Iron River (16 page)

“Don’t forget my straw,” called Finnegan.

 

 

 

Hood took the elevator up to the sixth floor but one of the uniformed deputies outside Holdstock’s room said that Jimmy was sleeping. The deputy said Jimmy was doing okay—his wife and kids were in earlier. He looked okay. Right now Holdstock was in dreamland.

Hood asked to just peek in and when he did, he saw Jimmy on his back with his hands bundled into gigantic white appendages that lay beside him. His face twitched and it was a color between white and blue and covered with sweat. Hood got the nurse to look and she said it was good, always good when they can sleep through pain like that.

Hood took the stairs down, and on the third level he saw two U.S. marshals standing guard at the landing door. The stairwell air was hot and still, and Hood’s footsteps echoed flatly. The marshals recognized Hood and stood in deference as he came down the steps.

“Deputy Hood,” said one.

“What’s this?”

“A Gulf Cartel heavy who got himself shot up last night. We have to give the creeps top-notch medical care and protect them from their enemies, right?”

“When did he come in?”

“Early this morning. Hey, terrific work down there. I heard your guy had it pretty hard.”

“Yeah. They tell me he’s doing better.”

“When they start letting marshals join the war parties, I’m signing up. Take some scalps. What are you guys going to do next—Blowdown, I mean?”

“Just our jobs.”

“Keep up the good work.”

Hood nodded and headed down the stairs. He called his mother and they talked for a few minutes, then Hood asked her to get the two letters he had written and read them out loud to him.

Standing in the shade of the Imperial Mercy entryway, Hood listened to his mother’s voice as she read. He remembered that same voice reading stories to him when he was young, remembered the Bakersfield living room in which they sat, remembered his mother as the young woman she no longer was.

The name Holdstock was not in the letters.

Then Hood talked briefly with his father, who sounded clear and rational and before hanging up said, “I love you, Anderson,” Anderson being his father’s friend shot down over Khe Sanh in 1968 and never heard from again.

 

 

 

 

H
oldstock in fact was dreaming he was in Imperial Mercy Hospital. In his dream the deputies outside his door talked quietly, Hood looked in on him, a nurse spoke to Hood just outside his door. He was aware of everything in his room. It was exactly like the one he occupied when not dreaming except that lying back-flat against the ceiling was a blue-faced werewolf that looked down on him, affixed to that surface by the logic of terror. He couldn’t open his eyes and look at it. Even from within this dream, Jimmy was sure he was dreaming and he knew the blue-faced werewolf wasn’t really there, but he couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes and look because he might be wrong. He knew the cost of being wrong. He tried to muster a dream-shattering scream, one that would explode him and the monster out of it—his body shook and his mouth gaped and his lungs heaved from their very depths, but not even a whisper of sound came out.

Earlier in the dream, Jenny and the girls were standing above him and he looked up into their faces. Gustavo Armenta stood between the girls, holding their hands, pale as death. Their expressions were searching, as if he were a river and they were looking for something on its bottom. Jenny. Patricia. Matilda. Gustavo. They were talking about him as if he weren’t there. The blue-faced werewolf was stuck up on the ceiling, and Jimmy had to face his family and smile while the beast stared down at all of them from just a few feet away.

In the dream, when he couldn’t take it any longer, Jimmy sprang out of bed and lunged up at the ceiling with both hands, but he felt his fingers wither and his hands melt and his arms dissolve until they were only short stumps that smoldered at the ends like wet firewood as he waved them impotently at the werewolf. Jenny and Patricia and Matilda pressed him back into the bed and told him everything was all right now and they looked down at him again with their searching expressions and continued talking about him as if he weren’t there.

Later a nurse shook him awake. It seemed to take hours for Jimmy to swim up through the heavy sedated layers of sleep. Then he burst into the world. It was like being born. She told him it was time to eat something and she raised his bed with the control. Jimmy felt the blood rush from his head and his heart pounding hard and fast and he smelled the high-pitched stink of fear coming up from the blanket. He glanced up at the ceiling and felt the dry approximation of a smile crack across his lips.

 

 

 

 

H
ood walked into Gun Barn and felt the cooled air hit his hot, damp shirt. There were customers at the counter and in the aisles. Hanging fluorescent tubes cast a nervous light on the men and the racks of long guns. He noted three security cameras without even really looking for them. He smelled gun oil and steel.

“Help ya?”

The man before him wore a Glock on his hip and a black leather vest and star-shaped badge that read DALLAS.

“Charlie Hood for John Crockett.”

“Appointment?”

“Eleven.”

“Good, because he’s the owner and you have to have an appointment.”

Hood badged Dallas. A man behind the counter, black-vested and star-badged also, looked over at Hood, then went back to his customer.

“Mr. Crockett will be right with you.”

Hood browsed the racks of long guns, mostly used, mostly old American military guns. The prices were good. Some had the bayonets still on. The semiautomatic rifles and carbines were lashed together with locking cables through the trigger guards. He browsed the counter, looking down at the handguns, everything from two-shot ivory-handled derringers to a Casull .50 caliber. He saw some nice Colt 1911s similar to the one his grandfather had given him and that he occasionally carried on duty. There was an archery section that had bows very similar to Luna’s. The crossbow section was large. Hood saw blowguns and throwing stars and throwing knives and high-powered slingshots similar to the ones he had owned as a boy. The knives ranged in size from huge bowie knives to tiny dirks. There were battle swords and Japanese fighting swords and decorative swords and lances and scimitars and dueling foils and medieval execution axes and scythes for the Grim Reaper. Farther back in the store, he found open crates of surplus antipersonnel bombs and neutered hand grenades and brass. There were government-issue flashlights and wristwatches and helmets and flak jackets and combat boots and K rations and parachutes. The clothing section featured everything from underwear to sports coats in a variety of camouflage patterns. The security cameras watched him.

The man from behind the counter appeared beside Hood. “Sorry. We’re busy. I’m Crockett.”

“Can we talk in your office?”

“I can talk anywhere I want.”

Crockett led them around the pistol counter and checkout stands, down a short hallway, and through swinging saloon doors with a KEEP OUT sign with a picture of a gun barrel pointing out at you. Crockett let the doors swing shut, but Hood had his hand up in plenty of time. Crockett was short and big-eared and wore his hair in a crisp flattop so that, viewed from behind, his head looked like a wing nut.

The office was spacious and carpeted and lit with the same jittery fluorescents as the showroom. One wall was a bank of video monitors, ten in all, each fed by a separate camera in the showroom and one at the rear exit. There was a big steel desk behind which Crockett sat and began to trim a dark-leafed pyramid cigar. He snipped a hole in the small end, then lit it with a lighter shaped like a hand grenade. Hood waited as he puffed and rotated the cigar and the smoke wavered out and up.

“Shoot,” he said.

“You know the deal. You see us here every other month. Suspicious sales, suspected straw men, bad guys. It’s your responsibility to report all of that to us, but since you almost never do, we have the pleasure of coming out to where you are.”

“I love you feds. You make doing your jobs sound like the twelve labors of Hercules.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Mr. Crockett. You’re just a small man. Maybe you can offer me something meaningful today.”

“You’re new.”

“To Blowdown.”

“Something meaningful? Sure. Maybe you can tell me what this means. A couple of years back, I sold guns to a couple of guys I didn’t like the looks of. They cleared the FBI check. They had valid ID. They did the wait period, and their check cleared, the whole deal. But I had second thoughts, so I called the feebs. The FBI. The ATF. I left messages and I e-mailed them, too, just to make sure there was some kind of paper trail. Well, guess what. I never got so much as a call back. No e-mail, no nothing. And that, Mr. Hood, is why I don’t relish you coming in here and hassling my ass while there’s paying customers waiting for my help.”

“So in the last two months you haven’t sold a gun to anyone who raised your suspicions?”

“That’s right. We get our share of dumbass crazies who can’t even pass the background. But if I called you guys every time one of them walked in here, you’d have to set up an office in the parking lot. I mean, look at that guy on camera six. You count from upper left across, then down, to arrive at six. Good. See that guy? He’s come in every week for five years trying to buy a Desert Eagle. Look at his clothes. Look at his hair. He lives under that bridge on Fire-house Road. Eats out of Dumpsters. He’s crazy as a shithouse rat and I won’t sell him anything in my store. So don’t tell me I don’t do my job.”

“I had more sophisticated buyers in mind. There’s a war going on down in Mexico right now, Mr. Crockett. It’s left six thousand people dead. Five hundred of them have been cops and judges. Some are women and children. They’re getting those guns from us. Every time the Mexican government asks us for a weapon trace, it comes back to a U.S. dealer.”

Crockett turned his cigar and puffed and blew a plume out at Hood. “Whatever you say. You’re talking about six thousand pistoleros, not everyday people. Bad guys kill other bad guys. From where I sit, it’s Mexico’s fault. They hardly check cars coming into their own country. You ever think of that? I sell a legal product for self-defense. I sell to people who pass the background and have legal ID. I can’t control what happens later. In case it’s never occurred to you, my taxes pay your salary. Those animals down there are the killing machines, not the guns. Not me.”

Hood watched the video monitors for a moment. He watched the blue smoke drift across the screens.

“No suspicious sales?” he asked.

“Not one.”

“Look at these pictures, please. Tell me if you recognize any of the men.”

Crockett looked at his watch and sighed. “Okay.”

Hood pulled the folded sheets of images from his shirt pocket. There were four pictures per page. Most were made from digital surveillance videos, some from old VHS tape. Some were clear and some were not. All were unidentified. But ATFE had gotten tips that put these men under suspicion, and all had been seen along this stretch of the Iron River.

Crockett flipped through them, shaking his head. He set one aside. Then another. He held them up and pointed. “Here. I’ve seen this guy and this guy in my store.”

Hood collected the hot list. “When?”

“Impossible to say. Last six months, probably. Or I’d have forgotten them by now.”

“Did they purchase?”

“I’ve got a brain up here, not a computer. I can’t remember every buyer. Impossible. I’ve got all the Firearm Transaction Records, just like you require. You can go through them anytime you want. See? I cooperate. I care.”

“I’d like to see the FTRs for the last sixty days.”

“I’ll get Dallas to help you. I’ve got better things to do than sit here and watch you sound out the big words.”

“You’re funny.”

Crockett smiled around his cigar at Hood and called up front for Dallas.

Hood read through the records and wrote down information on buyers who didn’t look quite right. He had little more to go on than their names and addresses and their handwriting. They had cleared the backgrounds and shown good ID and paid good money for their guns and ammo. He tried to think in patterns, as his ATFE instructors had drilled into him. He saw no patterns, just men buying guns. Dallas tried to help, giving his opinion on some of the buyers, prying ATFE hiring information out of Hood. Dallas was fixin’ to join up someday.

 

 

 

Hood drove toward Calipatria through the ferocious middle day, heat wavering up from the horizon like fumes, the asphalt before him pooling with liquid nonexistent but appearing as smooth as mercury. He thought of the lives he had taken near Mulege. In the dazed aftermath of the shoot-out, Hood had retraced his steps and found the last of the four men he had killed. He had knelt beside him but he didn’t know what to do. The older man’s body lay heavily in the desert sand and it seemed to Hood to be as individual and as important as himself, more advanced on its earthly journey and therefore worthy of respect. But Hood still didn’t know what to do. He wanted to believe in an accessible and generous heaven awaiting most men, but this was not the Christian arrangement that he had been taught, so he did nothing. He found the three others and did nothing also and he told himself fuck it, they chose this life and I chose the flip side of it and we all signed on with our eyes open. There was no way Hood could feel superior of soul in this wind-blown, bullet-ruled patch of torture and death.

The manager at Rudy’s Gun Room had not sold guns or ammunition to any suspicious buyers. He was a pleasant but vague man with a large mushroom cap of a mole growing from his right cheek. Hood had the feeling that as a seller of firearms, he was neither observant nor discriminating. He walked Hood to the door and waved him off like a relative discharging an obligation.