At the end of the long time, Hood was suspended with pay for one week and ordered back to L.A. for desk duty, pending a full investigation by CID. Hood stood and dropped his gun and badge to Warren’s desk. Second time in four days, he thought. “This job isn’t worth the heartache or the paycheck. I’m out. I’ll be at home if you want to arrest me for something.”
Afterward he drove to Bakersfield and met his siblings and mother at Applebee’s for dinner. They stayed up late, reminiscing. His brothers and sisters struck him as predictably advanced versions of what they had always been, and he was certain that he appeared that way, too. He slept in his boyhood bed. Lying in the dark in the small, familiar room, he was effortlessly transported back through the years and he dreamed the dreams of his childhood. The next day they spread his father’s ashes up on the Kern River, where he had loved to fish.
• • •
Back in Buenavista, Hood learned from Owens that Mike Finnegan had at least five residences in Southern California, her favorite being a remote cottage near Piru that backed up to Piru Creek and the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge. Ventura County, thought Hood-he and his father had fished Piru Creek when Hood was just a boy. According to Owens, Mike had purchased the cottage in 1887 when Piru was being developed as “a second Garden of Eden” by a wealthy publisher of Sunday-school tracts. Mike had told her that the nutcase publisher had planted the surrounding valley only with fruits identified in the Bible-dates, figs, grapes, olives, and pomegranates. Mike could see the original vineyard from his back patio. Owens said that Mike, even to this day, was still proud of his subterfuge in purchasing a home in the middle of enemy territory.
There in the cottage, she said, Mike now spent long stretches of downtime-reading, writing, researching on the Internet, daydreaming, hiking the rugged hills, and swimming most mornings in cold, fast Piru Creek. He used a mask and snorkel and diving weights to get down and observe the fish and aquatic insects, often photographing them with a waterproof point-and-shoot camera. Owens told them that Piru was the only one of Mike’s homes she knew of where he allowed himself to sleep-sometimes for up to two hours at a time. He slowed down and relaxed when he was there.
She said Mike believed that some places had certain powers and that these powers were determined by history. He had told Owens that the indigenous people of Piru-the Tataviam-had been free and spiritually advanced until their conversion to Christianity through the San Fernando Mission. He called that a tragedy. So, in Piru, Mike liked to let his mind ride back in time to before the King had ruined the Tataviam. He would sit out on the back patio of the cottage for hours on end, staring out at the fertile valley and the biblical flora and the more distant peaks of the mountains, a legal pad in his lap and his pencil held between his fingers like a cigarette. His eyelids would gradually close but never all the way. After hours of utter stillness, Mike would often suddenly sit up straight and start writing, filling page after page with his tight, clear print while he muttered and chuckled and hummed. Owens admitted to have peeked at the writings later in secret but Mike had never once written in a language she recognized.
Owens told Hood that Mike also had an apartment down in National City, two-level with a view of the shipyards; an active-seniors condo in Laguna Woods Village in Orange County where he played golf and made friends with older people; a little stucco 1950s tract house in Torrance; and a place somewhere on the Pearblossom Highway near Palmdale, though this was the one home he had never shown her. She suspected he had other houses though she couldn’t be sure.
So Hood Google-Earthed all of the homes and saw that the Piru cottage would be the best place to surprise Mike. It was out of the way and tucked up tight to the woodlands and the creek. A good road in and out, a low chance of witnesses, and plenty of places to hide and stage. Besides, Mike would be in one of his pensive phases-resting and ruminating and daydreaming and swimming in the creek. The only thing Hood didn’t like was the long drive back to Buenavista. He had friends with helicopters and light aircraft but he couldn’t expose them to danger.
• • •
That evening in the kitchen, while Hood stood vigil over a prime rib and made up the horseradish sauce, Beth and Gabriel started in on potatoes, asparagus, and salad. Bradley came back from town with cheese, crackers, wine, beer, and various liquors and mixers, for which he took orders, then served with an unusual-for him-air of concern. Hood saw trouble in his eyes and noted that Bradley kept looking out the windows. Owens made an apple pie and a peanut butter pie, then set a boom box on the breakfast bar and found Mozart on the classical station. Erin hovered about with Thomas in her arms until he fell asleep, and she put him in the portable crib set up in the living room, close by, where she could easily see him. Daisy and Minnie lay down beside the crib. Bradley delivered a rather large glass of white wine to Erin and she took it with the first smile Hood had seen her offer him in recent history. Beatrice flitted about, “testing” the food and gulping zinfandel. With Thomas asleep, Owens found some rowdy Mexican music and cranked it up. “About time,” said Reyes. “Does anyone ever get the feeling that just below the surface here, everything is crazy?”
“Duh,” said Beatrice, who had heard Bradley use this current expression, and was quick to pick up on such things. “Gabe, would you teach me to drive a modern car while there’s still a little light? I’ve never gone over twenty-six miles per hour.”
“Easy on the wine, angel face,” said Reyes. “Or you’ll be DUI.”
Hood and everyone else followed them out, Erin holding sleeping Thomas against her shoulder. Gabriel made Beatrice take the passenger seat of his pickup and when she had her shoulder restraint fastened he commenced an overview of the modern automobile. Hood looked out at the desert in evening light, the backlit peaks of the Devil’s Claws touched with orange and their bases locked in purple shadows. He looked south to Buenavista in the middle distance, its nineteenth-century church with the bell tower jutting up just beyond the Burger King and the Blockbuster and the Chevron station. He thought about having quit the LASD. He hadn’t planned to quit, but wasn’t enough enough? He liked L.A., but he liked Buenavista better. But what to do? He wondered again about selling cars, and wondered whether, with the sudden death of Israel Castro and change of ownership at Castro Ford, a fresh salesman might be needed. Could a physician and a car salesman be happy together? If not, why not?
A minute or two later, Beatrice slid over and Gabe came around. She took forever with the power seat, moving it every which way and back again. She started up and jumped into reverse, tires throwing gravel against the undercarriage, then made a neat highway-patrol turn and accelerated down the rough dirt road. Daisy and Minnie ran alongside barking. Hood watched the dust rise behind the truck and the serpentine course she steered, left and right and left and right. Overcorrecting due to the power steering, he thought, then wondered if she was just doing it for fun. A half a mile out the truck stopped, then swung onto paved Sunset Rim Drive, and the panting dogs came over the rise back to the house.
• • •
Dinner was the most unusual of Hood’s life but one of the most pleasant. The women took over the conversation, all of them except Erin drinking briskly. Beatrice set the pace on the wine and out-ate the others, roughly five to one, including half of the peanut butter pie. She reminisced on the Portuguese in San Diego and the Apaches at Yuma. Owens told amusing Hollywood tales from her acting jobs and Beth became excited by her own ER stories and Erin described for them in fascinating detail the decaying castle in the Yucatan jungle where she’d been held captive by the drug lord Benjamin Armenta. Bradley continued to fill their glasses. Soon all four of them were telling four stories more or less at once, a layered narrative that reached Hood’s ears as pleasant near-chaos: Geronimo scalped him, then yawned and lay down in the shade and took a nap. Quentin takes my wrists in both hands and kisses them! I yell out, two pints, stat-blood, not bourbon, you fool! The black jaguar looks at me again, and I sw
ear he’s sizing me up for dinner.
Hood sipped a little wine and kept an eye on the windows. He put Mary Kate Boyle on speakerphone while he did dishes-she sounded happy and relieved, and the rehearsals were going well. She’d gotten back her job at KFC, no problem, just like Hood said she would. She still had headaches from Clint’s blackjack, but less than before. She’d let him know about opening night. Hood thanked her again for her courage and good humor over the last weeks and she seemed disappointed by this.
Hood noted that Bradley drank nothing but coffee and was ankle-strapped and rarely had his back to a window or the front door. Reyes had a few beers but he made his limping rounds every forty minutes or so, flashlight in hand and.38 holstered to his hip.
49
Awakened by a dream in which Thomas was sold for one large silver coin to three faceless traders in a bazaar, Bradley lay on the long leather couch in Hood’s living room and listened to the breeze hiss through the yuccas and ocotillos outside. He pulled on his pants and boots and heavy canvas barn coat and took the gun from under the pillow and put it in his coat pocket. He walked quietly back through the house and looked in on Erin and Thomas, both deeply asleep, touched by a faint band of moonlight. He went out the front door, triggering the motion lights. The giant and the two dwarves stood out by the stone wall on the other side of the carport. Bradley could see the twinkle of a vehicle down the roadside, parked out of earshot of people and dogs. He approached. “What do you ugly fuckers want?”
“We apologize for waking you up,” said the giant. His voice was deep and clear; his tone was polite.
“I saw you earlier. You don’t blend in.”
Both dwarves motioned him down the road and Bradley followed, the giant so tall his head seemed to brush the sky, while the dwarves on either side of him were as short and stout as bookends. Fifty yards down all three stopped and turned to face him. “What we want to do is help you,” said the giant. “Mike wants your son and he’ll do harsh things to get control of him. We have differing opinions on how Thomas should be raised. We think there’s only one person who can do it properly. And that person is you. Not Mike.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“It’s not confidence in you we have,” said one of the dwarves. “What we have is belief in nature’s order. You are the father. And we are here to help you do whatever is necessary to secure your son. We are here for you.”
“I don’t want you here for me. I want you as far away from me as possible.”
“Of course,” said the giant. Bradley guessed him at close to eight feet tall. He wore a dark suit that fit perfectly. He brought a wallet from his coat pocket, and in his giant’s hands, it looked like a child’s plaything. But his fingers were deft and he extracted a card. Then, with two strides he covered the ten feet to Bradley. “My business card.”
Bradley took it without looking at it. “I hit you, didn’t I?”
“Yes. Fine shooting.” The giant put back his wallet, then lifted his shirt and showed Bradley the small red slit, inflamed but apparently healing. “Still rattling around inside, too.”
“I’d shoot you again if it would do any good.”
The dwarves looked at each other and shook their heads in disdain.
“We feel pain,” said the giant.
“So do we.”
“Bradley, we watched the fireworks down at Valley Center last night. It was a spectacular attempt to escape your own past. We all know it can’t work because you can’t change who you are. That would be like a tree frog trying to become a tree. But we knew that the real point was to put your wife and Hood at ease, so I think the spectacle was a meaningful performance.”
“It was not a performance. It was real. I am not what I have been.”
The dwarves let loose a tight, vicious laugh.
“We did have the thought, though,” said the giant, “that you might need some financial assistance to get started fresh. So, we’d like to offer you this. Just a beginning, of course.”
One of the dwarves waddled forward holding up something flat and black and shiny, as if he were badging Bradley. Then he reversed it to reveal a similarly sized white card rubber-banded to its back. He turned the dark side to Bradley again and wiggled it to catch what there was of the moonlight. “A Visa Black Card,” he said. “Their best.”
“There’s a quarter-million-dollar limit,” said the giant. “But if you need more than that, just call the number on the business card I gave you. We’ll take care of it. And the CDL on the other side is genuine, though, of course Bradford Johnson and his personal information are not-quite. We have a much more generous budget than Mike Finnegan will ever have. But more importantly, we have far more progressive, forward-looking ideas about how best to serve our partners. We’re part of an elite group. I am not bragging. Keep a hapless angel in a mineshaft for one hundred years? Inflict senseless cruelty on human beings we don’t judge to be worth our time? Delight in human pain and chaos? We are not this. This is not how we behave. Think about it. Think about Thomas and what you would like him to become. Let your imagination run wild and let us help you make your dreams real.”
Bradley took the credit card and looked at it and turned it over. The moonlight was just enough to reveal his own image on the driver’s license, a picture he hadn’t known was being taken. The giant went down to one knee and he spread his enormous arms. He and Bradley were roughly eye level now and the outstretched arms spanned far wider than Bradley was tall, and this freakish display brought him a woozy rush. “Bradley?” whispered the giant. “Fetch Thomas and Erin immediately. She’s a key part in our hopes for Thomas, unlike in Mike’s. Now. Bring them out. Save your wife and son, and we will help you build upon your life. Don’t throw them away!”
Bradley looked at the kneeling giant, who was smiling now, and felt a shudder come up through him. He slipped the business card into the bundle and flipped all three back to the dwarf. They hit his chest, but he caught it before it fell. “Go to hell, all of you.”
“I told you,” said one of the dwarves. He snatched a rock off the ground and hurled it into the darkness and Bradley heard it hit far away. “A complete waste of time.” He spun in the gravel and crunched down the road toward the vehicle, the second small man close behind him.
“Won’t you at least take one of my cards? As a matter of respect between gentlemen?”
Bradley pulled the Glock and aimed it at the great prow of skull above the giant’s eyes. “Bradley-I am disappointed. But please know, no matter what you do or where you choose to do it, I will be looking in on you over the many years you will live.”
“March.”
“As you wish.” He nodded and rose with a grunt, holding up a huge hand in appeasement, then turned and followed his associates down the road, his shoulders hunched, as if expecting a pesky bullet.
Angry and anxious but clearheaded, Bradley sat in Hood’s living room until the first light of day came gray and faint through the blinds. He felt like a beetle caught in a spider’s web. It seemed impossible to move without making things worse. He wrote a passionate letter addressed to Erin and Thomas, folded it neatly, and put it in his pocket, then woke up Hood and Reyes and Beatrice and told them he’d be gone awhile.
• • •
By nine thirty he was in El Monte, being waved into Rocky Carrasco’s property by a thin man with a big holster on his hip, cowboy style. Rocky’s lair was a contiguous four-parcel spread with a large, aging two-story home on each parcel. The properties were surrounded by a single high concrete wall long overgrown with fragrant trumpet vines. With all of the backyard fencing removed, Rocky had built his compound-four apartments over the four detached garages, and a common area containing a playground for children and palm frond palapas for shade and a basketball court, horseshoe setup, and small swimming pool. There was also a small beach-style cantina made mostly of corrugated aluminum and metal beer signs, with steel-drum barbecues and plenty of tables and cha
irs, similar to those cantinas found around his favorite Mexican city, Mazatlan. All of this amidst lush palms and giant birds of paradise and plantain and huge agaves, some of which grew almost to the power lines.
Now Bradley and Rocky sat in this cantina in the morning sun. Rocky was a small knot of a man, heavily tattooed and bald, with a large bushy mustache. He wore a gold Kobe jersey and a pair of oversize athletic shorts. Bradley noted again that Rocky’s skin was still prison pale from his years at Pelican Bay and his compulsively private, indoor life since his release. Rocky’s idea of a good time was to watch basketball, futbol, and boxing on the several large-screen televisions in his house-live broadcasts and taped events all blasting away simultaneously. And of course The Simpsons, Animal Planet, and Pimp My Ride. This replica Mazatlan cantina was Rocky’s only encounter with the outdoors that Bradley had ever known-inspired by a beach that Rocky had probably not seen in four decades.
“I worry,” said Bradley. He could not remember ever having to choose his words so carefully, except perhaps when he was trying to deceive Mike Finnegan.
“That’s what every new father does.”
“Erin distrusts me.”
“Maybe she is too beautiful for trust.”
“I don’t think it’s that. I put her in danger. She no longer believes in me.”
“But so long as she obeys you, then the belief and trust can come back.”
“She’s never obeyed me. I’ve never expected her to.”
“America was ruined in the sixties.”
“I want her back.”
“Then you keep on trying, man. You get her back with good words and good actions. And if that doesn’t work, you get a girlfriend.”
Bradley nodded and looked out at the horseshoe court and the hoop and the brightly colored pots of flowers. “The watchdogs are all over me at work. They know I was down there when Armenta got it, but they can’t prove anything. Yet. They’re pretty sure I’m tied in with Herredia, but they can’t prove that either. Yet. They know I rescued Stevie from the Salvadorans, so therefore you and I must have something going. Suspicion creates its own truth. You know what I’m saying?”
The Famous and the Dead ch-6 Page 32