Iron River (7 page)

Ron Pace collapsed to the sand and Herredia stepped over him and came up the beach. Bradley watched the smoke rise and vanish, heard a groan, saw the boat heading toward the dock fast, the men with their hat bills low and serious.

“Zetas,” said Felipe.

“Not anymore,” said Bradley. He walked back to the spool table and took a red plastic bucket and carried it down to the water and let it fill halfway. Then he came back over and poured the cold seawater over Pace’s face. Bradley dropped the inverted bucket to the sand and sat on it and lit a cigarette and waited for Ron to come to. He took out his cell phone and checked it, then heaved it out into the ocean. He watched the boatmen load the bodies into the boat, swinging the dead by ankles and wrists high until their own weight carried them over the gunwales and they hit the deck with thumps that became less hollow as their numbers mounted.

“Holy shit,” said Pace.

“Little holiness here,” said Bradley.

“Five men.”

“A hundred a week. Two hundred. Heads on stakes. Mendez against the Zetas. We don’t know how many are dying.”

“I may vomit.”

“No one cares about your vomit. Stand up and shake it off, Ron. It’s time to negotiate with Mendez.”

“He’s Herredia.”

“Herredia, then. Stand up. Clear your brain. We’ve got a deal to make.”

 

 

 

Late that night they sat on a tile veranda overlooking the Pacific. Bradley watched the moonlight shiver on the water and heard the palm fronds rattle in the breeze. He felt culpably brutal but he was not a man given to self-doubt.

Pace proposed to manufacture one thousand guns, two large-capacity magazines for each firearm and one sound suppressor each, for one million cash dollars. He pointed out that this was roughly one-half the cost of used Chinese- and Indian-made submachine guns in God-knew-what condition, and only one-third the cost of new ones—few of them concealable and none of them silenced. They would be warranted free of defects for one year. The guns would bear no serial numbers or manufacturer’s marks except for
Love 32
on the right side of each barrel.

Pace handed Herredia some Polaroids of the Pace Arms building, the mold and dye bays, the assembly lines, the firing lines, the offices. Herredia looked at them patiently in the light from a tiki torch.

“I think the thirty-two ACP is a weak load,” he said.

“Tell the five dead men that,” said Pace.

“I want to rename the gun,” said Herredia. “Something about death or the devil.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mendez, but it’s the Love 32. This is nonnegotiable. History . . . ,” he added absently, staring out at the water. Herredia brooded and glowered and tried to ply Pace with fine tequila and wine and fishing stories but Pace responded with a series of knock-knock jokes until Bradley finally butt in and suggested that he shut the fuck up and make a deal.

Pace came off his price a hundred grand, while making clear that all transportation and shipping was one-hundred-percent Mr. Mendez’s responsibility.

“Shipping is not an interest of mine,” Herredia said, with a look at Bradley. “Mr. Jones here is very good at moving things from one place to another. Between us, the transport will go smoothly.” At first, Bradley hadn’t liked El Tigre’s quip about the stolen Red Cross helo carrying more cash and guns than any vehicle. Bradley had no patience with men who didn’t value a good ally when they were lucky enough to have one. If Herredia wanted to move his own dollars and guns, then let him. But now it sounded like Herredia was offering to share the machine. A helo. Interesting.

“And I’ll need one-third of the nine hundred thousand dollars up front so I can order materials, hire my crew back, retool the lines for a totally new product, and make enough molds and dyes to crank out the units fast,” Ron said.

Pace had told Bradley this a few days ago when he’d made his proposal over martinis, so Herredia was prepared for it. Herredia told Pace that there would be three hundred thousand cash in small bills waiting for them in a Compton warehouse just as soon as they could get there to pick it up.

Pace told Herredia that, once operational, he would run one assembly crew—his finest—on seven twelve-hour shifts per week, with two hundred and fifty units ready for pickup in ten days. The full one thousand would take until midsummer, three weeks out.

“Your enemies will never know what hit them,” he said.

Bradley was prepared for Herredia to pitch smug Ron Pace off the balcony and be done with the
pendejo.
Ever since the death of Gustavo Armenta, El Tigre had expected vengeance on Americans from Benjamin, which meant American retaliation, which would be very, very bad for business. Herredia was irritable enough without being cajoled by a wiseass gunmaker. He just wanted his thousand machine pistols, value priced, and he wanted them soon.

“Tonight I will say a long prayer that I am not in business with a fool,” said Herredia. “
Ándale.
You have work to do.”

He stood and shook hands with the gunmaker. Felipe watched from a corner. Two pistoleros left the darkness and escorted Pace and Bradley to the car.

 

 

 

 

T
wo days after the Buenavista shoot-out and one day after the disappearance of Jimmy Holdstock, Hood and his Blowdown team let themselves into Victor Davis’s townhome in Yuma, Arizona.

They were looking for guns. They searched the living room, kitchen, and small dining room without success. The master bedroom entertainment center yielded pornographic DVDs but no firearms. Hood noted that the framed picture of a lovely woman on Davis’s nightstand was actually the sample photo sold with the frame. The Frame Shop sticker was still on the back. The dream girl had cost Victor $9.99. In the master closet hung two dozen dark suits, at least a dozen white shirts, and maybe thirty ties.

But the guest bedroom held pay dirt: four plastic bins under the bed, containing forty-eight used small-caliber handguns. Many were in poor shape, Hood saw. Six more bins stacked neatly up on a closet shelf held the big stuff: six .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolvers, four .44 Magnum autoloaders, ten .38 Detective Special revolvers, twelve Pace Arms nine-millimeter automatics, and two FN 5.57s. They were used but in fine condition.

Bly pointed to the FNs. “They penetrate body armor. The cartel gunmen call them
asesino de policía—
cop killers.”

Hood immediately thought of Holdstock again. He looked at Ozburn and Bly and knew that they were thinking of him, too. Hood feared the worst. Holdstock had vanished somewhere between San Diego and El Centro the day before. His car was missing, too, suggesting willful flight. But Holdstock had a family. Holdstock was stand-up. Hood thought he’d been murdered or abducted in retaliation for the shooting of Gustavo Armenta. Zetas. Abducted was worse.

“Okay,” said Ozburn. “We’re having another Jimmy moment. I’m gonna think a prayer for him right now where we stand. You two can join me or not.”

Hood bowed his head and closed his eyes. He sensed Bly doing the same. He asked for Holdstock’s safe return. He pictured Jimmy flipping the burgers at the barbecue he’d hosted for Hood before Hood had moved to Buenavista. It was a nice afternoon, and those few hours between them made Jimmy the best friend Hood had in this vast desert. His wife and daughters were a delight.
Help him, help him.

“Amen,” said Ozburn. “You didn’t think that ATF could be so much fun, did you, Charlie?”

“It never stops.” Hood smiled to himself. He liked these people. He liked the way they refused to call themselves ATFE, just the old ATF was what they said. Ozburn had quipped once that it was ATFE but the
E
was silent.

There were four shotguns stacked in one corner of the closet and long rifles stacked in the other. The closet floor was lined with green military surplus ammo boxes, and when Hood toed them, he could tell they were full. He squatted and opened one and looked at the neat boxes of .44 Magnum loads, factory made.

Hood had quickly learned that Arizona was the widest and deepest part of the Iron River. It was legal to buy guns in Arizona with minimal ID, a cursory background check, and no wait. Then a gun owner could sell, trade, carry, and conceal with almost no paperwork. Many dealers both licensed and unlicensed worked out of their homes, just like Victor. Hood had seen handguns for sale in scores of gun shops in Arizona towns, in liquor stores, even in the convenience stores of gas stations along the scenic state highways.

“We yanked Victor’s license a year ago,” said Ozburn. “He sold to some straw buyers plugged into the Tijuana Cartel. He sold to young mothers in east L.A. We couldn’t build a case, so we closed him down. But Victor didn’t miss a beat. Gun heaven, man, pistol paradise. Most of this iron would have hit the streets in the next three months if Victor hadn’t run up against his own product. He’d sell the beat-up shit guns to the inner-city bangers. The heavy stuff he’d sell to the cartels. The badder the bad guys, the better their guns are.”

Bly ran a metal detector through the house in search of more. Ozburn safed and photographed and logged the guns and put them into ATFE lockboxes for transport.

Hood found a briefcase stuffed with ATFE Firearm Transaction Records and appointment books under the living room sofa. He’d seen such forms before—each dealer was required to complete and sign one for each sale, then keep it in his possession. If the dealer went out of business, he was supposed to send the forms back to ATFE for storage, but Victor Davis was noncompliant. Hood wondered at a system that trusted the crooks to follow the procedures.

He set the briefcase on the kitchen counter and rifled through the forms. They’d been thrown in loose. He found dates ranging from 2004 through June of 2009, when ATFE had pulled Victor Davis’s federal firearms license. Hood knew that 2004 was when the Iron River began to swell—cartel competition, another surge of Mexican law enforcement, another hike in the prices of street drugs across the United States. Now it was a flood and he was part of the levee.

He ran one hand through the piles of forms. Hundreds of them. All makes of guns, all calibers, from .22-short derringers to 10-gauge riot guns. The buyers were mostly men, but not all. The prices ranged from fifty dollars for a used Lorcin .25 to seven hundred and fifty dollars for a new Colt .45 ACP. The names were Dalrymple and Johnson and Gutierrez and Hoades and Valenzuela and Milliken and Djorik and on and on and on. Hundreds and hundreds more.

Hood pulled up a barstool and flipped through, arranging the sales by year.

A Beretta nine for Wilson of Oceanside.

A Taurus .38 for Foxx of Commerce.

He thought about Holdstock and his car. The car gave Hood hope, but not much hope. Holdstock had had enough? Run out on his wife and daughters? Run away to Mexico in order to stretch a modest federal paycheck? What quality of hope was this?

A Savage Arms 12-gauge for Mendoza of Yuma.

A Ruger .22 for Pfleuger of Santa Ana.

A Colt .45 for Lochte of Tempe.

Mendoza of Yuma, the Ruger for Pfleuger, Lochte of Tempe. Like poetry, thought Hood: bad fucking poetry. Maybe Holdstock ran his car off the highway and CHP hadn’t found it yet. Was this hope at all?

A Pace Arms for Gowdy of Phoenix.

A Bryco for Stevens of Alpine.

More likely the Zetas had grabbed him and used his own car to take him across. If that was true, Hood thought, then he was probably beheaded by now and someone would find his body in one place and his head in another, and the Iron River would have swept away another life. The cartels had never come north to grab a U.S. lawman. Now they had accomplished what before they had never dared. The old rules were gone. The word
unraveling
came to Hood’s mind. He saw the ends of fresh-cut ropes twisting in a bitter wind.

A Winchester for Lopez of L.A.

A Lorcin for Barret of . . . who cares?

A Charter Arms for . . .

A .40-caliber derringer for Allison Murrieta of Norwalk, California.

Hood looked away and took a deep breath and let it out and looked back at the FTR.

Allison Murrieta/Suzanne Jones. Take your pick. He recognized her bold handwriting. It conjured her voice and the shape of her face and the feel of her body and the taste of her breath. She had been shot with that derringer in her hand, not quite ready to use it against a boy. It was ivory-handled and beautifully tooled. Now it was Hood’s gun, bequeathed wordlessly to Hood by Allison’s son.

Hood held the form and looked at her signature and in spite of everything he felt at this moment, he smiled.

 

 

 

As he put the
FTRs in chronological order, Hood looked for patterns. His ATFE task force trainers in Los Angeles had been pattern crazy. Most of Victor Davis’s customers were male, though there was a group of females aged twenty-two to thirty-five, all with east L.A. addresses. This pattern was common: Inner-city moms afraid for their children were often targeted by gun pushers. But an opposing pattern existed, too: Inner-city moms were also often straw buyers purchasing weapons for homies and husbands and boy-friends. Hood had learned that once a buyer purchased two or more handguns in five or fewer days, the dealer was supposed to file an ATFE Multiple Sales Form. These were kept on file in regional ATFE offices, and a pattern of heavy MSF filings suggested organized trafficking. Of course straw buyers knew this, so they would change to the “lie and buy” method, which was to use a counterfeit ID. These IDs not only disguised the true identity of the buyer but easily passed the brief Arizona state background check because fictitious people aren’t listed in databases. If a licensed firearms dealer was scrupulous, he would report any suspicious sales to ATFE. If not, or if the bogus driver’s licenses were convincing, then dealers could sell deadly weapons to criminals with records of violence, underage buyers, the insane, the undocumented, the drunk, the high, or the furious—or to anyone wanting to make money as a middleman for the cartels. A dealer with a pattern of sales to such people always sent up red flags in the ATFE computers, but by the time the flags waved, it was often too late.