Iron River (14 page)

“Sure. And a new one I invented. I think you’ll love it.”

“You invented it?”

I nod. Sharon has always been drawn to inventions. I remember trying to impress her with my own inventions over the years. There was a battery-operated toilet bowl sweep based on the sweeps used to clean swimming pools, a device that kept umbrellas from folding up backward in the wind, a pepper-spray attachment that would fit any cell phone, and a better mousetrap that actually
was
better but far too expensive to build. I never sold any of them, though I came close with the toilet bowl sweep.

I can only imagine what she’ll make of the Love 32.

“Come on,” I say. “Rise and shoot.”

“I want to go say hi to some of the guys. Marcos here?”

“You bet. I’ll go with you. It’s really great having this place up and running again. And, Sharon? I’m really glad you’re here.”

“I realized this is the one place I can go where I have something to do and don’t have to explain myself.”

“It’s good to have a place like that.”

She sighs and stands and shakes her head. She looks at me for a good long time and I look back at her.

Of course I blush and of course she knows why.

“Ron, that’s insane.”

“No, Sharon. It’s the definition of sanity. I love you and always will and we both know it. It’s a simple truth. It has nothing to do with what you say or do. Deal with it.”

By then I’ve allowed myself to acknowledge the happiest truth of my life: Sharon Rose Novak has come to
me.

“Coffee. Thanks.”

 

 

 

Sharon and I make a provisions run and return to Pace Arms with a six-pack of Bohemia, a cold bottle of Stoli lemon vodka, ice, one pound of peanut butter-filled pretzels, and two cheese enchilada dinners from El Matador. Down at the firing range, we sit at stations four and five and eat the dinners from their foam boxes. Sharon dusts two beers and pours a stiff vodka over ice. She pulverizes dinner.

“I haven’t eaten since I got that letter,” she says.

After dinner, we set out a new silhouette target and run it back to fifty feet. If you’ve ever tried to hit a human-size target with a handgun at fifty feet, you know it’s harder than it sounds. Sharon blasts away with one of our .40-caliber Hawk automatics and she gets three of nine rounds in the black. Two hit outside in the white and one misses the paper altogether.

I motor in the target and examine it. “You can do better than this. Remember, it’s
Daryl
.”

Sharon gives me a dark look, and for a second I think she’s going to cry again. “Slap on a new one,” she says.

“You might want to try a different gun,” I say. From the station four gun safe, I remove the lacquered gun box given to me by Mom. I remove the Love 32 and show Sharon how it transforms from a rather homely .32 semiautomatic pistol to a silenced machine pistol. She watches and frowns as I affect the transformation. When I finally slam home the beautifully curved fifty-shot magazine—no rounds in it yet—Sharon takes the weapon and shakes her head.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you. I’ve named it the Love 32.”

“Why?”

I explain the Murrieta angle. Predictably, Sharon has never heard of and is not one bit interested in Joaquin or Harry Love and is somewhat grossed out by the severed head.

“Whatever, Ron.”

“You won’t say ‘whatever’ when you’ve fired it.”

I load the weapon and lecture her on the muzzle-rise tendencies of machine guns. I show her how to press down with her left hand on the air-cooled comb. I run the target back to about thirty feet so Sharon can wallop Daryl hard. She drains her second sizable vodka rocks and takes her position behind the firing line of station five. Let me say for the record that I’ve never seen a more beautiful sight in my life than Sharon Rose Novak standing ready at the firing line with the Love 32. She looks back at me still red-nosed and hostile, then she turns and unleashes a full auto, five-second, fifty-round fusillade that makes very little sound beyond the metallic chiming of empties on the carpet and the quick rip of paper and the smacking of bullets hitting the sandbags that line the far wall. She saws Daryl pretty much in half. She safes the gun and points the barrel to the floor and looks at me. Strangely.

“Again?”

“Of course.”

“Goodie.”

She pours and drinks most of another glass of vodka while I load the Love 32. When I bring in the line for a new target, Sharon hands me the letter from Daryl.

“Head,” she says.

I find some tape in the station four tool bin and fix the letter directly on the target’s head. “Sharon, don’t forget the muzzle rise.”

“You think I’m drunk.”

“You should be drunk by now.”

She gives me a wicked laugh and sweeps up the Love 32 and takes her position. I send the target out to forty feet.

“Ten feet more,” she says.

So it is done. I sit back and cross my arms and watch Sharon lay serious waste to Daryl’s poetic good-bye letter. She keeps her head steady, but her hair bounces with the vibration of her body. As do her small but lively breasts on either side of the peace sign. She holds down the barrel with her left hand, just like a pro. Scraps of letter jump into the air—all of imbecile Daryl’s pretty adjectives and big-bore nouns and elegant verbs, his
cannot
and his
devil
and his
soul.
The poor windbag has obviously made the biggest mistake of his life.

Then Sharon lowers the gun and just stands there looking out at the target. She sighs and sets the Love 32 on my station bench and goes back and slumps into the seat at station five. She finishes the vodka and pours another. She tears into the peanut butter-filled pretzels and eats a handful.

I break down the Love 32 and stow it back in the gun box. I bring the target forward and unclip it, and with the tatters of the letter still taped on, I fold it in half a few times and set it on the firing bench. I collect the brass in a plastic bucket—range rules.

All the while, I keep half an eye on Sharon. She sits unmoving except to raise the vodka to her lips, staring downrange. Her expression is glazed and her hair is in her face. The pretzel bag slips off her lap and spills to the carpet. Time passes. To help pass it, I check my cell for messages and text Bradley that the first run is coming off as I write. I tell him the units are exceptionally beautiful, though I haven’t seen a production line gun yet. It never hurts to beat the drums ahead of time. I stare at station two for a long moment while I think of Dad. He wanted me to follow Mom into marketing, but Chester said that I would head production and later graduate into R&D. So much for that. I did my own R&D and came up with the Love 32. All Pace Arms had to do was go bankrupt to give me my opportunity.

“I wish I had a sister,” says Sharon. Her voice is low and thick. “If I had a sister, I wouldn’t be so fucked up.”

“You’re only temporarily fucked up. If you were chipper right now, you wouldn’t be normal.”

“I don’t want to face all those people tonight.”

“Then don’t.”

“I don’t want to shoot Daryl anymore.”

“Then don’t shoot him.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Do nothing.”

“I don’t feel so good.”

“I’ll help you up. You can have the penthouse. The water pressure in the shower is terrific. It can blast a potential hangover right out through your pores. I’ve done it.”

“I don’t feel so good. Did I already say that?”

“Sharon, let’s stand up and hop right over to that elevator.”

We ride the elevator with her head on my shoulder. I pretty much hold her up. I get her to the penthouse couch and change the bed-sheets. When I come back to the living room, she’s curled up, breathing fast. Then she starts in with those high-pitched moans that flutter on the ends, and I shoulder her up and to the bathroom and lay her gently on the cool marble floor and get some good hot water going in the shower.

I shut the door and wait outside. A few minutes later, I hear her banging around. Then she gets sick. That takes a while but there’s still something feminine, almost dainty about it. Then the shower door slides open and shut. She sighs hugely. She mutters. Nearly an hour later, I’m sitting in the living room and I hear the bathroom door open and the meaty pad of bare feet on hardwood. Then the bedroom door shuts.

I hustle downstairs to the range and collect the pretzels. Back in my office, I make myself a drink and set up the sleeper couch. I eat and drink on the foldout bed and read Winston Churchill’s
The Gathering Storm
then watch some true crime reruns on TV. When the show is over I read until late, but even with lights out I can’t get to sleep.

I smile in the dark and I know why I can’t sleep. I’ve got a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar deal working downstairs and the only woman I’ve ever dreamed of asleep in my bed a hundred feet away.

This is the happiest night of my life, so far, and I want it to last.

 

 

 

 

H
ood introduced himself to Owens Finnegan through the security screen door of her El Centro home. He held up his shield wallet and said her father had asked him to look in on her. He couldn’t see her through the small perforations in the steel. Her voice was pleasant and soft.

“Dad’s okay?”

“He’s in the hospital in Buenavista.”

“Please come in.”

She was on the tall side and slender, just as her father had said. Her hair was brown and wavy and cut above the shoulders, with bangs almost to her eyebrows. Her eyes were light gray and calm. She wore a crisp blue pin-striped dress shirt over a pair of jeans and she was barefoot, with a silver or stainless steel chain around one ankle. There was a pearl on each ear. Her skin was pale. She was beautiful and she had neither the air nor the appearance of joy.

The living room was small and had two director’s chairs with blue canvas seats and backs facing the door. There was no other furniture and no pictures hung or plants growing. There were half a dozen cardboard boxes against one wall. The carpet was dark green and old.

“Just moving in?” asked Hood.

“I’ve been here two weeks. I don’t have a lot.”

“Do you move around?”

“When it’s time. I’d offer you coffee, but I don’t have any. There is water.”

“Please.”

Hood looked around the barren room and listened to the water running in the kitchen. She came back with two cups, and when she handed him one, he saw inside her shirt cuff the end of a scar that wrapped out of sight beneath her wrist. The cups were foam and the water was room temperature.

She regarded the room. “I dislike confined spaces. There’s a picnic table in the backyard and it’s in the shade this time of day. We can sit out there.”

The lawn was a stubble of tan crabgrass, but a peppertree shaded the table and benches. Hood sat across from her and told her what had happened to her father, and how he was doing now at Imperial Mercy, and how they had found ninety thousand dollars in cash in a tool chest in his truck.

She nodded as if she had heard all this before. “Did he tell you the bathroom products story or the wealthy family from Napa County story?”

“Bathroom products.”

“There are other stories, too.”

“Any of them true?”

“Everything he says is partially true. You haven’t really seen him, have you—his face as he speaks to you, I mean.”

“No. His whole head is wrapped up.”

“Well, to understand my father, you have to see him. I learned to watch his face as he talked to me. When you do that, something about him slowly becomes evident. It can take quite a while to realize it.”

“And what’s that?”

“He’s insane.”

Hood considered. He had once browsed the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
and been impressed by the sheer number of them, and the way they were classified and differentiated. He thought again of his sister, whose sanity seemed to be dwindling until her brain tumor was discovered, and how quickly her sanity was salvaged when the tumor was removed. He thought of the bullet taken from behind Mike Finnegan’s cheek and wondered if it could have caused mental disturbances.

“What’s his diagnosis?”

“Paranoid schizophrenia. He’s been treated for it most of his adult life.”

“In institutions?”

“Occasionally. He’s not a danger to himself or others. No violence.”

“Does he take medications?”

“I truly don’t know. He’s always been sensitive and secretive about his condition.”

“What can you tell me about the bullet in his head?”

In the outdoor sunlight, the gray of her eyes looked like polished nickel, and Hood had never seen eyes of this color.

“You said he was hit by a car,” said Owens.

“They found a bullet lodged behind his cheekbone, below his left eye. They said it looked like it had been there quite a while.”

“He never told me he was shot. That’s Dad for you.”

“That’s just a little hard to believe, Ms. Finnegan.”

“You don’t know how many things about my father are hard to believe, Deputy Hood.”

“He must have a facial scar.”

“There is a small scar below his cheek. But he always said it was caused by a boyhood injury in the vineyard in Napa.”

“Did your father and mother get along?”

“She died of a heart attack not long after I was born. My father remembers her fondly. He loved her.”

“Did he ever take you to her grave?”

“She was cremated and scattered in the Pacific.”

“What was her name?”

“Bernice.”

She looked away and Hood found her scar, a raised and jagged thing lying in wait inside the buttoned cuff.