The Border Lords (27 page)

“I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone at this department. She lived for her job just like you live for yours. And I don’t mean just the teaching job. I mean the other one, too. I found this out later. Reading her journals.”

“But why? It was dangerous and hurtful and it got her killed.”

“It was dangerous, exciting, and a turn-on. And lucrative, too. She never hurt anyone. Not one person. She saved an old man’s life with CPR on one of her robberies. She gave money to the poor—real money, not a hundred here or a hundred there but scores of thousands of dollars. Yes, it got her killed. Something always gets us killed, sooner or later.”

“I’ll take the later, Bradley. I hope you do, too. We’re off to a decent start—we might be the only two LASD deputies stabbed in the line of duty before the age of twenty-one.”

“We are. I researched it.”

“I’ll never forget those videos your mother sent to the networks. That mask with the crystal on it. The derringer. Her voice. Trying to explain herself. One of the strangest things I’ve seen. You remind me of her. Not looks. ’Tude.”

“I loved her and I miss her.” Bradley lifted the briefcase to his lap and felt his cheeks flush. “She loved red Corvettes.”

Dez eyed him. “Thanks for the tip, Deputy Jones.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me that, either.”

“I’m left with Commander Dez.”

“That is who I am.”

“I like the sound of Sheriff Dez better.”

“I’ll remember that when I run for office.”

“Also remember that you can’t buy the kind of publicity that a high-profile bust will get you.”

“I hear Allison Murrieta again.”

“That’s a nice compliment, Commander Dez. I’ll give you information as I get it. I’ll do everything I can to make sure it’s good stuff.”

“But what if your man is just telling tales to pay for his next fix?”

“If that’s the case, you can blame it all on me. But it won’t be the case. He’s good for this. But I do ask one thing of you, my commander.”

Bradley smiled and waited a beat.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Leave my name off of this as much as you reasonably can. We new hires are competitive. Everyone wants to outdo the others—except for the clock punchers. I had great good luck stumbling into the Stevie deal, I’ll admit that. But if I’m shown to have even more great good luck in find out about Gravas, well, my peers are going to hate me and my superiors are going to wonder.”

“Maybe I’m wondering.”

“I was born lucky. I’ve got more luck than I want. Gravas is for you and I want no part of him.”

“What do you want?”

“For you to be a friend and mentor.”

“You really puzzle me, Bradley Jones.”

“I puzzle my own wife.”

She studied him for a long moment, then wrote a number on the back of her card and handed it across the desk to him. Bradley stood and took up his briefcase and walked out, holding the card between his fingers like a cigarette.

Erin and the Inmates took
the Bordello Bar stage that night in L.A. for a sold-out show, Erin trim and fair-skinned in lavender leather and ankle-high lavender boots with stainless zippers. Sitting at a table near the back, Bradley felt his breath catch as she led the Inmates on. The crowd went off.

Mike Finnegan sat on one side of him and his alleged daughter, Owens, on the other. Bradley had met them at one of Erin’s performances back before they were married. At first Mike and Owens seemed to be groupies of some sort but they had turned out to be more than that. Exactly
what
, Bradley was not sure. They had made a few calls that had helped him send a large shipment of Love 32s through Charlie Hood’s fingers and into the hands of Carlos Herredia. Mike knew way more than he should about various criminal enterprises in the American West and in Mexico, but he also knew more than he should about law enforcement, history, ornithology, astronomy, viticulture, the wholesaling of bathroom products, underground comics from the sixties, black-powder gunsmithing and gold mining. It was fairly obvious that Mike was not Owens’s father but Bradley saw no reason to spoil their fun, or whatever it was they were having.

Erin strapped on a white and gold Les Paul and the crowd went off again.

“God, she gets more beautiful every month,” said Owens.

Mike flinched. “Yes, she truly does.”

Bradley clapped and yelped loudly for his wife. Her hair was red and lush and held up on the left side by a clip that a fan had made for her, a cute little porcupine with big eyes and quills that were laser pointers that shot a moving pattern of red dots to various points throughout the small and very crowded bar. Her hair caught the stage lights with a vengeance, he thought, the sparks and pops of loose electricity.

“Red, red and more red,” said Finnegan.

“Like your hair is supposed to be,” said Owens.

“Change is good. Where does it say that a man can’t change the color of his hair?”

“Beware of little men with big ideas,” Owens said to Bradley. Finnegan grinned and threw up his stubby little hands and waved over the waitress for another round.

Bradley sat back and sipped Dickel on the rocks and gave himself over to Erin and her music. He’d fallen in love with her doing just this, nightclubbing on the Sunset Strip with a fake ID, age sixteen. July third, he thought. Hot and humid for summer. He’d jacked a Porsche Carrera—just to drive that night, not to sell—and he was trying to tamp down the adrenaline with vodka. A skosh tipsy. Her band was called the Cheater Slicks then, and her hair was longer and she wore jeans with holes in them and ropers and a skimpy green silk halter. By the end of the first song of the first set he was unquestionably in love with her. He went back the next two nights and tried to catch her eye but failed. Near the end of the third night Bradley bribed the bouncer to get backstage and there, she had really
seen
him for the first time. He said something to the effect that looking at her was like walking into a beautiful room. And this was their beginning.

The Inmates were a guitar, keyboard, bass and drums, and their rock was rough and electric. There were shards of metal in it, shades of country, bits of barrelhouse. But Erin’s voice was clear and articulate so it sounded to Bradley at times as if she was trying to sing her way out of the music, like she was something pure stuck on something wild, an angel lashed to a Harley.

In the relative quiet between the second and third songs, Finnegan leaned in close to Bradley. “Tell me, how is Felipe?”

“Felipe who?”

“You know, the puckered man with the eternal shotgun. You’d be surprised how forthcoming he can be with a little
perico
in the offing.”

Parakeet, thought Bradley,
narco
slang for cocaine, because it makes you chatter like a parakeet.

“He’s just developing a taste for the stuff after thirty sober years of drug trafficking,” said Finnegan. “And how is El Dorado?”

“You’re babbling, Mike. You’re making no sense to me.”

Finnegan grinned at him. Bradley had long ago given up trying to figure the man’s sources for information. He seemed to know a lot of people and things, but he obviously read lots of books and periodicals and knew his way around the Internet. Bradley had decided that Finnegan actually knew far fewer people than he claimed, that he was a researcher, not a player. He seemed to crave participation but rarely participated. An observer. He was certainly a man who forgot nothing. Oddly, Bradley carried some distant memory of having met Mike long before that night in the Viper Room, a few years back, when Mike had first introduced himself and Owens. But he couldn’t remember when, or where.

Finnegan smiled at him, eyes aflicker with mischief. “I’m sorry, Bradley. I must have you mixed up with someone else.”

“Listen to the music, man.”

“She is in fabulous voice tonight. It becomes stronger with every season. Summer was better than spring and now fall is better yet. Climates of vocal change. I can hear them in her.”

“Shut up, Mike. Have another drink.”

“And you must, too. These are on us tonight. After all, we sailed in here without a flag and boarded your table like pirates.”

Owens considered Bradley with her cool gray eyes, then turned her attention back to the stage. She was an actor, beautiful, dark-haired, quiet. Bradley found her inexplicable as her father but much more exotic. He had seen her in two commercials—one for a cell phone and one for a home improvement store. As she looked away Bradley’s gaze was drawn to Owens’s wrists, each underside ringed with scars. She often wore bracelets to help hide them. Tonight she wore long sleeves.

“I wonder if Sean Gravas will smell it out,” said Finnegan. “The setup.”

Bradley swallowed his bourbon and water hard, an ice piece going down in the reflex.

“Wrong pipe, Bradley?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Bradley. “That’s above my pay scale.”

Finnegan looked at him dubiously now. “Yes. I
must
have you mixed you up with someone else.”

Bradley felt the anger shoot through him. He was prone to it and had spent most of his short life trying to keep it down. True, Finnegan had helped him with the Love 32s, but now all Bradley could see was a small, annoying man who thought he knew things, a meddler, a dilettante. Bradley’s instincts told him to keep Finnegan and Erin far apart, on either side of himself, that they were elemental opposites of some kind and only catastrophe could come from mixing them. But here he was, jovial and generous with the cash, buying rounds and offering Bradley help on a project he could not possibly know much about.

He was relieved to see Caroline Vega and Jack Cleary come in, and he waved them over.

“I guess you do, Mike. And I’ve got some friends coming in and we’ve got some things to talk about.”

Bradley regretted his words before they were out. Now Finnegan would focus all of his ferocious senses on Vega and Cleary, and would come away from this night knowing far more about them than he should. He’d assimilate them, digest them. Add them to his friends list. Like he did everyone else.

“I’m sorry you’re angry, Bradley. But remember that Gravas is increasingly irrational.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“I might be able to help.”

“See you, Mike.”

“Yes, sir. Owens, hon? We’ve been foreclosed upon.”

But by the time Erin had announced that the Inmates were taking a short break, and Finnegan had collected his change and stuffed his fat wallet back into his jeans, and Owens had put on her jacket and slung her purse over her shoulder, Caroline and Cleary had arrived.

“Mike, this is Caroline Vega,” Bradley said curtly.

“Hi, Caroline,” said Mike. “We met at the street festival last year in West Hollywood. You had the LASD booth and the sun in your face and I had the lovely daughter and the great big frozen lemonades.”

“I haven’t forgotten you or that lemonade or your daughter, Mike. You’re leaving?”

“Just buried in work tonight. And Owens is shooting early tomorrow so I should get her home.”

Owens and Caroline shook hands and Bradley saw them exchange looks of recognition. Bradley had to introduce Jack Cleary also, and, in a pleasant surprise, Cleary and Finnegan had never met. Cleary, large and well muscled, looked down on the little man as if he were something stuck to his shoe.

“Well, carry on, kids,” Mike said with a smile. He clapped Bradley on the shoulder and began to work his way out of the crowded room.

Bradley saw Erin catch up with the little man and say something in his ear. Finnegan bobbed his head and smiled, looking pleased. He kissed Erin’s hand in good-bye, which pissed off Bradley. He watched her work her way through the crowd toward him, in a state of wonder, for the millionth time, that Erin McKenna belonged to him and he to her. He stood and wiped off the back of her hand with a drink napkin, then pulled out his chair so she could sit.

 

 

Late in the show
Bradley huddled close with Caroline and Cleary, and told them he had a confession to make. He confessed to believing that there was more to life than risking it by chasing small-time bad guys for not much of a salary and crummy hours.
Witness the potato peeler
, he said, tapping his sore breast. To address this imbalance in this tough economy, he proposed an arrangement wherein the three of them would target the MS-13 street dealers and enforcers now overrunning L.A. as paid employees of Benjamin Armenta’s besieged Gulf Cartel. Cleary, a Narcotics Bureau sergeant, would gradually get Vega and Bradley into his unit and they could work a lot of the busts as a team. Why? Because Armenta and his Mara errand boys were scourges on the city. Because they made Rocky Carrasco’s outfit look like Boy Scouts and the city was better off without them.
Kidnap Stevie? They’re worse than animals
, Jones explained. When he was almost done with his pitch, Bradley’s heart was pounding and he felt flushed and exposed. He knocked back his drink and stared at them.

Both Vega and Cleary stared back. He sensed that this idea appealed to Vega’s young sense of adventure but Cleary looked uninterested.

Bradley heard Erin singing in the background, a ballad she’d written called “Blue Rodeo,” but not even the pretty melody and high emotions of the lyrics could penetrate the heavy silence at the table. He held the gazes of Cleary and Vega one at a time, back and forth, thinking,
Screw you two wimps if you can’t see an opportunity and take it.

Then, into the silence scratched only by the music of his wife, Bradley dropped his final bomb:

“Two grand a week for each of you.”

Now he felt not just exposed but utterly naked—stripped down to his bare chassis—no extras, no options.

“Say that again,” said Cleary.