Iron River (40 page)

 

Half an hour later, Hood saw two of the gunmakers walk from the warehouse into the yard lights and continue down the ramp. They moved self-consciously, as if they knew they were being watched. The short one wore a Dodgers cap, and the taller one a rugby shirt and a windbreaker.

They moved across the shipping yard, past the Sun King motor home to the black Econoline. The short one keyed open the driver’s door and hit the UNLOCK button and climbed inside. The engine came to life.

“Frank, we’ve got the two workers in the van. They’re taking off.” Hood watched the van pass through the yard lights to the gate, and the gate slide open on its runners. It was heavy on its back wheels. It bounced dramatically as it crossed the gate runner. The driver signaled his turn onto the empty street.

“They’re riding heavy,” said Hood. “They’re yours, Frank.”

“What, you heading for Denny’s?”

“Just a hunch.”

“The Grand Slam breakfast is still the best.”

In his rearview, Hood saw Frank’s unit four SUV start up. Ahead of him he saw the black van signaling its next turn.

 

 

 

Hood sat and waited. An hour later, Ron Pace reappeared on the loading dock with Sharon. They held hands and each pulled a small rolling suitcase. Pace dropped her hand to answer his phone. No Chester. The sun was rising. Ron looked around as if expecting someone or something. He nodded and put the phone back on his hip. Sharon wore khaki slacks and a light sweater and carried a blue-and-white purse that matched her athletic shoes.

Hood watched Ron check his watch, then say something to Sharon, and they walked down the ramp and across to the Sun King. Ron set his suitcase by the motor home. Then he stacked the plastic chairs and set them aside and removed the legs from the awning. He went inside and a moment later, the awning retracted onto its roller. Sharon followed him into the motor home, collapsing the handle of her rolling bag and heaving it up the steps to Pace. A moment later he came back and got his own suitcase and carried it in and shut the door behind him.

The Sun King started up with a rumble and a cough of smoke that rose into the beams of the yard lights. Then the motor home lurched toward the exit gate, slowed, and made the cumbersome turn onto the street. Its headlights came on, and Hood watched it turn out of sight toward the boulevard before starting his engine.

He followed well back. The Sun King was large and easy to see in the growing light and there was already generous traffic heading down the surface streets for the freeways.

Hood clicked his other headset when his cell phone rang.

“Ozburn, checking in.”

“Two of the gunmakers rolled in the Econoline,” said Hood. “Frank’s on them. Pace and Sharon just pulled out in the Sun King. They’re dressed up nice and they’ve got overnight luggage.”

“Roger. We’re about seventy miles from Tecate. These guys are oblivious. Dumb as sticks.”

Hood followed the Sun King south on Bristol Street, headed for the freeways. The fog was thinning and the traffic was thickening and Hood had the unhappy thought that Ron and Sharon were getting away for a couple of days, maybe to celebrate the big sale. But Pace didn’t get onto the San Diego Freeway and he didn’t get onto the 73 and he didn’t get onto the 55.

Hood eased up to let more cars between them. Pace made a left onto Red Hill, then a quick right on Lear, and Hood realized they were taking the back way into John Wayne Airport.

He remembered that this south end of the airport was for private and charter aircraft, and smaller cargo planes. He watched the Sun King turn onto Airway and roll up to a small commercial hangar. Hood pulled off the road and watched from three hundred yards away. The motor home approached the hangar, but it didn’t stop. Instead it accelerated across the tarmac like a runaway horse. Hood traced its path but saw nothing. Then he took up his binoculars and saw a Red Cross CH-47 cargo helicopter idling far out on the vaporous edge of the runway, its cargo bay open and waiting like the maw of some great beast. The Sun King charged into view, aimed straight for it.

He gunned the Yukon back onto Red Hill. He ran the stop signs at Lear and Airway and skidded a left turn toward the hangar. At fifty miles an hour he veered off road across the infield straight toward the runway and the Sun King. It was less than half a mile out. He saw the motor home slow to a stop, then crawl a few yards forward onto the lift, a man directing with hand signals. Hood stood on the gas. He was only a quarter mile away by then, but as he watched, the cargo lift rose and the transport helo swallowed the motor home whole. The director scrambled up into the cockpit. Hood hit a hundred, throwing infield dirt that rose into the rearview. He felt the tires riding the shocks high up into the wheel wells as he flattened reflectors and runway lights and a row of red plastic pylons dividing the tarmac. Then he was suddenly upon the huge helicopter, and Hood had to veer right to miss it and as he did, the CH-47 lifted off into the sky with a thundering rebuke of dust and sound.

The Yukon shuddered into a skidless horseshoe turn and Hood stomped on the gas again. Through the windshield the helo was so close he could see the new welds on the underbelly and the bright new red cross on its clean white background. Then the steel monster was suddenly high above him and climbing hard west toward the Pacific. He pursued across the tarmac. But the distance between the helo and his earthbound vehicle lengthened by the second, great acres of sky multiplying between them, and the hope drained from Hood’s young heart as his foot moved to the brakes.

He sat watching the aircraft diminish to the west as he called Ozburn to dispatch the ATFE chopper, then called the Orange County Sheriff’s, the Coast Guard, the Miramar Navy Base, and Camp Pendleton to report the fugitive Red Cross impostor.

For the entire drive south to Tecate he waited to hear something back and he even listened to the news and he called Soriana in the San Diego ATFE office four times, but he heard not one word from anyone about an intercepted helicopter.

 

 

 

By the time he made Tecate, the Blowdown team was going through the last ten crates. They were just outside of town, and the Imperial County Sheriff’s and CHP and even some Guardsmen were there. There were network uplink vans parked on the wide dirt shoulder, and stand-up news crews cordoned off by the ICSD deputies, but the cameramen were shooting video regardless. Two news helicopters circled noisily and low. The traffic was routed down to one lane, a highway patrolman directing, and the city-bound cars were backed up for half a mile, the passengers hanging from windows to better see the action.

The opened crates were strewn about the roadside, scores of them, all apparently filled with new jeans, all folded neatly, the manufacturer’s labels still stapled to the back pockets, some with their sizes on clear plastic strips taped to the thighs. Hood saw that many of them were children’s. There were pink ones and black ones and yellow ones and a hundred shades of blue.

Hood stood and watched Bly use a pry bar to open another gun crate. More denim. A man in a passing car asked if they had a pair of thirty-six/thirty-fours. Hood told him to move his fat ass along. Bly looked up at Hood with dampened fury in her eyes, then shoved away the case, toppling its contents into the shoulder dirt. She cursed and used the crook end of the pry bar to yank the next crate toward her.

Hood gazed down at the bounty of new pants. Bradley and Clayton and Ron faked the weight of the boxes, Hood thought. They had known they were being watched. They had acted their parts. And he had watched them do it but not understood what he was seeing.

Hood found Ozburn in his SUV, tapping on his laptop. Ozburn was getting ready for an undercover assignment and trying to make his face scarce. He rolled down the darkened window. “The Econoline had a blowout in Temecula, so Frank made his move. It was loaded with bags of ready-mix concrete. Ninety pounders and lots of them. Charlie, these dolts had some help. They could never have pulled this off on their own. Pace just drove that motor home right into a transport helo?”

“It had a cargo lift.”

“Then a thousand guns just crossed the border by air while we got a hundred crates of jeans. Who are these guys?”

“Bradley is Allison Murrieta’s son.”

“The teacher? The armed robber?”

Hood nodded. “Clayton is a forger.”

“They say they’re volunteers with All Saints. They say they’ve been doing this for two years and they’ve got priests and social workers and towns full of poor people who will tell us so.”

“They probably do.”

Bradley sat handcuffed in the back of one government SUV and Clayton in another, each watched by an ATFE agent. Bradley shook his head as Hood walked up and swung open the front door and looked in.

“Charlie. Tell these guys who I am.”

A videographer had escaped the media area and came crunching along the shoulder toward Hood and Bradley, camera up, shooting as he walked. “Gentlemen—let’s have a shot of the good Samaritan here.”

Hood wrenched away the recorder and popped the video card out before tossing the camera back at the stunned man. “Get back where you belong or I’ll arrest you, too.”

Hood was watching the man retreat when his phone rang. It was Beth Petty. “Charlie, something’s happened to Mike.”

“
What?
”

“He, um . . . he walked out.”

 

 

 

 

T
he nurses trailed along wordlessly as Hood and the doctor hurried through the ICU. Beth opened Mike’s room door and pulled back the privacy curtain. Hood looked at the chunks of plaster, some on the bed and some on the floor, some in the wastebasket, some pieces separate and some still attached by gauze. The girdle stood whole on the floor where Mike had apparently stepped out of it. Hood saw the dressing gauze ripped and wadded and strewn about the room. The collar and blood-smeared cranial rods were set in a corner. There were a few drops of blood on the floor. The catheter tube was tied around the bedrail uphill of the bag so it wouldn’t leak. The room smelled bad.

“Who was with him?”

“No one. He tore out of his cast and walked out alone.”

“Wearing what, a hospital gown?”

“Owens came yesterday. She brought him some new clothes, though I told her he was far from ready for discharge. She said she knew that, but maybe the clothes would inspire him. I thought that was fine. She had a Hawaiian shirt, a navy windbreaker, a pair of chinos, a pair of Vans slip-ons, underwear and socks, and a Padres hat. She put them all in the closet there. She used hangers for the shirt and jacket and pants. Later in the day, Mike asked me to show them to him and he said he hoped they weren’t too big, that Owens always bought a size too big. I thought it was endearing, a guy in a full-body cast worrying about the fit of clothes he wouldn’t be able to even put on for weeks.”

Hood looked at the closet, empty except for four metal hangers, the shoulder of one uplifted and caught on the shoulder of another as if a garment had been yanked off in a hurry.

“He walked out of the room to the nurses’ station,” said Beth. “It took them a moment to realize who he was. They ordered him back into his bed, but he politely refused. He thanked them graciously for all they had done, especially all the good books, and as soon as he left ICU, they called security. Security caught up with him in the lobby and he explained that his account was paid in full and that he was feeling very good. He did a little dance that left him with the toe of one shoe pointed up and his hands spread out. He smiled. Security said the smile looked weird. It was probably because his jaw is still wired shut. Outside he got into a black Mercedes convertible possibly driven by his daughter. I have the plate number.”

“You’re telling me he ripped out of that cast on his own?”

“Yes. Nobody could have helped. Nobody can get past the station without being seen.”

“Why the blood?”

“From the cranial rods. The flesh heals over them, but when they’re removed there’s bleeding. You see, there isn’t much blood here. About right. The hat would hide those wounds.”

Hood squatted and picked up a piece of plaster cast. It was slightly concave and roughly the size of a paperback book and ragged on all four sides. White mesh dressing clung to the inside and extended past the torn edges of the plaster. It smelled of unwashed cotton and an unwashed human being. Hood turned it over and saw the sweat-stained gauze and the four crushed indentations where Mike had torn away this section of solid plaster as if it were a piece of bread.

“I wouldn’t believe a single word of what I just said except I saw half of it,” said Beth. “The other half I believe because I know these nurses.”

“It was the strangest thing I ever saw in my life, deputy,” said one.

“When he came through that door all dressed and I realized who he was, this giant cold shudder went through me,” said another.

“He really did manage to smile,” said another.

Hood stood and tossed the piece of plaster onto the bed. “Nurses, doctors, security, cops, deputies, marshals, and two thousand Guardsmen, and he walks right out.”

“We can’t keep him,” said the first nurse. “We can’t hold anyone against his will. That’s what you do.”

 

 

 

Hood parked across from Owens Finnegan’s El Centro home just after three o’clock. The desert lay darkening beneath the stacked thunderheads, and a heavy wind had picked up. Her garage door was open, but the black Mercedes convertible was gone.

He knocked at the front door and waited but she didn’t answer, as he knew she wouldn’t. The door was unlocked. Hood walked in and closed it behind him and stood for a moment in the empty living room, then walked through the empty kitchen and down the hall to the once beautiful bedroom into which he had been invited, and this was vacant now, too. The bathroom was cleaned out, but on the counter was a wedding absinthe goblet, and beneath the goblet were two sheets of paper. Hood moved the goblet and looked down at a drawing. It was done in charcoal, masterfully rendered, sharp true lines and deep smudges of shadow pierced by light. It depicted Bradley Jones inside the Pace Arms manufacturing bay, dressed in his smart Explorer uniform, examining the newly born firearms as he walked along the workstations, his face locked in the exact speculative, lost-in-thought expression that Hood had seen that night through the window.