The Famous and the Dead

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “How often?”

  “It is variable. Once a month. Then maybe twice.”

  “So I’d make the runs here on Friday evenings, but once or twice a month I would leave my car and drive the trailer back north.”

  “I will arrange for your Porsche to be waiting for you at Castro Ford. Israel will give you a complimentary wash!”

  “Twenty million dollars, retail,” said Bradley.

  “I will pay you ten thousand as a flat rate. No matter the amount of product transported. Israel will pay you ten thousand more upon each delivery.”

  Bradley inwardly smiled at a minimum $240,000 a year of tax-free cash, for roughly four hours of work a month, driving the same homebound route he’d be driving anyway. Herredia chuckled, then laughed. “Son of Joaquin!”

  “That’s me, alright.”

  “I can see by the light in your eyes that we have an agreement.”

  “We do.”

  Walking back toward the pool, Bradley wondered again at how his fortunes had begun to change so abruptly for the better, almost from the instant that he’d recited the Statement of Parity and asked Mike Finnegan to be his partner. Warren? Off his case. The Blands? Dismissed. Hood? Headed for genuine catastrophe. Herredia? Instead of punishing him for eighteen months of spotty service, El Tigre was heaving fresh fortune his way via Ford Motor Company, Mexico. Could all of this derive from his arrangement with Mike? Or were these upgrades largely just a matter of his own attitude? What could Mike really be other than insane? Yes, Mike had beautifully staged the Theater of Beatrice. But it was clear that the “angel”—most likely Owens using her actor’s vocal skills—was not truly trapped in the mineshaft at all. There was probably a ladder bolted to the rock walls, or perhaps some kind of powered miners’ funicular by which she came and went. But, Bradley thought, if Mike and his silly rituals were just a placebo that swelled his good luck, then so be it. His terrific reversals of fortune were almost everything he wanted in the world. Except for Erin, he thought. Erin. But this was all for her; his fortune was for her. And their son. And down near the center of Bradley’s cunning soul he knew that Erin was coming around to him. He would win.

  • • •

  The four men drank and smoked cigars around the pool late into the brisk Baja night. Felipe with his craggy face and shotgun kept to the edges of light and darkness. There were six women—three Mexicans and three gringas, pretty and friendly and well dressed. Bradley was polite but uninterested and enjoyed Caesar’s company and shoptalk about the Hermosillo plant. Caesar had a hopeful face and tone of voice, and he was a proud Ford man all the way. His wife’s staggering gambling and shopping debts had led him to the other side of the law. Those, and his daughter’s seemingly eternal college studies in the United States.

  Herredia regaled them all with fishing stories of which he was the hero. Arturo in his olive suit drank heavily and extolled the virtues of ignorant, promiscuous gringas over wary, repressed Catholic Latinas. He danced with a gringa who wore a gold dress and she was nearly his height in her gay rhinestoned heels and when they finished he whispered something into her ear, then knocked her into the pool with a roundhouse punch. She looked like a mermaid gliding to the shallow-end steps and climbing out, sheathed in gold, bent in pain, the high heels still on. She gathered up a towel from the cabana and pressed it into her face as she ran in short steps, shivering, toward her guest casita.

  Arturo said something about the way a wet dog shakes itself dry and laughed at his observation. One of the Latinas followed the drenched blonde and the other four women migrated to the cantina at the other end of the pool. Their anxious words and brittle laughter carried across the water. Arturo brought another bottle of tequila to the table and cracked the seal, then poured himself a shot. He pushed the uncapped bottle toward Herredia, and by some small miracle it slid to a stop instead of pitching over into El Tigre’s lap. “Carlos,” Arturo said. “I quit. I resign from this. I am ashamed of what I have become.”

  Herredia tipped the bottle and Bradley saw the downward furrow of his eyebrows as he measured the pour. Watch out, Bradley thought.

  “I truly thank you for your friendship, Carlos,” said Arturo. He burped. “But I am not the man I thought I was. I am an engineer. I am in control of quality. I have skills. I have no nerves for this kind of work.”

  “You had nerves enough for the many thousands of dollars I shared with you.”

  “You bribed me for the use of my automobiles,” said Arturo. “Isn’t that more accurate? In addition, I will pay you back.”

  “Don’t lose your bravery now,” said Caesar. “We’re almost finished here. Señor Herredia only has to fly us home in his jet tomorrow. You drink too much, Arturo.”

  Arturo burped again and knocked back the shot. “When I drink too much the veil is lifted and I see the world for what it is—a cauldron of greed. I want to go home tonight. I want to sleep in my bed and wake in the morning without the stain of greed in my heart. I want to confess my sins to Father Patricio.”

  “Confess?” asked Herredia.

  “Fully and truthfully.”

  “Fully and truthfully. I understand. But you can’t go home tonight. My pilot is drunk and sleeping.”

  “We drove here. And we can drive home.”

  “We cannot drive home the trailer loaded with new Fords,” said Caesar with a smile. “We have made a deal and they are going to El Centro. And we would look crazy driving back to where the cars were manufactured.”

  Herredia studied Arturo in the short silence. “Go to the garage and choose a car to your liking,” said Herredia. “The keys are in the ignitions.” He gestured invitationally but in the candlelight Bradley saw the pronounced blackness of his eyes. Bradley sensed that he was reading a story that would end in blood. Herredia barked an order to the women and they trailed off toward the guest casitas, drinks in hand.

  “You are coming with me?” Arturo asked his friend.

  “No,” said Caesar. “But I will prevent you from driving in your condition.”

  “I shall now be finding a car. Can it be a Ford, El Tigre? So that I can be assured of its quality?” Arturo swayed upright and zigzagged along the pool without falling in, then made it past the cabanas. Bradley heard the crunch of the drunk man’s feet on the dry desert gravel.

  Caesar tried to rise from the table, but Bradley stopped him with a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I will stop Arturo from driving away,” said Caesar.

  “You will sit and stay,” said Herredia.

  Bradley watched old Felipe appear beside Herredia’s chair as if by magic, and lean down close for El Tigre to whisper in his ear. Then Felipe hustled off, bandy-legged, unslinging the shotgun from his shoulder.

  “Caesar,” said Herredia, “we have arrived at a problem.”

  “I know it. He will kill someone on the highway at night. Or be killed.”

  “He will not get to the highway.”

  Caesar’s hopeful expression had fallen away. He looked at Bradley as if for help.

  “Everything Arturo has seen and heard here can be told to authorities,” said Herredia. “He is made rotten by fear and he cannot be trusted with our secrets. Do you understand this?”

  “He is a harmless quality control engineer.”

  “He is a foolish and greedy child. And you, Caesar? What are you?”

  Caesar looked past Herredia, toward the garage, then back to his host. “I am interested in remaining alive.”

  Bradley looked up the drive to see Felipe and Arturo walking back toward the pool. They were little more than faint apparitions but Bradley saw that Arturo was weaving drunkenly and Felipe was well behind him. Felipe’s cackle rode in on the breeze and the two men walked to the barbed-wire pasture fence and stopped.

  “If I cannot trust Arturo, why should I trust you? You are as important a danger to me as he is. You have seen what he has seen. You know what he knows.”

  “His courage failed. Mine has not.”


  “But you are together. You two are a link in the chain. And the chain is only as strong as the weak link. Look how weak Arturo has turned out to be. He wants to go home and confess!”

  “Yes. I see.”

  “And you are a part of him.”

  “But I am not weak.”

  “You say you are not weak.” Herredia reached behind his back and set his Desert Eagle on the table, pointed at Caesar. It was a .50-caliber semiauto, bulky, gleaming, and incontrovertible. Herredia set his big brown hand upon it. “Your words are like drops of rain on the ocean. They fall and can never be found again. But this? This is how words are made to be real. You say you are not weak. This is the true maker of weakness and of strength. Not words.”

  “Why is it pointed at me?”

  “It is judging you.”

  “What are the charges against me?”

  “Weakness. Disloyalty. Betrayal.”

  “I am none of these.”

  Herredia lifted his hand from the gun and rested on his elbows, leaning toward Caesar. “Then use this tool to make your words real. You know what must be done.”

  Caesar glanced at Bradley again and Bradley saw the panic in his eyes. “How? How am I to . . . ? I have never touched a gun.”

  “It’s the only way to continue your life, you fool.”

  Bradley followed Caesar’s gaze to the Desert Eagle as he drew his own civilian sidearm, a compact nine-millimeter. He set this on the table in front of him with both hands upon it, in case Caesar tried to shoot his way out of this predicament, unlikely though it was. He caught Herredia’s approving glance. Caesar placed both hands against his face and pressed against his eyes as if he could wipe this terrible moment from his vision.

  Bradley looked out to the pasture fence. Arturo was haranguing Felipe but the old man, hunched and gnomelike, stood with his shotgun pointed at the quality control assistant manager.

  “Murder,” said Caesar.

  “Weakness and strength. Loyalty and cowardice. These are only words that stand for something. But they are not what they stand for. They are all equally without meaning. You choose which ones are to be made real and then you make them real.”

  “He is a good man.”

  “He has treated you very poorly. He has forced you to the edge of death with his own weakness and shame. Yet El Tigre has seen a way for you to live.”

  Caesar looked toward the pasture. He wiped a tear from under each eye, then took a deep breath. “You just pull the trigger?”

  Herredia offed the safety and placed the gun in front of the man. Then the tequila. Bradley tapped his fingers on the nine. Caesar drank deeply, then stood. “Only two months ago everything was good. There were no drugs hidden in our cars and my friend Arturo was not about to die.”

  “Think about your debts,” said Herredia. “Think about a future that has great riches no matter how much your wife gambles and spends. Or how many degrees your daughter needs to have. Caesar, be a man. If you hesitate much longer I’m going to be very happy to shoot you both.”

  Caesar took up the .50 caliber and walked past the cantina and the poolside palapas and onto the road. Bradley could see him stop and look back, and beyond him he saw Arturo still gesticulating and Felipe with the shotgun on him. Arturo’s voice, shrill and angry, came in fragments. Caesar trudged toward them and Bradley heard the road gravel rasping under his shoes.

  “Will Felipe kill him?” asked Bradley.

  “Only if he loses his courage.”

  Bradley watched Caesar approach the two men. There were still fifty feet between them. Arturo turned and said something and Felipe didn’t move. Caesar answered, still advancing. Arturo spoke again and his voice ended on the upsweep of a question. Caesar began talking fast but Bradley could only catch a few words, something about the truck and getting back to Hermosillo and their esposas. Arturo exclaimed something to the old man and proudly slammed his fist to his own chest. He took one step toward the new Fords, then an orange blast from the Desert Eagle blew him like a rag into the pasture fence. He shrieked and thrashed awhile, then his head sagged forward with the great exit of his life. His coat sleeves caught up on the barbs so his arms and body slid only partially free and he hung there, half in and half out of his coat, with the dark liquid blooming on his white shirt.

  “Now both men can be trusted!” boomed Herredia.

  Bradley watched as Felipe sprang forward and tore the gun away from Caesar, who did not move to stop him. The old man came scampering down the road toward them, his gargoyle face delighted in the moonlight. Bradley saw that Caesar had knelt and wrapped his arms around his friend. His lamentations arrived in a cadence broken by the breeze.

  26

  Bradley was ready to set off at sunrise on three hours’ sleep, sitting high in the tractor cockpit as Baja California came alive in the clean pink light. He’d always liked driving eighteen-wheelers, and was taught to handle them by one of his uncles, who drove long hauls for a living. At age sixteen, Bradley had stolen a big rig from a drunken operator at a truck stop. Just a joyride, really, though he had gone all the way to Reno. But this morning’s ride was an even bigger joy: $24,000 stashed in a toolbox, another ten thousand cash coming at Castro Ford, followed by the greatest joy of all, Erin. He’d have time to buy her something nice.

  He had a tall mug of strong Mexican coffee between his legs and the nine-millimeter holstered under the seat. Herredia waved like a proud father, two pretty women standing on either side of him, one of them the gringa who’d been knocked into the pool. Bradley picked his way through the first few gears, felt the great tonnage pressing from behind him like something untamed. Two gunships, four men each, rumbled along up ahead, and two more trailed behind. They’d get him as far as the first paved road, then the way north would be secured by various state police. Dust rose around him. The cardón cacti, tall and singular, passed his windows slowly, then less slowly, then not so slowly at all and El Dorado was gone.

  He drove Highway 1 west through the spectacular Baja desert. The clouds were dark blue but through them sunlight slanted down in bright girders. The beauty of it fought his nerves to a draw. He listened to Mexican songs on the radio and thought of Erin.

  Off Highway 3 he stopped in a village with a lovely old church because he suddenly wanted to say a simple prayer in the house of His Lord. Maybe mention poor Arturo. He set his hat on the seat beside him and climbed down from the tractor. He checked the pigtail, then walked the length of the double-deck trailer, eyeing the tie-downs and chains, three per automobile.

  The church was of minor historic note because it was made almost entirely of copper. The door was copper-covered wood inlaid with a full-length stained-glass image of Saint Francis of Assisi. There were birds on his shoulders and a lamb and a lion at his feet. Bradley pulled open the door and stepped inside, smelled the soot and smoke of many candles, the decades of incense, the faint earthy scent of the pavers.

  He sat in the back row of pews and looked at the simple altar and the communion table with its wooden candelabras and folded white towels. High on the chancel a bleeding Jesus hung on his cross. Bradley began the Lord’s Prayer but as soon as he thought Our Father a wave of nausea broke over him and his face went cold. He felt dread. He bent over slightly and looked at the floor, reviewing what he’d eaten for breakfast at El Dorado: ham and eggs and tortillas and grapefruit juice. He had always had an iron stomach and was proud of it. The nausea passed so he knelt as his mother, a very lapsed Catholic, used to do on the family’s rare excursions to church.

  He began his prayer again, but he felt his stomach turning over and the cold flash of sweat on his back, and again he had to stop at Our Father. Bad ham? It had tasted fine. Too much coffee? That was hours ago. Maybe it was just the pressure of smuggling over a ton of drugs into the United States. And all that cash. If convicted he’d get, what, fifteen years? Twenty? He thought of the Blands. What if they really weren’t off the job? What if Dez had changed her mind? D
read nagged him. Could this be some kind of delayed reaction to last night’s murder of Arturo? Certainly not the first killing he’d seen, and he’d never had such a reaction before. Then he wondered if this might be Mike Finnegan’s Declaration of Parity coming back to bite him. Asinine, he thought. The second wave of nausea left him breathing faster and more heavily, and even when he straightened his back and felt all his weight being borne by his knees he couldn’t quite seem to get his breath.

  Movement on the floor beside him caught his eye and he looked down at the red diamond rattlesnake inching toward him across the pavers. It was very small, no more than eight inches long. Wide head, thin neck. It was nearly the same brick red as the floor, but its diamonds were outlined in white and black and its tail had black and white rings. The pupils were elliptical. The rattle was but two small buttons. Bradley was conversant with the behavior of some snakes, having lived on the Valley Center property for much of his life, where he had observed that in spring and summer the rattlesnakes were active, less so in the fall, and in winter were almost never out moving around unless it was very warm or very late in the season. This February activity was unusual. The day was cool. The snake approached slowly with its tiny tongue darting in and out and made small directional adjustments, but its course was directly at Bradley.

  Suddenly the nausea hit again. Using the back of the pew in front of him Bradley pulled himself off the padded prayer kneeler and stepped into the aisle and stumbled for the exit. Outside he rounded the building and bent over with his hands on his knees in the cool shade. But the nausea passed again, and he straightened and felt the blood coming back to his face. Settling into his seat in the tractor, he had a headache but no longer felt sick. He glanced at Saint Francis of Assisi and wondered what had just happened in there.