Peltz and Wampler covered the agents as Skull put his pistol hand to the doorknob and pulled, keeping an eye on Hood. In the newly opened rectangle of night, Hood saw Yorth charging toward them with his sidearm drawn, Bly wide to the left and Velasquez to the right. Behind him, Marquez launched into Brock Peltz, who crashed hard into the door. Skull dropped his crates and was gone. Hood swept the pistol from under his coattail and went after him. From inside the clubhouse Hood heard a shotgun roar twice.
Skull was heavy but strong and he muscled through the darkness step for step ahead of Hood. Near the wall he stopped and fired three rounds that whirred past Hood’s head. Hood went down, rolled over his hat, then popped upright again without ever stopping. Skull climbed the wall, turned and fired off two more rounds, then scrambled over. Hood made the wall and ran along it for fifty feet before he jumped it. He landed flat and hard and he could see that Skull had lost sight of him. The cop started across the street. A car swerved and the driver cursed furiously as Skull lumbered into the park-and-ride lot. Hood sprinted with all he had. His two-toned brogans were poor running shoes but his legs were long and he could see that Skull was slowing. He crossed the street without traffic and sprinted past Yorth’s and Bly’s cars. Skull ran to the edge of the dimly lighted parking lot and charged off into the darkness of a cotton field.
Now only the quarter moon showed Hood his way, but Skull’s heavy breathing drew him closer. Hood could see him out ahead, plodding heavily between the rows. The cotton pods were just dabs of light in the broader darkness. Hood stayed a hundred feet back and a few rows over, keeping Skull’s pace while the man tired. “Hey, Dirk—you can’t outrun me and you’ve got no friends out here. Why not just drop the gun and we’ll rest up a minute and head back? See what all the commotion was about.”
He dropped to one knee behind a cotton plant just as Skull’s pistol burped orange and a round whistled well to Hood’s left and overhead. Then another round badly off to his right.
“We really are ATF, Dirk.”
“I really wish you weren’t.” He had stopped and bent over, resting his hands on his knees, breathing hard. Sirens whined. “Me and the boys had a good thing going. Now I’m either going to get shot or arrested.”
“Go with arrested, man!”
“Naw.” Skull huffed upright and cupped his pistol in two hands and fired two more wild rounds, then he turned and barreled off down the crop row. Hood pushed off and followed. He saw two vehicles, light bars flashing, screaming down the street toward Buckboard Estates. Out ahead of him, Skull began to weave in and out of the cotton plants and Hood could hear the brittle snaps of the branches breaking. He couldn’t get much closer without high risk of getting himself shot. Skull crashed through another plant and got himself realigned with a row and he pointed his gun behind him without stopping or turning and sent a bullet that cracked not inches from Hood’s left ear. Hood pulled up and drew down. Skull’s big body lurched in and out of his sights. “Drop the gun! Drop the gun, Dirk! I am going to shoot you!” Skull fired again without looking, then ran a brief, steady course and Hood heard him braying for air as he crashed through the cotton. Hood closed the distance easily, too easily, he thought, when Skull stopped and turned. Hood dropped into a shooter’s crouch and held steady on Skull’s big trunk. “Drop the gun, Dirk. Be smart for once in your life.”
The big man took his air in big noisy gulps. The gun was at his side and he looked at it, then flung it toward Hood. Over Skull’s exertions Hood didn’t hear it hit. He stood and kept both hands on his pistol, taking long balanced strides right down the center of the row. Skull went to one knee, head bowed, his back and shoulders heaving. Hood was near upon him in an instant. “Don’t touch the throw-down.”
“There is no. Throw-down.”
“Don’t move either hand. Not one inch.”
“Not gonna.” Sucking wind, Skull looked up at Hood as he hiked his right pant cuff, and Hood saw the ankle rig and he took two long steps and kicked Skull in the chin so hard he fell over backward and dazed. By the time Hood had rolled him over and cuffed him with plastic and removed the skinning knife from the scabbard on his belt and the switchblade from a pocket in his pants, Skull was snorting heavily, nostrils pressed into the fertile soil of Imperial County.
Hood heard the squeal of sirens leaving the clubhouse.
• • •
He aimed Skull through the open gate. Prowl car floodlights lit the clubhouse, and the colored flashers of the paramedics and fire-and-rescue units raked the walls. Hood heard a generator. In the parking lot he snatched up his hat and put it on and delivered Skull to two El Centro cops, who roughly deposited him into the back of a car. One side of his face had swollen prodigiously and hate was in his eyes. Brock Peltz glared at him from the back of another police car.
The Blowdown team and six cops stood outside. Yorth looked stricken and Bly argued with a plainclothes detective. Hood could see Marquez inside, talking with a uniformed sergeant. Velasquez stepped away and Hood saw that he was breathing hard and his shirt was untucked.
“Wampler shotgunned Reggie. Paramedics made it here fast but it looked bad. No word.”
“Where is that sonofabitch?”
“He lost us in the dark.”
“Let me guess, with one of the Stingers. Out the back door.”
“Yeah. I don’t think he’ll get far in this desert with two yard-long crates.”
“He’ll hijack the first motorist he finds.”
“The cops have called up every available unit. There’s a helo on the way from San Diego. There’s no way that kid can get out of here.”
“Did he get the money, too?”
“Not enough hands, apparently. It took Marquez a minute to take down Peltz and that’s when Wampler got away. By the time we got there and saw he was gone, he was way in the dark somewhere. With a launcher and a missile. But Marquez got the money.”
“Cepeda’s that bad?”
“Shot twice and pretty close up, man. If it was buckshot . . .”
Hood stood at the entrance and looked into the clubhouse. The fire-and-rescue team had set up floodlights. There were more uniforms trying to figure out where to string the crime-scene tape, and a woman shooting video. Hood saw the launcher and missile crates on the floor where Skull had dropped them. He saw the blood-smeared floor were Cepeda had fallen, and the holes in the wall plaster where some of the shot had gone through. Big holes, he saw. Made for a man, not a pheasant. He saw that if he had waited a second or two to go after Skull, he would have been hit. Suddenly Hood’s adrenaline was gone and he felt ugly and tired and luckless.
For the next ten minutes Hood and Velasquez cruised southeast El Centro in the Charger, hoping for new luck. Just after nine o’clock, the police issued an all-units watch for Clint Wampler and a stolen white Sequoia. At the intersection of Imperial and Ross, he’d pistol-whipped the vehicle’s driver, who confirmed that the carjacker was in possession of a pistol and two wooden crates.
Velasquez called Yorth at the hospital and Cepeda was critical and in surgery. Hood worked his way outward from the Imperial-Ross intersection in a series of right-hand turns. The wind stiffened and the night went cold.
They were quiet for a long while. Hood worked his way back toward the place where Wampler had carjacked the SUV, willing the white Sequoia into his field of vision. His heart sped up as a white Yukon sped across the intersection of Adams and Brucherie. Damn. “What if Wampler decides to use it for something spectacular?” asked Velasquez. “Because that’s what guys like him want. To do something unforgettable. Because they themselves are so utterly and totally forgettable.”
Hood nodded. He hadn’t forgotten the Murrah Building catastrophe. He’d always remember the date because he was sixteen years old, learning to drive his father’s pickup truck on a lightly traveled farm road outside of Bakersfield, when the news came over the radio. His dad had told him to pull over so he could listen. Hood had watched the anger buildin
g on his father’s face and that anger Hood would never forget because his father was an otherwise gentle and generous man. I hope they hang those fuckers, he had said. Years later Hood’s mother told him that his father had flown an American flag on the day they put the bomber to death.
“There used to be something in me like there is in Clint,” said Hood. “When I was young, I wanted to make a statement and be a hero. But I had no statement to make and I had no idea what a hero was. There’s nothing in the world scarier than a young man with bad ideas.”
“Yeah. I get that.” Velasquez answered his phone, listened silently, and punched off. “Reggie didn’t make it.”
Hood drove for a while in silence, doubling his willpower to conjure the white Sequoia with the murderous young man inside.
Velasquez asked him to pull over, so Hood steered the Charger onto the white, broad shoulder of the avenue. Velasquez set his head back against the rest and closed his eyes. Hood looked out at the stars and the cotton field and the windblown sand inching across the asphalt.
20
Rovanna holed up in the mountains where he didn’t think the cops would look for him, a little village not far from San Diego called Wynola. Rovanna, meet Wynola, he thought. He got a weekly rate on a motel cabin because it was off-season and cold. The owner was in no way curious about him and she accepted his cash and his story of stolen ID. He signed in as Donnie Archibald. That first night he saw the eleven o’clock news story with the Reverend Steve Bagley. Rovanna saw now that it was careless to use his real name inside the church.
His cabin was small and mostly clean. He took in his suitcase, prepacked before the Neighborhood Congregational visit just in case of trouble. He waited until nightfall to bring in the radios, six of them, various shapes and sizes—two powered by nine-volt batteries, three by AC, and the other a hand-crank unit meant for emergencies. All of which he found amusing because they didn’t need external power to be heard.
Now he sat in the darkness with the radios deployed around him and the Love 32 loaded with a full magazine and hidden under a bed pillow. His motel was built up close to the busy road, and there must be some kind of biker rally, he thought, because the Harleys growled and grumbled and roared at all hours, singles and pairs and big convoys of them twenty and thirty at a time. So the voices coming from the radios picked their moments to be heard. They were all soft, reasoning voices, two men and four women today, the opposite of yesterday. Though he only understood the English, the radios spoke several other languages that Rovanna recognized, and others not necessarily of this planet.
Later he walked to the pizza place and sat in the back, spiking his soft drink with vodka from a water bottle he carried in a cloth market bag along with the Love 32. The pizza was excellent. A woman dining alone gave him a hard look as she walked out. She was older than Rovanna but not old, and she wore a heavy black knee-length sweater and black gloves and leggings. Her hair was auburn, touched with gray. Avoiding her eyes, he noted her boots, old-fashioned lace-ups with low heels, something he imagined Belle Starr might wear. The leather looked ancient and worn of color, and could have been suede or finished, he couldn’t tell, though the modern, lug-pattern soles looked new and squeaked on the floor as she went by.
He watched the TV for a while, then went outside into the surprising cold. As always he wore cargo shorts and slip-on sneakers but he did have his hoodie. He walked down the curving mountain highway, past his motel and a saloon and a beauty salon and a restaurant. The trees were high, jailing the quarter moon, and invisible patches of ice waited along the roadside. A pack of motorcycles snarled by. Rovanna followed a dirt road down into a swale surrounded by trees but open in the middle. He stood still for a while in the close darkness and listened. No voices out here. Not one. What a strange thing. He picked his way through the rocks and skidded where the road was steep and found himself locked in by the trees again, trees so high when he looked up he couldn’t see the tops against the black sky. He heard the distant gurgle of running water. Down the slope he stepped and slid as the rocks clattered beneath his feet and the cloth shopping bag knocked against his leg.
Suddenly he found himself standing directly in a stream. The water was vividly cold and his sneakers were instantly soaked through. The water rippled over the stones, sending up bright sounds—chirps and bell-like ringing, and the clear tinkle of glass. He had avoided bodies of water his entire life because he couldn’t swim but now, hearing the water music, he felt no fear. He heard something behind him but when he turned he saw nothing. He put one foot in front of the other and walked into the current. The stones were smooth and extremely slippery. After a few yards he couldn’t feel his toes. Then his feet. He stopped again to experience the voicelessness around him. The stream warbled and the highway was just a faraway hiss. He thought of the Identical Men and what had happened when they attacked him in the church and he felt that he had done the right thing. Stren’s voice joined the stream and highway, a three-part harmony: There is nothing wrong with you, Lonnie. Sometimes friends are all we have. And voices speak to all of us at different times. Listen to them and do what you think is right . . . use this gift to protect yourself and those around you and to advance the ideals you believe in.
He waded farther upstream. His ankles were aching but not unpleasantly, because Rovanna could separate himself from himself at times, just observe. He heard rocks clatter behind him but when he turned, again there was nothing. Then another a voice broke through but it wasn’t a voice he was expecting. He could see the owl hunched black in the sere branches of a cottonwood, and he could see the flat metallic eyes blink when it adjusted its head to better behold him. “Owl. Don’t say anything more. Too much talk on earth. Plainly.” Rovanna sloshed along until he was almost under the owl, then he stopped and looked up. The animal watched him for a long while. Then without warning its wings spread and it rose from the branch as if pulled by strings and disappeared into the blackness. Rovanna saw the feather spiraling down toward him and he caught it and put it in his bag.
Back at the roadside a car was waiting. It was a newer economy car like Rovanna’s, but red. The passenger door stood open and inside Rovanna saw the woman from the pizza place. Her sweater was buttoned up tight, the cowl almost covering her ears. Her auburn hair had a coppery sheen in the weak interior light. “I’m Joan,” she said, her breath fogging. “Get in.”
Rovanna sat close because the car was small. The defroster was set to roar. Before shutting his door he looked at her face, which was grave and prettier than he had first thought. She did not smile. He glanced at her aged boots encrusted with brown dirt, one on the brake and one on the clutch. The car smelled faintly of cherries. He set his market bag on the floorboard and fastened his restraints.
The little car revved high and jumped onto the asphalt and sped up the mountain toward Julian. “Lonnie, you have no chance if you try to do this alone.”
“Do what alone?”
“Survive. In the glove box there’s a book, and your meds from the El Cajon house. Take them out. Put the pills in your pocket and the book on your lap.”
Joan turned on the interior light, and Rovanna found the small leather-bound Bible and his Tramadol and Zoloft and did as she said. He saw the cherry-shaped cardboard air freshener on top of some maps. He looked at the backseats and saw the neatly rolled sleeping bag resting on a bed pillow, a laptop computer, two milk crates overflowing with electronic pads and pods and gadgets and cords and chargers.
She turned off the light. “First, you must take your medications. They work for you. Over time you can teach yourself to live without them. But for now you must take them or your mind will betray you into foolish actions.”
“I left them behind in El Cajon on purpose.”
“That was bad decision-making, Lonnie. Second, do not talk to Stren again. If he shows up, hit him with that Bible. Literally pound him with it. It will repel and sicken him. The Torah and Koran can be used also. Electronic edit
ions are not effective. But, the most important thing you can do is to not stalk Representative Freeman at the Alternative Book Fair in San Diego.”
At the word Freeman, Rovanna flinched inwardly. “How do you know about—”
“I don’t have the time to explain myself to you in a way that you’re ready to understand. But I know you. Believe me, I know you. It really was nice back there on the little stream, wasn’t it? When you stood in that cold water and listened and there were no voices. For a short time, at least.”
“I haven’t experienced that in years—no voices for minutes on end.”
Joan wound out the little four-banger on an uphill run. Rovanna watched the pines sweep past. She came up fast on a couple of belching Harleys, downshifted, and gunned the little car into the oncoming lane, passing them on a blind rise, then veering back into place ahead of them.
“I got a blue Focus,” he said.
“These new economy cars are really something,” said Joan. “The mileage and power and comfort. I put between eighty and one hundred twenty thousand miles a year on cars. This is like my third or fourth one.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“Sales. Look, Rovanna, I can’t take that gun away from you. You know, the machine pistol in the shopping bag at your feet right now. I’m not authorized to take it. But I can tell you this: You are a troubled man now being manipulated by a devil, and the final cost to you will not be the pain you inflict, but the pain that you will receive. It will be utterly unbearable and you will not survive it. Take your meds, read that Bible, and keep it with you always. Most importantly, stay away from Scott Freeman.”
Again Rovanna flinched. It was a physical reaction to the word and the man it identified.
“Do not attend the book fair,” Joan continued. “I implore you to leave that gun with me tonight. Just leave it where it is when you exit my car. If you are not strong enough to do that, then do not attend the book fair for any reason.”
The Famous and the Dead Page 15