The Famous and the Dead

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Not funny, Brad,” said Erin.

  “Erin, this is the last time he’ll hear about any of this.” Bradley looked back at Hood, then with a flourish pulled the last blanket from the workbench. The glass jar was just as Hood remembered it, the head pale and hairless and stripped of hope.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Reyes, crossing himself.

  “Ouch!” said Owens.

  “My God,” said Beth.

  “Don’t let Thomas see it!” said Erin.

  Hood sheltered the baby deep in his arms, hiding him from the world and the world from him. He watched Erin take a step toward the jar. She reached out her hand but stopped it short of the glass. “You came from him?”

  “But tonight and here, all of this ends. It should. Mom couldn’t decide if knowing was a curse or a blessing. It is not a blessing. And I won’t let Thomas carry it.”

  Hood watched as Erin turned away from the jar and toward Bradley. She looked up at him for a long beat, then touched his face. Hood thought her hand looked like a blind woman’s, touching an unknown face for the first time. Then she came past the others and took Thomas from him and climbed back out of the bunker. Owens followed.

  Bradley spread his arms. “Hey, everybody! Show’s over. Help me load all this stuff into the tractor outside. Everything on the workbench, everything in the safes, all of it. Right down to the blankets.”

  • • •

  Within five minutes the tractor’s front loader was heaped with the known physical history of Joaquin Murrieta, and the proceeds from Bradley Jones’s life of crime. Hood carried the big jar, as no one else seemed inclined. Reyes, his arms cradling bricks of cash, gave him wide berth. Hood came back and got the blankets, too. Bradley started up the clacking diesel and the dogs ran around the machine barking. In the faint moonlight Hood could see Joaquin’s head bobbing with the rhythm of the engine. Bradley slowly drove the tractor across the barnyard toward the house. Hood saw Erin and Owens standing in the porch light.

  At the water’s edge Bradley stopped and reversed so the front loader bearing his past faced his home and his wife and son. He backed into the water. Then he waved at Erin and shut down the tractor and jumped off. Hood saw the gas can in his hand. Bradley sloshed ashore, set it on the ground and pulled out the nozzle, then lifted and upended the can over the front loader. Hood watched him drench it all, shaking out the last of the fuel before tossing the empty can up onto the barnyard grass where it landed with a hollow thump. Bradley waved back at Erin again, then turned to the tractor. Hood saw him bring his left hand from the duster pocket, and the motion of his shoulders, and a moment later the big bucket burst into flames. Bradley called the dogs as he backpedaled away and slipped and fell, then he was up again. The fire, momentarily confined and angry, roared and whirled upward, and Hood could see the writhe and curl of the blankets, and the journals sparking and smoking, and the quick surrender of the plastic wrap. It took some time for the densely packed cash to catch, but finally it did, with a sudden concussive whump! Bradley and his dogs had scrambled almost to the big oak tree when Joaquin’s jar exploded and the sky was filled with burning fragments of him and fiery glass and bits of paper, all reflected in the water. Hood saw the lariat, aflame and uncoiling through the darkness on its way back to earth.

  48

  The next morning at LASD headquarters in Monterey Park, Hood was questioned by Chief Miranda Dez and Jim Warren. They were very interested in his transportation of alleged drug money to a known drug kingpin in Mexico. Confronted with the video and photographic evidence, Hood confessed to being the bag man in a kidnapping ransom payment. “It was a private thing, not a department action,” he said.

  “Everything a deputy does is a department action,” said Warren. “Were Bradley Jones, Caroline Vega, and Jack Cleary involved, too?”

  “They were part of it.”

  “Why don’t they appear in any of this material?” asked Dez.

  “Bradley edited them out so they could perjure themselves and avoid blame.”

  “Who was kidnapped?”

  “Erin.”

  “His wife? Why didn’t he tell us?” asked Warren.

  “You know why he didn’t. You just can’t prove it.”

  “Charlie,” said Warren. “More coffee? Something to eat? You’re going to be here a long time.”

  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 th
e 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 Yucatán 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 swear 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 a
t 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.”