Iron River (9 page)

“You tell me I’m a murderer and Erin is a liar. Why am I standing here? I told you this visit was a dumbass idea, sweetie.”

“I guess,” she said quietly. “Hood? Charlie?
He was with me.
”

“I hate the sight of you lying. I hate the sound of it.”

“I’m going to be an LASD deputy, Hood. Get used to it. You don’t own the department. You don’t own me. I’ll probably be your boss before you know it.”

“I might have killed him, too,” said Hood.

“You don’t have the balls. Well, I’ve had enough of this beautiful desert for now. Erin, get in the car.”

Bradley grabbed the suit bag and jumped the wall. Then he stopped and turned and smiled back at Hood. “But I still want you at the wedding, Charlie. I want a big expensive gift, too.”

Erin stood by the table. She looked at Hood, then back at Bradley waiting by the car now, then at Hood again.

“We didn’t deal those cards, Charlie. We played them.”

 

 

 

Late that night, Hood was back on his courtyard, writing a letter to his mother and father. Only his mother would fully understand it, but she would read it out loud to her husband, a once warm and energetic man now nearly incapacitated by Alzheimer’s disease. Hood’s father loved getting the letters he only partially comprehended, and Hood did this mainly for him. He had bought high-cotton stationery and an expensive pen and a book of stamps. He thought before he wrote and tried to say what he thought.

Hood readied the envelope and put it in his pocket and slipped his jacket over his gun and drove into Buenavista. This late the town was quiet. Hood parked near the zocalo and walked past the church and the fountain and civic buildings to the post office and dropped the letter in the slot.

He was surprised to find a postcard in his post office box, likely from his mother. It was a picture of Imperial Mercy Hospital taken on a clear day under blue skies. On the back was a brief paragraph about the state-of-the-art medical facility, and a handwritten note that appeared to be slowly and painfully accomplished:

Hood pocketed the card and walked up the street where they had chased Tilley and Victor Davis, past the shops and the galleries and the market, all closed now. He stopped within the shadowed columns of the colonnade and looked at the Club Fandango, where a doorman stood outside with his arms crossed and his feet spread as if against a crowd of onrushers, but there was only a blond girl who looked too young to get in and the man was shaking his head no. Music pulsed faintly from inside, and the light behind the shaded windows randomly changed colors and depth.

As Hood watched, three black Escalades rumbled up the stone street and came to a stop in the No Parking zone at the entrance. They were almost new and the windows were blacked out and the roof-tops bristled with antennae. California and Mexico plates, he saw, Sonora and Sinaloa. Two of the men who got out of the middle vehicle were young and black-haired and trimly dressed. The two others were older and larger and they dressed in looser clothes meant to conceal. There were two women, young and stylish, hair up and earrings dangling and high heels sounding on the street stones, and the trim men offered their arms to steady them for the walk to the door. A similar contingent exited the SUV farthest from the entrance, and Hood heard a quick shriek as one of the women stumbled and was caught by the other. Men commented and laughed. No one left the first vehicle.

At the door, the young men had words with the doorman and the girl, then the doorman swung open a tall wooden door and the men went inside. Hood watched the girl say something to the doorman, then sling her bag over her shoulder and saunter to the nearest Suburban. Her hair flashed golden in the light of the streetlamp. A back door opened and an arm came from the black interior and helped the girl climb inside. Hood stood unmoving for half an hour and watched, though he didn’t know for what. Then he walked back to his Camaro and drove home.

 

 

 

 

M
ike Finnegan sat nearly upright in his ICU bed. Hood saw the twinkle of his eyes deep in the gauze. His TV was tuned to the morning news, where a meteorologist called for very warm weather in Imperial Valley, midnineties and humid with subtropical moisture.

“Why won’t he use the word
hot
?” asked Finnegan. His voice came tightly from within his wired jaws. “Ninety-five is not very warm. It is hot.”

“The power of suggestion.”

“Yes, weathermen come to believe they influence the weather, like craps players with dice or you policemen with crime rates. Her name is Owens and she’s twenty-one. Five seven, one fifteen, brown and gray. She didn’t get my cramped little body and brain. She’s beautiful and smart. Her mother died six years ago. A heart attack.”

“Did Owens run away?”

“Vanished. She didn’t run away. She didn’t pack anything. She had just finished her junior year of college with a GPA of 4.25. She was working part-time at a bedroom store and volunteering at a Skid Row soup kitchen in L.A. on Saturdays. When she disappeared, it made the local papers. I filed all the proper police reports.”

“Was she living with you?”

“She had an apartment in Glendale.”

“Boyfriend?”

“No. Some casual male friends. Nice young boys.”

“You’ve talked to them?”

“Absolutely. No calls. No ransom demand. No contact whatsoever. . . . I read about the mishap in Buenavista. Two days after you get here, boom—the body count jumps by two. Gustavo Armenta? I shuddered when I read his name in the paper, then I thought, no, certainly he can’t be related to Benjamin of Gulf Cartel fame. But then again, he certainly could be.”

Hood considered Finnegan. The patient in the next bed lay intubated and unconscious. The other bed in the three-bed pod was empty. Hood used the remote and turned up the volume on the news a little.

“Why would you shudder?”

“In anticipation of vengeance.”

“Gustavo was his son.”

“Amazing how little we know of the Zetas.”

“What do you know of them?”

“Only what I read. Paramilitary. Magnificently armed. Lavishly cruel. Heads over here, bodies over there. I wonder what they dream about. I’d sure keep a weather eye for myself and my task force brethren, too. Benjamin’s honor will demand vengeance for his son. Blowdown. I like the name.”

Hood listened to Finnegan’s clear and sometimes animated voice. He liked pronouncing words. Hood studied the bedside cart. On the top shelf were three good stacks of hardcover books—history, biography, current events, science and technology,
Dog Cartoons,
and a novel that Hood was pretty sure had won a big literary prize last year. The second shelf of the cart and the bottom were filled with neat piles of newspapers. One pile was the
New York Times,
the other the
Los Angeles Times,
the third stack the
Imperial Valley Press
.

“Do you know how tiring it is to hold a hardcover book in one hand, up high enough to read because you can’t raise or lower your head? Then move the book back and forth to read the lines because you can’t move your head back and forth? Then set it down and struggle just to turn a page, then lift it back up? I do not recommend it, deputy.”

“What are you doing down here in the desert if Owens went missing in Los Angeles?”

“She called me five nights ago. She was sobbing. She said she was sorry for putting me through this. I only demanded one thing—an address. It’s just inside the
Secret Wars of the CIA
volume on top there. Get it.”

Hood moved around the bed to the cart and lifted the cover of the book. The address was written on a Hamburger Hamlet bar napkin: 181 Skylar Road, El Centro.

“And you were on your way there from L.A. when the tire on your pickup truck blew?”

“Exactly. Go to that address. Tell her what happened to me. Tell her she is loved beyond her wildest dreams.
Beyond
them. Don’t try to get her to come here. She will not do anything unless she wants to. She’s always had a mind one hundred percent her own.”

Hood took the napkin and slid it into his coat pocket. “Why do you care what the Zetas dream about?”

“In dreams, men are uncontested. They’re free. A man alone with his soul is pure man. Oh, very revealing what he dreams. Human nature on display. Did you dream last night?”

“Not that I remember.”

Finnegan chuckled softly. “They say that both God and the devil can place dreams within a sleeping human. They say it is done less often than you would think. It’s risky because they don’t know how a man will react to it. A dream can be rejected, like an organ. Somewhat prosaically, they call a dream placed within a sleeping human, well, a placement.”

“Who calls it that?”

Finnegan lifted his right hand, indicating the book cart. “Oh, some writer in some book in some century in some language. It’s impossible to keep everything straight anymore. It’s all just conjecture, isn’t it? No man has seen God. No man has seen Lucifer. No man that I’ve ever talked to! It’s just a useful way of looking at the world. And seeing into it.”

Hood wondered if this was Finnegan’s brain damage showing through. It was surprising how lucid and even humorous the little man was, given the severity of his injuries. Hood’s sister had suffered a brain tumor as a teenager, and the first hint that she was afflicted were meandering, dislocated, illogical ruminations on her faith and religion. They happened with growing regularity. Then she had a seizure and they scanned her brain, and the surgery was done, and his sister never warbled on about God and his angels after that.

“How did you get my name and address?” he asked.

“I told you. Coleman Draper.”

“When? How did you know him?”

“Last winter. He worked on my car.”

Hood had investigated Draper, a reserve sheriff’s deputy, for Internal Affairs, and discovered that the man had done some remarkably terrible things using his reservist’s uniform, gun, and shield. Draper had owned a thriving German auto repair shop in Venice Beach.

“He told me of his association with the sheriffs. I told him that my daughter had disappeared. This was the first time Owens had done this, and I had reason to believe she was in Antelope Valley. He gave me your name as a contact at the LASD substation in Lancaster. He spoke highly of you.”

“But Draper died sixteen months ago. He couldn’t have given you my new address.”

“No. I cajoled it out of a friend at the USPS. I have my contacts, deputy, just like you have yours.”

“What do you do for a living, Finnegan?”

“Bathroom products, wholesale. It’s not as exciting as it sounds.”

“Which manufacturer?”

“Most of them. I’m a broker.”

“What’s the name of your company?”

“Just Mike Finnegan Bath. I’m known. Bathroom products is a small world once you’ve been in it for a while. I’m in several Los Angeles Yellow Pages if that impresses you. So, has Benjamin Armenta demonstrated his displeasure with the Blowdown team?”

“Do you know Armenta?”

“We’ve never met.”

“That’s not your business, what happens with Blowdown.”

“No. My business is Mike Finnegan Bath.”

“And that’s how you earned the ninety grand in the toolbox in your truck?”

“That’s how.”

Hood said nothing for a long moment. He saw a momentary blackness within the gauze before the reappearance of the twin glimmers.

“Much can happen in a blink, can’t it, deputy?”

“So, Owens vanishes with regularity?”

“This is the second time.”

Hood looked at motionless Finnegan, listened to the TV news and the hum of the ICU and the voices coming from the nurses’ station just outside the pod. He felt someone behind him and turned.

“Dr. Petty,” said Finnegan. “You melt my plaster in that trim white doctor’s coat.”

“You have too many broken bones to be flirting with me. Good morning, deputy.”