Iron River (21 page)

Using his penknife scissors, Hood cut away part of the bandage on Holdstock’s right hand. In a minute the index finger was exposed, pale, then darkly stained with Betadine from mid-knuckle to tip, which was gnarled purple and deeply slotted by the violent extraction of the nail. It looked alive and discrete, an appendage to no thing. Hood was surprised by its ugliness and seeming incurability. In Holdstock’s gaze was a short history of pain. Hood raised one knee and withdrew the eight-shot .22 AirLite from his ankle holster and fitted it snugly into the gauzed palm of Jimmy’s hand. Jimmy concentrated wholly as he passed his trigger finger through the guard without touching the nerves to the steel, then curled his finger very gently to the trigger. He nodded and withdrew the finger and let it rest safely alongside the guard and the lower frame of the small revolver. He smiled slightly. He exhaled and lowered the gun to lay against his leg and covered it with the corner of the sheet. They waited. With the door shut, the antic noises of the hospital were dulled. Hood heard the padded volume of someone walking past the door outside, then it was gone.

Then a louder shuffle outside and a sudden rapping on the door.

“Security. I’m coming in.”

“This is Deputy Charlie Hood. Enter with your hands up where I can see them.”

“I’m Lucas. I’m not armed. You in there, Jimmy?”

“I’m in here, Frank.”

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” said Hood.

“Nobody get excited and shoot, now.”

Hood hooked the chair away from the door with his boot and the door slowly opened. Two empty hands appeared to their forearms, and the security guard elbowed in. He was tall and stately and wore rimless spectacles. His eyes went to the gun on Hood’s thigh pointed up at him, then to Jimmy.

“I got a call from a doctor to come to this room, and another call about two men of interest somewhere on these ten floors. I’m half the Sunday shift, but the other half called in sick. I can’t be in two places at once, so I came here.”

“You’re agent in charge here, Jimmy,” said Hood.

“I can handle it.”

“I know you can.”

Hood holstered his gun and went to the window again and looked down. There was a young couple walking toward the building and a taxi in motion. He walked out and shut the door behind him.

At the elevator banks, he pushed the DOWN buttons on both sides and waited. Over the next minute, two cars opened empty and one stopped, and the flower woman looked at him. He waited another minute and heard cars pass down and up, the sounds of their hoisting machineries muted within the shafts. Then out came the two replacement deputies for Jimmy’s room. Each held a large white beverage container with a black top, and Hood intercepted and badged them and explained what was happening. They argued briefly. Then the deputies set their drinks on the floor, and one broke off toward Jimmy’s room and the other followed Hood to a waiting area. There Hood looked down to a different part of the lot, the front lot, and he could see the great concrete overhang that shaded the main entrance and the curving entryway and the palms towering up on either side. Up close to the building, the lot was filled with cars, but farther back were empty places. A black-and-white police cruiser was parked midway, and the two deputies walked briskly toward it. From these six floors up, the bleached hair shone like a small brass coin. Then Hood saw a yellow Charger sweep into the lot and he knew it was Janet Bly’s.

He was on the speed-dial in an instant, but her recording came on just as the Charger parked at the red curb near the entrance and Janet got out and disappeared beneath the overhang, running.

Leveraged by the handrail, Hood flew down the stairs, the deputy clambering loudly after him. It seemed to Hood that he hit the ground floor in seconds, but as he sprinted across the lobby, he saw that Janet had apparently already made the elevators, and when he ran outside into the concussive heat and rounded the concrete planters into the parking lot, he saw that the prowl car was gone.

He ordered his new partner to call it in, then ran to his Camaro in the rear lot and gunned it for the exit. He had to guess which way they had turned on B Street. So he guessed and turned, but he saw nothing of them or their car.

He was cursing when he saw Ozburn’s raised black Land Cruiser roaring toward him down Third for the hospital. Hood circled back.

 

 

 

They all sat in the cafeteria. No one was sure who the two stairwell deputies were: The door team never saw them, and the off-shift stairwell team had either known them to be legitimate or not laid eyes on them. One of the first stairwell team deputies confirmed by phone that he and his partner had departed their posts a few minutes early because of the sweltering heat. They had not seen their replacements and didn’t know who they would be. Neither of the door team said they knew a fellow deputy with a head of upswept bleached hair. The terrible question of what had happened to the authentic replacements, should this fleeing pair prove to be the impostors they seemed, went loudly unsaid. Hood felt the hostility in the deputies and he didn’t blame them for it.

Later, Blowdown huddled in the first-floor prayer chapel for privacy. There were holy books in several languages on a shelf, and on the wall were framed photographs of religious sites around the world. Hood said the bleached deputy could be a genuine deputy working both sides of the iron trade. He had worked with profoundly corrupt deputies in L.A. and he knew that L.A. was not unique. Not all men were immune to money and power, and far fewer immune to the survival of their family or themselves.

 

 

 

Four hours later, Hood and Beth Petty emerged from the Imperial Sheriff’s Department station in El Centro. He held open the heavy door of his Camaro and Beth got in. The night was cool and the sky was flat and heavy with stars. Hood felt only a small ripple of contentment as the V-8 and the glasspacks rumbled beneath him.

They had seen pictures of the two deputies assigned to the stairwell during the shift in question and these men looked nothing like Glasses and Pompadour.

Over the next three-plus hours, they had viewed HR photos of every sworn male deputy and had not been able to identify them. At Hood’s request, they also looked at pictures of all male reserve deputies and this had been fruitless, too. A strong but nameless tension had mounted in the conference room. Hood felt the currents of it shifting and changing as various ICSD brass came to check progress and left to make cell calls and muttered quietly among themselves out of earshot.

As Hood and Petty were getting ready to leave the room, the ICSD captain who had run the show told them that the two deputies who were supposed to guard at the stairwell had apparently thought it was the midnight shift. They claimed they were told it was the midnight shift. There had been a communication glitch, and the captain said he’d get to the bottom of it.

 

 

 

They sat across from each other in a brightly lit booth in the Buenavista International House of Pancakes. It was late and the dining room was nearly empty and Hood heard a vacuum being run on the other side of the register. He was tired and nervy with hunger, but he felt again the pleasure of being with Beth Petty alone. Surrounded by the claret vinyl of the booth cushions and the geometric polyester carpet and the rose-colored laminate tabletop, she looked to Hood like life itself. He watched her study the big illustrated menu. She lowered it.

“It’s different.”

“What.”

“Everything. The world now. The guns and drugs. The heads. The cops that aren’t cops. All the slaughter. It’s no longer occasional. Thousands of abortions every month and women leave babies out back of the hospital all the time. Something got out of its bottle. I’m not sure I want to know what it is.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t believe in the end of the world. I believe it keeps going and it becomes what we make of it. Approximately.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I saw you check my ring finger that very first second in Mike’s room.”

“You nailed me, Beth.”

She put the menu back up and talked from behind it. “I’m starved. That was a long, long night at the cop house. Cops are slow people. Deliberate people. The German plate sounds good. Either that or the chocolate chip pancakes on the kid menu, side of bacon. And I’ll be honest with you, it felt good to have that finger checked.”

“I’m sure it happens a lot.”

She moved the menu to see him. “I was married through med school and it was a disaster. We about ruined each other. Should have never done that. Live and learn and no hard feelings. You?”

“No.”

She positioned the menu over her face again. She said nothing for a long while, then, “I hate having to explain myself. That’s why I don’t date much. When I do, I pray for a guy who talks about himself the whole time. I escape with my privacy intact. Not that I have secrets. I’ve had a very ordinary life. Maybe a quirk or two, sure, everybody’s got those. I can’t guess what kind of date you would be. But then, this really isn’t a date.”

“Want me to start in talking about me?”

She spoke again from behind the plastic sheath. “I’m going kid menu and side of bacon, large milk. Guilt free. I love this place because there’s not a single health-conscious thing in it. I used to fast once a week for a day. All I can say is, it’s hard to sleep that night. I love to eat. There’s an overweight woman inside me, just waiting to get out.”

“You talk a lot for a person who doesn’t talk a lot.”

Menu down: “Wrong. I don’t like to explain myself but I love to talk at certain times. I talk when I’m hungry. I talk when I’ve had a hard day, and men with guns have been creeping around in my hospital. I talk at meals because for eight hours a day most everything I see has to do with blood, guts, illness, and death. I talk to my dog. I like saying words such as
violet
and
Saskatoon
.”

“You want a guy who can listen to you blather on and on without a comma and never even get tired of it.”

She raised the menu again. “He’s bound to get tired of it, but he still has to listen. I value good manners very highly. You know, I could do the German plate
and
the kid plate. And I’ll bet you right now, if I ate all that I could still have dessert. Which begs the question of what’s a good dessert after chocolate chip pancakes? What do you think?”

“I think it means you were raised in a large competitive family.”

The menu stayed up. “Five kids.”

“Ours, too.”

“Then how come you’re not talking
your
fool head off?”

“I’m letting you.”

When Beth Petty lowered the menu, there was a straw in her mouth aimed at Hood and she blew a spitwad into his chest.

 

 

 

 

H
ood sat on his stool in Hell on Wheels, the ATFE Dumpster modified for surveillance. The tow truck he had used to transport it was now parked over near the restrooms. Hood was borderline claustrophobic and disliked being caged. He ate a candy bar and drank a can of odd-tasting iced tea.

Twelve hours ago, Ivan Dragovitch had called Hood about the ammo sale, and Hood was now near ground zero of the deal, a rest stop on Interstate 8 midway between San Diego and Yuma. Ozburn and Bly had given him hell and their blessing, but this was still a legal deal, and bad as it smelled, it didn’t warrant the whole Achilles team. Within the ATFE ranks, small individual operations were encouraged because they often got results and were an important method of finding possible informants. Hood told them nothing of his relationship with Kyle Johnson. He wanted to see Bradley buy fifty thousand rounds of .32 ACP with his own eyes.

Dragovitch had suggested the rest stop. Here, in the far corner, at nine P.M., Kyle Johnson would inspect and legally purchase the product from an unlicensed munitions dealer named Wesley Savage. Ammo sales were not federally regulated, and the state forms were cursory at best. Dragovitch would preside and Hood would witness and record. Hood knew that Bradley could have gone online to any number of sites and had the quantity drop-shipped to his home, but this would have subjected him to the security protocols of the company and to their suspicions and possible relationship to ATFE. Savage’s prices were higher because he had no questions and filled out no forms.

Sitting now on the stool in the Dumpster in the middle of the immense desert, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his fingers crossed, Hood saw himself from the outside for a moment.
There I am on a stool in a cage. All the many paths have led to this
.

He thought of Beth Petty and her nervous chatter and the tone of her skin against the yellow dress. He wanted to touch her.

He held the video recorder up to one of the holes. He had positioned Hell on Wheels way out on the edge of the parking area to give himself a generous field of vision. With the zoom he could see across to the “Dangers of the Desert” display and the vending machines and the strip of ground with the NO DOGS sign above it and the sun-blackened turds dry in the dirt. Past them were a flat expanse of desert in which the creosote and ocotillo and cholla stood disparate in the windless evening. At the end of everything, the sun lowered into a lake of red.

Dragovitch pulled into the rest area at eight o’clock. Hood watched his black Dodge pickup lap the parking lot once, then roll to the far corner, closest to the desert, where pets were allowed. Dragovitch got out and left the door open, rolled his shoulders, looked around with casual alertness. Hood expected Sheila to get out next, but she didn’t. Instead Ivan whistled sharply and a white blur sailed from the pickup cab and into his waiting arms. Dragovitch held up the wiggling papillon, then set it down, and it pranced sharp-footed to business in the dog patch.