“This is just goddamned unbelievable, Bradley.”
“Keep watching.”
The plane made another pass. The cameraman had switched to a still camera with a strong telephoto lens: Hood exiting the castle through the front door, Luna behind him.
“Armenta is already dead by now. Hood and the rest of Herredia’s hired cutthroats murdered him while he was playing accordion in a recording studio. They shot him up good and blew the accordion to pieces, according to one of the castle servants.”
Then came video of Mexican Army troops swarming the compound from one direction while an assortment of civilians—black domestics dressed alike in gray, people wrapped in white robes and balaclavas, a tall angry priest and his frightened young novitiates—fled the castle and vanished into the jungle. Bradley stole a look at Miranda Dez; she was transfixed by the spectacle. The last half minute of video showed the castle stewing in flames, smoke billowing all the way up into the camera until the screen went black.
“Pardon this,” said Dez. She fished a pack of cigarettes from a boot sock, pulled the matches out from behind the plastic wrapper, and lit up.
“Something to calm you down,” said Bradley.
“I’m not really sure what to say.” Dez stood and walked to the railing and looked down at the many dogs. Only Call, the unrivaled leader of pack, was allowed up on the deck proper. He lolled in a sunny spot out past the overhang with his eyes open and on Dez. She blew a plume of smoke that hovered, then thinned to nothing. She looked out over the rolling hills of Valley Center, toward the creek and the Indian property on the other side of it. He thought of his mother standing right about there, the same tilt of head and line of jaw. Finally, he thought, I’ve found it: a way to punish Hood for taking her body and a piece of her heart, and leaving her unprotected in the world. “And I’m not really sure what to do.”
“Get Warren off my back and deal with the real bad guy here. How can you not?”
“Warren thinks you were part of this Armenta thing.”
“You just saw with your own eyes that I wasn’t. I was in Yucatán with my pregnant wife and two good friends—fishing. Sometimes a coincidence really is just that. No matter how many times I tell Warren, he refuses to believe me. That’s where you come in, Chief Dez. You’re on the CID oversight panel. You can talk to the others, and redirect Warren’s pathetic investigation of an innocent deputy. Get them off me, especially the watchers. Now. Every time I turn around, there they are. Turn Warren loose on Hood. In return, you’ll have this recorded evidence to get started, and my full cooperation. And the full cooperation of deputies Caroline Vega and Jack Cleary, both in good standing, both of whom were there with me at Bacalar while Hood was gunning down Armenta. They’ll corroborate my story from the top down.”
Dez tapped some ash over the railing. “You’re the most manipulative young man I’ve ever known.” Bradley shrugged, reached down, and ran his hand over Call’s sleek, hard head. “Do you hate Hood for carousing with your mother? I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“You’re not qualified to not blame me.”
“Then I’ll retract that statement.”
“In fact, I feel sorry for Hood,” said Bradley. A strangely delicious warmth swaddled his heart. Lying was a genuine pleasure at times like this. Wickedly genuine. “He was a good man and he’s lost his direction and clarity. His windmills are devils.”
“Devils.”
“Ask him about them.”
Dez stubbed out her smoke on the underside of the top rail and let the butt drop to the ground. “I’ll take that thumb drive back with me. The panel should see it. Undersheriff Counts isn’t a fan of Warren, not since the Renegades scandal. And he’s been dubious about the Jones investigation from the start. He’ll see this my way, and the sheriff himself will lean with him. They’re tight. Warren’s men won’t follow you again.”
“I feel like a window has been opened.”
“How much money do you think Hood has made off Carlos Herredia over the years?”
“Scores of thousands. Maybe hundreds. Maybe you’ll be able to tell me someday.”
Dez stood in front of Bradley and looked up into his face. “If this is some kind of frame, or if your intel doesn’t wash, or if I begin to suspect your motives or your honesty, I’ll give Warren the green light to take you down.”
“I’m going to sleep at night, in spite of all that.”
“You’re a strange one, Jones.” Dez put her sunglasses back on and looked out to her driver. “Isn’t your wife due soon?”
“Next week.”
“Congratulations.”
Bradley smiled and nodded. “I’m truly blessed.”
“Fatherhood will make either a man or a fool out of you.”
• • •
After dinner Bradley went into the barn and lifted weights, then rode the stationary cycle for an hour plus. His muscles buzzed. He’d been missing the hapkido training but now it would be easily affordable again, thanks to Israel and certainly Mike. And Dez! What great good fortune, he thought. What a team. After the weights, arm heavy, he hit Ping-Pong balls against the raised half of his table, concentrating fully. When he’d had enough of this he tossed the ball and paddle onto the workbench and pushed a hidden button. With a whirring sound, the Ping-Pong table and the wooden rectangle of floor on which it stood rose into the air on hydraulic lifts. He’d taken them off trash trucks he’d stolen from the city of Escondido years ago. He climbed down the stairs into his vault.
He opened one of the four heavy safes just to see what was inside, though he knew. He admired the nearly four hundred thousand dollars inside, and the two cigar boxes filled with expensive wristwatches he’d bought for pennies on the dollar from a couple of his smash-and-grab friends. There were two jewelry boxes also, each crammed with treasures for Erin, similarly purchased for peanuts from bandits more daring than he—diamond brooches and ruby chokers and sapphire earrings and gold and gold and gold. The other three safes were comparably stocked.
He opened and checked them also, running his eyes and fingers over the bricks of compressed cash, the jewelry and old silver dollars, some loose gemstones waiting to be sold or set. He liked to see his loot in mild disarray and casually stored, more or less heaped, like a pirate might do. He lifted a wad of necklaces, mostly gold and pearls, then dropped them back to the safe bottom. There was even a cigar box that held the first few items he’d shoplifted, as a ten-year-old. He opened it and looked in at the baseball-card bubble-gum packs, now hardened and cracked within, the jawbreakers, pocketknives, toy cars and plastic reptiles, the tube of BB’s, and the miniature skateboards.
Pleased, Bradley locked the safes, then walked over to the long table that stood along one of the walls. There were three colorful serapes spread upon it. He carefully pulled each one away and let them drop to the floor. Then he looked down on remnants of his history: Joaquin Murrieta’s walnut-handled six-guns in old hip holsters; a bulletproof vest made for Joaquin by a French-American blacksmith in 1852; Joaquin’s journal; the leather-bound journals written by various Murrieta descendants, including his mother, during the century and a half since his death, all of them filled with lawless exploits and seductions and great bravery and generosity, and no little violence. And of course Joaquin’s severed head was there, too, still in the jar in which it was originally displayed after the shootout at Cantua Creek—the charge was one dollar to see the head of the bloodthirsty murderer and horse thief, Joaquin Murrieta!
Bradley ran his hand over the smooth leather of the holsters and the cool handles of the revolvers. He lifted his mother’s first journal, begun when she was ten years old, and read out loud her opening line for maybe the thousandth time: “Dear Children, do I have a tale of adventure for you!”
A tale of adventure was right, he thought. He pictured her and set the journal back with the others.
Now Bradley beheld the head. It was pale and roughly severed. The original preservative
was brandy but this eventually had been replaced with isopropyl alcohol, then formaldehyde. It had yellowed, slightly. The face was vaguely handsome, as Joaquin had reputedly been in life, but his famous wild black hair had fallen out through the decades and now lay at the bottom of the jar. Sometimes he looked noble to Bradley, and sometimes only hapless and forlorn.
He tapped it twice and watched the head sway and the hair lift and lilt. How could you have been everything they said you were? Bradley wondered. They said you were a real man. But they also said you were only imagined. They said you were short and dark. They said you were tall, blond, and blue-eyed. They said you murdered for fun. They said you were generous and kind. They said you were loyal to Rosa. They said you seduced hundreds. They said you died young and were beheaded. They said no, it was a friend of yours who was beheaded. They said you lived and died very old with your head still on and a large family all around you. So what am I supposed to make of you, El Famoso? You’re my history, but which history? How do I discover what I am when I know so little truth? What should I do with you? This is the twenty-first century, dude, and nobody needs a head in a jar. Especially a head that may or may not be what it’s said to be. What am I going to tell Thomas about you? Mom got driven half crazy by that question—she worried for years what to say to me and my brothers. Should she tell us the truth? Tell us lies? Tell us nothing? Tell some of us some things and some of us other things? She agonized over it. Because she knew that I would fall for you. She knew I had something that she had, and that you had. Something waiting to be set free. Something wild. She died undecided. You must understand what a problem you are to me, Joaquin. Maybe I’m better off without you. Has knowing you made my life better? Well, you’ve helped me become reckless, brave, and rich. Yes. I’ve murdered several men, though I might add that they all deserved it. I’ve stolen. I’ve stolen a lot. I am steadfastly dishonest, manipulative, and self-serving. I’ve deceived and endangered the only person I love. And of all those things, the only one I regret even a little is the last—what I did to Erin. And here I am, doing it again. Hell, she doesn’t even know about this place, and all the things I’ve done. So, Joaquin, why should I keep you around? Haven’t you had enough? What does my son need with you? What good are you to me?
Bradley went to the workbench and poured a neat Scotch. He brought it back to the table and clinked the glass to Joaquin’s. “To the river that carries us all,” he said. “Run long.” Then he covered Joaquin back up.
17
In the morning Oscar the security guard offered a minimal smile as Hood held his ID to the door lock on the ATF hallway. Hood got coffee and went to his cubicle and began reading still another ATF Form 3310.12, used to report multiple sales of semiautomatic rifles in Southwest border states. Hundreds were generated each month. It was attached to ATF Form 4473, the Firearms Transaction Record. Dealing with such forms made him drowsy.
Bly had requisitioned them from Buster’s Last Stand and it wasn’t hard for Hood to find what he was looking for. He wondered why Yolanda Drumm, the rhinestoned AR-5 buyer, needed a new 7.62 mm assault rifle every week for the past four weeks running. And why, before the new reporting rules, she had needed two, sometimes three rifles per week. Once, four. Well, clearly, for the Sinaloans, Hood thought, or other deserving patrons. He yawned.
He wrote down Drumm’s address in El Centro, and her phone numbers, and her credit card number. If they could catch her selling to the wrong people, they could take out one small supplier, one tiny contributory to the Iron River. She probably made fifty bucks a gun, maybe a hundred. Hood’s counterparts in Mexican law enforcement called this small-time gunrunning contrabando de las hormigas—contraband of the ants—but when the many ants were added up, their trickles became a big part of the river.
From the government numbers Hood saw, he conservatively figured that the flow of guns from the United States to Mexico was between a thousand and fifteen hundred a month. What he’d seen with his own eyes—there were over six thousand federally licensed gun dealers operating along the border, roughly three per mile—put the number higher. One prominent think-tank estimate of two thousand guns per day seemed way high. But in a sense everyone was counting backwards, because the number of guns going south could only be extrapolated from the number of guns found in the south and traced back their origins. Many guns of course were never found, and many more were not traceable. So the numbers floated as numbers do, subject to interpretation and misinterpretation, often politically colored.
Regardless, Hood knew for certain that it was good luck running into Yo Yo and the Sinaloans at El Pueblo. They probably did their deals in the parking lot in back, or somewhere close and handy. Hood believed in luck. His cell phone buzzed and he liked the number he saw. He hit the digital recorder on his desk and answered.
“Hooper. It’s Dirk Sculler here.”
“The Lewis made my collector very happy.”
“I had the weirdest dream last night. And when I woke up I thought of your customers, the ones you said didn’t need small-bore playthings.”
“Edge of my seat, Dirk.”
“I dreamed of FIM-Ninety-two Stingers, straight from Raytheon, still in the crates.”
“Certain people do dream of owning those.”
“I’d like to meet just one.”
“Let’s get off the air for this conversation, Dirk.”
“Meet me at noon at the Monterey Restaurant. Best burritos in the world, according to Israel Castro. And he owns a Mexican restaurant. You know Israel?”
“Every human being in Imperial County has bought something from Israel.”
“That’s him, alright.”
• • •
They sat back by the restrooms, away from the window. Hood set his straw gambler crown-down on the seat beside him. The restaurant was loud and busy. Hood got the carne asada “super burrito,” which came loaded with guacamole, sour cream, and pico de gallo. He had a speedy metabolism and could devour such meals several times a day and not gain weight. Skull outweighed him by twenty pounds and his four-item combination plate was down to two before Hood had taken a bite. Hood looked around the room and tucked one corner of the paper napkin under his shirt collar. Today he was wearing a pale blue cotton/linen seersucker suit and a Jerry Garcia necktie that he didn’t want stained.
“Where’s the wild bunch?” asked Hood.
“What do you care?” Skull held his fork with the handle palmed and his thumb on top, lifting from the elbow.
“How’s the chimp’s finger?”
“Black. The tip’s pretty crushed. The nail’s gonna fall off for sure. I couldn’t tell if he reached into the trunk before or after you started to close it.”
“Before,” Hood lied. “But I just couldn’t resist.”
“Yeah. He’s a good guy, Hooper, and I guess you’re not. Here’s the deal . . .”
Skull talked softly and Hood leaned forward, ate, and listened: Two FIM-92 Stinger missile launchers, lifted from the Naval Weapons Station adjacent to Camp Pendleton by a pair of “enterprising friends.” Two missiles to go with them, but more launchers and missiles possible. The weapons were the RMP variant, which use both infrared and ultraviolet homing systems. The warheads were hit-to-kill types with impact fuses and self-destruct timers. “They can knock a Cessna Citation out of the sky at five miles,” said Skull. “Anything bigger is just that much easier. Eighty grand for the pair. Value priced.” Scully gave him a wicked smile and his shaven head clearly reflected the ceiling lights. He had merry blue eyes and a black tattoo of barbed wire around his thick neck.
Hood nodded and gazed over Skull’s shoulder to the sun-washed parking lot. El Centro was bustling and he could see the steady river of cars on the westbound freeway. The winter optics were clean and the day was cool. He leaned in and spoke softly. “I have some ideas, Dirk. But let me ask you something. Aside from friendly governments, these kinds of tools usually end up in the hands of religious fanatics, insurgen
ts, warlords, cartel kingpins. Do you have any problems at all with these types of individuals?”
“I won’t sell to rag heads. Just won’t do it. Anybody else, well, the only problem I got is if the check bounces.”
“That’s what I figured you’d say.”
Skull leaned back and looked around the room and didn’t bother to moderate his volume. “There’s plenty of people out there who could use what I’m offering. Any of these goddamned cartel beheaders and torturers, they’d love to shoot down a government chopper or a rival’s jet or a commercial airliner. Just to make their point. Which is, well, I’m still not really sure what their point is.” Beside them, a four-top of Mexican farmhands looked over at Skull and Hood. As did a well-dressed businessman and his female tablemate sitting catty-corner. “So, let the Mexicans lose their souls. They’re not human anyway.”
“That’s not scientific.”
“They’re taking over this whole country. Look around you. And think it over, slick. Don’t take too long. Nice suit. You see a lot of that poofy material in the south. Queersucker, something like that.”
Skull stood and pulled two twenties off his roll and let them fall into the salsa bowl. He lumbered between the small vinyl tables and booths and pushed out.
Hood took his time finishing his lunch. Skull called, but Hood saw the number and let it ring. It was not yet one o’clock. When he was finished, he stood and walked out through the hostile stares.
• • •
Hood called Skull forty-five minutes later from the conference room of the ATF Buenavista field office. “The Stinger batteries crap out after five years, so none of the eighties-era stuff will do. I won’t touch it.”
“In the crates means new, Hooper. Christ.”
“New, I’ve got interest at seventy grand.”
“The price is eighty. Subtract it from your end, Hooper. You’re not the only show in town on this one.”
The Famous and the Dead Page 13