Iron River (30 page)

“No, sir. The whole deal stands. One thousand units, complete, at nine hundred dollars each.”

“Then you insist on giving our product away.”

“I’ve never seen nine hundred grand in one place in my whole life.”

Chester leans back, and my executive chair wheezes. The headrest doesn’t even come up to the tops of his shoulders. “And the incentive discount on a cash commitment for the next thousand from Favier and Winling? I remember us agreeing on a discount of three percent off the new per-unit price of twelve hundred fifty dollars.”

“It’s three percent off the current price of nine hundred per gun, Uncle Chet. You and I agreed to nothing. I haven’t heard back yet.”

Chester studies Sharon. “Have you had any success finding us some customers?”

“I have a list of possibilities. At nine hundred dollars per unit, the Love 32 is going to sell briskly at the very least.”

“CC me on the list, please. Sooner than later.”

Sharon says nothing.

“Ron, is the crew on a twice-monthly payroll cycle as before?”

I nod.

“So they’ve been paid for just three days’ work so far?”

“Yes. Their big payday will be the last day of production, if they can finish in eighteen. I’ll actually have to pay them a day early, because payday is on a Friday. They’ll be getting bonuses, too.”

“Bonuses? Oh my, Ronald. Not like the old days, is it?”

“They’ll earn them. Believe me.”

Chester eyes me with something like amusement. “Now, I’ve given some more thought to our endeavor,” he says. “One, on a go-forward, we will change the name of the gun because nobody wants to confuse love and death. Two, there is no Favier and Winling of Paris, France. I suspect these extravagant and dire events in Mexico may be linked to our order—this is merely an intuition. I expect you to tell me the true name of our customer by the end of the work shift tonight. Three, Ron, you can’t simply pocket seven hundred thousand dollars. The three of us will receive the monies, distributed per our old salaries and according to the old percentages, then share the balance, greatly increased by the reduced number of employees, according to the same established model. Of course. Ronald, as designer and production manager, you will draw a handsome salary for the time you have spent on the project. Sharon, you will continue to draw your current generous salary. I love all the new money-saving lightbulbs, by the way. I of course will be compensated as CEO and president. We will all be quite happy on payday. Now, lastly, and I think you’ll like this—on the morning of the big payday, you will call the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service and the United States Border Patrol and anonymously report the undocumented workers who will be arriving that afternoon on floor one. At that time we will be having appetizers before a king crab dinner at the Charthouse. My treat. The workers will be arrested and deported without pay and we will save the labor payroll. Don’t worry. I still have friends on the labor board. Our chances of prosecution are nil.”

It’s so quiet I can hear the tap-tap-tapping of the finish men two stories down. I look at Sharon, and her face is blank fury but somehow very specific about what it wants me to do. I sigh and stand and go to a window and look out. South Coast Plaza is sparsely lit and empty. The Christian compound is dark. Only the freeways buzz with life eternal. My heart is pounding and I feel a stiffness in my knees. My legs are weak as I return to my chair and sit down beside Sharon. I lean forward.

“Uncle Chester,” I say. My voice wavers and I clear my throat, then clear it again. “Sharon and I have put some considerable thought into this matter. When our business plan is finished, I’ll be able to be more specific. But for now . . .”

“
Business plan?
”

“Ron and I have talked about it,” snaps Sharon. “We think that after this first recovery deal puts some cash back in Ron’s pocket, we should reincorporate the old Pace Arms operation under a new name and with new investors and new directors. We’ll apply for all the necessary permits and pay the fees and taxes. We foresee a completely legitimate new firearms manufacturing company before the end of the year. You and Ron’s mother will receive ample proceeds if we make ample money. We’ve talked to our lawyers and they are drafting a buyout for the property and machinery and furnishings.”

Chester, always pale, has now lost even the pink flush of his cheeks. “We’re having a bit of a power struggle here.”

“Uncle Chester,” I say. “You brought this upon yourself. When I looked up from that desk a week ago and saw you standing here, I thought, terrific, Chester’s back. He knows the business like nobody else. Maybe he can help. Maybe we can work together again. He is a Pace. He is my mother’s husband. Maybe, just maybe, with all of us working toward it, Pace Arms can sail the seas of commerce again, under a different flag. This is what went through my head, all when I first saw you. But instead of helping, you try to take over my work. You try to take everything I own. You try to cheat my men and rename my invention. You visit my mother a total of one time—she told me this, Chet. And you look at the woman I love as if she were a picture in a jack-off magazine. You even take
my
seat at
my
desk in
my
office. So, Chester, there’s no struggle here at all. This is ours now.”

To make the point more dramatic, I stand, which puts me more or less eye to eye with Chester across the desk. I think of the mastiff he crushed, which outweighed me by twenty pounds and had larger teeth. But surprisingly, or perhaps not, my knees feel fine and my balance is good and I feel a lightness and a readiness and a sense of physical and mental well-being. Chester is impossible to read now, just an immense, unmoving, pale, bald, infant Buddha with battalions of rage apes lurching around inside his head, no doubt.

“I’ll be in touch,” he says.

“I’ll be here.”

“There is no problem unsolvable by reasonable people,” says Chet.

“You have to find them,” says Sharon.

 

 

 

 

H
ood sat in his Blowdown Tahoe across from the Pace Arms building and watched huge Chester Pace come lumbering from the entrance. Hood turned down the radio news. Chester’s head shone in late-night security lights, and his pale suit rippled as he walked and he was looking down as if in thought.

There were lights still coming through the blackened windows on the first and third floors, but from this distance Hood couldn’t see in. The building was ringed by a metal fence. Eight vehicles were parked in the Pace lot, mostly older economy cars, one nicely lowered Chevy Malibu, and one battered van. Hood recorded the license plate numbers in a small notebook.

Chester Pace strode into the parking structure, and a moment later a black Lincoln Town Car came into view, listing to port, tires whistling on the concrete ramp. The Lincoln lurched to a stop at the pay booth, and Chester punched something into the keypad and the arm raised. Hood wrote down the plate numbers in his small notebook and slipped the notebook back into his coat pocket. He turned the news back up.

Four hours later, just after five A.M., twelve men came from the building in a loose group, all Latino, early twenties to sixties. They looked tired. One of them placed a card in the fence gate and then opened it. He held it open for the rest and they walked into the parking lot in loose formation, then spread out to the various cars. Through his open window, Hood heard one of them laugh and a
buenas noches.

When they drove away, the lot was empty. The lights on the first floor went off. Hood looked up to the third. Two of the corner windows were not blacked out but sheltered by blinds, which were now only partially open. He could see part of a ceiling lamp, and this and the blinds suggested a residence. Hood saw two figures inside, a man and a woman, moving slowly and closely as if in conversation.

He sat there in the dark for a few minutes. The lights on floor three went out. He kept waiting for his cell phone to ring with news about Jimmy, but it did not. Twenty-four hours since his abduction, thought Hood, Buenavista crawling with Guardsmen, and the president still holding up the possibility of a military surge into Mexico. Hood hated that idea, but he’d take it if the U.S. Marines got Jimmy back. Fat chance of that, he thought. The only way to get Jimmy out of Mexico was to deal with the people who took him. Simple. But if the Gulf Cartel wanted Jimmy’s headless body found on a road somewhere as a warning to law enforcement or other cartels, then there would be no word from them, ever. Hood’s hope was growing dimmer and his anger was burning brighter.

 

 

 

Late afternoon the next day, Hood was back. It was five o’clock. Same lights on the same floors, same vehicles in the lot. No Chester Pace. Hood’s background check of Chester had revealed no criminal record. He had paid back taxes of nearly three hundred thousand dollars last year, which on top of the legal fees to defend himself and Pace Arms had all but wiped him out. He had no children, an engineering degree from Cal Poly, and according to his CDL, he wore no corrective lenses and weighed three hundred and eighty-four pounds.

The background check on Ron Pace had revealed a twenty-two-year-old high school dropout with no criminal record, either. He was single and held two patents, one for a toilet bowl sweep and one for a device that would keep umbrellas from being ruined by the wind. From a smattering of articles written on the Pace family over the years, Hood had learned that Ron’s father had committed suicide right here at Pace Arms when Ron was ten. Ron’s mother had married Chester the next year. Two of the articles touched upon Maureen Pace’s hospitalization for schizophrenia.

Around five thirty, Hood watched as Ron Pace and a pretty young woman came from the Pace Arms building. They walked arm in arm across the entryway and into the parking structure. A moment later a red Mini Cooper zoomed to the pay booth and the arm went up. Pace waved to the attendant, then sped out. Hood followed. The Mini weaved through the traffic up Baker and turned north on Harbor Boulevard. Hood stayed back. Pace signaled a turn into Fairview State Hospital. The Mini stopped at a guard gate, and Pace talked to the guard. A moment later the gate swung open. Hood waited for the Mini to clear, then he pulled up to the gate and showed the guard his federal marshal’s badge. He tailed Pace to a parking lot shared by three of the smaller buildings of the complex. When Pace parked, Hood found a spot at the opposite end but facing the same direction. Hood watched Pace and the woman walk into what looked like a large Victorian home that stood apart from the other buildings and was surrounded by a trim green lawn.

One hour later they came back out. Hood waited half an hour, then walked across the lot and the grass and into the old Victorian.

Inside, it was dimly lit and quiet. It smelled lightly of mildew and disinfectant and age. The foyer had a sign-in log. Hood printed the name Sam Fischer beneath Ron Pace’s entry and wrote in the time of day, and in the “to see” space he wrote “Maureen Pace” and under “relation” he wrote “friend.”

Confessing that this was his first visit to Maureen, Hood was given her room number by a helpful young patient with black curly hair and ice blue eyes who was watering the plastic palm in a brass pot in the hallway. She smiled beautifully. When she tilted the big red plastic watering can back up to continue her task, Hood noted that not one drop of water came out.

Hood stood outside Maureen’s room and looked past the open top of the Dutch door. When he knocked, she came into the small foyer with an inquisitive look on her face.

“Good evening, Maureen. I’m Sam Fischer. Do you remember me from Pace Arms?”

“Of course. How are you? Come in.”

Hood waited for her to open the bottom half of the door. She smiled at him and stepped aside, then led Hood down the short hallway and into a sitting room. There was a fireplace with no fire and a braided rug on top of the carpeted floor and a bentwood rocker and a love seat facing each other over a small pine coffee table. There was a small kitchen. Two walls had tall corniced windows that offered views of the lawn and beyond. The glass was reinforced with steel safety mesh.

Maureen took the rocker. She was slightly built and pretty although she took no pains with her appearance. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and her face was pale and lined. There were ribbons of gray in her dark brown hair. She wore a denim dress that looked two sizes too big for her, and a pair of athletic shoes with no laces in them. Hood thought she looked incomplete.

“I was hoping you might be able to put me in touch with Ron,” he said. “I’m unemployed. Guns are what I know. Manufacturing, sales and marketing, admin—I can do it all and I’ll take any work I can get. When I ring the bell at the old building, nobody answers.”

“Oh, the company is long bankrupt,” said Maureen. “They don’t have a penny. But I see Ron almost every day. He was here just a few hours ago.”

“How is he?”

“Good. Good. He took up with that girl he was so crazy for the whole time—Sharon.”

“Of course, I always liked her. What’s Ron doing for employment, then, if Pace is completely defunct?”

“I don’t know, really. He
says
he has an office there. He
says
he goes into work. Just a couple of weeks ago, he said he had a big project starting up. But I don’t believe him. I think he makes up good news to give me something to be happy about. Ever since I told him about the caves, he’s been quick to make things up.”

“The caves?”

“Exactly.”

Hood paused and looked out the mesh-reinforced windows to the shady lawn. There was a round vinyl dining table with chairs around it and a birdbath with a mockingbird splashing and drinking. In the evening light, the grounds seemed bucolic and hopeful.