Iron River (35 page)

Hood balanced Jimmy upright, then knelt on hands and knees on the sharp ground, and Holdstock lay over his back with a huff. Hood stood and got Jimmy’s legs under each arm and started down the path much faster now, but the man’s weight was cumbersome and substantial and his big arms were firm around Hood’s neck. Hood’s legs and back were strong and he took long strides down the path and when the path vanished, he accelerated between the clumps of creosote and the rocks and the infernal cholla, and again judged his distance from the vehicle on the U.S. side against the three-vehicle war party now streaming from the south toward him. He could see the faint contrails of dust in their wakes and he guessed from their speed and violent rocking that they were military all-terrain vehicles of some kind and that they needed no trail to traverse the desert floor.

He broke into a trot. The rise and fall of Holdstock’s weight was prodigious, but Hood found a breathing rhythm as he watched the ground in front of him, then looked up to fix his course toward the wall. Suddenly the headlights of the stateside vehicle came on. Then another set of headlights from beside it, but these were much closer together, a quad all-terrain vehicle, thought Hood, maybe even a sand buggy. Both sets started toward him. He was sucking deep for wind now and trying to control the exhale, imposing his will. Holdstock’s forearms were hard around his neck because of his useless fingers. “
Jimmy, not so tight. On my neck. Easy.
” From his right advanced the three vehicles from Mexico. He heard footsteps behind him but he couldn’t turn without stopping and he couldn’t stop. Duarte huffed into his view on one side, short-legged, stomach swaying, an M16 in his hands. On Hood’s other side emerged both officers and they also had their assault guns, and these younger men were light in the boots and they moved ahead of Hood a few paces and remained abreast, and the five of them crunched on toward the wall. He could hear the Zetas’ vehicles behind him. Ahead of him the two American vessels broke into the lighted security area, a Hummer and a quad runner, trundling back into darkness and coming across the rough desert straight for him. Hood’s legs were burning and he could feel the imminent collapse of them and he slowed so as not to fall, and both the young officers and Duarte closed ranks around him. He heard the clatter of small-arms fire and he saw the muzzle flash from all of the vehicles except the quad, which came buzzing at them like a mad badger. Duarte and the officers fell back and fired from the darkness. Hood trudged onward. He labored up a rise, lungs heaving and legs wavering and it felt like a miracle just to clear it but he did, gasping for air as the quad whined at him through the darkness, and Sean Ozburn laid it into a slide that brought its rear end around and to a stop. Hood dumped Jimmy onto the cargo carrier on the back and climbed on top of him. Ozburn drew an M16 from the handlebar scabbard and handed it back to Hood. Then Ozburn turned off the lights and gunned the quad, steering back toward the wall and the light.

The four-cycle engine was game but overburdened. Ozburn’s memory of the terrain was good, and in the darkness he was able to keep the quad on its own track most of the time. Hood looked a quarter mile ahead to the pool of security light and the end of the wall. He saw the other American vehicle now, an ATFE Humvee crawling toward them through a sandy plain. The Mexican vehicles closed fast but they were still half a mile out. Hood held to the roll bar with one hand and lowered the assault gun at the oncoming enemy, but in his logic, gunfire wasn’t worth betraying their position in the darkness. Ozburn found a hard-packed gulley and the quad groaned along. Hood watched the Humvee, a hundred yards to their left and a hundred yards behind them, make a wide U-turn and pull up slow so Duarte and his men could climb in. The driver kept the rpms high and the speed even, and the heavy machine began across the sand again, back toward the wall.

Ozburn steered them onto American soil. He veered around the floodlit construction area, then brought the smoking ATV to a stop on a rise a few hundred yards from the unwalled border. The engine smoked, and smelled of overheated metal. Hood saw the Humvee lumbering toward them, rhinoceros-like and unfazed. He watched as the three Zeta vehicles stopped forward progress a quarter mile away and began circling like meat bees, their dust-filled headlight beams crisscrossing the night, then finally turning and speeding off into the darkness. He realized he’d never even seen what kind of vehicles they were.

The Humvee rolled to a stop, and Janet Bly got out of the driver’s side and headed straight for Jimmy. Soriana exited the front, then the three Chihuahua state policemen, then Mars.

Holdstock stood in the moonlight beside the smoking quad with his bandaged hands at his sides while the Blowdown team welcomed him back and lightly clapped his shoulders and messed his hair and told him how good it was to see him. Bly hugged him, crying, and Ozburn hugged him, swearing they still had plenty of beer to drink and Zetas to kill. Then they stepped away just a little to give Jimmy some breathing room, to hear his piece, to reestablish his place within their pack, and Jimmy looked at each of them in turn before turning his tearful gaze to the desert floor and saying nothing.

Ozburn introduced himself and the others to Duarte and his officers. “We’ll give you a ride back to your truck if the Zetas don’t blow it up,” he said.

Before ten minutes had gone by, an orange ball of flame puffed to life a mile south, roiling and growing and fighting to stay upright against the westerly breeze.

 

 

 

 

T
wo evenings later, Hood watched Jimmy’s taped statement on
World News Tonight
. Jimmy was made up, Hood saw, and his hair was freshly cut and styled. The set was designed to look like a home, but Hood knew that the segment had been taped at the ATFE field division HQ up in Glendale.

Jimmy sat in an armchair, the room bathed in warm lamplight, and there was an end table beside him with a Bible and a vase of yellow roses on it. Jimmy’s eyes were glassy, but he had a small smile on his lips, just an upturn, just a hint. The bulbous bandages on his hands were gone, replaced by streamlined wraps of flesh-colored dressings.

“I’m James Holdstock of ATF and I’m back home in the United States now,” he said. His voice was soft. “I want to thank my friends for getting me back home, and the Mexican government for helping all of us. I wouldn’t be here without them. I know that my abduction has become a controversy, but now it’s over. I’m safe and healthy and I’ll return to work soon. I’m proud to be an American and an agent of the ATF and I’m proud to call Mexico my friend.”

Hood took his beer outside and sat on the flagstone patio. Bly had told him that it had taken nine tries for Jimmy to get the speech right. In spite of the teleprompter, he kept losing focus, slurring words, tearing up. She also said that Jimmy was living in an ATFE safe house now, out of state and heavily guarded. His family had moved in with relatives in St. Paul.

Through the screen door, Hood could hear the anchor interviewing the expert.

Hood looked out to the sprinkling of lights that was Buenavista, and the tent city of the National Guard sprawling to the west. A convoy was now departing the base, heading through the desert on a just-bladed road, a chain of headlights snaking into the dark. He thought of the steep descent to Batopilas, his own headlights faint in that hostile world, the immense spires of rock engulfing them finally and the sky disappearing. He thought of the bodies and the heads, and of Jimmy sitting defeated upon his horse beside Vascano, and he heard Luna say that his wife was beautiful even in old clothes and that his daughters would marry warriors like themselves, and he saw Luna’s great bull’s body shiver as the bullet passed through. He heard the twang of that bullet ricocheting off the rock behind him. Hood put his head in his hands.

A few minutes later he brought his stationery and a good pen outside and he set the paper on the old rough table with a
Road & Track
magazine to pad it.

 

 

 

 

H
ood parked his Camaro in the improvised lot near the pond on Bradley Jones’s ranch. There were scores of cars and a charter bus and a place for taxis and limos to drop off and pick up. A passenger helicopter lowered to a pad cut in the woodland beside the pond. Beth Petty waited for him to get her door and they walked toward the barnyard in the late afternoon.

Hood held a blue box with a white ribbon under one arm and Beth held his other. He wore a new navy suit and a white shirt and a tie and new shoes that had cost him dearly. Beth wore a beige knit dress with cut mother-of-pearl worked into the fabric, and their surfaces shimmered in the sun. Her hair was up and she had sapphires in her ears and around her neck. When Hood had picked her up and first seen her lovely face and chocolate eyes and the joyous blue jewelry, he was speechless. Suddenly he felt alive, when all he’d felt since Mexico was numb. He had smiled for the first time since Batopilas.

Now as the ranch came into view, Suzanne Jones surrounded him, the memory of her or the ghost of her, but Hood saw no reason to resist it and he didn’t try to. She barged right in. He remembered the light in her eyes and the volume of her body and the taste of her and he had a strong feeling that there was something special she wanted to tell him on this, the wedding day of her oldest son.

In the barnyard an oval ring had been made of pipe rail, complete with heavy wooden walls and bleachers all around. It looked like a rodeo ring. White bunting hung from the rails and the grandstand and the rain gutters of the barn and from the ranch house itself and from the arms of the floodlights surrounding the arena and from the generators that would power them. The tremendous old oak tree was hung with hundreds of tiny lights that even in the midday sun twinkled like fireflies.

They walked into the shade of a huge white tent and onto the gleaming wood of a great dance floor. The stage was big and raised, and Hood recognized two of the Inmates, the bass player and the lead guitarist, arguing over monitor placement. There was a long table already heaped with gifts, and Hood added his. It was a heavy lead crystal vase etched near the base with the date and the words
Bradley & Erin, Long May You Run.
He had ventured into Tiffany’s in all innocence, and the vase had chosen him.

Beyond the gift table was the bar. The bar itself was forty feet long and backed by a wall of mirrored shelves six feet high and filled with booze, and the barstools were cowhide, many of them taken. Four very beautiful barkeeps were tending and talking with the drinkers. They were done up like saloon dancers. There was a huge punch bowl on a table near the bar, and the pale pink liquid poured from a pitcher held by a glass maiden and spilled down tiers of scalloped ponds to the final basin.

“I think I’ll start with the punch and work up to the bar,” said Beth.

“Good call.”

Hood dipped gold-trimmed goblets into the stream and handed Beth the glass and touched it with the rim of his. “It’s good to be here with you,” he said.

They drank and she studied him. “You look better than you did a week ago, Charlie. There’s a little something coming back into your eyes.”

“Mexico took it out of me.”

“Maybe this day will put something back.”

“I’d like that.”

 

 

 

Another large tent was set up near the ranch house. At seven o’clock, with the sun lowering and the heat of the day broken by a distant onshore breeze, Erin came up the aisle through the neck-craning crowd, in a dazzling white satin dress with sequins and lace and a veil through which Hood saw her half-smiling face framed in the red ringlets of her hair and her eyes bright and composed and aware. Her maids were lovely.

Bradley wore a black notch-lapelled tuxedo with a black tie and cummerbund and he bore it as only a slender but well-proportioned man can do, making it casual and unimportant. He glanced at selected faces including Hood, his expression amused and alert. Hood studied Bradley’s retinue: little brother Jordan, Clayton the forger, Stone the thief, and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s sergeant Frank Cleary.

The service was Catholic due to the McKennas. The priest was round and big-toothed and smiled greatly. Hood found the ceremony overlong but moving. In his heart was happiness for Erin and sadness and some anger, too, because he believed that Bradley had already come to no good and that his foolishness would eventually harm her. Before he knew it, Bradley and Erin Jones were striding back down the aisle and the crowd was hollering with reckless abandon.

 

 

 

The warm-up band was Los Straitjackets
,
who played surf music and wore Mexican wrestling costumes. Hood was a guitar lover and he had played unpromisingly as a boy and always liked the reverbdrenched, double-lead twang of the Ventures and the Surfaris. When Los Straitjackets found a groove, Hood felt a giant metallic wave had broken over him, and notes of music were shearing off the walls to splash him.

He saw Bradley’s half brother, Kenny, just three years old now, race onto the dance floor and begin flailing about. His father, Ernest, watched him from the crowd, his big Hawaiian face stoic as an Easter Island statue’s. Hood had met them right here at this ranch two years ago. He could see that day. It had been his first assignment as an LASD homicide team trainee. He had driven way down here from L.A. to interview Suzanne Jones, whom he suspected of having witnessed a crime, and by the time he drove off forty minutes later, the path of his life had changed.