had units out looking for him. And of course ICE and Border Patrol in their SUVs. And then there were all the unmarked-but-still-obvious cars the feds were driving-Mercs and Chevys with little whippy antennas on top: FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals. Even the U.S. Postal Service investigation service was after him again because of that post office fire back in Missouri, is what the TV said. He had also seen unusual numbers of small helicopters and low-flying aircraft. He had almost been trapped at a CHP checkpoint that, as if by a miracle, had shut down when he’d advanced to fifth in line, a pistol lying under a rag on the passenger seat of his second stolen car, his cool and clarity settling over him.

  Looking out past the junked cars he saw the rutted dirt drive and the Jackalope Lounge sign, and beyond that the Jackalope Lounge itself, an almost windowless, low brick box decorated with Christmas lights. Quiet, this time on a Sunday. It sat just off a wide dirt road. Beyond the road was a white expanse of what looked like sand or maybe salt, then the flat silver mirror of the Salton Sea. The whole place smelled of dead fish and foul water, and there were screeching goddamned birds everywhere you looked. Bombay Beach, Wampler thought. Worse than anywhere in Russell County. Plus he was hungry and worried about going out for groceries and his money was running low. And his left middle finger might be getting infected because it got redder and hurt more every day. The pain made him think of spectacular ways to return it to its rightful owner: Charlie Hooper.

  Thinking of revenge on Hooper gave Clint just a taste of that cool, clear feeling he liked. So he went to the middle of the small “living room” and practiced his draw. He was a pocket man, not a holster man-easier to conceal and easier to draw fast if you had the right jacket, which he did. The peacoat had wide slit pockets at perfect angles. He whipped out twenty quick lefts, then twenty rights, then twenty doubles. On the two-gun draws he alternated bracing left over right, then right over left for steadiness, none of that waving-’em-around bullshit like in westerns. Wampler liked short-barreled guns with flush or internal hammers that wouldn’t catch on things. He turned around and went through the routine again. Not a snag or fumble. Gotcha. The best was doing it live, out in the woods by Little Creek, using the skinny poplars and willows for targets-if you could hit them, you could hit a man practically with your eyes closed. Plus it sounded great. Clint did another twenty draws each way.

  Then he stepped into the “kitchen” and instead of drawing a gun with his right hand he whipped out his hand-made blackjack and rapped it righteously against one of the wooden cabinets. The weighted end left a quarter-size dent in the wood, just like it would leave on a skull, Clint thought. He hit another cabinet, harder, and this time the sap went all the way through and he had to wrench it back out through the ragged hole. When he finished his workout, his pulse and breathing were right up where he liked them and his vision was clear and sharp.

  Half an hour later Castro called to say he could go the full forty thousand on a new crated Stinger. “And he’ll front the money on the next two, at thirty-seven five.”

  “Fine. Deal. See how flexible I can be?”

  “I vouched for you, Clint. I think you understand what that means.”

  Wampler felt flush and lucky, though still hungry. “Oh. And I want five thousand of my money to be in the form of a dependable used car, Mr. Car Dealer. A good one, not some fucked-up little economy car. I want it legal and mine. I also want a sawed-off shotgun and some ammo and a blanket to cover them up with. The gun, the car, and thirty-five grand gets you the missile. And seventy-five thousand more gets you double trouble. Or is it triple?”

  “I’ve got a secure place we can meet.”

  “That’s good, but I’m not moving one inch until I’ve got my money.”

  • • •

  Five hours later Wampler parked his ’09 Sebring in the Denny’s parking lot in Fallbrook and stepped out into the cool w
inter air. He left the sawed-off shotgun on the backseat, covered in a bright yellow-and-black serape. The pistol under his Windbreaker felt useful and he was assured by the flat, hard combat knife strapped to his calf. His fingertip throbbed in the cold, same beat as his heart.

  Skull’s two Pendleton friends were older than Clint had expected. One short and one medium. They had tattoos and military haircuts and moved with brisk authority. They reminded him of Skull. The parking lot was dark but busy enough, and the friends had told him that Fallbrook had some sheriffs for patrol but not many. Wampler saw a security guard who seemed not to notice them. His heart rate always fell in dicey situations like this, and he saw things in a slowed-down kind of motion. For the two Stingers he handed over $50,000 in the backpack in which it had come to him. The other $25,000 was his end, already stashed in the car. The Sebring had a big trunk and the crates fit fine alongside the plastic bags of his cash.

  Wampler shut the trunk and got back into his new $5,000 used car. The balance of $35,000 from Castro for the first Stinger sat on the front passenger seat in a steel navy ammunition box covered with the heavy wool coat he’d brought from home. He wondered again if he should keep Skull’s and Brock’s shares. With the blood of a murdered federal agent on their hands, it might be a long, long time until they saw the light of day. There was a question of honor, however. He had honor. Up to a point. One of the men was coming to the car so he drew his.44 and kept it in the dark and rolled down the window.

  “More where those came from,” said short, who called himself Skip.

  “All the business I’m giving you, Skip, seems the price might come down some.”

  “Take a thousand off the next two, if that helps.”

  “Off each one or both?”

  “Off each of however many you want, my friend. We aim to please. Where are these babies going?”

  “If it mattered to you, you wouldn’t be selling them.”