“Doesn’t it look that way to you?”
“Keep watching.”
Hood watched video of the dirty motor home trundling across the tarmac on a charter company landing strip at John Wayne Airport in Orange County. It climbed a loading ramp into the belly of a waiting CH-47 transport helicopter with Red Cross signage, which lifted into the air. An SUV came skidding into the picture.
“Airport security video,” said Grace Crockett. “Is that one of you ATF agents in the Yukon?” She looked at Hood with a faux innocence. She had a sweet, almost girlish voice.
“It was me,” said Hood.
“That’s what we had deduced,” she said. “Because all of your other agents were down near the Mexican border, correct?”
“Right. They followed the two trucks and I took the motor home on a hunch. There was also a van that left the loading dock, so at that point, we thought the weapons were divided up into four vehicles.”
Grossly leaned forward. “You followed the motor home on a hunch. A hunch that turned out to be very damned right. The motor home had one thousand of these machine pistols in it. Yet still it got past you.”
Hood looked back at Grossly’s incredulous face. “I realized it too late. We were stretched thin and the helo was waiting.”
“You seem smarter than that. Maybe you just did what you were told.”
“Nobody told me to let a thousand machine guns get away. We were trying to stop those guns. When we pulled over the trucks down near the border, they were loaded with gun crates. But the crates were filled with clothing, mostly new pants. The load-in was a good stage play.”
“Pants?” said Grossly.
“Mostly children’s jeans. New ones. Different colors and cuts. Bradley Jones was driving the Ram. He said they were taking the pants down to Mexico for the poor.”
“Did you believe Bradley Jones’s story?” asked Schmitz.
“No. The charity work was just a cover. We chased the jeans one way and the guns went the other way.”
Hood looked at Lansing and wondered where the moral support was. The big man sat back with his arms crossed.
Crockett spoke again in her sweet voice. “You know him, don’t you? Jones. You’re a friend and you attended his wedding.”
“I went to his wedding. We’re not friends, never have been.”
“Why doesn’t he appear in any of these pictures or videos except with the crates of pants?” Schmitz asked.
“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” said Hood, though it seemed obvious that Bradley himself had a hand in this. “He was at the loading dock.”
“Yet you appear,” said Crockett. “And several other ATF agents.”
“It was our case.” Hood looked past Grace Crockett to the Century City skyline. In Iraq he had worked for Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which put him at odds with the soldiers he was investigating. Over the months he had come to know their distrust and contempt. Now he felt that same enmity coming from the people in this room.
“Who were your Achilles team partners in this?” asked Grossly. Hood named them while the representative and lawyers wrote. “Were you the only LASD sheriff deputy attached to ATF in Operation Blowdown?”
“Yes.”
“And you’d been assigned to ATF for how long?”
“It was my first month.”
“And on only your third day, you were involved in the shootout that killed Benjamin Armenta.”
Hood said nothing. He had not fired on Armenta and he knew that Grossly must know this. The shooting had been covered widely by the media.
Next, the monitor showed various pictures of Mexican crime scenes, all containing Love 32s. The police officers and military men looked down on the bloody bodies and guns. Then came a video news clip from a Juárez shootout that showed masked gunmen firing automatic weapons that were almost certainly Love 32s.
The following video clips showed the weapons back in the United States one year later: police and ATF footage of the aftermath of a rampage in Buenavista that left three young men dead—and two Love 32s to be recovered.
“Buenavista,” said Grossly. “Not the Mexican side. The American side. Our side. ATF let one thousand machine guns go south into Mexico and now they’re coming back.”
“Hold it,” said Lansing. “A thousand machine guns got away.” He looked dolefully at Hood, then to the congressman. “But we have seen no fault of ATF. We did not let these guns walk. This was not part of Fast and Furious. This was not failed policy. Don’t try to make us a scapegoat. I won’t stand for it.”
“Is that right? Then I’ll ask Mr. Hood directly—who in ATF gave the orders on this investigation?”
Hood looked at Lansing, who stared back. “Sean Ozburn was the team leader.”
Grossly gasped incredulously. “Sean Ozburn murdered three people, was mixed up in a Mexican cartel gun deal in L.A., and later died in an airplane accident. Correct?”
Hood nodded and felt fury that a man in such a high position could be so ignorant of what Ozburn and ATF had been through with regards to those thousand machine guns. What Grossly had said was true, but it was not the whole truth. And what Grossly chose to ignore was much larger than what he chose to see. “He was murdered. He lost his life in the line of duty. And you have the chronology wrong, also.”
“Well, okay. We all see what we want to see, don’t we?”
“I was just thinking the same thing.”
“Then who was above him? Certainly Special Agent Sean Ozburn, young and zealous, was not calling the shots on all of Blowdown.”
“That’s above me, sir,” said Hood. “I had no contact with upper-level management at ATF. I joined the Blowdown task force in order to work along the border. I followed orders and did my job. If all you need is someone to hang, go ahead. Hang me.”
“You’re not big enough.”
Hood looked at the representative but did not speak.
“I will look until I find him,” said Grossly.
“ATF is blameless in this,” said Lansing.
“ATF blameless? First Fast and Furious, now this? If you are blameless, then I have never seen a more inept governmental bureaucracy in my entire life. One thousand new machine guns flown out of the United States into Mexico under your noses? And you suggest to me that a murderous and perhaps half-crazy ATF agent doing deals on the side was responsible? I beg your pardon but that’s not how things work. Things work top to bottom, not the other way around. And all I want to know is how far up the line did the real decision-making on this whole thing go? Who let it happen? I’m going to find out. I’m done here, people. Agent Hood, thank you for your time. We will most certainly be in touch.”
23
Mary Kate Boyle rang up another Family Bucket Extra Crispy and took a handful of wadded bills from a very short woman who looked exactly as wide as she was tall. Mary Kate sorted the damp currency and made the change and when she handed it to the customer she had to bend over the counter and reach down. The woman waddled out with a white-and-red KFC bag in each hand, their bottoms scarcely clearing the floor. Tony, the manager who had hired her, helped another customer at the next register. He’d been shuttling between the front and kitchen all day but, now that early evening had come, he had to concentrate on the waves of hungry working people who hit just after five o’clock. Tony glanced very quickly at her, then away. He’d been doing that. Mary Kate pulled her cell phone from her apron pocket and checked the time, then put on a smile for her next customer.
Thirty-five minutes later she was at the Lowell Theater on Fourth, breathing hard from the long, fast walk, trying to steady herself to read for the part of Curley’s wife in Of Mice and Men. It was a Community Theater Players production, non-Equity. In the theater lobby she scanned through the brief story synopsis and character description of Curley’s wife. She’d read the book twice, years ago. She had liked it that Curley’s wife didn’t have a name and wasn’t allowed to exist outside of the way the men on t
he ranch saw her. But she knew that Curley’s wife had a whole other existence, invisible and outside the written story, like many women where Mary Kate came from. Secret hearts, she called them. A good many of the women she knew had them. Some men, even.
Waiting in the near darkness she watched the other actresses read. They were doing the scene at the end where Curley’s wife talks to Lennie in the barn. Mary Kate noted the training and skill and robust beauty of the real actresses. Several of them seemed to know one another. Still, after four readings, she saw that there were things about Curley’s wife that these women did not quite get. They played her as a sexy tramp, but didn’t give her true loneliness and her sharp fear that her life’s possibilities had almost totally slipped away. Those qualities were what made her more than just Curley’s wife, which is what the writer knew but his characters didn’t. Mary Kate sensed she wouldn’t get the part, especially with her split lips and black eye, though the wounds were healing. But the idea of not getting the part somehow calmed her. She felt good inside. She was out of the sticks and into a city full of terrific food and good people. Her pulse was normal as she waited, her thoughts drifting peacefully along with the dialogue, a sense of confidence settling in. Her fight. The one thing she knew she had a lot of. A lot more than most people could even see. It was hers. Only an empty stomach could take away that fight, and her stomach now was filled with fiery chicken thighs and mountains of coleslaw and those terrific mashed potatoes, and there was more where all that came from.
“Mary Kate Boyle?”
• • •
The casting director said he might or might not call. Later she met Tony and some of the other KFC crew at a diner in the Gaslamp District. It was not far from her fleabag hotel, and it was noisy and busy and had the buzz of a local’s hangout. Tony bought beers for everyone because he was the manager, though he explained that he made little more than his cooks and front-store employees made, and put in twice the hours. Three of the cashiers were there, all about Mary Kate’s age. Two of the cooks came by later. Mary Kate liked the cooks. They were Mexicans, like Tony. For the past few days during slow times at KFC, she would go back into the kitchen just to watch them work. She liked their coordination and athletic balance and goofy singing as they slid around the greasy kitchen floor carrying heavy pressure kettles—boiling with fat and chicken—from the flame-belching stoves to the drainers. They looked like they were roller-skating. They were a happy bunch of daredevils, sliding around like that, but she hoped they weren’t just showing off for her. Don’t want to be like Curley’s wife, she thought. That story had haunted her since the day she finished it.
They shot some pool at the Rack and when it got late Tony walked her out. The Gaslamp was quieting now and the breeze off the ocean was up and Mary Kate buttoned her coat high and put her hands deep in the pockets. Out in front of the Winston Arms, Tony embraced her politely and waited until she’d gone inside. By the time she got upstairs to her window he was gone, and this was good. She liked him but didn’t want him stuck on her. Her phone rang and she checked the number and didn’t recognize it, except the area code, which was Russell County. “Hello?”
“Clinton Stewart Wampler here.”
“Not you, Clint.” She put him on speaker phone and turned on the recorder that Charlie Hood had given her.
“Why not me? Skull’s in jail and Brock, too. They got busted by the feds. But not me. I got away. I got a plan and I need some help.”
“How am I going to help you from way back here in Missouri?”
“You listen. I didn’t just get away, I got away with a missile! I want to sell it for big bucks. And if I can’t, I’ll just blow something up. Like maybe an abortion clinic or a Muslim church or school or something. Southern California’s full of shit like that.”
She felt queasy at the words abortion clinic. “But why are you calling? What do you want me to do?”
Clint said nothing for a moment, then, “I want you to come out here and be my girl.”
“While you blow things up?”
“Exactly. We’d be like a movie.”
“I was Skull’s girl.”
“Why did you say that?”
“I’m not sure why. Something about how different you two are.”
“But you’re not his girl no more, right?”
“‘No more’ is most certainly right.”
“Then what about me? I always was lookin’ at you when I wouldn’t get caught at it. Skull and you didn’t know squat about my affections and overall designs for you. He was too old to understand your value. I’m young, Mary Kate, and I got a future.”
Mary Kate Boyle said nothing for a long beat. She was truly flummoxed.
“Now when you come, bring all the money you got and a decent car.”
“I can’t afford a car.”
“Then borrow one. Just get here. Take a Greyhound if you have to.”
“What’s in this for me, Clint?”
“Forty thousand American-made dollars is what I’ll take for this here Stinger. I ain’t saying one penny of it’s yours but if you’re with me it’s gonna rub off. You know what I mean.”
Mary Kate kept herself from laughing. It was funny to her that anyone could be as self-serving as Clint yet so confident in his success. Maybe that’s how people like him got away with things. He’d never said much more than a word or two to her in the six months she was hanging with Skull’s merry band. He looked about eighteen with the big ears and bad haircut but she knew he was older than that.
“Let me think about,” she said. “I’ll call you.”
“You can’t. I’m on a pay phone and I won’t use it twice. When you going to make up your mind?”
“When I’m done thinking about it.”
“Don’t be taking all day. I got half the cops in the world out here looking for me. I think I’ve pissed them off. There’s this one, Charlie Hooper—tall asshole with diamonds in his teeth, the guy who set us up—I’m gonna do something special with him.”
A chill rippled down Mary Kate’s back. “Like what?”
“Like none of your business.”
“If Skull and Brock got popped, how did you get away?”
“’Cause Clint is smarter and meaner, that’s how.”
“I guess I believe that.”
“I’ll call soon. Don’t piss away the lifetime of an opportunity, honey. I’ve got a big heart for you. And plenty more.”
“Yeah, yeah. I get that part, Clint.”
“Skull said you got it real good. Now I’m the one loving you.”
“You’re not doing any such, Clint.”
“I know you’re gonna come.”
• • •
She played the recording over the phone to Charlie Hood. It was very late but she thought this information might be important. Lawmen always wanted to hear about bad guys blowing up things like schools or mosques or clinics. Hood had told her a full day ago that Clint might call and she had thought that was ridiculous. Why would he call her? But now she knew and Charlie had been right. He was a smart guy. With diamonds in his smile. She wondered if maybe he was still in bed right now and if anyone was in it with him. It worried her that Clint Wampler wanted to fix Hood’s wagon and had a missile to do it.
“So, Charlie, what do you want me to do?”
“Tell him you’re on your way.”
“Then what?”
“Set him up for us.”
“I figured that’s where you were going.”
“Can you do it? There’s always risk when you deal with people like Clint. He murdered a man less than forty-eight hours ago. But we’ll keep him away from you. It can all be by phone. We won’t let him get close.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Promise me another thing, Charlie.”
“What’s that, Mary Kate?”
“Aw, I don’t know. Anything you want. Just funnin’ with ya. My lips are almost healed up enough to smile
again.”
24
That Friday Bradley embarked on his first Baja run in nearly a year and a half. The evening was crisp and breezy, and the sunset was framed by towers of black clouds limned in orange. It was a glorious feeling for him to leave Rocky Carrasco’s El Monte warehouse without the Blands tailing him. Heaven on earth. He kept checking the mirrors and smiling to himself. He wore the Santana Panama for good luck.
His heart was filled with nostalgic memories of such nights, and the hidden compartments in his Cayenne Turbo were filled with bricks of cash. So were the bottoms of the plastic tubs that otherwise held new clothing for poor Mexican children. The cash amounted to $412,500 and he’d end up with approximately $14,000 for himself. Of which he would lay off $2,000 each to Caroline Vega and Jack Cleary. All of it was Southern California drug profit for Carlos Herredia’s North Baja Cartel.
He drove the speed limit south on Interstate 5, past the nuclear power plant at San Onofre and then along the hills of Camp Pendleton. To his right the Pacific Ocean looked plated with gold, which made him think of the silly gold-plated pistols that Herredia loved so much, which made him think of drug lords so he put on a recording of the song Erin had written in captivity four months ago. It was called “City of Gold,” and she’d been forced to write it by Benjamin Armenta, one of Mexico’s most powerful drug lords, as a way of gaining greater fame and notoriety for himself. Thus, it was a lowly narcocorrido, one of many such ballads commissioned over the years by cartel players in order to glorify themselves. But because Armenta came from Veracruz he’d made Erin write the song in the well-known jarocho style of that city. So, although the song told the story of a violent drug lord, it did so with exuberance, a lovely harp-decorated melody, a hint of Caribbean rhythm, and exotic percussion instruments. The dissonance between subject matter and sound somehow made the song beautiful.
Armenta had never heard the full version because Bradley had blown him into eternity right there in his own recording studio in his secret castle on the Yucatán. Erin had foretold such an ending in her song. What a journey that had been, he thought now, what an astonishing ten days of trying to rescue her from the hell that he had helped put her in. He remembered the moment he swung open the door to the studio control room and through the glass saw Erin at the piano, facing him, and Armenta standing with his accordion on and his back to Bradley. He pictured it all again: charging into the hushed tracking room, opening fire with his silent machine pistol, the window glass shattering and falling, the dozens of bullets that the bearlike Armenta took before he finally went down in a heap, draped over his instrument. Bradley turned the volume up and started the song again.
The Famous and the Dead Page 18