Iron River (39 page)

Then I hear three sharp cracks. Through Chester’s palms I register three small tremors. His hands shiver and his eyes widen and he growls again, then grimaces, his small even teeth not a foot away from my face. He drops me to the floor. I roll toward the door and there is Sharon, standing just inside the doorway, her dress ripped and dangling and a Pace Arms Hawk .22 up in both hands, aimed at Chester. He lumbers toward us. I stay down on my knees to give her a clear sight line. If he gets close, I’ll spring onto him to keep him from her. She shoots him three more times and Chester stops. I can see two small bloody circles on his shirtfront and a bright red gash high up on his skull where the bullet has bounced off. He grunts and twists one arm behind his back as if trying to scratch an itch, and I realize this is where the first three shots hit. Sharon has eight shells left if the magazine was full, nine if there was also one cartridge in the chamber. Chester steps forward and Sharon shoots him three more times, pretty much dead center at this close range. He rocks and staggers backward. He sways, then steadies himself. “Nobody does that to me,” Sharon says dreamily. She fires and misses and misses again. The bullets smack the wall. Then she cracks a shot between his small blue eyes. His head shakes and settles and he looks at us. He sits on the foot of the bed and places his hands on his thighs, as if he were about to say something. There’s blood running down his mouth and off his chin. He extrudes a small pointed tongue and tastes it. His torso is drenched in the red blood of his lungs and the black blood of his heart. He collapses then, like a building imploded, his lower body slumping to the floor first and his head whipping down last with a sharp centrifugal splat. The back of his cream linen coat is a bloody thing, too. Sharon hands the gun down to me and walks unevenly away, one shoulder and half her back showing above the flap of her torn green dress, one foot bare and the other still shod.

I find her in the kitchen, wiping out two martini glasses. Her eyes are wide and her hands tremble and she doesn’t look at me. I come up behind her to put my hands on her shoulders.

“Do not approach me.”

“Okay. I won’t. Sharon, he didn’t—”

“No, he did not.”

“I’m thankful for that, Sharon. I’m going downstairs to talk to Marcos while you make those drinks. We’ll need to make some adjustments.”

“The ice cream is melting.”

“I’ll get it.”

“What if he’s not dead.”

“He is dead.”

“But what if he’s not.”

I read the old inscription on the Hawk, then set it on the counter.

“I didn’t know you kept this.”

“It’s been in my purse since the day you gave it to me.”

“If he’s not dead, shoot him again.”

She looks up toward me, but I don’t think she sees me. She smiles vacantly. “Terrific, Ron. Don’t be long.”

I look in on Chester to make sure no miracle cures have occurred. He’s still as a boulder, and the hardwood floor around him is a dark slick. I feel regret that he’s dead and an odd sense of loss, but very small amounts of each. I never understood how he could have been the brother of my reasonably sized, generous, sensitive, good-natured father. I still don’t. The wood floor is a modern laminate and will clean up well.

As I walk toward the front door, I see Sharon in the kitchen, scooping ice into the martini shaker. Her hair washes over her face, and tears run down her cheeks, but her hands are steadier now. She has tucked the torn shoulder of her green dress up under her bra strap. I am so proud of her, and that she chooses to spend her time with me. She looks back at me with an expression that says:
Don’t say one word.

I don’t dare.

I ride the elevator down into manufacturing. I’m trying to figure out how to tell Marcos what I now need from him, but my phone rings and I see that it’s Bradley.

“Bra—”

“Don’t talk,” he says. “Only listen.”

I listen and do not talk. Bradley tells me that ATFE knows what I’m making, that the Pace building is probably under surveillance right now. I can’t understand
how
they would know. Chester? At Bradley’s orders I write down an address and a time, and I make a list of the things he wants me to buy and in what quantities. Some of these things make sense to me and others do not. I see that what I’m going to need from Marcos is small potatoes compared to what Bradley needs from me.

“You got it, Bradley. Done.”

I punch off and stab the phone back into the belt holder. I take a deep breath and straighten my back.

Rounding the corner into the intensified smells of solvents and lubricants and blued steel and loud Mexican music, I raise my hand and hail Marcos. It’s just dawning on me how to pull this all together.

 

 

 

 

H
ood watched the Pace Arms entrance through slitted eyes, his head back on the rest, radio turned to a music station. It was nine P.M. At ten thirty, Sharon came down and drove her Z-car from the parking structure. At eleven o’clock he saw Chester Pace’s black Town Car roll into the same structure and a moment later the big man lumber from the darkness to the building. Just as Chester reached the entryway, the door opened and one of the gunmakers looked up at Chester and nodded and held open the door for him.

A minute later, Hood saw a slight change of light in the penthouse, then movement behind the blinds. Fifteen minutes later, Sharon parked and walked out of the structure with plastic bags in both hands. She was dressed in a green dress and looked tanned and casually lovely.

Hood turned down the radio and watched. A few minutes later, the fog settled over the building tops and descended over the street-lights, muting the world. Hood rolled the windows up against the chill. The next time he checked his watch, it was after one A.M. No Chester. No nothing. Four hours to go to end of their shift.

Just after seven o’clock, the men emerged from the building into the foggy morning light. They shuffled to their cars wordlessly and began to drive away. Hood watched them go and counted them. Twelve had gone in. Only ten left. He felt addled from lack of sleep, and he was sore from the sitting. He felt like he had worked the shift alongside them.

His phone vibrated and he saw a new text message waiting:

Hood called Beth Petty and asked her to have the ICU nurses concoct a reason to wheel Mike out of his room for a few minutes around eight A.M. When she asked why, he said it had to do with guns, cash, and human life. She agreed to do it. Then he called Gabe Reyes and told him to be at Imperial Mercy ICU at eight o’clock to retrieve Mike Finnegan’s cell phone and check it for calls or messages left or sent.

Forty minutes later, Hood was stuck in traffic in Corona. He slowed to a crawl and cursed and answered a call. Reyes gave him both of the numbers he found on Finnegan’s phone, both outgoing and both made within the last nine hours. One went to a number that Hood recognized as belonging to Owens, placed not long after Hood had left the ICU at Imperial Mercy. The most recent was a text message to Hood.

 

 

 

 

L
ate the next night a small army surrounded Pace Arms under the cover of fog and darkness. The air was cool and still and it misted the windshield of Hood’s Yukon, but this was not a time for wipers.

Behind the building, Hood watched from his Yukon as a big raised Dodge Ram pickup truck backed up through the bright shipping yard lights. It finally came to rest against the Pace loading dock, beside a battered white Ford F-250. Hood had figured two vehicles for two thousand pounds of iron, plus the weight of the crates. Two vehicles wouldn’t betray the weight, and would either cut the risk in half or double it, depending on how you looked at it. The big motor home sat parked against a far wall, its awning now extended for shade over two white plastic chairs. It was as dirty as it had been before, all its windows opaque with dust except for the big black windshield. Hood wondered if someone lived there, a watchman perhaps. There was a clean black panel van parked across from it.

Ron Pace came trotting down the loading ramp. Bradley and Clayton got out of the truck and shook hands with the gunmaker. Bradley wore white shorts and red canvas sneakers and a Bush-Cheney T-shirt, with his holster and sidearm bobbing unashamedly on his right hip. Clayton wore a light blue seersucker suit and what looked like white Hush Puppies. Pace was dressed for safari in cargo shorts, suede work boots, and a shirt plastered with pockets and epaulets.

Hood looked into his rearview at Janet Bly. He could barely make her out behind the wheel of her SUV with a San Diego office ATFE agent beside her.

“Charlie, Janet here—look at those dorks,” she said over the radio. The headsets were made for hands-free contact between the teams, and sound was excellent. “I can’t believe this Jones kid. You
know
him?”

“Long story.”

“I can’t wait to see his cute little face when we cuff him and shove him in a car. His buddies, too.”

“All units,” Hood said. “We’ve got Bradley Jones and Clayton Farrar on scene. Pace is here, too.”

Hood knew that Ozburn was parked around front of Pace Arms with an agent on loan from Glendale. There were four other vehicles involved: an undercover sedan parked down the street from Hood with two more agents inside, another two-agent sedan near the Pace Arms entrance, two more ATFE agents in an unmarked SUV watching the on-ramp to the 405 freeway, and one roving unit. All drivers were radio-wired, all agents armed with .40-caliber autoloaders, one shotgun and one tear gas launcher per vehicle. The ATFE Bell would track high and loose until the ground agents made their move.

Bradley and Clayton and Pace laid out tie ropes in the bed of the Ram, then walked up the ramp and into the warehouse. A few minutes later they emerged one-two-three with hand trucks, and the hand trucks each held four wooden gun crates. In turn each man went down the ramp, arms extended, leaning back against the weight. Pace and Clayton lifted the boxes into the truck bed, and Bradley hopped into the bed and arranged them.

The crates seemed lighter in Bradley’s hands, and Hood wondered at the strength of his body and the audacity of his mind. He had to hand it to Bradley for sheer boldness. In this young descendent of Joaquin Murrieta, Hood saw outlaws dead and outlaws not yet born, and he also saw Suzanne, and he even glimpsed something dark and tempting that he had long ago banished from himself. In its place he had installed the straight and the narrow, the pledge of allegiance, the call of duty, to protect and serve. All of this he had done willingly and with his eyes open. He could have chosen differently. But a man could not be both things, both the law and outside the law, no matter how valiantly Bradley Jones was trying to be. And if Bradley succeeded at being both, then Hood and his choices were superfluous.

He watched the young men push the hand trucks back up the ramp and bring down another load. They finally stopped when the Dodge held five rows of ten crates. Then Bradley spread a large blue tarp over them and brought the ropes up and tied it all down with a flourish of exotic knots. Another fifty cases went into the worn Ford. The words ALL SAINTS CHARITY and an El Monte address appeared in fading paint on the door.

Hood yearned to make the pinch here and now, but without the money it wasn’t a sale, and without a sale, arrests would net little. The money was everything—the money and who supplied it and where it came from.

“Charlie, this is Sean. Whazzup back there?”

“They’re ready to leave. The black Ram and the All Saints Ford.”

“Let Bly take the lead. They’ve never seen her.”

“Fine.”

“You cool with that?”

“I said fine.”

“Something wrong, Charlie?”

“I don’t like the look of the gun crates or the motor home. And there are three more men inside that building, not counting Ron and his girl.”

“Talk to me, Hood.”

“The crates are heavy to Pace and Clayton and lighter to Bradley. The motor home is dirty and the awning is out and there are chairs set up outside it, but the windshield is clean. Yesterday it was filthy. I’m talking the whole windshield, not just where the wiper blades would go—clean like somebody’s going to drive it soon. Ron’s uncle is still inside, and two of the workers. It’s just not adding up.”

“Okay, what, then?”

“I want to hang back and see, Sean. You guys take Bradley and Clayton.”

“You want unit four to back you up?”

“I’ll take unit four, you bet.”

“Unit Four, Frankie, you there?”

Hood watched Bradley guide the Ram onto the street. The charity Ford followed, driven by Clayton, his left hand out the window with a cigarette, tapping against the door in a fast rhythm.

The vehicles rolled slowly down the street and made right turns toward the boulevard. When they had gotten out of sight, Hood heard Bly’s engine start up and he watched in the rearview as her black Suburban pulled from the curb. Light from the streetlamp played along the flank of the big machine, then vanished. The unit four GMC lurked half a block down, unmoving.

“Frank,” said Hood.

“Charlie, I’m here. We’re not missing the fun, are we?”

“You can go if you want.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. I hope you have a good view of that thing, because I can only see the top of it.”

“I’m locked. When something happens, you’ll be the first to know.”